So, things seemed simple enough. In order to improve my chances of surviving I had to accumulate Essence. I had done so for my first 320 Essence. Apparently by ruining the days of various disgusting beasts down here. The plan was to use this essence to improve myself and thus my chances of making it out alive. Surviving first.

I suspected to need less food and water now with my [Improved Constitution], but it was still my first concern apart from avoiding to become food for something else down here. I had to explore, climb up this foul place – to get out of this dump and reach higher caverns. There just had to be a place higher up with something I could thrive on, or my struggle would be futile from the get-go.

It took a few moments to wriggle free this time. I basically just had buried myself with rocks, my upper body sticking partways in a crack in the wall, with just a hand width of room to breathe. The walls around me were smooth. So smooth in fact, that I suspected a big Magmaworm, as I called it, had carved these tunnels by melting and consuming the stone. I did not want to explain to a worm of that size what had happened to its…offspring.

I drank a few days worth of precious water, greedily licking my lips to let none of it go to waste. I needed it for the day ahead, even when it would run dry in two more days, or less. Thirst would grip me much earlier, if my Core Skill hadn’t changed my mortal needs by too much.

I took the sword again. I never let it out of my sight for long down here in the darkness. The blade was utterly ruined from my fight with the Magmaworm. It would never hold an edge again, but I could saw through some of the weaker enemies with the using the cracks like sawteeth or pummel them to death, if that didn’t work.

I took a deep breath, which I immediately regretted, because down here your best bet were shallow and quick breaths to avoid the smell and fumes. I took out my trusty lantern and made my way into the darkness again.

Mentally, I was troubled. The sanctuary of my Demesne allowed me to rest and get out of the horror, quite literally. But coming back was hard, and got harder the more I had to do it. Maybe I would loose my edge and my focus, if I didn’t commit 100% to my situation and surroundings.

I hated every gods damn second of it. It was beyond disgusting and I was not above repulsion and fear. How could I, in the narrow tunnels of stone filled with filth, darkness, claws and mandibles? So I edged along the walls of the tunnels, occasionally hacking spiders or centipedes apart, who could get as long as my arm.

But for a couple of hours I didn’t encounter anything worse, like a swarm of insects or another Magmaworm. It was a closed ecosystem, I suspected. Insects and even more disgusting beings fed on the refuse and bodies, mushrooms and whatever else once sprang forth from the decay. Magmaworms meanwhile feasted on those living, all while expanding the evergrowing labyrinth under and around the Abyss. But I recognized another thing. I was lost. I mean, I never had known the way, but now I even lost my sense of where I had been before.

But I was safer than I had ever been down here. I cloaked myself in [Walk the Night Unseen] and slipped through the shadows, whenever I could not reasonably fight my way past an especially big or dangerous monster. That way I could even avoid a sleeping Magmaworm, even though I only tried it once and regretted every second of it, knowing that it had more than one sense. But my Skill held true.

[Eyes to Pierce the Darkness] helped me when I had to snuff out the lantern and to avoid trap laying predators. Hours and hours passed by like a breeze. A breeze filled with razor sharp pieces of broken glass, shit and whatever made this deepest pit of the earth so fucking disgusting.

I had almost mastered the trick to actively detach my mind from my situation. To stuff everything that happened to me deep down, to the back of the queue, while I let my rational self handle the problem or situation of the moment. To help me enter the state I handled it like a Skill I could activate. I whispered it, whenever I needed it, to help me detach myself. I called it [Iron Mind behind an Iron Mask]. It was no Skill, just a psychological trick. But it helped me.

I made my way upwards, and two days later I still lived. But I had reached an obstacle not so easily bypassed.

I stared like an Idiot. A Magmaworm of giant proportions was coiled up in a pit. I could not even comprehend a comparison. Nothing was that big. Nothing breathing and moving, that is. It was coiled up as if sleeping, and around the beast in the pit were dozens, maybe hundreds, of worms. Writhing, moving around the big one, under and over one another.

The heat was almost unbearable. The reason I still stood here, even after fifteen minutes as tightly wrapped in [Walk the Night Unseen] as I possibly could – after wrestling my gods forsaken panic down to the ground – was an opening in the ceiling.

It was huge, directly above the giant worm. I could see through it. A deep and easily climbable ramp leading further upward. And the reason I could see it was light. Not the light of the glowing worms under the opening, but a greenish tint of light, somewhere up there.

This was it.

A way – maybe the only way – out of the labyrinth. Out of the disgusting tunnels to the higher caverns.

Finally, I left. Just around a corner really. But I stared at that corner forever. I would have stared at the worms instead, but I feared my Mana would run out on me and I could not fuel my Skills forever. Down this smooth tunnel of stone, I stared at salvation. And certain death. I had some means.

I mulled over them in my head again and again, until even the most reasonable sentence sounded wrong to me. My ideas were insane to begin with. Somehow making the worms fight each other, somehow running up the giant worm and jumping to freedom. But the Idea I always came back to, the reason I was still here was: climbing the walls. Silently and unnoticed.

I am a child of the mountains. I can climb. I just never had done anything like this before, not with this difficulty and surely not with my life beeing on the line. I just could not give myself a high chance to survive. I had not eaten or slept properly in days, thirst and hunger weakened my senses and even my body.

I could turn back. Go back to the filth, the insects and darkness. Looking for another way out. So why was I still here? Because I could climb. I was good at it. And the goal was near, so near. The idea of going back, of having to eat one more toxic and disgusting thing in this sewer of the world made me almost end myself right then and there. I just didn’t have it in me to turn back again. I had reached my limit.

The flicker of hope consumed me, broke my conviction. Made me take risks. I would try it. I would try for hope and freedom, even on the risk of death.

I was pressed so hard against the jagged rocks, that my chin got scratched. I had taken off my shoes, to get a better purchase on smaller ledges and had left quite a bit of gear behind. I just had a small bundle in my backpack, only my ruined sword strapped to it, because I just could not leave it behind.

Sweat was pouring down my neck - half physical effort and half the heat of the air around me. The sweat carved a tickling way down the caked grime and muck on my back, before dropping and landing among the worms somewhere way below me. My heart, racing along with my trembling muscles as if to compete for the prize of exhaustion, skipped a beat again, but once more no worm seemed to react to the dropping liquid.

This was it. I had made my choice. I had studied the wall and the way I would take. And I had done it. I took to the wall and climbed with a calm and control only being an expert in a field could grant you.

I was high above the ground, high above the worms- straight above them in fact. But I had to climb overhead to get to the ledge I now stood on: the smallest thing between me and magma filled maws and a violent death in bestial frenzy. And I had nothing left to give.

I was done. I had overestimated myself. I had to climb an angled wall still. Every ounce of my body would be on my fingertips and the distance…well it was short but It could just as well be a thousand leagues. I couldn’t go on.

Desperation burned in my lungs alongside the heat. I just wanted to see the sky again. But my muscles burned hotter still. With the smallest of sighs, I slipped the backpack off. Everything, sword and lantern, food and the rest, tumbled down into the pit. A moment of silence followed the pack like wolves hunting their prey. One of the worms was smacked right on the head. Then all hell broke loose.

In mere seconds the pit erupted in a whirlpool of bodies and fire, flesh and stone, biting, tearing, crying and dying. It was carnage, the sound alone brought fear to my heart only to blast it away with ice cold panic and terror. I pressed myself even harder against the wall.

Then the mother started moving and the sounds of rage turned desperate.

As was my struggle to hold on. I stuck to the wall because it meant living, because it meant taking another breath.

Everything else was meaningless, was non existing. Just me and the pain, and my rasping breaths. Every second counted, every second I lived like it was my very last. I was just a small light in the world, but I was a small light too stubborn to go out this very moment, or the next, or the one after…No amount of time or all of it passed and I snapped back to reality when my fingers just … stopped working.

I slipped and fell.

Too astonished to scream or really feel anything but surprise, I landed with a crack, snapping bones and ribs, and pain engulfing me. Fires burning away my hair and skin, the worms around me moving, scratching along, fighting each other.

And I saw her. In all her majesty, her glory. The Queen of Worms, mother of the Magmaworms, reared up in all her colossal size. She roared and the mountain trembled, for her newest children dared to kill themselves before her. Consuming themselves in fire and fury. Their rocky hides cracking under the heat.

The Queen had no eyes and yet she stared at her next generation that would never be. Because they were defective.

I understood. She was eternal, she had burrowed her labyrinth from the spine of the world herself, with will and fire. She had countless offsprings and no remorse. She was not angry, felt no loss. Only disappointment. She would try again. But first she would feast.

I got buried under the bodies of the fighting worms. Bitten and burned. I never stopped screaming. I never stopped moving. I screamed as my skin flaked off my body in charred black flakes, I screamed as my bones got churned to dust. I screamed as I pulled myself out of the pit, crawling away into the cool darkness, with willpower alone.

And I still screamed silently, even as I lost consciousness. Entering the sanctuary that was my mind. Far away from all the pain and fire.

“I should be dead, right?” I whispered, not quite able to grasp my situation. I looked around with a wild and hunted gaze. The sudden disappearance of every danger and pain left a cold tickle behind.

“You would be, if the Queen had spotted you. You crawled out of there. You are just a few breaths away from your last, though.” Lily was with me and spoke softly.

The contrast between reality and…this…was too much to bear this time. All the desperation, the terror and pain and now – nothing. I began to tremble and sweat, and fell down to my knees.

Lily tried to comfort me: “Yes, Hannibal, your mind is astonishing and your will is your greatest asset. Even now you can save yourself. Through willpower alone.”

“How?” My voice was as broken as my body.

“Will the power of creation into your body. Sheer willpower and Essence. The body is just that. It doesn’t hold a candle to the power your mind wields now. You can change reality. And that includes your body.”

“How is that possible?” I croaked. I could still vividly remember how my eyeballs had popped under the heat, how my skin was sheared off and burned.

“Why would it be different to bending light around you with your mind alone? Your body is part of reality. Healing your body is a far easier process than influencing your surroundings, in fact. But awfully expensive, Essence wise.”

“Why would it be easy?” I screamed. “It seems impossible to me!”

“Because it is you. Because you know yourself in a way you know nothing else. You just speed things up. You ask creation to step in, where time would fail you.”

“This is madness! I should be dead!”

“No one ever is ready. Why do you think all gods are so…inhuman? So detached? Thousands of years of the strange and impossible do that to you.”

I groaned deeply now. But whatever feeling I just had, disappeared. I was left with nothing else.

“What do I do?” I whispered, broken.

“Envision your healthy body. Really see it. Then you start throwing Essence at the problems that pop up.”

It was not a complex thing, the restoration of my body. But I had nothing to work with but raw power, no knowledge whatsoever, so it massive amounts of Essence.

Where a doctor might have splinted a broken leg, I completely replaced it with a new leg woven out of yarn instead. If that comparison makes any sense. I finished not caring where the Essence came from I threw at my body, not counting the exact amount. But It was enough.

Ding! In the blue letters of Lily’s writing a textbox appeared and hovered in front of me.

[New Title gained! Reforged in infernal fire! You not only saw the mother of the Labyrinth, you braved her nest and lived to tell the tale!

It's acts like these the aeons, heavens and hells recognize and reward!

Skills unlocked: [Magmabite] [Stonehide] [Whisperer of Worms]

Reward: 200 essence, 17 Shards of essence]

“What the fuck!” I cried. “Who did that?”

“That is a title. And to who did that…I cant explain that, really.”

“Well try it, would you?”

“The mightiest god we know of…is not omnipotent. No one is. They all bow to the laws of our existence. But who made the laws? Who watches us and gives us points for pleasing or unpleasing acts? We just don’t know. We just assume there is something. A guardian, or a system. Just something beyond us. Maybe it's an elitist club of the mightiest gods to amuse themselves. I don’t know.”

“There is so much to learn!” I was frustrated now.

“And I cannot wait to give you the tools you need to start learning, for I am tired of these questions.” There was a soft humor in her voice.

“You like it.”

“Yes. You are quite right.”

“So, what would you recommend doing next, Oh teacher of mine?”

“Let’s see what we have got left.”

My metaphysical Essence footprint appeared in front of me. Neatly organized in its glowing beauty. It was substantial.

“What is next?” I asked again.

“Expansion, I think.”