The glow of the teleportation array lit up the thirtieth floor of the Blood Fiend Dungeon, casting a bright light across the entire level.
Lu Mao was the first to step out of the formation. Looking up to survey his surroundings, he couldn't help but raise an eyebrow.
This entire floor had been hollowed out, the rock walls cut with clean precision. The ground was paved with gravel and sand, and the ceiling rose dozens of feet high, embedded with several fist-sized light crystals that cast a soft, even glow downward.
Looking out, a dozen or so small wooden cabins and a few low stone bunkers lay scattered across the space. Wisps of cooking smoke rose from the cabin roofs, and dried herbs and strips of cured meat hung on the outer walls of the bunkers.
If not for the heavy layers of rock pressing down overhead, Lu Mao would have almost thought he had wandered into the outskirts of some remote, peaceful village.
A few skeletons were busy working in the open space beside a bunker. One of them, carrying a bundle of timber taller than itself, walked calmly across the gravel path. As it passed Lu Mao, it even stepped aside to give him room, the two green flames flickering in its hollow eye sockets seeming to size up the visitor.
Another skeleton squatted beside a wooden cabin, holding a small iron hammer in its bony fingers. It clinked and clanged as it reinforced the rivets on a doorframe, its movements so skillful it hardly seemed like a mindless skeleton.
A few more sat around a large iron pot where unidentified tubers and herbs boiled, sending up clouds of steam. One of the skeletons stirred the soup with a long-handled wooden spoon and even leaned in to sniff it—Lu Mao wasn't sure how a skeleton without a nose could smell, but it certainly went through the motions.
“These skeletons were all personally converted by me,” Sorge said as he walked forward, his staff tapping lightly against the ground. The working skeletons immediately paused and bowed slightly toward him.
“Their intelligence is preserved quite well. You don't have to worry about their daily lives; they can build houses, cook, and farm.”
Sorge waved his hand at them and looked back at Lu Mao, a hint of pride undisguised in his tone.
“This floor is my private domain. Over the years, adventurers haven't dared to enter this dungeon, which has left me in peace and quiet.”
“You certainly have a lot of skeletons here,” Lu Mao remarked.
Lu Mao looked out. Skeletons were walking between the wooden cabins, beside the bunkers, and even at the entrance of the pitch-black mine in the distance. At a rough estimate, there were at least a hundred of them.
He ran a quick scan. Most of these skeletons were Mid-Tier monsters, with very few High-Tier or Elite ones among them.
“Of course,” Sorge replied.
Sorge gently twirled his staff. “They only take orders from me and are unaffected by the dungeon riots. During the annual outbreaks, the dungeon's monsters instinctively rush outward. This is because the sealing formation's suppression of the monsters weakens during the riot, causing magicules to overflow and stimulating their instincts to spread outward.”
“But my skeletons are driven by the power of contracts and do not rely on the dungeon's magicules. That is why during past riots, they went about their business here as usual.”
“This riot is different,” Mayfield said.
Having come along with the group, Mayfield planted his staff on the ground, its base sinking into the gravel and kicking up a few stone chips. “Three dungeons are rioting simultaneously, and all of them are at least ten days ahead of schedule. An anomaly of this scale cannot be as simple as a loose seal.”
Sorge fell silent for a moment, then raised his hand in a gesture. The soul crystal at the tip of his staff lit up, and the skeletons scattered in various corners stopped their work at the same time.
The one carrying timber set it down, the one repairing the doorframe laid aside its hammer, and the one cooking soup neatly rested its wooden spoon on the rim of the pot. All of them turned toward Sorge.
Over a hundred skeletons stood quietly in place, the eerie green flames in their eye sockets flickering as they awaited their next command.
“Pack up your valuables. We are preparing to depart,” Sorge said calmly.
The skeletons immediately sprang into action, lining up in two neat columns on the gravel road, their steps perfectly synchronized.
Sorge sat on a bone chair carried by four skeletons, resting his staff against the armrest. With his jaw tilted slightly upward, he looked very much like an old general leading his troops to war.
The group began their journey toward the surface. As they ascended from the thirtieth floor, the rock walls on both sides of the passage gradually grew rougher, and the light crystals became sparser. A familiar, putrid, metallic sweetness began to drift through the air.
Lu Mao was all too familiar with this scent; he encountered it every time he entered a dungeon for a commission. However, today's stench was far more intense than usual, almost as if someone had overturned a massive bucket of rotting meat in the passage.
Novia walked at the very front of the line, having already assumed her half-combat dragonkin form—her arms were covered in silvery-white dragon scales, and her vertical pupils gleamed coldly in the dim light.
Her dragon tail lashed occasionally, sweeping against the rock walls on either side of the passage and leaving shallow gouges behind.
Lumu followed close behind. Although her tail was invisible under her Disguise, her slightly quickened pace suggested she was not as relaxed as she appeared.
Agrix and the troll brought up the rear.
Before they had climbed even two floors, a dark shadow suddenly darted out from the side of the passage.
It was a Mid-Tier monster covered in dark green scales—a Rockscale Lizard. Though normally ferocious, it usually possessed a shred of cunning instinct, observing its prey before deciding whether to strike.
Now, however, its eyes were completely bloodshot, and turbid drool dripped from the corners of its mouth. Without any probing or hesitation, it lunged straight at the skeleton soldier walking on the outer flank of the group, biting down hard on the skeleton's arm bone. Its scales scraped against the rock wall, throwing off a shower of sparks.
The skeleton soldier swung its axe back, hacking into the lizard's neck. The bone blade sliced through the scales, spraying dark green blood everywhere, yet the Rockscale Lizard still tried to lunge forward. It was only when another skeleton pierced its eye socket from the side that it finally convulsed and collapsed.
The entire exchange took less than two breaths, clean and efficient. Yet even after the Rockscale Lizard fell, its limbs continued to paw the ground unconsciously and its mouth snapped open and closed, as though its brain were already dead but its body remained consumed by an uncontrollable urge to bite.
The further up they went, the more frequent such occurrences became.
A putrid giant rat covered in pustules lunged down from the ceiling of the passage, only to be stomped into a meat patty by Novia. Even so, it still tried to scratch at her leg armor with its remaining front claw.
Several goblins clad in tattered leather armor rushed out of a side path. Carrying no weapons, they charged bare-handed at the skeleton column, only to be sent flying by the shield-bearing skeletons in the front row. They crashed against the rock walls and slid down, but after struggling for a moment, they scrambled back up, letting out incoherent growls.
There was even a near-Elite-tier Stone Golem. A construct that should have been driven by a magic core, it had somehow also charged into the passage. Red light flashed wildly in its eye sockets as it slammed headfirst into a shield-bearing skeleton's large shield, cracking the surface.
Novia shattered its torso with a single kick, yet its fallen upper body continued to hammer the ground with its fists, stopping completely only after four or five strikes.
“Something is wrong,” Mayfield muttered.
Mayfield knelt beside a goblin corpse, drawing out an extremely faint, dark purple mist of light from its wound.
The mist wrapped around his fingers twice before dispersing. He looked up, his expression growing even grimmer. “The magicules inside these monsters seem to have been disrupted by some external force, frying their entire nervous systems into a tangled mess. Even a construct like the Stone Golem was affected, which means any entity that relies on magicules to function will be swept up in this.”
“But my skeletons remain unaffected,” Sorge said, walking over to his side while leaning on his staff.
His skeleton army was methodically clearing the battlefield, dragging the monster corpses to the sides of the passage. The damaged skeletons retreated to the rear of the line on their own, retrieving bone powder from their supply packs to patch the cracks in their broken bones, their movements steady and practiced.
“The driving core of a skeleton is my mental imprint, not a magicule circuit. This proves that the signal only acts on instinctual reactions at the magicule level, bypassing entities bound by a mental contract.”
Lu Mao stood to the side in silence, his mind rapidly piecing all the clues together.
“Could someone be using the sealing formation to reverse-control the monsters?” Lu Mao suggested.
“They seem to understand the dungeon's spell formation structure very well. They turned the formation that was originally meant to suppress the monsters into a tool to control them.”
Mayfield stood up and looked at Lu Mao, a hint of approval in his eyes, though his tone was grave.
“I was thinking the same thing. This perfectly explains why three dungeons are rioting at the same time, and why the outbreak began ten days ahead of schedule. It is highly likely that someone is actively manipulating the nodes of the sealing formations, releasing the suppressing power in reverse to artificially engineer this riot. But if that is indeed the case, then our opponent is probably extremely powerful—far stronger than we anticipated.”
When they finally reached the third floor, the entire group fell into a brief silence.
Where the tavern once stood, only a sunken clearing remained. The entire tavern had been completely erased from the dungeon's map, leaving behind no rubble, no wood chips, no shattered remnants of a sign—not even a single wooden plank that had once belonged to the building.
Lu Mao stood at the edge of the clearing, an ominous premonition rising in his chest.
Just as Lumu was about to say something, the ground beneath their feet shook violently. A few loose stones cascaded down from the ceiling, and the entire passage began to sway back and forth as if gripped at both ends by an invisible, giant hand.
Lu Mao instinctively reached out to steady himself against the rock wall. The moment his palm touched the stone, he felt an incredibly violent surge of energy radiating outward from deep underground.
Then came a low, barely audible yet omnipresent rumble, like a great bell being struck miles beneath the earth's core.
Lumu whipped her head around to look at the entrance of the passage leading to the fourth floor, her pupils contracting slightly.
“This is... my Lord's—no! The core of the sealing formation has been breached.”
The ground shook violently once more, even more fiercely than before. Cracks spread upward along the rock walls, and chunks of stone began to rain down from above in sheets.
Mayfield used his staff to steady himself and shouted to the group, “Evacuate first! The structure here can't hold! If we stay any longer, we'll all be buried alive!”
Novia shattered a falling rock headed for her skull with a swipe of her claw, taking the lead to clear the path.
Agrix followed close behind, his bone wings folded tightly against his sides as his massive skeletal frame forced a path through the narrow passage.
Sorge commanded his skeleton army to tighten their formation. Over a hundred skeletons surged into the ascending tunnel like a tide, the sound of their footsteps and clattering bones echoing against the vibrating rock walls.
Dragged forward by the collar of his shirt by Lumu, Lu Mao ran as rocks continuously pelted down from above. With the violent waves of energy from beneath their feet continuing to push upward, he felt as though the entire passage were rising and falling like waves.
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