The next morning he was up at the first knock.
He opened the door. The old man stood in the corridor.
"Food will be ready shortly."
"I see. Thank you, Bob."
The old man left without comment. Daemon got dressed, checked all his equipment, and headed downstairs.
This time he took a seat close to the counter.
"Nomead, you seem prepared. Are you entering the labyrinth today?"
"Yes. I've rested enough."
"What about party members? Did you find a decent group yesterday?"
"Hh," Daemon thought what to say. He had just entered the Tower — saying he was going alone would draw unwanted attention. But in his case entering with a party could very well draw even more.
"Yes. I found a decent party while I was looking for provisions." Daemon said a white lie.
"Good. Still be careful of your party members, it is rare to encounter them, but Spider Parties are more and more fervent nowadays."
Spider Parties. Daemon knew the term. Groups that recruited new Awakeners under the pretense of exploring the dangerous labyrinth together, then have them killed once they were in.
"Thank you for the warning. I'll be extra careful." Spider parties weren't his problem — he had no intention of joining any party.
He turned his attention to the food. Mashed potato with meat, though not as much of it as he would have liked. He'd learned over the last two days that this wasn't the inn's failing — it was a fundamental problem with the economy down here.
Most Awakeners didn't bother hunting normal animals, since the EXP was negligible or nonexistent. And the true beasts that did carry levels were too expensive for any inn to buy and serve regularly.
If I find some game in the labyrinth I need to hunt it, that way I would have even better food. To Daemon food has become very important, he wanted to taste all kinds of foods when he got out of the Tower.
He ate faster as he wanted to leave as early as possible, finished the last piece of meat, picked up his equipment, and said goodbye to Bob.
He left the inn before the light crystals had fully cycled into their daytime intensity.
The walk to the southern bridge took him back along the inner wall he had climbed the day before, and the chasm looked no less impressive the second time. If anything, seeing it from ground level made it worse — standing at the edge of the bridge, looking down into that bottomless abyss, gave him a feeling of being watched.
The bridge itself, narrow and curved and ancient, felt considerably less solid under his boots than it had looked from above.
"Fuck, why is this so terrorizing!" That was the only thought he could produce while crossing it.
He crossed without incident, alongside a thin scattering of other Awakeners heading out for the day. No one looked at him twice and he preferred that way.
On the far side, the bridge fed into a tunnel mouth. He stepped into the dark and let the city disappear behind him.
The tunnel walls were familiar in their construction — the same weathered stone, the same intermittent light crystals that had lined the underground of the Ascension Spire. He had never actually been in the labyrinth before, but it felt the same.
Something else felt different, though.
Daemon noticed it almost immediately. He could hear things he hadn't been capable of hearing before — the faint drip of moisture somewhere far down a side passage, the subtle shift in air pressure that told him the tunnel was widening ahead before he could see it. His eyes caught details at this light level that should have been invisible: a healed crack running along the stone, the faint disturbance in dust that meant something had passed this way recently.
Is this the stats or the skills? His [PER] stat has climbed considerably since entering the Tower, but Hunter's Senses and Hunter's Sight were both built precisely around this kind of awareness. He suspected it was both working together. Either way, the labyrinth felt less like hostile terrain now and more like home ground, almost — which was a strange thing to feel.
He walked at a steady pace for more than two hours.
Then he eventually walked into an opening where the tunnel stopped and gave rise to a forest.
The ceiling, which had been pressing low and close for the entire journey, simply vanished — soaring upward into a darkness so high above that it might as well have been a sky.
Enormous, ancient trees with some having trunks as wide as houses, their roots driven directly into the stone walls of the cavern itself, their branches reaching toward the 'sky'— stretching toward other tunnel openings far above, as if the forest itself were trying to colonize the entire labyrinth one branch at a time.
Scattered throughout the canopy and embedded in the trunks were crystals — not the familiar warm blue of the city's light crystals, but something colder and deeper, in clusters of varying size. They caught the ambient light and threw it back across the forest floor, bathing everything in a pale otherworldly glow that made the whole space feel less like a cavern and more like the bottom of a frozen ocean.
Lakes lay scattered across the floor, dark and still, reflecting the blue light back up at the canopy in long, wavering streaks.
Daemon stood at the tunnel mouth for a long moment, just looking.
This is the south. It was nothing like what he had imagined. He had pictured something cramped and hostile to match the goblins that lived here — not this. Not something that looked, in its own strange and alien way, almost beautiful.
Each individual forest was easily the size of Central Park — and there wasn't just one. The tunnel had opened into a network of these spaces, forest after forest stretching out in directions he couldn't fully track, separated by stretches of plain tunnel before opening again into another impossible cavern.
Somewhere in one of these forests was the dungeon. Which one he had no way of knowing — and worse, he understood from what he'd absorbed at the inn that the dungeon didn't stay fixed. It relocated after every challenge, success or failure, moving somewhere new within the southern zone each time.
"Finding the dungeon isn't a matter of memorizing a location. It is a matter of being in the right forest at the right time, which makes the entire endeavor closer to luck than navigation."
"With what luck I have I probably won't find the dungeon until I have explored every forest or I will be wounded and can't challenge it."
But that was a problem for later. He had come here to level up. The dungeon wasn't in the plan.
He stepped into the trees.
It didn't take too long to find his first prey.
The first goblins he found were exactly what he expected, and the fight that followed told him everything he needed to know about how far he had come.
Three goblins clustered near a small lake. Daemon didn't bother with the careful, patient approach he had relied on in his first hours in the Tower. He didn't need to anymore.
It was over in seconds. Genuinely, almost embarrassingly fast — he barely registered finishing one before he was already moving toward the next. The gap between his own speed and theirs was so vast that the goblins seemed to carry weights.
[You have killed an Unranked Level-3 Goblin, +1 EXP]
[You have killed an Unranked Level-5 Goblin, +2 EXP]
[You have killed an Unranked Level-4 Goblin, +1 EXP]
Daemon stood over the bodies and let out a short breath that landed somewhere between a laugh and genuine disbelief.
"The difference between me and them now is the difference between a grown man and a toddler. It wasn't even close." Daemon thought back to that first goblin in the dark tunnel — the one that had hunted him, that had genuinely frightened him with its caution and its patience — and felt almost nothing in comparison to what he had just done here in under ten seconds.
"No wonder the status gap between normal people and Ascenders keeps growing." He looked down at the three bodies.
"I'm a level-two Awakener, and I could have obliterated my own unawakened self in seconds. Granted no normal level-2 should be this strong, but the Awakeners who have level up and ascended and became F-ranks E-ranks or those Ascenders who have challenged the Tower for more than a decade What kind of monstrous strength do they possess?"
The thought was genuinely unsettling to Daemon.
He had been operating with a vague, comfortable assumption that his A-rank talent and his unusual starting circumstances put him ahead of the curve. And they did — relative to other new Awakeners, significantly so.
But Daemon realised that wasn't enough.
"I need to finish the Basement floor in a month. Two at most."
He kept moving deeper into the forest, and the blue light closed around him.