《The Cardboard Explorer》Chapter 13
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Once Cade finished dealing with leveling up his linked equipment, he stretched his body and flopped on his bed. After a few minutes lying on his bed, he got up and went online to apply for more dungeon licenses.
Before he started exploring the slime dungeon, Cade wanted to conquer all slime dungeons on the planet.
However, after he got to know Slime 1, Slime 2 and Slime 3, he did not feel like doing that anymore.
They were not monsters that loved fighting. They preferred peace. Cade felt guilty killing them and decided to not explore any slime dungeon.
Cade searched through the list of dungeons in Dineon’s government website for limit entry license but there were none currently available.
All the low-level dungeons were bought by many big guilds for their new members and thus leave him with zero dungeons to go through.
Cade sighed, “Maybe I should join a guild,” thought Cade. If he wanted to get access to a lot of dungeons, the only way to do that was by joining a guild.
However, there were advantages as well as disadvantages of joining a guild. For example, guilds preferred their members to form a party while exploring the dungeon but Cade did not want to join any party because of his luck.
If people knew about his luck, many of them would want him at their party and that was a hassle. If more people knew about it, he might end up with the same situation as the lucky girl.
“Will girls come at me and want to make babies with me?” Cade shuddered when he thought about it. He did not want to go through that situation.
The lucky girl got it easier concerning making babies because she was a girl. She needed to choose only one guy but Cade was a guy and in the current era, a man having many wives or mistresses happened a lot and were accepted by society.
Men from a prestigious and powerful family usually married a lot of women and according to Cade’s research before, even his father was the same.
Cade’s mother was the fourth wife and Cade had many step-siblings. His father was quite good at making strong children excluding Cade because they were all born with high potential and all of them started making names for themselves at a young age.
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Cade knew all of their names and faces but Cade wondered if his siblings even knew about him? Not that he cares about it anymore as he had decided to ignore his family and maybe fight them if they tried to harm him.
He was an explorer and he had a huge opportunity of becoming super strong. He won’t stay still and let his family bully him anymore.
As there was no more dungeon limit entry license available, Cade went offline. He did not know what he should do now. Joining a guild or waiting until a new dungeon appeared.
Cade walked out of his room and into his living room and then, he switched on the television. Upon opening it, it was a news channel with breaking news.
‘A dungeon with time and level limit appear at Planet Snowball in Ice Star Sector!’ The news title wrote. Cade was immediately pulled by the news.
It was not weird for him to get pulled by the news because everyone else would surely get interested in it too.
The reason was that there was never a dungeon with a time limit and level limit. The dungeon that had appeared all this time had no time or level limit.
They usually appeared until some explorers killed off the monsters or the boss and then the dungeon would close and disappear. The dungeon would always stay open until someone closed it.
The dungeon was also opened to anyone without any level limit. No matter how high or how low an explorer’s level was, they can enter all the dungeons that appeared in the universe.
A dungeon with time and level limit had never appeared once in the 10 000 years since their first appearance.
The news then showed the footage of the dungeon and suddenly, Cade got a warning from the system.
[Warning! Warning! Warning!] red letters were used to write the words. It meant that it was an emergency.
[Clear the dungeon before the time limit ends!] said the system.
[70:52:23] the system showed Cade the time limit for the dungeon. It looked like something would happen if the dungeon was not clear within the time limit.
Below the time limit was the level limit. [Level 30 to 40] That meant only explorers between level 30 to level 40 were allowed inside the dungeon.
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“I wonder what will happen if the dungeon is not clear within the time limit?” Cade wondered and the news host said something that interested Cade.
“We just got an update that the Snowball’s government decided to see what will happen when the time limit ends. The high-level explorers from Planet Snowball were the ones asking them to do that.”
“Since this is the first time a dungeon of this type appears, they want to see the result. All of the high-level explorers guarantee the citizens that they will make sure to protect everyone if something bad happens.”
“The dungeon is at a low level so I can understand their confidence… but this warning from the system is not good news. The system had never once sent this kind of warning when a dungeon appears,” said Cade while looking at the news.
Cade felt like they were making the worst decision ever. No one knew the real reason humans got or were given the system. When the dungeons appeared, everyone concluded that the system appeared to counter the dungeons.
However, when the dungeons appeared in the past, there was never any warning coming from the system but for the dungeon in Planet Snowball, a warning sign was given by the system.
Biscuit Star Sector was too far from The Ice Star Sector and just by watching the dungeon entrance from the television’s screen, the system gave Cade the warning sign.
“The threat of that dungeon must be huge,” thought Cade and he was afraid to see what will happen after the time limit ended. He had a bad feeling about it.
After reporting the decision made by Snowball’s government, the news followed up with the public reactions toward that decision.
An interview with lots of people was shown and most of them disagreed with the decision made by them but only the normal citizen thought like that.
Experts like scientists, explorers, and theorists, however, agreed with the decision made by Snowball’s government. All of them said that if something like dungeon breaks happened, there were many high-level explorers available to handle the situation.
The dungeon breaks were a theory made by humans when a dungeon appeared for the first time 10 000 years ago. The theory explained that all the monsters inside the dungeon would come out after a certain period.
However, that theory was useless when the monsters easily came out of the dungeon a second after the dungeon appeared. There were no such things as dungeon break.
“Are they testing the dungeon break theory?” Cade wondered more because, at the moment, there was no news about any monsters coming out of the time limit dungeon.
It looked like the monsters were restricted inside the dungeon. After the time limit passed, the monsters might be able to come out.
Cade went online and saw the news about the time limit dungeon was trending on social media and every news website. The time limit dungeon had turned huge.
On social media, many people were against waiting until the time limit ended, especially the citizens of Planet Snowball. They were scared because the system gave them a warning about the dungeon.
They wanted the explorers to immediately close the dungeon. A lot of Planet Snowball’s citizens went and did a demonstration in front of the government building urging them to close the dungeon immediately.
It was understandable for them to do that as they were normal humans. If the dungeon breaks happened, they won’t be able to protect themselves.
Yes, there were lots of strong explorers and they guaranteed the citizens safety but who knows what might happen when the time limit ended?
The explorers cannot be fully trusted either. Even if they were called explorers, they were still humans. Many humans were selfish, greedy and many more and most explorers were known to be high on those.
Killing between explorers happened a lot due to their selfish and greedy nature. The clearest example of that was when the fight for the puzzle pieces happened before that destroyed seven planets.
The powerless and helpless citizen cannot trust any of the words coming out of the explorers and thus decided to do the demonstration.
Two days later, Cade saw the news and couldn't help but be stunned at what the news was reporting.
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