Chapter Thirty-One: The Withered Fire Marsh (Part One)

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Due to an extreme shortage of manpower, Zhao Tianhe was tasked with leading the eleven first-rank newcomers from Rog Town to tackle not just two D-level, but also one D+ dungeon instance. For their first stop, Zhao Tianhe chose the most challenging: the D+ level Desiccated Fire Swamp, which had once been the E+ level Lightless Fen.

“Starting with the D+ one, huh?” asked Ryan, the bald-headed leader of the hero squad originally assigned to this instance, a man proficient in fire magic.

“Yes,” Zhao Tianhe replied with a smile that sent a chill down everyone’s spine. “My innate abilities have limited uses, so let’s take care of the hardest one first. The other two will mostly be up to you all.” He paused, then added, “Of course, my exclusive profession is formidable as well—leave reconnaissance to me. I guarantee nothing unexpected will happen. Still, let’s first test the strength of the monsters here.”

At his words, the group nodded and followed Zhao Tianhe into the cave, separated from the outside by a shimmering red barrier.

Not a hundred meters in, they encountered a sheer cliff, plunging three hundred meters straight down. At the base was a swamp—now dried up into a wasteland of sand, with the monsters populating it having changed drastically.

“Watch out, there are slimes on the cliff wall,” Zhao Tianhe warned. He peered down and saw several slimes slowly writhing along the rocky surface.

“Just ordinary fire and earth slimes. Leave them to me,” said a young woman carrying a longbow. She stepped to the edge, drew several throwing darts from her belt, and, with a few swift motions, sent them slicing through the air. The slimes exploded on the spot—the specially crafted darts were so piercing that they passed right through the gelatinous bodies.

After scanning the area below, the woman signaled to the others, then began to descend, using footholds carved into the rock.

It was obvious that this ranged attacker had chosen the Weapon Master talent. Her companions watched in surprise; clearly, she hadn’t possessed this skill before. Yet, thanks to her exceptional agility and newfound abilities, she had, in just one night, become deadly accurate—even against the slow-moving slimes.

Zhao Tianhe watched her movements, feeling a vague sense of unease. He focused his perception entirely on his sense of touch, pressing both hands to the ground.

“Something’s wrong! The dungeon’s changes have caused fissures in the cliff, and there are slimes inside!” Zhao Tianhe shouted. “Warn Isis!”

Isis was the longbow-wielding woman. With the highest agility in the team, she had always served as their scout. Though her agility slightly outstripped Zhao Tianhe’s, the difference was moot: with his perception fully unleashed, his sensitivity in any single sense could reach nearly a hundred—a level even many second-rank elites couldn’t match!

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Stacking sensitivity across senses incurs some loss—not a perfect sum. So it wasn’t 15×2×6=180, but only 97 to 110, as Zhao Tianhe’s experiments the night before had shown. The sixth sense had the lowest conversion, vision the highest, likely correlating with how developed that sense was. If he could master his talent and achieve full stacking, it would qualify as a true skill.

“I’ll cover her!” said a crew-cut man, drawing his longsword and leaping over the edge.

He nimbly grabbed protrusions and fissures in the cliff, and when none presented themselves, his five fingers dug into the rock like iron hooks.

This silver-haired man was Liu Tie, always the vanguard and main tank of his team—a brute whose chosen talents were Herculean Strength and Iron Body. True to his name, he was as tough as iron.

Several slimes, sensing the disturbance, began to ooze out from the cracks, one emerging right beside Isis.

Yet Isis spotted it instantly. Calmly, she let go, dropping further to create distance, then dispatched it with a dart before landing safely below, using the uneven rock to slow her descent.

Seeing this, Liu Tie relaxed. He grabbed a protrusion, lunged at a nearby slime, slew it with a single stroke, then released his grip, dropping swiftly to dodge its self-destruction and to join Isis.

Isis, now on the ground, drew her bow and picked off the slimes crawling from the cliff.

“All clear,” Zhao Tianhe announced, standing and nodding. The last of the slimes in the cracks had been wiped out.

At the same time, twenty-three experience points were credited to his account. Killing regular monsters in a D-level dungeon still yielded experience, yet—

Adherent lv0, Class Experience 103/20000 (a bit left over from Jeros’ party run yesterday)

Yes, the starting requirement was twenty thousand experience, and the amount needed increased by ten thousand with each level.

“If only I could give all my experience to Artoria, so she could unlock the class module sooner. For her, that would be like making the first rank,” Zhao Tianhe thought with a sigh. Still, he quickly rallied—grinding higher-tier dungeons every day should let him unlock the class module soon enough.

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Once they reached the ground, a swarm of slimes gathered around them, accompanied by a horde of large beetles, each half a meter long with red-brown markings on their shells.

“These little bastards’ attacks now deal extra fire damage—be careful!” Liu Tie warned, already engaged in combat. He wrenched his sword free from a beetle carcass as he spoke.

These beetles had once been black-green and their attacks laced with poison, but since the dungeon’s upgrade, their attributes and attack methods had changed.

Although everyone had been here grinding monsters yesterday, under Jeros’s lead, they never really learned what new tricks these creatures had acquired—Jeros had simply obliterated them all.

Of course, Jeros could have used magic to analyze the monsters’ detailed properties, but he hadn’t bothered. Gathering such information was an important part of the heroes’ own training.

“There it is. D-level dungeons really are a pain…” Zhao Tianhe muttered, frowning as he watched small dunes in the sand begin to rise in the distance. “Heads up, an elite monster is coming!”

There were two major differences between D- and E-level dungeons: first, the monster variety increased dramatically; second, at any time, an elite or even a boss could spawn, not just at set intervals as in E-level dungeons.

From afar, the dune’s true nature was revealed: a gigantic Gravel Slime, its entire body steaming with red vapor!

“A D-level elite—first time I’ve seen one. Support skills should be enough to handle this with certainty. As for summoning Artoria… that’d work, but there’s no need.” Zhao Tianhe judged that unless they ran into three or more D-level elites at once, there was no need to call on Artoria’s power.