Chapter 130: Graveyard Story Is Really Fun
Hold on. What does this mean? Is this asking me to do a full hostile takeover and become the main landlord?
Reading the description more carefully: even if Dracula suddenly came back and tried to reclaim control of the whole castle, Ross would still retain operational authority over the Grand Cemetery area?
Did he have Trevor to thank for this?
Ross wasn't entirely sure of the underlying mechanics, but that didn't stop him from smoothly accepting control over the Castlevania Grand Cemetery.
He wasn't a villain, of course. He would adjust the Grand Cemetery's monsters and drop rules with the three-way balance in mind.
The Grand Cemetery was the weakest area in all of Castlevania. Even ordinary people with conventional firearms could break through it without too much difficulty and reach the BOSS rooms further in. But precisely because it was the weakest area, it was the one with the most contact with adventurers. It was the foundation. And in a certain sense, the weaker a map was and the closer it sat to the outer human settlement, the more it was the pillar holding up the dungeon economy.
The vendors' eyes lighting back up the moment the castle reset proved the point without another word needed.
What Ross didn't know was that his well-intentioned reset had, in practical terms, been eating into Dracula's control authority over Castlevania. Running away from home comes with costs. Getting your home rebuilt at no personal effort costs even more.
Put plainly: for as long as Dracula stayed absent and didn't come back to reclaim authority, each time Ross reset the dungeon was equivalent to one more bite taken out of Castlevania's control, until eventually the entire castle would belong to Ross by default.
Impressive.
That said, the situation wasn't all benefits with no drawbacks.
The first was the obvious change in his relationship with Count Dracula. They hadn't even met face to face yet, but having a castle this large progressively taken from under you wasn't something Dracula was going to smile and hand over graciously, unless he had already found somewhere else to put his heart.
The second was Castlevania's own soul-imprisonment rules.
The ghoul and skeleton units in the Grand Cemetery wearing human clothing and carrying human weapons had already confirmed it: souls were genuinely being imprisoned inside the castle and reshaped into monster units.
Which meant that as Ross's control authority over Castlevania grew, the Spirit World's attention, currently misdirected onto Dracula, would inevitably start shifting toward the actual responsible party.
From the Spirit World's perspective, this was actually fairly serious. The total number of souls that could be imprisoned here, limited to those who actively stepped into Castlevania's territory, was negligible compared to the daily death toll of the entire world. But it was a matter of principle. A castle that actively imprisoned souls was, by definition, overstepping.
Ross, blissfully unaware of any of this, was scrolling through the list of modifiable monster types available for the Grand Cemetery area, eyes drifting to the five-colored dragon and metal dragon units from Tower of Druaga, with no idea what his new permanent authority over Castlevania actually implied.
Just before all of that, in the Republic of Batopia's Dentora District, at the foot of Kukuroo Mountain, outside the front gate of the Zoldyck family estate, a gate known as the Trial Gate, yet another uninvited guest had arrived.
The Trial Gate, all seven stages of it, had become something of a local tourist attraction. Every so often, someone would show up convinced they could force their way through, and within a short time the estate would toss out another set of bones. The shops around the gate had long since turned "how long will the uninvited guest last this time" into a small wagering pastime.
The last memorable visitor had been a hedgehog-haired stubborn kid who had actually walked away with the family's third son, which had kept the surrounding shops in conversation fodder for quite a long time afterward.
This new arrival was different from every visitor before, including the black-haired stubborn kid.
The means of transport alone signaled something. A carriage of striking opulence, heavily Gothic in design, had stopped before the Trial Gate. The horses drawing it were immediately unsettling. Only the front halves of horse bodies. The actual pulling was done by a glistening, pale skeleton.
The skeleton dropped lightly from its perch, pulled open the carriage's side door with quick efficiency, and out stepped a man who looked every part a figure of the highest rank of old European aristocracy.
White hair. White beard. Pointed ears. Simply standing there was enough to make the air feel heavier. Black cape, immaculate. But the vivid scarlet lining of the collar gave off a strange unease. Just looking at him made you feel the taste of iron in your mouth.
"So this is the place."
His voice was a deep, resonant baritone, unhurried, with a theatrical rolling quality to the consonants, as though each word were being savored. It sounded like a question and like a statement to himself at the same time.
Then, abruptly, his body gave an involuntary shudder. He had felt it: something on a distant continent was eroding his domain, and whatever was doing it was of the same essential origin as his own power.
In the past, he would have turned around immediately and returned, delivering this world's most severe and chaotic punishment to whatever had dared reach into his territory. Right now, he clearly had more pressing matters.
A cold sound through the nose, and the man walked forward to face the Trial Gate directly. His body shifted into a strange translucent state, and he stepped through the Trial Gate as though it wasn't there.
Some time later, the interior of the Zoldyck family estate erupted.
Because "that thing" was gone.
Ross didn't particularly enjoy management simulation games. Civilization, Hearts of Iron, Europa Universalis, Stellaris, Dyson Sphere Program, Harvest Moon. He had sampled all of them and never gone deep.
But right now he had to admit: Castlevania Graveyard Story was genuinely something.
Just adjusting the spawn rates, drop items, and monster strength had consumed a striking amount of his time without him noticing. He had experienced the classic gamer's phenomenon of logging in at eight in the morning, blinking, and finding it was nearly eight in the morning again.
No. This was too indulgent.
The essence of the Spirit Wave Style was balance: learning, rest, play, and eating all done in proportion, nothing taken to an extreme. So after setting the Grand Cemetery's fixed BOSS to a green dragon, Ross firmly pulled the cartridge out and did out-of-sight, out-of-mind.
With the castle having rebuilt itself right in front of his eyes, Trevor looked like his entire understanding of the situation was starting to crack. He wasn't going to make another casual run at it until he figured out what was actually going on.
Ging, by contrast, was fully absorbed in investigating Castlevania with the complete focus of a Ruins Hunter deep in his preferred territory. He looked remarkably happy.
Meanwhile, having a green dragon at the end of the Grand Cemetery served as an efficient filter, keeping the weaker ability users occupied with the grunt monsters in the outer zone and only letting through those capable enough to potentially go deeper.
The balance Ross was aiming for had taken initial shape. Time for some idle play.
He was just about to call in a room service order using the arena's internal line when the phone rang first.
"Contestant Ross, there is a Floor Master who wishes to invite you to join them for breakfast. Is now a convenient time?"
"A Floor Master? Who?"
"The Floor Master of the 249th floor. Contestant Younger Toguro."