“Can’t say I was expecting this.” I looked around in slack-jawed confusion, submerged up to my calves in warm, tropical water.
I was standing in the middle of the saddest ocean I’d ever seen, only as deep as my calves as far as the eye could see, the water pristine blue with colorful fish swimming just beneath the surface. No land was sticking out of the water, just a plain sky overhead and the warm water.
“Is this a joke?” I scratched my nose, trying to figure out what was going on.
Not exactly a cold place now, is it?
I wandered, my feet slushing around in the water as I searched for…. Well, anything, really. At one point, I saw what looked like an extremely long eel sliding beneath the gentle waves of the blue sea. Still, it darted off with serpentine speed, leaving me uncertain if my eyes were playing tricks on me.
Probably not.
Wandering for lords above knew how long, nothing seemed to change, nothing but the gentle lapping of the waves at my legs to alert me that there was any passage of time in the first place.
“Is this supposed to be like the last layer?” I looked at my cat, still perched upon my shoulder, as if expecting her to respond.
My cat, thankfully, did not speak.
“I would shoo you off, but I’m unsure if you can swim.” I continued speaking to my cat, my voice disrupting the overly serene environment.
Seriously, does this place end?
After a while of aimless wandering, I felt pangs within my stomach, gurgles following shortly after.
“Right, food.” I sighed. “When did I last eat?”
My mind slowly tracked back through the last few layers of the dungeon, then to trekking through the frozen forest, the Ring Gate, and the gondola ride all the way back to-
“Lords above, has it been days since I last ate or slept?”
The realization shook me. Between hours spent on the gondola, traversing the forest, and the dungeon itself, something like a day or two had already passed without noticing. The only reason I hadn’t noticed sooner was that, unlike most other humans, hunger and exhaustion seemed to take longer to bother me, which became more and more pronounced with each additional sage ring.
And now I have five. Just how long could I go for if I wanted to?
A sense of creeping dehumanization came from losing connection with things as primitive as sleeping and eating. Of my fears, it was perhaps the thing that scared me most in recent years. With a sudden desperation, I cast my case into the water, searching for the closest fish of reasonable size. Eyes locking onto a fish that appeared to have five sets of fins and only one eye, I flicked my wrist upward as I spoke.
“Aulous.”
Instantly the fish was trapped within a sphere of water that rose out from the sea, floating helplessly in the air.
“Rainsplitter.”
My sword appeared in hand, and with a single deft thrust, I stabbed through the fish, releasing the bubble of water containing it as I inspected the specimen from closer.
Its scales, which had looked blue beneath the waves, were a mixture of green and blue, with even a few purple scales intermixed. I pinched its jaws, revealing a gummy-looking interior with no teeth.
“Wait,” I paused, still inspecting the fish. “How am I supposed to eat this?”
It had just dawned upon me that I had no way of cooking the fish, the same problem I’d had with the frozen hinges of the shed door containing the entrance to the dungeon once more rearing its ugly head here.
I had no magic which could create heat.
Technically anyone could use limited degrees of magic outside their affinity, but trying to cook an entire fish with a flame the size of a candlewick would be slow going. If I tried to gather much thermal energy in a single condensed point, it would burn itself out far too quickly.
Meaning…
“Uck.” I felt sick as I considered what I was about to do. Pulling the fish free of the sword, I slid it alongside the blade’s edge, dressing the fish as I removed its scales and bones as best I could. Finally, content that I’d cleared as much of the undesirable portions of the fish as I could, I closed my eyes.
Here goes nothing.
Tilting my head back, I opened my mouth before dropping sliced pieces of raw fish into my mouth, doing my best to swallow without letting the seafood touch my tongue.
Don’t think about it.
I continued dropping pieces of fish down my throat like a seabird, swallowing it in a single go, until I titled my head forward too soon on the final piece. As a result, the fish landed squarely on my tongue.
What surprised me wasn’t the disgusting taste.
No, it was that the fish didn’t taste disgusting. The flesh almost seemed to melt against my tongue like butter, a savory flavor coating my mouth.
“I’ll be damned.” I opened my eyes, letting my tongue slide around my mouth as I smacked my lips. “That actually wasn’t bad.”
Stomach still rumbling, I thrust Rainsplitter-
Or perhaps I should say Wavesplitter.
-beneath the waves, spearing another fish of the same species. Once more, I repeated the process of descaling and deboning the fish, handing the unwanted parts to my cat, who ate them up. The fish cleaned as much as I could; I ravenously tore into the morsel, never bothering to cut it into strips this time. Gobbling it up, a quick burp escaped me, catching me by surprise.
“At least no one was around to hear that.”
Issue of eating taken care of, I was brought back to my current problem.
“What the hell am I supposed to be doing here?”
Tired of having no answers, I flopped back into the water, my cat hissing as she found herself tossed off my shoulder. I didn’t care that my clothes were now drenched; I stared overhead, floating on the warm water as my cat began paddling about, looking highly annoyed at being wet.
“Really, have to make me go through this?” I shouted, hoping that perhaps the Dungeon Will was listening and would appease my annoyance.
In response there was no response.
“Figures.” I sighed.
Now what?
It was the question of the day. I was lost and confused.
But at least I’m not hungry.
I smiled softly at that single silver lining, momentarily closing my eyes.
Yes, I’m not hungry, and this is quite relaxing. I feel like I could just slip under these waves and-
With a jolt, I sat upright, splashing water around.
“Whoa there.” I exhaled heavily, surprised at how I’d almost slipped into a daze when I’d just been bemoaning my lesser need for sleep. While I hadn’t seen anything dangerous yet, falling asleep unguarded in a dungeon wasn’t exactly the brightest idea.
My relaxed state was quickly replaced with growing annoyance, unable to spot anything or figure out what I was supposed to be doing.
When in doubt?
“Violence,” I huffed. Standing upright, drenched but uncaring, I raised my hands overhead, clenching them together.
“Rainsplitter!”
This time when Rainsplitter appeared, it was in its fully manifested, gloriously shining form. Just manifesting the sword alone took a massive toll on my mana reserves; I might have barely been able to get off a single swing of the weapon before I’d be completely spent.
But that was regarding a fight, where you didn’t have time to sit around gathering energy.
Right now, nothing was attacking me aside from my own annoyance. All the time in the world, I had to slowly build up energy in the blade of light, holding it overhead as my sage rings slowly replenished themselves.
Standing there, the seconds passed into minutes before the minutes passed into half an hour, then an hour.
Finally, two hours of standing later, I felt the sword brimming with enough energy for what I needed it. Swinging hard, I brought the blade down low as a wave of light crashed into the water, which instantly began hissing in a sudden explosion of heat and steam. The light didn’t stop there, though, cleaving through the sandbank and ripping open a giant tear in the ground where the wave of light descended.
Huffing hard, but thankfully not depleted of mana after having spent so long slowly filling the sword with mana, I released my hold on Rainsplitter, examining my handiwork.
A rift the size of a massive towering redwood had been torn asunder into the sandbank beneath the waves. Cautiously I stared down into the rift. The sand went down as far as a person was tall before revealing a rock shelf beneath. The shelf was nearly twice as thick as that, and finally, beneath even the rock shelf were hidden depths, pitch black and ominous.
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“Inviting,” I muttered before glancing behind me. Resting on a mound of fish bones tall enough that they stuck out of the water, my cat was napping.
“Nice to see someone enjoyed this mini vacation.” I chuckled, Panthera peeking at me from between her eyelids as she heard me. “Morning, sleepy. Unfortunately, I think I know where we’re headed next.”
The issue was, how?
As impressive as my magically induced body was, it still needed air, and I doubted my cat was equipped with gills.
Which means it’s time to get creative.
“What if I just conjure a water bubble around our heads?” I pondered the question out loud before shaking my head. “Stupid, we need fresh air, or we’ll choke on our own exhales.”
“Any ideas?” I questioned my cat, who once more said nothing.
“Thanks for the help.” I sighed. “We need air we can breathe, but a bubble over our heads isn’t enough….”
Panthera smacked her paw on her mountain of victims, rattling the bones.
“Yes, yes, I know you enjoyed your fish.”
I could almost see the annoyance in her eyes, thrusting her head to look away from me like she were disgusted.
“What? What’d I do to you.” I grumbled. “I get it, you like your fi- oh. Oh, that’s clever.”
Fish. As in aquatic animals. As in animals that could breathe under the sea.
With gills.
Gills that filtered the sea, allowing fish to breathe underwater.
Constructing the mechanics of the spell in my head, I firmly grasped onto it, whispering.
“Aulous.”
A thin film of water wrapped over my mouth as soon as the spell was spoken.
Time to test it out.
Dunking my head under the water, I opened my eyes, the clear water easy on my eyes.
No matter what anyone may tell you, no matter the depths of your power or magic, the idea of forcing yourself to inhale while underwater is something that the most basic, primal aspects of our being simply can’t come to terms with. For several seconds I tried to force my mouth open, to suck in a breath, but my body seemed to refuse my commands.
Just… do it!
Forcing myself to open my mouth, I half expected to start choking on water. However, none slipped past.
Water not filling my lungs; I tested it further, exhaling. For a moment, I felt the warmth of my exhaled breath against my face before, an instant later, the air around my mouth cooled as the hot air of my lungs was drawn out of the bubble shielding my lips.
And now the final test.
So far, my spell had succeeded at creating a barrier against the water, and it had also succeeded in diffusing my exhaled breath.
Cautiously, I began to inhale. Again, no water entered my lungs. For a second or two, neither did any air. Worried I’d messed the spell up somehow, I attempted to suck in another breath, and this time, some air finally hit my lungs, like the magic had needed a moment to draw breathable air out from the water surrounding me.
It worked!
The spell had proved a success. I was surprised, I had expected to need at least a few trial-and-error attempts, but I wasn’t about to start complaining.
Now then…
Concentrating briefly, I cast the spell on my cat as well. Technically I wasn’t sure if she even needed air, she was a plant monster of sorts, but I didn’t feel like drowning her all because I wanted to test the theory.
All that’s left is to dive in.
I took a deep breath, steeling my nerves, before I dove into the aquatic rift, the light of the surface quickly fading to nothing. Mana entering my eyes, I was once more able to ‘see’ as I entered the ocean void, even if it wasn’t seeing in the traditional sense of the word. Rather than padding alongside me, my demon cat tucked her paws in, swimming alongside me as one would expect from an eel, her entire body behaving like a paddle.
Never seen that before.
It was a stark reminder that the cat wasn’t actually a cat and only mimicked the appearance of a cat.
Confident that the shadow blossom wouldn’t be left behind, I picked up the pace, diving faster into the unknown darkness, uncertain of what I was searching for.
I continued my downward dive for several minutes, the darkness a perfect black canvas of emptiness, not a single fish swimming about.
Strange. Not even one?
The thought put me on edge, the complete lack of life disorienting in a way I hadn’t felt before. I wasn’t sure the last time I’d been anywhere that had absolutely no life. Even the Great Rift within the Citadel of the Moon at least had the company of the Sage of Wisdom.
Here? Nothing.
As the minutes stretched longer, one thing did begin to change, a subtle change that took some time before I noticed it.
It was growing colder.
The warm tropical water of the surface was slowly getting colder and colder. At first, nothing more than the warm water cooling to lukewarm, but even that began to give, the lukewarm turning into a frigid bath.
And it wasn’t done yet. Swimming became more challenging as the water sapped the heat from my body, now colder than an ice bath.
C’mon, there must be something, right?
I paused momentarily, looking for signs of anything, yet there was none. In fact, even my sense of up and down had been thrown off, the pitch-black depths impossible to make sense of.
Had it not been for my spell maintaining my ability to breathe, I would have begun to panic. Thankfully, I was in no danger of drowning.
The more significant issue was the plunging temperatures. While I could withstand extremes far outside what an ordinary human could, it wasn’t infinite. Even I had a limit that I was nearing as the water reached temperatures that should have left it frozen solid.
Further and further, I swam; it must have been at least an hour or two of swimming, and still, there was nothing.
Was I wrong? Was this not what I was supposed to do?
Doubt was beginning to gnaw at my gut, but I banished the festering thoughts before they could take root. Self-doubt was a slow and insidious killer.
On and on I went, the water vapor of my breath freezing into tiny ice crystals that would collect within my oxygen bubble before melting away from the slight warmth of my body struggling to stay warm.
That’s it, that’s my limit, I can’t go any-
My warning thoughts were dashed midway through as finally, after what had felt like an eon in darkness, my mana-enhanced sight landed upon something.
A trench.
You’re kidding.
I’d finally reached the bottom of this accursed void, only to be greeted with an even deeper trench.
I’m supposed to swim down there, aren’t I?
My body was shaking violently from the cold tremors I could feel in my very bones.
How am I supposed to make it to the bottom? I’ll go into shock if it gets any colder.
The water was long past the freezing point, several magnitudes colder, in fact. It was only by keeping my mind locked onto the task at hand that I’d made it so far.
Yet I was aware that there were limits, even for me.
So how?
I couldn’t warm myself with magic. My affinity was for water, not heat, after all. Furthermore, contrary to what many believed, it was harder to use water magic deep underwater; the surrounding water would snuff out any spell, diffusing it within itself.
Could I use Flow?
It would undoubtedly increase my swim speed, but it couldn’t magically prevent heat loss. It was nothing more than-
Wait! That’s it!
While it was true that Flow wouldn’t specifically help with the temperature problem, that wasn’t to say it didn’t have the answer I needed.
Or rather, its predecessor did.
Closing my eyes, I began to circulate mana through my body in a way I hadn’t in years, not since I’d manifested my first ring and upgraded to the usage of the word magic Flow as a way of augmenting my body.
Flow wasn’t something I’d come up with on the spot, though, instead built upon a foundation that had laid the groundwork for my magic, the very first steps I’d taken on my path as a Sage.
Ruptured Body.
Ruptured Body was different from Flow in that it did not use mana as a magical energy source to sustain a state of heightened physicality. Instead, it was akin to an adrenaline rush if dialed to an eleven, forcing my body to reach superhuman capabilities through purely physical mechanics. Mana was forced to circulate through my body, and while it granted incredible strength, the drawback was that it physically damaged my body to an acute degree.
Which was precisely what I needed. Rather than using magic to augment my body, the forced enhancement of my body with Ruptured Body would lead to an overall increase in body temperature as my muscles were constantly put into a state of overwork.
Here goes nothing.
Unlike when I was younger and could barely detect mana, now I was intensely aware of the path of the mana coursing through my body, bombarding my muscles with bursts of violent energy like a shot of pure adrenaline. My heart began to hammer away like an intense drumbeat as the fibers of my muscles began twitching, and the apocalyptic cold receded, still horribly cold but no longer on the verge of sending me into a freezing grave.
Gritting my teeth, I dove toward the trench. For how long I could maintain this, I wasn’t sure. The oxygen spell alone was essentially negligible in the drain it had on my reserves of mana, but Ruptured Body would burn through the reserves much faster. The actual usage of mana needed to energize my body was surprisingly low. Yet, as my body underwent constant internal injury from muscle fibers ripping in response to their overly energized state, my automatic healing factor would begin draining the mana from my sage rings with growing intensity.
A rather long-winded way of saying I was on a time limit now.
Thankfully unlike the rest of the ocean void, I could sense the ocean bed only two or three hundred meters below as I entered the trench. The lack of light just made it seem deeper than it was.
Good.
A quick glance to my side revealed that, unlike me, my shadow blossom seemed largely unphased by the cold. In fact, it was almost as if the complete lack of light was energizing her; she swam with surprising vigor.
Interesting. Don’t think anyone knew that about shadow blossoms.
Closing in on the bottom of the trench, only a few dozen meters to go, a light suddenly flashed before me, all but blinding after spending so long in the pitch-black depths.
There, at the very bottom, was the voidalisk.
Relief flooded through me at the sight.
Made it.
The relief was short-lived, as with only a moment of warning, my shadow blossom darted forward, hissing from within her air pocket.
What the-?
My question about what had suddenly alarmed her was answered when, from the darkness, a massive tentacle suddenly wrapped around my legs, yanking me through the water.
What the frozen hell!?
For a moment, a burst of fear shot through me. The only thing that should have been undetectable to me, even with my mana sense open, would have been something without any mana to speak of.
A Hollow.
I cast my sight toward my attacker, expecting to see the horrid mass of empty darkness that was a Hollow. While the creature was a writhing mass of… stuff, it definitely wasn’t the black ooze of a Hollow.
Tentacles, hundreds of them.
A Lusca!?
There was no denying it. A Kraken was, size-wise, closer to a leviathan, and giant squids only had a handful of tentacles.
There was also the fact that the writhing mass of tentacles blossomed out from a maw like that of a shark, unmistakable as anything other than the deep-sea Lusca.
It sort of looks like a sunflower seeing it up close.
With that comforting thought, I thrust my hand out as Rainsplitter manifested, striking at the tentacle that had snagged me.
I got careless.
It wasn’t that the creature had no mana whatsoever. Its mana signature was barely decipherable to the surrounding water, a magical adaptation for catching prey unaware.
Or so I assumed, not like I was a marine biologist that specialized in deep-sea monsters, after all.
More tentacles darted toward me, but I was no longer unsuspecting prey. With agility that was only minorly dampened by the fact that I was underwater, my sword flashed forward like a striking viper, sweeping through the tentacles as if they posed no resistance.
Hah! How do you like that?
I expected more tentacles to come in an ever-increasing flurry, a life-or-death struggle in the frozen depths.
So it came as quite a surprise when rather than an anticipated battle, the Lusca recoiled upon losing several tentacles and, seemingly thinking better of it, darted off into the inky darkness.
Huh. I lowered my blade, staring at where it vanished, half-expecting it to return with a surprise attack. That was… easy?
My understanding of the monster was apparently off. It was not some predator that savagely hunted its prey but lurked in ambush for something to approach.
I guess that makes sense in hindsight.
The Lusca, a deep-sea creature, likely couldn’t afford to waste precious energy battling it out or hunting prey with reckless abandon.
Curious, but I’ll count my blessing.
No longer under assault by a deep-sea horror, I began swimming toward the voidalisk, the first source of real light I’d seen under the waves. It pulsated gently with power, meaning all I had to do was press my hand against it, and I’d be whisked away in a sudden column of light.
So what am I waiting for?
Perhaps it was my curiosity, my appreciation for understanding I’d gained ever since I’d learned of the wonderful world of books, that made me surprisingly reluctant to leave the depths. While I’d been under the assumption there was no life down here, there was nothing to be intrigued by in the first place. Now that I’d seen the Lusca, I couldn’t help but wonder if there were more things out there. Dungeons weren’t just randomly generated terrains. After all, from what I’d learned of my own dungeon, upon creation, they could draw in nearby locations, folding them into the meta-space that constructed a dungeon. Therefore, this underwater ocean was once likely connected to the nearby area.
In fact, that explains why I had to split the ground to get down here.
At one point, an underground ocean likely existed, deep under the titanic mountains, an ocean most would have been none the wiser of.
There really is always something more to see, isn’t there?
Satisfied with my conclusion of the lost history that the freezing depths represented, I pressed my palm against the voidalisk.
Who knows what else is out there?
Shutting my eyes before I was blinded, I felt the slight simmer of heat as the light enveloped me.
Now, onward to whatever comes next.