It was already very late, and everyone was exhausted. We probably should have transferred to another safe room where it was drier, but the girls passed out almost as soon as the bags were down. The air wouldn’t last all night, but I suppose I could give them an hour or two before waking them up and transferring up to the fifth-floor safe room to rest. We had a hard day today.

This safe room retained the theme of looking like the inside of a tree, although this one looked more like a hollowed-out log sitting on the bottom of the lake. The holes for entry and exit were notches in the wood where large branches had broken off at some point during the decay. The space we were in was a gap in the wood. The cover had been made of stone, however, giving away the true nature of this room.

As the girls slept, I took the time to check the mural. It seemed like there weren’t many details when it came to this curse. That could be because the curse was extremely old. It seemed to be depicting some kind of great battle between the humans and the blue-skinned race. Bodies littered the ground. That was all I was able to glean from this one. I just wish I knew what it meant.

If humans emerged from the dungeons, did that mean that humans weren’t native to this world? Were they similar to demons? If dungeon creatures emerged from dungeons, and over time their miasma was purified and they became mana creatures, then was it possible there was a time humans were the demons of this world? Did we come in the same manner the demons did, and then wipe out the original inhabitants of this world? I didn’t want to believe it, but the lore of this dungeon seemed to suggest this.

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In that respect, was miasma even corrupted mana? Miasma could just be mana from another world. While I noticed miasma had a unique signature to it, there seemed to be only one type of mana. Any special kind of mana seemed to stem from some kind of talent. Fairy dust, spirit fire, and recently Terra revealed to me that she had been able to produce Gaia. Shao could produce mana, but any mana she produced had a unique signature to it.

I hadn’t noticed it before, but when I first met her, the miasma she produced was not the same miasma that I made. However, once she became my slave, her miasma has somehow changed to fit me. Now, if I produce miasma or she did, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference in who it came from. I had thought that miasma had some kind of life to it, that it recognized enemies and friends. Perhaps, what it was recognizing, was the source of the person in question.

Perhaps, the mana of this world would be miasma to another world. Perhaps creatures from another world would see us as the miasma creatures, and themselves as the mana users. I shivered thinking about the possibilities of all of this. It looked like the nature of everything around dungeons was far more complicated than I ever could have imagined. Just as I was finishing up looking at the mural, I heard a shout. I spun around just in time to see Miki plunge into the dark waters below. No, she didn’t plunge. She was pulled into it. Without a thought, I leaped into the water after her as the other girls let out cries of surprise.