As I twisted a specific sconce ninety degrees to the right, the metal groaning as rusty joints grated against each other, I felt a small pang of amusement at how my guess about the Slime Pit's challenge task had been spot on. Here, on the fourth floor, about a third of the way down the corridor, twisting one of the black torch holders revealed a hidden passageway.

  In fairness, it wasn't perfectly hidden. While most of the dilapidated furniture was in side rooms, there was a rotten bookcase here in the corridor, next to the torch. I'd walked past it without paying attention the first time around, but had I been looking for secrets, I probably would have noticed it.

  Probably.

  In any case, I knew about it now, with the result that it creaked and juddered as it moved to one side, the jerking mostly due to the mechanism's rusty rails.

  I wasn't too sure about all the rust. It felt like another of the bits of slightly odd dungeon construction. Yes, there was enough damp around that iron would rust, but that was the problem, really. Rusted that badly, the mechanism shouldn't have worked at all. I could see how the rails were deformed, and no wheel should have been able to fit through them, jerkily or otherwise.

  The moving bookcase revealed a small doorway, narrow enough that I needed to twist to fit through it, beyond which was a staircase down. An alternate exit to the fifth floor.

  The bookcase shifted back into its original position behind me, which was a little ominous, but it wasn't as if I intended to leave by the same route I'd arrived. Thankfully, there were more sconces along the staircase, holding their own ever-burning torches, so the closing door didn't plunge the narrow passageway into darkness.

  At the bottom was... well, more of the same, really. Another corridor, no different from the others. Side rooms containing identical rotting and rusted furniture, placed by someone or something with no understanding of sensible interior layouts.

  Actually, speaking of layouts... Given the direction of the staircase and corridor, and the fact that the staircase had been the same length as the others within the dungeon, I was fairly sure this corridor overlapped with the usual fifth floor. Yes, dungeons pulled weird stunts with geometry all the time, but it still amused me.

  Also like the usual fifth floor, this one was occupied with black slimes. Since I wasn't pushed for time—I wasn't supposed to be meeting the agent of the king until the evening, I hadn't long woken up, and the Black Burrow wasn't more than a couple of hours from the capital—I'd been poking my head into every side room to earn a little extra experience. With [Dagger Mastery], even the black slimes took less than a second each to despatch, and the result was well worth it.

  Given the upcoming dwarven mission, putting points into Mana seemed ill advised, but I wanted to round out the last of my other Stats.

  There was no sudden evolution of [Fragment of the Past], nor did I feel any different, but if I was to be expected to 'remember' the language of a long dead race, more Memory wouldn't hurt.

  The fact that I'd apparently used ancient dwarfish terms without noticing was kinda weird, though. [Ancient Soul] implied my memories were from a completely different universe, while the dwarfs were self evidently a part of this one. The discrepancy was strange, but it wasn't as if it was the sort of subject I could simply go and research in a library. Hopefully, more information would come to light later.

  As for the skill points... The plan had been to start work on magic, but while the king hadn't loaded me up with treasures, I had left the palace not only with both arms, but also a certificate that would permit me to purchase any skill crystal. Not just combat skills of any rank, but even other restricted things like [Lock-picking] or [Analysis]. It wasn't as if another two stages of [Mana Sensitivity] would be immediately useful, so there was no reason to spend them this instant.

  Something else I hadn't left the palace with was two arms' worth of armour. It stood to reason that healing magic—or a healing potion, rather; they'd given me something called an 'elixir' that had regenerated my arm over several excruciatingly ticklish minutes—wouldn't heal my armour, too, and so the chopped off arm was still missing. Not that I needed it for slimes, but last night I'd paid for the adventurers' guild to do a rush job, and would hopefully have a replacement ready by the time I conquered this dungeon.

  Actually, now that I considered it... The king hadn't wanted to donate useful equipment or single-use items to my cause in case it harmed the Paths and Marks I earned, but by providing us with information on dungeon challenges through the adventurers' guild, hadn't they done just that? If I'd come in here and found the secret passage rather than having it told to me, would I earn 'more' of something that wasn't on my Status?

  Then again, I had found the first one myself, and the adventurers' guild had only given us more information when we asked about it.

  Did that imply that if I'd simply asked the king for equipment, he would have said yes? Darn. Not that I could have, with the damn suppression field he kept up the entire time. Or would making a request through that have been an achievement in itself? I really needed to read up on Paths, but I didn't have time to spend hours in the library, so it would need to wait until I returned from Harvent Canton.

  If I returned from Harvent Canton.

  I still had no idea what an Unbound was, but I could deduce that Count Harvent had somehow transformed into it, and that there was a way to defeat or weaken him indirectly from inside the ruins. I also suspected that heading into the ruins would be only marginally less deadly than facing this new form of Count Harvent in person.

  In any case, that was a problem for tomorrow's me. Today's me wanted to check another pair of dungeons off the list and earn a couple more levels while I was at it.

  The boss looked like the same giant slime as the first time around, except that this time, it had minions. A hundred blobs of clear slime, each one smaller than even the weakest green slimes, but nevertheless, a danger simply due to their numbers.

  More troublesome was the fact that they lacked cores.

  A few got in my way as I closed in on the larger, central blob, but while I could slash at them, splattering them across the flagstone floor, they simply flowed back together, reforming within a handful of seconds. The boss rippled as I approached, launching tendrils straight at me, just like the original boss. Evasion was harder with the mobs around, but my Skills and Stats were much improved. Besides, while I may have lost my left arm's armour, I still had both of my boots, and could simply stomp on the little slimes to briefly splatter them.

  The bigger issue was what happened to the tendrils after I cut them off.

  Therein lay the secret of this boss. It was not, in fact, a big clear slime and its mobs. It was all one slime. A cluster slime, capable of splitting off parts of its own body. Unlike the previous version, the severed tendrils didn't 'die', but they simply drew themselves back into smaller blobs, adding to the collection of mobs.

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  This C-rank boss couldn't be whittled down indefinitely like its D-ranked cousin. If it ever did its leap-and-splat attack, it would suck up all the mobs as it reformed, resulting in something even bigger than when we started.

  Thankfully, I no longer needed to whittle it down that much. I let it launch tendrils and slime bullets until I deemed it small enough for the core to be in range of its surface, and then...

  "Stab!"

  Whatever the rank of a slime, the core was still a weak point, and with [Stab], I no longer needed to worry about exposing it.

  All that bouncing around had barely cost me any Stamina, and the only lost Mana was that of a single [Stab]. I was a little disappointed that I'd only gained two stat points from [Dungeon Subjugator I], though. It was logical, since I'd already gained one from this dungeon, but still disappointing.

  Still, there was always [Dungeon Subjugator II] to look forward to, and now I was presumably one step closer. Unless it required dungeons above E-rank, which would be logical... Something else I needed to look up when the world slowed down and stopped throwing princes and kings, assassins and Unbound at me for a few days.

  The chest, amazingly, contained another skill point crystal, which I activated instantly before anyone could tell me any reason why I wasn't supposed to.

  And with that, I teleported back out. This time, the guard was a little less surprised to see me appear in a flash of light, as opposed to ascending the stairs.

  "The store clerk was looking for you," he said. "Your new armour is ready, and I still think it was foolhardy of you to play around in a dungeon without it, even if you had cleared it before."

  "If you think that's bad, I beat my last dungeon without an arm," I said, refraining from adding that I'd gone one step beyond 'clearing' the dungeon.

  I could claim that slimes no longer posed a threat, but that second boss was C-rank, and worth as much experience as an orc chieftain. To claim it posed no threat at all would be a lie. Still, as long as I was careful and didn't do anything stupid, it wasn't going to hurt me.

  "... I'm not even going to ask," sighed the guard. "I mean, it's not like I can imagine any way you'd end up neatly missing one gauntlet and one sleeve other than losing an arm, but you seriously cleared a dungeon before getting it healed?"

  "I thought you weren't going to ask?"

  "Yeah. You're right. Don't answer that. I don't want to know."

  I giggled as I hurried up the stairs, fetching my armour from the store. The damn outfit cost the bulk of my orc earnings, but at least was apparently made of slightly better materials than my first set, even if the appearance was pretty much identical. With my money, I should have been able to get something another grade or two higher, but there were limits to what I could get prepared overnight no matter how much money I threw at it. If not for the guild master presumably having some inkling of what I was up to, I doubted I'd have got anything at all.

  Properly dressed once again, and hence a little less at risk of losing my arm for a second time, I left the capital, blissfully unassailed by assassins, bandits or monsters. The Black Burrow wasn't in a village at all, but was in the middle of a meadow, a distance east of the sapphire city. It was easy enough to find, despite the vague directions I had: follow the eastern road until it crests a tall hill, then look right and it'll be the big obvious black patch.

  There was indeed a black patch, and it was indeed obvious.

  Green fields of young winter wheat had been planted across vast swaths of land, and I could spot a few villages dotted between them. I could also spot one field that was not at all green. Picking out a route through the fields, I headed towards it, observing how once I crossed the edge of the cultivated fields, there was barely any wildlife. There was grass, at first, but as I neared the dungeon it changed from green to yellow, then to black, and then there was nothing but bare, blackened soil.

  The Black Burrow was, as far as the adventurers' guild had recorded, the only E-rank plague dungeon in the world. Thankfully, the diseases it produced didn't spread—it was only E-rank—but the extra challenge was a pain. No healing magic, either general or specifically disease targeted, and no enchanted items or potions that resisted or cured disease. It had to be cleared with nothing but my Constitution preventing the dungeon's best efforts at turning my internal organs to blackened mush.

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