Rui and Kane quickly bounced back from the incident on the fourteenth floor as they set out in search of new floors once more. Rui did not intend to sit around doing anything, and the second they returned from their fake public trip, the two of them set out in search of a new dungeon floor to explore and raid.
At this point, about a little over thirty percent of the Shionel Dungeon had been fully explored despite nearly a year and a half passing by since the opening of the dungeon. Yet the pace of clearance of the dungeon was increasing significantly.
Part of the reason was the impact that Rui had had. The twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth floors got cleared at an extreme pace now thanks to him harvesting most, or even all of it extremely quickly.
And the two of them did not intend to stop any time soon. The two of them quickly set about into the dungeon, looking for new floors. Rui had resolved this time to stay away from any human presence. Last time’s fiasco taught him that he could never be too careful around other people especially when the stakes were high. Even if he made sophisticated and complex plans, he simply could not do anything about dumb luck. Thus, he resolved not even give luck a chance to mess up a plan.
The two of them set out as they explored the Shionel Dungeon for new floors.
“I think it’s interesting how different floors are so different,” Kane commented out of the blue. “Feels really strange when I think about it. Like, why is there no overlap in the monsters between all of the floors? Seems like every floor has a unique pattern that is never repeated.”
“True,” Rui nodded. “It is strange. The floors are supposed to be pockets of space formed from areas that either didn’t have dense vegetation across them that was dungeonified when the roots of the species came across high-energy powerful esoteric mines.”
𝚘𝐕xt.𝗇t
Still, it felt almost artificial to a certain degree how different species were perfectly isolated to different parts of the Shionel Dungeon, although monsters did leave their floors often. He wasn’t sure how that could be the case.
Wouldn’t one normally expect that animals get naturally mixed across the entire dungeon like how forests and jungles normally were?
He wasn’t sure why this wasn’t the case inside the dungeon. Just as Kane was about to respond, he paused when he noticed that Rui had suddenly become a lot more alert.
“What’s up? Is it a new floor?” Kane asked with a hopeful glance.
“I’m not sure, honestly,” Rui murmured. “Let me get a closer look.”
He began jogging forward, causing Kane to do the same as he kept up with Rui. Rui’s eyes wandered around, lost, as he used Riemannian Echo to keep track of his environment.
He frowned as he didn’t quite seem to understand what he was witnessing.
Then, they finally got close enough for Rui to get a full picture of what he was looking at.
His eyes widened as he paused, speechless.
“What is it?” Kane asked impatiently. It was clear to him that Rui was seeing something truly strange.
“It’s a floor, alright… But there’s only one monster the size of a portion of a district,” Rui murmured.
Kane’s eyes widened as his head cocked back in shock.
“What?!”
Districts were usually a few kilometers in length. For a monster to be the size of a district, its body would be enormously giant. Rui had trouble picturing just how big it was.
The two of them eventually reached the end of a tunnel that opened into a gigantic cavity.
“Holy shit!” Rui’s eyes widened. “It’s dead! Its head is completely destroyed! Also… this species. I know this species! It’s an Earthen Basilisk!”
Rui’s mind flashed back to many years ago when he undertook his first hunting class mission as a young low-grade Martial Apprentice. Back then, he was extremely weak and inexperienced, yet had stumbled upon a dangerous subterranean beast that traveled beneath the ground and sensed through seismic radiation. Rui had employed clever tactics and strategies to corner and eventually kill the beast.
He hadn’t immediately made the connection because of the missing head of the creature, but once his senses enveloped the entire corpse, he recognized it almost immediately.
“But what the hell is one doing in the Shionel Dungeon, and how in the world did it get so gigantic?” Rui couldn’t help but be bewildered as he swept through the information that he had on the Earthen basilisk from his mission with it.
The Earthen basilisk was a species that existed in the Beast Domain. He vividly remembered being told that the Beast Domain was so dangerous that even the Earthen Basilisk found the need to migrate away from the core of the continent and towards the outskirts, eventually leading it to the Kandrian Empire.
He did not know that they were capable of growing that big. Nor did he know whether that actually was the case, or whether this one was an exception due to the strange environment of the Shionel Dungeon monsterifying it, causing it to grow more powerful.
Rui felt goosebumps on his skin at the thought of the creature running amuck in the dungeon with its great size, or at the thought of it running amuck outside of the dungeon in the outskirts. It would be an absolute menace to put down since Martial Seniors were not allowed anywhere near the dungeon.
Based on the sheer size of the Earthen Basilisk compared to the weak Apprentice level one that he fought many years ago, he had a hard time imagining how absurdly difficult it would be to take down. Its sheer size meant that even with his blade and pipe, he was not going to be one-shotting it any time soon, although he was able to conceive of ways to take it down.
“Speaking of which… What on Earth happened to a creature this powerful? How did it die such a miserable death?” Rui couldn’t help but wonder.