Aaron followed the many tracks through the desert while trying to ignore the gnawing feeling of dehydration and the headache pulsing in the back of his head. It was easy to follow them in the end as they had left a trail of scorpion corpses and an ample amount of tracks in the sand. The path followed along mostly in the shade of the dunes towards the deep desert. The scorpion corpses increased steadily and Aaron actually stumbled on some scorpions feeding on their kin.

They were quite occupied by their feeding frenzy and so Aaron had no problem to walk past them. It was a disgusting sight, but understandable. The scorpions were the only thing alive in this desert and so they resorted to cannibalism to sustain themselves. Which made no biological sense of course. They could not possibly reproduce fast enough to feed themselves from their offspring. At least not if this was a natural biome. But Aaron guessed from the cannibalism and from the sheer amount of scorpions that inhabited the desert that the scorpions were somehow spawned in like mobs in a video game.

Aaron had not played many of those, they were mostly a waste of time in his mind. But he had some basic knowledge about a lot of things, thanks to him stalking and gathering intel about his targets in his previous life. He had for example poisoned one of his targets at a gaming convention before. The man in question had never left his house for anything. The man’s villa was so well protected and fortified Aaron had not even thought about breaking in. So instead he had a find a way to lure the man out. He had found an opportunity at the gaming convention the man went to every 2 years and because the security there was excellent as well, much to his surprise, he had instead of killing or abducting his target, just poisoned him. It had been a relatively harmless poison that was slow acting, but would drive the man out of his house to go to the doctor. The man did not have a car, if you could believe it, and so he went on foot to his doctor that had his practice only a few streets over. On that way Aaron had abducted him and then killed him later. For that whole plan to succeed he had to pose as a fellow game developer to get access to the man and while he faked the ID and credentials, he still had to learn a lot about games not to be suspicious.

Another time he remembered he had abducted a woman at Comic Con of all things. For both occasions he had taught himself plenty about the basics of the gaming and anime culture, learned about their habits, their beliefs, their memes to blend in.

He would have never thought that his game knowledge of all things would be helpful ever again. But the whole tower, starting from the Hall of Illusions to this floor. It was all more or less designed like a game. The Second level had a time limit imposed on players because of the curses. The time limit, he assumed, was to make it harder to kill the bosses and to make this floor not habitable. Everything, especially the Vessels and how their powers worked, made a strange amount of sense to Aaron if he thought about the tower like a game. It felt like this Emnu was trying to get them to play a game of life and death to eliminate those who would not be suitable to serve him. Aaron would have been just fine with that. Games were usually just puzzles he could solve and he was very good at puzzles. It was just that Aaron had somehow ended up selecting the legendary difficulty hard mode permadeath option in this game and made things just a whole lot more difficult for himself by choosing to become a cultivator.

Aaron snorted at that thought. In the end this was no game at all and if he could become as powerful as the 13 in the prison, which he was sure he could, no would. Then he would also find a way out of the tower. A prospect the Vessels or Mages did not realistically have. So yeah, he would gladly play on the worst difficulty if he could beat the final boss because of it.

After walking for another 30 minutes he had to start fending off frequent attacks of Scorpions that were not satisfied with feeding on their fallen brethren.

There were so many of them here it was almost impossible to evade them all either way and Aaron started to dispatch them one after another. His best weapon for that was the enchanted dagger. It pierced easily through the beasts carapace and once Aaron had figured out where to stab to instantly kill them, it turned into a trivial endeavor to dispatch them. In this case he could stab into their tiny brains if he landed on top of them and angled his dagger in a 45° angle downwards while stabbing into the first segment of their head. Killing one of the scorpions would also slow down all other scorpions coming for him, as they would fight over who would feed on their fallen kin before resuming their pursuit. Aaron was so busy killing and evading scorpions that he barely realized he had arrived at his destination. In the center of the desert stood a great big rock with a hole inside. The giant monolith was hollow inside and formed an arena of some sort. Inside of that arena was the dead corpse of a gigantic white Scorpion.

It was as tall as a small building and longer than a truck with cargo on it. Its pincers were car sized and its stinger could probably skewer an elephant with ease. Carefully Aaron stepped closer into the Arena and spotted a whole bunch of black scorpion corpses. The giant white scorpion had burned out holes where its eye sockets were and its stinger was missing, the whole back segment of its tail was missing actually.

So they probably blinded it first and then took out the stinger before killing it. Aaron was not sure which had been the killing blow, but there were plenty of grisly wounds in the scorpions head segment.

Slowly Aaron walked around the corpse and then scanned the inside of the monolith until he spotted something on the back wall inside of a cave, half open to the arena. There in the shadow he could see something carved into the wall. Aaron walked into the cave wearily, but it was empty. The only thing of notice was a giant scorpion that was carved into the stone. It looked eerily similar to the one laying dead just a few feet away. In the center of its tail, just underneath its stinger was the pictogram he had seen on the door to the third floor. It was dull and although Aaron touched it, nothing happened. He studied the carving and then paused. Its claws were slowly, very slowly filling with white, like the sand in a sand glass. From what he had heard, these bosses respawned and this looked sort of like a timer. He assumed that if the whole scorpion was white it would come back to life or just reappear out of nowhere. He was not sure. But there was nothing to do here till then and Aaron left the Monolith slightly dejected. He was too late. His eyes followed the tracks on the ground. The group had not taken the same way back that they had come, otherwise he would have seen them. No instead they had made straight for another part of the Second floor and if Aaron had to guess, it was the jungle Boss they were going for next.

Aaron hesitated only for a moment, then he activated Wind steps and jumped from dune to dune with his maximum speed. There was a good chance they had not even reached or finished the boss fight with, what he assumed, would be a giant snake in the jungle. The jungle would give him perfect cover, perfect concealment and he would be free to ambush or kill any number of them because they would not be able to pursue him at all.

Or he could try to steal their kill and get the first half of the key he needed to go up. Either way he had to be fast if he did not want to miss his chances.

Aaron sped through the desert, jumped over scorpions, vaulted over dunes, flew past the tracks and corpses left behind by the group he was tracking and he closed in on the jungle fast. The group had to have some way to navigate this floor, there was no way they would not get turned around otherwise. Their path was so exact and on point it was a little scary. Maybe a skill, or an item? Either way Aaron would love to find out how they did it. With his top speed and no worries about Qi expenditure he got to the jungle fast. The tracks had become harder to follow at the edge of the desert because they had killed fewer scorpions. But as soon as they got to the jungle, they had cut a literal aisle into the forests undergrowth to proceed.

Aaron grinned and climbed up into the trees and followed the obvious path of destruction from above. They had just chopped through the vegetation instead of going around and that took time if Aaron was not mistaken. Sure some of this path could have cut while on the way to previous encounters, but it was still very easy to follow. Aaron ran along the branches, flung himself over gaps and the deep joy he felt of being on the hunt, running freely was only dampened a bit by the jungle sickness kicking back in.

He would not fight at his best that was for sure, especially if his stomach had anything to say about it and he had to suffer through another bout of diarrhea. He hoped it would not come to that, because not even the best fighter could fight while he had to shit. As crude as that sounds he could not imagine fighting like that. Sooner than later Aaron had to fend of snakes of all sizes that hung in the trees. Most he dodged, some he killed as they barred his way, but they did not really slow him down. Corpses of snakes littered the ground and had turned the whole aisle through the jungle into a buffet for all kinds of animals living in the forest. It was a feeding frenzy down there.

Not so up where Aaron was jumping from branch to branch, but that was fine. He was safe up here in the trees. Aaron ducked a snake trying to bite him, battered away another one trying to entangle him like a rope trap and cut of a dangerously rattling snake’s head while he slid by in a baseball slide. He got up without pausing or losing momentum, his movements unnatural and strange, but they started to feel natural to Aaron now and while the snakes got bigger and more frequent he heard shouts in the distance.

Finally he had caught up with them. Aaron paused and coughed a fit while he was still far enough away, spitting out, before he quietly got closer to the group.

Aaron found himself on the top of a tree peering down at a bona fide boss fight. A giant white snake was curled around the trunk of a white tree, its giant mouth open, its tail lashing out as its head bobbed and weaved back and forth before it came down insanely fast on a man with a broad shield.

The Defenders, as Aaron dubbed them in his head, were wearing heavy metal armor and big shields covered their front. They stood unmoving and the massive snake bite was battered away with an upward movement of the shield in one of the men’s hands. Other melees were spread out around the snake, hacking away at its scales, dodging its tail and running away when it moved towards them or its head turned in their direction.

The ranged attackers, the [Ranger]s, [Archer]s and Mages stood in a half circle a good bit behind the Defenders, letting loose a whole arsenal of spells and Arrows at the beasts head and eyes. The spells especially scored deeply, carving out bloody chunks from the giant snake, which hissed angrily.

There was another line of Defenders and men and women in light armor that covered the fight from the outside and dispatched any snake that came close. Had it not been for those guys Aaron would have been tempted to rush the Mages this instant. But the group was big, more than 30 people, equally split between inside and outside ring around the snake. There were little gaps and the ranged members of the group looked well protected.

Aaron hesitated up from his perch high in a nearby tree and studied the whole fight. The most interesting to him at first glance was the white tree the snake was curled around. It was gigantic like all the trees in the forest, but it had no leaves and the sun shone down fiercely through dead snow white branches. It looked dead, but not rotting. More like it was petrified and made out of stone, not wood. Many snakes had made the tree their home and slithered out of holes, down branches and attacked the line of Defenders that formed the front line of the fight. Their heavy armor and sharp weapons made short work of them without the snakes dealing any serious damage. Only when one of the real big snakes came out they peeled it off and killed it with the ranged attackers focusing it.

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Again, Aaron had never actually played an MMO himself with boss fights like this, but he had watched some videos and made himself familiar with it. This looked very much like a Boss Fight like you would find in any MMORPG. Just in real life. There was no HUD for him though, no red circles to dodge, just real life danger and corpses. Those littered the ground and turned the clearing in the jungle into treacherous terrain.

Aaron studied the group intently, identifying the mages, 3 of them in fact. One, a small man with a very red face, who shot small fire balls at the snake that whenever they hit burst into a small explosion that left the snake hissing and burning. Another mage, a tall dark skinned woman ripped rocks out of the ground and shot them at the snake, breaking bones and battering its scales over and over, sometimes she formed spikes out of the rock before she chucked them at it. The last mage, a tall bearded man zapped the Snake with Lightning he summoned from a metallic glittering staff and he made the whole jungle smell like ozone.

Aaron knew the last mage, it was the man that had electrocuted him during his escape and he was one of the stronger mages he had encountered so far.

Not a good sign. He did not want to fight anything while that man could instantly zap him from a dozen feet away. It would be foolish to do so and he was not sure how the magic of the tall woman worked, because each stone she ripped out of the ground looked way too heavy to lift with one hand. He hoped she did not really have the strength to do that and it was all magic in the end. Because he could not fight a muscle mage. His only range was melee range and if she was strong enough to lift boulders and throw them casually he would be equally easily thrown away.

Not a prospect he looked forward to.

So what could he do? For now it looked like his best chance was to watch and wait for an opening. He also wanted to see what exactly the key was to open the doors and how they were intended to be used. He studied the people closest to him and paused as he found a hint of an answer. He spotted a glowing tattoo on the back of a rogues hand and the same one on a man’s arm with a shield and an axe. It was a glowing scorpion, which would be a big surprise if that was purely a fashion choice and had nothing to do with the giant white scorpion the group had killed earlier. The more he looked the more tattoos he found, they were usually on the hand or arms and sometimes hidden underneath arm guards or long sleeves. One Rogue had the tattoo on his forehead actually, which made him frankly look ridiculous.

The giant snake thrashed as the damage from the spell casters accumulated and then uncoiled from the tree. Suddenly it was not immobile anymore and it attacked fiercely. It pushed through the line of defenders straight towards the mages. But the group had been waiting for this and they spread out on a call. The snakes head followed the bearded lightning mage and the man ran behind two nerby men with giant shields. The beasts head rose and then it spat a giant glob of green liquid. Everyone tried to evade it, but some of the Defenders were too slow and Aaron looked surprised as the Armor of the man who had been caught was slowly dissolved.

“Fuck, I hate this shit.” the man called out when they dragged him out of the acid or poison puddle. The mans armor was ruined, but he had otherwise no big injuries, besides some burn wounds. Acid then, not poison.

The snake was kited between the mages now who had formed up behind Defenders and they methodically brought the beast down. One of the snakes eyes popped and its hissing cries echoed through the jungle. The fight was over quickly after that. A man with a big, two handed sword cut into the beast neck until its head came off. He would have been unable to cut through its scales, but around the area the man cut into the mages had burned away the scales.

When the beast finally fell, Aaron studied the battlefield. There were few injuries, mostly damaged equipment and those who were injured healed themselves with healing potions. But the most interesting thing for Aaron was the bottom of the tree that the snake had coiled its body around. There was a very familiar looking carving in the white tree. A giant snake, its mouth open, a pictogram in its mouth. The pictogram had started to glow as the beast died and Aaron was sure this was the source of the glowing tattoos.

This was his chance, the group was disorganized and the pictogram had just started to glow. Aaron jumped to a nearby tree and then vaulted with Wind steps over to the white tree. It was a long jump and Aaron fell half weightless towards a big white branch. Once he landed he dashed downwards, using his speed and the element of surprise to vault down directly in front of the Carving. While falling from above he slapped a hand on the pictogram and felt a mana signature activate. Aaron had used and absorbed mana since he had come to the tower and so feeling something like that was child's play. The spell caught, its imprint set and Aaron only glimpsed at the back of his hand as a glowing white snake imprinted itself on his hand. Aaron landed in a crouch and was spotted immediately by a whole lot of people. But they were too stunned to react for a moment or two. Aaron vaulted back up the tree, running up the tree trunk, dodging and weaving while the group reacted with shouts of surprise and alarm and the first spells and arrows followed his retreat.

But as soon as Aaron had reached the tree top, he was basically safe. He moved around in the tree’s empty canopy and then launched himself towards the branch of a nearby tree. A thunderbolt flashed past him with a crack and the leaves he landed on exploded in a fireball, but then Aaron was already gone in the thick foliage and behind tree trunks.

Aaron had no doubt he could escape and was more than pleased with his heist. It had worked! There had been a distinct possibility that he would not be able to get the tattoo because he had not been part of the fight. He needed more information and so after he disappeared in the trees he circled back and silently crept closer, trying not to disturb the already very angry snakes that were left in the vicinity of the white tree. Down in the clearing the group had formed up again and there were curses and angry shouting that were honestly delightful to hear.

“Merlin warned us about exactly this scenario. Where the fuck are your [Rogue]s Kathrel?!”

“My [Rogue]s? They were busy saving your clumsy [Guardian]’s life because he can’t dodge the only ranged attack this boss has.”

“Don’t put this on him, this happens, we have protocol for that. Someone else goes and protects the Carving.”

“Calm down everyone, what is done is done. The cultivator is gone, but he can’t leave because he does not have the Scorpion tattoo, that is the most important thing. Lets report back and then they will send a group to camp the Scorpion until his Tattoo expires. 24 hours is not a long time. We did our job, even though we failed here.” The bearded mage calmed the other two group leaders down, much to Aaron’s disappointment. But he told him some important info, the Tattoo would last 24 hours. Which was longer than he had expected it would.

The whole group went up to the carving and got the snake tattoo and then they left through the jungle in a different direction. Aaron could easily spot where, because the jungle had been cut through and a path had been made probably on previous attempts to kill the boss. It seemed they had a fixed route to and from the bosses. He was not sure how he felt about that, but maybe he could find a way to take advantage of it. Aaron let the group go, there was not really anything he wanted from them anymore and it would have been hard to achieve anything. From what he could see they kept up a tight formation and were very alert and weary of anything moving around them.

Instead Aaron stayed in his perch up in the trees and observed the glowing pictogram and the carving. After around 10 minutes the pictogram flashed a few times and then the glow vanished and it grew dormant again. Curiously Aaron went down to inspect the Snake Carving and found it too was filling back up with white paint, just like the scorpion Carving.

“Respawn Timer.” he muttered to himself and wished he had a wristwatch or any kind of timepiece really, so he could accurately guess how long it would take for the boss to reappear. At least that was what he guessed happened.

If he wanted to get out of this situation, he needed to go after the Scorpion as soon as possible. Logically the Boss should not have respawned yet. If there was some sort of logic behind the length of the Tattoo and the Respawn timers then it was either, once every 24 hours or every 12 hours. At least that was his best guess. The Carving filled really slowly so he had trouble guessing which one of these options it could be. Not faster than that though.

Time was really difficult to tell time on the 2nd floor to begin with with the sun shining around the clock. The logical thing to do now was to head straight for the desert Monolith and the giant Scorpion Boss again and try to get the next kill before they came, or steal the tattoo from under their noses. Aaron did not use much Qi to traverse the jungle again, just running and jumping in the tree canopies was more than enough. He had absolute confidence in himself and even if he slipped or fell he could always activate wind steps and be totally fine. But he did not really need to most of the time. Being able to fearlessly jump across yawning gaps with absolute confidence felt great and it beat trying to run on the ground by at least ten times.

Aaron smiled to himself as he jumped across to another branch and then paused. Something was different, something had changed. He had missed something, his intuition told him and Aaron frowned, stopped and thought about what had changed. Then he realized it. The jungle sickness, the curse, it had vanished. He had no smarting stomach anymore, he did not need to cough and when he felt at his forehead it was sweaty yes, but it did not feel too hot. So no fever, no cough, no diarrhea. Why?

The answer was obvious and Aaron studied the tattoo and the spell impression on it. It did not feel like much, it did not really do any active magic, he would have felt that, it felt like it was just a marker. But maybe that was it. Maybe it marked him not to be targeted by the curse. Which was an elegant solution in his mind at least. There probably was a spell in the sun or something equally ridiculous and it would target every human unless they had a marker. But no matter how it worked in the end, fact was he was not sick anymore and that made the time he had very valuable until the tattoo would vanish and the sickness return. He could freely hunt, cultivate, do whatever he needed to do and not suffer through the horrific side effects of the floor’s curse.

Aaron hesitated. But in the end he kept going towards the desert. He needed to get off this floor and if the third floor was the way to do it, then that was just fine by him. After half an hour of crossing the jungle as the bird flies he reached the spot where the group had entered the jungle and jumped down towards the ground. The desert was empty and quiet and when Aaron stepped over the threshold he felt his thirst increase again immediately.

So immunity to the curses was only in their respective biomes. The difficulty would persist while trying to kill the bosses.

Aaron sped through the desert, conserving Qi, he would probably need it to escape and to get what he wanted. When he arrived at the monolithic rock and the arena within, nobody was waiting for him yet. Perfect.

He had to kill quite a few scorpions to get here but they had turned from threats to merely a nuisance even with his headache and burning thirst that plagued him. Hunger had joined it shortly after and Aaron reluctantly ate some of his dried rations. He could not really go hunting at the moment after all.

The inside of the monolith was just like he remembered it and when he walked over to the scorpion carving it was barely half full. So it was most likely 12 hours not 24. Otherwise it should not be that far along.

Aaron looked for any spot he could hide, but found nothing. The arena was bare, rock floor with a thin layer of red sand above it. Not enough to hide under the sand and the cave itself had even less places to hide than the arena. Eventually Aaron looked up at the caldera like opening in the center of the giant rock and decided to climb it. Activating Wind steps he leapt up and looked for any outcropping big enough to hide him in the uneven surface of the rock. It took him quite a few attempts, climbing was difficult even with Wind steps. The arena was too wide for Aaron to be able to jump from wall to wall and so he had to find spots where he could find a foothold for even just a moment to change directions and his momentum. But there were barely any and more than once he fell down towards the arena again. This was a problem because that meant this was not an escape route. Not if mages shot at him while he tried to make extremely precise jumps to reach the next foothold to jump higher.

Eventually he made it half way up and found a small ledge he could theoretically hide behind, but it was too narrow and he would be seen instantly if someone looked up. Further up the rock wall looked much smoother and Aaron could not find a single foothold. With a sigh Aaron floated back down and left the Arena. If he could not climb from the inside, then maybe from the outside would be easier.

It was in fact considerably easier. There were a lot of footholds outside and the angle was not vertical, but just really steep. Quicker than he had expected he found himself on the top of the monolith, looking around the desert stretching far beneath him. Like a crimson tapestry with messy folds.

There was nothing else to do now but wait.