'That was one hell of a run!'

Theo didn't rush back into the underground the moment he managed to get most of the wood out of the trees the boss felled. As it turned out, when he removed those logs, the area around his hole turned out to be quite rich in bushes—as one could expect from the deeper part of the forest.

'Seventeen berries, twenty-eight sticks, and half of a stack of foliage,' Theo thought as he took a quick look at his inventory. 'Adding seventy-seven blocks of wood to that…'

Theo shook his head before breathing out a satisfied sigh.

"It really feels good!"

The young man exclaimed while making sure not to make his voice too loud.

Out at the edge of the forest, he could never know when danger was lurking around… Or rather, whether or not nearby monsters had their hearing range greater than Theo's threat detection subroutine.

'That was a job well done for sure,' Theo thought, taking one more breath of rest before standing up and moving back right the way he came.

First, he crossed over the small, shallow tunnel to the spot he picked for his future trap. Yet, rather than lingering there, he opted to go down his secondary stairway, reached the primary one, and then… started to dig in the opposite direction of the forest.

'No matter what, this solution is too obvious not to try it out!'

With the bare minimum of food now secured, Theo could get a little bit more liberal with his time.

And so, just like he did for what felt like hours by now, he went back to digging, patiently swinging his shovel and then his pickaxe.

'That makes a third… no, fourth staircase,' Theo thought, doing his best to keep himself from getting into the zone. It was a great mindset to be in when he had to do some mindless digging… But not knowing what to expect from his current goal, Theo dared not to just… turn his mind off.

'I guess I should start naming them to at least know myself what the heck am I talking about…?'

Increasingly bored, Theo used his creativity to find seemingly random topics to just think about.

'The first staircase I made, the one leading further down from my base, shall become the mining steps. The staircase leading up to the surface will be the main one. Then, that trap access… Trap steps?'

Theo smirked, still fresh enough to notice his lackluster naming sense.

'Then, since I went for practicality with the first three, how about I make a better name for the stairs I'm digging right now?'

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Theo's current tunnel couldn't be more cramped, leaving only just enough room for him to carefully descend, practically squeezing through the excavated blocks.

And yet, with the ultimate goal of those steps in mind…

'Freedom stairs doesn't seem all that bad,' Theo thought as he allowed himself to entertain the idea that he could just ignore the massive gate above and dig his way out of his exile by going underground.

A hope that continued to reinforce itself the longer Theo dug… only to come to a crushing end when his pick struck the stone, only for a notification window to appear instead of the progress bar Theo had long since grown used to.

[Magistone - You need a magi-grade tool to break it!]

For a moment, Theo just stared at the notification, only to then turn his eyes over to the magistone itself.

There was absolutely no difference between the stones all around him and the stone ahead, a fact he confirmed after excavating around the place and then whipping out a torch from his inventory to inspect it closer.

The only way for Theo to differentiate between normal stone and magistone… was to strike it down with his pick. That is until he took the time to excavate around the area a bit more, only to soon realize that this wasn't just a chunk or a gathering of some special ore but quite literally a wall of an element he couldn't overcome. A wall stretching as far up, down, and to the sides as Theo bothered to venture.

"I guess that's the cue for me to give up, isn't it?" the young man muttered to himself as he sat down on the nearby stone step and heaved a long sigh of resignation.

Resignation that wasn't matched by the growing fire of determination in his eyes.

"As fucking if!"

Using the momentum of his rage against his circumstances, Theo stood up… and started to dig sideways. What's more, no longer willing to hold anything back, he took a moment to turn his memories of the surface into a geoschematic in his mind… before turning his zone ability on.

...

...

...

"Woah!"

Theo let out a small cry as yet another notification appeared before his eyes, slightly different from what he saw just before.

[Hardstone - You need advanced-grade tool to break it!]

Without a word, Theo turned around and even summoned his torch again only to wave it in the narrow tunnel—only to fail to see the end of it.

'Judging by the amount of stone in my inventory, I didn't really dig all that far, but…'

Still, it was a bummer.

But even now, Theo had yet to exhaust all of his options!

'Surface it is, then.'

Knowing better than to waste his time lingering on what didn't go according to his desires, Theo hurried back across the tunnel he just finished up, taking roughly a minute to return to where he entered the zone and started to dig with the wall of magistone directly to his left.

This time, however, Theo decided to dig up, creating a second leg of his freedom steps, leading all the way up to the dark-covered surface. Yet, pretty much as soon as Theo's shovel broke the very top layer of the dirt leading him up to the ground, his head suddenly spun around, his vision blurred, and his entire sense of self crashed out like a computer about to flash its owner with the blue screen of death.

This attack, bug, or whatever else it was struck Theo so heavily, he ended up falling right back down several steps of his staircase… Only for whatever it was attacking him to cease its offensive as soon as he involuntarily retreated two or three meters underground.

And so, lying there, struggling to process what had just happened, Theo could only come to one singular conclusion.

'Surface is a bust.'

He thought, feeling the heartache of yet another avenue of escape from this hellish place closing down right before his eyes.

But again, rather than making him give up, this setback only reinforced Theo's determination.

'That leaves me with no other choice but to try to dig deep enough to reach the damned bedrock!'