Maria and her friends had been exploring the Underworld and were making a map of the region past the 10 kilometer mark that Maria hadn't explored yet. Their expedition proved to be extremely fruitful as they found a lot of untapped underground resources during their exploration like fungi, moss, and various kinds of unknown underworld flora that were usable for potion and remedy concoction as well as normal consumption after the NPCs with the necessary identification skills inspected them.
Lizzy thought that it would be cool if Heltania Undercity had its own unique underworld cuisine and Maria thought the same. Once they got back, she was going to order her city's culinary experts to experiment and create those dishes and have her farmers cultivate the underworld flora that they brought back.
Their group explored the region only up until they were 20 kilometers away from the city and decided to go no further until the expedition party finished building an outpost here and other than the various underworld flora that they found, Maria and her expedition group also discovered a few ore veins after clearing out some of the monster nests that they stumbled upon by chance.
The underground monsters ate minerals and ores, so it wasn’t surprising that they housed themselves and built their nests near their food source. With this in mind, Maria decided to exterminate all of the monster nests within the 20-kilometer area of her Undercity so that she could dispatch her dwarves to start mining the ore veins found there.
It would be a pretty large undertaking because most of the nests near the Undercity were pretty big. The ones that Maria and her friends cleared were nests that were on the smaller side, so only a few of them were built around an ore vein while the medium-sized ones all had ore veins at their center. They noticed that the size of the nest also depended on the size of the ore vein it was built around, so they were right to believe that the larger nests would be built around an extremely large ore vein.
Of course, other than Maria's greed for the resources, she honestly couldn't just leave the large nests alone because they were an immediate threat to her city, but she couldn't touch them just yet because she didn’t have the necessary firepower and manpower to defeat all of the monsters in those large nests without suffering too many casualties.
Even if Maria summoned her Shadow Puppet Army to aid the expedition party, her summons could at best be used as shields and cannon fodder because in front of the Underworld’s monsters, the Shadow Puppet Army was extremely out-leveled and they wouldn't be able to bridge the disparity between their stats even with the [Tenebrious Embrace] blessing. The Shadow Puppets were practically unkillable thanks to Maria's large pool of Divine Energy keeping them alive, but without the necessary damage, their side would be overwhelmed once Maria depleted all of her Divine Energy.
The best they could tackle at their current level with the help of the Shadow Puppet Army were the small and medium-sized monster nests, which were easy in comparison to the large monster nests, but even then, Maria, her friends, and the warriors from the expedition party still struggled to destroy even one of those monster nests, and this was after her friends had acquired the [Tenebrious Embrace] blessing.
They spent a few days clearing those nests, but didn't forget about the expedition's original purpose. Eventually, the 20-kilometer region around Heltania City had been thoroughly explored by the group and on the map that Amanda was holding, there were various marks on it that showed all the points of interests that they had discovered. There were some blanks spaces on the map, but these spaces were the large monster nests that they had avoided.
Maria counted that there were 6 of them and counted help but smile because this meant that there were 6 origins of wealth around her territory just waiting for her to take. The expedition was finally over and the expedition party also managed to build an outpost in one of the medium-sized monster nests that they cleared which was easy to protect.
Lizzy thought that their adventure was a little too short despite it lasting for a few days, so she goaded Maria into agreeing with her plan to scout the area past the 20-kilometer mark and this was when the interesting bit of their expedition started. They were going to completely uncharted areas and the first thing they encountered was an underground humanoid race’s settlement and, to their surprise, the inhabitants of said settlement weren’t aggressive like the ones Maria previously encountered which was really surprising..
When Maria first stumbled upon it, the settlement’s people were apprehensive of her and her party, but they didn’t immediately attack them like all the other humanoid ‘monsters’ she had encountered before. Instead, they tried to communicate with her and her friends which halted Maria in her tracks when she tried to attack them. Thanks to her previous title, [The Knowledgeable One], which had long since evolved into [The Sinful One], she was able to understand bits and pieces of what they were saying.
Her evolved title retained the effects of its previous forms, so [The Knowledgeable One] and [The Unlucky One]’s effects were still there, so the former's effects of granting a basic understanding of all languages allowed for communication to happen with the Underworld’s indigenous people. She didn't understand why it didn't work on the previous humanoids she encountered, but after taking a closer look at the Underworld people she encountered this time, they were quite different from the ones she previously had conflicts with.
These people were much smaller and looked more like gray-skinned humans unlike the humanoid 'monsters' she fought who were like gray-skinned giants. However, when she inspected the rest of the indigenous people's camp, she did see those gray-skinned giants, but unlike the giants she fought before, these giants seemed more gentle and were capable of communication.
Since they were able to talk with these people, Maria put away her weapon and began trying to talk with them to the astonishment of Lizzy and her other friends. Once communication was established and Maria conveyed that they didn’t mean any harm, the indigenous people, whom she now referred to as the Underworlders as they called themselves that, allowed Maria and her friends to enter their settlement.
"Hey, Mary, how come you know their language?" Lizzy walked over to her and asked with Amanda and Emily following right behind her.
"It's because of my titles. One of them gave me a basic understanding of all languages in the game," Maria replied as she showed them the title's description.
"The Sinful One? How come it has so many effects?! Some of them are even bad!"
"You're less likely to find unique grade items and above from monster drops or chests and you'll attract the attention of monsters more often while on the field and inside a dungeon..."
"Yikes..."
"Ah, that's the title's evolution. It was previously The Unlucky One and before that it was The Knowledgeable One. The latter is what granted me the language skill."
"Oh, so that's how it is...how'd you get it?"
"Remember way back when I was locked in Enoch City's Library for a while?"
"Yeah?"
"After reading all of the books in there, I finally got the title."
"...never mind. I don't think I can sit through even 2 books before passing out. There's no hope for me getting that title."
Lizzy immediately gave up when she heard how her friend obtained the title while Emily also gave up. Only Amanda seemed interested and asked her about the details before deciding that she would head back to Eur for a while to get the title.
While the girls were chatting at the entrance of the Underworlders' settlement, the Underworlders waited for them and after realizing that they were being waited upon, the girls quickly rushed into the settlement and followed the people that Maria previously communicated with.
Walking through the settlement, the girls noticed that the indigenous underground people didn’t have any advanced technologies and they were practically still living in the iron age at best. They lived in tepees and were wearing armor made of the ores and minerals that could be found in the Underworld, so at the very least, they weren’t in the stone age.
The Underworlders looked extremely similar to a regular human being, except that they had rough gray skin, yellow eyes with slitted pupils, and were completely without hair. Also, while some had similar builds to a normal human being, there were a few that seemed more like giants than humans. They were extremely tall, towering at 3 to 4 meters in height, and had very bulky, muscular bodies. There were even some of these giants that had an extra pair of arms located just underneath their 'normal' pair.
They were pretty intimidating and the Underworlders that Maria previously encountered were like the big ones with multiple arms, but unlike the 'humanoid monsters' that she encountered before, these large Underworlders had intelligence radiating from their eyes instead of just blind madness and hostility.
Maria and her friends were brought to the settlement’s chieftain who a human-sized Underworlder and they were now sitting together in a tepee trading questions and answers with each other. The Underworlder chieftain appeared to be very young, which was the complete opposite of what Maria and her friends had expected. When the people that brought them here said they would take them to their chieftain, the girls expected to meet with a very old man.
When the chieftain asked about their origins, Maria answered as best she could using the Underworld's language. Thanks to her title, she was able to convey her meaning quite easily and their exchange went along smoothly. After the information exchange, Maria and her friends were allowed access into the Underworlders’ settlement and were given permission to use their shops and smithy.
They were even allocated a single tepee that they could use to rest in which was pretty fortunate since they just so happen to need a base to move to and from in this uncharted zone of the underworld. Unfortunately, it couldn’t be a permanent base because the Underworlders were nomads and they didn't stay in one place forever.
Inside the tepee that was allocated to them, Maria was giving her friends a briefing on the information she had obtained earlier in the exchange with the Underworlders’ chieftain.
“In exchange for the information of who we are, where we’re from, and what our purpose is, the chieftain, whose name is Rak’khar, gave us a lot of info about the Underworld.”
“We need you to explain this to us, Mary. We, unfortunately, don’t have [The Knowledgeable One] title or any of the evolutions of that title, so we couldn’t understand anything you and the chieftain talked about,” Amanda said.
“She was curious about who we were, but the answers she gave after I asked my questions were really important. First of all, the Underworld has a few layers to it. Right now, we’re only on the first layer and this layer is extremely large.”
“So we’ve got a lot of areas to explore and even more layers after that, huh? This is great!” Lizzy said with a grin.
Maria nodded and said, “Yeah, and apparently, Rak’khar and her people came from the second layer of the Underworld. There’s actually an entrance that leads to the second layer if we go deeper past the settlement.”
“We definitely have to check it out then.”
“Rak’khar doesn’t know the exact location, but she says it’s a long way from here. She also warned that it’s best not to go there for now because it’s apparently the period when the monsters are extremely active.”
“An increase in monster activity…I guess they came to the first layer to avoid being attacked by the monsters,” Amanda said after thinking for a brief moment.
“That’s what Rak’khar said when I asked her. She gave us a place to stay, but unfortunately, it’s only for 3 days.”
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“...Why just 3 days?”
“It’s because Rak’khar and her people are nomads. They’re only staying here for a few more days before relocating to a new place. They plan on venturing further away from the second layer’s entrance because there’s a possibility that the monsters from the second layer will overflow into the first layer.”
“That could be bad for us…The second layer monsters are bound to be stronger than the first layer ones,” Emily said. “We’re struggling to fight the first layer monsters, so meeting a second layer monster or hordes of them could spell our doom.”
Amanda nodded at Emily’s words before saying, “For now, I think it’s best we stay away from the second layer entrance.”
“I also agree with Amanda. There’s no need for us to go looking for death. We already have a lot to do on the first layer,” Lizzy said in agreement.
Maria was also of a similar mind, but she gave them a valid reason to head towards the second layer’s entrance. “We should still head towards the entrance though. We need to confirm where exactly it’s located and pin it on the map so that we know which direction we should avoid moving in.”
“Yeah, that’s actually pretty smart. Let’s do that first then. If we start moving again and don’t know where the entrance is, we might accidentally stumble on it and get ambushed by the second layer monsters.”
“We'll head out tomorrow.”
"Alright."
Even though they wanted to leave immediately, they couldn't because the day was ending in real life. It was time to log off and sleep, so they could only continue their adventure tomorrow. Luckily, they were in a safe zone so they could rest and log out of the game.
Before logging out, Maria went to talk to the Underworlder's chieftain again and suggested for her tribe to move to her Undercity or somewhere close to it at least. Even though these people still had an underdeveloped society, Maria could see that they were knowledgeable about many things in the Underworld. This made them extremely precious to her, so she tried to convince the chieftain, but to her surprise, the chieftain readily agreed.
Apparently, the Underworlders weren't nomads by choice. They were forced to move around for their own safety. Even though they had the protection and grace of the Underworld God, Neyrubi, the monsters of the underworld were just too powerful as they were descendants of a being that they called, the evil god. The evil god didn't have a name, so the Underworlders began calling it the Nameless God.
This god, or whatever, was already dead, killed by the Underworld God a long time ago, but its flesh spawned the underworld monsters and since they were birthed from the flesh of a divine being, they were extremely powerful.
The chieftain naturally explained that this was only a legend of the origins of their species along with the Underworld monsters, so she told Maria to just take it with a grain of salt, but she personally believed in it. Otherwise, she didn't know how to explain the reason why some of her race's people would suddenly go mad when they were mentally and physically healthy, as if some supernatural spirit had descended on them and caused them to lose their sanity instantly.
When Maria heard this, she frowned because what happened to them sounded extremely similar to what happened to her and her friends before.
'It's the status effects that appeared before obtaining the [Tenebrious Embrace] blessing...how's this possible? Shouldn't all Underworlders by default have this blessing?' Maria thought before her face darkened because she realized that the people she killed before were all Underworlders that were just suffering from the Underworld's bad effects.
There were a few other Underworlders in the tepee and when she looked at their status screens with [Inspect], she finally noticed that not everyone had the [Tenebrious Embrace] blessing. Only a very select few had them and the adverse status effects of the Underworld were affecting these people, but it was working very slowly on them unlike with her and her friends.
'Damn...even if they were crazy, I still killed those people...this just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.'
Maria grimaced at the thought. The chieftain saw the look on her face and guessed what happened so she asked her about it and even consoled her afterwards. She told her that the Underworlders who go mad are beyond redemption and the only peace one could grant them was the peace of death. This cheered up Maria a little because her massacre of those mad Underworlders was actually a good thing since she was able to put them to rest. At least it was better for them to die in her hands rather than in the jaws of the underworld monsters.
The chieftain continued to explain that if they were left to roam around in their madness, other Underworlders might fall victim to their vicious attacks. Maria asked why they didn't personally put the mad ones to 'rest' themselves and the chieftain simply said that it was because their god prohibited them from killing their own kind even if they had gone mad. The only thing they could do was banish the mad ones or the ones that were showing symptoms of going mad.
It was a really tragic reality. These people could suddenly go mad at any time and if they did, they'd be abandoned. It wasn't just the abandoned ones that had a hard time. Those who abandoned them had it hard as well. They'd have to leave behind a father, mother, husband, wife, brother, sister, son, daughter, or friend behind without being able to do anything at all for them.
Hearing their situation, Maria was rather saddened, she asked if the underworld tree that burns blue helped them, but the chieftain said that it was because of those trees that they were living like nomads. Those trees grew really fast, but they only grew in certain places, so once one area's trees have been used up, the Underworlders would have to leave that area and go to the next one. Maria understood now why the chieftain readily agreed to move into her city without much debate after hearing that she was growing those trees in her city.
Growing the underworld tree Edlvungr outside of the designated areas that they dubbed as sacred places was something the Underworlders couldn't imagine. Probably because of their underdeveloped society, they haven't realize that the soil was the main factor that allowed the trees to grow and not just the place they were growing. Maria didn't know this yet, but once the Underworlders started living in her city, they'd start worshipping her as Neyrubi's physical incarnation that descended to the normal plane to help them out of their plight.
They'd worship her not because of the incredible underground city she built, but because she planted a vast forest of Edlvungr trees inside and around of her city. Only the Underworld God could create or grow those trees, so once they see that Maria could do the same...well, it wasn't hard to predict what would happen next.
When she first discovered those trees, Maria had already made plans to make a forest of it around her city because she realized that the trees were probably going to be an important resource in the future once the players eventually arrived in the Underworld. Best to stock up on them in vast quantities and then turn in a profit once the players arrived.
However, other than an important resource, a forest created by these trees could be used as a buffer zone for when the monsters attacked her city. Those trees were extremely sturdy and couldn't be uprooted using normal means and not even the underworld monsters could destroy them unless they struck a certain part of the tree.
Striking the tree's base was the only way to cut them down and doing anything else was useless. You couldn't even burn the trees as long as they were still connected with their roots. As a defensive structure against the underworld's mindless monsters, Maria thought that it was pretty perfect. She also wanted to have a steady source of those trees so that she could use them more often and find out if they could be used for anything else.
Maria had a lot of people working on growing the forest right now, so once the Underworlders arrive at her city and see it, they'd immediately mark it as a safe and holy place for their race. Having a safe place to stay was what these people needed because the Underworld was an extremely dangerous place even for them, the very people who were born and raised here.
She quickly gave the Chieftain the coordinates to her city and asked them to move there as soon as possible with their safety in mind. At least in her city, the adverse effects of the Underworld were completely nullified thanks to the forest of Edlvungr trees that was nearby and the few that were planted inside of her city.
After exchanging a few more words with the chieftain, Maria left the tepee and logged out. When the next day arrived, she, Amanda, Emily, and Lizzy quickly left the settlement and began heading towards the direction where Rak’khar said the Underworld’s second layer entrance was located. They were warned not to go, but their group was already adamant about going since they needed to find it and mark it on their map.
Rak'khar could only let them go after seeing that she couldn't stop them from going. She tried giving them accurate coordinates, but without an actual map, Maria and the rest would have to rely on the chieftain's descriptions to find the place. Despite the chieftain's help, the girls spent an entire in-game week to find the underworld second layer entrance.
The Underworld had many branching paths that made its structure almost maze-like, so they got lost a few times because they were only relying on Rak'khar's descriptions which Maria honestly couldn't translate really well since she only had a basic understanding of their language. It was quite unfortunate that despite being a nomad race, Rak'khar's people still haven't developed cartography yet.
If they had, it would've made things so much easier for Maria and her friends. However, eventually, they found the second layer’s entrance. They didn’t find the exact location of the entrance, but just the general location because the area around the second layer's entrance was teeming with extremely powerful Underworld monsters.
“The second layer monsters have already overflowed into the First Layer. I think we should head back now. At least we know the general location of the entrance,” Emily said as she suggested that they turn back.
Everyone nodded in agreement, but unfortunately for them, it wasn’t going to be easy. Unbeknownst to the girls, a small contingent of monsters that were moving separately from the large group they saw, had somehow sneaked behind them. The monsters quickly revealed the party's location and began kicking up a racket which attracted all of the monsters in the vicinity.
“Oh, crap!”
“Dammit, we couldn’t kill them in time!”
“Let alone kill, we weren’t even able to bring its HP below half!”
“Stop talking and just start running! Unless, of course, you guys want to become monster food!”
The second layer monsters were truly too powerful for them at their current stage. Since they couldn’t defeat them, the only way out was to run, but things took a rather unfortunate twist for Maria and the girls. It was like the monsters were extremely intelligent or something, but they herded the girls in the direction of the second layer’s entrance and when they realized this, it was far too late.
“Damn, what the heck? Isn’t this the second layer’s entrance? How’d we get here?!”
“They herded us here…”
“We have to go. If we just stay here, we’ll definitely die!”
“Screw it, let’s just go to the second layer! If we’re gonna die, then shouldn’t we just die on the second floor and see what it’s like? It’s much better than meaninglessly dying here!” Lizzy yelled.
“You first then!”
Staying meant dying and going down to the second layer also meant dying. Being able to see what the second layer was like before dying was much better than staying on the first layer and dying for nothing. This was smart and all, but unfortunately, they forgot about something extremely, extremely important.