For the next five days, things settled into a rhythm. Each night, we headed into the dungeon, leaving a part of me utterly flabbergasted at its continuous replenishment. Every time we entered the dungeon, we were faced with a similar challenge. While the details varied, the experience never fundamentally changed. The only real difference was the quality of the loot, the first night’s loot being vastly superior. We still got one or two items from each boss, though only one was of similar quality to those we had received the first night, the other of lesser quality, and the EXP were lowered as well. Or, more likely, the EXP were back to their normal amount, while the first night had granted a hefty bonus, thanks to the Dungeon Explorer buff.

Either way, five nights of dungeon crawling were enough to boost me to level thirty-four and pretty much all my skills were boosted quite a bit. Constant combat was quite good at pushing you to improve, at least if the combat didn’t kill you. My Rune Masteries increased across the board, with Ice Rune Mastery keeping its lead with a gain of three points, bringing it to twenty-eight, likely because it was one of my primary combat tools. Darkness and Blood Rune Mastery didn’t improve quite as much, only ticking up by two points each, bringing them to twenty-five. Still, it was good progress.

Amusingly, while I had used a lot of Water Magic and Rune Mastery in the dungeon, as Water was an excellent medium to conduct Cold-Runes, the skill only went up by two, bringing it to eleven, but it was enough to grant me another Rune from the Astral River. I had tried to get something along the lines of Waterfall, or maybe Geysir, something along the lines of swift, forceful movement of water, but sadly, the best I had managed to pierce together was a Flow-rune, helping me to focus the streams of Water I could conjure, even if I didn’t force it with Water Magic.

In comparison, my Wind Rune Mastery seemed to be rather pathetic. I had done quite a few experiments and tried things out in an effort to gain some understanding, but I had only managed to increase the ability by one, bringing it to four. Clearly, there was still a lot of work to be done.

My pure Magic skills went up as well, especially once I realised that I could push and prod at magical constructs with my Darkness Magic. Darkness Magic held the domains of Change and Magic, both of which could be used to influence nearly everything, even if that influence was horribly inefficient. But by pushing, prodding and jabbing the magical forces keeping the Undead together, I was able to test a few ideas I had in regards to the dungeon and its magical operation, though nothing I actually could harness just yet. But the whole process pushed my Darkness Magic up by incredible five points, bringing the skill to a respectable twenty-five after it had languished for some time.

In comparison, Ice Magic went barely up, only going up by one, bringing it to twenty-eight, but that might have been due to the limited use it had been in the dungeon. I probably had gained all points I could for moving around Hailstones of my Frozen Shuttle, if I wanted to keep increasing the skill, I’d have to change things up. Either create additional tools or create additional shuttles, always pushing myself to control what I could do.

Similarly, without sacrifices, my Blood Magic didn’t get much use, just a little bit to harvest meat on the way back, or when we visited the farm. It wasn’t much, but what little use it got was sufficient to push it up by one, bringing it to twenty-four. I’d have to do some work with it, or maybe teach Lia more about it. Teaching her had likely been the major source of my own improvement, as teaching and understanding went hand in hand.

Water Magic, just like its Rune Mastery, had made some progress, going up by one, bringing it to nine, while Wind Magic had managed to outstrip its corresponding Rune Mastery, going up by two, bringing it to seven. While I was rather happy with the progress I had made, I had invested most of my downtime into them, hours upon hours of training. When comparing it to the strides I had made with my Ice and Darkness Magic when those were at this level, it felt a little lacklustre but maybe that should be expected. Ice and Darkness were my primary elements after all, and the entire Legacy of Morgana was based around them.

When it came to Death Magic, my progress remained rather minuscule. I had managed to brute force my way to another point, bringing the skill to seven but I had a feeling I would be hitting a wall soon. Trying to channel more Death Magic, trying to accustom my body to the deadly energy, simply didn’t work well, there had to be something else, some trick I was missing. Maybe I’d figure it out eventually, but for now, I doubted there was much more progress to be made.

Mind Magic, on the other hand, had made another leap, though not in combat. Given that I didn’t want to edge myself into a dead end, I had done quite a bit of work with the skill in conjunction with Astral Meditation and Lia, helping her delve into the Astral River and even trying to teach Rune Mastery to her directly, primarily with Blood Runes. It had been a wild ride, one where we had both suffered a headache of five, but Mind Magic had gone up by four on that wild ride, bringing it to twenty-one, while Astral Meditation had gone up by two, bringing it to twenty-seven, though that wasn’t just from meditating with Lia.

Another skill I had yet to apply to combat was Earth Magic. I had done some work, some pushing and prodding, and managed to get the skill to three, raising it by one. However, the bigger success was conjoined with the increase in Astral Meditation was my success in gaining the Earth Rune Mastery. I only had access to a single rune, Earth, which was a general Rune just like Ice, Water or Wind, allowing me to conjure material I could envision as part of that domain, though I had yet to really experiment with it. There was simply not enough time, even if I spent most of my time working on my magic.

Amusingly, with all the time spent training my magic, my Fire Magic remained as rudimentary as it had been. I could create sparks, even a flame the size of a flickering candle, but that was it. No skill gained just yet, but maybe, it would appear soon. I wanted the skill, if only to round out the set, just like I wanted the Rune Mastery. That desire was only spurred on by the curiosity to see if there’d be a special reward for gaining the four basic elements, or mastering their runes, as implied by gaining the Rune Masteries.

But it wasn’t just skills and EXP we got in the dungeon. We also gained quite a few items, some weird, others less so. There was an obvious theme to them, or rather there were multiple distinct themes. The first group were items based on some equipment used in a slaughterhouse, for example, the Cleaver Lia had found on our first run or a chain ending in a meat hook that increased Strength and Dexterity and allowed the user to restrain targets from a distance. At least if those targets had meat and the wielder was skilled. There also was a lighter blade, more a fillet knife than a cleaver, that I took for myself, even if I missed the refined forms of my Butterfly Blades, especially the protection they provided my hands.

The second group was equipment decorated with some animal parts, mostly bones, horns or teeth, the solid stuff. Lia’s helmet, Silva’s necklace and a few similar items came into our possession, though sadly, nothing truly impactful. We still needed to get some decent armour, but we now had a few things we’d drop off with the other survivors when we visited them again. It was stuff we didn’t need and while I had no illusions that the other survivors could actually pay us in any impactful way, giving them powerful gear would hopefully boost their opinion of us. They needed stuff like that, so it should be very welcome.

The third group of items was just weird. The large bone, the egg, stuff like that. We had to figure out the way to use those animal products for ourselves and I only had managed to do so with the bone. Placing it in boiling water somehow resulted in a surprisingly delicious broth, one that the three of us had shared. After taking the bone back out, I noticed that it shrunk a bit, so I wasn’t sure how many servings we’d get out of it, but we had found two more of that kind of bone, so we could make soup for a while.

Sadly, when we returned to the dungeon on the eighth night, the door remained shut and a blue window told me we couldn’t enter for almost fifteen days. We needed to find a new space to grind, or maybe focus on something else for a while. Maybe visit Apple Gate Farm again, they might have some news.