Chương 124: Penicillium - Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Three We stopped for lunch about halfways through the sixth floor, in one of the little rooms we'd cleared earlier. It wasn't anything special. Phillipe didn't want to light a fire--and I couldn't blame him--so we mostly just ate canned food, spooning it directly out of the tin. Phillipe and Tyro talked the entire time about the kinds of classes Tyro might now have access to and how he should go about training once they were out of the dungeon. It seemed as though resetting to a new class was...

while rough, not the end of the world. Sure, it meant losing a bunch of skills and the like, but from what I understood, and from my own limited personal experience, not having a skill didn't mean you couldn't do the thing that the skill let you do. The exception was maybe magical skills? Or.. maybe not. I created a rough sphere with my [Aura of Growth] then tried to create the same shape with my mana, without the skill being active at all.

While difficult, and requiring a lot more focus and concentration, it was possible. So skills were just shortcuts and something that assisted you in doing something. I wouldn't need a skill to imitate another skill. All I would need in lieu of a skill was time, practice, and maybe something to learn from. Interesting, but I wasn't sure what the direct applications of that would be just yet. All it meant was that I could learn to do stuff the same way I could back before. That wasn't very special.

At best I could maybe pick up a skill, level it a lot, then get rid of it to see if any of the skill's ability stuck even when I didn't have it. That could be cool. I suspected that having a skill meant that, to some degree, skill degradation wasn't a thing. A person without a skill might become proficient at something, but if they didn't practice for a long time it was possible to have that skill atrophy.

A pianist who didn't play for a year or two would remember the basics on returning to the instrument, but they obviously wouldn't be as talented as they once were and would have to relearn some things. Did skills mitigate that? Meh, it didn't matter for now. Once lunch was done and washed down with lukewarm water, we continued on through the sixth floor. It didn't take too long to get to the stairs leading up to the fifth floor. We wanted to hurry a little.

Time was passing on and if we didn't make it to the fourth floor then it would reset and we'd have to kill our way to the top. Judging by how tired we were already though... I gave it decent odds that we wouldn't be making it back to the fourth floor until much later. The trek up the stairs to the fifth floor was, as predicted, another nightmare. My leg muscles had calmed down after our lunch break, but the renewed climb brought back all of the burning and then some.

I wasn't even moving fast enough to use my [Running] skill or anything, which was frustrating. So I focused on using my magic. I was only going to have another day or so in the dungeon; I might as well use it to the fullest and push my skills as hard as I could. I needed a few extra levels to reach five hundred total levels and unlock that second class. I didn't expect to reach it while within the dungeon... but still.

Eventually, with a little bit of help, we made it to the fifth floor, then it was another trek through the stinking sewer level to try and reach the exit. It took hours. Every trap-filled passage had to be crawled through at a slow, careful pace, and while we didn't meet much resistance, that wasn't to say there was none. We still encountered some slimes and a couple of beaten up goblins that we'd likely failed to kill on the way down.

I used the last of my mushrooms, leaving only my emergency 'just in case' reserve. While there hadn't been any obvious changes in the dungeon yet, I was expecting something to be different. Or else, what was the point of that entire ritual? Nothing apocalyptic had happened at all yet, at least not within the dungeon. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. I had a lot of theories and ideas, but nothing I could even begin to prove or test.

Maybe the ritual had unleashed the dungeon, making it so that it could now spawn things outside of its boundaries. Or maybe the ritual would make it so that the dungeon would grow significantly more dangerous? It was all guesswork. So far, nothing seemed to have changed, but it hadn't been more than half a day since the ritual took place, so maybe whatever terrible thing was going to happen hadn't happened yet? In any case, we didn't see anything out of the ordinary as we continued our push to the fourth floor.

We arrived at the stairs leading up to that floor by what I guessed to be late evening, and I almost gave up then and there. But no, I wasn't a quitter. I shored up my resolve and pressed on upwards... for maybe ten minutes. Then my legs started to wobble and I fell further and further behind the boys, who also seemed a little tired, but not nearly as exhausted as I was. Phillipe turned back eventually, and I tried to hasten to catch up, but... I couldn't.

I just stumbled on the steps, then took a moment to catch my breath. The next thing I knew I was being hoisted up, an arm under my knees and another around my back.

"Come on," Phillipe rumbled. I complained, but he didn't even bother to reprimand me for it, or say anything really. He just carried me up the stairs without pausing. Eventually I went limp and stopped whining. It was too tiring, and I couldn't fight the kind gesture if I wanted to. Somehow, much to my mortification, I fell asleep and only woke up when Phillipe was setting me down onto the ground.

"Huh?" I asked as I snapped awake.

"Tyro, can you help me smash some of the furniture in here? We'll start a small fire, cut out the humidity, maybe keep some of it to cook in the morning."

"I can help," I said as I started to rise.

"Hey, nah," Tyro said.

"Get some sleep. If you start cooking you're likely to keel over into the fire. Look, we have blankets and stuff." I protested a little more, but even I could tell that my voice was on the wrong side of drowsy and my eyes felt heavy. Eventually I just gave up and laid down atop a blanket, Sir Nibbles curled in close to my chest while I covered myself. The boys moved about and prepared camp, and soon enough I could feel the warmth of a fire filling the room and lulling me to sleep.

When I awoke it was to a darkened room, with nothing left to light it and any of my low-light vision mushrooms very much metabolised already. I fumbled about for some time, then found and lit one of the lamps the boys had brought. It still had a bit of oil left in it. I had no way of telling when it was, but I had the feeling it was early in the morning. Still, by the light of the lamp I started the fire up again, using what wood was left, and I started cooking an early breakfast.

Phillipe woke up next, and I asked him to keep an eye on things while I went to the next room over for some morning ablutions. Really, the biggest downside of all these dungeons was that they didn't have public washrooms. Maybe that's what the ritual would do? Introduce the world to good public infrastructure and guilt everyone into doing the same? Well, I could hope. I returned and finished up the cooking just as Tyro yawned himself awake. Then we had a quiet breakfast around the fire.

Today we were going to make it through the fourth floor, and if we were lucky, we'd encounter a team heading down on the third floor and make it to the surface before the day was completely gone. Meeting someone going down would be nice. A sign that maybe the ritual's impact wasn't as terrible as I worried it might be. I'd have to see once I got back to the surface, I supposed. One way or another, I had the impression that Feronie's goal wasn't so much destruction as destabilisation.