Whoosh!
The moment they crossed the threshold, the temperature plummeted.
The toxic and humid air of the sewers was instantly replaced by a dry and suffocating cold that felt like breathing in powdered glass.
The grey polygons of the entrance reformed behind them, sealing them into a pitch black corridor of polished obsidian.
"Little boss, it's dark," Grog muttered. His heavy boots echoed unnaturally loud against the stone. "Grog can't see nothing to smash."
Sebastian didn't answer immediately.
His eyes were adjusting to the gloom, but the Ethereal Plane's lighting mechanics in this zone were actively hostile.
The darkness wasn't just an absence of light. It was a localized debuff that slowly drained stamina and caused auditory hallucinations.
Whispers scraped against the inside of Sebastian's skull. It was the digital wailing of damned code!
Suddenly— SLASH!
"AGRHH!" Grog roared in pain.
The massive Ogre staggered backward, his heavy iron shield scraping against the obsidian wall. A deep and jagged gash abruptly materialized across his thick bicep.
Digital blood, a vibrant and glowing crimson, sprayed onto the black floor!
[-450 HP!]
"Something bit Grog!" the mercenary yelled, swinging his rusted battleaxe wildly. SWISH! The heavy blade hit nothing but empty air. "Show yourself, coward!"
CLANG! Another invisible hit connected.
Grog's breastplate groaned under a heavy kinetic impact, denting inward. The Ogre stumbled to one knee.
'Any normal player would definitely wipe here!' Sebastian smiled bitterly in his mind. The Crypt of Silence was infamous on the forums in his past life.
The first layer was populated by Spectral Assassins. They were Level 20 mobs that possessed absolute optical camouflage and zero footstep audio.
Without a high tier Cleric casting area of effect illumination spells, a party was just blind meat waiting to be carved!
Sebastian didn't have a Cleric. He had a glitch.
"Hold on, big guy. Let me see what we're dealing with."
He opened his inventory and bypassed his combat gear. He pulled out a thin and pathetic looking pamphlet he had purchased in the Ironhold market alongside his wind and lightning spells.
It was bound in cheap leather and smelled like dust.
He crushed the book in his fist.
[Skill Learned]
↳ Basic Identify (Tier 0 Utility)
↳ Level: 1/10
↳ Cost: 5 Mana
↳ Effect: Reveals the name and level of a target within 5 meters.
↳ Proficiency: 0/100
It was a worthless skill designed for absolute beginners to check the levels of slimes before attacking them.
Sebastian didn't even look at the floating grey text. He simply activated the skill. He channeled five points of mana into his eyes and directed his gaze at the empty space in front of Grog.
The system woke up with a violent and beautiful shriek!
[System Notification]
↳ Action Registered: Cast Basic Identify.
↳ Nexus Glitch Activated: Proficiency x10,000.
↳ Basic Identify leveled up to 10/10! Max Level Reached!
↳ Evolution Requirement Met.
↳ Basic Identify evolves to Tier 1: Aura Vision!
↳ Proficiency Overflow Detected! Aura Vision leveled up to 10/10!
↳ Evolution Requirement Met.
↳ Aura Vision evolves to Tier 3: Soul Piercing Gaze!
↳ Proficiency Overflow Detected! Soul Piercing Gaze leveled up to 10/10!
↳ WARNING: Concept Threshold Breached. Epistemological Law Unlocked.
↳ Soul Piercing Gaze evolves to Conceptual Law: True Sight.
"Shit!" Sebastian hissed, clutching his face. ARGH! A spike of blinding, agonizing pain drove itself right into his optic nerves as the server forcefully rewrote his digital eyes.
The game was no longer feeding him standard graphical outputs. It was feeding him the raw and unfiltered source code of reality!
He dropped his hand and opened his eyes. They no longer looked human.
The irises had shifted into a swirling and infinite expanse of silver light, pulsing with mathematical perfection.
The darkness of the corridor was instantly banished!
The obsidian walls became semi transparent. They revealed the glowing ley lines of mana running beneath the dungeon.
And more importantly, the empty air in front of Grog was no longer empty.
Hovering just inches away from the terrified Ogre were three Spectral Assassins!
They were horrific monsters made of twisted and weeping faces stretched over elongated and translucent limbs ending in jagged scythes. They were winding up to decapitate the mercenary.
"Grog," Sebastian said. His voice echoed with a strange and metallic resonance from the True Sight. "Swing at two o'clock. Waist height."
Grog didn't question the order. He roared and pivoted on his heel. He swung his battleaxe with terrifying and brute force momentum.
Grog didn't ask questions. He roared and spun. SWOOSH! The heavy rusted iron slammed right into the side of the invisible ghost.
Because Sebastian had identified the exact coordinate of the code, Grog's physical attack connected.
SCREEEEECH! The ghost shrieked like tearing metal and shattered into blue pixels.
"Now directly above you," Sebastian commanded. He walked calmly forward. "Overhead strike."
CRACK! Grog brought the axe down hard, splitting the second ghost perfectly in half.
Its digital ashes rained down on the Ogre's shoulders.
The third specter lunged at Sebastian.
Sebastian didn't dodge. He simply toggled his Void Walk.
He stepped into the parallel dimension and became completely intangible. The specter's scythe passed harmlessly through his chest.
Sebastian lazily pulled out his Rusty Iron Dagger. SHING. He tapped the back of the ghost's neck. His passive skill bypassed the ghost's physical immunity entirely.
The conceptual law of absolute severance bypassed the ghost's physical immunity entirely!
The specter's head slid off its shoulders, and the entity evaporated.
"Keep moving," Sebastian ordered, sheathing the dagger. "You hit where I point. I handle the rest."
For the next hour, they descended deeper into the crypt. It was a systematic and brutal extermination.
Sebastian moved through the dungeon like a bored exterminator. His silver eyes completely bypassed the game's stealth mechanics, while Grog happily turned invisible horrors into digital paste.
Finally, they reached the end of the corridor.
Creak... The corridor opened up into a massive underground cathedral. The ceiling was held up by giant pillars of bone. In the center, sitting on a throne of human skulls, was the Crypt Lord.
It was a Level 25 Lich!
It wore tattered and royal purple robes over a skeleton that radiated a sickening and pulsing green aura. In its bony hands, it clutched a staff topped with a screaming human soul trapped in crystal.
[Boss Information]
↳ Name: Lord Malakor, The Eternal Scholar
↳ Level: 25
"MORTALS," the Lich's voice boomed, rattling the bones of the pillars.
The intelligence was programmed for a grand and terrifying monologue.
"YOU DARE TREAD UPON THE SACRED DUST OF..."
"Shut up," Sebastian interrupted.
The Lich paused. Its glowing green eye sockets narrowed. It slammed its staff against the stone floor.
"The Lich paused. Its glowing green eyes narrowed. SLAM! It hit its staff against the floor. "INSOLENCE! RISE, MY CHILDREN! CONSUME THEM!"
RUMBLE... The ground of the cathedral began to tremble.
CRACK! CRACK! The stone tiles cracked and shattered as hundreds of skeletal hands burst through the floor!
Within seconds, a massive and undulating horde of heavily armored Undead Knights and Rotting Hulks poured into the room.
There were easily three hundred mobs. They formed an impenetrable wall of rusted steel and decayed bone between Sebastian and the throne.
"Little boss," Grog stammered. He took a step back and raised his shield. "That is too many bones to smash."
Sebastian looked at the swelling army.
His Solar Flare could incinerate a massive chunk of them, but the room was too wide. A single blast wouldn't cover the flanks, and the surviving skeletons would swarm them while his spell was on cooldown.
He needed crowd control. Absolute and mathematically perfect crowd control.
He opened his inventory and pulled out another trash skill book he had secured in Ironhold.
[Basic Clone]
It was a Tier 0 illusion spell that created a fragile and non combat hologram of the user to distract low level mobs for exactly three seconds.
He crushed it in his hand.
[System Notification]
↳ Action Registered: Cast Basic Clone.
↳ Nexus Glitch Activated: Proficiency x10,000.
↳ Basic Clone leveled up to 10/10! Max Level Reached!
↳ Evolution Requirement Met.
↳ Basic Clone evolves to Tier 1: Phantom Double!
↳ Proficiency Overflow Detected! Phantom Double evolves to Tier 3: Solid Shadow!
↳ Proficiency Overflow Detected! Solid Shadow evolves to Conceptual Law: Army of One.
[Conceptual Law]
↳ Army of One
↳ Description: You do not create illusions. You fracture your own timeline, pulling perfect and autonomous copies of yourself from parallel instances. Clones possess 100% of your stats, passives, and conceptual laws.
↳ Duration: 10 minutes.
Sebastian exhaled a slow and cold breath. He tapped into his mana pool and activated the law.
CRASH! The air around him violently fractured like a broken mirror!
Ten shimmering and geometric portals tore open in the reality of the cathedral.
From each portal stepped a Sebastian.
They all wore the same ragged Drifter tunic. They all had the same deadpan and uncaring eyes. They all possessed the exact same catastrophic glitches loaded into their digital biology.
The jaws of everyone in the room would have dropped if they were human!
The Lich Malakor paused its summoning. The advanced intelligence was frantically trying to calculate the threat level of eleven Level 10 Drifters standing in a perfectly synchronized line.
"Fire," the original Sebastian commanded.
Ten clones raised their right hands in perfect unison. They extended their index and middle fingers.
They bypassed the standard casting times and tapped directly into the concept of nuclear fusion.
SNAP! Ten fingers snapped at once.
The sound didn't register. The physics engine of The Ethereal Plane completely and utterly crashed!
Ten miniature suns dropped from the cathedral ceiling directly into the horde of undead! Each radiated the incandescent fury of a dying star.
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!
The overlapping shockwaves of pure plasma didn't just burn the skeletons. It unmade them at an atomic level.
The resulting explosion was a localized supernova!
The heat instantly vaporized the stone pillars and liquefied the floor into a raging sea of molten glass. The air in the cathedral ignited, expanding with such terrifying force that the walls of the dungeon physically bowed outward.
Grog screamed! He dropped to his knees and curled into a ball behind his massive iron shield, which instantly began to glow cherry red from the ambient heat.
When the blinding white light finally faded, the cathedral was gone.
In its place was a perfectly smooth and glowing crater of orange melted slag. There were no skeletons. There were no bone pillars.
The Lich's throne had been reduced to a puddle of bubbling calcium.
Lord Malakor, the Level 25 boss, hadn't even had the chance to trigger its second phase. It had been instantly erased from the server's database!
The ten clones shimmered and dissolved back into the timeline, their job done.
Sebastian stood at the edge of the glass crater, entirely unharmed by his own friendly fire disabled spell.
He looked down into the center of the molten depression. Sitting miraculously untouched by the heat and protected by the system's loot preservation code, were two items.
He casually walked down the sloped and glowing glass.
He picked up a plain silver band. It was the Ring of Space, an inventory expansion artifact that defied localized geometry.
Next to it was a heavy bound tome radiating dark purple energy. It was the Grimoire of Souls.
"Come on, big guy," Sebastian called back to the shaking Ogre. "We're done here."