Chương 524: B8—Chapter 29: Through the Looking Glass

The next morning, once I entered the portal of doom, a wave of vertigo washed over me and the world tilted sideways. My stomach lurched, my legs gave out, and suddenly I found myself standing on all fours on the cold ground. I looked down, and instead of legs, there were white paws where my feet should have been. My brain flatly refused to process what my eyes were telling me. Shaking my head didn't help. The paws stubbornly remained paws. Turning my head, my jaw dropped open.

Mahya stood on my right, staring down at herself with an expression halfway between horror and fascination while absentmindedly fondling her chest like she couldn't quite believe it was there. On the other side, Al was grabbing his crotch with a smirk that looked profoundly wrong on his face. Al didn't make expressions like that. Ever. Behind me, my body stood and looked around with my tongue hanging out while strange panting sounds escaped my mouth.

"What the hell?" I exclaimed. Or at least tried to. Instead, a bark came out. Al squeezed his crotch again.

"I always wondered how this appendage would feel. I'm not sure I'm a fan." Mahya turned toward him.

"Is that the core of your problem?" She shifted awkwardly, grabbed her chest again, and frowned.

"How do you maintain your balance with these?" My body barked, stuck its butt out and wiggled it from side to side. Then it made choking sounds, and Rue's telepathic voice followed.

"Were Rue's tail?" By that point, I already understood what happened, but my brain still struggled to properly wrap itself around it. We switched bodies? How? Again, what the hell? Switching to telepathy, I asked,"What's going on?"

"I have a dick," Mahya said from Al's body. I tried to make a face at her, hoping to drag her attention back to the actual problem instead of her newly acquired body part, but Al, currently inside Mahya's body, beat me to it.

"Kindly refrain from further manhandling my genitalia."

"If you stop playing with my boobs," she shot back, sticking her tongue out at him. Al yanked his hands away so fast it looked almost painful and made a tiny squeaking sound that absolutely did not fit his usual dignified image. I burst out laughing, though in dog form it came out sounding more like choking mixed with whining. My body barked happily and wiggled its butt again. I tried to walk and almost fell flat on my face.

My hind legs did the walking motion, but the front ones didn't move with them, which only shoved me forward like a collapsing table. Stopping, I took a deep breath, focused, and moved my hand and foot together. That attempt went even worse, and I crashed onto the ground with an undignified yelp. Mahya looked down at me from above.

"I suggest moving the contralateral hand and leg rather than those on the same side." Right. That was Al in there. Spirits, this was confusing. Trying to get back up by myself didn't work. My legs tangled together every time I pushed, until Al finally crouched down, hugged my midriff, and lifted me back onto my feet like a toddler. For the next attempt, I carefully lifted my right hand and left leg together, wobbled dangerously, and quickly put them back down.

For some reason, walking on all fours as a person was easy, but now it was a serious problem. I knew how dogs walked. I'd watched Rue do it every day. The problem was that knowing what his legs were supposed to do and actually making them do it were two very different things. My balance was completely wrong, my legs weren't where my brain expected them to be, and every time I tried to move one paw, I instinctively shifted my weight the way I would in a human body.

Which didn't work particularly well when I had four legs. I tried again, moving one paw forward this time. Then another. For a few seconds, I managed an awkward shuffle before my legs somehow got out of sequence. I stumbled sideways, scrambled to correct myself, and instead made it worse. My legs slid out from under me in four different directions, leaving me sprawled on the floor like a starfish. Hmm, being a dog required practice. Behind me came a smacking sound followed by a pitiful whine.

Rue, currently inside my body, lay crumpled on the ground after apparently suffering the same problem. Al's body completely lost it, doubling over in hysterical laughter, while Mahya's body looked between the three of us with an unreadable expression. Finally, Mahya's body sighed, walked over to Rue in my body, scooped him up in a bridal carry, and headed toward the dungeon exit.

Al's body slowly stopped giggling like a demented troll, wiped tears from his eyes, then walked over to me, hoisted me into a fireman's carry, and followed. The moment we crossed out of the dungeon, another powerful wave of vertigo slammed into me. The world spun, and I hit the ground hard. Al stood above me, wincing.

"My apologies for not preventing your fall. The vertigo and the switch are confusing." Mahya put Rue down, again giggling like a demented troll. I rolled on my back and lay there, happy to have my familiar body back. It was a short experience, but deeply disturbing. The rest of the day, we each did our own thing. We needed a breather after that. I moved on to the second book in the enchanting materials series.

Like the first one, it started with wood, but this time it focused on specific aspects and flavor mana saturation based on the kind of enchantment the material was supposed to carry. It was fascinating. The interplay between aspects and desired enchantment effects got surprisingly complicated once the basics were out of the way. Some combinations were glaringly obvious. Fire-aspected materials worked better for heat generation, combustion, or explosive effects.

Nature and Life mana improved healing, growth, and regeneration enchantments. Earth helped with durability and reinforcement. There was even a section explaining that Light aspects could slightly reduce mana resistance in perception artifacts, while Darkness aspects helped concealment enchantments "settle" into the material more naturally.

Water aspects apparently worked extremely well for flexibility, flow control, and even certain memory-retention enchantments because mana "circulated" through the material more smoothly. Wind-aspected saturation improved responsiveness and mana transmission speed, which made it useful for movement artifacts and reaction-based enchantments. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

All in all, it was fascinating reading, and of course, I immediately started experimenting with my healing artifact. It took a while to figure out how to properly saturate a piece of wood with crystals aspected to both Nature and Life without the two clashing. Every time I tried aspecting the crystal with one, and then the other, one aspect always overpowered the second and canceled it out completely. On the fourth or fifth attempt, I switched approaches and used the same method I'd developed for my swords.

First, I aspected each crystal individually. After that, I flooded both with mana and carefully merged them together. It worked like a charm. For the rest of the night, I worked on engraving the healing artifact, slowly carving the runes while occasionally checking the mana flow through the wood. By the time I finished, the artifact hummed softly with stable energy and smelled faintly of fresh sap and crushed herbs from all the Nature mana soaked into it. As a test, I cut my palm and used the old artifact first.

The bleeding stopped in about five seconds, but the cut itself still needed roughly seven minutes to fully close and disappear without a trace. Then I tested the new one. The bleeding stopped almost immediately, and the cut vanished in less than five minutes. That didn't justify a full Gangnam Style celebration, but it absolutely justified several fist pumps, and a loud "Yes!" Since I'd worked all night, I didn't head down again the following day until late afternoon.

By then, the house was quiet except for the television. Only Rue was home, sprawled on his beanbag while watching TV. His tail lazily thumped when he noticed me enter.

"Where're Mahya and Al?" I asked as I headed toward the kitchen and started the coffee machine.

"Went again into dungeon." I grabbed a mug, and leaned against the counter.

"You didn't want to go with them?" Rue made a deeply offended sound and lifted his head.

"No. Rue not like having only two legs and no tail."

"Yeah, I know what you mean. The four-legs thing was very confusing." Rue slowly turned his head and stared at me like I'd lost my mind. For him, I guessed I basically had. Mahya and Al came back in the evening looking absolutely wrecked. Smears of blood covered both of them, their clothes were torn, and Mahya had the kind of expression usually seen right before a murder.

"That good, huh?" I asked from the couch. Mahya made a furious fft sound and marched up the stairs toward her room without answering. Al dropped onto the couch beside me, leaned his head back, and closed his eyes.

"That dungeon is profoundly disturbing," he said in a tired voice.

"Naturally, we switched bodies again the moment we entered, but that was merely the beginning." Rue lifted his head from the other side of the couch with interest. Al rubbed his forehead.

"The entire place appears to operate on mirrored or crossed spatial logic. One sees a projectile flying toward the left side of the body, reacts accordingly, and the attack instead strikes the right shoulder, the leg, or occasionally the other person. Direction, distance, and movement cease to behave in any rational manner."

"That sounds annoying," I said.

"It is significantly worse than annoying." He made a deeply offended expression.

"At one point, we entered a corridor where gravity inverted entirely. We found ourselves walking on the ceiling with our hair hanging downward and blood rushing into our faces. Attempting to jump back down proved impossible. I do not mean only physically impossible. Even skill-assisted movement refused to function correctly." Rue made a sympathetic whining sound. Al pointed at him.

"Precisely." He sighed and sank deeper into the couch.

"There were also entities resembling translucent ghosts. Half-formed distorted things, difficult to properly focus on. The obvious assumption was that they were monsters."

"They weren't?" I asked.

"Oh, they absolutely were," Al replied dryly.

"The problem was that every attempt to attack them somehow redirected the strike toward us instead. Mahya attempted to cleave one apart and nearly removed my arm. I tried to freeze another and encased her left side in ice instead." From upstairs came the sound of something heavy slamming into a wall. Al opened his eyes and slowly looked toward the ceiling.

"She is taking it remarkably well, all things considered."

"We've come across difficult dungeons before," I pointed out while handing him a mug of coffee from my Storage.

"That is not the issue." He accepted the mug with both hands and stared into it.

"The dungeon is circular. After several hours of navigating that nightmare, it deposited us back at the same entrance from which we started." I stared at him for a second before the realization clicked into place.

"Oh. No core?" Al gave a slow nod.

"No core." Another loud thump came from upstairs. All of us looked up at the ceiling. Another muffled bang echoed. I crossed my fingers and hoped Mahya wouldn't break my house. Turning to Al, I asked, "Need healing?" He shook his head tiredly.

"No. We drank potions." Then he pushed himself off the couch and trudged up the stairs toward his room with a defeated posture. Rue watched him go, then turned toward me with a serious expression.

"Rue happy Rue no go into dungeon." I nodded solemnly.

"You and me both, buddy. You and me both." We spent another two days by the river and castle before deciding to head deeper into the dungeon. The place was really gorgeous despite the eerie silence and the complete lack of anything living. The river flowed clear beneath the pale stone bridges, and the castle towers reflected in the water like something out of a painting. Without monsters, wind, birds, or even insects, the entire place felt frozen in time.

Beautiful, quiet, and just unsettling enough that the back of my neck never fully relaxed. Mahya calmed down by the following day and returned to her usual self, which meant sarcasm and only moderate threats of violence instead of silent murderous rage. Most importantly, my house survived the experience without structural damage.

The other side of the castle was nothing but dense vegetation and uneven terrain, with no river to make travel easier, so reaching the next barrier took another two days despite me constantly using Nature affinity to move branches, vines, and entire bushes out of our way. At least that part got easier with practice. Plants bent aside almost willingly now, opening narrow paths through the forest with little more than a steady flow of mana and concentration.

The barrier itself turned out to be a disappointment for Mahya and a massive relief for both Al and me. This time, it wasn't woven vines blocking the way, but enormous trees growing so tightly beside one another that they formed a solid wall of wood. Their trunks pressed together without even the slightest gap between them. You couldn't have slipped a piece of paper through the cracks because there were no cracks. And the size of those things…

Had they stood apart, it probably would've taken ten people holding hands to circle a single trunk. The bark looked ancient, dark, and hard enough to stop artillery fire. There was absolutely no chance we were chopping, cutting, or blasting our way through that. Mahya stood in front of the barrier for a long moment, staring upward while thoughts visibly raced through her head. Several times, she opened her mouth and closed it again. Finally, her shoulders slumped.

"I guess that's the end of the road for us here." I had to work very hard to hide my smile. Beside me, Al looked suspiciously content, at least by Al's standards. Turning back, we headed out of the dungeon, and it took us seven days to finally leave it. Thankfully, this time around the monsters didn't try to stop us from leaving the second ring. In fact, we didn't encounter a single one the entire way back. Not one snake. Not one root monster. Nothing.

The forest stayed eerily quiet the whole time, with only the sound of our footsteps, the occasional rustle of leaves, and Rue grumbling whenever branches got tangled in his fur. I got the distinct impression the dungeon wanted us gone as quickly as possible. Considering the fact that it probably had a sentient guardian somewhere inside, I was fairly sure that was exactly what was happening. Mahya was still subdued and clearly disappointed. I could understand why. She'd really wanted those extra two levels.

That said, I couldn't quite bring myself to sympathize too much. Personally, I'd had enough fighting for a while and wanted to simply explore this world. Back at an inn—a different one from our previous stay—we sat around the dinner table, eating roasted meat and fresh bread. People talked at the nearby tables, someone laughed across the room, and dishes clattered as the servers moved between them. After the silence of the dungeon, I was glad to be somewhere noisy again.

"What's the plan now?" I asked between bites. Mahya shrugged without looking up and kept stabbing her dinner with enough aggression to almost break the plate. Al delicately folded his napkin before answering.

"I believe we should inspect the three nearby Gates first." I looked at him.

"Don't you want to explore this world?" He nodded immediately.

"Certainly. However, the Gates are close enough that ignoring them for now would be rather foolish. It makes considerably more sense to investigate them first and only afterward decide where we wish to spend more time." He calmly cut another piece of meat.

"And should one of those worlds prove interesting, we may simply return there later under more relaxed circumstances." Mahya grunted.

"Preferably someplace without murderous plants and a surprise dick." Al choked on his bite. I burst out laughing loud enough that several people in the inn turned to look at us. Mahya smirked and stabbed another vegetable. The joke made me feel better. If she could joke about the whole thing, then she was finally getting over her disappointment.