I didn’t need to say anything, but it felt more final to command the Bandits to break apart. There was a time where I would have struggled to do this. All of these Bandits used to be people, and although they were only a shadow of their former selves, I would have felt that destroying them would be cruel. That was a version of myself I had to leave behind a long time ago.
I wasn’t the kind of man who would allow Bandits to escape or show mercy to dungeon monsters anymore. I needed to use the resources available to me, or risk losing everything. Countless lives had been lost to this dungeon. Calypso had likely used innumerable sacrifices to build up and grow this dungeon. If I just allowed that miasma to disperse, then I was letting all of those lives go to waste.
Now, I coldly held out my hand, following the instructions that Elaya had given me to convert them into a miasmic crystal. I could then feed that to my dungeon, strengthening it considerably. The Bandits collapsed. The weakest ones seemed to go first. They didn’t seem to feel fear. There weren’t looks of shock or cries for mercy. They merely dropped down, and then faded into mist. As it progressed, more and more Bandits dissipated.
The smokey dark miasma would then stream toward me, circling the palm of my hand before condensing there. At first, there was nothing to see, but slowly, a crystal started to form. At first, it was the size of a splinter, but it quickly thickened the more miasma I drew.
Although I couldn’t see them, those that existed on other levels similarly collapsed and disappeared. More miasma came through the walls from other parts of the dungeon, seemingly uninhibited by barriers at all. Finally, even the strongest Bandits collapsed and then turned into food for this crystal. Despite everything, the crystal was still smaller than my thumb. This dungeon had already exhausted a great deal of miasma beforehand, so even after harvesting it this way, I couldn’t expect too much.
Not only had Calypso blown a lot of mana, throwing monster after monster at our party, but I had also consumed well over half the remaining miasma to rebuild my soul. It just goes to show just how much a miasmic creature cost a dungeon, considering the number of soulless monsters that could be created with just a wisp of miasma. Rather than create these more powerful mobs, it was no wonder that souls were broken apart into miasma. It was far more economical.
Just as I was preparing to start consuming the remaining miasma of the dungeon itself, after the last of the mobs had turned to dust, I felt some kind of energy enter the dungeon. I was still new at this, so I couldn’t figure out what it was, but it was moving quickly, blasting through wall after wall as it came here at full speed.
I stopped my absorption of the dungeon as my brow furrowed. Just what could that thing be? Just as it broke through the wall, I finally realized what was happening.
“Oh, you got to be kidding me!”
The dungeon lore that Calypso had taken with her had reached a completed state. It had ripped right out of her grip, and flown back here. It slammed into me, and I collapsed on the floor as pain shot through my body.