What felt like an entire wall of living vines slammed into the ground where I had just been standing. My spined buckler flashed bright as I spun and caught another grasping vine on the edge of the shield. All the force from the blow vanished like a midwinter sigh as the moonstone did its thing, and I finally attained my feet.

It was a good thing too, as I was down to my last slice of boar.

I lashed out, piercing a root of the grasping bulb with my adze. Moonlight erupted from the wound, tearing apart the fibrous appendage as I flicked my arms to reset the combo on both weapon and shield. The grasping bulb shivered, instinctively pulling back its many roots towards the pink-speckled bulb that formed its heart.

For a split second, I sagged along with my foe. Sweat poured down my temple, and my lungs felt like they were on fire from the intense, constant fighting. I really wished I could just chuck a fireball at this thing right about now.

The grasping bulb, however, was far better at recovery than me. I gathered myself as, before my very eyes, pale white sap oozed out of its injuries. The cooling fluid melted into the deep punctures delivered by the adze, sealing and healing the damage in real time.

Before the creature could undo all of my hard work, I lunged back into the fray and unleashed timed strikes with every ounce of my strength. Headless of my own safety, I let the various vines strike me, only making the effort to deflect those that would hit a critical area. My health plummeted as I knocked aside the feeble, damaged tendrils and then delivered a devastating overhead chop that impaled the plant monster right in its central bulb.

It thrashed, battering me mercilessly with its many roots, but I gritted my teeth and stood my ground. Fighting the thing felt like digging through soft sand. My attacks tore apart more plant flesh, only for the damnable white sap to undo most of the damage. I caught every third blow on my spined buckler, abusing both charged moonstones to withstand and dish out as much damage as humanely possible.

Eventually, my adze struck the creature, and it stiffened.

>

I toppled, suddenly losing my balance as the notification pinged. The enormous vine melted, releasing me and drenching my lower half in gel at the same time. Its drop was revealed, and I cursed. I really didn't need any more elderberry seeds, but that didn't stop me from snatching up the oblong beige seeds and tucking them deep into my pocket for safekeeping. Loot was loot.

There has to be a better way, the cool voice of my intuition flared with annoyance. I shook my head, agreeing completely. Even the massive boost in damage from using moonstone-enhanced strikes barely made a dent in the massively over-leveled creature. Ever since the update, the combat formula had changed and now I was only level 36 compared to the grasping bulb’s 44. It was a huge discrepancy, especially since I didn’t doubt for a second that the infernal creature had most of its stats allocated to defense and recovery.

My shriek of agony morphed into a gurgling wheeze as an eight-inch long serrated blade erupted through my back and out my torso. Demonic gibbering sounded right behind my ear as I felt a slimy set of fangs sink into my neck.

Spin, a voice like an arctic hurricane, whited out my thoughts.

I ripped myself from my assailant’s grasp, ignoring the agony as I reached out and grabbed the eight-foot-tall creature hunched over me. Six limbs sprouted from its rail-thin body, each capped with a long serrated blade. One of which was currently sitting two inches from my heart.

A Stickborn Runner.

Hook it.

Pulling hard with my left hand, I slammed my adze into the creature’s hip. It attempted to jerk back, but I overpowered it with the leverage granted by my weapon. I yanked it closer, then slammed my shield once, twice, three times right into its abdomen. Snaps and cracks sounded as the hemogris fangs fused to the shield pierced the stickborn runner through.

Eat.

As the thin creature switched tactics, I fumbled my last boar steak into my mouth. With a thin, reedy whistle of exertion, it swung its remaining five blades over my head and into my back. The sharpened appendages pierced right through the thick iron of my armor with a gruesome squelch of displaced organs. Darkness crept at the edges of my vision but quickly receded as I bit down on the steak. The maple campfire nearby flared, and I was suddenly back to nearly full.

Finish it.

I roared, twisting my shield to rend its woody flesh with my spined buckler. Abruptly, the stickborn runner stiffened, falling over and melting into a pile of goo.

>

I fell with it, shivering as the icy fear sitting in my gut faded. The stickborn runner had dropped an innocuous pile of black crystal fertilizer, and after a second to catch my breath, I grabbed it.

Finally, I grinned, booking it out of the obscenely difficult tunnels.

I burst out of the tunnels and into the safe zone with a gasp of relief. The luminescent moss greeted me cheerfully as I tossed my meager spoils of war beside a fully kitted-out forge. The huge gates leading out of the dungeon stood open at the far end of the room. Braeburn roots wound down the sides of the huge chamber walls, giving an ominous spiky appearance to the whole area. At first, the dark roots had put me on edge, but I’d since grown used to their imposing presence.

I flopped beside the unlit forge to rest and recover from yet another near-death experience in the dungeon.

So far, I’d come across three unique enemies roaming the tunnels. Grasping bulbs were most common, with an infuriating capacity to regenerate health. Stickborn runners were the assassins, with high damage and speed that made them impossible to catch unless they had already impaled themselves on me. The last were the moss giants. Huge implacable foes that were as rare as they were impossible to kill. I simply didn’t have the damage output to whittle down their immense, level 50 life pool.

It had been nearly a day of delving into the tunnels and returning with maybe one or two kills worth of loot before setting out again. Tier four enemies were no joke, especially since my combat stats felt nerfed since the update. Killing them at least granted more experience than the hemogris, but I wasn’t sure if it was worth the time considering the difficulty.

They were my key to farming with the supplies they dropped. Farming itself was vastly accelerated in this world. Tier-1 plants took only 10 minutes to grow, while tier-2 took half an hour. So far, I'd gleaned that there were two plants per tier, with a new plant unlocking every five levels. I'd collected a fair amount of seeds so far, but mostly in low-level elderberry or braeburn roots. Elderberries were tart and sweet, healing as much as rat meat while being actually pleasant to eat. On the other hand, Braeburn roots were just thorny, and I'd stopped farming them entirely. Ever since I'd hit level 10, I'd switched to planting frisea seeds in both large garden beds available in the safe area.

During this time, I'd also made some progress along the chunk objectives. Turned out, frisea leaves combined with boar meat over a suitable campfire created a tier-4 food I’d dubbed: meat stew. It was vastly superior to boar meat, but I’d refrained from bringing it into combat. Mostly because it came in a bowl, which made it annoyingly difficult to keep it from spilling in the chaos of battle, but also because the ingredients were...difficult to collect.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Speaking of, I went over to check on the garden beds and felt my gut fall out from under me. The beautiful green frisea stalks I’d planted earlier in the fertile black soil were not doing well. The normally bright-green plants, with wide leaves and distinct minty scent, drooped listlessly as if infected by plague. The once black soil had gained an offputting yellow tinge that indicated the ground had run out of fertilizer. I quickly inspected the plants by touching them with the pruning clippers I'd found in the smithy. Its status popped up, and I zeroed in on the first entry.

I cursed, slumping down to the ground. I refrained from wasting my last bit of fertilizer on the dead plants. If the plant had been sickly or even diseased, the fertilizer might have helped, but I’d learned the hard way that once a plant died, there was no way to heal it.

I closed my eyes and sighed. It wasn’t so bad. I just had to collect more fertilizer before I planted the next batch. Then I’d watch it like a hawk until it was ready to be harvested.

Plan set, I returned to the tunnels with a fresh inventory of food. The tunnels wound chaotically around the safe zone. Vaguely in the shape of a spiral, but it was really hard to tell since some of the tunnels meandered above or below the starting point. That and the tunnels were infested with the fast-moving stickborn runners that attacked if I paused for any reason.

Every 100 paces or so, the tunnels widened into chambers of various sizes. The small ones housed between one to three grasping bulbs, while the larger ones sometimes also contained a moss giant.

I avoided the downright lethal, level 50 bioluminescent killing machines for obvious reasons. They stood at over twelve feet tall and had massive tree trunk clubs that could knock me across the room like a ragdoll. Theoretically, I should be able to take one down, given I’d defeated Iroth Grimskull, but that was before the combat update. Now, I was less sure.

Fortunately, the tunnel network was riddled with side passageways and shortcuts. I took these liberally as I hopped from room to room in search of individual foes. The grasping bulbs were tough, but after a couple, I got the hang of going all out to overwhelm their defense. I was able to reliably take them down using this strategy.

A stickborn runner would almost always attempt to ambush me after or during a kill. It didn’t take long to anticipate these unwelcome assaults and even less time to formulate strategies to counter them. Getting hit was inevitable, but the creatures were too fragile to survive a prolonged engagement with me in close quarters.

The first trip ended uneventfully and with a grasping bulb and two stickborn runners slain. That netted me several duplicate seeds and one more fertilizer that I dumped in my stash. On the third trip, I managed to kill four enemies before running out of food, and I got another fertilizer for my trouble. By the fifth trip, I was reliably killing five enemies each time, and I’d acquired enough fertilizer to take a break.

In the safe zone, I carefully planted some frisea seeds into each bed and generously sprinkled fertilizer over them. The soil instantly darkened, and a quick check with the gardening clippers revealed the plants were healthy. It took around half an hour for the plants to mature completely, and I made sure to fertilize both beds every ten minutes just to be safe.

The result was fantastic:

“Three levels!” I grinned as I harvested the delicate leaves. I would be able to make more meat stew with this which would help heal me in between engagements. More importantly, I was only two more levels from farming the next tier of seeds slowly burning a hole in my pocket.

It was time to return to the grind.

I rushed back into the tunnels with a vengeance. Meat stew was unusable in combat but surprisingly helpful after a fight concluded. Each stew restored 33 hit points instead of the 25 that regular boar meat did. It also granted me more recovery experience, which meant I swiftly received another notification.

I kept killing, gathering materials, and returning to the base to farm. There was definitely an experience multiplier for harvesting crops, and the early levels flew by. At level 15, I was able to plant and harvest buttermilk gourds. The hollow squash-like vegetables had thick white flesh, not unlike a coconut on the inside. Once I hit level 20, I was finally able to plant my singular kiku fruit seed. That netted me nearly 20 small, fuzzy berries that each healed as much as tier 3 food without having to cook them at all. Needless to say, I was quite relieved for a change in diet.

Perhaps most importantly, the amount of fertilizer I needed for tier-2 crops dropped dramatically once I hit level 20. This meant I could burn through my lower-tier seeds to boost my level and augment my food supplies without spending more time gathering fertilizer.

This further boosted my level, but by the time I hit level 25, I had yet to receive another seed, and the chunk objectives still showed I hadn’t yet encountered the relevant item. This meant that I would have to do one of two things to progress. I could go kill some moss giants or scout deeper into the cave system for another solution.

I opted for the second option. Moss giants were still way beyond me without some serious hours grinding for levels. The caves quickly grew darker and narrower, with less bioluminescent moss and more dangerous enemies. Rooms became bigger, with sometimes as many as five or more grasping bulbs bunched together. Moss giants also became more and more common, with some rooms containing several of the huge giants at once.

That was good if I decided to farm the giants, but my scouting trip abruptly came to a halt not long after I left. I hadn’t noticed before, but getting close enough to a moss giant started damaging my health pool. The damaging aura was weak—nigh unnoticeable—from a distance, but deeper in the tunnels, I was oftentimes close to several at a time. The result was that by the time I found a group of vulnerable enemies, I was already out of food to fight them with.

Returning to the safe area, I checked on my crops before hopping out of the dungeon to walk out in the sun. The simple solution was just to grind some more levels, but that could take months. There had to be a better way. A method that involved magic. A skill that as of yet eluded me.

To my surprise, Fang rushed up to me as I paused by the stream.

“Fang! You gained a level,” I said, giving the fluffy wolf some much-needed scritches. “How’d you manage to get out of the dungeon?”

Fang whined and ducked his head into my chest. I frowned and intensified my scritches as I checked him for injuries.

“You didn’t get out of the dungeon, did you?” I said slowly. “Died in there, huh?”

Fang whined again, bumping his cold nose into my face.

“Poor baby,” I chuckled, pushing the big lug away. “Luckily, you respawned. Guess that shows you, you gotta be careful with random black doorways.”

Fang huffed, circling around me and trying to crawl into my lap.

“Nah,” I frowned. “I don’t think you can come with me. Maybe the system will implement party play after the next reset, but for now, we gotta be solo for a bit.”

Fang flopped onto the ground and looked up at me with huge doe eyes.

“Oh, don’t be that way. I’ll come visit you often. I just have to make sure to farm every tier of...plant.”

I trailed off as I suddenly got an idea. I’d started with elderberries, then moved on to braeburn roots once I hit level five. Those jagged plants hadn’t been edible though, so I’d quickly dismissed them, but maybe they were the secret to casting magic? The walls of the safe zone were covered in them, after all.

Grinning, I sprinted back into the dungeon. Entering revealed all my progress had reset, which was mildly annoying. Luckily, I hadn’t left anything too important inside. Rushing to collect the farming clippers from the smithy, I tested them out on the jagged, black roots lining the cavern.

“Yes!” I crowed as the interface to harvest the plants popped up. I quickly selected yes, and an entire segment of vines on the wall vanished to be replaced by a small item in my hand. I continued harvesting the plants around the perimeter. One after another, they revealed the rugged stone remains of what must have been an ancient civilization. That was until the final one revealed a hidden tunnel.

The tunnel was perfectly square and extended nearly twenty feet before abruptly ending. Magical-looking glyphs were carved into the walls, with a distinctly square design that felt harsh and unyielding after so long in the organic cave system. The letters were bunched together as if some college student had desperately crammed their notes on the wall.

I couldn’t begin to decipher the runes, so I turned my gaze deeper. At the end of the tunnel stood a pedestal with a large open tome resting ominously on top. The pages were thick like vellum, and I could tell they were completely blank, even from a distance.

It was the spellbook referenced in the chunk objectives.

Slowly, I stepped into the tunnel. It felt sacred somehow. And cold. Goosebumps rose on my arms as I approached the tome. There was something majestic about it. Maybe it was the thick leather cover dyed a deep black and purple. Or maybe it was the perfectly blank pages that seemed to beg to be filled.

It suddenly grew a lot colder, and I shivered. It wasn’t just in the air but in my bones. My teeth ached. My head. It...

Finally, a domineering voice grumbled in my head.

I staggered as a wave of dizziness washed over me. The edges of my vision dimmed and flickered as I reached out to grab the tome for support. The pages felt nice. Thick and soft. Almost like...