CHAPTER 40: The first upgrade phase and the Vacuum

The basement beneath Silas's office smelled of must, cheap wine, and old dust. The flickering candles cast long, dancing shadows on the damp granite walls, and the only sound drowning out the rapid, terrified beating of the merchant's heart was the heavy, metallic clink of my spatial pouch. I grabbed the leather straps of my pouch, tilted it, and with a lazy, relaxed movement shook the contents directly onto the massive oak table.

CLATTER!

An avalanche of sparkling crystals, high-level essence cores, and volcanic obsidian shards flooded the table, burying Silas's ledger under a mountain of shining, fioletowa capital. The dense, concentrated mana radiating from the loot caused the very air in the basement to hum with an oppressive, electric energy, painting the dark room in neon shades of sapphire and purple.

Silas literally lost his pipe. The wooden stem slipped from his teeth, dropping hot ashes directly onto his trousers, but the old fence didn't even flinch. He sat frozen in his chair, his eyes bulging from their sockets, and his mouth hanging wide open in expression of an absolute, catastrophic system lag. His merchant brain, usually so quick to calculate margins and profits, had just suffered a complete blue-screen.

"T-this... this is..." he finally stammered, his hoarse voice cracking as he reached out with trembling, sweaty fingers to touch the glowing core of the Abyss Exarch. "The entire seventh ten... cleared? Dave... you absolute, unhinged psychopath! On the seventieth floor, elite inquisition squads and veteran guilds get wiped out in minutes! They send armies there once a decade, and half of them return in wooden boxes! And you... you did a speedrun in a few weeks?! This is not in any books! My entire long-term financial plans have just been completely demolished!"

"Pure time optimization, Silas," I replied with a relaxed, brazen chill, leaning my shoulder against the dark bookshelf and keeping my hands pushed deep into the pockets of my black coat. "I have no intention of standing in place. The prologue of this game is coming to an end, and we are moving on to the wider world. Clean your vaults and make sure the ledger is spotless by the morning. The capital must work."

Silas nodded feverishly, snatching the contracts with trembling hands. His merchant calculator had been ultimately reset, and his complete, iron submission was cemented forever.

"But do not expect us back in the dungeon tomorrow," I added coldly, my sapphire eyes narrowing with a sharp, calculating focus. "To go any deeper into Hell, my engine requires a hard, physical update. My energy conduits are still too narrow for the sapphire pressure, and I have no intention of spitting out blood for the amusement of this loch. We are taking a temporary break."

I turned on my heel and walked out of the dark basement, Shnee and Kaede following me step for step with complete, silent devotion.

The iron bolt in my bedroom door on the upper floor of the Golden Griffin slid into place with a hollow, heavy click.

Before I cut myself off from the world, I had issued strict, non-negotiable instructions to the crew: an absolute ban on entering, knocking, or reacting to any sounds coming from my room, no matter how macabre or inhuman they might sound.

I sat on the hard, bare floorboards directly in the center of the room, crossing my legs and placing my hands flat on my knees.

My common-sense logic suggested simple engineering. To push twice as much rushing water through a biological pipe, you must first physically widen the channels and concrete the banks. Otherwise, the sudden, monstrous pressure of the sapphire core will simply tear the entire system into bloody shreds from the inside. The stable, standby output of my core was no longer sufficient for the volcanic depths of the lower levels. I needed to establish a hard, safe limit of exactly thirty percent throughput.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and completely opened the internal valves of my sapphire reactor.

The pain hit me in the exact same millisecond.

It was a physical, inhuman torture. A thick, roaring current of sapphire mana broke into my energy conduits like a rushing river of liquid, boiling lead. Instead of searching for some mystical, spiritual enlightenment or calm water, I started a raw, biomechanical slaughter on my own body. The sapphire power aggressively tore my weaves from the inside, expanding the pathways with incredible cruelty, only for the passive, regenerative force of my Vessel to immediately flood the wounds, scarring them hard and building new, thicker walls of sapphire titanium.

Blood gushed from my nose and split lips, dripping onto the wooden floor with a steady, heavy plask. My body convulsed violently, and my skin became scorched, smelling of burned ozone and coagulated gore. But I gritted my teeth, tensing my core and keeping my mind on a state of absolute, surgical calculation. I did not allow myself even a fraction of a second of weakness. I was formatting the engine from zero.

I endured this sadistic cycle of destruction and rebuilding for exactly twenty-five days.

When the iron bolt finally popped open on the twenty-sixth morning, I fell forward into the corridor, leaning heavily against the wooden frame. From the outside, I looked like a shadow of myself—a living corpse with sunken cheeks, pale skin stretching over my broad shoulders, and dark circles beneath my eyes. My black shirt was stiff with old salt, sweat, and dried blood.

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But it was only a temporary, biological facade.

Deep within my pupils, a stable, incredibly dense szafirowy light now burned. My modernized Vessel worked perfectly. The energy pathways running through my limbs felt thick, cool, and completely tempered, ready to handle the thirty percent throughput of the sapphire core like an oiled industrial engine.

Elena and Mina rushed up the stairs, their faces turning pale as they saw my emaciated state. But I only smiled with a relaxed, brazen coolness, waving my hand carelessly.

"Elena," I rasped, my voice dry but carrying my usual, unshakeable confidence. "Bring down everything you have in the kitchen. I need a massive load of carbohydrates and high-protein meat. My machine has finished its update and demands immediate refueling."

After three days of brutal, high-calorie gluttony, during which Mina prepared mountains of roasted pork, thick broths, and fresh bread, the physical mass of my Vessel fully returned to its place. The hollow cheeks vanished, replaced by a cold, stable density under my skin. I stood in front of the mirror, adjusting the high collar of my new black coat and cracking my neck with a loud, satisfying pop.

I felt only one thing—a murderous, uncontrollable battle hunger.

"End of vacation, girls," I announced with a predatory, confident smile, clenching my hands into fists. "The engine is stable. Shnee, Kaede. Gather your gear. We are returning to the dungeon to check our new calibration."

The massive iron gates to the seventy-third floor of the Forgotten Necropolises opened with a dull, echoing moan, and we marched straight into the heart of the volcanic hell.

The environment of the seventh ten had completely abandoned any sterile, obsidian rawness. Instead, we stepped out into the Canyons of Ash—a monumental, crumbling rift in the earth where the air was so thick with toxic ash and ionized vapors that every breath felt like inhaling hot, throat-biting tar. Visibility was limited to a few meters, and the floor of the canyon was a cracked maze of basalt plates, with veins of orange-red magma oozing from the deep crevices.

I adjusted my coat, slipping my hands deep into my pockets as we began our walk. My zmodernizowane Vessel didn't even register the extreme temperature. The passive sapphire aura covering my skin easily repelled the volcanic heat, allowing me to stroll through this furnace as if it were a spring park.

We speedran the first levels with machine precision, bypassing minor mobs to save calories. Shnee, dressed in her dark combat uniform with silver frost accents, glided behind my left shoulder like a frosty phantom, her Celestial Silver rapier cutting through the occasional ash-ghouls with surgical precision.

But when we reached the seventy-fifth floor, the canyon ended in a monumental, basalt colosseum, in the center of which a colossal silhouette was waiting.

The Blacksmith of Ashes.

The monster was a five-meter centaur formed entirely of half-melted volcanic rock. Its chest was a glowing furnace of liquid magma, and its skeletal head was encased in thick bronze plates. It held a monumental, four-meter iron hammer in its hands, and with every deep breath, the beast devoured the thick sulfurous smoke rising from the craters, using it to heal its cracks and recharge its fiery shield.

As we stepped onto the arena, the centaur roared with a low bass, bringing its massive hammer down and sending a wave of entropic plasma directly toward us.

"He is absorbing the smoke to regenerate, Dave!" Shnee warned, instantly forming a defensive barrier of frost. "His core is protected by the heated magma, we cannot break through it with raw force!"

I didn't draw Orcrist. I maintained my default, relaxed posture—hands pushed deep into the pockets of my black coat, my sapphire-blue eyes calmly analyzing the physics of the boss's balance and energy conduits.

On a common-sense, engineering logic, fire and heat are simply a violent chemical reaction. And any combustion, no matter how magical or anomalous, requires one basic variable to exist.

Oxygen.

"Let's take away his fuel, darling," I murmured with a predatory, amused smirk.

I focused my will. Operating entirely outside my energy conduits, I activated my newly zbrojone thirty percent of aura. The power flowed smoothly through my modernized sploty, and with a sudden, sharp jerk of my mind, I closed a tight, perfectly spherical telekinetic barrier around the giant boss.

I created a spherical kinetic cage, cutting him off from the rest of the arena. Then, tensing my core, I began to violently and mechanically suck out absolutely all the air from inside the sphere, creating a pinpoint, one hundred percent vacuum.

The effect was instantaneous and clinical.

The Blacksmith of Ashes waved his colossal arms in panic, trying to swing his hammer, but his flames, deprived of oxygen, began to violently shrink and weaken in a fraction of a second. The bright orange magma on his rock-armor darkened to a dull, gray slag, the smoke vanished, and the fire went out with a pathetic, choking hiss. Within twelve seconds, the five-meter titan was turned into a stiff, brittle, and freezing lump of cooled volcanic rock.

"Now, Shnee!" I commanded coldly, releasing the vacuum barrier.

The white-haired elf did not miss her cue.

She propelled herself into the air with a fluid, feline bound, her Celestial Silver rapier charged with the maximum density of her **. She drove the crystalline blade straight into the exposed, brittle, and thermal-shocked collarbone joint of the beast.

CRACK!

The sudden, extreme cold caused the brittle rock to shatter from the inside out with a deafening, glassy crash. The centaur's massive body crumbled into thousands of harmless, gray carbon fragments, leaving only a glowing, ruby-red essence core clinking against the basalt floor.

I walked over, using a light pulse of telekinesis to lift the heavy stone into my hand, and dropped it into my spatial pouch. I checked my zmodernizowane weaves—the sixty percent energy transfer had occurred without a single drop of naderwana energy or blood. The Vessel held the pressure flawlessly.

"First serious verification passed with S-rank," I evaluated coldly, adjusting the collar of my black coat. "The engine works. Let's go down to the seventy-sixth floor, darling. I want to see what other system anomalies this loch has prepared for our monopoly."

We stepped onto the descending platform of the return Sapphire Prism, leaving the ashes of the seventy-fifth floor behind, as our relentless, bezkompromisowy march toward the absolute control of this world gained its final, cemented foundation.

"No, i zajebiście," I muttered under my breath in Polish, a brazen, predatory smile creeping onto my lips. "Time for a fucking long Early Game, baby!"