The horse was fast.
To be precise, since the horse was stealthed too, he couldn’t really tell whether it was fast or slow.
‘I’m flying!’
To Jaewon’s eyes, it looked as if only his upper body were floating through the air, running. If he concentrated, he could only feel the sound of hooves ringing beneath his feet and something swaying under his backside.
He had borrowed it from the stables of the lord’s castle—more accurately, untied one that had been tethered there and brought it along.
When he smeared a bottle of potion on an apple and offered it, the horse obediently ate it.
‘Sorry. I’ll give you carrots later.’
Considering that Jaewon had also drunk an invisibility potion, this fellow probably felt as if something unknown had climbed onto its back and was driving it.
Thinking that, Jaewon straightened his waist.
It didn’t feel bad.
No, even with the game facing a crisis, if he were being honest, it felt pretty good.
There was a reason.
---
He entered text into the crystal ball.
```
[Director → Log]
— I’m in a good mood right now.
```
A reply came.
```
[Log → Director]
— Please speak.
```
```
[Director → Log]
— This is hacking, isn’t it?
```
```
[Log → Director]
— It is not confirmed.
```
```
[Director → Log]
— It’s basically confirmed. Running undead auto-mining is blocked on the system level.
Blocking fraud related to currency is an area I seriously put effort into.
Even you admitted there are almost no holes there, Log.
```
There was a brief pause.
```
[Log → Director]
— …I admit it. I worked on it with you.
```
Jaewon squared his shoulders atop the horse.
Arcana Online had a lot of minor bugs.
He admitted that. Cannonballs were judged as arrows, split arrows got blocked, and when they patched one thing, something else exploded.
But those were naturally occurring accidents caused by the complicated entanglement of emergent logic.
The currency system was different.
Undead could be put into mining, cheaply driving down market prices, and necromancy or black magic factions could monopolize minerals or standardize the meta.
So he had painstakingly blocked that chain so it wouldn’t become boring.
Double code locks. Automatic anomaly detection. External intervention log records.
For someone to break through that meant—
```
[Director → Log]
— They intentionally hacked the laws of the world.
That’s not a bug. That’s a crime.
```
```
[Log → Director]
— I agree.
```
```
[Director → Log]
— And do you know why that makes me feel good?
```
```
[Log → Director]
— Please speak.
```
```
[Director → Log]
— If we catch them, it’s all-out war.
If proof comes out that they touched the laws of the world, the Constellations won’t just sit still.
Red Furnace, the dragon line, Snow-White First Snow, all of them.
Their game got hacked. They’ll be furious.
```
Jaewon lightly gripped the reins and continued typing.
```
[Director → Log]
— Then the Constellations are on my side,
and I won’t have to fight alone and lonely as the operations team anymore.
```
A reply came.
```
[Log → Director]
— The logic is sound.
```
```
[Director → Log]
— Using hacking to kill a competitor’s game means
they’re that desperate.
Desperate guys make mistakes.
And if there are traces of a mistake, catching them is my territory.
```
The horse’s hooves rang cheerfully over the dirt road.
It was the sight of a single upper body floating through the air and running somewhere, but at least the mood was triumphant.
```
[Log → Director]
— Director.
```
```
[Director → Log]
— What?
```
```
[Log → Director]
— The Constellation Snow-White First Snow has just arrived.
```
Jaewon stopped the hand he had been about to type with.
```
[Director → Log]
— Handle it yourself. Doesn’t it feel nice being with a beauty?
```
```
[Log → Director]
— No, beaks are my type. If I had to choose, wyverns are cuter.
```
Having unintentionally learned Log’s preference, he put away the crystal ball.
The horse kept running.
Ahead was a mine.
---
The mine where, according to the records, the undead were presumed to be sent.
The slope halfway up the mountain had been carved away. Wooden structures stood near the entrance, and thick ropes and pulleys hung everywhere. Several torches were burning.
And there were workers.
‘...Dwarves?’
Jaewon dismounted, left the horse behind a thicket, and slowly walked in.
The stealth was still active. No one saw him.
As he got closer, he looked at the workers.
They had beards, and their builds were dwarven too. They were holding torches and keeping watch over the surroundings.
But something was strange.
Their movements were uniformly monotonous. Heads to the left, to the right, slightly up and down...
‘Don’t their necks hurt?’
No one was resting. No one was drinking water. The same rhythm, the same speed.
One person’s face briefly glinted in the torchlight.
The skin was gray.
Jaewon went right up in front of him and peered closely.
The skin beneath the beard was not that of a dwarf.
There were no facial muscles, and the eyes were dimly colored. He was wearing dwarven clothing, but what moved inside it was—
‘Undead... but I’m not sure if it’s using a dwarf corpse or just disguised as a dwarf.’
Undead wearing dwarven outfits were operating the mine.
Jaewon let out a breath and turned around.
He saw two real dwarves standing at the supervisor’s position near the entrance. With their arms crossed, they were looking down over the mine. Occasionally, they wrote something down. It seemed like they were counting numbers.
‘As expected.’
Jaewon put a hand on the wall near the entrance and thought for a moment.
This was definitely the place. The evidence was right in front of him.
‘Now all I need is to find where it was breached. Once I know that, I can trace it back through the patch notes.’
If he found where the code that blocked undead auto-mining had been bypassed,
there would be a record of access to that bypass route.
Jaewon opened the patch notes.
---
With the tip of his pen, he opened the mine area code.
Terrain registration. Resource distribution. Mining efficiency. Labor force judgment.
He entered the terrain registration and labor force judgment sections.
Life-form status check. Job registration status. Fatigue accumulation. Abnormal behavior detection.
Jaewon’s finger moved down along the lines.
There was a clause blocking undead deployment.
It prevented bodies moved by black magic or necromancy from mining. If it had been hacked, that judgment...
was there.
It was clearly functioning properly.
Jaewon looked again.
It was there.
The clause existed, and the clause was normal. There were no signs of damage. No signs of bypassing either. The external access logs were clean too.
……There was no problem at all.
Jaewon closed the patch notes, then opened them again.
He looked again.
There was no problem at all.
In front of his eyes, undead in dwarven outfits were holding torches and murmuring among themselves.
Inside the patch notes, the code that should have stopped that was perfectly alive and well.
Jaewon looked back and forth between the patch notes and the undead.
‘…….’
An intact lock.
But an open door.
‘What is going on? This is the right place.’
Just then,
footsteps came from the opposite side of the mine entrance.
One, two.
Jaewon turned.
Undead were coming in. They were dressed as dwarves. Their size and gait were exactly the same as the ones working inside the mine. Counting them one by one, there were fifteen bodies.
Jaewon narrowed his eyes.
It was the Demon King’s Castle. What the general had said in the corridor of the Demon King’s Castle.
From seventy bodies to fifty-five.
Those seemed to be the fifteen.
The undead filed into the mine and disappeared inside. Jaewon followed one step in.
At that moment.
‘Ugh.’
He stopped.
There was a smell.
Calling it a smell was too generous. It was a stench. The kind that stabbed not just the nose, but the eyes as well.
He had only inhaled for a moment, yet the inside of his throat stung.
Jaewon quickly backed away and covered his nose with his sleeve.
‘What is this?’
It was leaking out from inside the mine. It also seemed to be rising from the floor.
The air itself was heavy. The flames of the torches burned lower than usual.
Jaewon scanned the terrain around the mine.
‘Now that I think about it, it was strange.
This is a bonanza mine, a place with ore of such high quality that the dwarf supervisors could secretly produce precious-metal cannons here.
But I wondered why, instead of mining a place like this themselves, they would go out of their way to bring in undead.
So the dwarves couldn’t enter themselves.’
Toxic gas came from the terrain itself.
In other words, this mine had minerals, but had been left untouched because no one could lay a hand on it. That was why undead were needed, and that was why demons providing undead had become a bargaining chip.
It felt as if one piece of the puzzle had clicked into place.
From the undead’s perspective, they didn’t breathe, so toxic gas didn’t matter. They just had to remain within the necromancer’s control range.
Jaewon looked at the mine entrance.
He had to go inside. There was no problem with the code.
That meant the breach was some unknown anomaly in the code. There was a high chance he needed to confirm what had been done inside the actual mine.
‘But if I breathe this in, I’ll die.’
For a moment, Jaewon alternated his gaze between the mine entrance and his own nose.
‘If Log were here, I’d send him.’
Log didn’t breathe thanks to spirit power, so he would be fine.
Right now, Log was probably dressed as a penguin, standing beside the Constellation Snow-White First Snow and looking south.
‘Bad timing.’
Jaewon crossed his arms and thought.
There had to be a way to enter.
He opened the patch notes.
‘Mining mask.’
He wanted to write, “Give to the Director,” but he didn’t even pull out the pen. Because he knew he must not.
If he wrote something in the patch notes, it would be reflected in the world. And reflected content could not be hidden.
If Jaewon received a mask, the Constellations would see it, and it would be discovered that the Director was near the dwarf mine.
Right now, the Director’s location must not be revealed.
‘Then what about other outfits?’
A method where he would write that several outfits were provided as smoke screens, and receive one of them himself.
His hand stopped again.
It would become a problem that the Director was using divine power privately. Outfit distribution was an official update matter. If he inserted a patch with no operational justification, the Constellation community would react.
Even if he was the great Director currently running large-scale content to much acclaim, that was still true.
With outside checks coming in recently, there was no reason to create a pointless target.
Jaewon closed the patch notes.
Gas leaked out from the entrance again. Just brushing the tip of his nose made his eyes sting.
‘...I don’t want to go in... Wait, I don’t have to go in myself, do I?’
Jaewon slowly raised his head.
Now that he thought about it, entering was not the objective.
Seeing inside was the objective.
---
He opened the patch notes again.
This time, the pen did not stop.
```
▶ Add Supply Item
— Add 1 spare crystal ball(水晶球)
to the Patch Director support tool list.
For preparedness against loss or damage of the currently possessed crystal ball.
```
The letters glowed faintly, then disappeared.
Application complete.
‘They’ll let a crystal ball slide, won’t they?’
One more crystal ball appeared in Jaewon’s hand. It looked exactly like the existing one. Round, smooth, and small enough to fit in his palm.
Jaewon held the two side by side and looked at them.
One was for communication. One was for what he would use now.
He looked toward the mine entrance.
It was the direction the undead had filed into. The last one to enter was still within visible range. Jaewon quickly followed it inside and fixed his eyes on one undead.
Dwarven outfit. On its back, there was a small gap between the seams of its armor.
Jaewon inserted the crystal ball.
‘It’s in.’
And as he inserted the crystal ball, a stench different from that of the mine rose from the opened gap.
He was only one step inside the entrance. Yet something burrowed through the sleeve covering his nose. His vision shook for a moment.
He wanted to scream.
He endured it.
He couldn’t make a sound. It wasn’t that the stealth would be undone, but...
If he was unlucky, the dwarf supervisors might turn around.
‘Bleeergh.’
Jaewon walked backward as quickly as possible. As soon as he escaped the entrance, he exhaled deeply. It wasn’t clean air, just air with less gas mixed in, but it still felt like salvation.
He wiped the corners of his eyes.
The undead had already disappeared inside.
Jaewon gripped the remaining crystal ball in his hand. The two crystal balls were connected. He could see from this side what the one attached to the undead’s back was seeing.
The screen shook.
It was because of the undead’s gait. The screen swayed monotonously back and forth. Torchlight passed, stone walls passed, the back of the undead ahead appeared, and then stone walls passed again.
Jaewon sat down with his back against a rock beside the mine entrance.
He watched the screen.
‘Now just show me.’
The undead kept walking.