The Gold Spire was cold and silent on the outside, but once Velik breached the threshold, it burst with life. There were hundreds or even thousands of creatures living inside it, all of them going about their lives. They made noise. They had smells. They breathed and moved and spoke words Velik had no hope of understanding.

It’s another monster civilization, he realized. A self-contained one, probably trapped in this tower.

He could smell the fresh turned earth of fields, the particular scent of sprouting crops, even fresh cut wood and iron worked in the forge. There was an entire world inside the tower, which was impossible. It was big, but it wasn’t that big.

He took a second to sort through everything. Normally, his high mental catalogued and filtered out everything his senses told him that he didn’t need, but the sudden shock of having so much hit him at once caused him to stumble over it. It only took a moment to sort things out though, and then Velik was moving again.

He burned his reserves to move through the shadow world version of the Gold Spire, one where everything was muted and darked, where he could catch reflections of the monsters living there without having to fight them. It wasn’t that he was trying to preserve the lives of monsters, even civilized ones; he just had his priorities. Finding the divine beast who’d created the dungeon seeds was his only real goal.

He'd encountered three different divine beasts already, and while they all smelled unique, there were some notes in common. And the Gold Spire was full of them, six different ones. There was a singular, overpowering scent, but the three Velik recognized were also there, hidden beneath the main one.

If I assume the strongest scent is the leader, and discard the three I’m already familiar with, that leaves two possible trails to follow. Now… would someone who does a lot of experiments smell like slime and sea water, or like fur and flowers?

There was no way to know for sure, but Velik was willing to take his best guess and hope he was quick enough to backtrack to the other trail if it turned out he was wrong. Going solely off the idea that none of the dungeon seeds he was aware of had been found near water, he decided to hunt down the furry divine beast first.

He hadn’t made it that far when something rattled the whole tower. It was almost a sound, but so low that he could only feel it in his chest, not actually hear it, and it carried a faint thread of power that he doubted he could have detected without [Sun Eater]

. There was essence in that reverberation, and strangely enough, it seemed to want to cling to him.

The [Magic Eater] part of his skill took care of that. Any essence strands that brushed up against him were immediately consumed, which flooded his notifications with constant updates of gaining one or two essence. After a few seconds, Velik updated the LPS to have a threshold of a hundred essence or more before it let him know of an increase.

He was almost past the entry hall when the smooth, reptile-and-metal stink that overpowered all the other divine beasts flooded the area. Even in the shadow world, it was sharp and horrible. Velik could only imagine how strong the smell would be if he stepped sideways back into the real world.

The entry hall was a massive thing of fluted pillars and polished black marble tiles. It had a vaulted ceiling some twenty feet high, and all sorts of gold and silver accents that Velik lacked the words to describe beyond saying that they were even fancier and more pretentious than the stuff Jensen filled his house with.

All of those details were washed away by the sheer presence of the being that strode through. It looked like a human man, almost seven feet tall and with a lithe, athletic build. It looked like that, but it wasn’t. It was a monster pretending it was anything but, and Velik wasn’t fooled. Even without the smell, he could see just from the way it moved that it wasn’t human.

For one thing, it practically glided across the floor in a way that no bipedal creature could, not without some sort of skill or spell to help them along. For another, he could see thick plates of mana drifting through the air around it, caught on an intricate web of threads that expanded out in every direction.

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He couldn’t say for sure, but Velik had a sneaking suspicion that even hiding in the shadow world wouldn’t save him from being noticed if one of those threads brushed up against him. Given how pervasive they were—their numbers just kept increasing as the man approached him—it wasn’t going to be easy to remain undetected.

It was a feat of incredible acrobatics and instinctual, half-realized reactions that pushed even his 344 physical to its limits, but somehow, Velik slipped that sensory web. The man passed by, and the farther away he got, the fewer threads there were. After a hundred feet or so, Velik was clear of the radius, and the few trailing threads were easy to avoid.

Good gods, that was close.

The divine beast stopped in the middle of the entry hall and peered around. “Hmmm. Interesting,” he muttered. “Halifex’s trick?”

Uh-oh. Spoke too soon.

If the monster stepped into the shadow world right now, Velik would be clearly visible. That would result in a fight that he wasn’t necessarily against on principle, but which he couldn’t honestly say he thought he had a good chance of winning. This divine beast was on a whole different level. He made Tesir look like a child throwing a tantrum. Even the inferno rolling off Eslaka hadn’t been as intense as the dreadful aura surrounding the beast in front of him while he casually stood there.

It was a stark reminder that no matter how powerful Velik grew, there was always someone stronger. This guy had to be near the peak, maybe even at the very top, but of course beyond him were the very gods. And Velik was a long way from rivaling a god.

He fled through the tower, following his nose and ears in search of the elusive furred divine beast. It was somewhere on the upper floors, or at least, it spent more of its time there than anywhere else. If Velik had any luck left to him in his life, he’d find his prey quickly and efficiently.

He quickly found what he assumed was some sort of access shaft between floors. There were no stairs. There was no lift. It was just a smooth-bored hole with walls of featureless gray stone that was a few hundred feet long. Climbing it was an act of running through the air until he reached the top, where a simple hole let him out into a landscape of endless golden wheat.

It wasn’t really endless, though. It just took him a moment to adjust to the illusion so that he could see through it and recognize the walls for what they were. Regardless, it was still a lot of field, with several hundred monsters that looked somewhat like bears crossed with humans that had brown fur with black markings tending to the crops.

The fur smell wasn’t terribly strong on this floor, but it didn’t take Velik long to find the way up. It was cleverly hidden inside the illusion of a massive tree, or maybe the tree itself was real, but if so, it was hollow on the inside, and he was pretty sure that would kill an actual tree. Either way, the passage up to the next floor had walls that looked like wood panels, and the bear creatures never noticed him sprinting over their heads in the shadowy reflection of their world.

Three more floors came and went, each one different, with unique monsters and ecologies. It was enough to make Velik wonder if the Gold Spire wasn’t some sort of conservatory, maybe housing the remnants of lost monster civilizations in an effort to preserve them from extinction. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that, but he also wasn’t willing to waste a lot of time in self-reflection figuring it out.

As Velik climbed higher, the scent grew stronger until he was sure the divine beast was actually in the Gold Spire. Well, that, or it’s screwing with its scent trails somehow. If there was ever a monster that could do it to this level, it’d be one of them.

The next floor appeared to be a massive garden, lovingly maintained with carefully pruned flower bushes, blooming flowers in beds that made complex patterns, and evenly spaced fruiting trees holding delicious-smelling treats in their boughs. Small insects buzzed around, flitting from one place to another, and swift birds occasionally darted down from their perches overhead to snatch up a quick meal.

And in the middle of that, strolling along casually like he hadn’t a care in the world, was a slight man with copper-colored hair pulled back from a face too pretty to belong to a man. He had striking golden eyes with vertical pupils, and his lips were curled up into a casual smile.

Velik watched the man carefully clip a few stems from a bush and place them in a basket. It was such a casual activity, wholly incongruous with the kind of monster who experimented with lives and played with people like they were toys.

But the smell was right. The man was a divine beast, whatever else he might be. And beneath the floral notes was something else: blood and gore and the sweat of unwashed bodies. It was mixed with an almost medicinal aroma that reminded Velik of ointments and tinctures local herb-witches made in small villages to cure coughs and soothe aches.

It’s him. The experimenter. It has to be.