-Tap-Tap-Tap...
The sound of my footsteps echoed down the damp, uneven tunnel, blending into the muted noise of the few other adventurers heading in and out of the Dungeon.
I kept my pace slow, trying to calm the chaotic rhythm of the heart pounding in my chest. It was an even mix of nervous adrenaline and fear.
Fear, because I now knew what it actually felt like to fight for my life.
The phantom pain of being beaten and ripped apart still twitched deep inside my nerves, acting as a very grounding reminder to never let my guard down again, especially without Nom-Nom or Peko around.
Cold sweat already soaked the back of my tunic while my eyes darted left and right, scanning the shadows for anything waiting to spring a trap.
I wasn’t taking any chances today. I kept a two-second Precognition constantly running in the background, pairing it with a 5 MP Ice Reinforcement focused purely on boosting my cognition.
I walked, dragging a gloved hand along the cavern’s moss-covered wall, feeling the damp, spongy texture of the spirit moss brush against my fingers.
And after a bit more walking, the claustrophobic path finally opened up.
The rocky ceiling sloped sharply upward while the tunnel spilled into a massive, cavernous hub.
It looked less like a natural cave formation and more like an underground anthill.
Carved directly into the far walls were multiple smaller tunnels, branching out and plunging deeper into the dimly lit heart of the Dungeon.
I stood near the center of the clearing and counted thirty-four of them.
"Okay," I whispered to the empty air, closing my eyes to block out the dim light. "Just like the System explained."
I released my mana with a steady push, pouring exactly 2 MP/s into the surrounding environment, expanding it outward in every direction until I hit a hard limit at around ten meters.
My awareness instantly stretched to fill that invisible sphere, acting like a strange, omnidirectional sense of touch. I could mentally feel the rough texture of the cavern walls, the uneven ground beneath my boots, and the faint traces of mana inside the spirit moss.
Projecting the field honestly felt like standing at the bottom of a swimming pool where the water was a part of my body.
Whenever my expanding mana hit solid rock or the densely packed earth, I felt a distinct resistance pushing back against my mind like how a body of water would react to a rock, proving exactly what the System meant about magic struggling to easily permeate dense matter.
[This is surreal. It’s like having that third eye.]
-Ding!
{You may refer to it as such. Domain has many colloquial names, including the ’Third Eye’ and the ’Mind’s Eye’.}
[Huh... cool.] I thought, shifting my focus back to the limits of my mana pool.
Between the two-second Precognition, the active Domain radar, and the Ice reinforcement overclocking my brain, I was constantly tying up 9MP a second.
I summoned an MP Ice Pebble just above my right shoulder, keeping it floating there as a quick-draw defense.
Forming the projectile took a 5MP upfront investment that my infinite regen instantly recovered, but holding it steady in the air added another point to my constant upkeep.
Making the total upkeep of Precognition, Ice Reinforcement for my cognition, the Doman, and that AP Pebble to a total of 10MP
That left me with 45MP for well... everything else.
[Should be enough, I guess.]
I adjusted the shotgun strapped to my back and stepped forward.
I picked one of the thirty-four tunnels completely at random before plunging deeper into the dark.
The heavy dampness of the narrower stone walls closed in around me, my mind automatically pulled up the monster entry Mimi had shoved in my face back at the guild.
I recited the horrific stats like a grim, protective mantra while my boots scuffed softly against the dirt.
Tier 1 with extreme aggression and absolutely zero sense of self-preservation. They could regenerate lost limbs in a matter of hours. And worst of all, they traveled in massive, overwhelming swarms.
The Guild’s math was brutally simple: if you saw a single goblin, you were mathematically guaranteed to be standing near at least a hundred and ninety-nine more.
But the sheer, suffocating numbers weren’t even the main issue here. It was the biological warfare.
A single bite or scratch could transmit Goblin Frenzy, a viral agent that would violently hijack a practitioner’s mana core and overclock it until it physically ruptured inside their gut.
Meanwhile, simply getting their infected blood in my eyes or mouth would hit me with Goblin’s Fester, rapidly rotting my immune system and turning me into a contagious, pus-leaking biohazard.
And that didn’t even touch on their horrifying, parasitic reproduction cycle. Since the entire species was born male, they forcibly used females of other races to breed.
I aggressively shoved that specific thought into a locked mental box. I was a dude, so I don’t have to worry about getting dragged off into the dark for that particular nightmare.
But getting pinned to the floor, ripped apart, and eaten alive by hundreds of highly infectious gremlins absolutely was.
I stopped dead in the middle of the tunnel, dragging my free hand down my face.
[I am a literal idiot...] I realized, feeling a sudden, cold wave of embarrassment wash over me.
It had just clicked that I was willingly walking into a highly infectious biohazard zone without a single cure on my person.
[I really should have bought an antidote for this garbage hours ago.]
I let out a heavy sigh, staring up at the damp ceiling. "System? Do we have a quick fix for magical rabies?"
-Ding!
Item: Cleansing Potion (Grade-9)
Description: A dilution of water utilized during the Sanctification Ritual in the name of Lady Sera, Goddess of Heroes.
Purges foreign pathogens and aggressively cleanses the physical vessel.
Price: 150 Credits.
Would you like to authorize this purchase?
"Yeah, buy it," I muttered, shaking my head.
-Ding!
{Item transferred to Inventory. Remaining Balance: 187 Credits.}
I had barely let out a long breath of relief when-
-AAAHHH-!
A raw, agonized scream of a man ripped through the cavern ahead, echoing violently off the stone walls.
"Shit!"
A rational human being with even an ounce of self-preservation would have immediately turned around and sprinted in the exact opposite direction.
The logic was painfully simple: running toward a dying man meant running straight into the swarm of at least two hundred infectious monsters that were currently killing him.
But before logic, intellect, or basic common sense could even fully register the fatal math of the situation... or rather before I let it, I slammed all 45 remaining MP into Ice reinforcement before-
-Boom-!
I shot forward, kicking up sprays of frozen dirt with every step.