The Illicitous Dungeon

"Therina, I want you to go as well," Styx commanded while releasing the human prisoners.

"Of course, it would be good to see Irie again as well."

"Is that so? I thought you hated all humans."

"For a human, she's not too bad."

Styx squinted his eyes at the stubborn elf who cheerfully smiled, wondering what exactly it was about his human woman that managed to make her slip through Therina's blatant prejudice.

All of the prisoners knew most of the main elves, Therina included. They quickly tried to leave a favorable impression with her without knowing that nothing they could do would improve her opinion of them.

The group then departed the dungeon, the humans squinting their eyes due to the long missed natural sunlight. Even Vivy's human boytoy was with the rest of them, and had adopted a marginally arrogant leadership attitude.

The females of the group were directly higher than him in the hierarchy as they were directly connected with Styx himself though, so he remained humble towards them.

"Humans," Therina gazed at the humans in disgust, "you still have time before you need to bring other people into the dungeon, you can organize yourself into groups or work alone individually later. The current main priority is locating the information source of The Relevant's reporters. Is that understood?"

"Yes!"

All the humans nodded their head while they exited the forest and made their way to the main road before entering Lagoon Porter City.

Therina let herself into Irie's apartment with her spare key and immediately checked if she had any new, exotic fruits to help herself to. She was very fond of the tantles she had last time and was anticipating having them again.

~~~~~

⠀

With the new shipment of mana gems, Styx had completed a steady rotation of using them as batteries and recharging, so his current production line had become much more efficient. He could even produce mana steel without having to infuse his own mana into the iron, greatly increasing the speed in which it was produced.

The raid parties of those seeking their own fortune or enterprising companies investing in adventurers and mercenaries had begun again too. With his recent limelight in the nearby dungeon city, they were coming almost every second day.

A group of four eager adventurers entered the dungeon, three at <Lv. 19> and one Second Step knight at <Lv. 22>.

The monsters immediately moved into position and were awaiting the right moment to pounce. One of the stronger monsters was the red furred lava fox, now fully grown into adulthood and even larger than the standard stone-tailed fox and at <Lv. 16>. With Styx's title boosts and its advantages as a bred monster, it could battle a weaker Second Step ranker on equal grounds.

Once the adventurers ran into the monster's ambush, the battle was over almost immediately.

The lava fox spat a cloud of flame at them, which the Second Step ranker blocked with a large shield and mana infused defensive skills. It cut their sight off at the same time, so they didn't see as its tail flicked through the air with a series of embers and smashed down on the defender.

He could barely defend himself before the extremely powerful tail wrapped around and constricted his entire body.

The needle like fur on the tail began melting through the armor, causing the adventurer to turn more and more red and start screaming as he was cooked within his own armor.

Those screams were cut off abruptly as the lava fox bit his head, still in the helmet, off with a single, devastating attack. The armor on his body soon melted into deformity and his body was turned in a bloody mess of torn apart flesh and muscle.

The carnivorous vine made short work of another adventurer while the final two were overwhelmed by numbers and had their cries silenced shortly afterwards.

There was another party of eager entrepreneurs on the same day, which Styx was more lenient on. He secretly controlled things from the shadows so they found a treasure chest with a couple piece of equipment with high level engravings of his own on them. Two of the them died before the others retreated with their spoils, eager to boast about it at their local taverns.

Whilst controlling all the monsters to do this, Styx was sitting down with Aura's head resting in his lap. His mana tendrils extended through her body as he navigated to enormous mana channels while trying to expand them.

His fingers combed through her long, thick hair, occasionally massaging her ears too as he hummed to himself an old tune long lost in the annals of time in his past life.

Due to his efforts over the past week, her maximum experience capacity had increased from 378,420/1,088,510 to 392,180/1,088,510. It also helped Styx learn a bit more about Max Level, as it meant that not only could inadequate expansion when levelling up lead to them being of an insufficient size, but it could also lead to them suddenly shrinking.

For instance, she required 972,515 to reach <Lv. 82>, meaning the had suddenly shrunk to approximately a third of their original size during the level up process.

With her mana channels expanding again, she had eagerly been hunting to keep filling them up again, as if in fear they would contract again. This created an unprecedented fear among parts of the massive Abyssal Forest among the monsters.

It wasn't as simple as killing a few higher level monsters for that near 14 thousand experience points. Killing a monster or even an opposing exotic lifeform which was of a lower Step than the killer resulted in a serious reduction of experience. It decreased by a factor of ten for each Step.

This meant that as a Fifth Step Monster Lord, Aura only got 10 percent of the normal experience of killing a Fourth Step enemy, 1 percent of a Third Step enemy, 0.1 percent of the Second Step, and 0.01 percent of a First Step enemy.

Due to this restriction, the number of people and monsters drastically reduced for every rank increase.

Third Step and above monster had very powerful instincts due to how much they had evolved to be closer to mana itself, and would hide almost the moment Aura went hunting. Therefore, almost all of her experience had come from an astronomical number First and Second Step monsters. There were large swaths of the forest currently almost as silent as a graveyard as a result.

~~~~~

⠀

The devil flowers had begun proliferating throughout their room in the most wonderous way. Whilst the large devil flowers had been saved, or at least retained a shell of what they once were, the offshoots were just like a field of normal flowers except for having their own unique characteristics.

They could also be used in alchemy to extract their essence, which could be used in more ways.

The new flowers were only palm sized, but they were still a beautiful sight to behold. The yellow flowers were the most normal, but their petals could be ground up into a powder which had a high mana conductivity, even higher than mana steel.

Higher ranked devil flowers were even more impressive in this regard, but they tended to have mana affinities, and would cause mana to refract into traces of odd attributes.

Crimson flowers had a strong fire attribute, while blood gold focused on firmness and hardness whilst having a beautiful reddish gold color. Above these were when the flowers became even more exotic.

The brimstone devil flowers kept constantly releasing lava, increasing the temperature of their room to a blistering heat as rivers of lava flowed through it. Currently, nobody could be in the room for longer than five to ten minutes except Beatrice and Aura.

The brimstone flowers didn't grown on the normal ground, but grew in the lava, sprouting on top like stunning crimson water lilies. They also kept the lava hot and prevented it from cooling down, cycling mana through themselves, the lava, and the air as they created a unique ecosystem.

The final tortured soul flowers were an exotic, almost ghostly, violet shade with large petals that swayed despite no wind blowing. They were also extremely dangerous and caused injuries to the soul itself.

Styx found this out when he had a gnome enter the field to pluck a few flowers. It quickly lost feeling in its feet and the ability to control them altogether. It then collapsed face first in a small cluster of flowers which gently brushed its head while swaying, taking its life over a period of a dozen seconds.

This field was immediately labelled as a danger zone more so than ever, and the only way to harvest the flowers is with tools and not touching them. They didn't even die once they were out of the soil as they would feed on the mana in the air instead.

"What are you doing?" Aura curiously asked as she hovered around him in his workstation, staring intently at what he was working on.

"I am testing the properties of the flowers, and seeing how they can be used." Styx ground up flower petals of the first three devil flower types into powder, dissolving some into liquids and turning others into thicker pastes.

He crafted several beautiful dyes with them, but more importantly began moving onto using them in the forge and new alloys.

"Take this for example," Styx indicated to the ground up brimstone flower petals which had caused grievous damage to his mortar and pestle. "It has an extremely strong fire attribute… no, let's call it a lava attribute as it is a bit different in nature than just plain fire."

Styx had a pile of molten iron bubbling in a furnace which was in the middle of a large, advanced lutherion infusion array.

Styx had a large neutral quarts mana gem which was floating above one corner of the array, powering the entire thing. This was his 24th attempt at this action, which he had constantly adjusted after each failure, even creating new mortar and pestles out of materials he hoped wouldn't get destroyed.

The mixture in the furnace, which was at the eye of the array, bubbled and spat at Styx. Thankfully, Aura's hand flashed and blocked the molten iron which was momentarily superheated by the lava attribute of the brimstone flower.

⠀

[

New alloy created.

Testing against existing records…

Record doesn't exist.

Evaluating alloy…

Please choose a name for the new alloy:

]

⠀

[

Award for discovering new alloy: Magmasteel.

+ 720 exp

]

⠀

"Success!" Styx shouted in celebration. "By infusing its powerful attributes into metal, I can create new alloys. There are a bunch of variants I can create from that base alloy too, but the base alloys are the most important."

"Ohhh~" Aura put her head directly in the furnace as if it was nothing, watching the white hot molten metal.

"Move out of the way! I don't have much time!"

Styx hurriedly pulled the liquid out with extra thick tools made from manasteel. He poured it into a clay brick mold inscribed with heat resistance runes from the Gileron Magic System. The remainder was poured into a basic dagger blade mold.

He turned his head to look at the curious wolfgirl and explained his actions.

"Unfortunately, I learned from all my previous attempts that this alloy has a very high melting temperature, and the current furnaces can't produce a temperature high enough to melt it again. I have yet to figure out how to use brimstone flower powder to bring its temperature back up to over 4,000°C to reforge."

"Can you have the elf ask?"

"The elf?"

"Yes, the one that hates humans."

"…Do you mean Therina?"

"Yes."

"If you know her name, why don't you use it?"

"Should I?"

"Of course, that is what names are for."

Because her entire life had been revolving around referring to others as what they are, such as how she was always simply called "Wolf", Aura instinctively referred to all the elves as "Elf".

She nodded in understanding, as if learning something new.

"Anyway, have the elf ask whom?"

"The humans. They make lots of interesting things."

Styx raised his brow in surprise and nodded his head in agreement.

"That is indeed a good idea. There is lots of knowledge in the books I haven't gone through yet, but asking someone directly would definitely be much easier. She can also ask about soul based constructs, since I have yet to manage to infuse the tortured soul power into any form of metal."

Styx had created two more alloys which were entirely new discoveries. They were firesteel, which was created with the crimson flower extract, and obsidum, a strange alloy from blood gold flower powder, black sand, iron, copper and a trace of refined brimstone flower powder.

Obsidum was the most valuable alloy so far. It had an extremely high hardness and estimated melting point. Styx had thought it was so hard it was nigh indestructible, but quickly changed his opinion when Aura snapped a bar of it in two with her teeth, although even she had to put in a bit of effort.