Fifth Floor – Mushroom Forest.
The once-glimring forest, glowing with faint bioluminescence, had beco a wasteland. Mushroom trees lay toppled in heaps, their severed branches and caps scarred with claw marks and bite wounds.
At the center of the ruins yawned a space fissure, over four ters long, jagged and raw.
Beyond the rift stretched a lush, verdant jungle—prival, thriving, and deadly. The proof lay in the beasts that crawled out of it.
One such creature, a hulking worm plated with thick chitin, was drawn by the scent of scorched flesh wafting from the fifth floor. It sluggishly wriggled halfway through the gap.
Then—without warning—the fissure contracted.
The unstable edges sharpened into blades of space. The worm’s armored shell, so durable against claws and poison, parted like paper.
Worse still, the rift’s edges embedded into its flesh, slicing deeper each ti it shifted. Unable to advance or retreat, it writhed helplessly in agony.
Yet it never realized this was its last chance at escape.
The fissure continued shrinking, inexorably, until it closed shut, leaving nothing but half a worm carcass on the floor.
…
Oh.
So that’s what repairing a fissure feels like.
In the core chamber, the monuntal crystal stele glead with pure cyan light. Lin Jun’s soul still remained inside it.
The pull of the core had not ceased, but he no longer feared being drained dry.
Once his soul filled the stele, a curious cycle began—
The core drew his essence in at a steady rate… and spat it back out again at the sa pace.
Now, his soul flowed like a dual-channel circuit, bound in a state of dynamic balance. A semi-permanent link with the Dungeon’s core.
“Semi-permanent” because, as administrator, Lin Jun could forcibly withdraw himself from the crystal at will. But he chose not to—reckless extraction might destabilize everything. For now, balance was safer.
With the core in his grasp, he held vast authority over the Athyst Dungeon.
In theory, he could command punishnt lightning, control passage rights, even shift space itself.
In practice… it was like debugging foreign code. And Lin Jun was no programr.
That lightning bolt that roasted the Codex earlier? Pure accident of being inside the core chamber, where permissions were at their most direct. Outside, every operation would beco exponentially more complex.
Fortunately, repairing rifts was simple. He only needed to funnel soul-provided compute power into the fissure’s coordinates; the Dungeon handled the rest.
But this carried a price.
His Puji control limit had been permanently reduced by five hundred units. And during active repairs, more capacity would be consud.
Thus, faced with a broken, war-torn Dungeon, Lin Jun had no choice but a cautious repair strategy—prioritize the most dangerous rifts first, patch the rest later.
Other functions? He’d learn as he went.
Still, he had a hunch: punishnt lightning was probably the easiest “button” to press at random.
Beyond permissions, he gained an unexpected boon:
【Inspiration LV1】
His perception had cracked open. Though faint, he could now sense the presence of souls. Apart from his own vast cyan essence, others were still hazy behind a thick fog—but this was a leap from nothing to sothing.
The skill wasn’t stolen; it had awakened naturally from his firsthand brush with soul extraction.
The soul domain—once his blind spot—was now within reach.
This crisis had proven it: all his careful contingencies, body transfers and severed networks, were physical asures. Against soul-level chanics, he had been helpless—outplayed by nothing more than a trap hidden within the core’s rules.
Had he possessed [Inspiration] sooner, perhaps the Codex’s sche would have been exposed.
As for the Yellow To, he hadn’t destroyed it yet for one reason: a sliver of his soul now clung to its cover.
At first, it tried to push him out. But each ti it shoved, he wedged more in—until equilibrium was forced. In the end, the Codex gave up.
Through this contact, he touched its essence—not quite a soul, but sothing like it. Whatever it was, wrapping and crushing it with his own spirit would snuff it out instantly. More direct, more absolute than any fungal parasite.
Even if he hurled the book into the void, distance ant nothing now. The soul-link remained.
The Codex had claid it held vital intelligence.
Smack—
A Puji tossed the tattered volu onto the floor. Cyan veins still traced its cover, but it was a wreck, hardly recognizable as the once-mighty Sacred Codex.
A Puji kicked it aside. “Didn’t you say you had important intel? Stop playing dead. Spill it.”
No answer.
A thin arc of lightning struck. Smoke curled from its cover.
Still silent.
Then more lightning. Again and again, until the Yellow To was nearly charred black.
The Speech Puji gasped theatrically. “Oh no! Forgive , mighty Codex—I forgot! You don’t even have a single page left to write on!”
A minotaur was promptly sacrificed into the book. A feeble soul seeped into its cover—only to feel Lin Jun’s cyan grip clamp down on its essence.
“Listen carefully,” Lin Jun’s voice carried through the Puji. “No more souls in your cover. Ever. If you store one—just one—I’ll crush you where you stand. Understood?”
The spine quivered faintly. A new page sprouted—thin, fragile, desperate.
The Yellow To rushed to prove its worth:
[Stop the lightning! I’ll talk! I’ll tell you everything!]
[The secret lies behind that little core gate!]
…
…
…
A few Pujis stood before the small sealed door. Lin Jun, now Dungeon Administrator, could have opened it with a thought.
But his voice was flat, incredulous.
“What do you an… a sixth of a Demon King is sealed behind there?”
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