What came into the view, was breathtaking. He was standing atop a mountain, covered in ice and snow. Two mountain chains created a valley in between them, littered with rivers going across it. At this point he felt so insignificant, so small that all his progress and growth felt like a speck of dust in an endless desert. While the feeling was momentary, it left a strong impression. It reminded him, that no matter how strong he gets, there is always something more astounding, more wonderous than his state of being, nevertheless his human pride had to make itself known. 'I am but a speck of dust, but not forever.' His ego stirred his spirit, both in a positive and arrogant manner. How dare nature boast it grandness and limitless beauty. In this world, he could reach it too, ney, surpass it.

Lower, and further in the distance he could see endless fields of green, some movement at the very edge of his vision, which was up to a few kilometers by now during the day. This exit to floor thirty one was situated in quite the place. What was a noticable change that Rex had recognised was that the deeper one went the more stairs there could be that led from one floor to the next. If the first few floors had one posibble path, floors five to ten - two to three stairs, floors ten to twenty five going from three to almost ten. It was asumed that from twenty nine adn onwards it multiplied exponentionally, since the size of the floors was becoming bigger and bigger. And because of the lizardmen and orc supertribes, adn the sheer size of the twenty-nineth floor, it had not been fully explored. To be fair, fully explored were only floors one through twenty. Further down there were quite a bit of unexplored zones mingling with well known territories.

Rex had become much better at orienting himself in the dungeon, and backtracking his path, to return from whence he came. While he had planned to spend a couple weeks down here in this floor, he was well aware that the auction was going to happen in four weeks, and he had to be back by then.Still he had plenty of time to enjoy himself, and he somehow felt that this floor would not dissapoint. He had also asked regarding the meat of monsters on floor thirty one, since he wanted to keep most of the suprise just as it was - a suprise. Eredar had provided him with a very simple tool. It was a crystal like contraption and it would shine in three different colours. Red, green and gold. Green colour meant the meat was poisonous or just utterly unedibble, and as such Rex should ignore it. Red meant the meat was safe for consumption, and while it wwould be just as saturated if not better that floor thirty, it was nothing to write home about. And the golden color meant the meat was basicly worth its weight in gold, if not more. What was important to know was that the meat from the deer, bison and other beasts Rex had farmed on floor thirty shone with Red colour, and Eredar said that no godl quality meat was ever found on that floor. Thirty first and deeper had that. It has to be noted that thirty third was the deepest, any raid had gone, and it happened only twice. First time, while they had quite the losses, they managed to haul home a treasury, but the sencond time only a few survived. the best scouts adn rogues, that managed to escape the byakko they had encountered. The rest of the raid was utterly wiped out. A few hundred A ranks lost their lives that day, as Eredar had recounted.

Rex moved with quite the gusto ,wanting to leave the snow covered mountain top to start his grind. He realy wanted to get his hands on some gold tier meat. If the masterpieces that Aisah prepared was so insanely good with just red grade meat, Rex salivated just at the thought of what was to come once he has some of that top shelf stuff. Speaking of super rare goods, Rex had something he was sure noone has ever had the pleasure of tasting, and he was not going to share it with anyone. He had an entire storage ring dedicated for it. Ok, there was one more person, aware of it, and who had the pleasure of tasting it. Great sabertooth tiger milk. Rex used exactly that to calm his salivation over gold grade food. Quickly taking a sip of the milk from one of the countless flasks he had in the time frozen artifact he enjoyed a pure bliss of the taste that overtook him, calming him down. Lira was the one person, who was tasked with the super secret and important mission to milk the tigress when she was lazing around. She would be feeding her cubs for at least a few more years and Rex would be expanding his own personal stocks of the milk as long as he could. That stuff was more valueable than godl in his opinion, and when Lira had the first taste, Rex saw the poor girl come from the pleasure after she drank it. Lira was under strict orders to keep quiet about it and in return she would get a bit for herself every now and then. rex of course could use the power of brand tor the same effect, but that just felt wrong. It had the taste of good wrong to it- to keep lira silent by bribing her, rather than forcing the silence with heavily pain induced curse. pain was meant for enemies, not his girls.

While half distracted with other thoughts, but never loosing his vigilance, using his multithreading to devote a few of his minds instances for neverending vigilance, he had reached the place where snow was barely covering the ground, and was slowly receding. He was close to the start of the proper living ecosystem of these mountains. Some rare small trees were already in the near vicinity, some moss on those trees, some more on some small shrubs here and there. The scenary kept changing, with more adn more trees coming into the view, getting bigger, and with the ground being less and less frozen, more than just moss started to appear. More and more small shrubs adn bushes, some rather tough looking plants here and there, but showing up more and more.

With another hour of descent in a now somewhat paced tempo, Rex had entered some sort of conifer forest. Light, mostly moss covered ground was now everywhere, few brushes here and there. Due to the uniqueness of the conifer forest, there was little in the way of obstruction on the lower level of the forest, since it was filled with huge, old trees tha tcovered and took most of the light, leaving the lover levels somewhat gloomy and dark. Rex had noticed all sorts of small birds and bugs moving around, and judging from the mana amount, those were just some lower level ordinary forest critters.

A few dozen minutes later, his sharp senses caught notice of something bigger moving in the distance. Even with all the gloominess and the grey atmosphere, since there was basicly no underbush, Rex quite soon found the creature raising the noise in the distance. The wind was blowing in Rex dirrection, and it had not noticed Rex in time. What Rex saw did make him slightly confused in the very beggining, but he quiclky got out of his stupor. It was quite a bizzare looking animal. Rex could only describe it as horse torso with six cat like legs neck twice as long as one would expect a horse to have and a wery tought looking beak like a duck. It also had a couple of quite dangerous looking bull horns tha extended more upwards. Rex reasoned it used them to stab things as ussual, and when running the beak would be pointed downwards so the horns were dirrected at whateevr was in front of the weird beast.

Without loosing any more time, Rex strenghtened his body with his spell he decided to name 'Boost'. It was a nice, short and self explanatory word, that whne trained enough would instantly activae the spell without much though or effort put in. Regulating the intensity afterwards was a simple matter, just imagining a switch with different measurments of mana input and he just had to will to make it greater or smaller. A matter of time untill it would be a second nature.

In a split of a second Rex had crossed over hundred meters and was in front of the beast, already swinging down his blade on its neck. Its head was severed quite quickly, but Rex did feel that its bones were notably tougher than the creatures before. Quickly testing the meat,and seeing the black color, he used drain, calculating the level of strenght of the creature. The duck faced horse was better by quite the margin than all but the apex predators of floor thirty, and its speed and toughness didnt prove a problem. With drain done Rex moved on, descending down the mountain as he had untill now.

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The next few hours was rather monotonous. He would kill another duck faced horse every now and then, draining it and moving forward. During this time he took down a few game birds and since their meat shoved red on the crystal, he stored them. Rex wanted to get to the mixed forests down the mountain sooner, well aware that the fauna and flora there will be much more diverse. What Rex did have to note was that the mountains in this chain must be enourmous, and he couldnt quite understand why with such immense altitude, he didnt feel less oxygen in the air. He reasoned that was one of the reality warping effects of the dungeon, since every floor was as if their own independant echosystem. For all reason the upper floors with the size of these mountains and the insane amount of lands he had seen, should be well in the space by now, however, since each floor was independant, as mentioned earlier, some weird stuff was to be expected.

Once he finally reached a change of biome he immediatly encountered some new creatures. Rex could only conclude that any logic he could use to reason the existance of the beasts before hand, now he was in a full on anything goes fantasy word. From velociraptor like looking creatures, that Rex just classified as them, to truck sized bears with three snake heads and scorpion tail, to eight meter long furry snakes with deer heads, to three meter high beasts with gorilla upper body attached to a scorpion and with aligator head. One thing that Rex noticed was that the more dangerous the chimera part owners would be in his original world, the more powerfull the combined creature would be. Of course with His mana chains now being able to act as living chainsaws ripping whatever Rex grabbed a hold of, if he so whished, they didnt provide much of a danger. The secodn consistent thing with these chimeras was that none of them had meat good for consumption, so Rex had quite the drain happening.

It was closer to the second morning that, after Rex had kept descending all night and murdering his path through countless chimeras that he found something peculiar. To be more precise, he felt it. A spike in energy in a certain dirrection, but unlike a sentient being, it was just there, dormant, as if waiting for someone to go to it. Rex, quite curious now moved with caution in that dirrection and soon arived near a cave. And he had another suprise waiting there for him. In front of the cave slept a giant monster. It sensed Rex as soo nas he was close enough, and raised its enongated neck. It raised itself up from its sleeping position, pushing itself up with its front legs, that were fused with its giant wings. It seemed reptilian like, almost lizard, if not for its more crocodile like head, just more elongated and slick, more smooth, with sharpened nose for better cutting of air stream when it was flying. Huge, scaly body, with a large and thing tail. It towered aproximately five meters high standing on all four, wings stretching upward from its front leg elbows, easlily breaching ten to twelve meter wingspan, maybee more, Rex wasnt entirely sure. The monster looked like a proper vyvern he had seen in some of this words books, just on steroids, seeing as its size looked biger thna described in the book.

To avoid the undesirable scenario of it utilizing its advantage of flight, Rex pushed in quite a bit of mana in the Boost, and charged the vyvern. While he was sucsesfull in in basicly severing the beasts wing, he had to go in an insane dodging spree as the vyvern schreeched and went on a rampage of attacks, using its powerfull jaw, both of its front legs and even using its tail to shred its adversity. Swing of its tail, tha Rex crouched to avoid, followed by an instant jump with a roll to the side, narrowly avoiding its powerfull jaws, that smashed in the rock of the cliff that the cave was developed into and the monster was sleeping on. It then quickly retracted its head, following Rex's movement with its senses, smashing its frong legs in another attempt to lock down the slippery meal. It was dangerous, sure, the beast could instinctively feel its, but the dungeons influence had pushed to go in a frenzy of slaughter. Whatever was before it, would be mercilesly killed.

''It has to be a guardian.'' Rex's eyes sparkled with more vigor. he was now quite sure inside that cave was a natural dungeon treasure, and this vyvern was its guardian. Rex was even more exited with that understanding dawning on him, and he pushed his boost up to the limit of his current ability. It made him even faster than he was by roughly another ten percent, and while it ddint seem like much, one hads to note he already was some twenty percent stronger with the current level of Boost active. With this additional empowerment Rex finaly could do more than just dodge the vyverns endless attacks. He could finaly return and attacks or two every now and then. He had plenty of mana to burn in his current stage, as mana reserves was one of the things he was the least worried about.

The also recieved some scrathes trom the vyvern's tail, that managed to damage his clothes, but not quite pierce his skin. Luckaly, Rex had come with no plans to brand anything and as such he was in his ussual clothes and not his mage disguise, so discardable clothes was not on his minds whatsoever. What also suprised rex was the insane stamina the beast showed since they had been going at it for almost an hour, whne finaly he could sense the monster slowing down, finaly showing signs of exaustion. The new wounds rex had managed to inflict upon it during this hour, intensifying the bleeding of the beast did not help either. Rex himself was profusely sweating, feeling quite the strain on his body as well. He could barely even try to drain the monster because of its seer might and tenacity. Rex had not met anything near its level before.

Another twenty miinutes of more avoiding the frantic and now ever slowing vyverns attacks that indicated its near end, and Rex ever increasing slashes that brought it ever closer to it death, Rex finaly got the oportunity he had been waiting for. After another big swing of the beast, its arm, that was used for the attack slipped to the side, purely because of all the lost blood and exaustion, making it fall down to the side, entirely plastering it to the ground. As it struggled to get itself up for another attack, Rex jumped on its back, feeling quite the exaustion in his body as well, and controlled all his ten mana chains to wrap around its limbs and tail,since they had stopped moving, and he could finaly lock them down, and started the vibrations of them, while thightening his grasp of the limbs. including its neck. It was his won personal version of chainsaw with the chains in attack mode.

The vyvern was strugling for another ten minutes as Rex was doing his damn harderst to cut its head off. The other limb cutting was simply to inclict more pain, keeping the beast muddled and incapable to properly stop Rex. Its wings and underbelly were the only properly softer body parts so most of his sucsesfull attacks were concentrated in those areas, however now Rex coudnt reach its underbely, so he had to make do with what he had.

When he finaly broke the scales on its neck, it took him less than three minutes to use those holes in its armour, to invade its body with his mana chains adn destroy the vital organs, finally bringing the crature to its end. Exausted, Rex slid down the beasts side and with his chains still lodged in the fresh corpse of the beast he activated drain,not willing to leave himself in such and exausted and vulnerable position for any period of time. No great sabertooth of night prowler could exaust him to this level, so rex was even more exited aboiut the prospect of the treasure inside the cave.

With new boundless energy coursing through his veins as drain refreshed and invigorated him, and then empowering his being, he once again confirmed the sheer might of the creature he had just slain. What suprised him even more was that one he had finished the drain, and the mana dust dissipated, the super hard scales from the monsters neck had remained untouched, fallen in a chaotic manner as the rest of its corpe disintegrated. Realizing, that those scales must be quite valuable and deciding to ask Eredar later, Rex stashed them in another one of his storage rings. Then he took a deep breath and went in the cave, where his well earned treasure awaited.