“You’re shitting me,” said Beck.

James pulled out his card, and, covering the luck stat with his finger, showed it to the three senior explorers.

said Mike.

“However, I have no problem killing normal goblins with ease,” said James. “Something fishy is definitely going on here.”

The three explorers looked at each other, but were helpless. They had never heard of such a thing happening. James sighed. As he expected, they had never seen a situation like this. James suspected in his heart that this matter about his inconsistent stats was related to his glitched luck stat.

“Still, when I ate the orbs, I did feel my strength increasing,” he said.

“Look man,” said Beck. “I don’t know whether to be confused about your status, or to get mad because you said ‘orbs’.”

James’ brow creased. “How rare are they?”

“4 years dungeon. 18 orbs. 19th floor.” said Leah.

The 19th floor! That was a long way up! James wondered just how strong these 3 senior explorers were.

“The 3 of us are all stuck on the 19th floor, afraid to challenge the 20th floor boss,” said Beck.

Mike added.

James was a bit relieved. His progress was actually quite fast. These seniors had taken years to get that far.

Leah brough the topic back to James’ inconsistent stats.

“James mana ball, smallest ever, seen. No enhancement?”

Mike translated Leah’s sentence for James

Leah gave a thumbs up. “Monster go boom.”

“Leah, James is only on the 1st floor, he would have enhancement magic yet,” said Beck.

Mike nodded.

Silence fell onto the table for a little while. The background murmurs and the clinks of John washing the dishes were caught by James’ ears. After thinking for a while, he said:

“I mean, it’s weird that my stats are so low, but there’s nothing I can do about it. It doesn’t seem to really affect me, so I’ll just continue with my plan.”

This got an affirmative response from his 3 senior explorers.

James then asked another question to Mike.

“Why are such things secret? People could die in the dungeon. Wouldn’t it be better to share all the information?”

Beck grimaced.

“Yeah, you’re right. You see, the three of us are a little group of English speaking explorers who decided to do just that. It helped all of us. Although I guess it’s a group of 4 now.”

Brett blinded James with that perfect smile once again.

“But there are some explorers out there that are, that are completely focused on making money. They don’t care for others. Although I don’t know what they’re after anyways. They don’t allow you to exchange too much money at once, for fear of inflation. I’m pretty sure that if I tried, I could

James understood. There were always those people that were completely selfish. So far, James hadn’t met any explorers like that, but it was a matter of time. James asked if fights between explorers happened. He was told that scuffles occurred occasionally, but if it got too heated, John would stop it. Apparently, John was very strong. Then again, he was an affiliate of the dungeon. Nothing else was known about him, except for the fact that he works at the dungeon shop 24/7.

Eventually, the talk at the table dwindled and the three of them eventually left the dungeon and returned to Earth. James checked his watch. It was about time for him to wake up. For Mike, who was living in England, it must’ve already been the afternoon. His body would be sleeping the entire time he was in the dungeon shop.

“Oh well,” he thought. When you’re that rich, you can do whatever you want.”

James tapped his dungeon card and left the dungeon. He still had to go to school. He had a group project he needed to work on, so he couldn’t let his groupmates down.

====================

??? received a notification. She checked the message, and discovered it was from John, the dungeon shopkeeper. She instantly leapt on it. John wouldn’t message her unless it was something truly important. And the only thing of importance she had told him about was the new dungeon explorer. Sure enough, the message was about James Lu. As ??? read through the message, her brow creased.

She kicked herself. Apparently, James’ stats and This was something she should have noticed herself. How could she have overlooked this in the past? ??? guessed that she had been too busy worrying about the tier 3 and tier 2 goblins James had defeated, and forgotten about his weak stats. She assumed that he’d be able to sweep through tier 1 goblins, and he had bolstered her assertions by walking through the dungeon a second time. But, all his stats were still lower than a normal goblin’s. Yet, he had still destroyed them as he was walking through the dungeon. His strength, which had been increased by the orbs, was at a level where it was believable. But his other stats were abysmal.

??? ordered her subordinates to run another stat check on James. But the results were the exact opposite of what she had expected. She thought that the stats that the dungeon gave James were too low. Running another check would update James’ status, which should be more normal.

But James’ stats that were shown by the redo were his initial stats upon going into the dungeon! Everything but his luck and intelligence was at 1 again. Even after redoing the test once, twice, three times, the results were the same. In fact, the only reason that James’ stats had gone up was because it had recorded James eating orbs and clearing the first floor. The true stat values were still at one.

How could this be happening? Was the system broken? No, because there were no abnormalities with any other explorer. It must be that James was special. Something about him made the system not work.

??? already knew that James was special. His luck stat was broken. But now all his other stats were too. What was going on?