Ryan felt sick to his stomach. He had basically just sent Richard to his death, and it didn't sound like it was a good death. But what else was he supposed to do? Ryan could barely stand upright anymore, he had no shot against a literal cyborg. He had seen how strong he was on the way here, taking down every monster before it could even flinch.

  "I'm sorry..." Ryan closed his eyes, trying to calm himself down for a moment. But soon, he realised that he had something else to worry about. The corrupted piscette boy was gasping for air, or water, on the ground. Immediately, Ryan used the horn to create a bubble of water around him. If he was used to that dirty water in the tank, this might also be pretty rough, but it was better than not being able to breathe at all.

  "You're okay, don't worry," he smiled, trying to hide how nervous he was from the boy, "The bad men are gone, alright?"

  The boy... the dungeon itself looked back at Ryan with those milky white, dead eyes, tilting his head to the side.

  "Alright... I'm going to ask you again. Can you stop the lockdown? Please, I just need to get my friends out of here," Ryan looked at him nervously, just a few seconds away from practically begging him. But in the end, the boy replied by shaking his head. He understood Ryan.

  Carefully, the boy held forward his hand toward Ryan. It was clear what he wanted. The briar-like patterns on his scales were moving and shifting toward his hand. The black lines were pulsating, as though they were pushing something out toward the boy's fingertips.

  Ryan knew what he was supposed to do. He carefully grabbed the boy's arm, and could feel the corruption latching onto him, burrowing into his skin. But it was fine. This didn't actually feel as aggressive as normal corruption. It wasn't trying to take Ryan over. Instead, it was trying to give something to him.

  His eyes rolled into the back of his head as his vision turned white. From that white void that surrounded him, something started rising up. It was an amusement park. It was this amusement park, back when it was still up and running.

  It was colourful and bright, and people were visiting in floods. They were having fun, engaging with the gimmicks of this place. They were doing small tasks for the mascots, collecting stamps from the rollercoasters, and taking pictures of the animals in the petting zoo.

  But soon, the day was over, and the darkness of night rolled over the park. While the place was mostly vacated by the regular folk, another type of visitor came in. A shady bunch that Ryan would try to avoid having to run into at any cost. He didn't quite understand why, but it seemed like the park was just some kind of money laundering business, or a way to get their hands on a lot of... 'materials' to work with without seeming too suspicious.

  The shady folk went to the gift shop, buying weapons and custom-made magic items. Drugs and illegal medicines were sold from the food courts. The animals from the petting zoo were brought down into the laboratory hidden below, for a number of different experiments. Sometimes it was just to test out those medicines, or to breed specific strains of viruses for quite vicious endeavours. But one of the things that they did down here that stood at the centre was a particular project.

  A man with a sparrow-pin on his suit jacket brought along a tank of symbiotes, asking for one thing and one thing only. A way to make symbiotes bond with whoever they wanted.

  And so, that's what the laboratory did. The sparrows, Bluesky, were paying more than enough for this kind of work, after all. They decided on a number of different routes. One of them related to the artificial, selective breeding of symbiotes, and another was about trying to extract the strengthening effects from symbiotes while leaving out the independent, sentient mind within them somehow. None of it seemed to work.

  All it ended up with was brutal petting zoo animals that attacked and ate each other. A strain of this artificial symbiote even got out into other parts of the park, infecting the actors at the haunted house and making them particularly aggressive. But at the end of the day, it was all just a total failure. That was, until one day, the man from Bluesky came back, holding a small wooden box. Inside of that box were pure white, petrified seeds, seeping with vicious curses of undeath.

  Curses were powerful things. They clung to people and often never let go. Trying to force this quality onto symbiotes, the people running the lab tried to breed this into those small, weak things that had almost no way to resist.

  And it worked. Though they lost their transparent nature and instead turned a deep, oil-like black, a number of different strains of these special, undead symbiotes were able to be bred. Since the animals seemed to react even better to the bonds than they could have ever hoped, they decided to take the next step. They decided to test one of the strains, their most powerful and effective type, on a person.

  On a small piscette orphan. It was the perfect candidate! Symbiotes, being an aquatic creature, seemed to often prefer bonding to other aquatic beings. And just like they hoped, it was a total success. The child bonded with the strain of the undead symbiote, and was placed into a special tank in the centre of the laboratory so that it could be observed over a long period of time.

  But then... there was a breach. It was an absolute disaster. One of the strains got out and infected the mascots, melting their flesh and fusing it into the costumes. The petting zoo animals got even more aggressive, starting to attack the visitors, and one particular strain had torn its way up into the office buildings, killing the administrative employees. Even a massive amount of the lab's various scientists were infected, being killed and turned into walking corpses by the symbiotes that wouldn't let go of them.

  The park was soon shut down. Finding it too risky to keep engaging with them, Bluesky, or rather the organisation backing Bluesky, pulled its funding for the project, and the laboratory completely collapsed from the inside out. Not literally, of course; it had just become abandoned. The undead, roaming scientists were abandoned, being left to wander around while rotting away. And the piscette child was left inside of the tank, soon passing on as well, his dead body being kept intact by the special breed of undead symbiote. The park was left abandoned, but not knowing the consequences of their actions, it wasn't sealed and certain strains of the symbiotes latched onto birds, insects, and even some of the visitors that had been attacked by the animals. Once let loose, these undead symbiotes became known as corruption.

  They were so far away from the original that nobody realised what their true nature was. Even a particular family that soon came here and bought up the land the park stood on didn't realise what exactly they were dealing with. But when they came here, this park was not yet a dungeon. Seeing this part of the vision was confusing, since he was told something different by Runar. That the Aglecards had just found this park that had already become a dungeon and decided to seal it away.

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  But Ryan was seeing some older members of the Aglecard family coming here when there wasn't any sign of it becoming a dungeon at all. They set up a protective perimeter around the property line, ensuring that nothing could escape, and flooded the old park with mana.

  Though they didn't know the details, they had been able to track the source of the corruption they were dealing with all of a sudden back to this park. And if there was one way to glance into the far-gone past of a place, it was by turning it into a dungeon.

  The Aglecards artificially created this place to investigate the source of the corruption. But even that project was abandoned at some point. From the timeframe he was looking at here, Ryan had a pretty good idea. It was right around the time where his father, Hayden, had betrayed the family. Everyone was in an uproar, and certain things fell onto the backburner.

  It wasn't until a decade later when this dungeon was rediscovered by Runar and his people. Not knowing the original purpose of this place, nor realising the connection to corruption, they decided to take advantage of this special dungeon and turn it into a training ground. In the decade where the dungeon had been left abandoned, a consciousness began to form. And that consciousness soon found a useful form for itself. The piscette boy that was left for dead in here so many years ago. Taking on that form, the dungeon's consciousness began to turn rather childlike as well.

  It began to take joy in those old gimmicks of the park that it didn't quite understand, and decided to help out the folk that came here to train. The dungeon was lonely, and it realised that the more it helped them out, the more often they would return. Soon, it began to try and give them items to help them grow more, as this seemed to make them happy. It even began to give the people special rewards if they did a really good job, just like the scientists used to do with this kid when he did well on his tests.

  But there were parts of the dungeon that were always left abandoned, and nobody had reached it. Until Ryan, who was the first to ever open one of the hatches in the food court. That was when the dungeon began to pay particular attention to him. It had left clues that were supposed to lead people down there, especially in the funhouse that the dungeon particularly liked, but nobody had even found those before. And even when Ryan did something so weird that it confused the dungeon into giving out items in a way that it didn't intend, it didn't mind. It made Ryan and his friends happy, so the dungeon didn't fix that 'mistake', the exploits.

  For a while, the dungeon thought that things were going to just continue like this, but then, some scary men came along, and cold, unbreathing machines following behind. They killed the dungeon's protector, one of the guards that had always been nice to the boy when this was still a park, and tried to forcibly tear open the door to the core room, so the dungeon grew scared and added conditions for entry, conditions that it hoped Ryan would be the first to complete. But at the same time, it made a mistake. It accidentally caused a lockdown in its moment of fear. The lockdown was something that happened while the original piscette boy died, so it was an unintended side-effect.

  But since then, Ryan had done his best to complete all those conditions, and though he grew more and more injured, he soon entered this place. When Ryan began to see himself through the dead eyes of the dungeon's core, he was pulled back out of this vision.

  He looked at the boy in front of him, and slowly pulled his hand away. The tendrils of the corruption pulled off with ease, simply letting go of him.

  "I'm sorry. You've gone through a lot," Ryan said. He wasn't sure what else he was supposed to say or do. From what Ryan saw, the dungeon couldn't resolve the lockdown on its own. The only way he knew how to do that now was to destroy the core. Meaning... to kill this kid. And Ryan had no idea if he could do that.

  The boy looked at him, slowly nodding.

  "No, I can't do that. You're just a kid, you... don't deserve this."

  Those white, dead eyes kept staring back at Ryan. He could feel Tiar squeezing him tightly. He looked down at his arm, seeing the intricate patterns swirling around.

  "You really think so..?" Ryan asked, looking back up at the kid, "Do you... do you want to die? For me to close this place down completely?"

  Again, the boy nodded his head.

  "I..." Ryan closed his eyes, taking a deep breath, "I don't know how to do that. I... at best, I could make you go to sleep for a while, but I don't know how long it would take for you to wake back up. And I don't know if I can convince my uncle to fully close you down."

  This time, the boy shook his head. But somehow, it was encouraging, like he was telling Ryan not to worry. That things would work out.

  Slowly, he pushed himself off the ground and walked over to his backpack. He had something in there that might work, and could be... painless. Though, Ryan didn't even know if dungeons could feel pain in the first place.

  It was a bottle filled with a white and slightly golden liquid. It was the cure for corruption. Ryan brought it over to the boy, sitting down in front of him.

  "If you drink this, I think it should do the job. I know you're not dealing with the real corruption anymore. It's just a representation of it. The memory of corruption. But maybe that memory can be made to fade as well," Ryan handed the boy the bottle. The piscette kid slowly stepped out of the sphere of water, and placed the bottle onto his lips, quickly drinking the contents.

  Almost instantly, the dungeon began to shake, and the boy just stood there. Despite doing this for a reason, it was clear he was still quite scared. And so, doing what he would do for any scared child, Ryan hugged him.

  "You're fine, I'm here. I'll stay here until it's over, okay?"

  As the very space continued to quiver, the boy returned the hug.

  Ryan could feel the room shrink. The massively tall ceilings were shooting closer, and the walls seemed almost oppressive. The room that appeared so huge just a moment ago became claustrophobic. The dungeon didn't just fall asleep. It died. The dungeon was fully closed.

  The boy's body disappeared, just like the corpse of a dungeon monster did. Ryan slowly got up off the ground, patting the dust off his trousers. Silently, he walked over to his bag to just get out of here.

  But when he walked past the tank of water, which was now fully intact, he saw something floating in there. It made him sick to look at. It was the corpse of the piscette boy.

  He knew it might be a totally stupid idea, but Ryan climbed up to the edge of the tank. He turned the horn into an icy hook to pull the body toward him, and carefully pulled him out. Ryan pulled off his hoodie and put it on the box. The corpse was covered in corruption. This version was still alive, but it was different to other sorts of corruption. Maybe it was changed by the dungeon, but it didn't try to latch onto Ryan, so he could safely move the corpse.

  And then, he started carrying the body outside. For a moment, Ryan was scared that he would run into Richard and the soldier, but there was no trace of them anywhere. To carry him upstairs, Ryan made something like a harness using the horn so he could climb the nearest ladder, and soon, they were outside. It was shockingly bright. The dungeon was usually clad in a constant, foggy night. But today was originally a quite bright, warm day.

  Almost immediately, the boy's body, basked in sunlight for the first time in decades, started to fall apart. Like it, still, was made of magic. It disappeared like a corruption did when it was destroyed.

  Soon he just held onto his hoodie. He wasn't going to put it back on, but instead just tried to fold it up and put it away. Though, as he did, something fell to the ground. A large seed. Well, it was basically like a nut, the largest of these 'seeds of blessing' that Ryan had seen so far. Its shell was cracked, and in its inside, a brilliant white gem was glistening back at him.

  Ryan smiled quite bitterly and pushed the seed into his pocket, walking through the park to try and find the entrance.

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