Three days. Twelve beast kills. Eleven inscriptions total.
Mordren pushed me through the forest like a man trying to forge a blade before the hammer broke. Dawn to dusk. Find a beast. Study it. Fight it. Inscribe what I could. Feed cores to the grimoire when possible. Sacrifice memories when not.
The memory losses were small so far. Trivial. A rainy afternoon I couldn't quite picture. The sound of a dog barking in my past life. The feeling of grass under bare feet at age six — I knew I'd done it, knew I'd felt it, but the sensation itself was a smooth blank where texture used to be.
Manageable. Ignorable. Almost.
On the fourth morning, Mordren led me somewhere new.
The dungeon entrance sat in a hillside two miles east of Greyhaven — a crack in the earth roughly ten feet tall and five feet wide. The stone around it was wrong. Not Greyhaven granite. Something older. Darker. Veined with faint lines of pulsing light where raw Aether bled through the rock like glowing capillaries.
The air coming out of it was thick. Not warm, not cold — dense. Like breathing soup made of static electricity. My skin prickled. The grimoire hummed behind my ribs, leaning toward the entrance the way a dog leans toward meat.
"Greyhaven Dungeon," Mordren said. "Common grade. Three floors. The garrison clears it every few weeks to keep the beast population from overflowing." He glanced at me. "They won't be clearing it today. You will."
"Alone?"
"I can't go in. My grimoire is shattered — raw Aether environments react to the fragments. Violently." He settled against a tree with the casual grace of a man who'd done this before. Drew his bottle. "I'll be here when you come out."
"If I come out."
"When." He drank. "Probably."
I stared at the crack in the hillside. Aether mist seeped from it in slow, luminous ribbons. The light inside pulsed with a rhythm that almost resembled breathing.
Eleven inscriptions. First Verse realm. I was walking into a dungeon that trained professionals cleared in teams.
The grimoire pulsed. Not with warning.
With appetite.
I walked in.
The first floor was a cave system. That's what I expected.
What I didn't expect was the beauty of it.
Aether had crystallized across every surface — walls, ceiling, floor — in fractal patterns that caught the ambient glow and scattered it into shifting constellations. The stone itself was semi-translucent. I could see deeper veins of Aether running through the rock like luminous roots, pulsing in slow waves.
The air was so Aether-dense that breathing felt like drinking. My inscriptions responded immediately — Iron Skin tingled across my forearms. Burst Step hummed in my calves. Everything I had felt sharper in here. More present. Like the dungeon's ambient energy was feeding my grimoire a constant low-level charge.
Mordren had mentioned this. High-Aether environments supplemented inscription fuel. Inside a dungeon, the memory cost of inscribing dropped significantly. The denser the Aether, the cheaper the price.
A dungeon wasn't just a hunting ground. It was a discount store.
The first beast found me thirty seconds in.
Crystalline Spider. Tier 1. Body like spun glass, legs like needles, approximately the size of my head. It dropped from the ceiling with the casual malice of something that owned every surface in the room.
Fast. Fragile. Venomous — the fang tips glistened with something that smelled like burnt copper.
It leaped. I sidestepped. Activated Heat Pulse — the Ember Fox ability. A wave of superheated air erupted from my palm. Not enough to kill. Enough to crack three of its legs and send it skittering sideways into the wall.
I followed up with a stomp that I'm choosing to describe as "efficient" rather than "panicked."
The spider shattered. Its beast core — a tiny crystal bead the size of a pea — rolled free from the remains.
I picked it up. Warm. Faintly pulsing.
But I didn't absorb it. Not yet. I was here to learn, not to snack.
I studied the corpse instead. The crystalline body structure. The way Aether had been distributed through its frame — concentrated in the legs for speed and the fangs for venom delivery. A simple biological inscription pattern. Elegant in its economy.
My grimoire reached. Tasted the dead beast's fading Aether signature.
Thread Walk. Rank 1.
The inscription settled into place with barely a whisper of cost — a forgotten dream, maybe. Something I'd never have noticed missing. The dungeon's ambient Aether had covered almost everything.
Thread Walk. The spider's ceiling-crawling ability. Adhesion to any surface through micro-scale Aether bonding. I could walk on walls. Walk on ceilings. Go anywhere a spider could go.
In a dungeon made of caves and vertical shafts and chambers stacked three floors deep — that was gold.
I pressed my palm to the ceiling. Pushed. My hand stuck. I pulled myself up, feet finding purchase on stone that suddenly felt as solid as flat ground.
The world rotated. Down became up. Up became a suggestion.
I hung from the ceiling of a dungeon on my first day and grinned like an idiot.
The first floor took two hours.
Seven Crystalline Spiders. Three Stoneback Beetles — Tier 1, heavily armored, slow, hit like a truck if they connected. One Gloom Bat — Tier 1, echolocation, darkness-based camouflage, nearly invisible in the deeper chambers.
I killed all of them. Inscribed two new abilities.
Stone Shell. Rank 1. From the beetles. A harder, more localized version of Iron Skin — instead of reinforcing my whole body, I could create a dense shield on a single point. Forearm. Shin. Forehead if I was feeling creative. Less coverage, more protection per square inch.
Echo Sense. Rank 1. From the Gloom Bat. Passive echolocation. Not as refined as the bat's — I couldn't map full rooms with it. But I could sense movement in darkness within about twenty feet. In a dungeon, that was the difference between ambush and awareness.
Thirteen inscriptions total. The grimoire was warm against my chest — not the deep cold of its dormant state. Warm. Fed. Almost content.
I found the stairwell to floor two.
The Aether density increased the moment I stepped down. The crystals on the walls grew thicker, brighter, more complex. The air was so rich I could taste it — metallic, sweet, electric.
And on the wall beside the stairwell entrance, I found something else.
A handprint.
Pressed into the crystal surface. Human-sized. Old — years old, maybe decades. The crystal had grown around it, preserving it in a shell of frozen light.
But inside the handprint, something flickered. A faint residual warmth. An echo.
I pressed my palm against it.
Fear. Sudden, sharp, overwhelming. A burst of raw terror that hit my chest like a fist — not mine, someone else's, someone who'd pressed their hand here years ago while something chased them up the stairwell. A hunter. Cornered. Knowing they weren't going to make it.
The emotion faded as quickly as it came. But my grimoire had already tasted it.
Memory Residue. Just like Mordren described. The emotional echoes of people who'd been here before — their fear, their determination, their final moments, crystallized in Aether and preserved in the dungeon's walls.
Fuel that wasn't mine. Memories that weren't mine. Currency I could spend without losing a single piece of myself.
I pulled my hand back. The residue had been absorbed — a faint trickle, barely enough to notice. But it was there. Scattered throughout the dungeon. In every handprint, every bloodstain, every place someone had fought or fled or died.
The dungeon wasn't just a hunting ground or a discount store.
It was a bank.
And I was going to make a very large withdrawal.
Floor two waited below. Darker. Denser. The sounds rising from it were heavier.
I started down the stairs.