The first few steps of the centipede lair were unchanged from my previous visits. As I stepped back into the cave, I took some time to scan my surroundings with my soul sight and spatial sight. I didn’t want any surprises to crop up at the last minute. Fortunately, there weren’t any centipedes that could access me easily. The only nearby centipede I noticed was on the other side of a cave wall. That one made me frown a little bit. Was there a passageway I hadn’t noticed? I only hesitated for a moment, before I tossed an extinguish at the centipede, then opened a portal right in front of me. The other end of the portal was right in front of the centipede. One lightning bolt later, the centipede was gone, allowing me to breathe a small sigh of relief. I didn’t want any monsters to get in the way while I was running for my life.

I spent a few hours waiting for my essence to regenerate, while I did my best to keep track of all of the moving monsters in the cave. As far as I could tell, there were around two hundred monsters here, not including the guardian. I could also see a few differently colored souls in the distance, although they were dim and hard to notice. I took that to mean the monsters in question were either weak, or further away.

I reviewed my plan one more time before my essence reserves finished recharging.

I didn’t want to fight the guardian of the cave. It might be a threat on par with the giant centipede I had fought outside of the cave - but it could also be stronger, or weaker. It was hard for me to tell, and without any sort of guarantee that I would win, I didn’t want to risk a confrontation. 

Thus, my plan was simple.

I already knew that I could open up smaller portals by using my first rune ability - that was the entire reason I had created the ability to begin with, after all. Moving objects around.

So my plan was to scout out a good chunk of the nearby caves, removing any monsters along the way to ensure that I didn’t get pinned down and trapped. Then, I wanted to teleport the object to me, if I could manage it. At least to my soul-sight, the soul that I was observing seemed very large. However, my soul sight also made it look like the object I was trying to steal was a bunch of fragmented souls. In other words, it might be possible to chip away layers of the giant object. If that worked, I would steal as much of the object as I could before running away, and then come back later to do it again once I was stronger.

Of course, that plan was a bit of a hopeful one. More realistically, the object I wanted to steal would probably be too big for me to steal, and I probably wouldn’t have an easy way to steal the object piece by piece. In that case, I planned to try hitting the guardian of the cave through a wall, much like I had with the baby centipede earlier. If I could kill the monster without it ever seeing me or setting eyes on me, it would be a much easier and safer battle than the fight against the giant centipede shortly after I entered this trial. If that didn’t work, I would try luring the guardian to the surface, and then hammer it down with {Fractal Rush}. I had tested out {Fractal Rush} during my months of mushroom thievery, and I had discovered that it was a surprisingly powerful skill, especially if I pushed my umbrella to high enough speeds. The only downside was the fact that I had little control over where the essence blades from the skill went - it was easy to miss when I used the skill. Still, the Skill was a powerful addition to my abilities, and as long as the guardian wasn’t too much stronger than the centipede I thought I had a good chance of winning in a fight. I just wanted to avoid testing that theory if I didn’t have to.

As the last bits of my essence returned, I got up, checked my surroundings again, and then left. Unlike usual, I turned right instead of left when I came to the first branching path in the cave.

I had explored the right branch of the cave a few times, but never in much depth. The terrain was far more hostile to me than the terrain of the left path, since it involved several sudden drops in elevation. More importantly, I had found fewer mushrooms in it. Unfortunately, the left branch of the cave was a dead end. It was rich in mushrooms, as if it were a granary, but there was no way deeper into the cave. In short, I had to take the plunge if I wanted to get anything useful out of this exploration.

As I descended, I continued to constantly scan my surroundings for souls. If I wanted to avoid a potentially dangerous fight, I needed to be stealthy. Luckily, the centipedes didn’t make much sound if I killed them quickly. 

After my first encounter with a centipede, I didn’t run into any others for several minutes as I crept forward. It seemed that I was lucky this time. Most of the centipedes were guarding other entrances to the cave, as far as I could tell. They wouldn’t be ready to join a fight if something went wrong. 

That being said, it wasn’t long before I started to notice other souls. These souls didn’t look like the centipede souls at all.They were quite a bit larger than the mushroom souls, but quite a bit smaller than the souls of the baby centipedes. If I had to guess, they probably had around Grade 7 or 8 Fortitude. If it were before my feast of mushrooms, that would have made me a bit nervous. Something with Grade 8 Fortitude was killable, but it would take a notable amount of essence to resolve a fight with something that sturdy. However, after getting two more grades of Alteration essence, my alteration essence pool had more than doubled - and so had my regeneration speed. I could drop a few smaller threats without putting myself at risk.

Still, I had no idea what creatures these souls belonged to. Even more odd, the first time I actually entered a room with one of these souls, I didn’t see

anything that the soul was attached to. I frowned.

Did these souls belong to some sort of invisible creature? I frowned, and took a few steps back. If the creature was some kind of ambush predator, I wanted to have as much distance between it and me as possible. However, the soul didn’t react at all.

Was it asleep? If so, dealing with it would be much easier.

I frowned, and focused more closely on the odd soul. After a few moments of inspection, I realized the soul was even more odd than I had thought. It wasn’t moving at all. Usually, souls made at least small, subtle movements every second or two. After all souls, were attached to the brain, and the brain needed to do all sorts of things every second, such as keep the body breathing, and make sure all of the body’s organs were working. However, this soul was perfectly still. Did it have no organs?

I watched the abnormally still soul for several more seconds, before I decided to try hitting it with a lightning bolt to see what happened. I blasted it… and then nothing happened.

Huh? The creature didn’t seem strong enough to shrug off a lightning bolt to the face. Why had nothing happened when I hit it?

A moment later, the wall itself began to tremble, before it started to arrange itself into a more humanoid shape. Limbs snapped into place like clay being molded by a sculptor, and stone shifted and cracked. Moments later, I was staring at a two meter tall golem. I blinked in surprise, and before the creature could make a sound, I killed it with an extinguish.

The creature collapsed into a pile of stone. At least I had figured out why the monster had been immune to lightning. With a body made of rocks, a lightning bolt would need a lot of extra essence to do any noticeable damage to the creature.

A moment later, a System message appeared.

Endless Hunger of the Ocean has devoured Sentinel of Stone for the first time. New Skill created.

Skin of Stone - Your Skin turns into solid stone, granting you drastically improved defensive abilities in exchange for drastically weakening your mobility.

I didn’t think about my new skill for more than a few seconds before I decided to ignore it. Having skin literally made of stone sounded more like a downside than an upside. Monsters in this trial were pretty strong. If I got hit too hard, my dress would either defend me, or I would die. I didn’t think stone skin would really change that outcome, so it was essentially a reduction of my mobility with no upside.

Slaughter: Kill a Sentinel of Stone for the first time

Achievement +500

The Slaughter Achievement boosted my Achievement total from  55,351 to 55,851. Not a huge boost, but better than nothing.

I shrugged. If the corridors were infested with golems, I would just need to keep that in mind. Extinguishing this monster had taken a bit more essence than expected, but it was still more than reasonable. I could take it slow and eliminate them as I moved through the corridors -

Right as I thought that, I noticed the giant soul in the center of the cave shiver, before it started rushing towards me. I cursed.

The monster had somehow detected the death of the golem. It looked like my plans to steal the giant life source at the center of the cave and run away would need to be put on hold. The guardian of this area was coming to me instead.