Chrysalis

Rushing forward in one great leap, I plunge my entire body into the atmosphere of the fifth. Despite the thrill of exploration, of taking part in another adventure in the Dungeon, I can’t say this is a pleasant experience. If I were to liken to anything, it’s like sticking my head straight into a toilet.

A toilet filled with acid.

My entire body burns. My carapace is on fire, my antennae are frying away, the joints in my legs are in immediate pain. Worst of all are my eyes. They are immediately attacked, consumed by the toxins which never relent in their attack.

Even more disturbing than the physical discomfort is the feeling I get from the mana. It’s invading my body constantly, those fingers of poison stretching inside, attempting to corrupt me from within. It’s… awful.

Yep… this is absolutely awful. No wonder people consider this place an uninhabitable wasteland of death. It is an uninhabitable wasteland of death.

I trigger my healing gland, welcoming the sensation of the icy cold healing fluid rushing throughout my frame, pushing back the damage caused by the environment of the fifth. At the same time, I put my brains to work, seizing the invading mana and purging it before it can do much damage or begin to propagate itself. With these measures in place, it still absolutely sucks to be here, and I probably couldn’t maintain it indefinitely. Putting aside how absurdly painful it is, without sufficient Will from the Vestibule, I’d eventually run out of healing to constantly repair myself.

Forward, forward, forward! I press on, eager to break through to the end of this entrance and take a glimpse of the true fifth stratum. It really tests my grip, the walls are far slipperier down here than they were in the fourth, but I hold firm and manage not to fall.

the condition I’m in, I don’t see any monsters in the tunnel itself, which I’ll take as a win. After carefully scuttling down the

I lay eyes on the fifth stratum, and all I can

less like a chamber and more like an enormous tunnel. Hundreds of metres across, perhaps even a kilometre, and just as deep, it’s massive, on par with some of the largest I saw in the first and second. Filling that space is the most disgusting kind of ‘life’ that I think I’ve ever

green mucus. Just… like… a river of it. I can’t even say it’s flowing… it looks more like it's seeping. Within that thick sludge, I can see eel-like creatures slithering over each other, covered in suckers and mouths rising up every

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slime, some connecting the ceiling to the floor, each emanating a visible aura of decay. Swathes of mould in bright, sickly colours carpet the surfaces, rippling as something within moves through them. Or perhaps the mould itself

thick haze of yellow-green…

here and there. A frog monster with an absurdly large maw prowls around, bright blue venom dripping from between its fangs. Fluttering here and there, surprisingly, are butterfly-looking creatures, each

doing the exact same thing: spewing a dense cloud of toxic mana directly into the tunnel. As I watch them closer, I see that my first assumption wasn’t quite right. They are sucking in mana, and then expelling it, before repeating the process. When looking at the flow of energy throughout the whole tunnel, it's almost like the

down here any more, and turn around. I trigger my healing gland for the second time as I climb upwards, and it does a decent job of battling against the acidity burning away at my body. Repelling the mana is taking far more of my mental energy than I expected, with almost half of my mind-constructs dedicated to the job. Since not even a single mote of the stuff can be allowed to exist within me, the minds have to work super hard scouring for every tiny trace of energy. If I was more sensitive to mana, it probably wouldn’t be

I eventually break through the barrier back up into the fourth

moly. It’s