Taking the time to sort one’s thoughts out and carefully and calmly try to draw the conclusions is, in fact, something that I always try to do. Though, admittedly, I am guilty of not being able to actually do that most of the time when it counts.

It’s not that I am easily irritable or unable to concentrate on things for too long – I am one of the calmest humans I have ever met and if I want to concentrate on something, I will do it with the intensity of a maniac, it’s just that the times that count, I believe, so far have been those that either directly threatened my continued survival, or the environment itself was not very conducive for long and drawn out meditations.

“What about the previous life you led then? Did your life also get threatened or did you live in a terrible place”, you’ll ask.

Well, no. It’s just there was not a single time that actually counted, considering where I am right now and the extent of how much those times are going to affect me now.

Well, anyways, this time, I believe counts very much, considering that acquisition of new knowledge about of magic, regardless of how big or small it is, is still incredibly precious to me as a collector (get it? My class being the “Arcane Collector” and me saying- nevermind, it was a lame joke), and that seeing all these undead has given me a great amount of knowledge.

Irrelevant knowledge I may not be able to apply, ever, due to inability to do so, but knowledge nevertheless.

...As you can probably guess by now, it has been a while since I set my foot into the dungeon for the second time. How much time has it been? Well, I stopped counting after the 68th undead I carefully and neatly turned into a puddle of biological waste in my attempts to understand what made them tick and how. Well, I have said that I can get my concentration to the maniacal intensity when I needed to and I tend to stick to my words.

I haven’t eaten in a while and I haven’t drunk any water either but I am feeling just right. Back on Earth or back when I first stepped into this dungeon even, I would’ve already died of thirst or malnutrition or plain exhaustion, but I guess that this will only get better as time goes by.

Back to the topic, I believe I have, for the time being have exhausted the value of these undead to me. For about a dozen undead, I haven’t been able to make a breakthrough in my understanding of their magic and I doubt that I will be able to learn more about them in the foreseeable future the way I am now.

But, it’s not all bad news – the hard work I put in wasn’t without harvest. I’ll start with the most eye-catching one:

Active Skills:

...

Living Dead (rare, lvl 1)

…

Yes, I got an active skill out of this endeavour. It was quite unexpected, considering that all the other active skills came to me with greater difficulty, but I am grateful regardless. And it is a lovely skill:

Active Skill: Living Dead(rare, lvl 1)

Description:

When active, allows the user to stop all bleeding and abnormal status effects, renders user completely immune to low-level poisons, toxins and low-level death-attribute spells, greatly improves physical stamina and resistance to physical damage as well as the user’s resistance to the side effects of physical damage.

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Warning: extensive use may lead to irreversible effects such as: permanent physical and spiritual damage, deterioration of physical health and psychological aversion to light- and life- attribute spells. During use, the user may experience violent fits of rage and short-term loss of memory.

Okay, may not seem the best from its description and its name doesn’t make it seem like a man’s best friend but it is a lovely skill, I swear!

Here’s Ralph’s testimony:

“When it comes to the permanent physical damage and the deterioration of the physical health parts – those are correct. If you use the skill for too long or too often you will suffer those side-effects. When it comes to the rest of the problems, your skills [Warped Mind] and [Mental Fortitude] will mostly take care of them, so use it all you want”

Ralph being so reassuring never makes me confident in whatever he reassures me in. He may always speak the truth, but he also likes to deceive me a lot, which is why whenever I ask him a question I ask the same way I’d imagine a lawyer would – by trying to eliminate as many potential sources of loopholes as possible from the answer.

But when it comes to skills, there are a lot of things that I am kept in the dark and Ralph isn’t. And those technical things can easily lend me in trouble if I take Ralph’s words for the absolute truth.

Still, this skill is too incredible to seal and I do intend to make use of it when the situation calls for an extra layer of caution. It is quite similar to the three skills I created when I studied a bit about the magical pathways and vortexes in the way that it does something with them and it leads to certain effects. As with the rest of the skills I have at my disposal, I am not aware of how exactly it works but I can make a few conjectures.

After all, the skill did appear when I tried to apply my newly learned knowledge to practice, the same way as it was with “Domain of Death” and “Domain of Life” - two other rare skills I have come in possession of recently.

Speaking of those skills, they are something I will have to touch upon when talking about the harvest I received during this time.

Firstly,

...

Domain of Death (rare+, lvl 2)

Domain of Life (rare+, lvl 2)

…

I have raised each of them by a whole level. It is related to some of the ways I tried to experiment which led me to some insight on the use of these two skills. Admittedly, I am not really a fan of levelling them as I don’t feel in control when using them. They feel like spells, they execute like spells and I can probably study them the same way I would a spell (which I have been putting in the effort to do to little reward), but I still understand very little of them. Even those insights were very ethereal and ephemeral – and they gave me the benefits anyways. These skills are making me insecure (like most things in life, come to think of it, but more).

Secondly,

I have created two spells that utilized the skills. One of them uses Domain of Death to give debuffs to the undead, the other, Domain of Life, just deals damage in a short burst of power. Both are very mana-expensive, even for me, so I double I will be using them all that much, but I will use them on the Boss of the first floor and its underlings, just to be more clear of their effects.

The undead make for a terrible control group when it comes to testing new spells as it turned out, or rather, the undead of the first floor, as they are practically uniform in their internal design.

But the biggest discoveries are those that will only show their worth in the long term – the countless ways of utilization of mana, primarily of the death attributes and all the new patterns I had never seen before.

For now, I doubt I will be able to make sense of how to utilize them, as they seem very limited in their use, but I have no doubt that once I familiarize myself with them, it will take my spell-casting and understanding of spell-design and application of mana and general understanding of this Universe’s magic to a whole new level.

Is this what it feels like to be giddy with excitement? I kind of want to finish the boss and then bail out just to make use of the things I learned here, though I won’t be doing it, otherwise, I am afraid I may spend too much time on this floor.

I have learned that one should try not to dwindle too long on a single topic for too long, as it will lead to negative side-effects in the future.