A dozen spectres phased through the stone walls, floor and ceiling. Their translucent limbs were extended out towards him, their mouths stretched into feral snarls of agony and fury. Leif jerked back in surprise, raising his arms, both real and conjured to defend himself. Something cold touched his ankle, an icy chill shooting up his leg. Leif fell to a knee as the limb gave out, he glanced down and saw a ghostly hand wrapped around his lower shin.

He struck out at the offending touch with one of his real arms, but the moment his fingers brushed against the ethereal hand a frigid chill shot down his arm. The contact was brief, and he still maintained control of the limb, but his leg was still being drained. Faint streams of golden light were flowing into the spectre’s arm, disappearing into the floor where the rest of its body was still hidden.

Above and all around, ghostly forms assaulted him from every direction. Their incorporeal bodies weren’t able to pass through his conjured arms, but their golden structure cracked and weakened as the spectres pressed the attack. Leif conjured a short blade of amber from the knuckles of his uninjured hand and struck down at the wrist of the monster partially submerged in the ground.

The arm was severed, the spectre still hiding within the floor fleeing out of sight. But making the attack had cost him, the golden blade had been hastily made, [Gold Iron Physique] only technically allowing the form to be made as it wasn’t exactly a limb. Leif had found that creating full arms, hands included with the skill, led to far more stable manifestations, but he could only guess as to why. Regardless, his distraction allowed the spectres to push past his defences, their ghostly fingers reaching out to touch him.

The cold sensation in his leg was already retreating as a flood of amber vitality restored functionality to the limb, but it would take a few more seconds before he could move. [Under my Protection] flared to life, the golden barrier snapping up around him, protecting him from the ethereal monsters, but not for long. Within moments his attackers began to press into the shield, their very touch enough to cause hairline cracks to spread through the skill’s structure.

They’re intangible, but thaumatic constructs can slow them down. He realised, amber arms fanning out behind him as he stood, then shifted into pointed spears. The shield dropped, over taxed by the spectre’s slowly phasing through, then each spectral undead had a golden point driven right at their centre of mass.

Five of his strikes were right on target, amber spears punching right through the undead’s chests and out the other side. Three only sustained glancing blows, their ethereal bodies dancing to the side to avoid his attacks. The rest blurred, their forms becoming almost invisible, only for them to appear several metres away.

Teleportation, that must be a skill of some kind. He noted, stabbing once again at the nearby spectres. Those he had struck were clearly damaged, their forms less substantial and their movements slower, but even having taken direct hits the undead were still alive. The spectres that had teleported away all raised their arms, haunting screeches coming from their still wide open mouths.

Ethereal weapons, each glowing with ghostly light began to manifest around them, then the weapons surged forward, edges glinting as the amber light of Leif’s skills reflected off the faux metal material each of the weapons were made of.

He battered two swords aside, deflected a spear with his real arm, then used [Amber Steps] to avoid an axe that fell down from above. Two daggers flew in low, cutting at the back of his legs, but unlike with human physiology their strikes found no weak tendons to sever, only the joint of hardened bark. As quickly as they had arrived, the summoned weapons began to fade, their attacks slowing and forms fading away. Leif looked around, and found himself alone in the t-intersection of the dungeon.

“Hey!” He called, indignant. “I wasn’t done, get back here!”

The spectres didn’t answer.

===

The dungeon was a maze, and [Amber Steps] didn’t leave behind teleportation anchors for long enough to be useful for navigation. Several times he was attacked by groups of undead, zombies, skeletons, a few abominations here and there. Leif intended to use their remains to track where he had been, but he quickly discovered after backtracking upon reaching a dead end that the dungeon somehow cleaned up itself.

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Marking the walls wouldn’t work either, any damage the structure sustained would slowly mend. Leif’s last hope for easy navigation was foiled when he encountered a pack of rotting ghouls in a part of the underground complex he was certain he had already cleared of monsters. So he couldn’t leave a trail, and he couldn’t just go wherever he found enemies. This left only a single option. I need to make a map. He thought, having returned to the chamber right before the portal leading out of the dungeon.

I don’t have paper, and even if I did I don’t have anything to write with. He mused, considering his options. Then a thought struck Leif, he quickly exited the dungeon, reappearing within the temple a moment later. He found a nearby building with a wooden floorboard, then pulled a plank out with little effort. Using [Wood Manipulation] he flattened the board, stretching it so its proportions were more symmetrical.

He returned to the dungeon, using the skill to keep the wooden panel floating before him. With a brief effort of will, he used his increasing expertise with [Wood Manipulation] to make a tiny indent on the map's surface. Then, focusing on [Intelligence], he began to mentally dictate an etching of the structure’s layout. [Intelligence] did several things, but what he was interested in boosting was the ability to concentrate on multiple tasks at once.

At this point in his advancement, one of the main limitations of [Gold Iron Physique] wasn’t the amount of power he could get out of the skill, it was how many arms he could conjure while still maintaining control. Using [Wood Manipulation] so actively would reduce his overall combat effectiveness with his other skills, but not getting lost was more than enough of a trade off for him to be fine with it.

In this way Leif continued, packs of monsters he would have been able to obliterate in seconds now took slightly longer, but other than encountering a second group of spectres he had little issue. He stood in a large rectangular chamber, ectoplasm dissolving all around him as the icy absence of vitality retreated from his right hand.

The ghostly monsters had once again tried a hit and run tactic, but Leif had put a stop to that by immediately going on the offensive. Three out of the nine had managed to escape into the floors and walls, but their tricks wouldn’t surprise him again. If he were anyone else, constantly having small snippets of life-force drained from his body would likely be quite dangerous, Leif could imagine a group of human adventurers slowly being whittled down by repeated attacks, their bodies becoming more and more susceptible to the death aspected energy that suffused the dungeon.

But for every spectre Leif was drained by, he refilled his supply of vitality by draining the more standard undead. He examined his surroundings more closely, noting for the first time that there were strange entrances and walkways higher up in the room. He had no way of reaching them, not that he had any reason to try. They were built into the walls, leading in ways nobody would be able to walk without falling off. He even saw a stairwell in the darkened shadows of the ceiling.

Shrugging, he marked the room on his map and continued on.

===

Everything was going great, he was making quick progress through the dungeon, outside of a few trap rooms he had been careful while crossing, Leif had discovered that despite his initial worry, there didn’t seem to be much in this place that could actually harm him. Not physically anyway. The further into the dungeon he travelled, the more and more dense the deathly energy became, the architecture of the structure slowly becoming less coherent.

The dungeon had been using the rough design on the Mythhold for its rooms, hallways and chambers, but the longer he explored the more things got weird. Rooms would be awkwardly combined, hallways would lead to a turn, but the turn would lead either straight up or down. Leif had no desire to potentially fall to his death, and climbing wasn’t really his strong suit.

Despite the psychic damage from the incongruous architecture, everything was going great, that was until he was walking down a hallway only to be forced to take a right turn. Then another, then another. When he made a fourth right turn in quick succession and wasn’t back where he had started Leif let out a long suffering sigh. He looked down at his map, now with four lines making a square in the wood.

It only got worse from there. Leif entered a large cylindrical chamber, darkness shrouding the floor and ceiling as the walls seemed to stretch up and down into eternity. As he peeked out over the edge Leif suddenly began to fall, not outward, but backwards. The hallway he had just walked down was now a vertical shaft below him. Amber arms arrested his fall, then pulled him up and into the cylindrical room. The walls of the room were now the floor, and as he tentatively stepped out into the chamber gravity seemed to follow him along the slightly curving ground, making whatever he was standing on the direction he would fall.

Leif glanced forlorn at his detailed and intricate map. Then he used [Wood Manipulation] to roll it up into a scroll. If the dungeon was going to throw nonsense like this at him, the map wouldn’t be much good. “If there’s a term for the kind of confusing bullshit this place is, I’m going to find out when I get to that big academy in the empire.” Leif shouted into the darkness. “I mean, how on earth does this even work?”

He hadn’t expected the dungeon to reply, so when a flare of foul power pulsed in the darkness to his left Leif turned to face it. Then he heard the scrambling of hundreds of creatures moving towards him.