A Jaded Life

After resting up just a little, we started walking out of the boss’ room. During our rest, I had taken a closer look at the items we had found while in the dungeon and came across a few actually interesting items. Not so much for their practical use, though a bracelet that increased Dexterity, a diadem that increased Intuition and a necklace that increased Courage were useful items, their real use was in allowing me to figure out the enchantments that made them into what they were. If I managed that, we wouldn’t have just one of these but I might be able to create similar items for all of us, or maybe improvise enchantments that increased those attributes on other items, for example, a bracelet increasing Intuition, Rings that increased Dexterity, that sort of thing. It wouldn’t be easy but with enough time? I should be able to manage.

The item I considered seriously interesting was the blade Lia had picked up. It was a fairly primitive design, looking almost like some sort of claw or mandible fashioned with a handle and turned into a weapon but while it looked crude, the quality was amusingly high. The weapon was incredibly sharp, excellent for slashing and stabbing, but sadly it looked a little brittle. However, the biggest, and most interesting, quality of the blade was that it was labelled a living weapon, able to devour Blood to repair itself. It would be interesting to see how that looked and worked, to the point that I was looking forward to studying this particular enchantment. Hopefully, it would give me an idea on something that could help Lia with her feeding, so she wasn’t primarily relying on me or on actually biting into our enemies. If she had a weapon enchanted to drain the blood she shed with it and feed her with that blood, she would be an unstoppable force, especially if she managed to figure out how to heal her wounds and restore her stamina with her Blood Magic.

Many things to work on in the coming days but for now, we had to walk all the way back through the tunnel. Or so we thought…

When we walked out of the room we had fought the boss in, I paused, looking around the cave in confusion. There were fungi, ferns and flowers growing all around us, but in an arrangement that hadn’t been here when we entered the room. While it was possible that these flowers had spontaneously grown here, just to congratulate us on our victory, I doubted that this was the case. No, the plants looked just like those we had encountered right before we entered the dungeon but that had been a long way from where we should be, unless the dungeon was even stranger than I had originally thought.

“These look familiar, don’t they?” I asked, glancing at the unexpectedly calm Silva. She had been going around in a state of agitation since we entered the dungeon but now? Now, she looked completely calm and normal, without a single raised hair in evidence.

“Looks like the dungeon’s entrance,” LIa commented, picking up the same thing I had seen. In turn, Luna’s eyes started to glow with silvery light and she looked around, especially focusing on the area behind us.

“But the dungeon’s gone,” she commented, making me turn around, too, and stare in the area behind us, focusing on my magical senses as I did. She was right, the dungeon and the weird behaviour of the stones within was gone and I could sense the area around us once more. Shaking my head, I walked back a few metres, so I could look around the corner that should have contained the boss’ room we had just fought in but instead of the massive room, I was looking at a small, rocky cave, barely a few metres across and without any strange plants in sight. Certainly no dungeon or anything like that.

“Okay, any idea what happened here?” I asked, trying to make sense of things. To make matters even more confusing, I was fairly certain that the area we were now in wasn’t the same we had entered the dungeon from. It looked somewhat similar, and with the identical plants it wasn’t immediately obvious, but the rock formation wasn’t the same. There was far less earth around and I could faintly feel the transition from Earth into something I couldn’t sense at this distance, either water or air. If I had to guess, from the feeling I was getting and the rugged surface I could sense, I would bet it was air as water would lead to a smoother surface. So, we were beneath a hill or mountain, almost at the surface instead of a few dozen metres beneath the surface in a fairly flat, forested area.

“We’re not where we entered the dungeon, so we need to be cautious. No idea what might wait for us out there,” I warned the others when I realised that I might be able to get a better idea of our location by using the sensation I had used to guide us this whole time, trying to sense the forming Nexus and compare the sensation to the one I had previously.

“Give me a moment, I have an idea,” I added, closing my eyes to focus inwards. For a few minutes, I simply attuned myself to the Astral River around us, getting a sense of the area and letting the soothing flow of Power all around me wash away the lingering exhaustion from the previous days. No matter where we ended up, we could continue our path. At worst, it might be a bit of a detour but other than changing how far we had to go, it changed nothing.

Knowing the sensation I was looking for, I quickly spotted it, once I searched deliberately. Curiously, it was about as strong as before, meaning the distance shouldn’t have changed by too much, but instead of pulling me to the northwest, it almost pointed directly north, though there was still some westward inclination. So, we had moved but the movement was fairly limited in scale, maybe a couple days travel, if that. Not that the precise distance actually mattered, I had no plans to return to the place we had been in before, but it was interesting.

“Let’s go, I’ll tell you what I found,” I told the others as my eyes opened back up and we all started to walk out of the cave.

We didn’t have to go all that far, the cave was fairly small, making the whole thing even more confusing and soon, we all collectively stopped in annoyance. Underground, especially in an isolated space like the Dungeon, it was completely impossible to tell the time. We had been fighting until we needed rest before continuing onwards, meaning even the intervals between food and sleep was unreliable for time-keeping purposes and now, the Sun was high and bright in the sky, with nary a cloud in sight.

“Guess we’ll stay here for now,” Lia quipped, looking back into the cave. There were a lot worse places to sleep in, ülaces like the dungeon we had spent the last, what, two, maybe three, days in.

“Yeah, let’s get comfortable and we can rest for the rest of the day, maybe even spend the night and another day. Not sure about all of you, but I’m somewhat exhausted,” I admitted, while Silva let out a tired huff and sank to the ground, showing just how tired she was now. Maybe I should have realised that our canine friend was completely exhausted, given the way she had pushed herself in the dungeon, driven by that furious agitation. I wondered what had caused it, other than the dungeon, that much was obvious. What I wanted to know was why this particular dungeon had affected her in this way, we had been in dungeons before but she never really cared, she certainly hadn’t reacted with such agitation.

Shaking my head, I went back into the cave and started the usual spiel of creating our shelter. The rocky cavern made parts of that a lot easier than normal while other parts were more difficult but it was nothing I couldn’t handle.

Soon, I was sitting fairly comfortably on something resembling a couch, if one made a couch out of stone and upholstered it with a mix of Ice, Earth and Water, creating a fairly soft cushion that wasn’t too cold and didn’t stick to people. Luna was stretched out next to me, her head in my lap and already fast asleep while I was trying to figure out where we were by sensing the earth around me. It felt as if this wasn’t just a hill but an actual mountain, leaving me a little confused about our location unless the Change had altered the geography to the point that mountains had risen. It sounded absurd to the point of impossibility but at the same time, so did many things we had observed since the Change had happened.