Exploration (Welcome to the Multiverse Book 10), page 11
Rewards:
An awakening for Clay Turner
A boon from the Endless Dungeon for you
Further quests
I could work with that. I checked to see if Samvek and Selena had gotten the quest, which they hadn’t. I was sure I was going to hear more about my potentiality later, but for now, I showed them the notification, then accepted it.
Clay finally roused after coming to grips with his new position. He stumbled over to us almost drunkenly, then fell to one knee. There might even have been some moisture in his eyes. “After my party broke up and more restrictions were put in place on the dungeons, I feared I’d never manage to break through to the next tier. You have my eternal gratitude. Know that you can always trust me to have your backs.”
It was awkward for me, but Selena was used to it. She reached out and pulled him up. “Congratulations! You’re part of the team. But Silas just got a quest to power level you to level 150 while impressing the dungeon in the process. So, are you ready?”
He smiled. “Born ready.”
We briefly discussed strategy. Clay naturally wanted to test out his new class and contribute as much as possible. Presumably, that would also earn him a larger cut of the XP. After planning out our safety protocols, we went to it.
The next stretch blurred together as we pushed deeper, floors peeling past in rapid succession. One level was a furnace of cracked obsidian and flowing fire where salamander packs hunted in coordinated lines. Another dropped us into glacial tunnels that rang like glass when struck, with ice spiders skittering along the ceilings before Clay carved them down from below. Insect warrens followed, thick with chitin and acid, and Clay moved through them like a living shadow, striking fast and vanishing before retaliation could form.
Of course, he was only able to move with impunity because I shielded him from being overrun. But we stayed busy, thinning out the floors from the moment we got to them. I tried to rotate through my abilities and use different spells on each floor. That made the process a little slower, but I wasn’t sure what the dungeon was looking for to impress it. Did it want a song-and-dance number?
At first, the levels came easily. Clay gained more than a full level on some floors, the system rewarding clean kills and decisive movement. I watched him adjust in real time, timing his Assassinate strikes better, choosing angles that let him end fights before they truly began. His confidence grew with every success. He didn’t grow reckless, but stayed grounded, the kind of mindset that came from knowing exactly what he could and couldn’t do.
The monsters on those floors would have slaughtered most parties from Aerth, at least based upon the information Clay had given us so far. I still chuckled at the name of this world. It was so similar to my own that sometimes I felt as if I had stepped back in time rather than across universes.
And some things were truly universal. Fire tore flesh, ice slowed blood, venom ate through armor, and to Clay, none of it mattered. He adapted faster than the dungeon escalated, and that seemed to please it. I could feel the environment leaning into our pace, rewarding speed, punishing hesitation. Equally, I imagined I could feel it paying attention to me. Impressed yet?
By the time we cleared floor 128, Clay was breathing hard but smiling. It wasn’t joy, not exactly. It was focus, sharpened into something dangerous. The dungeon had stopped feeling like an obstacle and more like a proving ground, and Clay was proving himself one floor at a time.
Chapter Twelve: Power-Leveling Makes the Best Friends (part 2)
Once we pushed past floor 128, I stopped treating the dungeon like something to be solved quickly and started treating it like an audience. If it wanted range, I was going to show it range. If it wanted a show, I was about to put on a three-ring circus performance. I rotated my approach on every floor, deliberately changing how I controlled space, enemies, and momentum. That further slowed our roll, but Clay was still gaining levels faster than anyone on Aerth had a right to. None of the rest of us had gained a drop of XP yet, though.
One floor inverted gravity in irregular pulses, turning the battlefield into a nightmare of sudden drops and sideways falls. I anchored space with layered force constructs, creating invisible planes that Clay could sprint across as if they were solid ground. When enemies tried to swarm from above and below, I folded distance with Here Not Here, snapping Clay out of danger and back into striking position before their attacks ever landed. The dungeon adjusted after that, but not fast enough.
Another floor was infested with shadow-things that blurred at the edge of sight and struck from blind angles. I let Spirit Singing bleed into my perception and the illusion peeled away like wet paper. Their hiding spots lit up in my awareness, and I guided Clay through them with quiet corrections, letting him take the kills while I sang to strip the monsters of every advantage they thought they had. I could feel the dungeon paying attention then, not reacting, but observing. I was starting to wonder if what I was calling the dungeon was actually a god.
On a crystalline maze floor that refracted sound and light into lethal feedback loops, I switched to deploying Lightning Arc Mastery with surgical precision. I threaded arcs through force-anchored corridors, using Mana Body to grow to a massive size, at which point I would stomp on foes or cut them up with claws. I enjoyed this approach—what little boy hadn’t made a village out of blocks, only to become the vengeful god or massive monster stomping it flat?
Samvek mirrored my pacing instinctively, herding threats without ever crossing into Clay’s lanes. Selena stayed mobile, adjusting reality just enough that Clay always had a clean opening, but I saw her having her own fun. For her, up could be down and down could be up, or inside could be out and vice versa.
Elemental bursts, layered debuffs, and coordinated packs came at us without hesitation. Clay adapted anyway, still leveling rapidly at first, then more slowly as the dungeon raised the bar. By the time we cleared floor 145, he was breathing hard and bleeding in a few places, but his movements were sharper than they’d been an hour earlier.
I could feel it more strongly then—a subtle shift in the dungeon’s posture. It wasn’t impressed by power alone. It was watching how I chose to use it, how little I wasted, and how completely I controlled the field. That was fine with me. I hadn’t even shown half of what I was capable of. Maybe there was even something more to the dungeon’s watchful eye. I couldn’t help but think I was being graded on my character, and judged by how I used my power to protect Clay.
As we went deeper, the dungeon stopped trying to overwhelm us and started trying to work me into a corner. Floors no longer announced their dangers immediately. Corridors bent subtly, distances lied, and threats arrived in layered sequences designed to tax attention rather than strength. I adjusted by narrowing my footprint, shaping force constructs into corridors, baffles, and pressure points that dictated where enemies could exist at all. Where the dungeon wanted chaos, I answered with structure.
On one level, the air carried a draining resonance that chewed at my stamina and mana. I responded by opening myself to absorb some of the life force that escaped with each death. The dungeon seemed to groan when I did that, as though it hadn’t been expected, but truthfully, I wasn’t any good at it. These were not skills that I used on a regular basis. Still, I did my best to rotate my cultivator’s core as I stuffed it full of life force, then let that flow into my body, reinvigorating myself.
When ambushes triggered from multiple vectors, Trailblazer’s Mind gave me just enough warning to reposition the team with Here Not Here. I was never flashy, never wasteful. Enemies died where I decided they would, not where they chose to strike. I knew there had to be a grin on my face by this point, but who could blame me? I was enjoying this. It wasn’t quite as much fun as when I could truly cut loose, but these threats weren’t potent enough for that.
Another floor turned hostile through timing rather than numbers, releasing enemies in staggered waves meant to punish overcommitment to one strategy. I had to admit, this did make the dungeon more fun. We were still at the point where we could obliterate an entire level’s worth of monsters with little more than a thought, but the special attention allowed the dungeon to try and surprise us. I always made a priority of protecting my allies, even if Clay was the only one who really needed it.
I split my constructs into semi-autonomous lattices and let them manage containment while I handled priority threats with Lightning Arc Mastery, threading controlled strikes through anchored lanes. The arcs whispered, precise and final, leaving space intact and bodies still.
The dungeon escalated again by mixing threats that demanded different counter-strategies. Illusion-bearers masked real attackers, while debuffers tried to slow reactions and heavy hitters pressed from blind angles. Most of it was easy to see through as it wasn’t intended for my level, although I noticed when the dungeon attempted to add in various layers of suppression against my senses. It tried sound dampening, blocking lines of sight, eliminating odors, and even erecting static fields which disrupted my tactile senses. Spirit Singing caused the falsehoods to collapse, allowing me to use force to isolate the real dangers one pocket at a time. It felt less like fighting and more like editing, removing errors until only intent remained.
By the time we passed into the 160s, the dungeon felt focused and deliberate. I got the sense it was simply continuing to test if my efficiency would remain high when pressure mounted and options multiplied. I kept my casting clean, my positioning economical, and my interventions minimal. If it wanted to see control, then that’s exactly what I would show it. A part of me expected the dungeon to suddenly ramp up the difficulty out of proportion to the level growth, but it never did.
The stretch from the mid-160s into the 170s turned into a grind by design. The dungeon stopped presenting spectacle and leaned into attrition, stacking encounters so close together that there was no clean reset between fights. I answered by refocusing on tightening everything, shrinking my constructs, shortening my casts, and letting efficiency replace excess. I got the sense it wanted to catch me wasting power under pressure, but it was going to be disappointed.
The increased number of enemies was welcome, though. The loot was anything but impressive, but I figured the gold would come in handy here on Aerth.
Enemy compositions grew less imaginative and more brutal. Thick-skinned bruisers anchored zones while fast movers harried from the edges and casters layered interference meant to disrupt timing. Samvek helped by using spatial disruptions to break up the groups of monsters, essentially assigning each threat a place and a moment, then wiping it out when it got to the head of the line. In that moment, I truly wished I’d put more work into my temporal affinity, because it would have made this so much simpler.
I stopped leaning on big answers and started chaining small ones. Force constructs became doors that closed, walls that slid, and blades that struck once and never needed to strike again. Lightning arcs pinned priority targets just long enough for Clay to finish them, then vanished before they could cascade. Spirit Singing stayed low and constant, a song not meant to inspire but clarify, stripping deception and fear until only purpose remained. Trailblazer’s Mind flickered on and off in short bursts, just enough to stay ahead without dulling my edge.
The dungeon responded by compressing time. Floors blurred together, stairwells appearing almost immediately after boss chambers fell, as if it wanted to see how long I could maintain discipline without slipping. I felt my smile return despite myself. I was in my element, facing new challenges one after the other. Not that I didn’t love being thrust into a grinder to fight my way out with all I had, but this allowed me to display both power and restraint, along with the reasoning behind my decisions. It wasn’t often I got to do that.
By the time we pushed into the high 170s, Clay was still standing and still leveling, but each gain came slower and cost more. That wasn’t the point anymore. The point was that I hadn’t lost rhythm, not once. The dungeon was getting proof of my control, floor after floor.
The next few floors felt deliberately plain, almost austere. Gone were the layered tricks and clever compositions, replaced by enemies that hit hard, moved cleanly, and refused to die easily. It was as if the dungeon had stripped itself down to fundamentals, asking a simple question instead of hiding it behind spectacle—whether we could still execute when there was nothing left to outthink.
On floor 181, Clay took a solid hit that would have dropped him an hour earlier. He staggered, recovered, and killed the thing anyway, his movements economical and stripped of wasted flourish. Celestial Restoration had him back to full health almost instantly. I got the feeling the dungeon was testing me on that, too.
Floor 182 slowed him to a crawl. The enemies outleveled him badly and refused to present clean openings, forcing him to make his own. It also forced me to slow, as I needed to be more protective. Clay bled more on that floor than on the last ten combined, but he never hesitated, even though every monster had more than thirty levels on him. When he landed the final blow, the system ticked forward again, almost reluctantly.
The fight on floor 183 was the least remarkable, but the most fun. A singular foe appeared in the end chamber—a bus-sized lizard, which greatly outclassed Clay. But the floor required that only a single party member enter, while all other party members took up positions on floating platforms surrounding them. We could help our appointed champion, but couldn’t do anything which directly affected the boss. I almost made Clay sit it out, but he was getting close to the target set forth by the quest, and I hoped doing this on his own might help him realize what he was truly becoming capable of.
That didn’t mean that we weren’t helping. Samvek accelerated him. I was boosting his stats and continually healing him. The beast he fought was no joke. It was astoundingly fast for its level and large enough that a dagger was almost a laughable weapon to use against it. He could penetrate its leathery hide easily enough, but his primary weapon only had a foot-long blade. There was no way that could pierce deeply enough to hit vital organs.
Despite our concerns, Clay was our champion. I figured in a worst-case scenario, I could keep him alive indefinitely with Celestial Restoration while he poked the lizard to death. The spell could bring someone from almost nothing to full health in the blink of an eye, and I could keep casting it all day if I had to.
The battle turned out to be an opportunity for him to show us how clever he was. He sliced tendons, used necrotic poisons to halt healing, and slowly but surely broke the beast down. First, he limited its mobility, then he blinded it, before finally going on to slowly work his way through to the spine, which he ended up having to sever in two spots before the monster died.
In total, the battle lasted nearly an hour, and Clay was panting in exhaustion, but there was a big smile on his face. And why shouldn’t there be? He had just reached level 150.
You have completed a quest. Floor loot will be rolled into the quest reward.
Chapter Thirteen: What a Dungeon Wants
Quest Completed: Impress the Dungeon
The Endless Dungeon has tracked your progress and pushed the challenge level to the greatest allowed for each floor. Further testing is required to determine the potential of Silas Renner, Selena Turga, and Samvek Rayden, but that is for another quest.
Today, you demonstrated your willingness to help those of Aerth, even though you are not part of this system.
Your reward is an introduction to an important asset within the Fey System—someone with whom you can advance the goal of the Heavens, to form a mutually beneficial pact. When you accept the next quest in the chain, the four of you will be teleported to a location where you can meet this individual.
Before that, Clay Turner will be infused with the energy necessary to awaken his race, but it is not the role of the Ways to do such things. The Fey System is not built in that way, as we do not have servants. Instead, we are the servants of all. The system subsists on our existence. But the one you are to meet has the authority to awaken Clay Turner, if not yet the power.
For tens of thousands of years, there has not once existed an adventurer who would have been satisfied with only receiving gold after clearing nearly one hundred floors of a dungeon in record time. Collect your loot. When you are ready, simply call out, and the new quest will be presented to you.
I was pretty sure I was grinning, because Selena was demanding to know what the results of the quest were. Clay had already told her that he’d reached level 150. But before I could answer, another treasure chest appeared, more in line with my expectations—neither small like a jewelry box, nor freakishly large.
Before we could open it, another notification popped up.
You have all qualified for the Speed Runner title.
Speed Runner: This title is highly sought after but difficult to obtain. In order to receive this title, you or your party must run ten consecutive floors faster than each individual floor has ever been run before. Further, you must kill the bosses, if any, on those floors rather than simply skipping through. This title can only be earned the first time you clear a floor. You have completed the parameters for Speed Runner across floors 109 to 183. This improves your title to Speed Runner VII.
This title grants +70% XP on any floor you speed run. This will be retroactively applied to any XP earned during the floors which earned this title for you. The XP earned by Clay Turner will be held in abeyance until he is successfully awakened.
It sucked that we hadn’t gained any XP, so the title didn’t benefit us now, but I smiled at the potential once we got to levels that were still relatively easy but were high enough to give us some XP. I didn’t expect that would happen for a while, but it was still something to look forward to. For now, the treasure chest was calling my name.
I approached it and slid it open, revealing five objects inside. The first was one of the floor crystals, keyed to the 150th floor. Clay’s eyes widened when he saw it. “You probably don’t understand why, but that is a priceless treasure. The emperor would give almost anything to get his hands on that.”
