About a half hour later, Sam was standing in front of another cavern, this one field with strange foliage that seemed completely at odds with the volcanic nature of the environment. Massive mushrooms soared into the lofty heights of the cave, and strange grasses grew on the floor of the mushroom forest, some of which were glowing faintly. There was a gentle ambient light from a patch of glowing moss on the ceiling, allowing Sam to see most of it clearly. As far as he could tell, there were no monsters here, but they could easily be hiding behind the mushrooms.
Sam headed down into the cavern a moment later, feeling his feet sink into the grass as he went. The grass was pleasantly spongy, and not at all what he had been expecting upon coming into his place. However, his expectations had been incorrect, it seemed.
Sam kept moving, heading into the deep forest of mushrooms. The mushrooms were all of one species, it appeared, of a reddish variant that looked as if there were small streaks of lava threaded through their caps. The mushrooms were incredibly large, but other than that, they seemed to be no different than any normal mushrooms from Earth.
Sam could see a few small creatures scurrying between the mushrooms, feeding off of them. They were of no threat to him, and he could sense that they were too weak to bother killing. However, he began to sense something more enticing further into the mushroom forest, and he smiled. He could feel the presence of a strong opponent here, something that would allow him to gain even more levels. At this rate he might have a chance of reaching level 100 before heading back to Earth. The pain from leveling up was only getting worse, but it was something that he would have to deal with.
He had placed the whole process in a subconscious bracket of his mind, and when he gained the requisite amount of essence, he simply completed the action without any sort of hypothesizing. It was only possible because of his enhanced Intelligence stat to do it this way, and it removed a lot of the fear of leveling from his mind. It was strange to have to invent such games, but such was the nature of life as a cultivator.
As he entered the mushroom forest proper, the light from the patches of luminescent moss started to dim, and he was soon in almost total darkness. If not for the field still suppressing his power, it would have been negligible, but as it was, he actually had to focus a bit to see where he was going. Gordanus was not going to make this entire experience easy for him.
From the start of the cavern, he had not actually been able to see how large it was, which meant that his mysterious enemy could be mere minutes away, or hours away. There was no real way of telling.
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Sam instead cultivated as he walked, keeping one eye out for any monsters. A few minutes later he encountered his first enemy, which was a small goblinoid monster that seemed to be partly infected by the spores of the mushrooms around it. It looked like a tiny, moving mushroom itself, and only its greenish skin and arms exposed it as anything other than that. Its head had been replaced by a mushroom cap, and it moved in odd jerky motions, as if it was not fully under its own control.
As soon as the monster saw Sam, it leaped at him, causing him to reflexively swat it out of the air. The monster exploded in a cloud of blood and spores, and Sam quickly closed his mouth to avoid breathing them in. The monster had been weak, which didn't say much about the toxic qualities of the spores, but it was better to be safe. This forest of mushrooms was slowly proving to be a more interesting place than Sam had thought. However, it was up to time to tell whether that would quickly shift into danger or not.
As Sam walked through the pillars of mycelium, he contemplated the decision that he had made that had led him to this place. There were no enemies in sight, not even the little mushroom infected goblins, and he had full rein of his own thoughts for once. He was in this position now because of his own strength and his will to survive, which had driven him up to the very top of power on the planet Earth. However, he was now seeing just how much further he had to go in this world, how many more walls there were to climb in his path.
While he had been able to defeat that alien general on the battlefield earlier, it had been a somewhat close thing, and he was sure that none of his captains would have been able to say the same thing. Sam was certainly up there in terms of strength in this universe, but he was not sure whether his position as the strongest was guaranteed, or even likely. In any case, out of the trillions, or perhaps quadrillions of beings within this universe, there were bound to be a few more powerful than him. After all, the Dao was not everything.
There were many avenues to power, and Sam was certainly lagging behind in the level department, which was a problem that he needed to fix on this training journey. He wished that the universal leaderboards that the System had hinted to were already up and running, so he could check his standing against the others within his universe. However, those would not come into effect until the universal tournament, which was still months away.
In any case, he would end up meeting his fellow universal citizens soon enough, and he would have to be ready for them. The people who would be attending that tournament were sure to be the cream of the crop, the very best that their people had to offer. Sam would need to train as hard as he could in order to reach that level.
He was probably already there at this point in his journey, but he needed to make sure that he did not lag behind in the months to come. One's position within a society’s strength was always tenuous, especially if things like leveling and Daos existed, which were sure ways to bump someone down a few pegs in any standing of strength. It was a stressful world, but also a very rewarding one. It was a world that Sam intended to make full use of in the coming years.