The Spine of the World – that was the name of the mountain range that stretched from east to west, separating the desert in the north from the fertile plains and lush meadows on the other side. It was said that when seen from an aerial vantage high enough, the cloud-piercing peaks perpetually covered with snow resembled vertebrae jutting out from their sheath of muscle. The mottled reddish-yellow rock that composed the mountains lent credence to the comparison. As did the number of peaks in the range: thirty-three.

In the summer months, the snowmelt would trickle down as burbling brooks that joined together, growing wider and more voluminous as they rushed down the mountains along the channels cut by water over millennia. Brooks merged into streams and streams into the five major rivers that cut through the golden sands. Three-month rivers they were called and the river Jhelum was one of the five. The main rivers and their tributaries supported the cities that had sprouted up like mushrooms along their banks allowing the orcs to maintain the population they did.

Beyond that, the rare oases were the only other places life could exist in the arid landscape of the Tyhr.

Gehenna, the City of Sin, one of the major cities located on the bank of one of the tributaries of the Jhelum nearing the main course of the river, was the entertainment hub of the surrounding regions. Bars, casinos, brothels, and the Arena of Sin – they had it all. Throughout the year, caravans of traders and tourists riding sand surfers or camels would be seen entering and exiting the city like ants drawn to honey.

It was an economy fuelled by hedonism, and in the middle of the barren desert, it was all the more garish.

Sand sat cross-legged upon his bed in his cell, meditating. Once he had adjusted his condition to the optimal state, he opened his eyes and looked at the three new additions to his room. First, most conspicuous, was the large stone vat in one corner of the room sealed shut with a heavy stone lid. Then there was the wooden box he had placed on his bedside table. Finally, lying on the bed in front of him cradled in a porcelain crucible filled with chalk dust was a shard.

All three were remuneration for his work at the clinic.

Kreg had given him two choices. He could either have all his payments in the form of mana replenishing pills – the same pill he had granted Sand to rapidly top up his mana before fusing his first shard. Or, he could choose his second skill ahead of time for the price of half his earnings for the month. If he chose the shard, he would have to fight within the week.

Sand had chosen the shard without hesitation.

If his goal was merely surviving in the pits, then the first choice would have been the logical decision but his goal was freedom. And for his plans to succeed, he needed to reach the peak of the rankings for Yellow mages within two years and hold his spot against challengers for several weeks at the very least to catch the attention of the distinguished guest that would visit at that time.

The more matches he won the faster he would climb the ranks and the more resources he would receive. A positive cycle that would see him to the top. Added to the fact that following his Dungeon prescription was quite time-consuming, if he didn’t rush, there was a high probability that he would miss the opportunity. And the next one would take several more years to arrive. He was sure that the more he delayed, the more the timelines would diverge and his escape would grow more unsure. So, the second choice was, in fact, his only plausible one.

He fixed his gaze on the shard. It looked like a piece of mesh rolled up into a thin cylinder, except that the mesh was made up of purple crystalline material. The name of the shard was Undead Marrow. It was an extremely special shard, the very basis of the entire ecosystem of the Myriad Toxins desert area. The skill description came to mind.

“Tier 1 Undead Marrow shard obtained from a Bone Monster. Advantages: Very effective defence and recovery shard that becomes more comprehensive as it rises through the Tiers. At Tier 1, it greatly strengthens the bones of the user. Disadvantages: Difficult to feed as it requires various toxins as sustenance. Expensive and rare toxins are required for promotion.”

“Advice: Appropriate auxiliary shard is needed to deal with the toxin.”

Even without the description he had read in the storehouse, Sand was extremely familiar with the shard. In his previous life he had spent quite a bit of time in the Myriad Toxins desert area in order to cast off the pursuit of the orcs sent after his trail. In that desolate land where the only things that could survive were the dead, where the land was perpetually shrouded by multicoloured clouds of toxic miasma, where slaughter was a way of life – he had spent ten years studying the ecosystem to improve his own Dungeon.

It could be said that he was an expert in the ways of the undead.

Getting up from the bed, he walked over to the table and opened the box. Inside lay four orange-red pills – each the equivalent of one week of his exercise. His advance payment for the month.

Given that he had to exhaust one pill worth of mana every session at the clinic and venomous injuries worth healer attention popped up three to four times a month, it would just be enough to break even. If he continued his exercise regimen, he could see the same level of progress as he originally would without his clinic duties. Since he had taken the shard this month, his mana levels would stagnate but counting the rewards for victory in his upcoming match and the eight pills he would receive at the beginning of the next month, he could make rapid progress.

Without hesitation, Sand sealed his pores and popped the first pill. His skin flushed a bright red as the heat dilated his capillaries, nearly scorching him from inside. After a moment, the heat coalesced into mana. The mana was no longer the dark crimson of the initial stage but the bright scarlet of the middle stage of a Red mage. The scarlet mana was twice as dense as the crimson form and the aura it lent his body allowed him to simultaneously fuse two Tier 1 shards at once. When the last vestiges of the pill dissolved and turned into mana, Sand was at one-fourth of his full capacity.

After consuming all four pills one after the other, his entire body was flooded with the scarlet mana with some areas tinged vermillion. Sand exhaled some steam and stretched to limber his body and let it adjust to the sudden influx of mana.

Picking up the shard from the bed, he walked over to the vat in the corner of the room, gathering a strip of cloth, a knife and a short stick along the way. There was only one source of light in his cell, a glass lantern enclosed within a wire cage hanging from a hook driven into the wall beside the door. On his way to the vat, Sand paused at the lantern to dial down the wick, reducing the illumination of the room and casting it into deep shadow.

Reaching the vat, he put the cloth down and carefully placed the shard atop it. Straining with all his might, he pushed the heavy stone lid, uncovering it and revealing the jet-black liquid within. It was the shadow venom he had extracted from the arm of the unconscious Gladiator.

Looping the cloth around his left bicep, he twisted it tight with the help of the stick until with his mana senses he detected that the blood flow had been totally cut off. Then he plunged his hand into the dark liquid. The venom only came up to his wrist but that didn’t stop it from rapidly seeping into his arm and spreading. Shadow venom was quite volatile when exposed to light but once it entered the body, in the darkness of a body’s interior, its resilience and toxicity were astonishing.

Within minutes, the liquid in the vat had turned clear as the toxin permeated into Sand’s arm. He withdrew his arm and tried to flex it. It didn’t respond. It was as if his arm didn’t exist below the tourniquet. It looked exactly like the gladiator’s arm, black veins beneath blotchy blue skin. Sand had been quite happy when the first patient he had treated had been infected by shadow venom. The venom was paralytic in nature, not corrosive, which was perfect for his needs.

Placing the unresponsive arm on the ground, he gripped the knife in a back-handed grip with his right hand and drove the tip into the second section of his thumb. He felt nothing as the metal dug into bone and split it. Leveraging the knife, he widened the gap in the bone, revealing the marrow. Picking up the Undead Marrow shard, he touched it to the wound. As though sensing an appropriate habitat, the shard dissolved into a purplish liquid that seeped into the marrow. The bone miraculously knit together and the wound above it scarred over.

Sitting back on his haunches, Sand pumped his mana into the shard. The purplish liquid greedily soaked up his mana and began to spread rapidly coating the inner walls of the canals in his bones with a mesh of purple crystal. The venom in the bloodstream was attracted through the pores of the bones and into the mesh then released back as a jet-black material that fused with his bones, strengthening them.

Sand only stopped when all the venom and around half his mana was depleted before examining the results. The bones in his left arm up to three-quarters of his forearm had turned jet-black with the crystal mesh in their interior. All traces of the venom had disappeared from his bloodstream and the skin had regained its colour along with the return of all sensation.

Removing the tourniquet, Sand flexed his arm and felt no difference. Taking up the knife, he drove it once again into his thumb. But this time with the sound of metal striking against metal, it bounced off the bone. Nodding in satisfaction, Sand used a bit of the cloth strip to bandage his wound. With his mana, it wouldn't take long to heal.

Strictly speaking, the Undead Marrow shard was a consumption class shard. It consumed itself to transform the body of its user. Its effects were permanent and didn’t need to be activated with mana during a fight – a passive skill. Depending on the kind of venom used to feed the shard, the characteristics of the bone that formed would be vastly different. It was one of the most versatile shards in existence.

In the wild, affected by the strange environment of the Myriad Toxins desert area, the skeletons of the creatures that died there were reanimated. They had only one goal, fighting each other and perfecting their form. Skeleton battled skeleton unceasingly, the victor consuming the fallen. Finally, a Bone Monster would emerge out of the numerous skeletons – the overlord of an area. The Bone Monster would proceed to condense an Undead Marrow shard. Deriving the toxins in the environment, it would improve its body until every single bone was filled by the Undead Marrow. It was then that the shard advanced automatically to the next Tier. A Tier 2 Undead Marrow shard could give birth to muscles by absorbing the toxins. A Tier 3 could produce blood. A Tier 4 gave rise to organs. A Tier 5 could form skin. At that point, it was called a Regeneration shard.

Depending on the Tier of their shard, the undead were classified as Bone Monster, Wight, Zombie, Ghoul and finally Revenants. Each Tier of undead had an absolute suppression over those lower in the hierarchy and they constantly fought each other, driven by the desire to consume the other and improve themselves. In his years of observation, Sand had come to the conclusion that it was nature’s way of deducing the perfect combination of shards that would result in a Dungeon.

Depending on the toxins they absorbed in their growth phase, the shards the undead condensed would be different and in the constant fighting, only the most superior combinations would emerge. Over thousands of years, one or two Dungeons might even be born by luck, promoting the undead to the level of a Lich.

Currently, Sand’s bones in his left hand had been transformed with Shadow Venom. This gave his bones extreme toughness and resilience. In nature, due to the weakness of shadow venom to light, it was quite rare for a Bone Monster to evolve using it as the bones would practically shatter when exposed to light but once they evolved to the next level and the bones were protected by a layer of muscle, they immediately turned into the toughest undead variants. Similarly, Sand could easily block a knife with only his bones now.

To use his Phlebotomy shard, he needed to cut his opponent and for that he needed to get close to them. He couldn't do that without risk of injury, so a defensive shard became necessary. The best thing was, due to the synergy between his two shards, when it evolved to Tier 2, instead of forming muscle, the Undead Marrow shard would produce blood. Thus, in effect, both his shards would feed each other.

This kind of synergy was one of the indications of a properly forming Dungeon.

Standing up, Sand was just about to return everything to its place when there was the clanging of the warden’s baton on the door. Turning around, he saw the albino orc squinting against the darkness.

“What ye be doin’ boy all sneaky like?”

Sand retorted coldly, “None of your business.”

“Brat! Want me ta come in and tan yer hide?!” the warden exclaimed, enraged.

“You can try,” sneered Sand.

“Damn it!” cursed the orc. Sand paid him no heed as he went about his task of cleaning up the room. The warden wasn’t even a red mage in the true sense. He didn’t have a shard. Unless he suddenly grew fearless of reprisal from Kreg, he couldn't touch him.

“Well,” said the warden deceitfully, “I was gonna be nice and read ye the details of yer opponent in the pits but since ye can give me lip, ye can read it yerself.”

He chuckled as he tossed a piece of parchment into the cell through the slit in the door. As it fluttered to the ground, Sand heard his footsteps going away. Sand’s gaze was deep as he stared at the light trickling in through the slit in the door. Hopefully, the warden would spread the news of how he had “put an arrogant slave in his place”. Preferably the news would reach the ear of the Gladiator he was up against and he would underestimate him.

Fighting in his young body with half his mana, he needed every advantage he could get.