Chapter 30: Gwendolyn’s Unlocked Skill Tree!

After stepping through the blue‑white light curtain, the sensation underfoot shifted. No longer gravel and dirt, but something damp and slippery. Cecil glanced down—dark green flagstones paved the ground, coated in a thin film of water, as if perpetually dampened by seeping underground moisture. The faint fishy tang in the air grew stronger here, mingling with the scent of wet earth and humus.

"...A sewer?" Freddy’s voice echoed hollowly down the passage. "This place feels like the drainage tunnels beneath the old city."

"Deeper than a drainage canal," Lydia knelt and touched the water film on the ground, her fingertips streaked with murky water. She shook her hand clean. "And the water’s freezing cold, nearly at the melting point of ice."

Cecil stood in the middle of the passage, gazing up at the surrounding walls.

Unlike the rough stonework outside, these walls had been chiseled smooth, dense runes carved segment by segment into the dark green slabs, etched as fine as if pricked one stroke at a time with a needle. The runes glowed a faint silvery‑grey in the dimness, dim but steady, like a thin glaze spread over the stone surface.

Gwendolyn poked her head out from Cecil’s shoulder, her blue eyes sweeping over the nearest stretch of runes. Her tail slowly rose, then sank back down.

"...These are altered guidance runes," she said, her voice softer than usual. "They aren’t seals or offensive traps. They’re markers. But someone tampered with them—laid a layer of disguise runes over the surface to obscure the true directions."

"Disguise runes?" Lydia frowned and leaned closer to the wall.

"It’s like covering a map with a sheet of translucent paper drawn with false routes. You can see the original underneath, but your judgment gets clouded," Gwendolyn tapped the end of one rune pattern with her tail tip, her tail tracing a curved groove. "These spots here—their original path led downward, but it was changed to the left. If we follow the altered ones, we’ll hit a dead end ahead."

Cecil stared at the wall for a moment. He couldn’t decipher the arrangement of the runes, but he trusted Gwendolyn’s judgment. As her tail moved, it left an extremely thin line of frost lingering on the silvery glow of the runes before dissipating.

"Can you undo them?" he asked.

Gwendolyn fell silent for a few seconds. "I can. But it’ll take time. I need to walk along the wall, map out every tampered node, then reverse‑engineer the original route."

"Then walk the length of it."

Gwendolyn leaped down from Cecil’s shoulder, her four paws landing on the slippery flagstones, her blue‑white scales standing out vividly against the dark green surroundings. She moved along the base of the wall, her tail dragging behind her, pausing at every stretch of runes to press her paw against the intersections of the patterns before pressing onward.

Cecil followed three paces behind her, his gaze scanning the passage ahead. The corridor was longer than expected, narrowing the deeper they went.

The walls, once wide enough for three people to walk side by side, gradually constricted to barely fit two people shoulder to shoulder. The water film on the ground grew thicker, and the faint squeak of boot soles against stone echoed with every step.

"...This passage keeps getting narrower," Freddy’s voice came from the rear, laced with suppressed tension. "If it dead‑ends up ahead, we won’t even have room to turn around."

"So we make sure it doesn’t dead‑end," Cecil replied calmly, though he was mentally calculating the length of the corridor and the rate at which it narrowed. At the current slope, another fifty paces would shrink the passage to only one person wide, leaving almost no room to dodge in a fight.

Gwendolyn halted at a section of the wall, pressing her paw against a set of runes, her tail lifting slightly. Her sudden stop tightened Cecil’s chest.

"What did you find?"

Gwendolyn didn’t answer at once. The silvery‑grey glow of the runes beneath her paw was shifting subtly—fading from a steady dimness to intermittent flickers, like a failing lamp. She pulled her paw back and stepped half a pace away, watching the runes slowly settle back to their regular brightness.

"The path ahead isn’t altered," she said. "The true markers are unobscured from here onward. Following them will lead us straight to the core area."

"So the disguise runes only covered the first half?"

"Yes," Gwendolyn glanced back at him. "Whoever modified the runes only got through the first section before stopping. Either they were interrupted, or something else happened."

Cecil was about to respond when a sound drifted out of the darkness ahead of the passage. Not footsteps, but something heavier—the scraping of hard arthropod legs against the stone floor, rhythmic and intermittent clicking, the friction of dozens of limbs touching the ground in turn.

Gwendolyn’s tail stiffened instantly.

Frost already coalesced in Cecil’s right hand. The three of them froze mid‑advance, Freddy’s breathing loud and clear in the silence. Lydia slid Ivy off her wrist and set her down on the water film on the ground, the emerald serpent slithering low along the edge of the stone.

A pair of dark red lights flickered to life in the darkness ahead.

Then a second pair. A third.

They were arranged vertically, one higher, one lower, positioned symmetrically left and right in the dark—like a colossal creature lying prone lifting its head, compound eyes opening one after another. The scraping of limbs drew nearer, steady in pace, closing the distance with every step.

A segment of dark brown body emerged from the shadows. Its width nearly filled the entire passage, with rows of slender legs on either side, each pair as tall as a human being, the segmented body covered in hard chitinous armor. When its head lifted, two pairs of dark red compound eyes locked onto the three standing in the center of the passage from different angles.

A centipede. A centipede wide enough to fill the whole corridor.

"...Behind us!" Freddy spun abruptly toward the way they’d come. From the shadows at the corner of the wall in their rear, another dark brown segment of body was slowly emerging. A second centipede blocked their retreat, slightly smaller than the one ahead, yet still filling the passage completely.

Cecil stood trapped in the middle, twenty paces from the first centipede ahead, fifteen paces from the second behind. The passage had narrowed to only two people shoulder to shoulder, the smooth damp walls offering no crannies or hiding spots. A thin film of water coated the ground, the flagstones glinting murkily under the dark green light.

Gwendolyn retreated from the wall to Cecil’s feet, a low resonant growl rumbling in her throat. Her blue eyes fixed on the giant centipede ahead, her tail tapped rapidly on the stone floor, then turned toward Cecil.

"The front one has thick armor plating, the back one’s thinner," she said. "Its weak point is the joints of its ventral shell. But you have to deal with the front one first—it’s blocking the path, we can’t circle around backward."

Cecil nodded. The silver compendium flared to life deep in his consciousness once more; this time no new branching paths unlocked, but a new line of text appeared beneath Gwendolyn’s entry: [Spirit Beast Skill Tree · Available Points: 1].

Cecil’s gaze lingered on that line. He had always spent his assignable attribute points on his own [Agility], [Speed], and [Strength], never considering they could also be allocated to Gwendolyn. But some condition had triggered just now—the system interface had pulled up Gwendolyn’s skill tree separately.

Gwendolyn crouched at his feet, fully focused on the centipede ahead, unaware of his brief pause. The dark red lights of the centipede’s eyes reflected in her blue irises, the resonant growl in her throat rising in frequency, fine frost crystals forming on the water film around her paw tips.

Cecil closed his eyes.

[Spirit Beast Skill Tree · Gwendolyn]

· Frost Breath (Basic) — Mastered

· Ice Shield · Single Target (Basic) — Mastered

· [New Node Unlocked]

Option A: Advanced Ice Shield · AoE (Covers two allies)

Option B: Enhanced Frost Breath · Continuous Damage

Option C: Dragon Resonance · Intimidation (Forces suppression on low‑rank creatures for three seconds)

[Available Points: 1]

Cecil opened his eyes. The centipede ahead had crawled to within ten paces, its dark red compound eyes locking onto him left and right, two antennae twitching gently in the air as if sensing temperature changes in the atmosphere. The second centipede behind was also closing in, water droplets on its dorsal shell glistening wetly in the dim light.

Gwendolyn stepped half a pace forward, her blue‑white form a small unextinguished cold flame in the narrow passage.

Cecil chose Option C in his mind: Dragon Resonance · Intimidation.

The silver characters vanished in an instant, replaced by a warm surge flowing into Gwendolyn’s body through their soul bond.

Her tail snapped rigid, the brightness in her blue eyes doubled, the resonant growl in her throat shifting from a deep prolonged tone into a series of short, powerful pulses—like an invisible bell struck in the darkness.

The sonic wave erupted outward from Gwendolyn, spreading forward and backward along the narrow corridor at the same time.

The centipede ahead froze for a split second the moment the wave hit it—all six pairs of dark red compound eyes dimmed at once, as if six lamps had been snuffed out. Its body halted in the middle of the passage, its head tilting slightly downward to the side, its antennae flattening against its dorsal shell.

The centipede behind was also affected. The smaller creature stiffened entirely for roughly two seconds, four of its eight pairs of legs buckling at once, as if losing its balance.

"—Three seconds!" Gwendolyn shouted, her voice tight with urgency. "Run!"

Cecil did not hesitate. He charged forward, squeezing sideways through the gap between the stunned centipede’s flank and the wall. The passage was narrow, but the centipede’s reclined posture left a half‑human‑wide gap between its head and the stonework. His shoulder brushed against the centipede’s dark brown hard carapace, the surface cold and damp, like a stone soaked in water for ages.

Freddy and Lydia followed closely behind. Lydia bent to tuck Ivy into her sleeve, Freddy clutched Turner in his palm, the two of them squeezing one after another through the slowly closing gap between the centipede’s body and the wall. The hem of Lydia’s robe snagged on the tip of one of the centipede’s arthropod limbs and tore, but she did not slow down.

The three sprinted another twenty paces past the centipede’s body before stopping. Gwendolyn glanced back from Cecil’s shoulder—the two centipedes were emerging from their stunned state. The one ahead had already begun slowly twitching its antennae, and the one behind had righted itself.

But the passage widened here. The walls receded on either side, forming a cavity roughly four paces wide. At the far end of the cavity stood a sealed stone door, etched with no runes, only a shallow groove—its outline an exact match for the edge of the dark red fragment beneath Gwendolyn’s abdominal scales.

Cecil stared at the groove, then glanced down at Gwendolyn.

Gwendolyn said nothing, but her tail brushed gently against the stone floor.

"...We’ve arrived," she said.