The Sector 12 Gate spat him out into a ravine.
Not literally. The entry point deposited him at the bottom of a geological formation that the dungeon had constructed from memory of deep underground canyons. The walls rose on either side to heights that perspective made feel like they were leaning inward. The sky above the ravine was the color of a bruise, and the air carried the cold alkaline smell that was common to Underworld spaces drawing from Nordic mythology stratum, old stone and ice-melt and something that might have been the ghost of pine forests that had never existed on this side of reality.
He had read the Gate file carefully before entering. Class D, Nordic variant. Typical creature composition: Draugr soldiers, Frost Shades, a Wolf-type minor boss. Standard layout: entry ravine, primary cavern, boss chamber. The Association's file estimated a four-person D-rank party would need approximately five hours.
He planned for three.
Shadow-01, the Bone Sentinel, who had become something like a squad leader in the passive hierarchy of the Register, materialized at his shoulder when Liu Yun touched the inner wall and sent the summon pulse. The Sentinel's violet eyes swept the ravine with the mechanical thoroughness of a security camera.
'Scout the ravine,' Liu Yun said. 'Come back if you find contact.'
The Sentinel moved into the darkness ahead. Not walking, exactly. Flowing. Shadow soldiers did not move the way living creatures moved. They relocated, their darkness simply present in one place and then, between one blink and the next, present in another, leaving no footprint, no sound, no disturbance of air.
Liu Yun followed at standard pace, blade out of habit, eyes on the walls.
The Draugr came from the walls.
They were always from the walls in Nordic dungeons. The dead warriors of a mythological tradition that believed its honored dead remained active in stone and soil, ready to be called back for one more battle. These ones were D-rank equivalents. Seven feet tall in rusted iron armor, their faces beneath corroded helms the grey-green of old copper, moving with the stiff relentless pace of something that had forgotten what hurrying was for but remembered very well what killing was for.
Four of them dropped from the ravine walls in a coordinated ambush. Standard formation: two to engage, two to flank.
Liu Yun said, 'Combat deployment. Sentinels and Crawlers.'
Three Bone Sentinels and two Shadow Crawlers materialized from his shadow in under a second. The Draugr, who had expected to land on a soft E-rank target with no time to react, instead found themselves facing five creatures of equivalent or greater size, all burning with violet fire.
The fight lasted forty-five seconds.
The Shadow Crawlers in particular were devastatingly efficient. Their obsidian-shard bodies shredded through the Draugr's rusted iron as if it were wet paper, and their speed made a mockery of the dead warriors' slow, grinding offense. When the last Draugr fell, Liu Yun walked forward and extracted four new shadows from the remains.
[SHADOW EXTRACTED: DRAUGR SOLDIER x4 - SHADOW SLOTS: 34]
The tier-two extraction, the upgrade from completing the tutorial, worked exactly as the system had described. Any creature he killed or rendered defeated, anywhere, was available for extraction. His army would grow with every dungeon he cleared. Every monster he killed would join him.
He thought about that as he moved deeper into the ravine. An army that grew by consuming its enemies. He wasn't sure whether that was poetic or disturbing. Possibly both.
The primary cavern was vast and lit by bioluminescent fungi that gave everything a cold blue cast. The Frost Shades materialized from the light itself. Semi-transparent creatures of condensed cold, their bodies like ice sculptures animated by malice, their touch capable of dropping a human's body temperature to fatal levels within seconds of skin contact. Three of them moved to intercept him.
He sent the Hellhounds.
Shadow-born fire against Frost Shade ice. The results were spectacular in the literal, violent sense. The Hellhounds' burning shadows were exactly the elemental opposite of the Shades' cold substance, and where they connected the Shades came apart in explosions of superheated vapor. The cavern filled with hissing steam and the Hellhounds moved through it without slowing.
Three more shadows joined the Register.
The boss chamber was at the end of a long passage that narrowed until he had to turn sideways to pass through. At the end of it was a creature that the dungeon file had called a 'Wolf-type minor boss' and which turned out to be a Fenrir Echo. A mythological reconstruction of the Norse doomsday wolf, scaled down to about sixty percent of the original's legendary size, which still put it at roughly the height of a three-story building.
The Echo filled the boss chamber almost completely. Its fur was black ice. Its eyes were storm clouds in miniature. When it opened its mouth, Liu Yun could see the void between its teeth. Not darkness, actual void, the absence of space.
He summoned everything he had.
Thirty-seven shadow soldiers materialized in the chamber, filling the remaining space, and for a moment the Fenrir Echo was simply surrounded. It thrashed and lunged and filled the air with howling that should have deafened him but instead only rattled his teeth. His army held. They were shadow. They could be struck through and reform. They were pain without injury. In three minutes the Echo was down.
Liu Yun stood before the enormous fallen body and pressed his hand to its chest and extracted the shadow.
The Fenrir Shadow was enormous. Even reduced to its two-dimensional soul-substance, it was the size of a wall, its shape unmistakable against the boss chamber floor. It entered the Register and settled there like a sleeping continent.
He had to stop for a moment because his legs were shaking.
Not from fear. From the sheer accumulated weight of what he had become in approximately twenty-four hours.
[QUEST COMPLETE - FIRST FORAY]
[VOID AFFINITY +3. SHADOW EXTRACTION TIER 2 CONFIRMED.]
[NEW TITLE: 'DUNGEON SOVEREIGN' - Completed a D-rank dungeon solo. All shadow soldiers +5% base stats.]
He collected the core fragments, logged his clear time, two hours and seventeen minutes, and walked back to the exit.
He cleared 40,000 coins from this run alone. Enough for rent, medication, food for a month, and a new pair of boots.
He bought the boots first.
He had earned them.