The door to the safe room sealed behind Kaizer with a soft click. As with each of the previous floors rooms, An exit door could be seen as usual. The ominous feeling that exiting would no longer allow him to continue prevailed.
The air inside was cool and clean, damp stone without the sour edge of burnt silk. The vein-light in the walls ran in neat lines, brighter than the corridors, and the floor was bare rock without a single strand stuck to it. Kaizer stood where he was for a moment and breathed, slow and careful. The raw scrape in his throat eased into something tolerable. It still hurt, but it wasn’t getting worse.
He set the partizan spear against the wall and rolled his shoulders. His forearms ached from hours of grip and correction. His wrappings were peppered with little punctures and dragged streaks of soot. He pressed a thumb to a bite mark on his calf through the cloth and felt tenderness underneath.
Painful, sure. It had been painful the whole way. It still hadn’t been dangerous.
Kaizer stared at his hands, flexed his fingers, then reached into the bracelet and pulled out a waterskin. The first mouthful tasted like leather and warm water, but every gulp helped. He sat against the wall, still reeling at his stupidity from Floor 1.
“Yeah,” he muttered. “Great plan, genius.”
He closed his eyes and tried to reach towards his instinct again. Nothing happened, so he didn’t dwell on it. Instead, he looked towards his core. He sat and meditated. When he had broken through in the tutorial, he had felt the essence pathways in his body grow stronger and more stable. He knew he had to keep working on those pathways but he also didn’t want to neglect his core.
Kaizer made some decisions. Before continuing, it was time to allocate his accumulated stat points. Next, he was going to experiment with these beast cores he had been gathering… Surely there was something he could do with them. Even if he just ate one, maybe there would be some benefits.
He checked his body and noticed that Instinctive Regeneration was hard at work. The small bite marks and wounds he had gathered over the last few floors were already almost fully healed. Thinking back on the floors, poison was slowly becoming an increasing factor. It started out with Huntsmen, non-venomous to humans and moved through some basic poisonous spiders, such as the Golden Orb Weavers and the most annoying, the St Andrews Cross Spiders. The giant mutated versions of these buggers had webs literally everywhere. They fought defensively and while not dangerous were just an absolute pain in his ass.
Knowing poison was an increasing factor, he focused his points in bringing up his endurance, hopefully making it harder for the fangs to pierce his skin, or at the very least, making it easier for him to process and deal with the poison.
He opened his status screen and smiled.
==================================
Name: Kaizer Harth
Race: Human (Beast Touched)
Class: Chimeric Warrior (Epic – Level 32)
Profession: Core Harvester (Uncommon – Level 29)
Core Rank: F
Essence Capacity: Rank F
----------------------------------
ATTRIBUTES
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Strength: 72 (+19)
Endurance: 77 (+10)
Agility: 69 (+12)
Perception: 72 (+6)
Mind: 65 (+1)
Instinct: 119
Synchronisation: 64
Free Points: 0
==================================
“Alright,” he said. “That’ll do.”
Kaizer leaned the spear back against the wall and reached into the bracelet again, this time for what he’d come here to check. One by one he brought cores out and set them on the stone in front of him. Small ones to one side, heavier ones closer. He checked the details of the boss cores he had recently extracted.
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Mutated Huntsman Core (Common)
====================================
A semi-stable core with skittering essence. Can be used for essence cultivation and alchemy.
Core Rank: Initiate
Attributes:
? Agility like essence resides within
====================================
====================================
Mutated Weaver Core (Uncommon)
====================================
A stable core with flowing essence. Can be used for essence cultivation and alchemy.
Core Rank: F
Attributes:
? A pure flowing like essence resides within
====================================
Unfortunately, Kaizer had failed to extract the cores of the Floor 3 and 4 bosses. He had tried to stabilise them on extraction using his Seal Core ability but unfortunately, the cores still disintegrated in his hands. Thinking back, Kaizer spent the time discovering the mistakes he had made. He noticed cracks and scratches in each core. Perhaps he had gotten too close when cutting the cores out. Perhaps he had damaged the beasts too much before attempting an extraction.
Kaizer closed his eyes and reviewed his extraction process. He had first cut into the beasts heart, then removed anything that was in the way of him pulling the core out, such as with the spiders, the chitinous exoskeleton in the area. He then slowly pried the core out of the body. This was the hardest part, these cores are often attached to essence channels. These channels, if ruptured incorrectly could damage the core. This is what had happened to the Floor 3 boss. He had pulled too quickly and the core had essentially shattered.
It was time for Kaizer to take a leap. To actually find a use for his haul instead of treating it like trophies and numbers.
He looked down at the two cores on the stone. The weaver core sat there with that smooth, heavy calm to it. The huntsman core felt twitchy even without him touching it, essence inside it shifting in short bursts that didn’t settle.
Kaizer picked up the huntsman core and turned it in his fingers. It was warm. Not heat like a fire, just the kind of warmth that prickled against his skin. He held it near his chest and focused for a few seconds, trying to feel how it wanted to move.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
The answer was messy. It pushed back against his attention, skittering, resisting any neat shape.
“Common,” he muttered. “Figures.”
He could crush it and try to force the essence out, but that felt like wasting it. He could “seal” it again, but he’d already learned what happened when a core wanted to fall apart.
Kaizer’s jaw tightened.
“Alright,” he said quietly. “Let’s see what you do from the inside.”
He lifted the core to his mouth.
It wasn’t easy. The thing was dense and slick in a way that made his throat want to refuse it on principle. He took a breath, steadied himself, then forced it down in one controlled swallow.
The core slid past and dropped into his stomach with a heavy, wrong weight, like he’d swallowed a smooth stone. Kaizer sat still and waited. Nothing happened for a heartbeat.
Then heat bloomed around the core, not a burst, but a steady burn that spread outward in slow waves. It didn’t stab. It pressed. It made his abdomen tighten as if his body wanted to clamp down and stop it moving anywhere.
Kaizer put a hand on his stomach and breathed through his nose.
“Easy,” he muttered. “You’re not going to melt me.”
The burn strengthened, then settled into a rhythm. The core didn’t dissolve. It sat there, whole, and began to feed essence outward in thin streams, like a slow leak that wasn’t a leak at all. Kaizer felt it searching for somewhere to go, probing at the edges of his essence channels the same way water finds cracks.
His throat worked once, involuntary, and he swallowed it down.
He closed his eyes and pulled his focus inward.
At first the huntsman essence hit his channels like friction. It didn’t flow clean, it tried to dominate. It wanted motion, speed, constant shifting, and his body wasn’t built to accept it. Heat crawled from stomach to chest, chest to shoulder, a line of burn that followed the essence as it pressed into the first pathway.
Kaizer clenched his jaw and guided it.
He couldn’t force it, he focused on directing it through his channels.
He adjusted the rate by breath, slow pressure with each exhale, holding it back when it surged, easing it forward when it resisted. The pain didn’t vanish. It changed. It stopped being a flare and became something he could work with, a steady warning that told him when the essence was pushing too hard.
He felt the pathways respond. Not growing, not yet, but stabilising around the flow. The burn dulled at the edges as his channels stopped fighting and started accommodating.
The core in his stomach stayed heavy. It kept feeding.
Kaizer kept managing it.
Minute by minute, the huntsman essence reached further, and the pressure at the centre of his body tightened as it approached his core. When it finally touched, his core didn’t accept it all at once. It pushed back, held its shape, and Kaizer let it. He guided the essence into a slow orbit around the outside instead of trying to ram it in.
He sat against the wall, sweat building at his hairline, breathing controlled, hands steady.
The core in his stomach fed. His channels carried. His core resisted and then, in tiny amounts, took what it could.
Kaizer opened his eyes and stared at the stone floor.
“Yeah,” he whispered. “This is going to take a while.”
Kaizer let his head rest back against the stone and kept breathing until the worst of the burn stopped climbing. The core sat in his stomach like a weight he couldn’t shift, feeding essence out in slow threads that kept trying to run faster than his body wanted. Every time it surged, his channels tightened and he had to rein it back in with focus and patience. It wasn’t a fight he could win by being tougher. It was a fight he could only win by not rushing.
He kept at it until sweat cooled on his skin and his pulse stopped thudding in his ears. The heat never vanished, but it settled into something steady. The core was still there. He could feel it, heavy and present, feeding outward at a pace he could manage if he stayed aware.
Kaizer exhaled slowly and opened his eyes.
“Alright,” he muttered. “You stay there. I’ll deal with you later.”
The core in his stomach pulsed. He felt essence peeling off it, slowly but surely.
Kaizer sat with it for another minute, long enough that the worst of the pressure settled, then reached for the waterskin and drank. The water felt like cool relief as it trickled down his throat.
He looked down at the remaining cores and put them back into his bracelet of holding. There wasn’t much he could do with them, at least not yet.
Kaizer pushed himself to his feet and rolled his shoulders. The heat inside him remained, low and steady, like a reminder. He could still move. He could still fight. He just had to keep part of his attention on not letting the flow spike out of control.
He exhaled and reached for his harvester’s knife. He checked the edge and balance. He’d have to look at getting better tools eventually but for now he’d make do. His focus felt… sharper.
The System chimed.
[Ding! Congratulations, Beast Extraction (Inferior) has upgraded to: Beast Extraction (Uncommon)]
Nice, He thought. He opened to check the skill.
====================================
Skill: Beast Extraction (Uncommon)
====================================
You excel at gaining additional resources from beast-like creatures. Your stable hands help when extracting cores from all beings.
Effect:
? Increased harvesting of resources
? Slight increase to the stability of core extractions
====================================
It’s not much but it’ll do, he thought to himself.
There was no point in wasting any more time. He stood, walked to the door and opened it.
The air changed immediately. Colder. Wetter. It smelled like damp stone and living things. The corridor widened into a long tunnel. Silk wasn’t just draped here. It was laid in thick anchor lines, stretched into bridges and sheets that hung like walls. The vein-light in the rock felt thinner too, swallowed by distance.
Kaizer stepped into the tunnel and waded through the webs.
The warren opened into a huge space. An absolutely gigantic cavern. Depth so far that he couldn’t see the end. Hollows where water pooled. Pale fungus on the stone. Patches of green pushing out of cracks, clustered herbs that didn’t belong underground but were definitely real. Movement could be seen everywhere.
Giant spiders spun webs. They were larger than any spider he had ever seen. Larger even than a man. Below, beasts and insects alike trawled through damp moss and grass. Kaizer stayed in the tunnel for a few extra seconds and let his eyes pick out the structure. The webs weren’t random. They formed paths across the canopies. Some ran high, thick enough to serve as bridges. Others ran low across the rock in fine, tight lines that caught the vein-glow only when he shifted his head. The cavern floor wasn’t a single field either. It broke into shallow basins where water sat and moss grew, and the herbs clumped around those damp seams like they were competing for the same cracks.
He stepped forward and immediately felt silk drag at his wrappings. He didn’t push through it. He used the spear shaft to peel the strands off and clear his shoulders, then moved again, slower this time, boots placed on bare rock where he could. A tight line crossed in front of his shin. He stopped, nudged it with the spear tip, and watched the tension run up and away into the dark. The strand wasn’t thick. It was placed where a distracted step would catch and pull weight sideways.
Kaizer followed the line with his eyes until it vanished into a seam, then looked up.
A spider bigger than him moved along the underside of a web bridge, legs spread wide across multiple anchor cords. It didn’t rush. It paused, tested a line with one leg, and shifted sideways in a short, controlled burst. Kaizer focused on it long enough to get a read.
====================================
Titan Web-Stalker Construct
====================================
Level: 29
Rank: F
A territorial dungeon spider created for ambush and lateral movement. Whilst its poison is mild, it can still paralyse in short bursts.
====================================
He looked around, noticing traps everywhere. Fine tensions of silk crossed shallow depressions, anchored into rock. They were placed specifically to form both tripwires and pressure points. Crude traps, but an unsuspecting person could trigger them.
Kaizer shifted his stance and dragged the spear tip lightly along one of the lines.
The strand quivered and tightened.
Up above, the Titan Web-Stalker went still. Alert. Its legs changed angle by a fraction. Its weight loaded.
Kaizer stopped touching the strand and let it relax again. He watched as the Titan Web-Stalker continued down its path… lifeless.
“So… nothing here is actually real” he muttered. “Good to know.”
It seemed that this floor had multiple ways to approach it. He could charge in blind and trigger traps to kill these constructs, but where would that leave the boss. Alternatively, he could play it safe and be careful. Only triggering traps where needed.
He took two careful steps out of the tunnel mouth, placing his boots in bare patches between strands, and stopped at the edge of the cavern’s first open pocket. A cluster of herbs grew close ahead, fat leaves and pale stems clumped around a crack where water seeped through. He could see another spider close to that patch, smaller than the Titan Web-Stalker but still large enough to be a pain to fight. Something else moved through the moss below it, a beetle with a glossy back, also larger than it had any right to be. He watched as it triggered the web strand in front of the spider. The spider reacted immediately. Pouncing and killing the beetle.
Kaizer’s stomach lurched as the fangs sank deep into the beetle, tearing it apart limb by limb. He turned to ignore the spider and slowly made way to a set of herbs in front of him. He crouched at the edge of the herb patch and kept his weight on his heels, spear angled across his body so the butt stayed on rock and not on any of the fine strands. The leaves were thick and waxy, the stems pale, almost translucent near the base where the damp had soaked into them. He didn’t know what any of it was, but he would work that out later. He pinched one stem, tested resistance, and pulled slow, keeping the roots intact. Dirt came up with it, dark and wet. He slid it into his bracelet without looking away from the moss line.
The huntsman core pulsed once in his stomach, a low surge that spread faster than it had a minute ago. Kaizer drew a controlled breath and smoothed it back down with focus. He didn’t stop gathering. He kept one part of his attention on the flow, the rest on the webs and the movement in front of him. The burn settled again into that steady pressure that told him the core was still feeding.
A second spider shifted closer to the herb patch as he took the next plant, legs stepping along a web bridge that avoided the moss entirely. It didn’t even notice him. It circled the edge of the open pocket and simply continued its patrol along the web. By now, any real spider would have already attacked him.
He backed half a step, careful, and watched the spider twitch forward. He looked down, his foot had slid against a web strand, tightening it.
The reaction was immediate. The smaller spider went still, legs flaring slightly, bracing for an opening that never came. Above, the Titan Web-Stalker had paused again, its body angle shifting by a fraction as it recalculated. Kaizer released the tension on his foot. The creatures returned to movement with the same blank rhythm as before.
He didn’t like the “construct” label, but the behaviour matched it. Trigger, reaction, reset. It seemed that as long as he didn’t fall into a trap, the spiders would do nothing… think nothing. He bent back down and continued pulling herbs. He wasn’t going to let resources go to waste.
