Slave Harem in the Labyrinth of the Other World (LN)

This is a treasure chest, master!

A treasure chest? This thing right here?

Thats right!

Roxanne rushed towards the treasure chest in excitement, but I still could not understand what was she getting so fired up about because the thing that she described as a treasure chest looked like a simple mound of soil to me, very similar to the ones that moles make whenever they stop digging through the ground and want to come back to the surface.

It this really the famous treasure chests I have heard so much about, and not just some kind of trap meant to lure in nave people blinded by the prospect of getting their hands on some easy loot? Also, according to Roxannes words, treasure chests contain the belongings of those who have died while going through the Labyrinth, so it can be said that this is a pretty morbid take on the typical system or randomly generated loot found in most RPG games, but through the standards of this world, I guess its inhabitants will see nothing wrong with it.

Back when we were only trekking through Veils Labyrinth I have never seen even a single one of those pop up, most likely because that Labyrinth is practically deserted and almost no one goes there, or at least to its lower floors. As a result there was no one who could have fallen prey to the monsters living there, resulting in there being no treasure chests whatsoever.

As for Quratar, we have not seen treasure chests up to this point either, but not because there was no people, oh no. Quratars Labyrinth is always teeming with Adventurers and Explorers alike so there are bound to be more treasure chests here, but so far we were only sticking to the shortest possible routes to the Boss Room, focusing very little of our time towards exploration out side of the path dictated by the map. That is one reason., the other one being that with so many people here at any given time of the day, even if some treasure chests were to spawn, they would all be picked clean by the time we have arrived at the scene. We were probably only able to find this one because we came here unusually early even for us looking for the Slow Rabbits to slay and snatch their Furs off of them.

Keeping a safe distance from the lump of soil, Roxanne poked it with her Scimitar a few times, but nothing alarming has happened. Still, it does not mean that we are in the clear just yet. This treasure chest might still be rigged with the kinds of traps that we cannot even begin to imagine, so we should still exercise extreme caution in interacting with it.

Do you think it is safe to open this thing up just like that? What if it is a trap?

It should be perfectly safe to open. And even if it was not and it turned out that it was, for example, a Mimic(TL Note: I fucking knew there are Mimics there!) masquerading as the treasure chest, all we would have to do to claim the treasure is to defeat it, which should not be difficult with masters strength.

Talk about having absolute confidence in her reply. Seeing her being so sure about that reassured me as well but wait, what was that about Mimics? They have Mimics here?! In that case, maybe I should stab this treasure chest a few times to see it is going to suddenly come to life only to drop dead in the very next second?

Roxanne, maybe I should

But before I was able to suggest that to her, she already stabbed her Scimitar into the mound of earth and lifted it up from the ground like a carpet. I see. So, it looking like a mound of earth was a sort of camouflage, huh? In truth, whatever this treasure chest was actually made of was more like skin, or a piece of paper. I guess things like that are one of the reasons why even the people native to this world cannot say for sure if the Labyrinths are truly alive or not.

Back to the treasure chest before us, the item that it contained inside of it was Leather Gloves. Just an ordinary set of Leather Gloves, without any Skills or Skill Slots to it whatsoever. We are relatively close to the end of the seventh floor now, so I guess the rumors that treasure chests contain the equipment of those who tried to brave the Labyrinths corridors is not just a baseless rumor after all. I can definitely imagine people getting impaled by the Escape Goats horns or bitten to death by Slow Rabbits fangs even though these are not pleasant images at all. Well, these Leather Gloves are not a great piece of equipment by any means so it probably will not be worth all that much, but there is nothing we can do about it now besides selling it in the equipment shop, which is good, because it will allow us to have that much more extra Nars for whatever we would want to buy next. Who knows, maybe if the person who was the original owner of those gloves invested in better gear he would have still been alive instead of biting the dust and having his armor and weapons serve as random prizes for other people who came here after him? Let this be another reminder for all of you. Labyrinths are dangerous places, and coming into them without proper and careful preparation will only end up in catastrophe for you.

Whoever you might have been, we will be gratefully taking this. Namu amida butsu.

Namu amida?

While praying for the souls of the deceased Adventurer or Explorer who dropped those, under Roxannes questioning gaze, I picked up the Leather Gloves from the treasure chest as the ground around it deflated and returned to its perfectly flat shape.

After that surprising encounter with the treasure chest, we have returned home before the sun fully rose to have breakfast. When we were done eating, we had ourselves a short break, after which it was off to the Labyrinth with us again. Since we explored Quratar Labyrinths seventh floor earlier, it was now the time for us to go to Veil Labyrinths seventh floor for the purpose of exploration and increasing our levels. Unfortunately, I cannot say that our run there went all that well, mainly because the accursed Escape Goats continued to be a royal pain in the ass thanks to their pesky Escape Skill, which they were using every time they were at deaths door and when they were conveniently too far away from me to reach them in time to kill them with Durandal or my magic, which annoyed me to no end, because we did not earn all that much EXP and did not get many items. But even so, we decided that we wont go back to Quratar to hunt for more Rabbit Furs. We have established that we will only do so in the mornings, and at this point it became such a routine thing for us that we didnt even have to think about it, so there is no point in changing that now just because we had a kind of a shitty luck when it came to the enemy RNG this time.

But since we are on the subject of Quratar there is one alteration that might prove beneficial to us if we decide to implement it into our morning Quratar Labyrinth runs: I would like to try and divide our time there between getting Rabbit Furs and trying to take on the Floor Boss of Quratar Labyrinths seventh floor. But first things first, we have another thing that needs to be done.

When we woke up the next day, we got dressed and went to Quratars Labyrinth to hunt some more Rabbit Furs as usual, and we managed to obtain more than three hundred of them without any major incidents happening to us along the way, meaning that we managed to achieve the goal we have set for ourselves, so after we got back home in order to have breakfast, we knew what our next stop before going to Veils Labyrinth was going to be: we are going to Imperial Citys clothing store in order to sell all of those Rabbit Furs. We warped to the Imperial Citys Adventurers Guild, made our way to the store and walked through the entrance specified in the poster in front of the store as the one meant for those who wished to sell Rabbit Furs. Once we were inside, I noticed that this side part of the store was not divided from the rest of it by any walls, doors or even curtains. It was a simple side entrance to the store, from which you could see the inside of the entire store and go anywhere you wanted without being stopped.