Chapter 221: Sunken Vault

Alex began spinning the new star using the same principle as before. Since he was no longer trying to move higher or lower and only needed to maintain the same altitude, he quickly managed to regain his balance and stabilize himself.

By the time he looked down again, the explosion had ended, leaving behind a gigantic crater. The surrounding trees had been burned within the blast radius, large amounts of water had been vaporized, and the tentacles had been badly burned and damaged.

They were still alive.

Instead of attacking Alex again, the injured tentacles were retreating toward the enormous hole. The monster seemed to have become afraid of him, so it was retreating to the area where it had home advantage. Part of the hole had been emptied by the explosion, but Alex still could not see its bottom. The fact that the creature had survived his strongest attack yet made him realize how tenacious its vitality was.

The water poured into the enormous gap, quickly filling the space created by the explosion while Alex remained above it on his newly created mana star. He slowly tried to reduce the star’s spinning speed, but the construct did not respond as smoothly as he wanted, and before he could adjust it properly, his body suddenly dropped.

Alex fell sharply, but at the last moment, he increased the spinning speed of the star again and managed to stop himself from falling all the way to the water. He looked down at the construct and realized that it had another limitation he had not considered before: the star could only move vertically, so he could not use it to travel in any other direction.

There was no point in wasting more time trying to fix it.

Alex jumped down from the star and allowed himself to fall toward the water. He had damaged the monster badly, but he had neither killed it nor discovered how it was using Origin Energy to regenerate, and he was unwilling to leave either question unanswered.

The monster was most likely a mid-rank species, judging from the amount of Origin Energy it possessed and the control it had demonstrated over it. If Alex could kill it and absorb its Gene Potential, he might finally reach Level 10 in Species Rank and evolve his species, so he had no intention of letting the monster escape after everything it had put him through.

The water immediately caught him and threw his body around as the waves dragged him away from his original position. Alex had already exhaled all the air from his lungs, so he did not waste time trying to swim against the current and instead allowed himself to sink toward the bottom.

As soon as his feet reached the submerged ground, several Mana Threads shot from the soles of his Asian slippers and anchored themselves into the earth. The threads pulled tight and stabilized his body, allowing Alex to begin walking toward the giant hole he had seen earlier.

He created a Fire Sphere to illuminate the area, but the light could only reach a short distance through the dark water. Alex continued forward while repeatedly using Mana Sense to confirm the direction, and after several dozen seconds, he finally reached the edge of the enormous hole.

Alex looked down into it, but he could not see anything beyond the darkness. The Fire Sphere could not illuminate the bottom, and even when he sent several pulses of Mana Sense into the hole, nothing returned to him.

’This is... a dungeon? It feels like one. The Origin Energy is thick enough to interfere with my Mana Sense, but the dungeon itself feels rather small,’ Alex thought as he examined the hole.

Before entering the hole, Alex summoned one of the pieces of metal from his inventory. He had been using them as ammunition for mana railgun. Now, it had a different use. He carefully infused it with Fire Element Mana, continuing to compress more and more mana into the metal until it reached a level far beyond what he could achieve with air or water.

The metal could withstand considerably more compressed Fire Element Mana before becoming unstable, but Alex eventually stopped when he sensed that it was about to explode. He hardened the compressed mana with his Will, so that it wouldn’t explode quickly, and then stored the metal back inside his inventory.

A thunderclap suddenly rang inside his head, and Alex’s nerves felt as if they had exploded. For a moment, it felt as though he were holding up an entire mountain, because the metal had become so heavy for his inventory that his mind was struggling to bear its weight.

Alex gritted his teeth and refused to take it back out. He had prepared it for a reason. Finally, Alex swam into the giant hole.

[Sunken Vault Dungeon entered.]

The notification appeared before his eyes, confirming his suspicion, but Alex barely had time to pay attention to it. The moment he entered the dungeon, he felt something strange about the darkness surrounding him, as if the darkness itself possessed some kind of power.

The fire sphere began to dim.

Alex immediately noticed that the light was being suppressed by the darkness around him. Before he could determine what was happening, the surrounding water suddenly shifted and crushed the fire sphere, extinguishing it and leaving Alex completely blind.

He did not even have time to consider whether a monster had destroyed it.

Something enormous wrapped around his body and immediately began dragging him downward at incredible speed. Alex recognized the sensation and guessed that one of the monster’s tentacles had found him, but instead of fighting against it, he allowed himself to be pulled deeper into the dungeon.

The tentacle began tightening around him, trying to crush his body and break his bones. Alex immediately powered up his Superior Body Reinforcement to maximum strength, reinforcing his muscles and bones with mana, yet the pressure continued increasing until pain spread throughout his entire body.

Alex gritted his teeth and endured it. He had not come this far simply to fight the monster. He wanted to understand how it regenerated.

Alex began infusing his Will into the tentacle wrapped around his body. The monster’s Will was surprisingly powerful, and Alex immediately realized that penetrating it would not be easy.

He created more and more Will and forced it into the tentacle along with mana, pushing against the monster’s resistance. It took nearly all of his concentration just to penetrate the monster’s Will by a single inch, but Alex refused to give up.

He also noticed something important.

..

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