Using [Dead Dominion] Sylver had what was left of his body lunge at blue robe, and the moment the corpse with a hole in its torso made contact, he pulled at it. Since Sylver’s small ribcage weighed less than his dense body, he was flung towards it.

Blue robe made the mistake of ignoring Sylver’s large body as he aimed his sword at Sylver’s flying ribcage, which was leaking dark smoke, while Sylver’s large body’s head made a clicking sound.

Sylver used all the mana he could spare to create a flash of light from the spot blue robe was staring at, while he simultaneously made his old body lean down towards the man’s neck and allowed the spring-loaded jaws to snap shut. Blue robe screamed in pain, and-

Sylver didn’t get to see what happened next, on account of purple robe’s “push”, which once again sent Sylver’s ribcage flying, and made him lose connection to his temporary solidified darkness limbs. He bounced from wall, to floor, to ceiling, with incredible speed, like a gore-covered pinball, and heard the sound of a door opening.

Sylver didn’t even see what was inside that particular door, as purple robe disappeared through it, and the door slammed shut behind him before Sylver had even had a chance to stop his body from bouncing around.

Still midair, Sylver materialized himself a pair of arms and legs out of darkness and waddled over to his body. It was still wrapped around blue robe, who was currently incapable of movement.

The reason for that was the shiny lattice wrapped around every visible inch of the man’s skin.

A sweater-less, and slightly smaller, Mora was sitting on blue robe’s back and informed Sylver that he had about 4 seconds before blue robe freed himself.

Sylver leveled his finger with the man’s nose and flicked it upwards. There was a fraction of a second when Sylver’s beam of abyss magic sliced through Mora’s strings, that blue robe could have theoretically escaped.

Theoretically being the key word here, because the blue robe wearing heir didn’t react in time, and instead died from having his brain cut in two.

[Human (Claw Of The Blue Tiger) Defeated!]

[Due to defeating an enemy 90 levels above you, additional experience will be awarded!]

Sylver extended his hand towards Mora and grabbed her before the man’s corpse had a chance to fall down. She felt light in an alarming way, the word malnourished didn’t feel right, but going by the incredibly uncomfortable feeling Mora was emanating, whatever she had just done was a one-time thing.

On a later date, Sylver would discover that Mora had different types of threads that she used, and the one she used to restrict the blue robe heir took months to produce and refine. And while it was ridiculously strong, it also had a half-life of barely a minute.

It was one of her trump cards, whenever she fought something she couldn’t defeat, and she had used it up to help him.

In all the commotion, Sylver had lost track of Ria, and it took her shouting at him, for him to find her staff embedded deep in the wall.

“Are you alright?” Ria asked as she helped Sylver wiggle the staff around to get it out of the deep hole purple robe had created

Currently, Sylver looked like a man made out of solid smoke. His robe helped him maintain his form, but he didn’t have a face, hands, feet, and there were bits and pieces of his bigger body’s spine and muscles slowly floating towards the middle of the room, where Spring was being helped by Mora to piece some of it together.

“The important thing is that we won,” Sylver answered, as he summoned Dai to help him pull the staff. The shade fell over when it finally dislodged and came out.

“Is this what winning looks like?” Ria asked, as she absorbed the staff into herself, and floated over to Sylver’s hollow corpse.

“Why did we come here again?” Sylver asked, as he crouched down near his body, and tried to figure out if it was worth the effort to rebuild his outer ribs.

Flesh was quite easy to heal, all things considered. Even if it was extremely dense, it would only take a couple of days for Sylver to regrow all of his skin.

Bone on the other hand was a different matter.

Especially his very fancy bones, which required a number of specific components to repair properly. He had enough with him to fix an arm, and a leg, but he hadn’t planned on having to essentially rebuild his whole skeletal structure.

His right arm was mostly fine, his legs were fractured, but good enough, but his spine had been shattered, as was his outer layer of ribs.

The weird thing was that the damage shouldn’t have been that bad.

Sylver’s extremely educated guess was that purple robe used the same thing Abril, the woman he had cornered to get a meeting with the Bucklers, had used.

“We came here to kill the two heirs of the Blue Tiger sect,” Ria said, in an oddly muted voice.

“Did we kill them?” Sylver asked, as he gestured with his hand towards the two corpses lying near his own, who were going to be patched up a little before he tossed them at the front gates of the Blue Tiger sect.

“Yes,” Ria answered.

“So, we came in here with a goal, and we’ve achieved that goal, and in your mind, this somehow isn’t a win?” Sylver asked, as Ria very vaguely gestured towards his, arguably, destroyed corpse.

“How did he move that fast anyway?” Ria asked, as Sylver summoned a sphere of water into his hand, and fed it to his corpse, to make the flesh swell up, to fill in the various gaps.

“Cultivators can augment their physical abilities, it’s more or less the basis of everything they do. Mages focus on altering the world around them, while cultivators focus on altering the world inside of them.

“But this… He did something, just before he moved, blue robe did it too… It didn’t feel like clairvoyancy, but even at their speed, I should have been able to perceive them…” Sylver said, as he slowly raised his hand in the air, and made all the shredded blood vessels and nerves extend into the hole in the middle of the body until they formed a rudimentary net.

Sylver removed his robe, and Spring helped him put his small ribcage/head combination into the mess of dark gore strings.

“So how do we counter it? If it’s purely physical, I can’t stop it,” Ria asked, as Sylver used one hand to hold his small ribcage in place, while he slowly stood up.

Spring and Fen walked around him and wrapped a very thick bandage around his torso.

“It’s Faust’s problem now. I mean, I do hope that purple robe dies down here, and that’s the end of it… But the much more likely scenario is that this will snowball into something massive. He might get the “hat,” or maybe he’s already gotten out, and is halfway to his sect as we speak.

“Either way, he, and whatever problems he brings, are no longer my concern,” Sylver explained, as he threaded his robe through the gaps between his inner ribs, and the space where his outer ribs should have been.

“Wait… Are we leaving? Is that what you’re saying right now?” Ria asked, with the kind of tone that made Sylver remember she wasn’t as experienced as him.

“What’s the alternative? I chase after him, and he simply shoves me out of my body again? We can’t ambush him, since we’re chasing him, I can’t curse him, because he has more Ki than I have mana, and while I am very tempted to simply throw myself and my shades against him until he’s dead, it would take too much time. We’ve already been down here for a whole day-”

“91 hours, 22 minutes, since the moment we left the sect,” Ria interrupted, as Sylver steadied himself, figuratively, and literally, given that his center of gravity had shifted.

“Anyway… Faust is better suited for this kind of fight,” Sylver said, as he jumped up and down a couple of times, to make sure he didn’t fall out.

Sylver did a backflip, and then a front flip, and then went through a series of stretches. His body was fucked, but it was still in one piece, and while it would take weeks to properly reattach all the various nerves and blood vessels to his smaller ribcage, he could still move, and he could fight, and at this very moment in time, that was enough for him.

His aim with his magic might be a little bit off since he wouldn’t have the coordination his arms and fingers provided, but it wasn’t that bad, given the circumstances.

A normal man would have been crippled beyond any hope of repair, or so dead it wasn’t funny, so while Sylver wasn’t happy about the condition his body was in, he wasn’t going to complain too much.

He limped over to the door they had come into the room through and pressed his right hand against the closed door.

“How are we going to get out?” Ria asked, as Sylver limped to the next door, and placed his palm against it.

“Although it isn’t anything like any dungeon I’ve ever seen, this is undoubtedly, a dungeon. You made a map as we walked through it, did you notice anything strange?” Sylver asked as he moved to the next door.

“Aside from the fact that the only way it makes sense is if this world is non-Euclidean?” Ria asked as Sylver paused for a moment.

Thankfully she realized she used a word he wasn’t familiar with.

“It’s geometry where a straight line isn’t always the shortest distance between two points. Is this one of those things you need to be able to sense mana to understand?” Ria asked as Sylver shook his head as he walked over to the next door.

“More or less. I don’t know if you’re aware, but our house in Arda is just a bit bigger on the inside. About 10 to 20 percent bigger. I think I even explained it to you,” Sylver said, as he moved on to the next door.

“No, you didn’t. I asked about it, and you said you would give me a book on the subject, but never did,” Ria explained, as Sylver nodded his head, as he moved on to the next door.

“It’s… damn, how do I explain this properly… Do you remember how I mentioned that sometimes a trip from point A to point B can take 10 days, but a trip from point B to point A can take 9 days?” Sylver asked as Ria nodded at him.

“I always found that strange, since you always speak of teleportation magic as if it’s nearly impossible,” Ria said, as Sylver perked up as his palm touched the door, and he found what he was looking for.

“A person teleporting from one place to another isn’t the same as space being naturally compressed. Look, Ria… It’s just a thing here. I don’t know how to explain it properly. Remind me to get you that book I mentioned, because it will do a better job of explaining this than I will,” Sylver said, as his right hand flickered with golden light for a moment.

“Why this door?” Ria asked, as she floated over to Sylver, who was gradually making a hole in the wall for Ria to pick it open.

“Dungeons do this thing so clairvoyants can’t map them out, without coming inside. Sort of like extra locks on doors. But, if you’re able to sense primal energy, you’re able to tell which door has the most locks, and which has the least. Except since the locks are on the sides facing the dungeon core, that’s only useful when you’re trying to leave,” Sylver explained, as he paused for a few seconds to minimize the damage the abyss magic did to his weary flesh.

“Alright…” Ria said uncertainly.

“The point is, assuming Ki dungeons work the same way as mana-based dungeons, we should be on our way to Faust’s sect in a couple of hours,” Sylver explained, as he continued making a hole in the wall.