Chapter 243 — Sixteenth Floor

Chapter 243: Chapter 243 — Sixteenth Floor

He spent the first full day on Sixteen simply mapping the terrain in his own head, the same careful habit he’d carried since his earliest solo dives — noting the shallow pools scattered across the ash-dusted stone, the algae clinging thick and dark to every surface the water touched.

Damp more than flooded. Different from Fifteen already.

The first proper threat found him midmorning, something shifting beneath a bed of silt he’d nearly walked straight over. A creature broke the surface in a spray of grit and murk, low-slung and segmented, too many legs working in a quick, scuttling rhythm as it closed the distance.

Silt Crawler, if the guild notes I skimmed are right. Rank Four.

He met it with Riverblade, the cutting current slicing clean through its lightly armored segments, and finished it with a second strike before it managed more than a glancing scrape against his boot.

He harvested it afterward, curious, and made camp early enough in the day that he had proper time to prepare the meat and test whatever it offered.

The warmth arrived gentle that evening, settling into his legs and the soles of his feet rather than anywhere higher, a loose, fluid looseness that felt almost like his joints had been quietly oiled.

A name surfaced.

Murkstep.

He sat with it, testing the understanding — the ability to move through silt, mud, and loose sediment without sound or resistance, his footing never betraying him the way ordinary movement through such terrain always threatened to.

He tested it along the pool’s murky edge, and found his steps leaving no visible disturbance at all, the silt parting and settling around him as though he weighed nothing.

Useful. Considerably useful, on a floor built almost entirely out of exactly this kind of ground.

He pressed on the following day, the terrain opening gradually into a wider stretch of shallow, ash-colored water, and found a second kind of creature waiting in a cluster near one of the deeper pools — long, segmented, pale things that clung to the algae-slicked rocks in loose knots, barely moving until he came within reach.

Brackwater Leeches. More of them than I expected in one place.

He cleared the cluster carefully, Emberstorm’s gathered heat scattering most of them before they could properly latch on, though one managed to catch his forearm before he burned it off, a sharp, cold pulling sensation that left a faint bruise behind even through his armor.

He finished the last of them and sat a moment, rubbing the spot where it had caught him, mildly annoyed but not seriously troubled.

Not dangerous individually. Dangerous in numbers, maybe, if something bigger herded a swarm of them toward someone unprepared.

He made camp that evening further into the floor, the terrain growing steadily more oppressive the deeper he pushed — not Floor Seven’s staggering scale, but something quieter, more unsettling, the ash-dusted stone pressing close in a way that made the air itself feel heavier than it had any right to.

The warmth from the leech meat arrived strange that night, cool rather than hot, settling into his chest with an odd, draining sensation before it finally resolved into something he recognized as understanding.

Siphon Touch.

He tested the name’s meaning carefully — a draining strike, drawing a small measure of vitality from whatever he touched directly into himself, not enough to properly heal from a serious wound but enough to steady him in a pinch, a quiet trickle rather than any dramatic theft.

He tried it cautiously against a loose stone, more out of curiosity than any real expectation of feeling anything from something lifeless, and felt nothing at all, confirming what he’d half-suspected — the ability only answered against something actually living.

Save that for a real fight, then. Good to know regardless.

He pushed through the following two days at a steady, careful pace, clearing scattered pockets of Silt Crawlers and avoiding the larger leech clusters where he could, the floor’s considerable scale demanding the same patient thoroughness every deep stretch of the Depths had eventually taught him to respect.

A third day’s travel brought him across a stretch of pooled water considerably deeper than anything he’d crossed on this floor so far, the ash settling thick enough along the bottom that Murkstep’s quiet, sediment-parting ease made the difference between a clean passage and a slow, sucking struggle. He crossed it without incident, genuinely grateful for the ability’s timing, and found a modest patch of dry stone on the far side worth a brief rest before continuing.

He spent part of that rest simply sitting and listening, an old habit Shadow Sense had reinforced over the months — not actively hunting anything, just letting the floor’s quiet, heavy ambiance settle around him while he caught his breath. A distant, rhythmic dripping carried from somewhere deeper in, steady enough that he nearly mistook it for something mechanical before dismissing it as simple water finding its way through unseen cracks in the stone above.

It was on his fourth day that he caught the first clear sign of the pattern he’d been half-expecting since Dallin’s old, offhand mentions months ago.

A Silt Crawler nest, considerably larger than anything the guild bestiary suggested was typical, sprawled across a wide stretch of the floor’s deeper pools — dozens of the creatures, nearly double the density he’d seen anywhere else on this stretch, clustered together in a way that felt less like ordinary population and more like something had pushed them all toward the same crowded ground.

He cleared a careful path through rather than engage the whole nest directly, no interest in picking a fight he didn’t need, and noted the density in his journal that evening with the same quiet, unbothered habit he’d carried for months now — one more small, unexplained detail added to a pile he’d long since stopped expecting any immediate answer from.

Odd. Not my problem today.

He wrote the rest of that evening’s entry practically, cataloguing the day’s progress without dwelling further on the nest’s strange density.

Fourth day on Sixteen. Murkstep and Siphon Touch both gained, both useful in their own way. Silt Crawler population considerably denser than expected in one stretch — noted.

He closed the journal, and let the floor’s heavy, ash-tinged quiet settle around his small camp, sleep coming steadily despite the day’s accumulated effort.

He woke the next morning already thinking ahead toward Seventeen, the floor’s boundary somewhere past the dense nest he’d skirted the day before, and pressed on with the same patient, unhurried curiosity that had carried him through every deliberate stretch of this long, strange journey — genuinely content, for now, to simply let the odd details accumulate without forcing any answer from them before their proper time arrived.