The two of them had inadvertently spent an entire day in the Shionel Dungeon. It had taken nearly three hours of exploring the dungeon with Rui's Riemannian Echo, and then the rest of the remaining day for Kane to finally extract all the esoteric resources himself from the corpse of the Earthen Basilisk.
The two of them immediately left the fifteenth floor as they headed back home.
On the way, back, Rui had much to think about. The floors of the dungeon were definitely diverging from the norm far more than he had expected.
Generally, floors were pockets of esoteric resource reservoirs, monsters tended to coalesce because they were large open spaces.
Thus, Rui had expected that the floors would all be straightforward monsters that could very easily be dealt with similar strategies each time. Yet this, and previous floors showed him that he should not be certain of what to expect.
After all, he ran into a town of monsterified living zombies inside a floor, things didn't really get that much crazier than that.
Rui suddenly paused as his senses picked up something strange.
"What is it now?" Kane asked with dismay, having experienced this many times now. "Is it a monster or another floor?"
"No, actually, it's a bunch of Martial Squires in different groups in different places… They're actually coming down the same tunnel system that we're traversing," Rui murmured.
"How many?" content.
"A total of forty-three that I can sense," Rui frowned. "They're spread out and heading in different directions, exploring the dungeon."
"Wait, you're telling me that the normies have begun catching up with us?" Kane's eyes widened with shock. Rui's Riemannian Echo gave him such an absolutely uncontested dominant advantage in the Shionel Dungeon. The two of them were much further and deeper down the Shionel Dungeon than any martial Squire had ever been because they possessed absolutely no fear of getting lost with Rui's senses and memory.
Most Martial Squires had to explore more conservatively due to this and required more manpower.
Even Rui frowned as he found the presence of dozens of Martial Squire this deep below the surface to be quite odd. He was sure that they had been left quite behind in the dust.
"This must have something to do with the recent surge in Martial Squires," Rui's eyes narrowed.
In the past week, there had been a sudden surge of Martial Squires into the Shionel Confederation, and the traffic in the Adventurer Ring had increased visibly.
Rui had an idea as to what was causing this phenomenon, but there was nothing he could do about preventing it. He just needed to make sure that it did not change the outcome.
"Chairman Deacon sure is being aggressive, as predicted," Rui snorted. "The monopolization of dungeons has been his one and only semi-fruitful endeavor at beating me. He's going to start aggressively exploring with the help of the capital and manpower of internal and external foreign stakeholders that he has surely united by now and beat me with sheer numbers."
"What do his allies gain by helping him though?" Kane raised an eyebrow.
"The same success that they would have gained had I not participated in the Shionel Dungeon exploration and plunder," Rui replied. "Basically, they're going to join their forces and overwhelm me with numbers to try and restore the balance that existed before. He has internal and external support, and on top of that, he keeps increasing the bounty on my head that has also successfully harnessed freelancers and independents into hunting the nation for me. Furthermore, he is no doubt conducting extensive brute force investigations on all Martial Squires as well, as expensive as that is."
Rui did suspect that he was probably one of the most wanted Martial Squires in recent history. What other Martial Squire had so many countless Martial Squires working against him or her in such a manner?
"Sheesh, the man truly is fit to be called a bloodhound. The only reason that Chairman Deacon has not used his political power and governmental authority to leverage the state's power against me is because Guildmaster Bradt is singlehandedly crushing any attempt at that with his political capital and authority, however, he's doing that out of self-interest. And unless I can give him even more than I have given him, he is unwilling to do more," Rui murmured.
Unfortunately for him, he couldn't think of any bargaining chips that he could use to trade with Guildmaster Bradt to put an end to all this. Although Guildmaster Bradt did have the power to put an end to all of this by leveraging his enormous political and economic capital, it was extremely expensive and costly. Rui was aware that even with the precious map, and the profits of Esosale Suppliers, he would not be able to convince Guildmaster Bradt to put in even more work without some heavy concessions.
This was on a whole other level compared to asking Guildmaster Bradt to simply pass a bill amending some laws and protocols.
"Hmmm…" Rui narrowed his eyes. "What to do indeed… I can think of numerous plans. But for now, Let's get the hell out of here. These guys will eventually discover the fifteenth floor and inform Chairman Deacon, or the Shionel Adventurer Guild about the fifteenth floor."
Rui was curious about what the analysis on the fifteenth floor from the relevant experts would be. Every time a floor was discovered, eventually its details would become public, and a large number of experts who were unable to get a first-hand look would offer their insights on the floors of the Shionel Dungeon.
Although he was quite confident in his deductions and analyses, it did not hurt to learn the insight of actual experts who studied stuff like this for a living. He was also quite curious about how his skinning of the corpse for esoteric resources would be interpreted. Would they also give him credit for killing the Earthen Basilisk?
He hoped so, it would make his life easier.