Chapter 113: One gold coin is a lot of money

It was strange, looking at the numbers laid out in front of him now. In some ways, he had clearly grown far stronger than he’d ever been before, the recent level jump from killing Teon alone accounting for a chunk of his raw stat growth.

Yet at the same time, comparing this window to what he remembered from before, there was an undeniable sense that something had been lost as well.

His attributes though, the raw numbers sitting outside the parentheses, should have carried a much heavier weight than they currently did.

Before Arthur had stripped him of the right to wield Excalibur, the sword’s own passive bonuses had made up a significant, foundational portion of his total combat power, boosting his strength, agility, vitality, mana, and endurance all at once, evenly and substantially across the board.

Without that boost anymore, his overall stat spread felt noticeably thinner in places, more fragile than it should have been for someone who had just leveled up eight times in a single fight.

He could feel the gap clearly, even without needing the numbers to spell it out for him directly.

Still, for all the loss Excalibur’s absence represented, one number on the panel stood out sharply from the rest, refusing to be ignored.

His agility.

At a combined value crossing well past the twelve thousand mark, it dwarfed every other stat on his entire sheet, more than double his next highest attribute, and by a margin far too large to easily comprehend at a glance.

He stared at the number for a long moment, turning it over carefully in his mind.

In all his years training at the academy, in every ranking list and leaderboard he’d ever come across discussing the strongest, fastest players across the continent, he couldn’t recall a single name ever being associated with agility anywhere close to this scale.

Even the most speed-focused S-rank players he’d heard stories about typically topped out in the low thousands, considered exceptional purely for reaching that threshold at all.

Whatever benchmark existed for raw speed among players currently active in the world, he was fairly confident he had just shattered it completely, likely by an enormous margin.

As far as he could tell, standing here in this quiet, dungeon chamber with a pair of golden wings wrapped around his ankles, there was a very real chance he had just become the fastest player alive.

A short, disbelieving chuckle escaped him at the thought, equal parts pride and quiet amazement.

"And this..." he muttered, glancing down again at his own boots, "isn’t even my peak yet."

He still had over two hundred unspent attribute points sitting untouched, along with an entire world of dungeons, monsters, and legendary items still waiting somewhere out there for him to find. Whatever ceiling existed above him now, he had every intention of shattering that as well, eventually.

"I can still grow stronger," he said quietly, more to himself than anyone else. "Get more legendary items too."

With that settled firmly in his mind, he dismissed the status window with a simple thought, watching the translucent panel dissolve back into nothing in front of him.

He took one last glance around the empty, dungeon-core chamber, its smooth pink-lit walls already beginning to show the faintest tremor of instability, before turning on his heel and making his way back toward the tunnel leading up toward the surface, leaving the collapsing dungeon behind him for good.

Leon soon emerged from the gate, its surface rippling, showing signs that it would collapse in a few hours.

He turned and looked around the street, expecting to find the same crowd still huddled together where he’d left them. Instead, he found it empty, save for one figure.

The old man stood alone near the mouth of the alley, patiently waiting, his hands folded in front of him.

Everyone else had apparently already dispersed, drifting back to whatever remained of their homes now that the immediate danger had passed.

The old man’s face lit up slightly the moment he spotted Leon stepping out from where the gate had been.

"Sir Adam," he said, bowing his head respectfully. "You’re safe."

Leon nodded, glancing briefly down at himself, the grime and stains from earlier still clinging stubbornly to his skin and clothes.

Whatever relief he felt at successfully claiming the dungeon’s treasure, it did nothing to change the fact that he still smelled like the inside of a garbage bin.

"Please," the old man continued, gesturing toward a narrow side street, "allow me to offer you my home. It isn’t much, but you’re welcome to clean yourself there."

Leon hesitated only briefly before accepting. Whatever pride he might have clung to under different circumstances, there was no reasonable argument for turning down a proper bath after the day he’d had.

The old man’s house turned out to be small and modest, tucked between two larger buildings that had thankfully survived the chaos unscathed.

Inside, the space was cramped but tidy, clearly well cared for despite its owner’s obvious lack of wealth.

A simple wooden basin sat behind a curtain near the back, and the old man wasted no time filling it with heated water, apologizing repeatedly for the lack of anything finer.

Leon barely heard the apologies. The moment he lowered himself into the water, scrubbing away the layers of filth clinging to his skin, he let out a long, deeply satisfied breath, feeling more like himself again with every passing minute.

By the time he finished, changing into a spare set of clothes the old man had dug up from somewhere in the back of the house, slightly ill-fitting but clean, he felt like an entirely different person compared to the disgusting mess that had crawled out of that garbage bin only hours earlier.

When he emerged, the old man was already waiting with a small wooden bowl in hand, filled with a simple stew, the smell of root vegetables and some kind of broth drifting toward him.

"Please, sir," the old man said, holding it out earnestly. "It isn’t much, but you must be hungry after everything you did for us today."

Leon looked at the bowl for a moment, then gently shook his head.

"It’s fine," he said. "I’m not hungry."

That wasn’t entirely true, but he had no intention of correcting himself.

He could tell, just from the state of the house and the old man’s threadbare clothes, that whatever was in that bowl represented a meaningful portion of whatever food the man actually had left.

Taking it, even as a gesture of gratitude, felt like taking food directly out of someone else’s mouth, someone who had already lost enough today without needing to sacrifice a meal on top of it.

The old man’s face fell slightly at the refusal, clearly having expected, even hoped, that Leon would accept. He didn’t push the matter further, though, simply setting the bowl aside with a small, resigned nod.

Leon flicked his hand in the air instead, and a small gold coin appeared out of thin air.

It was from the pouch he had taken from Teo back when the latter tried to rob him, thinking he was nothing but a weak player.

"Here," he said simply. "Take this."

The old man’s eyes went wide the instant he saw the coin, his hands immediately rising in protest. "No, no, I couldn’t possibly—"

"Take it," Leon said again, more firmly this time, pressing the coin gently into the man’s reluctant palm. "Consider it payment for your hospitality. You gave me a place to clean up when I needed it most. This is the least I can do in return."

The old man stared down at the coin sitting in his palm, his fingers trembling slightly as he turned it over, as if still not quite believing it was real.

It took him a long moment to finally close his hand around it, his throat visibly tight with emotion as he looked back up at Leon.

"Thank you," he said quietly, his voice thick. "Thank you, sir Adam."

Leon offered a small, dismissive wave in response, though internally, he understood exactly how significant that single coin actually was.

He wasn’t wealthy himself, not by any reasonable standard, certainly nowhere near what someone from a proper noble household might carry around casually. But he’d gotten lucky with Teon’s coin pouch, at least in that one small way.

He remembered clearly, back at the restaurant, expecting the pouch to contain nothing but a handful of unremarkable copper coins, the kind any low-ranked player might carry for incidental expenses.

Instead, when he’d actually opened it up properly for the first time, he’d found five solid gold coins mixed in among a modest scattering of silver, an amount that had genuinely surprised him.

For someone like Leon, even five gold coins wouldn’t have gone especially far, not with everything he still needed to acquire moving forward.

But for a man like the one currently standing in front of him, living modestly in a small, unassuming home in a town like Ratdale, a single gold coin alone was almost certainly more money than he’d ever held in his hands at one time.