Chapter 93: Itinerary To Power.

The idea once again germinated in his head.

A rune of lightning or water or one of wind and so on, where he could change the rune based on the situation to have a different effect. Not one tool pretending to do everything, but a system. Modular. Swap the rune, change the output. It was the kind of idea that would have made him excited back when his life wasn’t measured in cores and blood loss.

It was a small idea, but he would never come to realize how groundbreaking it actually is. Well, for now that is…

***

Feeling that he had already overextended his stay in this humble room, which served more like a blacksmith’s workshop than a resting zone in an infested area. He decided that it was time for him to leave.

The satisfaction drained away the moment the practical part of his brain took over again. Staying meant risk. Every minute meant danger was creeping closer, the basilisk deciding it didn’t want to nap, the wrong person wandering down into the tunnels. His little workshop wasn’t a fortress; it was a borrowed breath.

Kael gathered everything he had and placed them in his inventory. His old bag sadly felt too empty since he transformed all the items on him into the system’s inventory instead. It was now time to leave.

The emptiness of the bag was… unsettling. It made him feel like he’d lost resources, even though logically he’d upgraded. Before, the bag had been a comfort, physical, tangible, full of tools. Now it was just cloth and straps over hidden wealth.

It was safer, sure. It also felt like walking with your hands tied behind your back, without trusting an invisible system to keep your things from vanishing.

Though he didn’t have any idea where to go right now, since the Sun Clan betrayed him and the Snakes have someone who saw him kill two of their members, Kael began realizing that he needed to clear this floor rather fast.

He didn’t even have the luxury of a neutral corner anymore. Everywhere had a label attached to it: enemy territory, danger zone, betrayal waiting in a smile. And now he was a red player. That invisible stain wasn’t going away. And he had a bit more time before that brand would disappear. One hour. Meaning he spent close to eleven hours in the depths of this tunnel system.

Just as he opened his map, his face turned pale.

The familiar glow of the minimap hit his eyes, and with it came the sickening sense of scale. He wasn’t just looking at streets and tunnels anymore. He was looking at a clock made of fire.

“Shit, I forgot about that completely…”

The raging Ifrit had come with a terrible cost. It was the reduction of the size of the whole first floor each day, and the pillars of fire had gotten closer and closer to where he was.

They weren’t abstract threats. They were lines. They were borders. Walls of heat that didn’t care who you were or what you wanted. They just moved in, relentlessly, the way a flood moved. The way a deadline moved. The way death moved.

It would take one day, maybe two at best, before the whole train station would be engulfed in flames.

The thought settled in his gut like lead. This wasn’t “eventually.” This wasn’t “later.” This was immediate and measurable. He could almost hear the crackle of fire already, like the floor itself was impatient.

No wonder the Baltak decided to leave soon. Because by the third day, even his shop would be in the red zone.

Kael swallowed hard. The rabbit’s tantrum wasn’t just annoying; it had turned the floor into a shrinking cage. Even the administrators had been forced to admit he was breaking the rhythm of the place. And the worst part was that Kael wasn’t even trying

to break anything. He was just surviving in a way the Tower hadn’t anticipated.

A part of him was feeling despair at the fact that he couldn’t by himself ever be strong enough to fight the basilisk for its materials and obtain the Rune of Darkness.

It was a bitter irony. He’d been inside the basilisk’s den. He’d touched its legacy. He’d turned its scales into armor. And still, the actual source, the epic rune, the hidden piece, was out of reach because the adult basilisk wasn’t a hatchling you could crack open with a crowbar nor a dead carcass you could harvest. It was a moving catastrophe.

He’ll have to give up on that Rune, sadly, since he cannot kill it. He knew it well; all he had was a weapon that could create fireballs, which were useless against both the Basilisk and the Ifrit.

The realization didn’t crush him; it sharpened him. It forced a new thought to surface, stubborn and practical.

“I need another rune…”

“Show me the rest of the Runes of the floor,” Kael asked.

The map immediately obeyed, showing this time only three itineraries.

Kael frowned. It was six yesterday, but now it’s only three? And one of them was in this dungeon, the Epic Rune of Darkness.

He zoomed in, eyes scanning, and it didn’t take long to understand why the options had collapsed. The fire had eaten routes. Entire sections of the floor had become dead zones, not because the runes were gone, but because reaching them now would be suicide.

Checking the map he realized the problem. Two locations were fully engulfed in flames, and albite one of them was far from the fire, the rune it had before was no longer there.

’Someone must have obtained it…’ Kael sighed.

The sigh wasn’t just frustration. It was a quiet anger at the idea of someone else taking what he needed, while he was stuck playing whack-a-mole with disasters he’d accidentally triggered. But envy was useless. He didn’t even know who took it. Could’ve been a clan. Could’ve been some lone climber with luck. Could’ve been in the hand of some random goblin who lucked out and grabbed it since it was a shiny obkect. Nothing to do about it, and no use crying over spilled milk.

“What runes can I obtain now besides the Darkness Rune?” Kael asked the map; there was no point in lamenting the past when the future was pressing.

[Rune Excise ᛋᚳᛁᛖᚱᚾᛖᛋ]

[Rune Momentum- ᚠᚩᚱᚦᚷᚪᚾᚷ]

“Ah, those sound like good stuff…”

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