Chapter 284 Cleaning Up the Forest

As we continued moving through the dungeon, the other two kept reporting more and more plant monsters that they encountered. Most of the time, they only appeared one at a time, but there were rare events when two or even three would show up at once. Diane’s theory was that this was because we were tackling the dungeon with such a small group, requiring the dungeon to condense the number of plant monsters down to populate their instances.

Unfortunately, these plant monsters were not always so easy to identify on my end. As Diane had originally speculated, the dungeon required exact precision. If a blade of grass had turned into a bladed whip lashing out at someone, I needed to locate that exact blade of grass on my end. If only one vine out of a bundle had turned into a venomous serpent, I needed to be able to find that exact vine.

This led to some problematic situations where I wasn’t able to identify the proper monster right away, leading to what Diane had taken to calling a ‘punishment round’ for the other two. The biggest problem with these punishment rounds was that the strength of the monster created did not vary based on the plant that was targeted. Whether it was a single blade of grass or a giant tree, the monster that appeared in front of Diane and Bella would always be a towering floral serpent.

Furthermore, because the landscape was heavily disrupted whenever one of them fought these giant monsters, they had to leave and reset their own instances every time I misidentified which plant I should be targeting. If there was any saving grace to be had, it was the fact that the plant monsters that had been successfully identified previously did not respawn after the reset, and the plant that they had originated from was still missing from the instance.

This trend continued as we followed the dirt path. Down the road, I could now make out an overgrown, metal bunker half buried in a hill. Roots and vines covered its outer shell, and there were two large, metal doors tightly shut at the front. What seemed the most odd to me was the fact that neither Diane nor Bella saw this bunker in their own instances. Instead, they simply saw the hill covered in dense foliage.

Next to the doors, I could make out a screen with text written on it in Cromoran. It seemed to be a progress bar, but my brow twitched when I saw the numbers written on it. Eighteen out of sixteen thousand, three hundred and eighty four. It had taken us over half an hour just to find these eighteen plants, having to reset multiple times after punishment games. How long would it take us to identify and destroy over sixteen thousand?

Calm down, Drake, Diane messaged me, as if anticipating the inner turmoil I was experiencing after reading that number. Puzzles like this aren’t unheard of. There are always ways to speed up our progress. Otherwise, even if you found and isolated one plant every four seconds, it would still take you a full day without sleep to finish the dungeon. Even if we had an army here to help us, the burden of activating Timeless Traces on the identified plants would fall to you alone.

I let out a grunt at that, turning my attention from the progress screen to my messages with Diane. What should we be looking for, then? This is the only facility that I can sense nearby.

First, we will continue our exploration. Bella will continue to look for any discrepancies between our instances. If there are any power-ups, they will likely be hidden in plain sight as a different species of plant. For instance, something that would give you more leeway when identifying the target plant, or increase our damage against these plants.

I was thankful that Diane had experience with these kinds of large collection puzzles, otherwise I may have ended up just telling the two of them to leave the dungeon while I ran through and used Timeless Traces on every blade of grass, every flower, every tree in the dungeon.

The three of us resumed our exploration, killing more and more monster plants. Oddly, we began encountering them in areas near where we had already explored, places where we knew that there had been no monsters previously. Diane attributed this to there being a limited number of monster plants in the instance at any given point, and we had to find some of the existing ones for more to spawn.

Regardless, it was almost a full hour later when we reached our next major development. Stop! Bella called out over the party channel, making me freeze in place as I was getting ready to move onto the next landmark. She hadn’t sent a screenshot of any new monster, so I wasn’t sure what the issue was now.

Is everything alright? Diane asked a moment later.

Finally, Bella sent a screenshot, though it did not show any signs of a monster. Diane, look at the bottom right of the screenshot. In my instance, I have a red flower with six petals, but the one in your screenshot that you sent is purple with seven. Drake, you should see the red flower as well.

I blinked, studying the image before looking around. Sure enough, there was a small, red flower on the ground, lightly swaying with the wind. It was amidst a patch of colorful flowers, so I would never have noticed anything out of place with just one flower being colored differently from what the other two had. I see it. Should I use the skill?

Do it, Diane confirmed. I just tried to interact with the flower, and did not receive any prompts. This is probably something that you have to activate from your side. 

With a sigh, I activated Timeless Traces on the little flower, which slowly melted under the light of the skill. I waited, seeing nothing happening around the flower patch, until a few minutes later when Diane sent another message. I was given a choice of three upgrades. First was an increase in damage against plant-type monsters. Second was a dungeon-exclusive skill to point me at the nearest monster in my instance with a five minute recharge. Finally, there was a passive skill that has a low chance to trigger instant death when attacking a plant monster.

My eyes widened at this. Though it wasn’t a huge increase in efficiency, being able to immediately find a monster would speed us up. You took the radar, right? I knew that Diane didn’t particularly need the extra damage right away. Aside from the punishment monsters, she was able to clear most of them pretty quickly.

That’s right, Diane confirmed. Standing in front of the flower patch, there is another monster in my instance fifty meters south-by-southwest.

The three of us turned, moving in that direction. Sure enough, Diane found another carnivorous flower, though she wasn’t immediately able to activate the skill again.

About ten minutes later, Bella spotted another difference between our instances. This one was on my end, where a vine was wrapped around a tree in the wrong direction compared to the other two. When I used Timeless Traces on this vine, I was the one presented with a choice of three options.

The first option I dismissed outright, as it was a reduction in the mana burden of the Timeless Traces skill. While that benefit would have been a godsend to a normal challenger for this dungeon, it was absolutely meaningless to me.

The second and third options, however, I had to strongly consider. The second option was labeled as ‘Shared Sight’, a skill with a five minute cooldown that would allow the user to share their vision with the other instances. Given my trait, and the fact that cooldowns were directly tied to mana burden, I should have been able to keep that skill active constantly, increasing our efficiency.

The final option was ‘Target Correction’. It created a five-centimeter diameter wherever I cast Timeless Traces. As long as the correct target plant was in that area, it would target that plant exclusively and not trigger a punishment.

I informed the other two about my options, and Diane immediately suggested that I go for Target Correction. Now that we knew that there were power-ups inside the dungeon, it was imperative that we avoid resetting for as long as possible, because we did not know if the dungeon-exclusive buffs would disappear if one of us left and rejoined the dungeon. For that reason, it was absolutely necessary that I have as much leeway as possible when locating the target plants.

While five centimeters wasn’t incredibly big, it was an immense help when my targets were individual blades of grass or a cluster of berries. Understanding her logic, I chose the upgrade without any further hesitation.

The next one to get an upgrade was Bella, who seemed to be the luckiest of the three of us. Reportedly, one of her upgrade options was glowing with a golden light. With a ten minute cooldown, she could locate the nearest upgrade plant within her instance.

Once we started finding more and more upgrades, the progress for the dungeon began to climb exponentially. One of the upgrades I received allowed me to randomly target another random anomaly in the dungeon every time I successfully purged one. These anomalies could either be the target plants or one of the power-up plants. So, although we spent nearly two hours getting the first hundred plants, the second hundred took us barely fifteen minutes.

Then, as we continued to receive more upgrades, this only got faster. The most obvious upgrades were those that reduced cooldowns, allowing Diane and Bella to activate their tracking skills more frequently. By the time we reached the halfway mark, both of them had gotten their skills down to the point of activating once every thirty seconds.

Aside from that, there were the upgrades for me, which increased the number of targets for my available dungeon buffs. So, my Timeless Traces would randomly target more and more anomalies, or I would get a larger radius to work with whenever I was purging one.

It took us a total of seven hours just to get to the ten thousand point on the progress screen. By this point, a large portion of the foliage around the dungeon had been erased, whether it was trees, flowers, or vines. It was like we were reclaiming the dungeon from nature.

At that point, I was purging nearly a hundred plants per single cast of Timeless Traces, with a full meter radius of leeway. We had all also unlocked the Shared Vision power-up, allowing us to quickly move through the dungeon without needing to coordinate via screenshots and typing messages. The other two couldn’t cast it constantly like I could, but they could follow my movements through the vision they received from me. Then, all they had to do was share their own vision the instant that they spotted a monster.

By the end of hour eight, we were up to over fourteen thousand, but Diane had to log off for the night. Although she wanted to see the end of the dungeon, she didn’t want to risk leaving and removing all of the buffs that she had accumulated.

The last two thousand went by in barely ten minutes, as the increasingly open space meant it was easier to spot monsters. Once we had cleared out the last monster in the dungeon, the space around me seemed to ripple.

Suddenly, the air folded in on itself, and both Bella and Diane appeared next to me, looking startled by the sudden transfer. They looked around at one another, and then at the now-pristine bunker standing before us, built into the wall. There was a button on the screen that had previously shown the progress bar, asking if we would like to enter.