The week before the Obsidian Labyrinth run, Taeyang trained.
Not combat training — he'd never be a match for real fighters in straight physical confrontation. His body was that of a former office worker who'd spent most of his career sitting in front of monitors. No amount of week-long training would change that.
Instead, he trained his ability.
Ghost's database included practice dungeons — low-rank environments that the System maintained as training grounds. E-rank and F-rank threats, minimal danger, but full parameter sets available for modification. Hunters used them to level new abilities. Taeyang used them to experiment.
Day one: testing modification limits.
He entered a training dungeon called "Goblin Grove" — the lowest possible difficulty — and started pushing his ability in directions he'd never tried before.
**[PARAMETER MODIFICATION ATTEMPTED]**
**[Monster: Goblin_Scout_01]**
**[Target: Existence Status]**
**[Result: Access Denied — Parameter class unavailable]**
Existence Status. He'd tried to delete an enemy from reality entirely. The System refused to let him touch that parameter.
**[PARAMETER MODIFICATION ATTEMPTED]**
**[Environment: Time Flow]**
**[Result: Access Denied — Parameter class unavailable]**
Time manipulation was locked too. Ghost had mentioned it as a theoretical possibility, but theory and practice were apparently different things.
Taeyang spent the rest of the day cataloging what he couldn't access. The list was longer than he'd expected:
- Existence parameters (creation/deletion)
- Temporal parameters (time flow, causality)
- Identity parameters (changing what an entity fundamentally is)
- System parameters (the rules governing [Dungeon Break] itself)
- Cross-dungeon parameters (anything affecting reality outside the current dungeon)
The System had drawn clear boundaries around what he could touch. Everything else — behavior, physics, damage values, spatial layout — was fair game. But the core architecture of reality was protected.
Day two: efficiency optimization.
The dynamic pricing Mina had identified meant he needed to get more value from fewer modifications. That required understanding exactly how costs were calculated.
He entered a B-rank training simulation and started testing:
**[Entity Modification: Goblin_Warrior — HP reduced by 10%]**
**[Cost: 2 SIP]**
**[Entity Modification: Goblin_Warrior — HP reduced by 50%]**
**[Cost: 5 SIP]**
**[Entity Modification: Goblin_Warrior — HP reduced by 100%]**
**[Cost: Error — Cannot reduce HP to 0 through modification]**
Interesting. Modifications scaled with magnitude, and there was a floor he couldn't cross. He couldn't kill things by editing their HP to zero. He could only weaken them to the point where conventional attacks finished the job.
**[Environmental Modification: Gravity reduced by 50%]**
**[Cost: 10 SIP]**
**[Environmental Modification: Gravity increased by 50%]**
**[Cost: 10 SIP]**
**[Environmental Modification: Gravity inverted]**
**[Cost: 15 SIP]**
Direction changes cost more than magnitude changes. The System valued disruption more than adjustment.
**[Boss Modification: Movement Speed reduced by 50%]**
**[Cost: 15 SIP]**
**[Boss Modification: Attack Damage reduced by 50%]**
**[Cost: 18 SIP]**
**[Boss Modification: Special Ability disabled]**
**[Cost: 25 SIP]**
Boss parameters were expensive across the board, with special abilities costing the most. Made sense — special abilities were usually what made bosses dangerous.
By the end of day two, Taeyang had a mental spreadsheet of costs and a better sense of how to budget for A-rank content.
Day three: combo testing.
Ghost had mentioned something in one of their conversations — hunters on the deceased list who'd tried to stack modifications in ways the System hadn't anticipated. Most of them died because their stacking crashed the dungeon or backfired. But the concept was sound.
Taeyang started small. He modified a training dummy's attack speed to zero, then its movement speed to zero, then its detection range to zero. Three separate modifications, three separate costs.
**[Total Cost: 9 SIP for complete neutralization]**
But when he tried to combine them into a single modification — "all offensive parameters reduced to zero" — the cost spiked:
**[Combined Modification: All offensive parameters to zero]**
**[Cost: 35 SIP]**
The System charged a premium for bundled modifications. Doing things separately was cheaper than doing them together.
He tested the opposite: applying the same modification to multiple targets simultaneously.
**[Modification: Aggro Range reduced to 0]**
**[Targets: 5 Goblin Scouts]**
**[Cost: 3 SIP per target = 15 SIP total]**
No discount for multi-targeting. Each entity was priced individually.
But then he tried something different. Instead of modifying the entities, he modified the environmental parameter that governed aggro detection:
**[Environmental Modification: Detection mechanics disabled]**
**[Cost: 20 SIP]**
**[Effect: All entities lose ability to detect threats]**
Twenty points affected everything in the dungeon. Cheaper than individually modifying a dozen enemies at three points each.
The lesson was clear: environmental modifications scaled better than entity modifications for large groups. Entity modifications were more precise but less efficient.
Day four and five: rest and research.
Taeyang spent the remaining time before the run studying Ghost's files on the Obsidian Labyrinth specifically. The dungeon was unusual even by A-rank standards:
```
[A-RANK DUNGEON: Obsidian Labyrinth]
[Structure: Shifting maze (walls rearrange periodically)]
[Monster Type: Labyrinth Guardians (stone golems with reflective armor)]
[Environmental Hazard: Spatial disorientation (compass abilities fail)]
[Boss: The Architect of Paths (HP: Unknown, Special: Creates/destroys maze sections)]
```
The Architect of Paths. Ghost's notes on this boss were incomplete — no party had ever killed it. The dungeon had been cleared twice in its history, both times by S-rank parties that burned through the maze fast enough to catch the boss before it could fully adapt.
"It learns," Minhyuk had said. "Like it's preparing for us specifically."
The boss's special ability was maze manipulation. It could create and destroy walls in real-time, controlling the battlefield at a fundamental level. That sounded like a parameter-based power — exactly the kind of thing Taeyang might be able to interfere with.
Or exactly the kind of thing that might interfere with him.
He sent a message to Mina:
**[The Obsidian Labyrinth. What does the Association know about its parameter structure?]**
Her response came three hours later, just after midnight:
**[More than I'm supposed to share. But theoretically, the Architect's maze manipulation isn't a special ability — it's a system function. The boss doesn't modify parameters. The boss IS a parameter. It's part of the dungeon's core code, not a separate entity.]**
**[Meaning?]**
**[Meaning your ability might not work on it at all. Or it might work in ways you don't expect. The Architect exists in a different layer of the System than normal monsters.]** A pause. Then: **[Be careful. The Anti-Break Protocol has been quiet lately. That usually means it's preparing something.]**
Taeyang stared at the message until his eyes burned.
The boss was a parameter, not an entity. His ability worked on parameters. That should mean he could modify it directly, right?
But if the boss was part of the dungeon's core code, modifying it might be like modifying the System itself — locked behind protections he couldn't breach.
Only one way to find out.
---
The night before the run, Taeyang couldn't sleep.
He lay in his cheap apartment, listening to the water stain drip, thinking about deceased hunters and dynamic pricing and a boss that was woven into the fabric of reality.
His phone buzzed with a final message from Ghost:
**[Good luck tomorrow, Breaker Boy. The System's been weird lately. Fluctuations in core processes. Almost like it's... excited.]**
**[Excited?]**
**[Anticipating something. Preparing for something. I don't know what. But it started three days ago — right after you scheduled the Obsidian run.]** Another pause. **[Maybe it's nothing. Maybe it's the biggest test you've faced yet. Either way... try not to die. You're my most interesting source.]**
Taeyang set the phone down and stared at the ceiling until dawn.
The System was excited.
That couldn't be good.
