Chapter 326:An inevitable decision.

Chapter 326: 326:An inevitable decision.

Silver deactivated Spatial Sense and the headache came immediately. He leaned against the stone wall, his breathing heavier than it should have been. He touched his side and his fingers came away with a little blood.

One of the recovering wounds had reopened.

"Great."

He checked his shoulder, still bruised but nothing serious. Then his shirt which was ruined. Silver stared at the claw marks and heavily sighed.

"This was expensive."

Apparently he wasn’t getting over that. He waited several minutes but no more burrowers attacked. He carefully moved through the chamber.

The corpses were scattered around him. He counted nine, tier Two. Not particularly valuable compared to the things he’d been hunting recently, but cores were cores.

Especially when he’d nearly bankrupted himself buying three Tier Three space cores. He crouched beside the first body and retrieved the core, then another.

He worked methodically. Some were damaged but most weren’t. By the time he finished, he had collected seven usable Tier Two cores.

Silver looked toward the holes in the walls. There were probably more creatures deeper inside but he had no intention of following them.

"Keep the house, I’m out of here."

Silver returned the way he’d come. The tunnel that had seemed so promising suddenly looked much less appealing.

He still explored one branch beyond the nest, but it narrowed into a maze of burrows designed for creatures much smaller than him.

Another branch ended beneath solid stone. A third curved downward so sharply that Silver abandoned it after ten minutes. Eventually he returned to his original mark.

He stared at it in defeat. He had been exploring for hours but most of his results were basically useless.

He drank some water, then continued but most of the tunnels ended in either a dead end or a collapsed tunnel. Another rose for nearly half an hour before becoming completely impassable.

Silver stood in front of that final obstruction for a long time simply glaring at it, then turned around. By the time he returned to one of the central intersections, his body was exhausted again.

The fight hadn’t been particularly difficult but the walking was worse. Hours of moving through uneven terrain while his body was still recovering had taken its toll.

Silver leaned against the wall while looking at his markings. There were too many crosses and his options were disappearing.

He knew what remained. He had known for hours but simply hadn’t wanted to admit it.

He started walking back.

He passed the underground spring. Continued through the tunnel he’d originally opened using Space Slash. Eventually, he reached the bottom cavern where he’d awakened.

The place hadn’t changed.

His dried blood still stained the stone. The section where he’d lain unconscious remained visible. The root that had caught his sword hung from the ceiling.

And on the far side of the cavern was the one passage he’d deliberately refused to explore.

The queen’s tunnel.

The enormous gouges along the walls were impossible to miss.

It was wide enough for the Rank Six creature to move through comfortably, which meant it wouldn’t suddenly narrow until Silver couldn’t pass.

More importantly, Silver knew exactly where it went.

Up.

The queen had used it to return toward the nest. The nest was somewhere within the upper tunnel system. And the upper tunnel system had once connected to the expedition routes.

Silver stared into the darkness.

There was only one small obvious problem with everything. The queen was somewhere up there, along with whatever remained of the worm colony.

Silver slowly drew his handgun and checked the magazine, then looked toward the tunnel again.

"No."

He holstered it.

Walking into the queen’s territory while exhausted would be idiotic.

His spatial reserves weren’t full anymore, and despite everything the system had done, his body was still recovering from injuries that should have killed him.

If he was going to use the queen’s route, he would do it properly. Silver walked toward a relatively flat section of the cavern and sat with his back against the wall.

He placed his handgun beside his right hand and his sword remained within reach, then he looked toward the dark passage one more time.

He had tried the safer routes and they had all failed. The mountain had made the decision for him. That was the only comfort he could give himself.

Silver sighed and rested his head against the stone.

"Fine." His eyes remained on the queen’s tunnel. "You win."

The next time he stood up, he would be going that way.

.

.

.

Silver remained seated against the cavern wall for several minutes without doing anything except listening to his own breathing and the distant sounds travelling through the mountain.

The queen’s tunnel remained directly across from him, a dark opening large enough to swallow several people standing side by side, with deep gouges carved into the walls wherever the Rank Six creature’s enormous body had scraped against the stone.

Nothing moved inside it, and he couldn’t hear the familiar scratching or clicking of the parasitic worms, but that didn’t make him feel any better about entering. If anything, the silence made him more cautious. He knew something was somewhere above him.

The only questions were how far away it was and whether he would be fortunate enough to pass through its territory without attracting attention.

He wasn’t going to find those answers while exhausted.

Silver reached into his storage and began searching through the medical supplies he had accumulated since obtaining the system.

He had purchased several of them back when his AP balance had been considerably healthier, usually after learning the hard way that having medicine available was much cheaper than desperately searching for it after being injured. At the time, some of those purchases had felt excessive.

Now, buried beneath a mountain with no doctor anywhere nearby, they seemed like some of the best purchases he’d ever made.

Several small containers appeared beside him. Silver picked up the first and read the label.

[Rapid Clotting Agent]

He placed it beside his leg.