Yuan made the decision before Zhang Wei had finished processing the notification.
"You need to go back."
"I just said I'd—"
"I know what you said." Yuan turned from the corridor. "That's a B-rank evolved form. Your reinforcement build can't tank that class of output for more than one hit and we both know it."
Zhang Wei's expression said several things in sequence. The first was argument. The second was the recognition that the argument was losing. The third was the particular resignation of someone who was genuinely brave and had just been given correct information.
"I'm not going back to the main hall while you—"
"I'm not asking you to go to the main hall. There's a branching corridor forty meters back, left side. Defensible position, single entrance, the Sentinel formation wasn't covering it which means the dungeon's distribution left it unguarded. Hold there. If I need to fall back I need somewhere to fall back to."
A pause. Zhang Wei looked at the corridor ahead. Looked at Yuan.
"You've been thinking about exit routes this whole time."
"I've been thinking about a lot of things."
"That's either very reassuring or very concerning."
"Forty meters back. Left side."
Zhang Wei went. Yuan watched him until he reached the branch and turned in, then faced forward.
Alone, again. The way the quest notification had implied it would be from the start.
He approached the evolved form the way he'd learned to approach every new threat since the awakening — Mana Sense first, constructing the picture before the eyes had it, letting the information arrive in layers.
What his Sense found was wrong in a specific way that took him a moment to name.
The Gargoyle King's mana signature had been dense and architectural — territorial, established, the mana of something that had existed long enough to become part of its environment. This was different. The signature was the same shape but the quality was corrupted, layered over with something that his Sense was registering as a secondary mana type he didn't have a classification for. Dark, slow, and spreading outward from the creature's position in a gradual radius.
The Blight Aura. Even at thirty meters, the edge of it was reaching him, and he could feel the slight drag it put on his own mana cycling — not damaging at this distance, but present. Like static on a signal.
He came around the corridor bend and saw it.
The size difference was the first thing. The Gargoyle King he'd fought in the main hall had been four meters at the shoulder. This version was closer to five, the additional mass distributed across a hide that had darkened from stone-grey to something closer to black, the calcified plates denser and irregular in a way that suggested rapid uncontrolled growth rather than natural formation. Its eyes, which had been absent in the original — no visible eyes, just sensory mana — were now present and glowing a sustained deep red, tracking the corridor with a focus the original had never demonstrated.
It was standing over something. A section of corridor floor that the dungeon's spatial distortion had cracked open, the mana from below venting upward through the fracture in a thin dark column. The Blight-Touched Gargoyle King was standing in it, drawing from it, the corrupted mana cycling through its hide and back into the floor in a closed circuit.
It's feeding from the fracture, Yuan thought. The core destabilization is powering it.
[Ding!][Evolved Monster Detected: Blight-Touched Gargoyle King]
[Rank: B]
[Abilities: Enhanced Stony Skin (Passive) | Corrupted Stone Fist (Active) | Petrifying Roar (Active) | Blight Aura (Passive)]
[Weakness: Light/Holy magic. Concentrated piercing attacks.]
He read the ability list and ran the inventory in his head against it.
Enhanced Stony Skin meant the cracks he'd opened in the original's hide were not going to open at the same force threshold. Corrupted Stone Fist meant the impact radius had expanded and the feedback probably carried Blight contamination. Petrifying Roar was a direct upgrade on the Intimidation Roar — not suppression but actual petrification, partial or complete, which at B-rank could be instantaneous at close range.
And the Blight Aura was already at the edge of his position and climbing.
His current toolkit: Shadow Step, Stony Skin, Battle Instinct, Tremor Sense, Ember Shot, the basic physical techniques. None of them addressed the Blight component. Stony Skin was physical defense and the Blight was mana-type damage, which meant it would bypass the passive entirely. Ember Shot was fire mana, which the Blight would absorb or negate based on the type interactions he was observing.
He needed something else.
He kept the thought controlled and stepped back from the bend, putting stone between himself and the creature's line of sight, and used the thirty seconds to scan the adjacent corridors with his Mana Sense at full extension.
Two signatures in the east branch — small, C-rank, one stationary and one moving in a slow figure-eight pattern that suggested patrol behavior rather than predation. The stationary one was warm. Very warm, relative to the ambient dungeon temperature, warm in the specific way that fire-affinity monsters were warm — not the spike of an active ability but the constant baseline of something whose body chemistry ran hot continuously.
He pulled the field guide entry from memory.
Fire Salamander. C-rank, fire affinity, native to high-temperature dungeon zones but adaptable to any environment with sufficient ambient mana. Combat classification: aggressive, elemental. Primary ability—
Cauterizing Flame. An ability that didn't just burn. It purified. The biological function was defensive — Fire Salamanders were immune to most mana-type contaminations because their fire ran hot enough to burn foreign mana out of their system before it could propagate. The ability, extracted and used offensively, would apply the same principle to a target.
Blight was corrupted mana. Corrupted mana was, functionally, contamination.
He was already moving toward the east branch.
The Fire Salamander was three meters long, low-slung, its scales running the colour gradient from deep orange at the spine to pale yellow at the underbelly. It registered his approach with a full-body orientation — not the mechanical tracking of a construct but the reactive alertness of something with genuine instincts — and opened its mouth.
Yuan activated Shadow Step and closed the distance before the ability fully charged.
The extraction was quick and clean. The Salamander's core was compact and intensely warm, and when it settled in his chest it felt like standing near an open furnace, a radiating heat that was uncomfortable for approximately four seconds and then integrated, becoming part of the internal landscape alongside the cold weight of the Gargoyle King's contribution and the dark compression of the Shadow Stalker's.
[Ding!][C-Rank Fire Salamander defeated. Experience +75]
[Ding!]
[Ability Extracted: Fire Salamander — Cauterizing Flame (C-Rank)]
[New Skill Acquired: Cauterizing Flame]
[Rank: C | Type: Active | Cost: 20 MP | Description: Releases a sustained burst of purifying fire. Effective against corrupted, cursed, or contaminated mana structures. Duration: 5 seconds. Cooldown: 15 seconds.]
Twenty MP cost. He was sitting at nineteen.
He looked at the number for a moment.
Then he looked at the patrol signature — the second C-rank in the east branch, still running its figure-eight, unaware that its companion had just ceased to exist. He crossed to it and killed it with a direct physical strike, extracted the core on reflex, and checked his MP when the notification cleared.
[Ding!][C-Rank Dungeon Crawler defeated. Experience +65]
The Dungeon Crawler's extraction hadn't produced a new skill — duplicate-type, his talent apparently recognizing the ability as something already covered in his current kit and converting it to raw mana instead. His pool ticked up by eight points.
Twenty-seven.
Just enough.
He stood in the east branch corridor and thought about the Blight-Touched Gargoyle King standing in its fracture vent, feeding from the destabilizing core, and about the eleven minutes remaining on the timer, and about the word evolved in the notification and what it meant that the dungeon was producing B-rank threats faster than the situation above had been resolved.
If I spend the Cauterizing Flame on the evolved form and it doesn't go down, he thought, I'm in a B-rank fight at the bottom of a collapsing dungeon with empty MP and no ranged options.
He thought about Zhang Wei in the defensible corridor forty meters back.
He thought about sixty students in the main hall and an S-rank prodigy who was going to run out of options when the dungeon upgraded again.
He thought about the Gargoyle King's core — the original, the amber colour of it, the B-rank Tremor Sense it had been carrying dormant. He thought about what an evolved form's core might contain that the original's hadn't.
Stop thinking, he told himself. You have eleven minutes and one shot at this. Make it count.