Chương 90: 89 - Testing the Waters

Something shifted in the troll's eyes as it fell subject to Dark Bolt's lifeforce corruption. Its wounds were healing more slowly. Sure enough, its regeneration ability was tied to lifeforce. In the tunnels of the dungeon, Alexandra kept her distance, keeping a firm grasp on her spear. She waited, observing how the troll had gone from healing in a few seconds to its wounds barely moving anymore. She was cold, courtesy of Life Curse. About the level of curse she'd adjusted her Dark Bolt to give her.

Nothing incapacitating. It was only the first of many trolls, so she decided to experiment. She gathered lifeforce at the tip of her finger and released another Dark Bolt at the beast. It stumbled as the needle hit its chest but didn't break stride. The troll roared and charged toward her with renewed vigor. Alexandra dodged as it tried to grab her and retaliated with two quick jabs. The first found an arm, the other a shoulder.

It didn't seem to do much, but as she reset and created some distance between them, she noticed the two new wounds seemed to be bubbling. Something was happening to them. Something caused by her, as sickness of empathy pushed a dull ache on her arm and shoulder, right where the wounds were located on the troll's body. It was much less than when fighting a human or even a goblin. It seemed like the troll's pain receptors were not as developed. Sounds about right for a species that would regenerate any injury.

Alexandra wasn't even sure the troll was real. She was in a dungeon instance, after all. As she didn't know those existed before today, she had yet to take the time to study the literature on the subject. She took a step to the side, narrowly avoiding a punch. Then she ducked under the other. Each time, the tip of her spear grazed the troll, adding on to its wounds. The troll was patient for a monster. It had stopped charging.

Now it circled, hunched back, fists grinding against the ground, tracking her with its small yellow eyes. The wounds kept bubbling, but the troll didn't seem to care about them. Alexandra matched its movement, keeping the spear between them. She jabbed at the knee. Connected. The troll grunted and swept at the shaft, nearly taking it from her grip. She let the momentum carry her back and reset her stance. The ache in her own arm had dulled. Background noise. She worked the same spots.

Left arm, left shoulder, the knee again. The troll bled slowly. No clotting. No regeneration. The wounds accumulated. It took the better part of ten minutes. By the end, the troll was leaning against the tunnel wall, one leg dragging. It swiped at her twice more. Both slow. She stepped past the first and drove the spear into its thigh on the second, then withdrew before it could close a hand around the shaft. When it finally went down, it went down sideways, like a building collapsing. Alexandra held her position.

Watched it. The wounds stayed open. She waited another thirty seconds before approaching. She crouched beside it and tried Drain Life. Extended the working toward the troll's chest. A careful hook, looking for the thread of something to pull. Nothing caught. She tried again. It was like reaching into water for something solid and closing her hand on nothing. She withdrew it and stood. It was dead. Of course there was no lifeforce left.

"Should I loot the corpse?" she whispered, then shook her head. She was in a dungeon, but it wasn't like she could carry anything with her. Alone, and with nothing to store them, the troll parts would be too much for her. Not to mention that she didn't know which ones were valuable and how grueling the process would be.

"I should get my hands on a spatial storage." She stood up and put some distance between her and the corpse of her defeated foe. Then, she opened her journal. Alexandra knew one of her curses was making her cold, but the second hadn't manifested itself. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. You are suffering from the curse of chill. You are suffering from the curse of empathy. She snorted in surprise. The curse of empathy?

No wonder she didn't notice the difference. She immediately sobered up and ran back to the entrance. The doors were still closed, but she assumed the cavern was the safest place in the dungeon. She sat in a corner and closed her eyes. Her attention bore down on her mana core. She immediately located the curse of chill. It was a thread running a simple loop around her core, tickling the other threads as it passed. Alexandra grabbed it and broke the pattern, dispelling the curse. It didn't change much.

This curse of chill didn't have much sticking power and would have dissipated by itself in less than an hour. Still, it left her with all her attention to focus on the curse of empathy. She was hoping to at least find it. This way, she could finally get an idea of what she should be looking for to cure her sickness of empathy. Alexandra wasn't expecting something obvious. The curse of chill had been a neat loop, almost decorative. She'd found it in seconds.

But with how elusive sickness of empathy had proved to be, she braced for the worst. She turned her attention inward now and swept through the threads of her mana core the way she might search for a book in the library. Methodical. Shelf by shelf. Nothing jumped out. She went deeper. The threads streamed mana out of her core in every direction. Radiating them like heat, spreading everywhere inside her. Some threads were thicker, others were thinner.

She focused on the thin ones, those she could barely make out, closest to her core. Then she went even deeper. Inside her core. There, an endless web of constantly shifting threads materialized. It wasn't neat. It wasn't ordered. She sifted through the chaos, looking for a pattern. She found it. It wasn't a loop. It was something flatter, a membrane, almost, adhered to the interior wall of her core rather than woven through it. Thin enough that she'd swept past it twice. It didn't pulse or flicker.

It just sat there, adhered, like a skin that had dried against a wound. She studied it for a moment without touching it. It had no obvious seam. No starting point she could identify. The curse of chill had been a thread with two clear ends, so she'd just snapped the pattern at its weakest link. This was different. She needed to find an edge to peel it. She probed the perimeter. The membrane yielded slightly to pressure but didn't separate.

She tried applying tension from below, pushing up against it from the core side. It stretched. She increased pressure carefully, looking for a point of failure. The ache in her arm sharpened. She eased off immediately. The membrane had thinned where she'd pushed, and the feedback had spiked. She filed that away. Brute force wasn't the approach. She sat with it another minute, just observing. The thing wasn't anchored from the inside. She'd been pushing against it from the wrong direction.

She shifted her attention to the outside of her core again. Traced the boundary slowly. And at the far side of the membrane, almost behind it, she found what she'd missed: not an end, but a fold. The whole structure had a seam running along it, flush against her core, invisible behind the threads. She focused her attention on it. Like getting a fingernail beneath a sticker. Careful. No sudden movements. The membrane resisted. She applied steady, even pressure along the seam rather than pulling at any single point.

It loosened. She kept going, maintaining the pressure, moving along the fold until she felt the whole structure begin to lift. Then she exhaled, gathered herself, and peeled it free in one slow motion. It dissolved before she could examine it. The ache in her arm and shoulder disappeared. Alexandra opened her eyes. She planted her spear into the closest luminescent mushroom and felt a light burn on her skin. The curse was gone, not the sickness.

She closed her eyes again and examined the insides of her core once more. This time, she didn't find anything. She exhaled. This was a start. She was one step closer to solving the issue for good. She picked up her journal again. Giant Slayer 2 -> 3 Dark Bolt 9 -> 10 Curse Unraveling 8 -> 9 Spear Mastery 2 -> 4 Good progress for a single fight. The troll lasted for so long that she had time to hone her skills. She almost regretted not taking more weapons with her to grind, but it wasn't like she could carry them.

Standing up, she dispelled her journal and headed down the same tunnel again. She had to keep exploring if she wanted to make it out here alive. She also needed to find a way to make Drain Life latch onto a troll. She frowned. This wasn't going to be easy. All her attempts had ended in failure. And it wasn't close. The troll's lifeforce had been a tidal wave. An unstoppable force she could only witness, not take for herself.

The way she saw it, she either needed to find a weaker troll—if such a thing existed—or she had to hope that Giant Slayer leveling up could help her bridge the gap. She tapped her fingers on her spear. Giant Slayer: This skill allows you to partially ignore rank suppression. Each level increases the effect. Now, she wasn't sure if rank suppression affected her ability to drain life. She wagered it did. As far as she could tell, it affected everything. Would it be enough? Only time would tell.

The tunnel kept going down into the belly of the hill. Deeper. Deeper. Was it really there, or was the instance in a separate space? She could wonder all she wanted, but the answer would only come once she returned to the Iron Library. Alexandra passed by the troll corpse. It hadn't moved. She kept going. Her eyes were fixed on the next bend. Then the next. She was expecting a troll at each turn. Yet, she didn't slow down. She was on a timer.

Having entered the Troll Cave at night, quest rest time was only a few hours away. And she'd be damned before she missed a quest.