It was a month after the void invasion happened and I’d been enjoying my “vacation” by traveling all across the sixth layer. The first thing I’d done was fly as far in one direction as I could until I eventually hit the wall. This section of the sixth layer was massive and it had taken me almost two days to reach the wall from where I’d ended up after the invasion. I then continued on, following the wall all the way around, learning that the section of the layer I was in was circular, unnaturally so. The whole thing seemed like a perfectly constructed dome, containing all the volcanoes, lava lakes, craters, and empty stretches of barren land.

Curiously enough, I didn’t find a single exit. I had been curious if there were other areas that I could visit, but the wall of the dome hadn’t featured a single tunnel or door. At least none that I could see. I assumed that there were some, but unless the system granted me access, finding them would be a fool's errand. Better to stay here and make the most of it.

After completing a lap around the dome, I started flying around in random directions to look for any interesting locations. I assumed that there were more dungeons for travelers to find, and if there were any, they should be recognizable in some way. The obsidian palace that I’d been tasked with finding, most likely either was a dungeon or was within one of the dungeons that could be found on this layer. To my surprise, I couldn’t locate a single dungeon.

The entirety of this area felt like somebody took the copy-and-paste function of a computer and just went wild with it. There were a lot of different volcanoes, lakes, craters, and other landmarks, but eventually, I started to notice certain things repeating. At first, I chalked it up to me simply imagining that I saw the exact same thing several times, but I could no longer deny it after finding two completely identical lakes next to each other. Once I started paying more attention to these duplicates, I couldn’t unsee them anymore.

Even after figuring all of that out, I hadn’t seen anything that looked like a dungeon entrance. No matter, though. If anything, I had time on my side. During all of my traveling, I’d pumped all of my mana into my seed, managing to get it to the sixth tier while avoiding fights so as to not spoil my “vacation”. Sure, I loved fighting, but I just needed a mental health break after the void invasion. I was getting frustrated with not being able to find anything of note, some might even say I was getting bored.

I might just need to start hunting again to stave off the boredom.

Another month had passed and, contrary to the first one, this one was filled with a lot more bloodshed. I wasn’t exactly on a month-long killing spree, but I did make it a point to spend a few hours a day hunting. After all, my attributes would only benefit from me doing so. I’d even get more mana to pump into the seed, win-win! It also had the nice benefit of being able to train up my spells and skills, which finally pushed void javelin over the edge. The darn spell had been stuck at level nine for ages now, even with how heavily I used it.

Ever since it was upgraded, I’d been having a lot of fun with it, especially after having been at the receiving end of it a few months ago.

Void Laser (A)

Shoot a concentrated beam of void mana.

Cost: 1'000 VMP

The description of the spell was deceptively simple, as was the spell, but oh boy did it pack a punch. The beam lasted for about three seconds and was freely aimable. Everything on the wrong end of the spell usually had a pretty bad time. If I did a swinging motion with it, the spell acted like a massive blade that cut into or through almost anything. If I concentrated to beam on a certain spot, it lead to a massive explosion. The mana cost was pretty steep compared with all my other spells, but since I had tons of MP readily available it didn’t matter all that much.

Since the spell upgraded I’ve started making it a point to use my other skills and spells as much as possible. No reason to not use this time to try and get everything I had to higher levels. Farming the necessary experience to get the skills and spells to level was a chore, but it’d be worth it in the end! At least that’s what I kept telling myself. Repetition was starting to set in again… I wonder what I should focus on next month?

I had spent this month focused on the craters and the eximovere trees. The stationary giants were the ideal target for my MP drain, so I’d been going from crater to crater sucking them dry of their MP and infusing my seed like a madman. I had also learned to differentiate the trees that still had their fruit and those that didn’t. The active trees usually caused the vegetation to spill out of the craters, which was the first sign that something was wrong. If I saw a crater like that I flew high above them looking for monsters that were spaced out. Usually, there were tons of monsters just sitting around due to the bewitchment of the trees.

I gave these craters a wide berth, not too keen to experience their trap once more.

Before I started draining the trees, I usually took care of the monsters inhabiting the craters. They provided me with a great snack for when I was glued to the trees. It was a bit difficult to eat while making sure I didn’t break contact, but with my big mouth, combined with my arm tentacles that I used to shove the food in, it all worked out. When I wasn’t busy filling my infinite stomach, I studied magic.

For now, I slowly went through all my spells, analyzing and trying to remember the different runes, what they meant, and what their role was in the matrix. I was mostly just learning my runes. The skills I’d received from the system let me read the runes and even provided me with the general functions they had, but that didn’t mean that I knew the runes. My high intelligence and wisdom scores assisted me in this endeavor, making memorizing the runes a lot easier than I ever thought it would be.

Back on Earth I by no means considered myself stupid. Generally a mess and helplessly addicted to gambling, sure, but I wasn’t stupid. There had been a time before everything started going tits up for me when I was a decent student. Good grades came easy and I was pretty studious. Never to this extent, though. My attributes did have a sizable influence on my abilities, and while things like intelligence weren’t as readily visible as maybe strength or agility, the effect was there. As a result, I had no trouble memorizing a large number of runes just by dedicating myself to the task.

For now, I still wasn’t entirely certain how the more complex spells slotted the runes together to produce the results they did, but I didn’t need to. I was trying to build myself a solid knowledge base, from which I could eventually draw conclusions.

Another month later I found myself back in the volcano section of the layer.

I needed to switch my focus every so often, every time I felt like I was going insane by doing the same things over and over. After studying a metric shit-ton, I was currently on a relaxing flight across the layer, occasionally swooping down to take out a monster or two. I needed to clear my head and take some time to process all the things I’d committed to memory regarding runes and spellcasting.

I absentmindedly attempted to see if there was any kind of pattern in the repeating landmasses, but it looked like the distribution was truly random. After a while, I came to the conclusion that there truly hadn’t been any thought put into the layout of this area. I was starting to wish that I could put myself on auto-pilot or something. I’d been hanging around this layer for four months now, pumping my seed full of mana while trying to distract myself with whatever struck my fancy at the time.

But, even this was getting boring. I was getting sick and tired of the volcanoes, the lava, the craters with the trees, and mostly the same set of monsters roaming around the layer. My seed was in the eighth tier by now, which was great progress, but I still needed a metric ton of mana to get it to the tenth tier. Judging by how the needed mana grew with every tier, getting the seed from tier nine to tier ten would take an insane amount of MP and time. I was determined to get the seed there, as the promised evolution benefits would all be worth it in the end.

But, god damn, it was boring work.

After constant use, my hunter radar finally reached the next tier. Additionally to providing me with the rough direction of the closest hunter, it now also let me know the approximate distance to it. After spending another month in a constant state of annoyed boredom, I finally got something new to do. Hunting hunters!

I didn’t know how many hunters were on the layer, although I had seen a few of them on my travels. It was relatively easy to identify them since the quest triggered once I got close enough to one of them. I was pretty sure that one of them was lurking in a lava lake, and I had no idea how that one looked, but there were two others that I’d seen roaming around. Of course, I had often thought about hunting them down, mainly because defeating each one gave special evolutionary energy as well as a free C tier skill. I’d held off until now because I wanted to raise the hunter radar by at least one tier and I wasn’t sure if and when hunters would respawn after I killed them.

Now the skill had upgraded and I could finally go after them!

Although I knew they wouldn’t be too much of a challenge at this point, I still got excited at the prospect of hunting some slightly stronger monsters for once. That, and of course the rewards! I had a few skills in mind that I’d love to get, and since I was still stuck on this layer for a while I would have ample time to upgrade them to B tier before I evolved and went to the next layer.

Off to hunt we go!

Turns out killing the hunters wasn’t as exciting as I’d thought it’d be. My ability to fly, combined with the devastating power of my void laser and my attributes which were getting to a ridiculous level, it was almost too easy to dispose of them. The rewards still came, which was nice, but there really had been three hunters still alive. I’d taken one out pretty early on and I wasn’t sure if there were supposed to be three or four hunters roaming around. Maybe it was three, and the one I’d killed had respawned already. Maybe it was four and the one I had killed hadn’t respawned after a whole six months had passed.

Whatever the case may be, I had killed four hunters on this layer and was looking forward to the special evolutionary energy further strengthening my evolution once the time for it came. As for the C tier skills, I got the following:

Mind Protection (C) (Passive)

Protects your mind from attacks that target it. Increases your resistance against the eldritch.

Shield (C)

Conjure up a shield of pure mana. Damage done to the shield will subtract MP instead of HP with a ratio of 3MP to 1HP.

Cost: 80 MP to activate.

Meditation (C)

Meditate to increase your natural MP recovery by 50%. Moving cancels the meditation.

Cooldown: 10 hours

The first thing I looked for when choosing my new abilities had been a resistance passive against the bewitchment status. It would seem that that particular resistance was rated higher than C tier, so I settled for the mind protection passive instead. It would do a similar job, and even protect me against other attacks against my mind. Of course, there was no guarantee that it could completely block the bewitchment status or any other similar statuses, but I felt a lot more comfortable knowing that I wouldn’t immediately die if I got too close to an active eximovere tree.

The shield spell had been a no-brainer as well. I’d been wanting one for a while now and the void invasion had proven just how important it was to have a spell like that. Of course, it came with the downside of using up chunks of MP whenever I got hit, but that also meant as long as I had mana, I could protect myself against almost anything. That didn’t mean that I could casually shrug off a powerful attack as it was likely that doing so would bottom out my MP immediately, which meant dodging should still be priority number one.

Then there was meditation. A skill that would improve my MP regeneration even more. I was in need of a ludicrous amount of mana, so I would take anything I could get my grubby little tentacles on. The cooldown for the skill was pretty long but similar to MP drain, I could keep it up indefinitely unless I was disturbed. I was looking forward to upgrading the skill and, who knows, maybe meditation would do my mental health some good. It would for sure be an effective and relaxing way to pass the time.

When I tested the meditation skill I noticed that I fell into an almost trance-like state. I could still infuse my seed while meditating, forming a nice cycle of restoring and infusing while time seemed to pass almost unnoticed. I had yet to test if I could use MP drain at the same time, but if I could, I should be able to massively accelerate the rate at which I charged my seed.

I had spent a lot of this month back in the craters. As it turned out, MP drain could be used while meditating and I’d gone a bit crazy with this cool new technique I’d discovered. It was an incredibly relaxing experience and I felt completely in tune with the mana around and inside of me when I did so. The month had passed in a flash while I went from crater to crater, still avoiding the active trees. Sure, I had mind protection now, but I didn’t want to risk it. I had started hatching a plan to just decimate the trees from afar with the void laser and swooping in to collect the fruit.

I was somewhat curious to see if eating another fruit would upgrade my lava diver passive. If not, I might be able to sell them somewhere once I was off-planet. Travelers had always been a foreign concept to me, but after seeing the group that came to my rescue, I knew they were definitely out there somewhere. Surely a fruit that gave you lava immunity would be highly sought after and sell for a pretty penny? Or maybe it was common trash, who knows? Either or, I was looking forward to finding out.

I was currently celebrating the achievement of upgrading the seed of the void to the ninth tier by going on a relaxing flight around the sixth layer. Cruising along high, high above the ground I once again wondered just where the hell that obsidian palace was hiding. I felt like I’d combed every inch of this darn layer twice over with no trace of the damn thing. There hadn’t been any dungeons either, so I was growing suspicious. There had to be something I’d been overlooking, and it had been annoying me for a few months now.

I knew that obsidian was some sort of volcanic glass, although I was unsure how it formed. I also knew that the stuff was surprisingly brittle, even if most believed it to be some kind of super-hard glass. Building a palace from the stuff should be beyond impossible, but then again, so was everything else I’d experienced since becoming a slug. I didn’t think the system would lie to me, so the palace had to be somewhere. I had looked everywhere all across the dome but hadn’t found anything… where else could I go.

A closeby volcano erupted, drawing my eyes to the spectacle. I watched for a while as it spewed forth a stupid amount of lava and ash, which I took care to dodge. I’d seen what the superheated ash from one of these eruptions did to the other monsters and I had a feeling like my lava immunity wouldn’t protect me from that. As I watched the eruption I remembered how I attempted to swim down one of the volcanoes only to have the entire mountain blown away by a voidling.

Surely, the obsidian palace wouldn’t be… below a volcano, right?

While the idea seemed almost preposterous at first, my new theory quickly gained steam. Hiding a bonus objective below an almost insurmountable obstacle like having to swim down a volcano through tons of lava seemed insane. Then again, the system did also send me to find and eat a fruit that would enable me to do just that. The more I thought about it, the more obvious it seemed and I started to wonder if my high intelligence and wisdom scores actually mattered.

Not wanting to waste any time I dove into the nearest volcano, swimming downwards as fast as I could.