Gabrielle's embarrassed emoji did nothing to diminish Dominic's condescension.

  Seriously? You're like an overprotective parent, my god. Just how much do you want to coddle your citizens? You seriously think that the residents—these residents, who fight against monsters and all the evils of the world on a daily basis—can't harvest the monster on their own?

  This is not a system I created! It was part of a standard template that all the worlds use that I copied over! And, and, and, I do want to get rid of the corruption and the evils of the world and the monsters—though most of the guidebooks said that they’re necessary to spark the growth of a world—but I just don’t know how to… I don’t have full control of the world, y’know? I’m still just a junior administrator… Soon, though! Soon!

  ( //>///
  You can't really blame me for not editing it too much, anyway! I’m learning on the job! All of it is unpaid overtime, extra effort that I put in! W—Well, I don’t get paid since I technically ‘own’ this world, so that argument isn’t fully valid, b—but, you get what I mean!

  And like, what's so bad about letting them harvest it? It'll help strengthen them, won't it? They can focus purely on battling and on increasing their strength and diving dungeons, while the world itself does all the dirty work for them!

  <( ???? - ????)>

  Dirty work helps people grow, Dominic objected, having done most of the dirty work for his master himself—any and all kinds of chores, even the most basic, his master had freely thrown them at Dominic without any hesitation, until he had become a demigod.

  ‘It builds character’, he’d said. Truly, the old geezer was a devil. Compared to him, Dominic was practically an angel.

  Gabrielle, surprisingly, didn't object to what he said.

  Maybe it does, but it's not a necessity. Character can be built in other ways!

  ?(?`^′?)?

  Dominic simply shook his head.

  Seriously, Gabrielle might not look like it, but she was a proper mother hen. He did not believe her excuse of, ‘oh, I didn't edit the template enough!’ for a second. Any proper programmer would look through the code bit by bit, making sure that there were no errors and that there were no features that they didn’t want executed present within the template code.

  Well, then again, no one had said that Gabrielle was a proper programmer. After all, she was still only on World++ instead of the latest version, and also just a junior administrator who was honestly just winging the whole thing with a few books and some guidance. Not to mention that this was a very primitive universe, too. Perhaps she was indeed telling the truth.

  Not that it mattered anyway—why did he care if the people of this universe could do chores like harvesting corpses with the click of a button? He was totally not jealous. Nope. Not at all.

  Dominic stepped in and explained what Harvest was to his disciple before he could get more confused. “You can press harvest, Calvin. It'll break down the corpse into all the parts of the monster without you having to break a sweat, and then we could sell that for money if we need to.”

  Hannah, if she was less dazed by the earlier system notification, would have pitched in with a question that sincerely bounced in her mind right now. Why and when would a demigod even need money? Dominic could just swish his hand and change the very ground to solid gold, and it would make absolute and perfect sense.

  Calvin raised an eyebrow at Dominic. “Do we even need money though?”

  Dominic simply shrugged. “I mean, you could use it as your pocket money. And anyway, no reason to waste free money, no? You could just donate it, or just play with the eyeballs of the Relfow, using them as balls. You get the idea, don’t waste resources unnecessarily.”

  Calvin nodded. That was true. The orphan spirit in him would never forgive him if he wasted stuff without even a vague pretense of a reason.

  “Those are all things I could do with the monster parts, yes.” Calvin smiled.

  Dominic watched as Calvin pressed something in the air, invisible to everyone but Calvin himself. Dominic could’ve forced it to appear if he really wanted to—it wouldn't be too much of an inconvenience to hack into this world’s system and see everyone's statuses and system notifications. Or he could just wire himself directly into Calvin's brain and watch through his eyes, see the world in the way Calvin saw it. With his permission, of course.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Now that he thought about it, that was a fascinating idea that should totally be added into his bucket list. It had been many, many years—far too many years—since he’d seen the world through someone else’s eyes. Except for Soul Eaters. He’d tried to peek into their minds, but only ended up gaining an intense craving for souls for a short while. Vinegar, for some reason, had soothed that urge. But still, he digressed.

  Dominic watched as the monster’s body floated into the air—hovering a few feet above the cave floor—and a faint blue translucent light enveloped it. The creature’s remains split apart into its composite parts in a single second, then the pieces gently descended back to the ground.

  Dominic looked at Calvin and then the Saintess. Shit, they’d forgotten to bring a bag along with them, and mortals didn't know how to make storage spaces. Though Calvin could make a bag using his shirt, tie it up into a small pouch, that would only be a temporary solution. At a certain point, once they gathered more parts, that bag would become useless.

  He mentally shrugged. It was fine—they were only going for as natural of a growth as possible, so that Calvin’s destiny was still connected with a world till he became a demigod and more importantly, his pride was intact, but Dominic storing these items should influence neither of those factors.

  He sighed to himself dramatically—of course, in his mind, maintaining the kind but stoic demeanor he always had externally—they were so lucky they’d met him as their patron demigod, the genius all-rounder who knew everything. This could have been very inconvenient if Dominic didn’t have an absurdly large storage space.

  With a swish of his hand, a purple rift appeared in the air—a very small crack which widened ever so slightly whenever he fed it the items lying on the ground. With another swish of his hand, the rift closed in on itself, like it had never existed.

  “Shall we proceed?”

  Calvin, as usual, nodded, about to stand up and walk into the dungeon. He exuded an aura of determination, ready to explore the dungeon more, brave its endless dangers and struggles.

  Dominic interrupted him before he could actually dive into the darkness, “You don't have to go deeper into the dungeon just now, y’know? Unless you want to, of course. If you’d prefer to grind your level more, you can simply stand at that spot and the dungeon minions will keep approaching you every few seconds.”

  Calvin blinked. “Oh, you're going to attract them here, master?”

  Dominic nodded. “If you begin exploring the dungeon, I would have to be slightly more involved to be able to scramble the chances of the dungeon spawning a much stronger mob completely. Otherwise, it is likely that every one in a few ten thousand times, something stronger than a minion, such as a follower, or perhaps even one of the top brass of the dungeon, a sub-boss shall appear. The boss monster, of course, won’t be spawned since it requires us to enter the boss room, but the others, they don't.”

  Well, this is all based on my knowledge of how this particular type of dungeons work. The girl could have totally nerfed or made dungeons PG-13, making it so that only minions spawn till one enters the Boss Room. He waited for a second, waiting for Gabrielle to either correct him or add in some knowledge. And her message did appear, albeit not to add in any information—clearly, his estimation of this world’s dungeons was right.

  T?T

  They aren’t PG-13, they’re in fact A rated! A being Adult, I’m assuming!

  Dominic blinked. You know about the movies from Earth?

  I don’t know much about this specific world called Earth, but we have a few worlds in this Universe with a similar grading scale.

  That aside, you have indeed summarized the situation succinctly, Mister Dominic. It would be optimal for Mister Disciple to wait right here if he wants to grind the Minions.

  ?????( ?^?^? )

  “I don’t mind even if you would prefer for me to be more actively involved and want to explore the dungeon right now,” Dominic offered, then thought back to the endless grinding his disciple had done with Wolfey and how much Calvin had enjoyed it, “I do know you enjoy your new status quo in the grinding, so I don’t mind if you decide you want to explore the dungeon right now anyway—”

  Before Dominic could continue, Calvin interrupted him, “No, of course not, master. I would never do anything that you would not recommend!” He flashed a cheesy grin at that, “I am a loyal disciple! Let us grind with these monsters, yes? What do you say, master?” Enthusiasm practically oozed out of the kid, “Let me level up to at least to level 100, or no, let's wait till I become an S-Ranker—do you know which level that is?—using these minions, and then we can go and explore the dungeon.”

  Dominic blinked, caught slightly off guard at the boy’s impassioned tirade, but nodded along.

  “You know, anyone who didn’t know our relationship would think you’re a sleazy corpo employee trying to butter me up.” Dominic joked, but Calvin only tilted his head confusedly.

  Right. Medieval magic era world. And the kid’s enthusiasm was genuine, which… wow. Was he like this when he was younger? This adorable?

  Likely so, Mister Dominic!

  That aside, it is completely possible to do what Mister Disciple wants, Mister Dominic!

  A human will hit the ‘maximum’ once they reach Level 160. This is the point where a person can unhesitantly be called an S-Ranker. To ascend beyond this maximum, there are a few conditions they must fulfill, but that is immaterial right now.

  After reaching A-Rank at level 110, the requirements will stop following the normal pattern and increase exponentially and randomly—doubling every few levels at minimum, and sometimes even tripling every few levels.

  So he'll obviously have kill quite a lot of Minions—thousands at least—but it is completely doable to do this even with just killing the Minions again and again.

  Gabrielle out!

  ?(^?^ )? ′-

  Before Dominic could convey Gabrielle's information to Calvin, however, Calvin continued, “..and I do want to tame more monsters, create a personal army, perhaps? Why not tame ten or a hundred or maybe even a thousand of the dungeon’s minions?”