Chapter 440: The Hunted Cadmus Dragon

“He’s right. It’s entirely too quiet.”

Pulling back from the corner, Finn also stood up straight, paying no mind to Aiden’s seemingly reckless behavior. His brows were knit tightly together.

Based on everything he knew about Cadmus Dragons, this area should absolutely never be this dead.

“I’ll go check,” Aiden told Finn.

Finn considered it for a fraction of a second before nodding his approval.

Emboldened by his own skill and having secured permission, Aiden abandoned any pretense of stealth and strolled right out into the open clearing.

However, just a few paces in, as the full scale of the Large Room revealed itself to him, his normally calm eyes went wide with shock.

“What… is this…?”

“What a mess…?”

Hurrying right behind him, Bete and Raul both froze in their tracks the moment they laid eyes on the scene.

It was a colossal room, easily the size of a city plaza.

While the space usually only supported a sparse scattering of trees—nowhere near thick enough to be called a forest—the vast majority of that foliage had been brutally snapped in half by some terrifying force, or crushed into pulp as if a monolithic beast had simply rolled over them.

The surrounding ground and walls looked like a war zone; some unhinged entity had rampaged wildly, grinding the stone into fine powder and scattering mountains of debris in every direction.

Even more incomprehensible were the rampant scorch marks. Evidence of matter being slagged by ultra-high temperatures was smeared across the entire room.

Plumes of black smoke still rose lazily from the shattered stumps of several trees, their wood stained a sickly, dark purple. A putrid, eye-watering stench—a wretched cocktail of sulfur and rotting meat—hung thick in the air.

“Gods, that reeks…” Raul grimaced, his face scrunching up as he instinctively threw a hand over his nose and mouth.

Plagued by confusion and unease, Aiden and the others carefully pushed deeper into the room.

Everyone’s nerves were wired tighter than piano strings. Scanning their surroundings for even the slightest twitch of movement, they carefully navigated their way through the charred, fallen timber.

Amidst this horrifying landscape of absolute destruction, there was exactly one spot that remained completely untouched, as if warded by some invisible, divine barrier.

The beautiful, deep blue surface of the water rippled gently. A crisp, incredibly fresh scent wafted from the spring.

At the very back of the room, a minuscule stream of water leaked intermittently from a narrow fissure in the rock face—a miniature grotto.

Housing a mysterious, pale-blue luminescence, the spring water trickled slowly down into a small basin lined with exotic flora, radiating an aura of total, intoxicating tranquility.

But there was also… the mountain of ash piled up right in front of that beautiful spring.

“Is this…”

“The corpse… of the Cadmus Dragon?” Bete raised an eyebrow, his voice dripping with pure disbelief.

The sheer volume of that ash pile matched the scale of the massive Cadmus Dragon perfectly in his memory.

Coupled with the eerie dead silence and the total absence of any other monsters in the area, the most logical conclusion they could draw was that this pile of dust used to be the apex predator that governed this room.

“Could another Familia have come through and killed it…?” Aiden furrowed his brow, offering up the most logical hypothesis.

“The number of teams capable of pushing this deep into the Dungeon can be counted on one hand. I didn’t receive any intelligence suggesting another Familia was scheduling an Expedition that overlapped with ours.”

Finn shook his head, his sharp eyes scrutinizing every single anomaly across the ruined room.

“Furthermore…”

Finn muttered, crouching down next to the miniature desert of ash pooling by his boots.

Reaching out, he gently brushed aside the top layer of dust and plucked something out from beneath the pile.

“The drop item… wasn’t collected?”

He pulled out a small patch of leathery dragon wing membrane that glinted with a dull gold hue. It was one of the monster’s signature drops.

“Cadmus Dragon Wing Membrane.”

It was an exceptionally rare crafting material that only had a miniscule chance of dropping upon defeating the dragon.

Exchanging this single scrap for valis would secure enough funding to fully outfit every single member of a large-scale Familia.

Bankrolling an Expedition into the Deep Floors was a wildly expensive endeavor. No sane adventurer would ever walk away from a priceless prize like this.

“Judging by this, whoever killed the Cadmus Dragon definitely wasn’t an adventurer.”

Aiden sifted carefully through the mounds of ash, finding absolutely no trace of the dragon’s massive Magic Stone. He stood up, his voice dropping into a grave timber. “But the Magic Stone is gone. Was it shattered… or was it eaten?”

That final word caused the air to freeze instantly.

Upon hearing Aiden’s assessment, Finn, Gareth, and Bete’s faces immediately darkened.

A consumed Magic Stone only pointed to a single possibility within the Dungeon: an Enhanced Species.

A monster capable of solo-hunting the apex predator of the 51st Floor—if that creature consumed the Cadmus Dragon’s Magic Stone, what kind of horrifying monstrosity would it evolve into? To their Expedition team, it represented a lethal, existential threat.

“We need to get back immediately. The situation has gone bad.”

Finn dug his thumbnail deeply into his lower lip. That sharp spike of pain forced his racing mind into a state of chilling clarity.

With the order given, Aiden and Raul instantly whipped out their empty vials and hastily began gathering the spring water.

Aiden carefully portioned out a specific amount into a separate vial, just as Hyacine had explicitly requested.

Usually, because the Cadmus Dragon treated this grotto as its personal watering hole, the amount of fluid adventurers could successfully harvest was extremely limited.

But today, with that troublesome ‘bouncer’ out of the picture, the two of them easily collected a volume that far exceeded their initial quotas.

“There was absolutely no point in splitting up to harvest this.”

Snapping the cap shut on his vial, Aiden couldn’t help but sigh. Had they known the Cadmus Dragon was already dead and the spring was this bountiful, they never would have divided their forces.

“True.”

As the five of them hurriedly marched back the way they came, a forced, bitter smile crept onto Finn’s face.

“Tell me, what’s your take on this?” he asked, glancing sideways at Aiden.

“Common sense dictates that another monster is responsible…” Aiden replied flatly, though his gaze darkened significantly.

In reality, a much more specific hypothesis was already forming in his mind.

Outside of regular monsters, there was exactly one other type of entity in the Dungeon that actively hunted for Magic Stones while showing zero interest in valuable drop items.

And that was the ‘Creatures’ resurrected by the Corrupted Spirit.

Or perhaps… the Xenos.

But he immediately discarded the latter theory.

Given the Xenos’ current combat strength, there was no way they could slay a Cadmus Dragon.

Moreover, if it had been the Xenos, they absolutely would have taken that priceless Cadmus Dragon Wing Membrane to hand over to Fels.

The Xenos still needed valis to commission Fels for surface supplies and gear. They relied on the skeletal mage to fence their monster drops; they would never leave something this valuable lying in the dirt.