Dad's Coal Pit Hid a Dungeon, Now Guilds Pay Me to Enter novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Three Claimants and a Cage
The credit union, the city and Daewon Guild arrive at his dead father's coal pit on the same morning, and when he rides the cage down to prove it is a flooded hole, it falls past the old bottom into a dungeon that names him its keeper and asks if he has eaten.
Three vehicles blocked the gate of his father's pit, and none of them had come for the funeral.
Gwon Seok-hyun saw them from the bus stop on the county road.
He was still in his green mart vest, with the night's cash-out slip folded in his pocket.
It was ten to eight on a Monday morning in November, and the mist off the mountain was freezing on the power lines.
His father had been in the ground since Saturday.
The white funeral wreaths still leaned along the fence, and somebody had kicked one into the ditch.
Seok-hyun was twenty-six and thin, a head taller than his father had been.
His hair was flattened by the mart cap, and he had a coffee-machine burn on his right wrist.
He worked nights at the 24-hour mart on Hwangji-ro for 10,320 won an hour, and he was rated C.
His skill was [Prop].
Any beam or wall he held with both hands carried its load for ten minutes.
A C meant the Association had found it useful but could not use it to kill anything.
Seoul guilds had offered him porter work twice since the Tower rose, at two million won a month.
His father had said no both times without explaining.
The Tower had come up out of Expo Park in Daejeon on March 14, 2019, a gray needle with no visible top.
Everyone in Korea over fifteen had heard one word in their head that day.
The Association had rated every word from F to S by how much it could kill.
Seven years later the Tower's holes were everywhere.
The law called them dungeons, the guilds called them claims, and the old miners in Taebaek called them holes and wouldn't say more.
A dungeon that nobody cleared overflowed in a hundred days, and its monsters walked out into whatever stood above it.
The guilds cleared them by killing the core at the bottom, and then the dungeon went quiet and the stone was only stone.
Every monster dropped embers, fist-sized coals that burned without smoke, and the power plants that once burned Taebaek's coal now burned those.
Taebaek had not been paid for a lump of anything since the pits closed in the nineties.
The first man at the gate was from the credit union, and he held his clipboard against his chest.
"Mr. Gwon, the loan on this land was called due at your father's death," he said. "The clause is on page six."
"It's three hundred and forty million won," he added, and looked at the wreaths instead of Seok-hyun.
Seok-hyun had known about the loan for four years.
His father had taken it out to pay for the oxygen plant at the town clinic.
Five old miners with ruined lungs breathed there for free.
His father had never said where the monthly payments came from, and Seok-hyun had never asked, because the payments had always been on time.
The second man wore a Taebaek City jacket and stood beside a white pickup with an orange light.
"Mine Safety Act, Article 14," he said. "A closed shaft showing subsidence must be filled. The city fills it Thursday."
"Subsidence," said Seok-hyun. "Since when?"
"Since a neighbor complained," the man said, and glanced at the black SUV.
The third man leaned on the SUV with his arms folded.
He had a camel coat under a black down jacket.
On its chest was the gold lion crest of Daewon Guild, the biggest in Seoul.
Two raiders in the same jacket stood behind him, both B-rank by the way they carried their shoulders.
"Seon Tae-gyu, Land Acquisitions," he said, and held out a card with two fingers.
"A hundred and twenty million won, cash, and Daewon clears the loan on top of it."
"You're rated C. Prop. We offered you a porter contract in 2021," Seon said.
"You stack noodles for ten thousand won an hour, and your father was a squatter with a key."
He said it pleasantly, and he took a funeral ribbon off the nearest wreath and dropped it in the mud as he spoke.
Seok-hyun looked at the ribbon.
He wanted to hit this man, and he was far too tired to be sure he would hit him well.
He thought about the sum instead, because the mart had taught him that every problem had a price on it.
A hundred and twenty million against three hundred and forty owed would pay off a third of the debt in his father's name.
Behind the fence, Bang Sun-ja came up the lane in her diner's blue van and got out with a steaming pot in both arms.
She was sixty-three, short, in rubber gloves and an apron, and she had fed him breakfast on every school day of his life.
Beside her stood an old man from the clinic with his oxygen line looped over one ear, and he said nothing at all.
Every person in the lane knew something about this pit, Seok-hyun realized, and he was the only one who didn't.
"Why does Daewon want a flooded hole?" he said to Seon.
"Our survey flagged an ember reading under this lot," Seon said. "A steady one, for years."
"Steady like a lit stove," he said. "Open your shaft, Mr. Gwon, or the three of us will do it with paper."
Seok-hyun looked at the headframe, a rusted steel tower over the shaft mouth, and at the little generator shed beside it.
The shed hummed, and fresh diesel cans stood by its door.
His father had kept a flooded shaft's generator running for years.
"Fine," he said. "You want to see the bottom. Come and look, then get off my land."
He told himself he would show them black water and be done.
The cage was a steel box with a chain gate, and the six of them filled it.
The credit union man, the city man, Seon, the two raiders, and Seok-hyun.
He had never ridden it.
His father had always said the bottom would kill a man with its air.
The lever was oiled.
The old brass tag board by the winch had one tag on it, hung on the hook of the last man down.
Gwon, it read, in his father's square writing.
Seok-hyun pulled the lever.
The cage dropped for a long time, past the lamp at three hundred meters where the old shaft ended, and it did not stop.
The credit union man grabbed the chain.
"This isn't on the survey," said one of the raiders.
The walls fell away on both sides.
The cage came to rest on a floor of black stone in a hall as tall as a church.
Seams of amber ran through the coal overhead and gave off a warm light.
Brass miners' lamps hung from hooks along the walls at regular intervals, each one burning blue, and a draft nobody could feel swung them slowly.
Far down the hall, something with many legs crossed the lamplight and was gone.
Words took shape in the coal wall, lit from inside, in the square letters his father had used.
[HWANGJI PIT. A keeper has come.]
"That's a dungeon," the city man whispered.
"Unregistered," Seon said, and his phone was already up. "Twenty years of ember output, and the owner knew."
"Under the Dungeon Act that's a report within twenty-four hours, then a sealed bid. The Association clears it, Mr. Gwon, and you get eight percent."
Seok-hyun barely heard him.
The words in the wall changed again.
Under them a smaller window opened in the air before his eyes, where he alone could see it.
[Gwon Seok-hyun. Heart's blood recognized. Third of the line.]
[Your father kept the agreement. He cannot answer for it now.]
Third of the line, he thought, and the first one had to be a grandfather he had never met.
[The agreement: the keeper keeps the Pit, and the Pit keeps the keeper.]
[He sleeps no more than thirty kilometers from the shaft, or the keeping ends.]
[Decline, and the lamps go out at the next turn. Whatever lives here walks up the shaft.]
He understood then why his father had never taken him to Seoul, not for the academy test, not for his discharge, not once.
His father had been tied to this hole for twenty years, never more than thirty kilometers from it, and he had told nobody.
Seok-hyun thought of the clinic's oxygen plant, and Sun-ja's rent, and five old men breathing on his father's money.
He thought of the three men beside him, and he made himself think about the sum one last time.
A hundred and twenty million won would not buy back one of those twenty years.
"Accept," he said aloud, and the cage shook.
The window filled with lines, and he read them fast.
[Keeper: Gwon Seok-hyun. Pit Level 1. Rule slots: 2 of 2.]
[Door: who may enter. Spawn: what lives here.]
[Speak a rule, and the Pit keeps it by your words.]
"Open it, and we all go home rich," Seon said, almost kindly. "We have witnesses. You can't keep a dungeon in Korea. Nobody can."
Seok-hyun looked at the two raiders, and the city man, and the man from the credit union holding his clipboard.
All three had come for his father's land before the earth was dry on his grave.
"Door," he said to the hall, and his voice carried in the stone.
"None may enter but the Gwon house, and those who hang a tag on the board."
The lamps along the wall flared white together.
The floor under the cage tilted, and the chain gate slammed, and the lever moved without a hand on it.
"What are you doing?" the credit union man shouted.
The cage rose, with Seon's phone still in the air and his mouth still open on the next word.
The light shrank to a coin overhead, and then there was only the hall, and quiet.
Seok-hyun stood alone on the black floor with his hand still raised from the rule.
[Door set. A shut door stays shut one day.]
He heard it then, low in the walls, a hum he almost knew.
A new line crossed the coal in his father's writing.
[The Heart asks: has the keeper eaten?]
His father had asked him that on the phone every night, before any other word.
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