After I arrived at the entrance, as expected, it was blocked.

The ladder I used to climb down was still there but as I tried to climb up, it seemed to turn indefinitely long: no matter how much I climbed, it was useless.

I threw a fireball from the bottom upwards and it wasn’t able to fly up at all. It just froze somewhere in the middle and went out…

I used the last of whatever mana I had and barricaded the way to the entrance with a thick stone wall. Whatever matter I created with magic would fade out of existence with time, but the amount I used would get me a good nap’s time.

As for what happened after, I don’t quite remember: I guess I fainted out of exhaustion on the spot.

HP: 7/11

MP: 102/251

…

…

…

HP: 9/11

MP: 162/251

It was a lovely morning… not. First, it probably wasn’t a morning, in the dungeon I couldn’t tell, and I was also sore, hurt all over, tired and hunted by countless undead.

My mana and health regenerated to some extent, I have tried to calculate how fast it regenerates usually and figured it was a pointless affair that probably depended on many things. But 162 MP would be enough for me to live for a few days without food and water while sustaining a state where I could fight against the walking de- I’ll call them the living dead people, to avoid copyright problems.

The wall still held strong, it was reassuring. I made a door-sized hole in it and then strengthened the rest with a moderate amount of effort.

Walking down the dusty corridors took much more effort than before but it was still bearable. I was lucky this time, there was a small group of undead ahead of me. I attracted their attention by throwing a stone at one of them and then led them towards my home base.

The undead weren’t very fast and in small groups it was no problem to deal, restrain, dance around them or do pretty much whatever. It was a good thing I guess.

As I was at the edge of the first floor of the dungeon, there were few of them and it was relatively safe. Here I basically had no fear. For how long it would last I didn’t know and cared not to find out.

The reason I lured those undead was to conduct a more thorough investigation of their weaknesses. Fire worked wonders but I wanted something more powerful against them. Well, not wanted, needed. Anyway, you get the idea.

I lured them over, there were six of undead overall, used stone pikes to nail them in place and looked at them with my most powerful skill, Mana Insight. This time I activated it enough to be able to hold on for three minutes.

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The undead were strange in their composition. I was a newbie at this whole magic thing, so I skimmed over the things I had yet any hopes of understanding and just looked at the general picture.

The most prevalent magical matter-like thing there was something I was quite familiar with, the thing I called death mana.

This was enough for now, so I turned Mana Insight off.

When creating spells, I messed around with my attributes and have created fire, water, earth, wind, life, light and dark attributed spells. I have tried using the death attribute but found no application to it at all. Same went for the space, time and other attributes I left out.

I also tried to see how they interacted with each other and it was honestly strange.

When taking small amounts of fire-attributed mana and large amounts of water attributed mana, I ended up with a greenish liquid that was uneven in its consistency.

When Taking some death-attributed mana and some water-attributed mana, I got some kind of dust and gas that smelled very foul.

It was quite bizarre. The conclusion I came to was that the physical matter in this world, maybe, or rather probably, in this universe consisted, if broke down to more or less primitive units, consisted of things amongst which it was possible to find mana of various attributes.

Basically, when my previous universe’s matter consisted of various chemical elements, this universe’s chemical elements were different kinds of mana. Blindly combining elements together caused random “chemical reactions”, so the results were unpredictable.

My Mana Insight was low in level, so it was hard to see how various attributes changed and interacted, but it could show me some things.

So, I turned the skill on again, chopped the first undead’s arm off and burned it.

What I saw was a violent interaction between the attributes. The complex structure of the death mana was torn apart, releasing mana of other attributes woven into the whole thing and further aggravating the situation.

If I ranked the attributes by the amount inside of an undead, it would be like this:

1: Death (probably 60%)

2: Fire (Probably 30%)

3: Earth (Looked like a lot, but much less than fire)

Others were there in very small amounts, so it would be pointless so try and count.

Since I had no idea what to do, I began to cut the first undead piece by piece, occasionally strengthening the “shackles” on the others, and burning those pieces while looking at it with the skill.

It took me another hour, a short nap, and two hours to more or less get a vague idea of what was going on.

By adding large amounts of the fire element, the structure’s balance became ruined and began falling apart because of it.

This caused me to notice that different groups of mana of similar attributes attract each other when in proximity. I kind of knew it already but never paid it any attention before.

The idea was quickly verified through a few quick spells fired together and I also found out that the strength of attraction was inversely proportional to the stability of the two spells’ structures.

So, my new idea was to create a spell that had low stability and had enough earth and fire attribute mana to quickly kill the undead.

It wasn’t a hard task. In the end, I ended up with a kind of “fire and sand mist”, I guess. It spread well, died out quickly and was super deadly to the undead. And it was easy and cheap to cast too! Though it wasn’t hot at all, its color was deep green and it stank like old shoes.

This is what we call human ingenuity! I now wonder what kind of spells mages of this world do... I imagined it would be something more like a game character's skills, with dragons made out of ice, thunder from the skies and cool-looking CG’s… It might be something like people throwing weird stinky sludge at each other now though… For some reason, I feel disappointed. Sigh.

The rest was simple. I went straight for the center of the labyrinth, spreading the mist, death and skink wherever I stepped, leaving a trail of melting corpses in my wake.

And in the end, I reached the center of the labyrinth a white tiger that was the size of a cow with six green-scaled tails and hooves that were the size of a baby’s head awaited, with roughly sixty three-meter undead monsters.

It stood in the middle of a spacious arena that vaguely resembled an amphitheatre from Ancient Rome and growled at me the moment I stepped inside.

This time, my opponents seemed much stronger than the small fry from before.