Chương 15: Old Roots

'Mana is genuinely interesting,' I thought, and was mildly surprised by the observation given the circumstances. I wrapped around the fourth body's scale surface, moving along it rather than against it, cutting at the joint points the Murderous Art was identifying without needing conscious selection, and felt the Thousandfold multiplier stack on each impact.

The body was not dead but it was structurally compromised, its movement coordination degrading within the temporal field as the damage accumulated along the network thread. I leapt off and came down near the pool's edge, which gave me sight lines on all five simultaneously for the first time since the engagement started. The Red Thread overlay was showing me something I had not been able to see while moving through them individually.

One of the five bodies had a network node that was brighter than the others, a denser concentration that the thread lines from all four remaining bodies connected back to. It was not the largest body. It was the third one, the one that had surfaced from the ground rather than the water, and it was positioned at the back of the group with the patient stillness of something that understood it was the anchor.

'There,' I thought. I redirected everything toward it.

"Death's Blind Spot." [Death's Blind Spot: Active. Execution line generated. Direct pathway to primary target node identified.] The line extended from my dagger tip through the air in a straight vector to the third body's network node, cutting through the other four bodies' positions in between, which meant the execution pathway ran through all of them en route to the primary. If I could send enough force along that line, the damage would propagate through every network connection simultaneously.

I needed the other four bodies stationary for long enough to make that work.

"Last Breath." [Last Breath: Active. All targets within range bound in shadow constraint. Duration: 8 seconds. Cost: Significant.] The shadows came out of the water surface and the stone beneath it and wrapped around all five bodies at once, pulling them downward and holding them in place with a force that the system had always described as absolute within its duration window.

The five colossal worm bodies dropped onto the surface of the pool and the water splashed outward in a wave that reached the walls, and they were held there, enormous and constrained, the cosmological reflection breaking into pieces around their mass. I looked at them lying there, all five, unable to move for eight seconds, and the smile that came was not the controlled one I had allowed myself after the floor three fight. This one I did not try to manage.

'Checkmate,' I thought. I took one breath in. One breath out. As an assassin, breath management was not optional. Every major skill activation cost something from the respiratory system in a way that was not reflected in the standard resource bars, a physical reality the class had always carried that made it genuinely exhausting to run at high output.

I had learned that the hard way across the runs where I had pushed the assassin class into extended engagements and found myself unable to sustain the final activation because my lungs had already submitted their resignation. One breath was what I had left before I used everything.

"Final Moment." [Final Moment: Active. All current attack outputs amplified tenfold. Resource cost: Total. No recovery after activation.]"The Unseen Hand." [The Unseen Hand: Active. Maximum single-strike output. Executes along all identified Death's Blind Spot vectors simultaneously. Network propagation: Enabled.] Supporting my right hand with my left, the blade was above my head. I cut down as the very air itself. and in that moment What left the dagger was not a visible attack in any conventional sense.

I did not see an attack pattern leave it. I felt it leave, a total discharge of everything Infinite Reservoir had been building across the entire engagement, amplified tenfold by Final Moment, directed along the Death's Blind Spot execution line through all four intermediate bodies and into the network node of the third body at the back.

The Red Thread overlay showed me the propagation in real time, the force running along every network connection and reaching each body's primary node within the same fraction of a second. The pool went quiet. Not gradually. All at once, the way a room goes silent when something large enough to fill it stops moving.

The water settled back into its cosmological reflection and the only sound remaining was my footsteps on the wet stone and the distant structural complaint of something very large losing the internal coherence that had kept it together. The Red Thread was still active.

It functioned like Pathfinder in the sense that it mapped connections, but where Pathfinder showed me mana structures and movement vectors, Red Thread showed me causal lines, the threads of consequence running outward from every action I had taken inside the creature. I could see them now across the surface of the pool, diagonal streaks of crimson light trailing through the air above the water, each one marking a pathway where the damage I had dealt was still propagating through the World-Eater's biology.

The flesh was being stripped from it in a process that had started inside its stomach and was working outward through every connected segment simultaneously. It was going to die. Not from one decisive blow but from a cascade I had started and could no longer stop even if I had wanted to. I started walking toward the gate. Not toward the creature.

Toward the exit, because there was nothing left to do here and my legs were informing me that they had a limited number of steps remaining before they submitted a formal resignation. I kept my pace even and my chin level and I watched the Red Thread lines flicker across the air above the pool as they completed their work. The impact sound hit without warning.

Metal against metal, a resonance so large it registered in my chest rather than my ears, and chunks of stone-dense biological matter dropped into the shallow water around me in a spread of slow splashes, each one sending ripples across the star reflection. I did not stop walking. I pulled my half-lidded eyes forward and kept my line toward the gate. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. The system manifested in front of me.

[You have slain: World-Eater, Titan-Class] [Level Difference: +7] [Threat Classification: Catastrophic] [Additional rewards calculated.] [Experience Gained: +85, 000 EXP] [Level Up!] [Level: 13 to 16] [Current Experience: 62, 400 / 78, 000] [Rewards Granted:] [+50 Free Attribute Points] [+5 Skill Points] [+1 Title: Titan Slayer] [+1 Mythic Attribute point] [World-Eater's Essence Acquired] [Title Obtained: The One Who Devoured the Devourer] [Description: You have slain a creature that consumed nations and buried civilisations beneath its endless hunger. Your existence has been acknowledged by beings who once considered Titans the apex of life.] I read it without stopping.

Then the next notification appeared below it. [Mundane Dagger Level 3: Broken.] The blade crumpled against my side as if it had been waiting for the system to make the announcement official before it allowed itself to fall apart. I let the pieces drop into the water and kept walking. Then they started, one after another, each skill suspending in sequence the way lights go out in a building when the power cuts floor by floor. [Red Thread of Death: Suspended.] The crimson lines above the pool faded.

Colour drained out of the air and the cosmological reflection came back fully for the first time since I had surfaced from the creature's interior. The world went from deep red to grey, and the grey was colder than I had expected. [Murderous Art: Suspended.] The burning sensation in my muscles stopped immediately. Not gradually.

The heat that had been running through my arms and legs since I activated the skill simply was not there anymore, and what replaced it was a fatigue that had apparently been queued up and waiting for exactly this moment. [Shadow's Verdict: Suspended.] [Final Moment: Suspended.] [Last Breath: Suspended.] Each suspension took something with it.

Not just the skill effect but the physical state that had been running underneath it, the structural support that had kept me upright and functional through the interior of the World-Eater and the five-body surface engagement that followed. I felt the absence of each one as a distinct subtraction. My pace slowed by a fraction with every notification and I was aware of it and corrected each time, because the gate was thirty feet ahead and I was going to reach it. [Gravewalker: Suspended.] The temporal perception effect dropped and the world snapped back to normal speed, which after Gravewalker always felt slightly too fast, like a film running at the wrong rate. I blinked and adjusted and kept walking. [Infinite Reservoir: Terminated.] [Arcane Overflow: Deactivated.] The mana I had been drawing from the expanding pool collapsed back to its standard ceiling, and the Vitality drain from Infinite Reservoir stopped, which should have been a relief except that the damage it had already done was still present in my health total. I checked the display without pulling the screen fully open, reading the edge values. [Health: 11 / 110] [Mana: 0 / 300] [Stamina: 12 / 100] Eleven health. I noted while I was twenty-five feet from the gate.

Then the last notification came, and it came differently from the others. Not in the same flat system voice that had been announcing suspensions. This one carried something I could only describe as authority, a register that was distinct from every system prompt I had encountered across fifty-two thousand runs. [Assassin Class: Locked.] And then, beneath it, in the same authoritative voice: [Initiating Penalty: Koalemos.] [Breach of System Integrity Detected.] I stopped walking.

'What breach,' I thought, and the thought was not anxious. It was precise.

'I used a skill set stored in a grimoire I carried into this floor. The grimoire came from the archive. The archive is part of the tower. The system permitted me to acquire the skill through a sanctioned mechanism.' The notification did not respond to that reasoning. It sat in front of me and waited.

I stood eleven health points from whatever the penalty was going to be, twenty feet from the gate to floor six, with the World-Eater's dissolution continuing in the water behind me, and I looked at the system message with an expression I was aware had gone very flat.

'I used what the tower gave me,' I thought.

'The grimoire was on a shelf in a sanctioned floor. The assassin pathway unlocked through a title I accumulated across approved runs. Every tool I used tonight came from inside this system.' The message remained. I had faced system penalties before. Not often, and not for anything I had done deliberately, but the tower had mechanisms for enforcing boundaries that it did not always disclose in advance. The penalty notification was new in its phrasing.

Breach of system integrity was language I had not seen before in any previous run, and the fact that it was using my name rather than a class designation or floor identifier suggested it was addressing me specifically, not a general rule violation. Which meant the system knew exactly who I was.

'Of course it does,' I thought.

'It always has.' I was lighter than I had been before the assassin skills suspended, and not in the way mage class always made me feel lighter, which was the nimble, low-mass quality of a build that prioritised mobility and channel speed over physical density. This was the lightness of a body that had very little left in it, running on eleven points of health and zero mana and a stamina total that was rounding down to nothing. I looked at the penalty notification. I looked at the gate.

I took the twenty feet at a pace I was not going to describe as steady, because it was not steady, and I put my hand on the gate and pushed it open and stepped through to the other side, and the floor five atmosphere closed behind me. The gate sealed with a sound like stone settling. The penalty notification followed me through. [Penalty Active: Koalemos.] [Duration: Floors 6 to 8.] [Effect: System access restricted. Attribute allocation suspended. Skill acquisition blocked.] [Reason: Utilisation of non-sanctioned cross-class awakening sequence outside designated progression windows.] I read it twice. Then I read the reason clause again. Non-sanctioned cross-class awakening sequence. The assassin pathway had not been an approved unlock at this stage of progression. The grimoire had been a sanctioned item. The skill acquisition through it had been within system rules.

But the combination, Infinite Reservoir driving assassin-class skills through a mage-class framework at level thirteen, had apparently crossed a line the system had drawn that it had not seen fit to tell me about in advance.

'Three floors,' I thought.

'No attributes. No new skills. Floors six, seven, and eight with what I already have.' I checked what I already had. Spellfist Rank 2. Arcane Burst Rank 3. Channel Investment Rank 1. Mana Circulation. Mana Pathfinding Rank 1. Wormhole. Arcane Notation Literacy. Mana Pathfinding. The World-Eater's Essence, which I had not yet examined. Fifty attribute points unspent, which the penalty had frozen but not removed. Five skill points in the same condition. A Mythic Attribute point I did not yet understand.

And one hundred and thirty-three base attribute points that had been allocated before the penalty activated, which meant my current stat line was already built and was going to carry me through three floors without adjustment. I pulled the status screen open and looked at it properly for the first time since the surface engagement.

[NAME: Koalemos] [RACE: Devas] [LEVEL: 16] [CLASS: Mage] [CLASS RANK: Mage Apprentice] [TITLES: The Regressor / Pathfinder / Master of Many Paths / Titan Slayer / The One Who Devoured the Devourer] [RESOURCES] [Health: 11 / 110] [Mana: 0 / 300] [Stamina: 12 / 100] [ATTRIBUTES] [Strength: 28] [Agility: 17] [Vitality: 23] [Intelligence: 104] [Wisdom: 21] [Perception: 16] [Affinity: 77] [PENALTY STATUS: Active. Floors 6 to 8. Attribute allocation and skill acquisition suspended.] I closed the screen.