Getting into the Dungeon without suspicion had been as easy as he’d been promised. Some thirty minutes had been spent modifying Jack and Sasha’s facial structure to look different, some dirt sprinkled on making it harder to identify them, but that hadn’t mattered regardless as they wore hooded robes which were never lowered.

Fred had simply wished them a good late-night excursion into the depths, briefly halting Elijah to congratulate him on his new position within the castle before letting him move along without the slightest touch of suspicion. He’d barely even looked at the two 'assistants.’

“Oh, I feel that,” Jack said when they reached the first layer of the Dungeon, the mana density increasing from one step to the other. “This is just… too much.”

“Adjusting to the pressure difference can take a few minutes the first time you experience it,” Elijah warned once again, as Jack shakily sat on the floor, not trusting his legs to keep him stable. He’d already gone through the information the two needed to know before they went down. It was mostly about safety, and what not to do when, but a larger chunk had also been about the Mana and how it could affect them. “Channel your energy through your Core. It helps accelerate the adjustment period.”

“Sure, sure, but that doesn’t stop me from feeling I’m gonna vomit,” Jack muttered, nearly doing so while Sasha took a few steps away from the man. While she had stopped for a moment while stepping inside, pupils widening as the senses were overloaded, she adjusted within seconds. “How are you not feeling this?”

Elijah was surprised at it as well, honestly. Maybe it was because of the constant negative amount of Mana inside her, as the world continued to state she possessed. She certainly seemed to passively absorb the surrounding Mana faster than usual, outpacing what Elijah could personally do when trying to do so actively.

“I’m not weak,” Sasha gave as an explanation for her condition, talking in her usual manner. Jack laughed for a second because of it, before his dinner from a few hours ago decided to see the world once again. “Get yourself together.”

Grumbles left the young man. Calm breaths came after a minute of them as he focused on making the energy inside his Core circle around the body in endless laps. As Elijah had promised, the sickness felt at the start faded quickly, the young man feeling better than he did on the surface.

“Don’t get used to it,” Elijah warned. “Your body will try to make more energy from the air than there is, and it’ll feel like you’re being hollowed out if you’re not careful.”

“... You’re making me want to live here because I don’t want to feel that.”

“Weak.”

“Hey!”

They continued down through the first layer before long, going through the caverns filled with various flowers. A beautiful sight as always, but it was when they got further down where the giant centipedes were located it started being more interesting for the group. As the day before, when the initial cleansing of the first floors had been done, piles of the monsters could be immediately spotted.

“Not as decayed as yesterday,” Aleksi noted, touching the pile with the tip of his axe. While they did crumble beneath his touch, it required a good amount of pressure this time, along with the insides not pooling on the floor. “The expedition went through here early this morning. More than 12 hours and the corpses aren’t gone?”

“The Dungeon is taking its time,” Elijah supposed. “Might be expecting them to go out and clean out the first floors again tomorrow, so why bother bringing back a full floor for them?”

In its own way, the monsters on the floor were an investment. The Dungeon, though it might not have been intelligent, worked on the principle of a net profit in terms of Mana gained. Energy was spent every time it created a plant, a monster, and a mineral of some sort. To be able to afford such actions, or even to control such a massive area, it required having an income of Mana from external sources. This could come from the deaths of humans who got too overconfident, people who died believing they could go further than previously advised.

The first floors weren’t too dangerous to anybody who knew how to defend themselves. Even Elijah, with his old body and inability to move around too quickly anymore, could still kill the giant worms seen around the area. But if he went down one layer, where those thin and disgusting foxes were located, he would have no chance. One step too far, and all his energy would be consumed by the dungeon.

An investment for more profit in the long term.

Which it wasn’t receiving now, with the Royal Guards moving through and killing everything before leaving the corpses on the ground and moving on without a care. It had gotten the message and was waiting a few days to fully regrow its population before it could trust the guards not to go in and kill everything again.

“Could we move a bit away from this?” Jack requested as they walked along. “I’m not sure I can sit and focus right, if… that is around me.”

“Not a problem,” Aleksi answered. “Already planned out a spot for you both to sit around and work in relative safety. I found this small cave a few years ago, away from the main path that basically nobody visits. Should be perfect for the two of you to sit around in.”

Elijah had been there himself, years ago when the two regularly dived into the floor and harvested herbs together. With the very few creatures running around that part of the layer, it allowed them to have a place for relative rest, with few herbs but likewise few monsters. A place to sit and eat during their longer trips.

“No killing monsters for us,” Jack concluded, tapping the weapon on his side regardless. “I understand.”

“If you fire that thing down here, we’ll go deaf,” Sasha commented. “So don’t.”

“You really think so? I don’t know if you noticed, but there’s no echo down here. Like, at all. That doesn’t make sense normally, but this entire place is so jacked up on magical stuff that I think it has some noise suppression already,” the man countered, though Elijah wasn’t sure that Sasha was even listening. “Ergo, it should be fine if I fire it. We can test it out right now if you really don’t trust me.”

“I don’t trust you, so don’t fire it at all.”

“... Rude.”

“If you do fire it, be prepared to catch the attention of any monster currently on this floor,” Aleksi supplied as they stepped off the beaten path, and onto the slightly darker rocks ahead. The trees were opening up, letting a thinner path be possible, but very few seemed to have walked down it in recent times. “You might not be able to hear them but I can.”

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“How many and how far away?” Elijah asked.

“A half dozen some hundred meters away to our right, same size fifty meters to our left, and a dozen a hundred meters back,” the giant answered immediately, Jack instantly muttering about the enhanced hearing being some sort of cheating. “They haven’t noticed us, or they might not care about us. They’re being… weirdly quiet in their movements. Like they don’t want to kill us for once.”

He and Aleksi guessed it was an effect of the recent cleansings yet again, the monsters he could hear being a part of the new batch meant to roll out within the next few days. It was still a smaller size compared to the floor's usual population, which meant the Dungeon was likely refilling the area instead of doing it in one burst. Having them be dormant as well would allow the entity controlling the place not to worry about the constant losses either.

But it still feels weird.

The Mana in the air… it felt different to his senses. Not outright wrong, but different enough that Elijah could feel something stirring. Was that an effect of Dawn? He couldn’t say.

“Here’s the place,” Aleksi said, arms wide as he represented the entrance to the side cave. It twisted right at the entrance, tricking any who looked at it into thinking that it was impossibly narrow and small, yet any who pushed on for just five minutes would find themselves inside a new massive cavern with ample space to sit and a minimum of spiky walls to be impaled on. “Just as thick with Mana as always, easy to protect, and just what we need for today.”

At the words, Elijah once again took a moment to notice the lack of echo. Even with the relatively minimal amounts of flowers and plants growing inside, golden and silver petals strewn about chaotically, there was no bouncing of their voices at all. A perfect noise reduction from the stone walls, something not even the castle could boast of as he distinctly remembered hearing his own footsteps when walking home this very same night.

‘Can I go out now?’ Dawn asked from within, as they watched the two young adults settle down and start with their distinctive crafts. He allowed the duck to leave, waddling around as the watching continued.

Sasha was relatively patient with her own training, doing her best to consistently absorb either heat or kinetic energy, while Jack was furiously filling up the bottles with as much gunpowder as he could manage. The Mana in the air apparently made it trivial to transform already magical powders into what he wished, which meant his productivity went nearly ten times its usual pace. Several grams could easily be produced every minute spent channeling, which was a very hefty amount.

‘Can I eat this?’ Dawn asked Elijah, catching his attention as she waddled over to some of the Sundrop Flowers. ‘Looks good.’

‘Shouldn’t cause too many problems,’ Elijah supposed, though he still watched on as the duck did as much. Pieces were bitten off the flower in hefty chunks, an entire plant disappearing into the fake animal’s gut within half a minute. ‘Did you learn something new from that?’

‘Plants are tasty,’ Dawn happily answered. ‘Can I eat more?’

… Elijah had been hoping for something more useful than a confirmation about how her former brethren tasted, but he supposed that such a thing was too much. Letting her have it, the duck immediately gorged itself on every golden petal it could find, while he tried to find something else that was worthwhile.

The silvery flowers, with their descriptive names of ‘Silver Mound,’ couldn’t be used for much either way, so Elijah had little fear about Dawn being in danger on her own. The only thing that could threaten her here were the giant centipedes, and those would have to get through Aleksi who was guarding the only way to get inside here.

“Are the two of you ready to try the reason we came in here?” Elijah asked some ten minutes later, when Jack had filled most of the bottles brought along with the gunpowder, and Sasha had tired of the waves of cold and heat next to her hands.

“I was waiting for you to offer,” Jack replied, Sasha limiting herself to a nod. “We’ve both gotten the book read aloud, though, so… you want to watch while we try it out?”

“I read the book several times over when I was going through the process the first time as well, and it still took me several hours to get it right,” Elijah countered without mercy for the arrogance before him. “Learning this technique, and nearly all other magical techniques, cannot be learned from a book alone. Your own method of moving your Mana, your own experiences, and your own form of skill, all change the exact details of each step. The pages can go into as much description as they want, but there will still be a blank that you have to fill in each moment. And, to make it worse, the mindset required for proper crystallization can take a long time to figure out if you're not prepared.”

“Order it into a new form, but let it control the journey to that new form by itself,” Jack repeated, having already heard Elijah give that speech a dozen times over now. Which he was supposed to have done, seeing as they could be crippled by his negligence if they messed it up. “We understand. Don’t worry.”

“Does he speak for you as well, Sasha?” Elijah asked, getting a nod in reply. “Then I suppose the only thing left is for the two of you to begin. Best of luck.”

It became eerily silent as they did, the muttering of the madman and the criticism of the fighter ending its endless cycle. There were only calm breaths, the swirling of Mana, and the sounds of Aleksi tapping away at the rock as he watched the entrance for anything stupid enough to approach.

“Now you’ll be getting a taste of the medicine as well,” the giant commented, as Elijah settled down beside him. “I waited three hours for you last time, just sitting around silently without something to pass the time with.”

“How boring,” Elijah replied, feeling like he should’ve perhaps brought a book with him. There were a few tomes inside the castle’s laboratory he wouldn’t have minded going through while he had the chance. “But… Now isn’t a bad time to talk regardless. I have bad news.”

“Bad enough that those two couldn’t hear it alongside me?” Aleksi asked playfully until he saw the blank expression on Elijah’s face. It was serious, the giant’s expression fading away to allow the veteran space to work. “What happened?”

“The King woke up, talked with me for half an hour, and was then able to guess most of my life story without getting a single fact wrong,” he explained, the giant’s grip around their axe tightening to the point the leather could be heard struggling. “Knew about the fakeness of my name, about the fact we didn’t come from some village in the south, about the fact that I was the alchemist for Death Squads, and… how I helped supply the necessary elixirs to kill thousands.”

…

“I’m guessing he was strangely fine with that history attached to you?” Aleksi said. The giant understood how strange it would be for all of this to be guessed, and then for Elijah to walk out of the castle on his own two feet. In a normal world, his body would still be in the castle, but his head would’ve been brought outside to the public to be used as an example of what pain had been forced upon the country.

“I was told I’d be trying an absinthe with the King and Alin Oathbreaker tomorrow since the latter enjoyed the bottle that his majesty still had in his room,” Elijah confirmed, the words feeling sour on his tongue. “When I asked, the King revealed that he’s simply grown tired of all the bloodshed, that he didn’t see the point of more punishment when my own knowledge of what I’d done was more than enough. An idiotic way to see it, but I didn’t fight the declaration for long.”

“A wise man,” Aleksi commented, seemingly not hearing the last part of what Elijah had muttered. “And he intends to keep this discovery of his a secret?”

“Since others might not share his views, he intends to keep his lips shut, yes.”

“Then I suppose we have nothing to worry about. If a man can rule as king of a country for this long, he must have some form of strong will left in the old bones.”

“In the bones, yes. There’s little muscle and proper flesh left on that royal we so adore,” Elijah said. “Haunted methods were used to keep him alive, ones that couldn’t heal the decay that had already occurred. There is very little left of the King that the people remember.”

“From what you’ve said, I think there’s plenty enough remaining.”

Elijah rolled his eyes at the giant’s poetic words, an immature response yet he knew nothing else that could convey the emotion felt. Hearing his friend of so many years agreeing with the melodramatic King, who like his daughter had no respect for what was safe, made something within ache. Not his heart, that organ having grown colder years ago, but something more substantial. Something important.