The head of an entire noble family and his eldest daughter had both run away from home, leaving the management of the entire household to Leon's stepmother?
What kind of bizarre turn of events was this?
"Boss… do you think you might've gone a little too far last time?" Maru asked, referring to Leon's visit home. He really had caused quite a scene, after all.
Leon's expression settled into something hard to categorize.
Beating up his own father and older sister in public certainly sounded excessive on paper. But weighed against everything they'd put him through over the years, it didn't feel excessive at all.
If anything, it had felt incredibly satisfying.
So, no — he stood by it. He hadn't done anything wrong. He certainly hadn't wasted the advice that shopkeeper Maldron had once given him.
Still —
"What exactly are those two trying to pull?"
He pinched the bridge of his nose.
According to his stepmother's letter, his father Teppi and his older sister Megan hadn't left together. They'd vanished one after the other, on different days, without saying where they were headed. They probably weren't even going to the same place.
…Don't tell me they're both off somewhere trying to get stronger before coming back to settle the score.
Wait.
Knowing his father's personality — that was disturbingly plausible.
Leon felt genuinely torn about it. But underneath the mixed feelings, the emotion occupying the largest share of his chest was, unmistakably, excitement.
Woohoo! Round Two of the Father-and-Son Showdown, incoming!
As for his sister Megan — he didn't rate her as a threat at all. She'd spent years indulging herself instead of training, and her strength had fallen well behind. Even if someone force-fed her a mountain of EXP Candies, she still wouldn't be catching up to him anytime soon.
Beyond informing him that his father and sister had disappeared, his stepmother's letter explained that managing the household alone had forced her into late nights day after day. Her health was starting to suffer.
So — swallowing her pride, admitting defeat — she was asking the eldest young master, Leon, to come home and take over the family's affairs.
"Boss… you're not actually going back, are you?"
"I thought we agreed — adventuring party for life."
"Not happening."
Leon rejected it without a second's hesitation.
Go back? For what — to bury himself in household administration until his father returned from training and tried for round two?
Besides — wasn't the family basically coasting on leftover wealth at this point? Where had all these sudden "important family matters" come from?
Ah. He understood now.
His stepmother had probably coordinated with his father on this. A trap to lure him home and let his training slip.
…He was joking, mostly. But there was no version of this where he went back.
He tossed the letter over to Maru.
"Write the reply for me."
"Just tell her I'm not coming back."
"Me?"
Maru blinked, caught off guard.
"But Boss… I never went to school."
"I can't write."
Leon went still.
This was the first time he'd ever heard her admit that outright.
"Then — how do you read?"
"Magic!"
Magic really was the most convenient thing in existence.
Which raised an obvious follow-up — if reading magic existed, surely writing magic did too?
That was when it clicked for Leon. No wonder Maru always found somewhere else to be whenever the team sat down to compile their strategy guides.
Fortunately —
"You're still young enough to fix this."
He looked at her directly.
She immediately spun to run.
Leon caught her by the back of the collar before she made it two steps, and smiled with a warmth that promised nothing good.
"This time—"
"You're writing the strategy guide."
"I'll personally teach you how."
A few days later, the expedition team's strategy guide for the Road of Sacrifices went public.
The response was immediate astonishment.
Who would have predicted Sein Dungeon suddenly adding a region genuinely calibrated for beginners? It felt almost like a deliberate balance patch. Once countless adventurers had gone through and personally verified the intel, it became clear that both the Road of Sacrifices and the Crucifixion Woods beyond it were genuinely excellent training grounds for anyone starting out.
The loot pool seemed to cross-pollinate from multiple existing regions — Purple Moss Clumps from Farron Keep, Titanite Shards from the Catacombs of Carthus — and several items interacted meaningfully with entirely separate areas.
For instance: Orbeck of Vinheim's Notebook.
Bringing it to Liurnia of the Lakes let adventurers skip the usual requirement of finding the Magic Tutor's Hat and jump straight into learning Soul Arrow and Spook. The advantage was obvious — beginners no longer needed to clear the Carian Knight before gaining access to sorcery.
The downside: the notebook only taught those two spells. Anyone chasing more advanced sorceries still had to track down the Magic Tutor eventually.
The guide also singled out two particularly valuable weapon locations — the Twinblades and the Exile Greatsword — while warning readers, in no uncertain terms, that the Exile wielding the giant golden "chicken drumstick" was extremely dangerous and shouldn't be engaged head-on.
Unfortunately, something odd happened almost immediately.
Following the guide's directions, adventurers went hunting for the Twinblades and instead kept finding the Brigand Twindaggers. Excellent weapons in their own right — but after reading the guide's enthusiastic praise, everyone wanted the Twinblades specifically.
Eventually someone actually located them.
Behind the Black Knight.
...
Never mind, then. Who needed that weapon that badly?
Adventurers, as a professional class, were world-class experts at knowing precisely when to retreat.
The Exile information also turned out to be inconsistent across reports. Some adventurers found the Cleric Exile wasn't carrying a Smelter Hammer at all — his weapon of choice had shifted to a Great Club instead.
Eventually the pattern became clear: both Exiles' equipment — and their actual strength — scaled dynamically against whoever was facing them. Their weapons cycled between three distinct sizes: small, medium, large. Whichever version appeared, the two of them consistently packed enough raw power to bar anyone from pushing further without a real fight.
Compared to that pair, even the Crystal Sage started to feel manageable.
Which raised an obvious question — wasn't the Black Knight standing further out actually the strongest enemy in the whole region?
The same adventurer who'd once tried baiting the Abyss Watchers into Wolnir's territory decided the trick deserved a sequel. This time he attempted to lure the two Exiles into a fight with the Black Knight.
The result: the Black Knight and both Exiles ended up chasing him instead.
A complete and total disaster.
Before long, a genuinely amusing trend emerged organically among the player base. Whenever adventurers wanted a straightforward way to measure their own strength against each other, they'd challenge the Exiles — specifically competing over who could force them into their larger weapon variant fastest.
That someone had invented this particular benchmark, unprompted, was almost impressive on its own merits.
If anyone ever managed to smuggle a combat power scanner into Sein Dungeon, the entire adventuring community would probably lose its collective mind trying to compare numbers.
The guide itself was, by any measure, packed with genuinely useful intelligence.
The problem was the delivery.
Everyone who received a magically duplicated copy of the original arrived at the same conclusion, expressed with remarkable consistency:
"…Who wrote this?"
"The handwriting is genuinely unreadable."
Entirely Maru's fault — her penmanship remained catastrophic. Most readers immediately switched to cleaner reprints put out by other publishers instead, and the expedition team's income took a visible hit as a result.
Which, incidentally, had been the entire point from Leon's side. Motivating Maru to actually practice her writing had been the goal all along.
The impact of the Road of Sacrifices arrived fast.
About a week after news of the new region spread, former adventurers began trickling back. Most of them had walked away back when Sein first shifted from an ordinary beginner dungeon into something closer to a nightmare — packing up and returning to their hometowns to farm potatoes instead.
In the time since, Sein Dungeon had kept producing miraculous windfalls. Every day brought fresh stories of someone striking it rich because of the place. The people who'd quit grew increasingly, visibly jealous.
The problem: their strength hadn't kept pace. They could still gather ingredients in the Gourmet Region well enough, but prices there had long since stabilized. The overnight-riches era for that particular strategy had passed some time ago.
People, however, never really stop dreaming about getting rich overnight.
And the Road of Sacrifices fit that dream perfectly.
Sein's unofficial "pig-farming strategy" lured back a genuinely staggering number of former adventurers.
"I'm making a name for myself here!"
"Never going back to potato farming, not ever again!"
"Take the gamble!"
"Turn potatoes into pearls!"
"If it means getting rich, I'd drink every last drop of poison in Farron Keep!"
"I found an ultra-rare Blood Gem! Hahaha — I'm rich!"
"Idiot."
"Titanite and elemental gems are the valuable ones now."
"Blood Gems? Those went out of fashion ages ago."
More and more adventurers kept pouring in. After repeatedly upgrading his Eagle Dungeon authority, Wade managed to expand the number of entrance portals to three, just to keep up with the growing crowds.
And that was only the first week.
Nobody had any real sense of how many people would eventually end up drawn here.
Expectations, needless to say, were running high.
While ordinary adventurers dominated conversation around the Road of Sacrifices, the kingdom's strongest names had been staying busy in their own way.
Numerous famous adventurers had already started making their way toward Sein.
The reason: a new trend had swept the Royal Capital entirely.
The "Sein Style."
Once the kingdom's nobility became fully obsessed with anything Sein-adjacent, ordinary citizens followed almost instantly. Anything with even a loose connection to Sein turned fashionable overnight. Even a plain Green Blossom saw its price multiply several times over — enough that many adventurers grew reluctant to actually eat the ones they'd farmed.
Much of the Sein Style's popularity traced back to Princess Serina — functioning, in practice, as an unofficial PR manager — who had hosted several Sein-themed banquets and tea parties in quick succession. Even Minister Oro had given it his tacit approval; there was, after all, no meaningful downside for the crown.
Trends move fast once they take hold. Whatever became fashionable in the Royal Capital got copied almost immediately in the surrounding cities, and from there the influence kept radiating outward.
And so adventurers carrying every conceivable ambition converged on Sein Dungeon — some chasing fame, some chasing wealth, some purely chasing raw strength.
Among them: the Gold Rank Hasavi Squad.
This elite three-person team had never shown much interest in dungeons before, specializing instead in surface-world expeditions. Broadly speaking, adventurers tended to fall into three categories — dungeon specialists, surface-world specialists, and the rare few who excelled equally at both.
Recently, under their captain "Flash" Fingri, the Hasavi Squad had successfully brought down a subspecies of Earth Dragon. After presenting its finest scales to a noble client in the Royal Capital, they'd received a reward substantial enough to live comfortably for years.
While in the capital, Fingri had also delivered Leon's letter.
Originally the team had planned a quiet stretch of rest. Then word of Sein Dungeon reached them. Following Leon's published strategy, they'd taken on Wolnir directly.
The endless Abyss. The radiant Holy Sword. Both left a lasting impression. And beyond even that — Irithyll of the Boreal Valley's scenery, once glimpsed, had impressed them even further.
Fingri concluded almost immediately that Sein ranked among the finest dungeons he'd ever encountered — standing shoulder to shoulder with the lost kingdoms, ancient ruins, and Fairy Seas he'd explored across a long career.
His curiosity flared. He wanted into Irithyll immediately.
Unfortunately, he had no Small Doll. With that door closed for now, the team turned their attention elsewhere.
Within just a handful of days, they'd witnessed: the Abyss Watchers, burning themselves to sustain the First Flame; the Death Rite Bird sweeping through the endless night sky; the roaring Golden Lion; a magnificent full moon hanging over the Academy.
Along the way, they'd also experienced the particular joy of catching a full-force lunar attack from Rennala directly to the face.
There was only one honest way to describe how they felt afterward.
They wanted more.
The regions currently open simply weren't enough anymore.
Then — a new one appeared.
Passing through the cannibal-infested Road of Sacrifices, and the unsettling stretch of Crucifixion Woods beyond it, a cathedral radiating genuine dread finally came into view.
[Cathedral of the Deep]
Staring up at the massive black structure ahead — a place saturated in fear and mystery in equal measure — Fingri raised a hand and smiled.
"Let's go."
"This time — we're the ones writing the strategy guide."