Chapter 08 – Skill Gathering (1/2)

After a split second, the lights came back.

I jolted upright.

The lights had never flickered or faded or anything since I first found this dungeon. There was no reason why such a thing should happen. They were one of the constants of the dungeon as far as I knew after all.

I was nervous, but I had to know what happened.

Slowly, I crept along the side of the fountain pedestal and looked around.

At a glance, there wasn't anything wrong. The room hadn't changed, nor had the fountain. But as I looked, I realized there was a difference. The fountain I was in should've been one I had only just visited, yet it looked clean. There wasn't any traces of dust on it anywhere.

Not only that, but as I stood up and got out from under the water curtain, there wasn't any trace of any dirt or dust anywhere. There should've been footsteps in the dust on the floor when I entered and exited the room, but there wasn't.

It was only then I noticed something that definitely shouldn't have been there: my things.

I found several piles of various drops on leather hides laid out on the floor along with a carpet made from rabbit fur.

It looked exactly like my home base, but that should've been impossible. I should've been on the fourth floor fountain, yet everything suggested that I was at the first floor fountain.

Carefully, one step at a time, I got out from the fountain and checked everything to see if it wasn't a hallucination or something.

I felt like I was pressured to the point where I really would've started to hallucinate my home.

Everything I touched seemed real. There was no indication that any of it was fake, no matter how hard I tried.

But what was most important wasn't what was inside of my home, but outside of it.

My nerves had been frayed to the limit, so my steps were unsteady as I slowly made my way to the dungeon side of my home and passed through the winding hallway.

At the end, I was forced to close my eyes due to how bright it got, but once I get used to the light, what spread out ahead of me was the familiar sight of the prairie maze where I spent so much time hunting.

My heart was pounding in my chest as I stared. Drool started to overflow, but I didn't have the mental capacity to do anything about it, because all I could think about was...

(FOOD!)

Before I knew it, was was in a mad dash, looking for prey.

Three turns later, there was a wolf. The same type of brown wolf that I had spent hunting all before I entered the second floor.

Without any mental capacity to slow down the slightest, I pounced on the wolf, wrapped my arms around it's tough bristling fur, and bit down with all my might.

The momentum of my leap knocked the creature down and we rolled on the ground until we came to a stop.

If my fangs didn't have a death grip on the back of it's neck, it would've been a heartwarming scene.

But I was too hungry to worry about such a thing, as I greedily sucked up the delicious blood that seeped from the wolf's wound.

The monster was small, and thus the quantity of blood it had was also small. I wasn't satisfied, but being even a little satiated brought the biggest smile I could make onto my face.

With the feeling of having sprouted wings, I raced around from one monster to the next until I could barely move from how bloated I felt, but the smile never left my face once.

I wasn't sure how much time I had spent, but it was a genuine struggle to get back home. My body felt heavy, and it was difficult to walk well. Though any monsters that I happened to meet were all ended swiftly with a single swipe of my claws.

The drops were left where they appeared. I felt like if I reached down to get them, I wouldn't be able to stand up again. My belly was so bloated I thought that if someone saw, they'd think I was pregnant. Though maybe they'd run screaming in terror first since in the latter half of my feeding spree I got pretty sloppy and let blood splatter and drip onto me as I fed. Now that I was so full, I didn't even bother eating and just killed the monsters that I encountered in the easiest ways I could. Due to that, I was pretty much entirely covered in blood.

The fact that the suicidal monsters kept rushing only to be split into two and burst their insides on me by my claws didn't help.

But I was a vampire. Being covered in blood wasn't actually that bad of a feeling, though it started to get annoying once it started to dry.

”...I'm the blood princess...hehehe...urp”

I started to laugh at my stupid joke before it felt like I put too much pressure on my stomach and almost threw up.

It wasn't good etiquette to throw up your meals...though in a sense I've been playing with my food for the last bit, so it was kinda too late for that.

(Someday, it would be nice to be able to have a bath of blood)

There was some negative images of a certain Hungarian countess who did just that, but it felt much more appropriate for a vampire to do that.

Once I got back, I had a slow soak in the fountain. My body handled the cold water surprisingly well, but a warm bath would've been really nice. That was something I needed to figure out.

As I relaxed and digested my meal, I thought back to what had happened earlier.

I was at the fourth floor fountain, then suddenly everything went dark, and when I could see again, I was at the first floor fountain.

Such a thing had never happened before. I've bathed in the fountain quite a few times already, but there wasn't any indication of being sent to a different fountain while doing so.

The only difference was that this time it was after I visited a different fountain. Though I did bathe in both the second and third floor fountains and nothing happened.

Was it unique to the fourth floor fountain?

But it didn't look any different from the others, so that theory was pretty weak. It was more likely that it worked with any fountain, rather than specific ones.

Then the only thing that was different was...

(I wished to come back to the first floor...?)

It was a theory worth testing.

”I wish I was on the fourth floor”

While leaning my back against the fountain's lip, I mumbled out those word without much thought.

Sudden, everything went dark making me jerk up before the light came back a split second later.

I stood up and looked around. Everything I left on the first floor was gone, but now there were the things I left behind on the fourth floor.

Now that I confirmed not only that it was possible to move between fountains, but what was needed to make it happen, a smile erupted on my face. Everything I went through, all the hunger and suffering, were things that didn't need to happen. But on the flip side, it meant that no matter what happened, no matter how the later floors were set up, I didn't have to worry about food, since I could always come back to eat.

But I did need to know more about this teleporting, so I started to play around with it, moving between different floors and trying out different commands.

What I learned was that I could move between any fountain I've visited, so no cheating floors. I also discovered that there was a lot of leeway when it came to teleporting around. It worked as long as I was touching the fountain, and any command that was reasonably clear of my destination and intent was enough to activate it.

With those discoveries packed in the back of my mind, I stored my loot back on my first floor home and continued deeper into the dungeon...after having one last bite to eat.

It turned out that the golems were pretty similar to the skeletons from the floor before when it came to feeding.

They were tasty, like eating lightly flavoured rock candies, but not too satisfying, also like eating rock candies.

The biggest difference was that I had to suck out their essence directly from their cores inside their central body. It wasn't possible without first opening up the hard shell. It was kinda like eating lobsters, but wasn't as rewarding.

Otherwise though, there wasn't anything remarkable about the floor.

The third floor gave me a few new skills, particularly [Bow Technique] and [Sense Presence]. The latter was kinda nice, but there wasn't anything that actually tried to hide at this point, so it went to waste for the time being.

The fourth floor gave me [Strong Arm] and [Tenacious Body]. The first raised my [Strength] and the latter [Constitution]. Golems were annoying to farm, but the passive skills were nice.

In addition, I noticed that the walls often had cracks and something sparkled in between. A close examination simply revealed it to be some sort of metal in the walls, rather than a hidden room or something, so I lost interest. The golems were already dropping large stones, crystal clusters and lumps of clay. I examined each drop a little. The first was a light grey and a bit grainy in texture. The crystal was smooth and hard, and the clay was hard with very little moisture, but felt more like modelling clay rather than some ordinary clay from the ground.

Out of curiosity, I tried licking them as well. The first one tasted as I imagined plaster would taste like, and lightly fizzled in my mouth as I tried to spit out the bits that came off on my tongue. The crystals tasted like salt. So much so that I desperately wiped my tongue trying to get the overpowering taste out of my mouth. The clay simply tasted like dirt.

I regretted tasting the last one, but the first two were informative, so overall it was a net positive. Now I only had to find a use for them to make my suffering worth it.

The same pattern continued for the most part. I'd enter a floor, feed and loot what I can and continue to the next floor.

Occasionally there was a particularly interesting floor.

The eleventh floor was one like that. The structure was new to me as it wasn't maze-like in any sense.

What first greeted me was a pair of monsters standing in front of gateway.

The monsters themselves looked like bipedal dogs wielding crooked metal spears and wearing armour made from roughly patching hardened leather together. Kobalds, if my memory served me right.

Of course, the second they noticed me, they acted in the usual manner and charged me without considering the difference in our strength.

Beyond the heavy wooden door was a small empty passage with another door. Past that was a larger hall with several kobalds outfitted in various ways.

At first I saw it as an easy and simple battle, but after the second monster went down, a sharp pain in my shoulder informed me that there was more than met the eye in that room. Above, instead of simply a ceiling, there was a second floor balcony overseeing the room I was fighting in, and there, there were a pair of kobalds aiming their bows at me.

Once I realized that, the fight was simple, but the fact that the floor was set up in that way shook me.

The rooms themselves weren't set up like usual. They weren't simply branching halls with side rooms that either had a treasure chest, enemies, traps, or were simply empty. All the rooms seemed to have a purpose, though there were tons of duplicate rooms, as if they were made to pad out content.

What was especially interesting was the fact that the monsters that appeared in those rooms were also appropriate for those rooms. Kobalds wearing chef outfits were in the kitchens, ones in leather aprons and wielding a hammer were in the smitheries, ones in white aprons over robes were surrounded by bottles filled with mysterious liquids.

But not only that, like in the second room past the initial gates, there were defensive rooms as well that contained strategically placed monsters optimized to ambush explorers like myself.

Frankly, if this wasn't in the middle of a dungeon, I'd have thought I accidentally wandered into a kobald fortress or something. Well, the layout itself didn't make much sense, and there were too many duplicate rooms in the first place. No fortress needed seven weaving rooms and six tanneries.

But while the design of this floor was unique, the most interesting part about it was the monsters themselves.

It might've been the first time I saw kobalds, but that wasn't what made them so unusual. It was the skills I got from them.

At first there were a bunch of ones that used magic. It wasn't the first time I got magic related skills, but the floors where they appeared, the skills were held by monsters that didn't have even vaguely humanoid characteristics.