When he checked the system again, a new notification flashed on and off in the corner of his eyes.

  Class quest I — Draw the first blood — completed!

  Hmmm?

  The following assortment of skills has been unlocked from the siphoned Bloodline!

  Poison Palm (Apprentice) – Turn your limbs poisonous, dealing additional poison damage upon each strike. The more Fae blood you have in your body, the more poisonous your blows are.

  Talon Burst (Apprentice) — Summon claws and unleash a combo of attacks ending with a burst wave.

  Sporal detonation (Apprentice) — Deal an area of effect damage effect on anyone standing within 20 meters of you.

  Thorn Barrage (Apprentice) — Summon thorn and vine spears from under the ground, catching enemies off guard. The size, strength, number, and speed of the summons depend on your wood affinity and Fae blood reservoir.

  Sylvian Spear Arts (Apprentice) — Your spear-wielding skill improves, and you can execute three of the Fae basic spear techniques: Impale, Sweep, and Block!

  Each skill costs 10% racial blood to unlock!

  He rubbed his chin in contemplation.

  Not that difficult a choice. Spore was crossed out because AOE damage over time was not feasible or necessary right now. Poison Palm sounded powerful, but he wasn't quite okay with the idea of turning his limbs into poison-spraying madness.

  And what'd he do with it? Try to poison stones?

  Thorn Barrage, too, lacked proper use cases. Sylvian Spear Arts was fine. Too bad he didn't choose a spear back then.

  In the end, the only viable option was Talon Burst. And he'd seen this skill in use. Back when he was fighting the treant captain, it was using this skill...or so he suspected.

  "Guess I can just find out."

  Talon Burst (Apprentice – Low) has been chosen!

  Body scanning complete!

  Skill incompatible!

  The host lacks an extensible claw or talons. The skill is physiologically unsuitable.

  Skill is being recalibrated to match the host!

  “If skill is incompatible, why show it as an option?"

  He frowned, and stared at the loading screen.

  Thankfully, nobody was here. Otherwise, staring into thin air would’ve been a bit awkward.

  Or was that normal in Eldera?

  Did people walk around staring at their screens? Then, what are the statistics of people just bumping their head into each other? Was there an organisation keeping track of such incidents?

  Ding! Skill calibration complete!

  Skill ‘Crimson Claws’ unlocked!

  Crimson Claws (Apprentice - Low): Summon mana claws and unleash a combo of slashes that ends with a burst of energy wave.

  Cost: Variable. Each combo takes 1 charge. Combo stackable up to 5 charges.

  Cooldown: 2 minutes.

  A grin rose on his lips.

  This was happening.

  I'm taking skills and changing names!

  As you unlock new blood samples, more racial skills will be available for you to use.

  New blood? By killing monsters, he could get more blood?

  This could get overpowered.

  If one day, he killed a dragon, he could steal something like Dragon’s Breath. Or maybe Dragon Claws. Standing there, he began to daydream.

  He stood at the top of Eldera, laughing boisterously and taking shit from no one. Not long after, he was an entity capable of shattering galaxies and eating planets for breakfast.

  He smirked.

  One day, he'd get there; he just has to defeat this dungeon first.

  Activating Crimson Claws, he gazed as a red, violent charge tore to his right fist, wrapping around his knuckles like a pulsating veil. From his nails extended mana claws, thin as paper, of scarlet shade.

  He made another come and wrap around it.

  Until he was at 5 charges.

  Mana pulsed his arm, forming a sheen of destruction, lighting the surrounding area red. The power he held now was frighteningly potent, even stronger than the punch he had used to break the wall.

  A growing impulse gnawed at him to strike down and destroy everything.

  Soon, he realised why—the mana was losing stability, collapsing, pressing against his mind, because he was not attacking.

  It had grown impatient. Of course, the stupid...red energy was impatient.

  Fearing backlash, he raised his arms back and slashed forward. A crimson wave left with a boom. Air cracked. A phantom claw that left huge gushes on the ground, before slicing a nearby statue into five distinct parts.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  He gaped.

  A deafening rumble echoed down the silent hallway as the statue crumbled down. Without a moment's wait, Zayn walked away, ignoring his bruised fist, pretending to have nothing to do with this.

  Nobody had seen this happen.

  The old man never opened his eyes, and who trusted a ghost’s testimony, anyway?

  ***

  Zayn contemplated what he’d seen so far—the statues of the beast man and the elf woman in particular. The answers he’d gotten here only raised more questions.

  What did this house have to do with the dungeon and its day-night cycle, and what role did the beast man and the elf woman play in it?

  The sculptor was the dungeon boss himself, probably. That much he could confirm. But as for whether he was the beast man beside the woman was up in the air. Who would depict themselves in such a gruesome, beastlike manner?

  Too many questions; not a single goddamn answer.

  He would have gone crazy if he didn't have things to "excavate."

  Further in, he became more wanton. Often, something caught his eye, and he had to bring out something from his storage ring to exchange, leaving behind a wasteland of broken ornaments and statues in his wake.

  Some statues lost their arms, others their heads. The unlucky ones even lost their entire torso.

  Feat Unlocked!

  Wanton Bandit (Bronze): You just ripped apart an ancient legacy...for a mug, and a bunch of manaless weapons! You are not just any bandit, but a wanton, indiscriminate bandit!

  Effect: Dexterity + 2, Vitality +1!

  Zayn nodded happily, not ashamed at all.

  Stats were stats.

  Though he pricked his nose and sniffed around.

  Weird.

  He smelled detergents.

  The place was too clean, and the it was getting damper by the second. Sure, he could attribute some of it to the hallway lacking heat, how was everything so…clean?

  "Also. Is that..."

  He found himself standing across a shelf with neat, rectangular stone slabs stacked next to each other. He wasn’t so dumb to assume someone was making a stone collection.

  With a creaking noise, he pulled it out.

  His muscle strained, and he almost stumbled to hold it, despite his improved stats. Finally, he was forced to keep it.

  Thud.

  Similar to the masonry, words and insignias were inscribed on the slabs, but there was one large difference. They had mana in them.

  ‘I see you now’ detects residual mana!

  Deciphering!

  After a while, words erupted on its surface, revealing letters one after another.

  Decipher incomplete!

  You do not have sufficient mana.

  But he deciphered enough to make out some words.

  “Theory of Golem Crafting,” It said.

  It opened up like a book, and revealed various diagrams, shapes, and descriptions explaining how the different golems worked, their mana circuit and cores, and how to inscribe different skills on them.

  Wow.

  He understood none of it. Like a monkey trying to comprehend quantum physics. He quickly gave up on understanding and moved on to stealing it for later.

  For scientific purposes!

  He found many other similar books.

  Theory of Crafting. Art of Golem Formation. Four Point Attack Theorem. Sculpting and Crafting. Geomancing.

  Once again lamenting the fact that he didn’t have enough space for everything, he began removing some of the ornaments to make space. Drowning in the realisation that life was indeed an act of letting go.

  His heart bled, “These don’t have mana. These don't have mana.” He convinced himself that what he was leaving was worthless. After all, everyone knew the value of books. They were always the most valuable things.

  Once he was done emptying shelf, he found a smaller slab hidden behind the bigger ones. This one was untitled.

  How curious.

  He pushed his dwindling mana inside.

  Decipher incomplete!

  You do not have sufficient mana.

  “Fuck it, take my charges.” He made a frustrated face.

  To his surprise, the skill concurred and pulled onto his art, taking charge.

  Right away, the slab spurted open with a bloody aura, like something straight out of the a horror movie. Nearly slapping his soul out of his body.

  "Kill!"

  "Slaughter!!"

  "DIE!!!"

  He didn’t even need mana to decipher this. The strokes, syllables were etched with such incredible hate that he could feel it without having to understand any of it. This entire thing read like a diary of a madman.

  Thirteen pages later, he found one complete sentence.

  “All my life, I’ve only known an unending hatred for the fae.”

  The Fae? Like the treants he fought. His class said something about treants being some corrupted race descending from the Fae.

  That added up.

  He flipped through. Another five page latter, he found another full, deciphered line.

  “Mother, father, sisters, I am sorry I couldn’t save you all. I am sorry I lived. But I live only so that Fae can meet their doom. I will be their...doom.”

  He had to put the slab down for a second. It was overwhelming, the amount of hatred; it melted his mind. He took a deep breath before continuing.

  No room for doubt.

  Dungeon boss wrote this.

  He still missed much of the context because using the charges only deciphered some words and lines. But that was enough.

  This kind of hate far superseded the hate he felt for Aubrin, his boss. This was the kind of hate that would drive a man insane and lead him to his destruction.

  “Little do they know that I have infiltrated right into their upper circles. They're so oblivious that I was made the guard of the high princess Orin. And she’s too naive to the destruction her race causes. They bear no guilt of murdering innocents just because we’re of a different race. They call us tarnished, godless, and other vile, unspeakable things, degrading us to mere monsters.”

  “I have discovered a key secret of Fae. Just enough to doom them. When I am done, there will be no traces of Fae left in Eldera.”

  “Princess Orin’s gaze lingered on me today. Did she find out?”

  Zayn stopped at that.

  Princess? The woman in the sculpture?

  “She knows.”

  “But she didn’t tell anyone. Why? Why would she look at me with such pity in her eyes? What did she even understand? Someone privileged like her could never understand. What a hateful, pretentious woman!"

  He began to notice a change. The strokes of the words no longer held the same hate. It was more reserved, hidden.

  “And why does she end up sticking around me? Why is she in my room at night? She is making a dent in my plans.”

  More like a dent in your pants! Zayn pursed his lips, not knowing why the genre had changed all of a sudden. This guy had lost all the momentum.

  “The second holy war is about to begin. My wait is almost nearing its end. Once the war begins, the seeds I have planted over the years will take the Fae apart from the inside. That's when I will deal my final blow. She’s here again.”

  “She wants me to take her away from the world tree, away from the war and hatred. Why? Why would she want that?”

  “Because she loves you, buffon!” Zayn muttered in frustration.

  What in the dark romantasy was he even reading?

  Screw it. He had to know what happened next.

  “Father, Mother, Sisters, I still hate them all, but she…she’s different from them. I’ll take her and go somewhere far away from the war. I am sorry.”

  Zayn exhaled. By now, almost at the end of the slab. His eyes strained from the repeated mana expenditure, but he kept changing pages. Then, he found one single line on the final page of the slab.

  “I have The Ultimate Weapon completed…”

  He closed it…exhaling, processing the information. Didn’t the old man in grey robes mention some holy war, too?

  Seemed like both were somewhat connected.

  Both of them had existed in the same timeframe, at least.

  Before this, Zayn had even suspected the old man was the dungeon boss pretending to be some senile old dude, but the more he read, the more he realised it was just mere overthinking.

  A futile attempt to connect unrelated dots.

  Both of them were max-level wife-loving madmen—that’s for sure—and that’s where the similarities ended. He needed to find out more about the holy war and Fae—

  Swish!

  He ducked to avoid a strike on his head, just by a hair’s breadth.

  Thankfully, he never lost the caution, always keeping 'I see you now' activated.

  Assessing…10%...30%

  In the darkness, he caught a looming figure scuttling snappily on insect-like limbs. Its rectangular, box-like body shifted and clattered as it moved.

  That didn’t make it any slower.

  It darted across the floor with a terrifying speed. Octa red eyes locking him with an intense murderous intent.

  Cleaner Golem, Lv ??

  Oh.

  It finally dawned into him...why this place was so clean and wet.