Chapter 284: A Mysterious Cultivation Method, And Moving To The Second Floor

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"What’s the book about?" Daniela asked, leaning in with curious eyes. Noir stood right beside her, head tilted in the same way, as if the two of them shared the same quiet curiosity.

"It’s a unique Cultivation Method," Riven explained, still examining the restored book. "Pretty rare to get something like this as a drop. Usually it’s just equipment or potions." He stored the frog’s corpse in his inventory for later, then looked at the book again with clear interest. "Feels like this might count as his inheritance or something. Hah."

He turned the book over once more in his hands, already wondering how the technique would fit with everything else he had learned so far.

"Heheh, really?" Daniela chuckled as she looked Riven over. "Well, he was really amazing at fighting! Are you sure you’re okay, Riven?" She pulled out a clean handkerchief and started rubbing the blood from his face and arms with careful movements. "You look all mangled! Look, now I have to take care of you!"

"Hah, there’s no need," Riven said, gently patting her head before turning his eyes toward the path ahead. "We’ve spent too much time here already. Let’s end this before a full hour passes since we left."

"Oh, it hasn’t even been an hour?! Wow, we’ve been doing this very, very fast!" Daniela said, climbing onto Noir’s back as the black wolf began to float a short distance off the ground.

"Let’s go," Riven nodded.

They moved forward at a steady pace. Vladimir was already waiting for them on the stairs that led deeper underground, arms crossed over his chest. Scattered around his feet were the corpses of several giant mollusk monsters known as Blood Crawfish, their shells cracked open and still leaking thick red fluid.

"You took way too long. Hurry already!" he said with clear irritation. "I can feel there’s a lot of activity going on underground. The Mana Reactor they set up is bigger than anything I’ve heard about before."

"Maybe it has gone through renovations," Riven replied, narrowing his eyes as he activated his Veil of Invisibility. "You two, stay with Noir inside my shadows. We’re moving stealthily from this point onward."

Both Daniela and Vladimir nodded without argument and leaped into Noir’s shadows. The wolf then merged into Riven’s own shadow and traveled with him under the effects of Veil of Invisibility. The skill had already reached Level 6, making it far more effective at masking presence and rendering him completely invisible as long as he avoided direct combat or heavy fighting.

"Alright, we’re here."

Once he walked down the stairs into the second and final floor of the Crimson Marshes, Riven moved forward without making a single sound, carefully studying everything around him.

The first thing he noticed was the complete lack of monsters in sight. Large sections of the swamp had been drained, leaving wide stretches of dry land where glowing red crystals stuck out from the cracked earth. The trees that still stood were hollow and brittle, many of them leaning or already beginning to collapse. The few remaining pools of muddy red water were filled with hissing leeches that carried strange mutations.

Some of the leeches had grown extra heads. Others had sprouted short legs and oversized eyes that darted around restlessly.

[Bloody Leech (Decayed Mana Mutation) – D+ Rank: Level 30]

It was clear that the contamination from the Mana Reactor had been steadily killing the surrounding biome while twisting whatever creatures were tough enough to survive into these warped forms.

"How awful!" Daniela whispered from within the shadows, her voice tight with disgust. "What is this place? Why are the monsters covered in mutations and huge tumors everywhere?"

Riven kept moving deeper into the dried marsh, his senses on high alert as the red crystals cast an uneven glow across the ruined landscape.

"This is what Mana Reactors do to the world," Riven explained through telepathy. He had awakened the ability through his psionic powers, though it only worked with people he had linked beforehand. "Or well, their surroundings. When Mana is drained out of the land, the supernatural biomes die off. At the same time, life itself is drained from the surrounding ground. The Reactor then, after producing energy, also generates a dark blue, sometimes purple smoke. This is Corrupted Mana, Decayed Mana, or as some call it, Miasma. This clings to the dried land and fills it with a corrupted and toxic substance that turns everything into an even more dangerous place than it should be. Anything tough enough to survive mutates into these ugly aberrations."

Daniela looked around at the twisted landscape and nodded slowly. "So it wasn’t just because of experiments from Professor Willhweim... This is terrible. We have to stop this! The Mana Reactors you can make in your land are much better."

"They don’t extract the energy from the land," Riven explained. "Sure, they’re much slower and produce way less energy, but they’re efficient without being destructive. Maybe... I could eventually share this technology with the world. But I don’t think humanity is ready yet. Not yet..."

He walked forward, ignoring the mutant leeches that attacked one another in strange, frenzied ways. Their bodies were swollen and covered in pulsing growths, and they tore into each other without any clear reason. Riven paid them little attention and continued down a set of cracked concrete stairs that led into a more open area.

There, he saw enormous walls made of thick concrete and metal. The walls were lined with rows of sharp spikes that hummed with electricity. Any monster or person who tried to climb over them would get zapped to death in seconds. The entrance to the territory was tightly guarded by five men standing in a neat formation. Five more guards walked the perimeter in pairs, each carrying special Mana Guns and Spiritual Sabers. Those weapons were expensive pieces of high Magitech produced by Claymore Tech, the subsidiary that handled all of the company’s advanced equipment.

Riven took a moment to analyze their power levels. "Looks like the weakest guards are E Rank. The majority are D Rank, and there’s one... one C Rank among them."

"Pretty weak," Vladimir said from the shadows. "Shall we kill them all?"

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