Dungeons are living things. And this one was hungry.
The thought struck Kaelen, no, Shen Yue as they tumbled through the portal's membrane and crashed onto the damp stone of the first floor.
The air attacked their lungs immediately. Heavy and oppressive just like the feeling of someone drowning in invisible water. It reeked of wet earth soil and something disturbingly organic mixed with decay.
"FORM UP!" Captain Dui's voice cracked like a whip through the disorientation. "Collect the cores. And whatever you do, don't touch the walls."
The warning came one second too late as a young SaoYu boy had stumbled sideways against the corridor wall to steady himself. His palm pressed flat against stone that shouldn't have been warm. He couldn't have been more than fourteen, though malnutrition had stunted him into the skeletal frame of a child. He was a collection of sharp angles and hollows; his collarbones protruded like handles against skin the color of old parchment. The "mange" wasn't just scarring , it was an active, weeping infection, leaving angry pink islands of raw flesh amidst tufts of straw-like hair. He wore a tunic stripped from a dead man, the hem dragging in the muck and swallowing his trembling limbs. His eyes were glassy with fever, staring vacantly ahead as if he were already half-gone before the dungeon even touched him. He looked less like a warrior and more like a discarded husk.
"Hey," he mumbled, fingers spreading. "The wall... it's mov...I saw it moving..."
The stone rippled like flesh pulled over muscle with a sound like a boot being wrenched from deep mud. As the wall inhaled, the boy's arm vanished into the masonry up to the shoulder, swallowed by grey matter that had transformed from rock to something obscenely organic.
"HELP ME!SOMETHING IS WRONG!!" His scream was raw, primal.
"Let him go," Dui said, his voice flat and expressionless. "He's already dead."
The boy yanked back with everything he had but the wall tightened not ready to let go of its prey. It absorbed him with suction force the boy could no longer defend against pulling him the way quicksand pulls down. His scream was cut off mid-breath as his head was dragged into the wall. For one horrifying second, his face pressed outward from inside the stone, mouth stretched wide in a silent scream before he was crashed and dissolved into it. Only then did the wall pulse once showing a satisfied heartbeat of digestion before gong still. All this happened fast that nobody could react.
No,no,no...Kaelen's panic flooded their shared consciousness threatening to drown them both. Shen Yue felt immediately their heart rate spiking as adrenaline dumped into their bloodstream and hands beginning to shake. The body's natural terror response was Kaelen's, but she was stuck feeling every spike of tremor.
Their hands clamped over their mouth. Bile surged up their throat. In the back of their shared mind, Kaelen was screaming in terror making a sensation of clawing at the inside of their skull.
Get a grip kid. Shen Yue's voice cut through the panic. She seized control of their breathing, forcing it to slow despite Kaelen's hyperventilation.
Calm down. Analyze the environment. Look at the texture resolution. Shen Yue tried reassurring Kaelen.
He's DEAD! We're going to DIE! We're all going to—
BREATHE. Shen Yue wrestled for control of their diaphragm. In. Out.
She forced their eyes open through the blur of Kaelen's tears. Through their swimming vision, Shen Yue overlaid her technical sight. The walls weren't just breathing. They were rendering. The moss on the ceiling crawled in and out of existence—present one moment, absent the next through the pores on the wall. Shen Yue noted with detached precision, even as she felt Kaelen's nausea rolling through his stomach. This isn't just a dungeon .Its something abnormally powerful
I don't care what it is! I want to go home! Kaelen's desperation pulsed through them like a second heartbeat.
We don't have a home anymore, Remember kid.
"Forward," Dui commanded, stepping over the pile of tattered rags the absorbed boy had left behind as the only proof of his ever existence.
Each step Kaelen took, Shen Yue had to fight for. His legs wanted to run. His body wanted to collapse. The fear was a living thing threatening to overwhelm her control.
Please, I can't do this, I can't.
You can. You will. One foot in front of the other.
The corridor stretched into darkness ahead lit only by bioluminescent fungi that dripped from the ceiling like melting wax. The group of thirty SaoYu shuffled forward in a ragged line. Shen Yue kept their breathing measured, but she could feel Kaelen's terror like static in their blood.
Ten minutes of shuffling terror later, the corridor widened into a hall. The floor here was paved with intricate tiles depicting scenes that made their stomach turn.. It was graphic illustrations of torture, dismemberment, ritual sacrifice engraved on the wall with faintly green glowing ink marking.
Oh gods, oh gods, that's a child in that carving, that's...
Don't look at the details. Shen Yue forced their gaze upward. Look at the pattern.
But Kaelen's horror was seeping through, making their pulse quicken despite her efforts.
Wait. Shen Yue's mental voice sharpened cutting through Kaelen's rising panic. I know this pattern.
Images surfaced from her memories: late nights at the office, energy drinks scattered across her desk as she tried hard recalling .
Nevermind. Its nothing
"Keep moving, runt!" Ling Yi shoved them from behind with both hands. The large bully stumbled past, his heavy boot landing squarely on a tile marked with a weeping eye carved into the stone.
Click.
The sound was mechanical, precise, echoing with terrible clarity in the sudden silence.
WE'RE DEAD WE'RE DEAD HE TRIGGERED IT WE'RE ALL—
KAELEN. SHUT. UP. Shen Yue snarled internally, wrestling back control as their body started to shake. I need to THINK.
"DOWN!" Gu Tian tackled Chan'er, yanking the little girl to the floor with one arm.
Chan'er... Kaelen's thought was pure anguish. The little girl's terrified face flashed through their shared consciousness. Shen Yue felt his heart clench ;no, their heart clench. The emotion was so strong it made her hands tremble. Time didn't stop but it slowed. Shen Yue could see beneath the stone now, through layers of reality. Gears grinding against rust. Volatile Qi flowing through carved channels like electricity through circuits. The mechanisms preparing to fire. A series of copper-inlaid pressure plates hum with a low, rhythmic vibration. Unlike simple mechanical weight-triggers, the floor acts as a spiritual sensor, tuning into the specific frequency of a cultivator's internal Qi. As a foot lands, the plates measure the soul's density, signaling hidden gears to grind to life behind the stone. With a hiss of pressurized energy, a row of serrated obsidian blades erupts from the walls, seeking the exact meridian points of the intruder. This ancient circuit remains dormant for years, waking only when it tastes the warmth of an active life force.
Who could have made these traps? And why is their technology ancient yet sosophiscated? Shen Yue wondered.
If those spikes fired, Ling Yi would be skewered. Probably a dozen others too, including Chan'er. Part of Shen Yue ran cold calculations but Kaelen's emotions crashed through her logic like a tidal wave.
SAVE HER! His desperation was so strong it made their chest hurt. PLEASE! She's just a child!
If we save them, we expose ourselves, Shen Yue thought grimly, even as she felt Kaelen's heartbreak threatening to crack their shared consciousness. If Dui finds out we can manipulate the dungeon, it would mean one thing we can't afford to reveal right now.
I DON'T CARE! The force of Kaelen's emotion actually pushed against her control. She has a mother waiting! She deserves to live.
Fine! Shen Yue mentally pressed [Y], partly from logic, partly because Kaelen's grief was making their hands shake so badly she couldn't think straight. But if this gets us killed, I'm blaming you.
Beneath the floor, the grinding gears screeched and halted mid-rotation. The Qi flow stuttered, fizzled and died. Somewhere in the mechanism, something vital simply... stopped working.
Ling Yi stood eyes squeezed shut and every muscle locked, waiting for the pain of steel through flesh but nothing happened. A faint puff of dust rose from the cracks in the tiles and the spikes remained retracted.
The bully cracked one eye open then the other. He let out a shaky, arrogant laugh that echoed too loud in the hall. "Ha! Ancient junk! Even the dungeon is afraid of me!"
Captain Dui frowned she grunted. "Luck is a finite resource, maggot. Don't test it twice. Move."
Their body exhaled slowly as sweat dripped down their nose. Shen Yue felt Kaelen's relief flood through them like warm water, making his knees weak.
"You didn't flinch."
The low voice came from beside them. Gu Tian was watching them with that single, unnervingly perceptive eye, the way a hawk watches a mouse that's behaving strangely.
"Everyone else jumped, tensed or ran. You just... stared. At the ground. Like you were reading something."
"I was frozen with fear," Shen Yue said aloud, forcing their voice steady despite Kaelen's terror making their hands shake. She clutched their chest for emphasis. "So I couldn't move."
Gu Tian's eye narrowed. He didn't look convinced. But after a long moment, he turned away without pressing further.
That was too close, Shen Yue thought grimly feeling Kaelen's fear still rippling through their nervous system like aftershocks. We need to be more careful about the interface visibility.
I'm sorry, I just...when I saw the trap, I couldn't...
I know. And she did. She felt every spike of his emotion as if it were her own. Just... try to control the fear responses. Your panic affects our body.
They stopped for a brief rest in a circular chamber where the walls seemed less aggressive, not pulsating, at least not visibly. Shen Yue directed their body to slump into a shadowed corner, feigning exhaustion while the other SaoYu collapsed where they stood.
She pulled the Grimoire open just an inch, keeping it hidden inside their tunic. The pages were warm and the text was scrolling automatically, reacting to their proximity to the dungeon's core like a magical detector.
[STATS UPDATED]
[NEW SKILL UNLOCKED]
Sixth Eye :level one
The text wasn't written in archaic fantasy language.
Wtf is sixth eye and what does it do?
But before Shen Yue could process the implications of her new control, the air in the chamber curdled as atmosphere literally thickened like reality itself had spoiled. Kaelen froze where he was. Chan'er's grip on Kaelen's wrist went iron-tight.
Shen Yue, still adjusting to her new body's reflexes, looked up. The ceiling was moving! No. Not the ceiling but something on the ceiling. She saw a silhouette resolving from shadow into nightmare geometry. Multi-jointed legs; too many of them, seven or nine or maybe eleven, she couldn't count them because they kept folding and splaying across the rock like a spider's but wrong because each joint bent backward and forward simultaneously.
The creature launched downwards towards them. A blur of chitin and malice that crossed twenty feet in a heartbeat, moving so fast Shen Yue's new eyes couldn't track it properly. Her body, Kaelen's body, reacted on pure instinct, the kind of panic-response hardwired into fourteen years of survival reflexes she didn't control yet. She fell backward with arms windmilling, Chan'er yanked down with her.
Shen Yue[1] hit the stone hard that breathe exploded from her lungs as she stared up into death.
Oh boy! Here we go again. I ain't even seen what you had down there. Right now, this was her only regret in the event she could die.
The creature's face wasn't a face. It was slab bone-white and featureless except for the crack running down its center. As she watched that crack split, rows of interlocking teeth the size of her arm were arranged in concentric circles that spiraled down into a gullet coated with thick and oily tongue she couldn't see the end of. The mouth was wide enough to swallow her whole.
Shen Yue, woman who'd negotiated billion-dollar deals without flinching, who'd stared down CEOs and walked away with their companies froze.
The jagged teeth descended casting shadow that closed over her vision, blotting out the dungeon light. She could see down the creature's throat now.
The first tooth made contact grazing Kaelen's cheek, just below his eye, and she felt the skin split. One millimeter, two. The pain was distant but she felt the warmth of blood welling up.
WHOOOOSH.
A sound tore through reality. It was not the wind. And before she could be gulped towards the jagged teeth aligned on its throat, a blinding arc of lightning-white steel materialized in the darkness between her and death.
[1] I mean her new body Kaelen's.