Outside the entrance to the Amethyst Dungeon.
"Get going! No setting up tents here!" The guard barked harshly, impatiently prodding several ragged, malnourished civilians with the butt end of his spear.
One of them hunched his back, his voice carrying a pleading tone: "My lord, please show mercy... we depend on these mushrooms to survive."
"Who's stopping you from gathering mushrooms?" The guard's brow furrowed deeply, his spear shaft pointing toward the distance. "There's a designated settlement area on the town's edge—build wooden houses or pitch tents as you please! Why must you crowd around this entrance? This is where adventurers come and go!"
"But... if we live too far away, we can't compete for the mushrooms outside the dungeon," another voice responded timidly. "And inside the dungeon... there are magical beasts..."
"Everyone's in the same situation—why should we pity just you few? Move along or I'll slash your tent to pieces!" The guard turned his spear around, the cold metallic edge gleaming before their eyes, finally forcing them to hastily gather their meager belongings and retreat in cowering fashion.
Vera's party of three caught sight of this brief conflict from afar, but their gazes didn't linger long. They merely frowned slightly before turning toward the dungeon's main gate.
The matter of demon spies sabotaging farmlands everywhere had long since spread far and wide.
Now that the autumn harvest had ended in dismal failure, this silent war had temporarily concluded. The demon race had sacrificed a large number of spies to reduce the kingdom's grain production by nearly half.
The "free" mushrooms growing wild outside the Amethyst Dungeon had become like a ray of hope in the darkness, rapidly spreading word among the starving populace.
Initially, only scattered individuals lingered outside the dungeon, but in just over a month, it had evolved into several waves of refugees arriving daily in an endless stream.
The guards' approach wasn't problematic either—the guild also agreed to let refugees pick mushrooms to fill their bellies, but having all the refugees crowd around the dungeon entrance simply wouldn't do.
In fact, even after designating a special settlement area on the town's outskirts, the sudden influx of large numbers of people had made managing this small town exponentially more difficult.
However, such matters were for those important figures above to worry about—they had nothing to do with adventurers.
Just as Vera's party was preparing to enter the dungeon, heavy footsteps mixed with the clatter of armor plates approached from far to near. They instinctively stepped aside to clear the main passage, but happened to come face-to-face with a staggering group emerging from within.
"Old Bear!" Vera called out first.
"Vera? Feilin? And Feiyin too!" The burly man carrying a massive tower shield, Old Bear, stopped in his tracks, his dirt-stained face showing surprise. "What a coincidence—running into you again!"
Having just returned from battle in the dungeon, Old Bear's leather armor was splattered with half-dried dark red bloodstains, mixed with mud and suspicious sticky fluids. His thick boot soles were caked with the local fungal threads, and his entire person reeked of intense sweat and the distinctive fishy odor of the underground.
Despite this, his eyes blazed brightly and his mouth unconsciously carried a smile—clearly he'd had a bountiful harvest.
His gaze swept over Vera's party's ready-for-action appearance, his tone carrying concern and puzzlement: "Wait... if I remember correctly, you three came out just ahead of us the day before yesterday, right? Haven't even caught your breath yet, and you're diving back down? Can you handle such continuous exploration?"
"Old Bear, your luck is incredible—just this morning! The material purchase prices at the guild hall jumped up another ten percent in one go!" Feilin couldn't help but speak up, her voice full of envy and frustration. "We're the unlucky ones—we just sold off all our collected materials yesterday, and after just one day we hear this terrible news!"
"Huh? It rose that much?!" Old Bear was first stunned by this news, then burst into booming laughter. His fan-like large hand vigorously patted Vera's shoulder. "Haha, no worries, no worries! This is good news! When you come up from this trip, Old Bear will treat you all to drinks!"
The two parties passed each other, and Old Bear walked forward a few steps before suddenly turning back as if remembering something. The hearty smile on his face diminished somewhat: "Oh right, Vera! Keep your guard up! Don't know if it's because too many people have been going down lately, but the magical beasts are much more ferocious than usual. Be careful on the road."
"Thanks for the warning—we'll be careful!"
After bidding farewell to Old Bear's team, who departed with their full harvest and fading laughter, Vera's party wasted no more time and entered the dungeon, habitually planning to rent a puffshroom.
When the three arrived at the familiar puffshroom rental point, the scene before them left them stunned.
On the empty fungal carpet sat a single plump otaku puffshroom responsible for collecting fees, while the illumination puffshrooms that should have been gathered around were completely absent.
"This is... they're all rented out?" Feilin asked uncertainly.
Vera's brow furrowed slightly, her tone carrying a hint of helplessness: "Mm, looks like it. Ever since the Puffshroom King was taken away by that duke's daughter, the remaining puffshrooms haven't been very active, and their numbers have clearly decreased. Now with so many parties flooding into the dungeon, and not enough illumination puffshrooms to go around... it's not surprising really."
With no choice, Feiyin had to raise her staff, gathering an orange-yellow orb of light at its tip.
Their destination remained the sixth floor, but the "berserk magical beasts" that Old Bear had warned about—they hardly noticed anything of the sort along their journey.
This was mainly because the dungeon was too "lively." They encountered several parties of adventurers coming and going throughout their trek.
The allure of increased purchase prices was astonishing. The upper floors were now scraped so clean by adventurers that they barely had any chance to encounter stray magical beasts...
...
After reaching the sixth floor, Vera finally experienced the so-called "berserk magical beasts."
The tree spirits and puffshrooms that usually wandered the sixth floor were nowhere to be seen, replaced by rampaging stone-hide boars and flower spirits with magic vines that would attack them even while already entangled with other prey.
Fortunately, the party had come prepared and suffered no injuries. Instead, they used the magical beasts' impulsiveness to easily harvest quite a bit of materials.
However, when passing the stairway leading to the seventh floor, they encountered a party that had met with misfortune.
Two adventurers were half-dragging, half-carrying a companion whose face was pale as paper, cold sweat rolling down from his forehead in beads the size of beans. His left arm was completely gone from the shoulder blade down!
A young man in priest robes stained with filth was pressing firmly against the wounded man, urgently chanting prayers. White light enveloped the victim's severed arm.
Vera's eyes sharpened as she quickly stepped forward: "Need help? We have tourniquets and emergency potions!"
A swordsman who seemed to be the party leader looked warily at the newcomers, only relaxing his brow after recognizing Vera.
"Thanks for the kind offer! But our party has a healer, and our potions are... barely sufficient." He pointed to another party member who was pulling out a small vial from his waist pouch and pouring the potion into the wounded man's mouth.
"What happened?" Feilin asked, looking at the terrible severed arm. "What kind of fierce opponent did you encounter?"
The swordsman's face showed a trace of lingering fear and regret: "It was the seventh floor. The water level on the seventh floor dropped by a huge margin somehow—we can't even lure out the underwater magical beasts anymore. This guy," he pointed at the one-armed casualty, "relying on his good swimming skills, held his breath and wanted to dive down to see if there was some kind of opportunity..."
He took a deep breath, as if still able to see that terrifying scene: "But just after diving down a short distance, a massive black shadow suddenly shot up from the water bottom! Fast as lightning, it bit his arm clean off in one bite! If our party's mage hadn't reacted quickly and used an impact spell through the water surface to deflect that thing slightly, he would have been swallowed whole. That he managed to escape to the surface was already a blessing from the God of Light..."
"Water level drop?" Vera's brow furrowed tightly as she tried to find a reasonable explanation in her memory and experience.
In this brief moment of silence, the mage from the other party who had been quietly taciturn suddenly raised his head, his gaze fixed intensely on what appeared to be an empty patch of ground to the side, his face full of confusion: "This... what is this?"
The others, including Vera's team, immediately followed his line of sight but saw nothing at all.
Vera instinctively wanted to step forward to investigate, but was grabbed by the arm by Feiyin beside her.
Feiyin's fingers were ice-cold, yet she gripped with considerable force.
She too was staring intently in the direction the mage had pointed, her delicate brows full of confusion and a trace of inexplicable unease. Clearly she had also sensed some kind of anomaly, yet couldn't understand what it was.
That mage quickly walked to the area of apparent "nothingness," extending his right hand with fingertips glowing faintly with investigative magical light, tracing and sensing through the empty air.
His expression grew increasingly grave, even carrying a trace of academic fervor: "Strange... so strange! There's clearly nothing unusual here, so why is the magical energy forming such chaotic patterns in this..."
*Hiss—crack!*
A sound like space itself being forcibly torn apart—tooth-achingly harsh—suddenly rang out!
A vicious, twisted rift with unstable edges abruptly appeared from thin air.
The mage's face still held traces of ultimate bewilderment and confusion. Before even a hint of horror could emerge, his body was split in two before Vera and the others' terrified gazes by that suddenly appearing rift.
His upper torso slid downward with a frozen expression of shock, while his lower half stood upright for a moment before being cut into several more pieces by the expanding and contracting rift!
Time seemed to freeze.
Everyone's minds went completely blank during these two seconds of absolute deathly silence.
Until a sharp, explosive scream burst from a female adventurer's throat: "Ahhhhh——————!!"
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