The Martial Unity

This was definitely a strange outcome. There were corpses on the floor that clearly died of natural causes that rotted normally. Furthermore, the skin of many of these corpses was sickly black.

"So the skins of these corpses that rot naturally and have been dead for quite some time were not the greenish-black like the others," Rui made an empirical observation. "That's interesting… That implies a correlation between them."

He glanced at the buildings. "Furthermore, these buildings were not constructed after the Shionel Dungeon was discovered. Not only is the age of the exterior worn away to a degree that is impossible to occur within a year but there's also an indication of erosion due to rain, which is absolutely impossible inside the Shionel Dungeon."

"So you're saying this isn't some strange feature of the floor, but that these buildings were constructed before Shionel Dungeon even came to exist, but wouldn't that mean…?" Kane frowned as the answer came to him.

"The town of Veril was a town that existed right outside the outskirts of the Shionel Confederation," Rui explained. "It used to occupy a place that is now occupied by the massive Shionel Dungeon. It was presumed that the town and all its inhabitants had been completely annihilated when the Dungeon erupted, as not a single trace, not even so much as a single brick from the entirety of the town had been found. People assumed that this meant that the town was utterly annihilated and crushed within the dungeon… There was even a large memorial honoring the deceased town and townspeople even if wasn't explicitly a part of the Shionel Confederation. However, if I'm not wrong, then this place is probably…"

Kane turned back to the corpse and the abandoned building with a dropped jaw. "And just like that, it became a dungeon floor? What are the odds, honestly?"

"I don't know," Rui admitted. "But it makes sense. The town would have had zero vegetation given that it was densely colonized, which meant that there was no vegetation in the village whose roots eventually reached the deep subterranean mine of esoteric mineral deposits, absorbing them and undergoing dungeonification. Thus the town as a whole was not overrun with roots immediately and instead got absorbed into the dungeon as a single piece."

"That's unbelievable, honestly," Kane sighed. "It's really hard to believe that despite being in the middle of everything, the town survived."

Rui remarked. "Survived is a strong

building of which only the foundations were intact, the many long-rotted corpses that clearly died painful deaths. The corpses were mangled and broken, some corpses had heads that were

that somehow survived being absorbed into the Shionel Dungeon. How does

before sighing. "The same way all the animals taken into the Shionel Dungeon became monsters. I can't believe it, but the mutations and physiological

explanation that made sense to Rui, he genuinely couldn't conceive of even a somewhat reasonable explanation asides from this. It also matched his senses being hampered when he tried to use them to gather information on the man's corpse,

had consumed whatever they found, and inadvertently started becoming like that?"

likely," Rui

"Can they be helped?"

entirely sure, but almost certainly not," Rui evaluated. From his understanding of esoteric medical technology, this level of mutation and poisoning of esoteric substances probably could not be accomplished. "At the very least, if there does exist some solution out there. It almost certainly cannot be applied to humans on such a large scale as such a solution would include prohibitively rare and important esoteric resources. The Shionel Confederation would never spare

"I see…" Kane sighed.

for them," Rui replied. "All of them must be suffering horrendously on the inside, even if it doesn't look like it. The least

can definitely agree with that," Kane stood up. "Let's do that before we plunder this entire

normal plans and harvested the floor of any esoteric yields that it had to offer. Yet, despite this, they both unanimously agreed to kill

are no different from monsters at this point, they'll resist and fight back. They probably will display aggression as well

they were