I wasn't immediately sure where on the level to find the Fairy Dungeon entrance, but it's not like it was ever going to be a difficult search. The only real complication was that I almost ran into another group of young Dungeoneers questing into the Dungeon. With my Stealth ability per se having been consumed into my new Cloak, I was momentarily panicked as I tried to figure out just how to avoid a confrontation, but in truth it didn't take much to twist the skill to do what the old skill had done... though, I suspect it did a worse job of it.

It didn't matter much, since I was several levels ahead of them and they weren't looking for me, but I kind of obsessed over it while skulking around in the shadows. It... it did occur to me as I hid there that me having named the new skill after a vampire painted my antisocial nature in an entirely different light, but you know what, whatever. I was just avoiding an awkward conversation from people that probably wouldn't understand.

And they probably wouldn't, I thought as I looked over the group. It was four people--two fighters, a Priestess, and a mage of some kind. I got the impression they didn't have a dedicated tank, but who was I to criticize party composition? Nothing I did was normal. I watched them go, their cheerful idle conversation making me feel a little lonely, and for a minute I flashed back to when Mel and her group were with me and Louise. That felt... better.

But they passed, either unsure of the path to the boss room or taking the time to grind before they got there, and I let them go. Aside from them, the Devil's hellish castle was just full of low-level imps and such, and I mostly ignored them, though I did cut down anything that I felt was excessive for what the floor was supposed to be, so the other party wouldn't end up in a bad spot.

I ended up finding the Fairy Dungeon entrance atop a big circular tower, with a nice view of a lake of lava fed by a falling river of magma. I took the time to look around; it was obvious (though it reminded me that I had a bunch of spare parts I intended to turn into a better sensory skill) that most of what I saw was painted on the walls of a room, even if some of those paintings were animated. There were luminous crystal growths that weren't real, a gigantic sleeping demon curled up next to the lava lake that was a brainless non-entity, an occasional swarm of migrating bats that didn't seem to exist as more than a faint illusion... it wasn't entirely without decoration, but it wasn't particularly fleshed out, either. It was just a big "hell" room with a castle in it.

I turned to the portal entrance, my Fairy Pass coming to hand as I did, and it opened up into another unfinished hallway. I stepped down it with some reluctance, feeling a little bit like I'd just had an argument with an old friend and walked away still angry.

Odd that I would think of the Administrator as a friend, especially under the circumstances, but what else was there to say?

Just 'round a corner t the end of the hallway was another desk, this time with no fairy in attendance. I looked around for a bell or something to ring, but no, it just seemed to be unmanned; I knocked at about where I thought the door was, and after knocking I could tell that there was something there, but even waiting for a couple minutes showed no sign that anyone was coming or had even noticed I was there.

So, in spite of knowing what was on the other side, I tried to force the door open.

It was actually surprisingly easy; the doors were, if anything, a decoration, since anyone who could open a Fairy Dungeon entrance was already clearly down to get themselves in trouble. If everything was going right, there was no need for defenses; if anything went wrong, someone going through the door would solve the problem a different way, most likely.

I came out on a small platform, only slightly larger than the black silk elevator that I'd taken, which overlooked the vast expanse of the Abyss.

There was no elevator here, and no cable that I could sense that such an elevator would connect to. There was some kind of magical widget that maybe was where the cable would connect, but I had no idea how it worked, and after glancing at it, I had no interest whatsoever in screwing with it.

Merry was still silent.

So I sat down on the platform and tried to gently nudge my fairy friend out into the wider world. She did, after a little bit of prodding, but she showed no interest in straying far from me. Instead, she sat down on my knee, still lost in thought.

Having nothing better to do than wait, I gave her a little more time, though I experimented a little bit with my abilities. This place was apparently just on the edge as far as my Dungeoneer abilities went; activating the Cloak didn't detach it from my core like it did at the transfer station, but it did strain something. Likewise, my mana recharged, but slowly; I was, technically, still within the Dungeon proper, but so close to leaving that the system seemed to not want to count it.

"So much killing," said Merry, finally.

I looked at her, confused, but let her pick her words.

"The blue guy... I'm not sure why, but... he showed me his world, but just... just the end of it. A challenge in which... in which a whole huge army died. I dunno how many, but it was... lots." Merry forced herself to look out over the abyss. "It wasn't just his people. Them, and Fairies, and Dungeon creatures, all against... I dunno, but it had to be him, right? The bad guy."

The Lord Beneath. I nodded, interested in whatever she might have gleaned from the image.

"But mostly, it was his people fighting each other, and I could smell the bad guy all over it."

I frowned, considering that. but Merry kind of shook herself.

"I... man, I dunno. Jay, the whole thing feels wrong. All I could hear the whole time was him thinking over and over that he should have known, and I don't know what. But the images, the images were all wrong. Most or all of the people fighting were... were wrong. Like they should have been warriors, and mages, and whatever, but they weren't. They were bad. I dunno."

"It's okay," I said, trying to comfort her. "You don't have to figure it all out. If it's too much--"

"Jay." Merry turned to me, and she looked guilty. "The Fairies were also bad. Like unhealthy-bad, and I don't know why. And they tore apart people and ate them and there was this whole war--"

"Easy, easy," I said, using my Skill rather than my hands to pick up the tiny little fairy and bring her up to my level. My finesse wasn't the greatest, but I could do that without any fear of hurting her. "So whatever happened to people happened to your people as well. Maybe they know more about it."

"I dunno." Merry put her small little hand on my will projection, and I could feel the magic in her body reacting to my own, as though we were touching hands physically. "But I feel like some of that bad is still in them today. The... I dunno. I can't sense much magic through his memory, but I get a sense of bad in fairies that makes more sense after that."

After that, Merry was silent again for a while. I looked out over the abyss, spending more time actually just looking. One of the things that was obvious to me was that it wasn't just pieces of dungeons and Fairy transfer stations hanging out in the abyss; there was a place not too terribly far from here that was, if my eyes didn't deceive me, like a chunk of actual ground with a village on it had been scooped up and just left hanging there, but without a protective shield of bedrock like the Dungeons had to block all senses in and out. Of course, "not too terribly far" could have been ten miles or something, but I sure got the impression that the furthest points that I could see were thousands of miles away, to say nothing of the giant... something below us, which must have been much further away despite its huge apparent size, because I couldn't sense it except in the vaguest way.

Looking at it made my head hurt, but it didn't boil my eyes or anything. It must have been the Star proper, though, because when I looked directly at it, I got the impression of limitless power held back by exceedingly powerful chains, like a god bound by pagan rituals into a mortal shell far too small to contain its true nature. In a sense, all that I could see was the chains; it really didn't seem like any energy was escaping. But in another sense entirely, I knew from the strength and constant effort of the chains just how much power it had to be holding back.

And it was huge.

I wondered as I sat there looking at it if perhaps calling it a Star wasn't actually being poetic. Perhaps it really was a star fully contained by a Dyson sphere, but that made little to no sense; the energy output of a star was so high that if you weren't constantly using... well, more energy even than we'd seen it using so far, it would overload and burn out anything modern science could imagine. Maybe it used that power to move? Any engine that could actually affect a star had to consume egregious amounts of energy.

I was wrapped up in those thoughts when I felt Merry smacking me on the knee to get my attention. She didn't seem quite so lost, now, and also didn't seem terribly upset by me being distracted, but she did have one hand on the black scarring over her body, the remnants of the corruption she received when she took the Caesarian Gentleman's body and tried to fight with it.

"Hey," she said, "let's go ahead and see if we can fix my body now, yeah? I'm so fucking sick of hurting like this."

"Oh!" I hadn't really considered that she was still fighting it, since she hadn't raised any kind of fuss. "Absolutely."

"Right, and about that..." Merry kind of pushed into my body, and somehow, I could feel her slipping into my Cloak, although I didn't have it really engaged at the moment. You didn't check your loot for that fight, right?

I didn't, and I glanced at them now. Surprisingly, I actually got four items; that broke a lot of rules for how boss loot was supposed to go, but then everything about that fight was weird. The one that I was immediately sure Merry was referring to, though, was obvious.

[ BOTTLED EXPERIENCE - Lv 250** ]

I nodded to myself, pleasantly surprised. With me being above the level cap, if I maxed out my experience, I still wouldn't go up in level; fighting a level 250 creature would, inevitably, overfill me, and virtually all of it would be immediately lost. Meanwhile, we'd been advised that fixing Merry would be easier with a lot of the stuff on hand.

I turned to her, mentally, and without reservation, told her Use as much as you need.

She smiled, but her smile was strained. I could tell she was worried about using it, but I frankly just didn't care.

It took a little work from Merry, but she projected a shared mental space for us, one which I tried to mentally grasp in order to support her. I doubt I did a fantastic job, but she did relax a bit, and then she tried to reach into her own magic, trying to fight the corruption and twist pieces to be under her control that... that were, frankly, too close to her magic "biology". Her body had become a part of her, and it was sick.

Of course, we were both getting good at screwing around with magic, and I tried to mentally offer everything I had available to her. My skills, my class, experience, class points, the broken pieces of skills still laying around somewhere inside me...

Merry wrestled with it for several long moments before something seemed to snap inside of her, and her body split into aspects like an item would. At that moment, it was clear which single, specific piece was the problem; it reminded me immediately of a finger-wagging elementary school teacher, bending over and snarling at a little child, saying, No, no, no over and over again, except that its words had barbs, and those barbs had already tasted blood.

Metaphorically, I mean.

At the same time, though, Merry suddenly became very, very weak, and I could sense immediately that we were suddenly in a position like surgery, where her ...innards were exposed, and she was leaking "blood" all over. So I threw experience at her, first from my own reserves, and then mentally grabbed the bottle and basically threw it at her, essentially unconcerned with the consequences.

When the bottle broke, though, I realized that a level 250 monster gave a lot of experience, more because I defeated it--solo--while underlevel.

There was an explosion of some kind of coarse, static-like liquid that might have drowned Merry or I had that actually been how anything worked, and the two of us both had to stop what we were doing to wrestle with it. Merry consumed as much of it as she could--or perhaps just as much as she needed--but what remained was suddenly cascading through everything like an exploded tank in a soda bottling plant. It was delicious, yes, but this was not how it was supposed to be enjoyed.

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I struggled with the raging torrent for a long time before I just decided that I didn't have a choice but to try to use as much of it on everything that I could possibly get my hands on. Some of it, I think, was dripping into my core and trying to move me up in levels, but I wasn't sure that that was the best use of it. Of course, I also wasn't that experienced with this Cultivation stuff, but...

No, focus, Jay, I need your help. Merry was struggling, and given her mental images, it was like pressurized sugar was trying to get into her veins. Still hurting here... like you said, delicious but...

I set everything aside and focused on the pieces of Merry's body, trying to put them back into order but without the corrupt piece. The problem became immediately apparent, though: soaked as they were in the juice that is used to change us as we grow, almost as soon as I mentally grabbed a piece, it wanted to reshape into whatever I was thinking of at that moment.

And these were supposed to go inside of Merry. There was not a lot of room for them to be wrong.

Instead of trying to piece together a version of what had come out, I just focused on the idea of Merry having a healthy, powerful little fairy body. It didn't have to look any different than Merry did when she first came into my head, as long as it could serve to keep her going in and out of my mind. I gave the pieces in my mental hands that impression and backed off to look at them... to find that as soon as I did, they started changing again, away from whatever I'd made them and instead reflecting some part of my mind that was idle.

So I just collected everything and tried to get lost only in those thoughts: Merry's body, hers, healthy, safe, and strong. Hers, healthy, safe, strong. Hers, healthy, safe, strong. Hers, healthy, safe, strong.

Mine, healthy, safe... and strong, I added, noticing that Merry and I were starting to synch up mentally. Hers, healthy, safe, and ...strong. Mine, healthy, safe, stable... flexible, and strong, I objected, worried that 'stable' would mean she couldn't grow in the future. Hers, healthy, safe, stable, flexible, strong. Deep, she added, a concept that I couldn't quite understand but could replicate intuitively, Mine, healthy, deep, safe, stable, flexible, and strong.

We continued, Merry somehow observing the result without disturbing the process, until finally, she was able to slip a controlled magical form inside of her and seal it with a ...honestly, horrifying slurping feeling. I felt, too, like a little part of me got sucked in with it, but Merry, with deft fingers, somehow reached in and ever so gently extracted it, like pulling a hair out of your dinner and trying to keep it from coming away with too much sauce on it.

And Merry was... Merry. No little Caesar circlet on her head, no more armor, and even her fishnet gloves had been somehow corrupted by all the rampaging experience and consumed, but she was there, and I could tell she was strong. She seemed, as I'd hoped, to be the same person she'd been since the beginning, just... mature.

I looked at her, and I could feel what she must have meant by deep as I did. It must have been a concept like mature or wise to her, because when I mentally locked eyes with my fairy, I felt like I could fall into them; not in a romantic sense of oh, I could look into your eyes forever, but in the sense that there was so much more to her, things she'd never shown me or anyone else. Like if she chose to show me what was inside, she could change my world, despite her age being, at this point, still counted in days.

Merry made a face at me as that thought crossed my mind. I love you too, Jerry, she replied, with casual layer of irony over her thoughts, if a somewhat more mature take on irony than she'd had, I think. But now you need to worry about the rest of the Experience in your system.

Because of course I did.

Although I immediately started panicking again as I tried to figure out where all the liquid was and what was happening--a lot, I noticed, was just dropping into my core, now--Merry found something in her depths that helped her calmly sort through the situation, and she immediately launched to work with obvious purpose. She corralled whole lakes of liquid, keeping them from soaking into things sat random, and instead separated out a puddle and threw all the Skill pieces that were leftover into them, stirring them around like a heavy but definitely watery soup and then focused on what was within.

What came out was definitely a sensory skill, but I wasn't clear on exactly what it did, and there was still no time to examine it.

You need to focus on using it on yourself, said Merry. You can't do it the way I did, but you have to use your self-image, and change that, not command the stuff. The imaginary you that you play at being when you fight--just pretend that he's real, and then exaggerate it, making an even better version. Faster, stronger, smarter, sharper.

I felt a wave of panic rioting through me, which thankfully did not seem to actively poison me with the liquid experience flowing through my body. Because out of all the things I'd ever been, self-confident wasn't on the list.

Except when you're fighting.

I... I could admit that. I tried to call to mind that version of me, and found that the thought that triggered it was being so goddamn tired. That thought, of being tired, brought to mind all that I'd been through.

And all of my experiences flooded through me, shaping my Experience so that it could reshape me.

Dodging, over and over; I was fast, and I knew it. Careful control of my skills; I was smart, smarter than anyone thought I was, to be sure. Cautious; I didn't want to just think of it as wisdom, but that was certainly a word for it. And strong, without a doubt; just being able to do what I did required so much more strength than almost anyone I'd seen, and yet nobody could tell, in part because my Dungeoneer body didn't acknowledge it.

Not yet.

I let my lips curl into a fierce grin as I thought about the boss fights I'd been through, especially the fight against the Harpies. Throwing myself around the room like it was nothing, because it was nothing. Ignoring a giant tide of biting, clawing meat as irrelevant, because I was too smart and too fast to fall for such a stupid, obvious hazard. Clinging to walls, double-handing weapons, double-wielding them, throwing skills behind them, channeling skills through them...

I felt something inside of me scream as a tide of Experience tried to reshape something inside my class, which was apparently not a good thing, or perhaps just not allowed. I didn't force it, but neither did I force the swirling liquid to stop; in my head, I could see my swords, far stronger than they had any right to be, all because I'd invented a class that was useful and used it well. And that whole collection of enhancements, which someday I would level up, so that future weapons I had would be stronger than they were when I got them. Everything I absorbed became part of a giant pool of resources I could use to reshape new weapons going forward.

Because they were all a part of me, a part of my mind. I didn't force the Experience to change me, instead just noting smugly that this was already true, whether my Dungeoneer body accepted it or not.

Something bent, and Merry nodded approvingly, but I didn't know exactly what and didn't have the leisure to find out. Because there was more to it all, more to my self-concept, and it centered on the thing that made me special--my ability to sense things, my ability to use my mind to do what other people had never really considered. Empathy, telepathy, telekinetic sense, but also, the subtleties that let me work with something as strange as broken piece of a skill, and the experiences I'd had that led me to be able to live with a fairy in my head without cracking up, the sheer idea of being gentle with my thoughts...

Before I knew it, I looked around to find that there simply wasn't a giant pool of experience within me anymore. Oh, there were pockets scattered around, and a lot of it had simply gone to lev--

It didn't go to levels. The only Dungeon I was close to was level capped.

I salvaged more of it than you'd think, said Merry, and I felt for the first time how her mental voice was more crisp now, less raw around the edges. I actually figured I could dump a bunch of it into skills, and that doesn't work quite right, but it does help. Telepathy and Enhancement Sage and Skill Sage all got a big dose, along with the Cloak and the other new one. The rest got less, but everything got a little.

I started to reach for Skill Sage, but I recognized as I did that it was in part the skill itself that let me manipulate and reform skills--something that I'd only thought of as mental labor. I frowned, and instead of using the skill by popping up windows, studied the skill with itself in a more personal way.

It felt almost like a phantom extra arm that only existed within that mental concept Merry had given me, in which I was surrounded by loops, sitting on a throne on top of a rocket engine. I could maneuver the skill loops around with it, and pluck the Skill Points or move them around, jam them into the destroyer... but before, the sensation had been raw and boneless, and now it felt a little more discrete.

Before we get too distracted, you need to look at your new sense. I'm kind of proud of it.

I tried to just slide into the new sense, finding that it didn't quite fit me right, but when that sensation passed, I opened my physical as well as my metaphorical eyes and found that there were thousands, or maybe millions of tiny little lines all around me, lines that I could tell were a System construct. Merry had mentioned them, before; when putting back together an item we'd destroyed, she said that the connections held together an item, and we had maybe not gotten those right, and that was why it was weaker.

That sense applied in different ways "inside" me, where my inventory was, but it still functioned. And actually looking at whole things (since I couldn't really see myself), I found that Dungeon items had a core as well as all of those little lines holding them together.

I materialized an item, one of the three others I'd gotten from my Slenderman/Dracula bossfight, and examined it, both with my new senses, and with what the system gave me.

[ SLENDERGLOVES - Lv 175] [ EVIL ] [ STRENGTH +50 ] [ VITALITY +25 ] [ RESISTANCE +25 ] [ CHAOS TOUCH - Lv 90 ] [ HERO'S BANE - Lv 100 ] [ ADMINISTRATOR'S NOTE - Lv 0 ] These white gloves contain all the malice of a forgotten nightmare, eager to lay hands on the ones that mock and abuse them. They smell like blood, and perhaps always will.

Soulforged; Absorb time 14D

[ CHAOS TOUCH ] Active ability. Releases immense destructive power, amplified by use of [ Strength ], on anything touched for the duration. [ HERO'S BANE ] Increases critical rate and damage to higher level opponents. [ Level Difference: >10 ] [ Bane ] [ ADMINISTRATOR'S NOTE ] If you follow in my footsteps, know that someday you, too, will beg for death.

I shivered at the note, even as my senses roamed over the gloves. There were a lot of interesting subtleties, but I couldn't really understand what I was looking at, yet. Still, if I ever wanted to...

I stopped, letting the gloves in my hand fall to the ground. If I wanted to be a Dungeoneer forever and play with these things, then there would be so much I could do, but that wasn't really my fate, was it? I had no idea what being an Administrator meant, but I'm pretty sure it didn't involve figuring out how to make myself into a stronger fighter. Maybe learning how items worked would help me designing loot, assuming that was the Administrator's responsibility (as the notes suggested), but presumably I'd also receive proper instruction when I got to that point.

It was shiny loot, but knowing that I wasn't destined to really use or need it, at least not more than once, really put a damper on it.

I looked at the gloves. The absorb time was ridiculous, and I'd never spend two weeks on that. I took the time to examine the other two items I'd gotten at the same time:

[ SLENDERSUIT - Lv 175 ] [ EVIL ] [ RESISTANCE +50 ] [ VITALITY +100 ] [ DOOM ARMOR - Lv 75 ] [ BLINK - Lv 50 ] [ CRUSHING LEAP - Lv 70 ] [ ADMINISTRATOR'S NOTE - Lv 0 ] This two-piece suit does not hide the monster within, though it provides enough cover that one can pretend to be human. Humans are monstrous enough, after all, that many will accept you as one of them, as long as you are close enough...

Soulforged: Absorb time 10D

[ DOOM ARMOR ] Provides some resistance against death. Acts as [ DEATH AURA ] [+25 ] [ BLINK ] Active ability. Provides a short-ranged teleport. [ CRUSHING LEAP ] Active ability. Allows you to jump, and significantly increases your strength as you descend. [ ADMINISTRATOR'S NOTE ] People think I'm a joke, you know? A thing that only looks human, that feeds off of people but is too stupid to do a good job of it. They think Administrators are all fools.

[ DRACULA'S CAPE - Lv 175 ] [ EVIL ] [ VAMPIRIC CLOAK SAVANT - Lv 175 ] [ ABSORBABLE ITEM - Lv 175 ] [ ADMINISTRATOR'S NOTE - Lv 0 ] No one but the king of vampires could wear this. It's comfortable, though.

Soulforged: Absorb time 1s

[ VAMPIRIC CLOAK SAVANT ] Acts as [ Vampiric Cloak ] [ +25 ] [ ABSORBABLE ITEM ] The effective level of this item for the purposes of the Soulforged's [ Absorb ] ability is reduced. [ Absorb time ] reduced. [ ADMINISTRATOR'S NOTE ] You just had to beat me at my own game, didn't you? Well, to hell with you, then.

I snorted at that. I was getting used to 'fuck you' responses to what I did. I barely thought about it as I absorbed the cloak, though I had to wonder just what a skill booster would do for a skill that I'd only just invented. Did the system really understand it better than I did? Or would it just let me turn up the juice on it, somehow?

I almost jumped out of my skin as a snapping sound echoed nearby, and looked up to find a cable had attached itself to the top of the elevator space, seemingly from nowhere. Someone, it seemed, was finally coming, and so I'd be able to leave.