Several more taipans gathered before lunging at them from the ground, yet all of them split apart like butter to a warm knife. Although the sheer quantity of taipans on the floor was not something that could be underestimated, each individual monster was not that strong, most of them were more or less between grade one and grade three, depending on their size.
Every once in a while he would run into one with the speed and power of a grade-four Martial Squire, yet, it did not matter.
"FUUUU…" Rui blasted a snake with cracklingly hot air, paralyzing the snake the second the air hit its skin.
A full-body swing of his blade split it apart so forcefully that it launched the two portions flying away from each other.
Rui glanced at the greenish-black blood on his blade.
('The monsterified snakes have undergone a change in the color of their blood due to ingesting food in the dungeon,') Rui noted as he swung his sword, cleaning it of all blood., before sheathing it to cool it down.
"Alright, great job," Kane told him. "I'm ready for another round."
Rui nodded. "Let's begin immediately."
The two of them went through the same process multiple times, as they scoured the grasslands. Rui made sure to take routes that avoided coming in contact with other Martial Squires, though that wasn't always easy.
Many a time, they ran into parties of Martial Squires, in which case they would take a detour to return to later, or they would continue extracting resources if Kane indicated he had enough stamina to ensure that they wouldn't have to reveal themselves by being forced to deactivate his Void Step while in their vicinity.
"Argh!" Rui heard from a distance. "Who mined all the ores without killing the snakes first?! How is that even possible?!"
"Did the snakes eat all the ores?! Where did they go?"
It seemed as though a party of Martial Squires had just come across the area that Rui had finished mining from. He laughed to himself as he continued extracting all the esoteric ores that he came along by on his way.
They continued scouring entire districts with a huge area before large chunks of the floor had been completely plundered despite the taipans seemingly intact.
A general wave of confusion spread across the Martial Squires in the dungeon, this didn't make any sense, after all. The Martial Squires began growing increasingly frustrated that despite fighting so many taipans and killing all of them in the vicinity, they ended up digging through only to find that the soil had already been dug up and ores had clearly already been extracted.
Many had even had their comrades die due to a venom bite that killed them before they were able to get them to safety. And at the end of it all, they found that the sacrifice had been in vain. It was unbelievable.
Everyone realized something was very wrong. This had never happened to date from the day that the Shionel Dungeon had been opened. In order to get past the monsters, you needed to kill them.
Yet here there was someone who was able to bypass these rules!
Half a day passed before Rui had reached his storage limit.
"Damn, we had a good haul," Rui stretched his arms. The two of them inspected their goods before Rui quickly stored them in his dimensional storage.
The two of them had stripped the floor of a considerable proportion of its esoteric ores. Even if the floor was as wide as a large town, two Martial Squires could get a lot of work done across half a day!
They had worked extremely hard until they physically could not work harder.
"Let's get going, we can come back tomorrow," Rui told Kane. "Assuming the rest aren't finished."
He considered the fact that a lot of monsters had been left while the esoteric ores in their areas had been mined. What would that mean for the monsters?
In time, he suspected Martial Squires would leave them alone at increasingly high rates. There were very few people that would be willing to fight and kill the monsters for no reward.
That would probably slow down Guildmaster Patrick's ambitions of commercializing the dungeon and dominating it with the fact that he would be the only one who had a map on it and would be able to maintain stable operations in the Shionel Dungeon.
However, if the dungeon was still infested with monsters that hadn't been killed, then that would be quite problematic for him.
Thankfully, Rui had not divulged the ways in which he intended to extract ores. Still, this would hurt his political opponent even more since getting people to extract ores would become harder now that the difficulty was also starting to rise now that Rui intended to go full throttle with his abilities.
This meant that his remarkable growth climb would also be hindered by that fact. That was extremely desirable to the guildmaster, thus Rui was certain that he would be pleased by this outcome. On the other hand, the number of esoteric ores in weight being mined and extracted from the dungeon would not decrease with Rui and Kane sweeping up the floors of the Shionel Dungeon, and thus there were little to no ways in which the distribution of these esoteric resources would negatively impact his own business endeavors.
In fact, if Rui and Kane happened to work even faster, then Guildmaster Bradt would actually experience a boost in growth himself, even before he used the map to dominate the commercialization of the Shionel Dungeon after all of it was completely emptied and erased.
"Still, there's going to be a storm way bigger than last time, that's for sure," Rui murmured with a resigned smile. The mystery of the missing ores would become prime gossip in the Shionel Confederation and he knew that there was no way that he could possibly avoid inevitably becoming the center of attention even if nobody knew who he was.