Now that I have finished working on my bed, I can start working on other short-period objectives of mine.

One of them is to further my progress in the dungeon. Last time I barely managed to beat the second floor, somehow making it out alive and on the verge of starving to death. This time, things will be different.

Why? - some may ask. The answer is quite simple, to be honest. This dungeon was made with intent. Intent of a higher form of existence, sure, but it still means that the dungeon was created with a purpose and a design in mind.

The dungeon is made with the goal of being beaten eventually. Not only that, the dungeon is among the easy ones, so it’s not meant to be beaten with too much sacrifice.

The reason that I struggled with it is because I am trying to conquer it solo, surely not something that is meant to happen at my level of power.

With that in mind, I doubt that the difference between the first and the second floors will be too great. It’s going to be pretty big, certainly, but the way I am, I can definitely beat the first floor in no time, meaning that the second floor is not going to be insurmountable, or live-threatening, which is good enough for me.

I have grown a lot from the last time I visited the dungeon. I have acquired a class, got a lot powerful skills and raised my proficiency with the magic I already had on hand, while making new spells.

Which is why I decided to storm into the dungeon without further ado.

…

I arrived at the well – the entrance of the dungeon. This time I didn’t bring any food with me as I can now go for quite a relatively long time without sustenance. I didn’t hesitate for too long before making my way down…

As I began my descend, I used Mana Insight to observe the place. While Ralph restricted my access to the skill, it wasn’t as if I didn’t have any access at all. I could still see a lot of things.

The dungeon was the same as last time: it was enchanted with a strange influence so strange and awesome that I couldn’t find any words in my limited vocabulary to describe it. The dungeon seemed like a different world altogether from the outside, maybe it was.

This time I couldn’t, to my deepest regret, observe the strangeness of the place due to my lack of clout over my own skill. I knew I wouldn’t be getting anything out of observing the place, but just watching something so interesting had worth in and of itself.

I made my way through the tunnels.

The undead were here again. I first came across a single specimen. This time I didn’t destroy it immediately, I wanted to observe it carefully once again.

Undead were beings brought into the world by magic, so, as an aspiring mage, it would be too big of a waste not to study it more thoughtfully and carefully than before, especially considering that in order to advance my levels I needed to learn, or rather ‘collect’, new magics.

I used a simple earth-attribute spell to nail it to the ground and took my time giving it a thorough examination.

Were I to keep Earth’s sensibilities-

“I doubt you had any sensibilities to keep in the first place”

Were I to keep Earth’s sensibilities, I wouldn’t bear to look at something as disgusting, but disgusting things are disgusting anyway, so allow me to not describe its appearance to you while I am looking at what is making it tick.

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…

It took me about two hours to finish the examination of the undead.

By the time I was finished, its bits and pieces were neatly and carefully splattered all over the passage I caught it in. I have found out quite a few things about how it works, not that I would be able to make something like this in the near future.

While I will examine more of them in order to get a more comprehensive view on them, I think I have a few small ideas on how they work.

Last time I came, I also examined them, but now my ability to use magic is much greater than before, so I was able to uncover more things.

While I didn’t have any precise equipment on me, so can’t be too sure, I believe that the undead doesn’t rely on its physical organs to sense it surroundings and that it receives information by a kind of embedded magical system inside it.

What it does is simple: inside the undead’s head (somewhat close to its brain and in-between its eyes) there’s a small piece of tissue that is highly sensitive to the changes of death and earth attribute mana that comes into contact with it.

When a small amount of mana impacts it, it filters out the death and earth attribute mana out of it and sends collects though it inside.

What exactly happens is a bit beyond me. Firstly, because even if it does use the tissue to observe its surroundings, it probably does it on a scale too small for me to observe with my eyes. At least for now, I have not idea how to observe mana on a smaller scale as you can’t exactly use a microscope for it, but maybe I will find some kind of direction by studying these monsters.

Second reason why I can’t understand what happens is because I can’t understand exactly how the tissue is formed from a magical perspective.

Let me explain: when I create a spell, I don’t exactly imagine what I want to do and it just happens like in the novels back on Earth, nor do I blindly combine mana until something happens.

I observe the real-world phenomena and by studying them, I create the spells.

That was the way I created most of my elemental spells – by observing the elements.

I make fire by looking at different kinds of real fire and copying it with slight (often involuntary) modifications.

I make stone by looking at different kinds of soil and copying that structure.

Same goes for water and even wind. I can’t just create anything without any material without any points of reference… yet.

The more difficult spells – things like making fog that kills undead, or foul-smelling liquid that burns when it comes into contact with the air, or explosions that causes tissue necrosis are all things that I used more simple spells as foundations of their material forms. The material structure of liquid, gas or fire is not something I can describe by using Euclidean Geometry and it is tightly connected to the physical properties of the end results.

This is why I can’t create something that would not dissipate after a certain time – I don’t understand the finer details of the structures of things. This problem is something I constantly try to tackle by repeatedly casting spells and observing objects, but it’s a slow grind.

The more complex the structure, the harder it is to understand and copy. I doubt I will be able to conjure up biological tissue in the near future.

Now, let’s get back to the sensory tissue of the undead. It is somewhat similar to human tissues and the tissues of the rest of its body, but it’s very much different in many places. And those differences are nothing that I had ever seen.

It’s such a bizarre structure that I can’t even begin making heads or tails from it yet.

I guess now it should be apparent why I can’t understand what is going on with it.

Let’s go back to the rest of the undead. The other interesting thing I found about it is its brain.

It seems to be powered by magic, which comes as a smaller surprise to than the fact that it actually works in the first place.

The death mana is constantly moving around this rotting piece of flesh and, while I have no idea on what it does exactly, the activity there is at least three times as big than in any other part of its body. By sending fine currents into it, I managed to cause it to spasm and screech and by interfering with parts of the flow outside of the brain towards it and vice versa, I managed to paralize some parts of its body, so I guess it is used the same way as a human brain is to an extent, not that I possess vast amounts of knowledge in human biology.

In the first place, my major mostly dealt with mathematics and computer science, so I will need to study biology later.

I also reviewed its muscles and some other organs that showed signs of activity, but it wasn’t anything that I didn’t see the previous time.

The undead didn’t have any vortexes and its pathways (apart from some clearly added post morterm with magic) were, while not as bad as the wolves, still not at all developed as mine, though whether it has to do with its identity as an undead or its previous identity is still not clear to me.

After having cleaned my body off of the filth, I proceeded to deeper explore the floor.