"Ugh—!" Louisa curled up in the corner, her body convulsing violently, looking as though she wanted to vomit up every drop of purple blood she'd just consumed.
She couldn't understand it—there hadn't been any strange smell, but the moment it hit her throat, it was like rotten sludge mixed with bitter bile. The taste was nothing short of torture!
Lin Jun watched with great interest.
This was his first time witnessing a vampire vomit. He observed with fascination for quite a while, though unfortunately, aside from dry heaving sounds and twisted expressions, nothing actually came out.
Come to think of it, do vampire stomachs even produce bile?
Tsk... he'd love to take a look, but not right now.
He was a rule-abiding mushroom—he could only punish the little piggy when she made mistakes...
Meanwhile, the yellow leather book was being held by Little Black, frantically begging for mercy.
[Boss! Boss! I only licked them! They accidentally slipped in! Really!]
[I won't dare again! Never steal food again! Please spare me this once!]
[Please, for the sake of how I stood up to protect Norris just now, give me a chance!]
Lin Jun indeed hadn't noticed the yellow book's theft at first, but when the two cave dweller corpses decomposed, they were completely empty inside—aside from some magic power, there was no skill proficiency gain whatsoever.
Who else could the culprit be besides it?
*Rip—*
At Lin Jun's command, a page was mercilessly torn from the book.
[Going to die going to die going to die going to die]
Looking at the constantly spamming yellow book in her hands, Little Black still had no idea it possessed self-awareness.
She only knew that the boss would occasionally have her tear off a few sheets of this thing that disappeared once removed.
This useless yellow book—completely worthless this time, and it even dared to steal food?
Lin Jun wasn't even sure if it had detected the anomaly and deliberately didn't tell Norris—though that possibility was slim.
In stark contrast was Little Black's near-perfect performance this time, discovering the anomaly and rushing over even before Lin Jun's reminder.
Without Little Black's timely intervention, Norris would probably be experiencing the wonderful treatment of limb reattachment right about now.
As a reward, a puffshroom produced a pair of beautiful gemstone earrings and handed them to the delighted Little Black. They refracted enchanting colors under the dim fluorescent light.
If Aidin were here, he'd surely recognize the decorations that had been on his ears just days ago.
The timing of these monsters' attack was truly inconvenient. At the time, Lin Jun was controlling a knight puffshroom in a fair duel with Fifteen, completely unable to pay attention to this side.
After the incident occurred, he could only hastily send a brief warning signal to Little Piggy and Little Black through the mycelial network.
But the problem was, Lin Jun hadn't had time to check these monsters' status panels then, and now that they were corpses, they naturally had no panels either. He had no idea what these things were.
Currently known: they could turn invisible and moved in groups.
According to Norris's description, there seemed to be a bizarre "eyeball" floating in the air, watching from a distance, though it had fled afterward.
However, a flying eyeball didn't seem like the same species as these stealth-ambush monsters.
Was it stalking these monsters?
Or cooperating with them?
The changes in the deep layers these days were happening far too quickly.
Back in the day, when Lin Jun had stayed in the old mushroom garden for two and a half years, the surrounding environmental ecology hadn't changed this dramatically.
If there had been invisible monsters like this back then, his survival difficulty would have increased by several levels.
Thinking about it this way, the culprit should still be the Rift.
But... where did they come from?
Several detection skills swept back and forth through his controlled territory, but no similar monsters were found.
So had he just happened to encounter a small group that had wandered over?
If these threatening monsters were nearby, Lin Jun would go destroy their lair, or at the very least station puffshrooms to block their passage.
But if they were far away with minimal impact, Lin Jun didn't have the time to open a side quest to deal with them.
He'd strengthen surveillance of the deep layer territory recently and see if these monsters would appear again.
Manipulating his mycelia, he completely devoured, decomposed, and absorbed the three monster corpses.
【Sin of Greed Triggered】
【Plundered Skill: Light Refraction Invisibility LV2】
【Cold Resistance: LV3→LV4】
【Plundered Skill: Claw Strike LV8→LV9】
Claw Strike was something that any monster with sharp claws would know to some degree. Level increases came easily, but unfortunately, it was just an ordinary skill that enhanced basic attack damage—nothing particularly noteworthy.
The invisibility skill looked pretty good though. While 【Mimicry】 could achieve invisibility to some extent, that was only when remaining motionless.
This invisibility skill appeared to be optical camouflage. Lin Jun immediately began producing puffshrooms for testing.
As for 【Cold Resistance】?
Did these things live in low-temperature areas?
From the fact that Lin Jun's own 【Cold Resistance】 was only level three, you could tell that the Amethyst Dungeon had nothing whatsoever to do with "cold."
If anything, the first ten floors had suitable temperatures, but after reaching the tenth floor, it became noticeably hotter, with occasional lava areas explaining everything.
If these monsters' lair was really in some ice cave, even if Lin Jun found it, he probably couldn't attack it.
Puffshrooms weren't cold-resistant.
Soon, the puffshrooms for skill testing were produced.
As 【Light Refraction Invisibility LV2】 activated, the puffshrooms indeed vanished from sight.
However, the effect wasn't perfect.
When they remained stationary, they maintained decent concealment.
But once they began moving, invisible ripples seemed to spread through the air. Their outlines showed subtle but clear spatial distortion, like looking at something through rippling water.
Probably because the level was still too low.
If high levels still had this clumsy effect, then when several monsters with massive bodies moved around, wouldn't it look like large patches of constantly distorting space?
Norris wasn't blind—how could he possibly not notice!
The skill to test wasn't just the monsters' invisibility. Lin Jun had also produced several puffshrooms with 【Divine Barrier】 obtained from the humans.
The reason for making several was that he'd previously seen church warriors able to stack and combine this skill to form more powerful protection—a technique he naturally wanted to try.
【Divine Barrier LV2】
With a thought, one puffshroom responded first. Light gathered, and a semi-transparent barrier flowing with liquid golden light instantly deployed before it.
The moment it formed, Lin Jun keenly noticed something different: this barrier's shape could actually be slightly molded according to his will!
Concentrating on manipulation, he watched as the light screen's edges obediently curled and bent inward. The originally flat wall actually twisted and deformed under his mental control into a stable semicircular shield.
No wonder humans could combine and stack them—with good coordination, it really wasn't difficult to achieve.
As for having puffshrooms cooperate?
That was even simpler than breathing!
Four puffshrooms quickly huddled together. The next moment, a perfectly seamless, gap-free spherical light shield suddenly appeared!
It radiated gentle brilliance, like a small light bulb in the eternal darkness of the deep layers, dazzling and eye-catching.
It successfully attracted Little Black's attention.
Through the semi-transparent golden light wall, the puffshrooms inside all appeared to have a sacred golden edge in Little Black's eyes, looking particularly dragon-tempting.
Little Black instinctively reached out her claw, but her movement carried rare hesitation—in her simple yet precious collecting experience, the shinier things were, the more fragile they tended to be.
Her claw tip carefully and tentatively, with an exploratory touch, gently scraped at the very edge of the light shield...
*Crack—*
With a crisp sound, the barrier shattered as if struck hard, transforming into countless drifting golden light particles that slowly dissipated.
Little Black: QAQ
Lin Jun: What kind of soap bubble is this?
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