The soul was quiet. Fuzem had returned to her pool and Errazorrus to his cave. Only Azotreh and Nicholas remained beyond their personal spaces.
Azotreh had broken down a little after the four had been locked within their own soul realm. The stress had caught up with them, combined with a level of guilt they hadn't experienced before in their life.
Neither Fuzem nor Errazorrus had the kind of ability or understanding of themselves to help, leaving Nicholas to do it.
Nicholas had been a little over thirty before dying and ending up on Aostea. His sister had leaned heavily on him after she'd achieved independence from their parents, leaving him at least slightly capable of reassuring Azotreh.
He reminded them that it wasn't their fault, that they didn't know what would happen, and that they didn't know everything. They weren't all-powerful and were destined to make mistakes. It wasn't their fault.
It had taken what Nicholas guessed was about an hour for Azotreh to finally calm down and eventually fall asleep with their head in Nicholas' lap. Nicholas just looked up at the blank void beyond the golden glass dome of their soul realm. The ground was still trembling, and echoes of pain pushed their way through his mind.
There really was nothing they could do. Something had trapped them in this space, and from here they couldn't access their body or the dungeon.
He had gotten system messages about selected perks, a new task, a new faction, and the greater favor of the gluttony overlord, whoever that was.
He'd also found another new thing in their soul from his position: three polyhedra hovered over the giant white obelisk in the center of their soul. One the same cerulean blue as their mana, one a blank white color, and one a shifting mass of mostly orange light. The number of sides, shape of said sides, angles, and lines didn't make sense. As if they were always changing, but remained the same anyway. He'd eventually just decided not to look at them. They were beautiful, but in the way suddenly becoming aware of how vast the cosmos can be beautiful.
Instead, he just sat on the soft grass and watched the realm around him. It was serene, if a little blank. Despite it feeling like an earthquake was always beneath his legs, the realm didn't visibly tremble with it. Or maybe he was just trembling in the same way, making it look unmoving.
Once in a while, the glowing outline of an item would manifest in the air above the realm and begin to shift. He checked the inventory menu, finding items being inserted and just left in there. He was pretty sure that he'd been explicitly digging the extra room to store the items so they wouldn't clog the inventory. But if they weren't hunting monsters or collecting items, there probably wasn't a point in leaving the inventory empty.
At least, it seemed that monsters weren't being hunted at first, but then monster materials began to enter the inventory as well. Of course, the ones they recognized were put in first. Teeth from that chaindog, rocks from the elymental, that stuff. But then new ones. Clearly from the monsters of their dungeon, too.
He glanced up at the glowing polyhedra and saw the lowest one, the blue one, flashing rapidly. He gently slid Azotreh's head from his lap, resting their head in the soft grass, before standing and moving to the obelisk.
Errazorrus had been watching the items specifically as they entered and hovered in the sky. He didn't want to pay attention to Azotreh and Nicholas. He did regret that he couldn't do anything to comfort Azotreh. He simply had no idea how. So he'd just focused on the sky as items began to be deposited.
He'd reverted to the true draconic form, or what he imagined it to be. The soul realm was one of unreality, and here, he could be whatever he wanted to be. Long neck, dark scales, powerful wings, and a thick tail. He was draconic in all ways except his eyes, which still spun with the four multicolored pupils like the eyes of Azotreh when all four of them were in control.
It was the only part of him he couldn't shift between the two forms, though he didn't care much about it. It's not like anyone who didn't share those eyes would ever see them.
His gaze was suddenly drawn to movement as Nicholas stood from where he'd been sitting and moved to the obelisk in the center of the realm.
Errazorrus stretched like a cat, haunches raised. His wings extended to their fullest, and his tail went straight before he stood properly and made his own way over to the obelisk, shifting his form to the nine-foot-tall humanoid.
He stepped inside through one of the doors, which isolated the expanded space from the soul beyond. Nicholas only shot him a glance before turning back to the screen, clearly not interested in a conversation. Errazorrus didn't try to strike up a conversation and instead just took a different chair to watch.
The large screens inside the obelisk normally showed the outside through their eyes. Whether those eyes be those of the dungeon nexus or the prime avatar's. But now, they instead showed flashing system messages.
Most of them were damage messages labeled as about summons. All were attacked by rabbit-kin. Some were about small amounts of XP gained from slain ants. Some were death notifications about monsters in the dungeon, and some others were loot notifications.
Most of the loot was rather basic. Monster parts, alchemic coins, monster cores, all that. But others were some of the rarer items. Potions, magic items, and the occasional item called an affinity.
There were also level advancement notifications. Not their primary levels, but ability levels. Specifically, their Basic Looting ability was clearly being used constantly by something.
Of course, there were also skill level advancements. Punch got some, as did Subordinate Control and Summoner's Efficiency.
The direct combat gains weren't great, but they clearly weren't the intended use of whatever was happening within the dungeon. The goal was the loot.
They were having the rabbit-kin kill monsters before looting the monsters themselves to advance their basic looting ability. It was kind of brilliant.
Errazorrus kind of hoped that the dungeon would also begin utilizing the Harvester's Ritual that came as instinct alongside basic looting on any greater monsters, not that he could actually communicate that.
Nicholas turned to Errazorrus for a moment before standing from his chair and saying, "I've got another thing I want to do. Stick around here to catalogue our gains. Also, tell Fuzem to begin channeling mana into the devouring ability. I don't think our regenerations were harmed, and if we've got nothing better to do, might as well try to advance in rank."
"Why not have Azotreh-"
"Azotreh doesn't need the additional stress. I think all of us have forgotten that they haven't even entered puberty yet. They don't deserve all the stress they've been through."
Nicholas paused at the door to say, "And make sure both you and Fuzem also rest sometimes. We have no idea how long we're going to be stuck in here, and I think we should take it as a break from the tension. If the dungeon is going to keep working, that's fine. But we're not built to work without play. It'll make Azotreh a dull boy."
Nicholas grinned at his own joke before stepping out of the room, leaving Errazorrus confused. What did that even mean?
Nicholas stepped out of the soul realm. The glassy surface of the poten sea looked like it had fracturing cracks across its surface, though it felt just as stable as ever. There was no threat of falling through into the rainbow mass of color and light.
He began a journey across the light. He had an idea based on something they'd done by accident and instinct what felt like a long time ago.
The magic of his new world was familiar and alien. It resembled a few RPGs he'd played, with abilities and stats and the like. But there was far more beyond. Why was there a difference between abilities and skills? Then there were the dozen or so other missing things on their stat sheet. He had no idea what an attunement was, and only guessed at what a resistance was. Daos were a concept from Earth, though he assumed there were differences there, too. As for attributes, conceptions, and all that other stuff, he had no clue. It left him, and Azotreh by extension, stumbling in the dark.
But there was one thing that had been mentioned repeatedly. Aspects of Existence. The system message about the Tri-Layer Border had mentioned them. Combined with some messages about the soul and core aspects, and the colors on the horizons of this space, he could guess quite a bit about them.
Even more, there was their stat sheet. It had 92 stats, not including their resources or resource regeneration rates. More accurately, it actually had 104 stats, since the six resource stats broke down into three each.
He glanced down at the poten sea. The stats were these potens, the energy now contained beneath his feet. But they were listed into eighteen groups plus two spares. Those eighteen groups were further split into six groups of three, and those six groups were Body, Mind, Soul, Core, Origin, and Base.
He had no idea what the origin and base were, though he had a theory that one sat above his head. But he could guess about the other two they didn't have access to. Body and mind.
The sky of this weird liminal realm was split into five colors, black above, and then four horizons. Red, pink, blue, and gold. Walking towards the gold horizon would bring him to the soul, and to the blue would bring him to the core.
But what about the red and pink? That's what he wanted to find out.
So, he began to walk, much as he had when their core had been overwhelmed by their skills. This time, he walked towards the pink horizon, opposite to the blue one.
The very space itself pushed against him, but he knew that he would break through eventually. He just had to keep going.
Normally, he'd do something more efficient than walking. But what else was there to do in this isolating darkness? Without the ability to reach their body, there was no possibility of anything more efficient than scoping out what else there could be.
The cold awareness spawned another twenty inferior gluttony elementals. As it turned out, the elementals were the best choice for its current goal.
Made from razor teeth and what seemed to be corded tongues, the tiny elementals could fit into smaller spaces than their body mass would suggest, and could morph their forms to become different challenges to those they went up against.
There was currently a single oversized monster blue slime hanging from the branches of the main tree in the room the rabbit-kin were living in. It had lucked into the monster when it was testing monster spawning for its plan.
Elite monsters were one of the normal tiers of monster, standing above regular monsters just as they stood above lesser monsters. They usually carried a specific property that was abnormal for their species, which, in this case, had turned out to be gigantism.
As a mutable entity, it could move its mass to touch the many monsters before they died.
It sent the twenty elementals through the small ant tunnels, along specific channels to reach the rabbit-kin. They would emerge from the roots of the tree and attack the group currently setting up to fight them.
The consciousness specifically commanded the monsters to fight them in specific ways. Challenging the rabbit-kin in their desire to grow stronger. It worked to both complete the Raison D'etre quest and their desire to complete the task from the Lord of Greed.
It had three tasks from the Mistress of Gluttony, but those were distant. They didn't naturally progress in grade as most lifeforms should; pushing skills to Journeyman was harder than expected, and they had no idea how to get the Glutton title.
While the first part of the Lord of Greed's quest seemed difficult, it had quickly figured out the method to advance the Inventory ability. Simply holding things inside it would grant it XP and allow it to advance, just as using its looting power would grant it XP to advance.
It assumed there were other ways to advance the ability, but hadn't discovered them. Instead, it would just do its best to fill every slot to their maximum capacity. The more items, the faster the inventory would advance. All in all, the replicable loot from the gluttony elementals, mostly teeth, flesh, some bone, and quintessence, had done wonders to fill the slots of the inventory.
It didn't purchase the sub-inventory abilities, since that would likely reduce the XP gains of the main inventory. The sub-inventories were useful if the goal was storage, but its goal was reaching level 100 in the ability.
It was tempted to eat the quintessence, but knew that any kind of turbulence when Azotreh returned might just send them back to wherever they were.
The cold consciousness honestly felt a little lonely without the bond to Azotreh. It hoped they would return soon.