I emerged from the darkness of the dome into the light. I paused in the section between the dome and the spires, contemplating all that I’d seen in the memory of this place. I felt like the memory barely scratched the surface of the obsidian palace’s history, yet, it put the existence of this place into perspective. It was easy enough to dismiss most of the things I’d found on this planet as a mere curiosity placed here by the system, but this memory once again reminded me of the fact that these places held significance.

The fourth layer had a lot of Asphon ruins, while the fifth layer seemingly told a story of an entirely different planet. Now, the sixth layer held the vestiges of this odd race of living lava and the worms they were in constant conflict with. It seemed relatively obvious now that every layer of this world was modeled after an entirely different world, or culture, which made me wonder what the first three layers were modeled after and whether I’d missed something important up there. I knew for a fact that there was something going on in the third layer since I’d seen those odd statues of faces, as well as the pyramid that held the elevator to the fourth layer.

Deciding that it wasn’t a good idea to linger on the “what ifs” for too long, I decided to check out the spires surrounding the palace. Who knows, maybe I’d find some more memories somewhere, or maybe some more items to collect. It took me almost four days to search every nook and cranny of the place, and in the end, it turned out to be a massive waste of time. Every single room was completely empty. Not a single piece of furniture to be found, no personal belongings. It was just smooth obsidian room after smooth obsidian room.

I grew a bit bored after a while but told myself that there might be something to be found yet and didn’t want to stop one unchecked room away from finding it. Now though? I wished I’d just given up. Sure, I’d managed to pump a lot of MP into my seed, but I felt like I could have better used my time by hunting or studying magic. I took off from the obsidian palace, deciding to search this underground level for any other interesting things. I hoped my search wouldn’t go the same way the search in the palace had gone, especially since the memory mentioned that the worms apparently had some sort of kingdom as well.

Chances were that they were in the molten sea, as they’d called it, and I wasn’t about to search a whole ocean of lava that I couldn’t see anything in.

4 Months Later

It had now been eleven months since the void invasion, and I was so close to finally upgrading my seed to the tenth tier. After the underground area with the obsidian palace turned out to be a bust, I returned to the surface with the help of some blind void jumps and restarted my old routine. Switching between hunting and devouring monsters, sitting on eximovere trees to drain their precious MP, studying the runes that made up my spells, and attempting to level up my skills, time went by in a flash.

I even took the time to remotely laser the few active eximovere trees to death to get their fruits which got me a whole five of them. I ate one of them to see if anything would happen, but aside from having wasted the fruit, I got nothing from eating a second one. The other four were now resting in my inventory, ready to be sold off in the future. I was currently sitting in a cave of my own design, going over my vastly changed status while continuing to pump MP into my seed.

My stats had soared to new heights, with most of them hovering around the 400-450 mark. My intelligence was at 856, and my wisdom got all the way to 959, which gave me almost three hundred thousand MP and two hundred thousand VMP. If I overcharged them with the effect of gluttony, I could actually reach those numbers. I had gotten stronger by leaps and bounds compared to when I first arrived in the sixth layer, and it was all thanks to spending almost an entire year on this layer.

My skills and spells had also gained quite a few levels, and I even got some upgrades. For example, my oldest skills compress and poison mucus armor both advanced to C tier. Compress now further increased my defense while allowing me to move a little faster than before, while poison mucus armor generated more mucus and allowed me to explode the armor off without needing to spend MP.

Powerful leap ascended to B tier, which added a second mid-air jump. Rush also arrived at B tier, which increased the speed boost from 50% to 80% while lowering the cooldown from ten to eight minutes. The rest of my skills sadly didn’t advance, but they were getting close to doing so.

As for my spells, I only managed to get two upgrades. That was mostly to blame on the fact that I’d been pumping almost every single MP into my seed while avoiding using expensive spells while fighting. At this point, even my weaker spells like poison spear were strong enough to easily contest with most monsters on this floor, since my intelligence was supporting their damage output. Sure, I could have let monsters beat me up while the shield spell was active, but that would have taken huge chunks of MP to train that I’d much rather have used to infuse into the seed.

Now that the end of the twelfth month was approaching and my “no-sleep drink” was about to run out, I was glad that I’d spent most of my MP to infuse the seed. At this point, I had infused hundreds of millions into the damn thing, and it was finally almost done. I needed to compress what my voidling contemporaries did over the span of decades into a single year, so I couldn’t afford to waste too much mana. And now it was finally about to pay off.

As for the two spells that upgraded, they were poison bomb and poison assassination. Poison bomb upgraded into poison explosion, which was essentially the same spell but with more oomph! Also, it was no longer a projectile. Instead, I could cast it at a freely choosable place, similar to how giant spike always emerged from beneath the target. Poison assassination on the other hand evolved into poison caltrops. The spell would spread a ton of invisible, poisonous caltrops on the ground, ready to poison anything walking over them. It was more of a trap spell, which I didn’t have much use for currently, but who knows, maybe it would prove useful eventually. But, even if poison assassination had now reached its highest level, I would probably never stop using it, since the spell was just too good!

The higher the tier of a skill or a spell was, the harder it was to gain levels in it. The best example of this was giant spike, my only SS-tier spell. I’d had the damn spell almost since the beginning and was using it often, yet it was still only level two. Void laser, as my first A-tier spell also proved rather difficult to level up. But at least I managed to get it to the second level in these past months.

Another thing that shot into the sky over the past few months were my DP. I’d been killing monsters en masse and the number of DP I had reflected my efforts. I hadn’t been paying too much attention to them, but a few days ago I’d noticed that I almost had two hundred thousand of them, so I decided to do a bit of spending. Two things in my pay-to-win store had always been out of reach, and now I finally bought them. I was of course talking about another piece of the mysterious “hidden access key” for fifty thousand points, which meant I now had two out of the required four. As expected, buying the part did absolutely nothing.

Then, I’d also bought the next system access level, or, access authority as it was called in my status. Back when I got the upgrade to the second tier, it added the search and filter functions for all those pesky lists, which helped me immensely. The third access tier gave me a little peek behind the curtains, letting me examine my attributes in a bit more detail. I could now see which skills and spells were affected by what attribute, and in what ways.

As I once again looked over my status and skill list to see the changes I’d gone through, my MP infusion suddenly stopped, as if I had run into a wall. A quick look with my seed analyzer skill revealed that the thing I’d been working for this entire time had finally happened: My seed had grown to the tenth tier!

I had finally done it! A huge sigh of relief left me as I could finally evolve and leave this layer. I had spent entirely too much time here and I was sick and tired of volcanoes and lava at this point. And, once Tim’s drink finally wore off, I would go visit and buy myself some expensive drinks to repay him. It was all thanks to him that I even had a chance to do this, and he had earned himself a large tip. After all, my status was now more than high enough that I could let go of a few hundred points.

Giddy to finally evolve, I pulled up the evolution menu.