Leveling up felt good, but I was learning that I shouldn't push my luck.
After making sure I wasn't getting watched or stalked, I started to leave the area slowly.
I hadn't expected so many elites to be present, but it wasn't something I couldn't handle.
Physically, elites and normal enemies were exactly the same from what I could tell. The only difference was their fierce intellect, and that sometimes they had more abilities or skills.
Nonetheless, leaving took me nearly twenty minutes even without fighting.
For the fight I had to get deeper into the region than I'd like, still in the outer part, but still, and even here it felt like I was quickly surrounded by more enemies.
While I was walking home I sent a few whispers to Merlin, but sadly heard nothing back from him.
It had been almost a day since we last spoke and I was truly starting to worry, but I knew he was a strong mage with good gear, perhaps better than even my own, so I just had to trust he knew what he was doing.
Once I made it home I laid down on my bed and stared at my ceiling again.
With Merlin not responding anymore, possibly even dying, tied with the knowledge that so many people were missing, my mind was wracked with guilt.
Guilt that I couldn't do more to really help people, more importantly help Merlin at this moment.
It was something I had been thinking about, why even tell us layers exist if they were a static concept?
I mean, most people thought there would be a class able to traverse them at some point, but why not now?
Layers were such a complicated idea if we applied Earth science, perhaps implying multiple parallel dimensions.
On top of that it scaled whatever the system was to higher multi-dimensional, a power level that clashed with every known law of science.
But then again, so did I.
When I put my mind to it, even at this low level some of the most revolutionary mathematical and physics concepts were understandable in an intimate way.
"I... I need to do something," I mumbled to myself, getting out of bed and going to the local book shop, buying an empty journal.
After that I went home and started to write down everything I knew of physics, which was comparatively a lot.
From basic motion to electricity to heat, they were all concepts common to a college physics course but insanely profound to the generations before.
It was the math old scientists were able to model the large-scale universe out of, reimagining how the world and even space as a whole functioned.
What I started writing down next was all hypothetical.
It was assumptions, ideas, and untested math on how mana fundamentally worked.
The math was complicated, far more than I would have ever seen on Earth, but after hours and hours I started to get somewhere.
[Whisper to Sheral] "Doing something stupid. Thanks for being my apocalypse mom"
It took some time to figure out what to say, but that's what I came up with.
Then I started to dump mana into a new spell, one that I was going to use to breach into Merlin's layer.
The magic hinged on using the faint connection of mana the system tied to friends, further implying nefarious magic could be used over it.
My spell though would more or less make a tunnel, connecting our two layers via that connection.
[Mana: 820/1320]
In an instant five hundred mana was gone, but I could tell that with that much I wasn't even close to halfway.
So I took out mana potions from my inventory, starting with one, then another, then five more.
I was hoarding mana potions at home, because I figured there would always be a use for them.
It was something I was infinitely happy for doing now that I needed such an insane amount of mana.
[Warning! You are interfering with a system (4) above your current level (2). Backlash will occur if you decide to continue]
This menu, unlike the normal blue, was a deep red.
Taking in what I knew, the level I'm supposed to interact with this is forty and up, which is fair for the mana consumption.
After thirty minutes of feeding the spell I could tell it was ready.
Under my feet was a magic circle more complicated than any I had made thus far, and the mana in it was unbelievable.
Just as mass had gravity, there was a similar force when a large amount of mana was concentrated like this.
It was something I got a little familiar with when I was dealing with Refined Mana, but even that was a bit different.
There were so many things that I wanted to analyze about this spell, but for now there was something I needed to do more.
Releasing the spell, I could feel something similar to when the system transports people, except instead of a smooth ripple it was a jarring, tearing, and immensely painful process.
It felt like my whole body was going to split into a thousand pieces, and the worst part is I couldn't affect it at all.
Here I would either live or die, based entirely on if I had made the spell right.
Once a spell had been fired there was no way to change or alter it.
Like a flamethrower, you can't recall fire that was already shot, but you may be able to put the fuel back into the tank.
After what felt like forever I finally emerged in the sewer again, the smell was truly the most god-awful thing I had ever experienced, only followed by the fact that I emerged on what could only be described as a mountain of shit.
My eyes started to water as I looked around, seeing a black man directly to my side.
He had long, unkempt dreadlocks that would usually turn me away from a person, but seeing as we were both covered in shit I decided to overlook it.
I reached out to shake his hand.
"Merlin?..."
That was when I noticed, I couldn't reach out to shake his hand, nor could I reach out with my right arm at all, because it was gone.
I screamed out, not in pain, just shock.
It was only a second later that I felt something genuinely painful by the right side of my head, and that a woman rushed to my side and started healing me.
"Holy shit!" the woman yelled out.
I could only reach around to feel my head with my left arm, and instead of feeling my skin I felt what I could only imagine to be my brain and a cut section of my skull.
As the seconds ticked by the pain was only growing as I tried to lay back.
"No! Don't you dare lay in that shit!" the woman yelled at me, holding my back up with the man I could only assume was Merlin.
"Dude talk to me! You're Tero, right?" Merlin tried distracting me from the injury, to little success.
"That's not my brain right!? Right?!" I yelled.
"No no man, listen to me! You're Tero, right!?" He said in a confident yet rushed tone.
"Yahhhh!" I yelled, fighting the pain in my head as a green light shone from the woman's hands.
"Merlin... I don't have enough mana for this right now," she said. It was clear she wasn't sure what to do, but still she was healing me.
"Just do what you can, Jane..." Merlin responded, going to the last person who wasn't looking much better than me.
He was probably a rogue of sorts, with tattered leather armor and two daggers tucked into his waist.
He was wrapped head to toe in bandages that were starting to show blood.
"I, ahhh! I have potions," I said, still in agony as the healing magic started to make the pain even worse.
Even taking them out of my inventory and handing them to her took a second, sadly once she had mana the pain only got worse, and not by a small margin.
I could feel everything starting to be repaired on my head, as the blood from my arm started to stop spurting out.
Between my brain and an arterial bleed from my arm, if I hadn't basically landed on a healer I would have died.
But I didn't, and now I'm alive and on a massive pile of shit.