As I split the ghoul in two, I watched a spectacle that was both rather grisly and fascinating. I had never seen this while fighting other opponents until now, since their bodies were already shriveled—basically just dry skin and very little desiccated muscle hanging off the bones—but this ghoul was different. He had it all: guts, muscles, the whole package. As I sliced him in half across the abdomen, his guts and blood wanted to spray all around the room, but before they could hit anything, they started changing into silver-ish particles and floating gently around me.

  It was a quite unique sight, seeing a cluster of guts flying at me, about to hit me, just to change into what looked like miniature shining stars flying all around me. Extending my hand, I started lazily chasing the little things that not so long ago were a part of the ghoul's innards.

  “I will have to get used to this!” The words escaped my mouth while my attention was still on the shinies.

  “It’s weird the first time you see it! You will get used to it,” Alrune chimed in.

  “Speaking of first times!” I walked up to the mushroom-like rock. “Let’s officially complete this dungeon.”

  I pressed my ID card to the stone. Instantly, notifications from the system started coming in.

  First one congratulating me for the clear, followed immediately by another for the level up. A third confirmed my status was synchronized with the Guild, and the final one informed me that I cleared the dungeon ‘Overrun Catacomb’ for the first time and also that I had ninety-nine times to go in order to receive my quest item.

  The notifications vanished at a thought; I left only the level-up message behind. I wanted to confirm something. Reading it properly, it was exactly the same as it was in the novel:

  ▽▽▽

  Congratulations you reached Tether level 2!

  Your connection to your Tether strengthened! You will be able to manipulate mana more freely now!

  Your body strengthened! You will be able to move more freely now!

  △△△

  The message was as generic as they came, and it was going to become pretty repetitive. Messages like this were going to appear every time I level up; the only exceptions are levels divisible by twenty-five. That is when one receives new skills. The issue was that you can only have five tether skills in total at any given time, so from level one hundred fifty, it becomes a game of exchanging the ones you don’t need, keeping the ones you want. Luckily, that’s very far down the line for now.

  “Vic!” spoke Alrune in my head. “Can I ask you something?”

  Having a good estimate of what she was going to ask, I braced myself.

  “Go ahead! Ask anything!”

  “How are you thirty-two and you've never entered a dungeon, never fought anything before, from what I see—yes, you have money, but nowhere near enough to afford a tether reroll coin? Where did you even come across that thing? Why did you risk everything by using it instead of living a life of luxury selling it? Those things are so rare, there should be maybe like two in the whole world and also maybe like five people even know they exist! You must have used one, since every human in this world receives a tether when they are fifteen and that coin is the only way to change it! I wanted to wait until you told me on your own at first, until the curiosity almost ate me from the inside!”

  “You are about the only person I was willing to tell this story to,” I said, sitting down comfortably on the ground after stashing the loot. “It’s just that the story is so fucked up that I never knew how to start. You see, I—my soul at least—was not born here in this world. My soul lived a life somewhere else, on a who-knows-where planet in a who-knows-when time. All I know is that I died there and spent centuries stuck in a void. As a reward, I was reincarnated into a world I knew very well, a world that follows a novel I read back in my previous life. I lost most of my memories as I was transmigrated, remembering pretty much just what I described, plus the plot of the novel. I received memories of this poor schmuck.” I pointed to myself. “As I came to this world, the voice that reincarnated me here gave me a few things as a gift. ‘Lucky coin’ and ‘Soul tether reroll’ were among them. The rest is history…”

  “Wait, wait, wait! So you received two among the most valuable things you could have in this world, and what you thought was, ‘let’s use them both together becoming overpowered’ instead of ‘which continent do I want to buy’?”

  “Yep!”

  “I love it!” Her laughter followed, echoing in my head for several minutes.

  “Just like that, on my word alone?”

  She needed a few seconds to calm down before she was able to answer. “It’s easy; no human in this world can lie to me without me noticing. Did you forget? The whole centuries-old Valkyrie shtick and all. Plus, with you, it is even easier since we are connected!”

  “Aren’t you angry that I got to have a contract with you by cheating the system, using the lucky coin?”

  Her answer came right away; her voice proud. “Why would I be? I was born, raised, fed, and trained my entire life to be a warrior. I lived centuries as a warrior! I died as a warrior! I lived by the blade and died by the blade! The fact that you used a personal continent's worth of resources to ensure the best possible outcome and got me... it does all kinds of things for me, anger ain’t one of them. I am honored, proud, horny… Mostly horny, to be honest!”

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  The last sentence destroyed all the seriousness and weight of the conversation. We both ended up laughing for minutes. After telling her everything, I felt lighter. After hearing her response—and knowing I no longer had skeletons hiding in my closet—I felt free.

  She ended up having a few more questions about my previous life, which I just had to answer with “I don’t know,” then a bunch more about the novel, on which I filled her in without any reservation, my future plans included.

  Once we were done talking about me, I was tempted to ask her about her past, ultimately deciding against that. The mood became upbeat, quite jolly, and I didn’t want to sour it by dragging out her past. Besides, I had no doubt about the fact that she is going to tell me herself when the time comes. There was one more thing: I was curious, yes, but that was it; I wouldn’t lose sleep over it.

  Instead of souring the mood, I left the dungeon, appearing in the same small house from which I entered. The moment I appeared there, I went right back inside, getting transferred to a new instance of the dungeon.

  This time around I didn’t waste any time; I just charged forward, determined to conquer the dungeon as fast as I could.

  Several hours later, I finally left the dungeon entry house, wanting to go rest. The whole deal with the Juliet and communication tablet came to my mind. Pulling the tablet out of my inventory, I had a good look at it. It was a small white pebble just a little bigger than my thumb, covered by countless runes. The moment it came in contact with my mana, as if reading my mind, the runes lit up, then Juliet’s voice sounded from it out of nowhere.

  “Greetings, Victor! What can I do for you?”

  “I wanted to schedule a meeting tomorrow. I would like to sell some stuff and pick up my bounty hunter ID! I will leave the time to you!”

  “Tomorrow I have time to take personal clients during the afternoon. What would you say to meeting around three?”

  “Perfect! I will be there.”

  With this, I stopped channeling my mana into the tablet, walking straight towards my inn. There, I had a decent dinner, crashed into bed, and ignored Alrune’s loaded comments about Juliet.

  The following day, I woke up early, had breakfast, then I asked them to pack me a lunch on the go before leaving the hotel for the Overrun Catacomb. Using the time before my meeting with Juliet, I ran the dungeon several more times; I even had my lunch in the dungeon after third run. After my fifth run this morning, I headed straight for the dungeon delver guild.

  The moment I entered, Juliet ran up to me, smiling and waving. She was wearing a different dress—same style, this one was dark blue with a very revealing neckline for a dress meant to be worn at work.

  “She is doing a really bad job hiding her eagerness. She looks like a cat welcoming you home; it is amusing!”

  Spoke Alrune in my head, her voice playful, fishing for my reaction. I decided not to entertain her, ignoring the comment. Instead, I politely bowed towards Juliet with my head, who was about to reach me.

  “Greetings, Juliet. How have you been?”

  Hearing my greeting, Juliet froze in place for a short moment but recovered equally as fast.

  “Good, thanks! How can I help you, Victor?”

  She asked as she led me towards one of the nearby sofas. Once we both sat down comfortably, I stated the reason for this meeting once again.

  “I would like to grab my bounty hunter guild ID, and also I would love to sell my dungeon drops!”

  Juliet nodded, smiling warmly. She then pulled out from her own inventory a dark gray card, placing it right in front of me on the table between us. As she did that, Alrune blessed me with another one of her comments.

  “At least have a good look when she is going to such a length to show you her tits! It’s impolite, Vic!”

  This time she almost had me; I had to do my best not to chuckle or not have a peek. Ultimately I managed to keep things professional, with both my eyes and face straight. Once Juliet placed the card in front of me, she sat back, continuing the conversation, looking almost disappointed.

  “What do you want to sell?”

  After doing some quick napkin math in my head, I spoke. “I have around one thousand two hundred of the smallest monster cores, sixty of the small ones, lastly ten minor boss monster cores. Outside of that, I have eight zombie brains, one ghoul brain, one nugget of cerulean iron, plus a common skill scroll: ‘Diseased Claw’.”

  Shock could be seen all over the face of Juliet; she sat there unmoving for more than a minute, then spoke frantically. “Wait!”

  She followed this with desperate tapping on her—let’s call it a ‘tablet’—for some time, until ultimately turning back to me.

  “Y-you ran the dungeon ten times s-solo on your first DAY? Five times the afternoon you got the ID and then another five runs this morning. Please don’t tell me something like that was your morning workout. And that’s not even all, you got all the way to level FIVE?”

  “Yes, calm down please. I could not do more; the experience I was getting from the sixth run onward was atrocious! The penalty for repeated runs kicked in, taking away more than half of my experience. I was hoping to do some bounty hunting so that I can let it run out!”

  She was looking at me, still a little surprised, but she finally managed to gather her composure back again.

  “I knew I did well partnering up with you! This is the first time anyone has run a dungeon solo ten times in one day, on his first day.”

  She then once again pulled out something; this time it was a metallic black square box. She placed it in front of me, once again making sure that I had a front row seat at the two bunnies performance in her dress, before explaining.

  “Place everything you want to sell inside!”

  Hearing her, I placed my palm on the box, offloaded everything I wanted to sell. Once I was done, Juliet grabbed the box, and tapped it a few times. Some runes lit up on the surface of the cube as her look returned back me.

  “One gold and seven silver!” she spoke, handing me the money.

  As I was grabbing the money and my ID, a few things grabbed my attention. First being that bounty hunter ID felt entirely different to the dungeon delver one. Delver one felt almost like a stone slab when you touched it, this one felt like a slick metal. On the other hand considering they had different use, it was only natural they were different tools. The other thing that I noticed was that Juliet kept her hand extended. But before I could process why, Alrune came in with another of her ambiguous lines.

  “First we were delving DEEP into dungeon, and now we are hunting? Shouldn’t that be the other way around? Well anyway looking at the consistency with which you get tits shoved in your face here, it’s no wonder we started by delving DEEP.”

  “Please lend me your communication tablet; I will fill in my sister’s contact so you can schedule a meeting.”

  Nodding, without a word I handed Juliet the tablet, there was no way I was speaking right now, I was busy maintaining my poker face, while Alrune giggled gently inside of my head, enjoying every second.