Everything hurt. Whatever had healed me before had managed to stop most of the bleeding from when the asshole monkey had put his hand through me, but I guess being beat unconscious and dragged across the tower top had partially reopened the damage.

The light I'd been tossed into was also beyond blinding. I felt space distort and ripple as I fell through it and the sky and open air that had been above me became only a memory.

Whatever made up the pillar of energy, it wasn't normal mana. At least not anything like the mana I'd felt my soulcore produce. It was different; it was either purer, or more condensed, I really couldn't tell which. Though maybe those were the same thing; I still wasn't really an expert on the whole magic thing.

My head was thudding. My regeneration was doing its best to keep up with my blood loss. It showed three hp.. then four... then two again as I felt something small and wet snap in my abdomen when I tried to see if I could still move--it was probably an artery, judging by the burst of wooziness I felt overtake me.

I needed it all to stop.

My mana was regenerating as fast as usual though. Which pretty much gave me my only surefire chance at not dying.

My eyes flared with power. Reaching for the magic, even if my mana bar said it was there, wasn't exactly easy when it felt like my neck was teetering on the edge of breaking, but I grabbed for it nonetheless.

My soulcore pulsed at my command, weakly at first, but then more steady. The flicker within me became a steady beat and [Arcane Fencer] took over, healing me with my magical power.

My health bar started to budge out of the red, but it was slow going and the System warning that I was extremely near death didn't immediately disappear.

The sensation of my bones and sinew knitting back together was also extremely uncomfortable.

I felt cords of power leak out from my mana channels and grab ahold of my jaw, shifting it through torn muscle to hold it back to where it needed to be; my eyes rolled in agony as the whole ordeal produced a loud popping noise from within my face. Similar sensations and sounds began to play and echo themselves out across my entire body.

I wouldn't say the healing was as bad as the actual hurting, but it wasn't worlds better or anything. Small bits of relief did begin to wash over me as the superficial wounds I'd taken in my fight were repaired in the less damaged parts of my body, though.

I felt myself grit my teeth as I lifted my eyes out to try and see through the pulsing light of the mana pillar as I tumbled through space.

Trying to look through the pillar was like trying to look outside of a lightbulb, if one were trapped inside one. It might be possible, but it was extremely disorienting as your eyes were adapted to an illumination that was much more powerful than what you were trying to look at outside it.

I couldn't afford to try and channel mana into my eyes to increase my eyesight, even though I was pretty sure [Arcane Fencer] might let me do that. No, I needed to keep everything focused on fixing the damage the Monkey King had done to my spine just by punching me.

As if on cue, I felt the large bone that connected my lower neck to my spine making a clicking noise.

"God!" I cursed in agony.

Heavy breaths entered my lungs.

I closed my eyes tight, but then forced myself to open then. I needed to see where I was going if I didn't want to go splat.

My surroundings outside the pillar were murky at best and changing fast as I fell, but I could somewhat see what looked like large pipes crisscrossing within a massive circular space.

So this was the interior of the ringed citadel?

The strange thing was though, I couldn't see an end to the massive network of pipes. The interior of the tower was humid and hot, but also seemingly much more expansive then even the massive exterior might suggest.

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"Great, more magic," I whispered to myself, realizing that my jaw was once more in mostly working order; though greatly sore.

My arm was slow to respond to me when I lifted it though. Slowly, however, it did so. I closed my fist, more out of habit than necessity, as my grappling line erupted out of the contraption on my wrist.

I was aiming for one of the pipes, hoping to take control of my descent.

Unfortunately, I realized that I may have misjudged just how fast I was falling when I heard my grappling line pierce into the metal I'd aimed at; which was followed by the sound of said pipe groaning and tearing.

My weakened arm was nearly yanked from its socket as my grappling line pulled me towards where it'd sunk itself into.

I was disoriented as hell as my eyes were plunged into relative darkness when compared to the blinding nature of the mana pillar.

I blinked, desperately trying to adapt my eyes, as I soared past multiple massive pipes.

The sound of tearing metal intensified as my weight pulled against my grappling line.

I blinked once again and, as my vision just barely caught up, I was greeted with the sight of a massive pillar of blue-colored steam erupting from where my grappling line was slowly slipping out of the huge pipe it'd pierced into.

Was the tower steam-powered? Why was the steam blue though?

I knew one thing: I didn't want to find out if it was poisonous to my new body.

I instantly instructed my grappling line to stop pulling me towards the steam.

My body lurched, mid-air, as my mind gave the command to the enchanted item and I felt myself swing to hang like a drifting pendulum beneath the pipe.

I took another deep breath. The abdominally-sourced blood covering the hole in my armor was growing cold against my skin, meaning that less and less fresh life fluid was making up the mess.

I could feel myself stabilizing, just as my mana and health equalized somewhere around twenty-five percent each.

I took the moment to look around my surroundings.

The pillar of light reached far, far into the tower above. Which was filled with more pipes and massive, steampunk-esque gears that turned in every direction.

Likewise, I could see that the terrain below me was much the same--with only one large difference: there was what looked like some sort of raised dome that the pillar of light flowed into. The dome appeared to open at its highest point.

I could climb my way back out to the Monkey King, I figured.

I frowned.

"Fuck no," I said aloud.

Which only left me with going down as an option.

Just as I had this thought, and as I was looking down to the odd dome, an odd sound filled my large ears from above.

I instantly glanced up, just in time to see some sort of buzzing creature land next to where my grappling line was just barely holding on in the pipe I'd fired it at.

The creature seemed to observe the billowing steam ejecting from the pipe for a moment, before it flittered off of the surface of the metal construction and began to bob and veer around the spearhead that held me in the pipe.

A feeling of dread filled my tight and aching stomach, just as the creature landed on the grappling line and then pulled it free and into its grasp.

----------------------------------------

The Monkey King stumbled and placed his still-remaining hand against the fountain-like brick structure that surrounded the tower's mana catcher. He only did this after the sorceress had disappeared into the light of it, however.

If his body still needed oxygen to function then he would've been gasping. He could feel the heavy, unrefined air of the low-level dungeon burning against his very existence.

With a grunt, he was forced to allow the manifestation of his power to suppress all the way back down to level thirty, before the unrefined nature of the dungeon could damage his state of being.

All at once, as his power drew back into the deepest recesses of his core to mostly become dormant, the agony of his injuries coursed back into his mind.

His now much lower pain-resistance skill began to fire on all cylinders, but it wasn't enough to fully numb his wounds as it had before. Not at all, in fact.

His shaking eyes slowly trailed to the pillar of power pouring into the mana-catcher.

The girl he'd fought was an oddity; perhaps she wasn't the most skilled low-tier he'd met in the multiverse, but she was certainly among the most concentratedly annoying.

She was much stronger than she should've been for her level. It was pretty clear she'd already managed to tier up at least a few of her skills and he could only imagine that at least some of whatever perks or spells she had were of a rare quality or above--otherwise she wouldn't have been able to almost imitate an elemental body at such a low stage of evolution.

If she managed to cross the first threshold with a high-rarity catalyst upon reaching level thirty then she might become a real up-and-comer. The chance was even higher if she found a catalyst that was in tune with the nature of her soulcore and whatever skills or perks she would choose as a foundation for her body.

What was most concerning though, was the fact that she might very well have been level-for-level stronger than him, who was very much an elite.

When he'd suppressed himself to her tier of evolution, she'd managed to nearly tear him apart. If he'd been serious from the beginning then it might've been different, even when he was suppressed, but he couldn't be sure.

And why had she known about humans while being on a world that had never been introduced into the Centrality before becoming a dungeon?

When he'd peered into her soul... he'd seen something odd. She didn't appear to only be a Caliban at all, though her spirit didn't have the hallmarks of a body-snatcher either.

It was all very strange. This Clarissa was very strange--and it interested him to no ends.

Of course, there was also the matter of the Eastern Ruler and this Cowagin.

He frowned and his hand tightened against the mana-catcher's stone. They both still needed to die for what they'd done to his friend and the boy king's world.