Chương 23: Secret Room

Lloyd didn't know how long he had been here. Hours? A day? Or longer? He had completely lost track of time. His last supplies of food and water had run out a few minutes ago, and even in this disgusting place his body kept demanding its due — his stomach cramped, his mouth was dry and bitter with the taste of rot that seemed to have soaked permanently into his throat.

The tunnel stretched on just as endlessly, green crystals lighting up ahead and going dark behind him, sludge squelching underfoot, and time here seemed to have stopped existing in the usual sense — it had turned into something viscous, sluggish, measured not in minutes but in metres covered and creatures he'd had to kill to cover them. His body had long since stopped obeying the way it should. His arms ached with fatigue — every knife strike now sent a dull pain through his shoulder.

His legs were soaked to the knee and barely registered anything anymore — whether from the cold of the sludge or because his nerves had simply decided to give up before his body did. His jacket had become something between a rag and a carapace — the green mass had dried in several layers and now crackled with every movement. Lloyd tried not to think about how badly he wanted a proper meal, a proper wash, a proper bed to collapse into.

Those thoughts only distracted him, and distraction here was a luxury he couldn't afford. In all this time he had killed about ten creatures. Deformed in different ways — some missing arms, others with too many limbs, others with heads sitting at crooked angles, as though someone had assembled them in a hurry and never finished the job.

All of them resembled humans in broad strokes — two arms, two legs, a torso — but the green rotting mass covered them unevenly, in patches, as though flesh and that strange substance were fighting over who the body actually belonged to. And yet, despite their differences, there was something common between them. Something systematic. Especially in how easily they broke. In all the time he had spent here, Lloyd had worked out two things for himself.

"Right. As far as I understand, all these monsters belong to what's called the Shadow rank." The crystal overhead flared slightly brighter, as though confirming the thought — a barely noticeable flash that Lloyd had already learned to recognise as the dungeon's own peculiar response to his thinking.

"That's the weakest rank — which, honestly, isn't surprising. I'm just an ordinary human after all. What matters is that these monsters are fairly fast and agile, but their bodies aren't solid. Even I can smash an arm or a head with simple hits. Not counting that actual living corpse I ran into right at the start, of course. Well, lucky for me it seems to be the only one of its kind in this damned dungeon." Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

Lloyd involuntarily recalled what he'd been through — in fragments, in pieces, as though his memory itself were trying to shield him from remembering it all at once. The cold sludge beneath him during the fight. Teeth snapping right at his throat. The sound the knife made sinking into rotten flesh. The scream that had torn out of him — wild, inhuman, the kind he never expected from himself.

"Was I actually lucky, though?" He walked a few more metres — slowly, heavily, his legs long since numb from exhaustion and constant contact with the cold sludge. The tunnel curved slightly here, bending off to the side, and the green light of the crystals reflected off the damp walls in long murky glares. Somewhere ahead another turn was barely visible, one of dozens he'd already passed through without properly remembering a single one — they had all blurred together in his mind into one endless damp loop.

And then he noticed something.

"What's this?" Lloyd stopped. He peered into the gloom ahead — there, where an ordinary tunnel should have continued with the same narrow damp walls, the space suddenly widened. The outlines of the walls spread apart, vanishing into shadow, and the ceiling rose higher than anywhere he'd seen so far. The air here seemed to settle differently — not as dense, not as suffocating, though the damp and the smell of rot hadn't gone anywhere.

He moved closer, carefully, keeping the knife ready in case this turned out to be another trap or the lair of something more dangerous. Every step came with effort — his muscles protested, demanding rest he couldn't allow himself. It was a room. In all the time he'd spent in the dungeon, he had seen only corridors — narrow, low, flowing into one another, a kind of sprawling sewer system with no beginning and no end. But this wasn't a corridor.

This was an actual room — rounded, with a higher ceiling than the tunnels, the walls here a little drier, a little cleaner, as though this part of the dungeon lived by different rules. No water dripped here. There was none of that oppressive feeling that had followed him the entire way. The air felt at least slightly lighter — though the smell of rot, of course, hadn't disappeared.

The silence in this chamber was different too — not threatening, but almost expectant, as though the room itself were holding its breath, waiting to see what Lloyd would do next. But what surprised Lloyd most wasn't the existence of the room itself — it was what was inside it. Right in the centre stood a simple wooden chest — old, darkened with age, its iron corners touched with rust.

Around it drifted a barely visible green glow — soft, pulsing, like a swarm of fireflies circling in the half-light, drawing closer to the lid and then pulling back, almost as though alive. From above, falling directly onto the lid of the chest, was the greenish light of the crystal in the ceiling — steady, almost ceremonial, as though deliberately aimed right there, picking the chest out from the rest of the room's gloom.

All of it together created a sense of something alluring, something that seemed to beg him to come closer and look inside — after so many hours of rot, darkness, and fighting for his life, this chest looked almost like a mirage, like something too good to be true. Lloyd's eyebrows rose.

"Could this be..." His heart beat a little faster — for the first time in a long while, not from fear, but from something else. From anticipation, mixed with a faint, almost forgotten hope. He slowly stepped into the room...