I awoke with a start, almost instantly cringing at the memory of the evolution process. I had gained a massive amount of constitution points since my last evolution and had been quite optimistic about my chances to stay conscious during the evolution, but I couldn’t have been any more wrong if I tried. Something about the evolution into a royal voidling was so devastatingly painful that I’d passed out almost immediately after the process began. I shuddered from remembering the unbelievable pain I’d found myself in, wondering whether I should continue to pursue this odd challenge I set for myself.

I tried to rationalize the extreme pain by telling myself that the evolution I went through was just THAT special, thus the increased pain. Next time would be different… hopefully. But, looking over myself, I had to say, I looked pretty fucking nice. It was hard to tell, but I was pretty certain that I’d grown a bit taller. The black parts of my void body had somehow become even darker, seemingly pulling in the light around me, while my green and red spots floated around like nebulas in space. The twinkling void stars spread across my body finished off the look.

Then, resting behind my eye stalks on my mantle, was my new void crown. Tiny spikes emerged from my mantle forming a ring, above which was a spinning circle of pure black. I could occasionally see a star twinkle within, and I had an odd feeling that the crown was a piece of the void itself. I stared at it for a while, wondering how that even worked.

I idly noted the fact that I was able to hear now, my new ears doing their job properly.

Suddenly, I felt the presence of something to my right and I flinched, cursing myself for not paying attention to my surroundings. My eyes shot over to where I felt the presence, coming face to face with the wall of the cave I was in, much to my confusion. It took a moment until I remembered that I had built a small bunker for my evolution and that I was safe in here. But then, why could I feel that there was a monster moving around out there? I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it moving about. It was as if I was a spider and the monster outside was brushing past my net.

It took a bit longer than I’d like to admit, but I eventually figured out that this was the effect of my void feelers. One of my new mutations that was supposed to work as an early warning system. I closed my eyes and focused on the odd feeling, trying to track whatever was out there with my new ability. I couldn’t make out what exactly was out there since the presence felt like a black hole that was moving around in a world of color. I read through the description of the void feelers again and finally understood.

The void was described as this different plane of existence, that was essentially overlaid over everything else. Everything that exists in this world, interacts with the void in some way or another, and the feelers helped me feel these interactions. Monsters, it would seem, occupied the space they were in, pushing aside the void as they moved around. Fascinating.

I moved about in my little cave for a while, trying to see if anything else had drastically changed, but my body felt pretty normal, if more powerful. After my quick workout session, I finally shifted my attention to the system notification waiting for me. I was still owed several spell level-ups, and the system was probably trying to tell me what had changed.

Void Jump (B) → Void Teleport (A)

Teleport to any place you’ve already been to.

Cost: 5’000 VMP

Void Laser (A) → Void Rend (S)

Use void magic to rend apart reality, causing massive magic and slashing damage to anything caught in the spell.

Cost: 6’000 VMP

Restoration (C) → Heal (B)

Restore HP - 300 MP to 100 HP

Grass Walk (C) → Ghost Walk (B)

If you cast this spell on top of Grass Walk, you will gain a further 30% movement speed bonus.

Cost: 300 MP per minute

Shield (C) → Elemental Shield (B)

When your Shield spell is active, you can cast this spell to change it to defend better against either fire, water, air, or earth elemental-type attacks.

Cost: 400 MP to change elements.

Your Adult form has been saved.

Just what the hell did the system mean by saving my adult form? It had been confusing me ever since I first saw it listed in the rewards back on the fifth layer and I still had no clue what it meant. I should probably ask Tim about it, he'd probably know what was going on.

I scanned through the list of spells that had benefitted from my evolution and couldn't help but notice that, while giant spike leveled up to ten, it did not get an upgrade. I wondered why that was for a second, before deciding that I had no clue and moved on to the other stuff. All of the spells that went from C to B tier were quite useful but, as expected, the real superstars were the void spells. I regretted not having used void jump more, because if I’d managed to upgrade it before the evolution I would have immediately gotten the S-tier spell of that line. Thankfully I had already unlocked the void laser, which now had completely skipped past the arduous leveling process and directly unlocked the S-tier spell, void rend.

The spell sounded like it would be a pretty devastating affair, but that was to be expected of an S-tier spell. Then there was void teleport, which sounded simply amazing. If it gave me the ability to teleport to any place that I’d already visited before, wouldn’t I be able to go back to other layers in order to explore and search for hidden things with my new skill, hidden radar? I definitely needed to test that out, but for now, I was more curious about what was waiting below me, instead of what was above.

To that end, I had an elevator to search for, as well as an elevator guardian to defeat.

No doubt the guardian would provide quite the challenge for any monsters that wanted to descend to the seventh layer, but I had an inkling that I just might breeze through this obstacle. I was excited to test out my new void rend spell, and who better than some startup roadblock as my guinea pig?

As per usual, the system was providing me with the direction of the exit, now that I’d met all of the conditions for descending. I burst out of my cave, startling the monster that had been snooping around, and took to the skies. I cast grass walk, layering ghost walk on top of it, and activated my rush skill, zooming into the air at unprecedented speed. Well, there was that one time when I went even faster due to Tim’s drink, but that didn’t count.

Volcanoes, lava rivers, and molten lakes blurred past me as I giddily went in the direction the system dictated, too excited to finally leave this layer and test out my new spells to care about what was going on down there. I kept activating rush off cooldown, yet it still took me about an hour to arrive where the system was guiding me. As it turned out, my destination was the wall of the layer. I had searched the entire circumference of the dome-shaped area and hadn’t found anything out of place, but as soon as I touched down in front of the wall, a system prompt popped up.

Please present your elevator key.

Not one to be told twice I pulled the key from my inventory and held it up toward the wall. After a short moment, the key disintegrated and the wall moved up to reveal a hidden passage. I quickly wondered whether my skill would be able to find a passage like this or if the system would prevent me from locating system-related stuff. Not willing to waste too much brainpower on what-ifs, I started down the tunnel.

The tunnel was rather large, presumably to accommodate the bigger monsters should they want to descend, magical lights illuminating it. I followed the tunnel that eventually transitioned into a downward spiral, leading into an open arena. There was plenty of space to fight in, massive webs giving a hint to what the guardian would be. As soon as I stepped into the arena, the tunnel behind me was closed off and the magical light dimmed. I was fascinated by the fact that I could hear something skitter around in the ceiling but quickly sealed my ears shut, just in case my opponent had any sonic attacks.

A long leg came into view from a hole in the ceiling on the other side of the arena, shortly followed by more legs and a large, bulbous body. The massive spider descended into the arena, doing its best to look intimidating. It was mostly brown in color, but some red and black spots could be seen decorating its body. It had four fangs for some unfathomable reason, each of them several times longer than my body, each of its legs tipped by hooks that looked more like curved spears.

If I was still human, I would have probably shit myself to death out of fear by now. Unfortunately for the spider, it looked like a cute house cat in comparison to some of the voidlings I’d encountered.

There was no system announcement to mark the start of the fight as the spider rushed at me. I used leap to get out of the way, getting ready to test out my new spell. Out of habit, I cast two poison assassinations to get some poison damage going, but just as I was constructing the overly complicated spell matrix for void rend, the spider suddenly collapsed like a bag of rice.

I stopped dead in my tracks, looking at the spider with confusion. The spider refused to move and I eventually realized that the system had already confirmed my kill via notification. I continued staring at the dead spider in disbelief, eventually realizing that polonic chance must have triggered. It was a pretty rare occurrence, even with all my luck points, but every now and again a monster would instantly collapse like that due to the instant kill effect of my poison. I had always assumed that boss-type monsters were immune to this effect, but it would seem that I was wrong.

Annoyed that I didn’t even get to properly test out my new spell, I went to collect the spider into my inventory before moving towards the now open passage to the elevator. I kept grumbling all the way until I was on the platform, pissed that the spider dared to get offed so easily.

As the elevator started to move downward, I consoled myself with the fact that there was an entire layer of monsters down there, waiting for me to void rend them from existence.