Chapter 230: — Fifteenth Floor, This Time Further

He spent two more days exploring Floor Fourteen’s considerable scale before finally feeling he’d given it its proper due, the heat vent discovery still sitting pleasantly in the back of his mind alongside everything else the floor had offered.

The fourth day brought a pack of Deepclaw Crabs numbering eight strong, more than he’d faced at once in Region III before, and he handled them with the same patient, deliberate approach that had become second nature — breaking the pack’s cohesion early with a wide sweep of Emberstorm, then picking off the scattered survivors one by one as they lost the numbers that made them dangerous.

The fifth day held a quieter rhythm, mostly travel through kelp forest that gradually thinned the further east he pushed, until the terrain finally opened into something he recognized from the guided trip months ago — the transition toward Floor Fifteen’s ancient stone formations, the ground here older and stranger than anything the floors above had offered.

This is where the team’s trip ended. Past here, it’s all new to me.

He made camp at the threshold that final evening on Fourteen, genuinely looking forward to what came next in a way that felt different from his usual patient curiosity — sharper, more immediate, the particular anticipation of standing somewhere genuinely unmarked by his own prior footsteps.

He crossed into Floor Fifteen the following morning.

The ancient stone formations greeted him exactly as he remembered them from the guided trip — weathered pillars rising from the lakebed at odd, deliberate angles, old enough and regular enough that he still suspected, same as he had months ago, that water alone hadn’t shaped them.

He moved through the familiar stretch slowly, in no particular hurry, and found a lone Cave Shark contesting the pillar field’s outer edge. It circled him warily rather than committing immediately, and he met its eventual charge with Tidal Lance followed by a clean finishing strike, the fight barely testing him now compared to how it once had.

The terrain beyond the familiar stretch opened gradually into something he hadn’t seen before — the pillars growing denser, more regular in their spacing, the water between them carrying an unusual stillness that made his instincts prickle faintly even without anything obviously wrong.

Quiet like this usually means something. Not always danger. Just — attention, maybe.

He pushed further, cautious, and found a cluster of Deepwater Leeches drifting lazily between two pillars, considerably larger than the swarms he remembered from Floor Eleven. He cleared the handful blocking his direct path and left the rest undisturbed, unwilling to waste effort on something that offered little reward.

A pair of Abyssal Pike darted past sometime later, scattering the moment they noticed him, and he let them go without a second thought.

It was deeper still, well past where he judged the guided trip had actually ended, that he found his first real fight of the day.

A Prismatic Serpent, larger than any he’d faced before, coiled defensively around the base of one particularly tall pillar, its scattered, refracting light considerably more disorienting than usual against the pillar field’s already strange, shifting visibility.

He called Hunter’s Eye before engaging, trusting its clean, cutting awareness to see through the confusion, and the fight proved manageable once he could actually track the creature properly — Riverblade finding true twice before the serpent managed to properly retaliate, and a final strike ending it cleanly.

He harvested what was worth keeping, and continued deeper, the pillar field’s strange geometry growing more deliberate the further he pushed, until he began to notice, studying the formations more carefully as he passed them, faint traces of regularity that felt less like chance and more like design — even spacing, consistent height, the occasional pillar bearing what might have been worn, eroded markings he couldn’t properly make out.

Ilyana mentioned ruins once. Said her team had seen hints of something like this, never properly explored it.

He paused at one pillar longer than the rest, running his fingers along a shallow groove near its base that might have been a deliberate carving once, centuries of current having worn whatever pattern it once held down to little more than a suggestion. He couldn’t make out any clear shape in it, nothing like the carving that had once started this whole long, patient mystery back in Millbrook’s quiet forest. Just a groove, old and stubborn, refusing to fully disappear despite however long the water had been working at it.

He didn’t rush toward understanding it. He simply noted the detail, the same careful, patient habit he brought to everything worth remembering, and kept moving, curious rather than urgent. A part of him wanted to linger, to trace every pillar in turn and see whether the pattern held consistent across the whole field, but he reminded himself, the same way he’d reminded himself at the chamber’s threshold in an earlier moment of curiosity, that this wasn’t why he’d come down here. Whatever this place actually was would still be here, waiting, whenever someone better equipped to understand it finally came looking.

The day’s light — such as it was, this deep beneath any real sun — began its slow underwater fade by the time he found a second fight worth mentioning, a trio of Ironclaw Lobsters claiming territory near a particularly dense cluster of pillars.

He met them properly, Bulwark Strike and Water Armor working in concert the way they’d settled into doing naturally by now, Riverblade and Lightning Strike finishing what the defensive pieces opened. It took real effort, three genuine Rank Five opponents pressing him at once, but nothing that threatened to outmatch him the way Region Three once reliably had.

He made camp shortly after, tired in the honest, satisfied way a full day’s genuine exploration always left him, and ate well from his considerably lighter stored supplies.

He wrote a brief entry before sleep, mostly practical, the day’s strange, mounting curiosity about the pillar field’s possible origins left mostly unspoken on the page.

Floor Fifteen, first proper day past where the team’s trip ended. Prismatic Serpent and a lobster trio both gave me honest fights, nothing beyond me. The pillar formations here feel less random the deeper I go — worth paying closer attention to tomorrow.

He closed the journal, and sat a while longer in the quiet, watching the pillars’ strange, worn silhouettes against the dim ambient light, genuinely curious now about what tomorrow’s deeper push might actually reveal.

Plenty of floor left. No reason to rush any of it.

He banked his camp for the night, the pillar field’s silent, patient presence settling at the edge of his awareness even as sleep began to claim him, content with how thoroughly, how properly, he’d finally come to know this stretch of the world that had once nearly ended him entirely.