Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh. Okay.

That… that uh…

I guess that solves the problem.

Can they do that?

I mean, are they allowed to do that?

Surely someone would try and say that they could just make someone experience hundreds of years passing, while only seconds pass outside, without letting them log out.

Or maybe this is also anime reality waved away fucked up like some other things.

Oh well.

If i'm right, that skill should evolve to keep up with my ever increasing AGI, so eventually it will look like things are frozen in time.

Very cool.

Now that I'm done testing out what my new weapons can do, I should head on over to the mountains to meet the grave keeper.

But one more thing before that, I should go back to the town to stock up on potions.

‘An unprepared gamer is a dead one.’

So I start making my way back to the town.

Once I start traveling, I immediately notice the effects the bullet time skill is giving me. The 30% change in perception speed is kinda crazy.

It feels like my speed is much more manageable than it was before.

Before I was actually kinda worried about running into things or tripping. But now I have a decent amount of time to react to anything coming my way as I move.

After making the trip back to the town and stocking up on a few potions of minor heal and a few antidotes, along with a map of the first floor. I was all set to finally start the grave keeper’s quest.

‘On my long journey towards the mountains I go.’

____________________________________________________________________________

On my travels I encountered a wide variety of monsters.

More of the kinds I had already seen. The heart shaped centipedes. The giant bees and boars. The bleeding mosquitos, the vegetable rabbits, the herds of monster deer, and the walking fruits.

I also ran into some I hadn’t before. Actual slimes, this time easy to kill. Extra fluffy sheep, extra scary spiders. Giant rats and tiny wolves.

I didn’t run into anything too dangerous though. Between hunting zones are pathways that lead to other areas of the map, so you could travel without getting curb stomped at low level level.

Though the weaker enemies of those zones do occasionally appear on the pathway, so I got a bit more practice with my new pike and using it with the threads.

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

I would use the glaive as my main weapon, while holding the pike with my threads, but for this quest specifically, it's probably better if I use my pike.

Its purpose in being a pike was for the extreme length it has, so I can reach whatever core the slimes have.

And if that doesn’t work, the pike will put a bleed effect on the slimes, which, like eating them, should put them down.

Hopefully.

After around an hour of traveling, which I assume takes much longer for people with lower AGI stats than I have, I arrive at the mountains.

My trek to get here was aided by the timely arrival of a new passive skill called “Traveler”, which aided movement by 30% when not in combat.

Very useful.

Anyways, I arrived at the entrance to the mountains, where, after a bit of searching around the periphery, I found the old grave keeper.

I approached him to say hi.

“Hello again,” I say to him.

“Nice to see you again” He says with a smile

“Did you have any trouble getting here?” He asks with a look of concern.

“No, thankfully I didn’t run into any trouble” I assure him.

“That's good,” he says.

“Shall we get going?” he asks.

“Let's” I answer.

After a bit of a climb to the middle of one of the mountains, we come across a brick entrance with a locked gate.

After we come up to the gate, the old man brings out the bone key, and opens the long unopened gate, with an incredibly loud screeching noise.

Entering Quest Dungeon - Deep Catacombs

‘Alright, here we go, dungeoning time’

When we walk past the gate into the mountain, we walk down a short hallway ending in a spiral stairway leading down.

We start to walk down the stairs, but since I can't just rush ahead with my high AGI, and have to walk behind the old man, who is holding a lantern, it takes almost an hour to get down to the bottom of the stairs.

‘We must be super deep now, this is probably the deepest point on the map, which makes sense because this place has a whole “deep” theme going on.’

“It has been such a long time since this place has been cleaned out, so I’ll let you go ahead and clear out the large buildup of slimes that are surely inhabiting this place.” the old man tells me.

“Will do” I tell him.

He hands me his lantern and pulls another one out of god knows where.

‘Right on ahead then’

I hold the lantern in my left and my pike in my right, and head further into the catacombs.

What I see a lot of at first, are graves, believe it or not.

But after a while of only that, I encountered something else.

A slime

A deep slime.

It was much smaller than the one I encountered in the forest, but its appearance was just as disturbing as before.

I gently set down the lantern beside me, and ready my pike for the moment of truth to see if it would be effective.

So, holding my pike in forward thrust position, I rush in at high speed and run my pike straight through its gelatinous form.

This time, I see my pike make it all the way through the slime’s body, and it is visibly shorter than before, so there must be some spatial compression in there.

But it doesn’t die on the first strike, so I draw my pike out of its body, and ready it to try again.

It takes another three attempts until I'm able to feel the vibrations of something shattering when I stab it, and after that it goes down.

It visibly deflates, then disappears in the familiar pixels of this game.

It doesn’t drop much, but it does drop a vial filled with maybe a tenth of the concentrated deep than was in one of the vials from the concentrated deep slime.

Alright, just gotta far way more of those because I doubt farming will be this efficient in this dungeon after it opens to everyone when I complete the quest.

It will probably jump to one-fifth the current effectiveness.

So before I fight the boss, I should probably fight a ton of them to collect a lot of concentrated deep. Either to sell, or to keep to give to whichever guild I join, which at this point I’m leaning more towards Maple tree than OOTHS.

It just seems like a more tightly knit group of friends, and the shenanigans going on there just seems so fun.

Anways, done with my tangent I get back to hunting for slimes to get better at it, make progress in the dungeon, and get more deep vials.

Soon enough I find another one, and this time it only takes 3 hits to kill.

I’m steadily getting better at targeting the core, I’ll probably have it down in a couple more kills.

After I get it down consistently I’ll hunt them for a couple hours and move on to the boss.

____________________________________________________________________________

I ended up killing 5 more slimes before being able to kill them in one hit consistently.

After that I hunted them for 4 hours, and ended up with around 12 vials of concentrated deep.

There was even an incident where I nearly got hit and died because I fought two at once, but I was too fast for them.

Though It did remind me just how squishy I am, I hope when I get a unique series set, it either gives me good defense, or something that makes it even harder to hit me.

Whatever, I’ll work with whatever I get.

During that time I managed to get to level 25, so that was great.

I also managed to get much better at using my pike. Both in hand and in thread.

All of that was very nice.

But I also found the boss room.

It was a grand looking entrance, with a writhing mass of black stuck in the doorway.

I guess now all that's left is to fight that thing.