14th Floor (2)

I entered the 14th floor of the tower with a heavy bag.

Today, every sense felt unusually vivid.

I could see thin wisps of miasma mixed into the humid air.

They were things I hadn't been able to see before.

This was also thanks to the effect of the newly acquired Insight Eye.

Just like the skill description said—"it doesn't show you everything"—it really was making the invisible visible.

"So this miasma is a kind of mana after all."

A god said to dwell in all things.

That was just another expression for mana.

The miasma on the 10th through 19th floors was just a twisted form of mana.

I reached into my coat and pulled out the World Tree seed, now grown to the size of a soccer ball.

It was honestly too big to even call a seed anymore.

The moment I took out the seed, the flow of the surrounding air changed.

The mana mixed with miasma was drawn into the seed, and purified, pristine mana flowed out the other side.

It was like a giant air purifier filter.

"If I plant this, will a World Tree eventually grow...?"

For a moment, I felt like planting it on the hill behind the neighborhood and growing it myself.

Maybe it would make a good landmark for Daejeon, the boring city whose only local attraction was a bakery.

A city with a World Tree in it.

Researchers and tourists from all over the world would flock there.

Daejeon's sluggish economy would probably come back to life too.

"But mine has to be saved as a hidden piece for the 20th floor.... Ah, can't I get another World Tree somewhere?"

After finishing my useless, boring daydream, I started tidying up the area.

Today's goal was, above all else, magic training.

I had to clear out any monsters that might get in the way of my training.

I casually activated Desertification and dealt with the goblins whose camouflage had vanished, leaving them looking like idiots.

Under the tower's system, if you kill all the monsters, it automatically clears.

This time, I planned to stay in the tower as long as possible and train.

So I needed to leave a few of them alive.

I made a few sand clones and firmly trapped one goblin.

Then I surrounded it on all sides with tall sand walls.

A perfect sand prison was complete.

"Ah, I should probably make an air hole."

If it suffocated to death, that would be very troublesome.

I drilled a small hole in one side of the wall.

"Hmm, even then I still don't feel safe...."

I used to keep a fish called a guppy when I was little.

Those little things would just keel over and die for no reason.

And sometimes, while changing the tank water, a few would accidentally get sucked down the drain.

Goblins are the same.

They're so weak to me now that even a tap kills them.

A fleeting death.

I caught two more goblins nearby as backups and trapped them the same way.

Now, even if one of them happened to die suddenly, I didn't have to worry about the tower clearing itself out of nowhere.

That finally put me at ease.

My next target was the trent.

I used Desertification to plow up the ground and search the jungle.

Soon, the trents hiding there were exposed.

With familiar motions, I harvested the fruit.

All of the harvested fruit was greedily devoured by the World Tree seed.

And then, once again, I discovered something new.

"So it wasn't trash after all."

The shriveled fruit the World Tree seed had eaten and spat back out.

I'd thought it was trash before, so I'd just thrown it away.

But the fruit seen through Insight Eye was different.

The trent's fruit wasn't just mana flowing through it. Miasma was flowing through it at the same time.

The trent was absorbing the mana and miasma that filled this jungle.

It used the mana as nourishment and gathered the remaining miasma to make fruit.

That was the true nature of the fruit.

"Wait, so people have been eating trent shit this whole time?"

Was that why it stayed neutral even after the fruit was picked?

Humans had basically just been playing the role of the trent's bidet?

I suddenly felt disgusted.

"I was even thinking of buying some fruit to eat later...."

But the wrinkly fruit the seed spit out was different.

The miasma had been perfectly filtered out, leaving only pure life force condensed inside.

"It's a little gross since it's poop that ate poop and shat it back out, though...."

I fell into deep thought before the purified fruit.

I had a strong feeling that eating this would definitely help me.

But its appearance and origin both bothered me.

"Ah, screw it. I'll just eat it. It looks good enough at a glance anyway...."

Right, I used to eat dirt off the ground.

What in the world couldn't I eat now?

I squeezed my eyes shut and put the fruit in my mouth.

And spat it right back out in 0.1 seconds flat.

"Ptui! Ugh.... This tastes like absolute shit...."

It was a taste beyond words, a horrifying one. The astringent, fishy flavor ravaged my tongue.

This was by no means something a human could possibly eat.

Even after rinsing my mouth out with water several times, the awful taste still lingered.

But I had one final method.

"If it doesn't taste good, then all I have to do is get rid of the taste, right?"

Using Weathering, I turned the fruit into sand.

When it came to eating sand, I was an unrivaled expert.

I put the sand into a water bottle and shook it up.

The important thing was to gulp it down before the sand settled again.

I swallowed the sand in one gulp without hesitation.

"Hmm.... Maybe this tastes different from the sand I usually eat...?"

Maybe because it was sand that still had its original source, it felt different going down.

Soon after, I could feel a heavy mass of mana flowing down my esophagus.

Soon after that, something warm settled near my solar plexus.

My intuition told me this was an elixir.

I processed the remaining fruit the same way and swallowed them all.

Gulp, gulp.

"Uh... I don't think this is good...."

It was when I swallowed the tenth one.

Suddenly, my insides grew hot as if they were on fire.

I was convinced something had gone wrong.

I hurriedly sat down cross-legged and began meditating.

Looking inward, I saw an enormous, uncontrollable mass of mana raging wildly inside my body.

How was I supposed to control this?

The mana raged through my blood vessels like a living snake, thrashing wildly.

"Ngh...."

Pain so intense it made my mind go blank.

If I left it like this, it felt like my body would burst from the inside.

I desperately focused my mind and tried to control the flow of mana. But it was no use.

It was as hard as trying to stop a flood with my palm.

My consciousness was swept away by the rampaging mana.

The sand around me began to go on a rampage.

A giant wave of sand rose up, and sharp sandstorms lashed about.

The entire desert I'd created came alive, grinding everything around it to dust.

I sat in the middle of that storm, trying desperately to control it.

"No, at this rate, I'll get swept away...!"

I was resisting this immense current head-on.

But the more I fought, the more violently the mana pushed back.

"No, that's not it."

Amid the pain of my body being torn apart, a long-forgotten sensation suddenly came back to me.

The moment I made the sand totem. The memory of my arm collapsing on its own and returning to a handful of sand.

Back then, I had thought...

Sand is still sand, even when it scatters. Nothing needs to be bound by form. Not even my body.

"Right, that was it."

I was treating this rampaging mana as an enemy from outside.

No, that wasn't it.

The Inner God is connected to the world.

And my body is made of mana, too.

This, too, is part of me.

I stopped trying to be the dam blocking the torrent of mana.

Instead, I decided to open a channel for it.

I pushed Insight Eye to its limit.

I focused on the Inner God.

It was the center of my magical power, the vessel that held everything I was.

I didn't try to force the raging life force into the vessel.

Instead, I put a hole in it.

I focused my mind and drilled one tiny, tightly packed hole after another.

The vessel was now becoming a sieve, letting mana flow through it.

My Inner God began to change little by little.

Its faint outline grew clearer. Starting from my feet, sand began slowly to fill me.

The elixir's mana mixed with my own and merged perfectly into one.

"Haaah...."

I exhaled deeply.

The sandstorm raging wildly around me died down as if nothing had happened.

The grains of sand that had been rampaging in all directions all began to align at once.

I opened my eyes again.

The grains floating in the air sparkled like stars in the night sky.

I had no idea how much time had passed.

The surroundings had been completely devastated.

The sand prison that had held the goblins was gone without a trace.

And in front of me, the familiar clear message floated there.

Apparently, the poor goblins had all died in the chaos.

I offered a brief prayer for the goblins' souls.

I paid my respects briefly and left the tower.

My training plan had been completely ruined in just one day.

If I wanted to climb the tower again, I'd have to wait a whole day.

But it wasn't like I'd gained nothing. I looked down at my feet.

Swish, both feet turned into fine sand and scattered away.

My Inner God had become just a little more sand-colored.

In other words, I had gotten much closer to my original goal.

But I still had a long way to go before I could turn my whole body to sand.

"Where the hell was I supposed to use the ability to turn my feet to sand?"

I let out a sigh.

It wasn't like I was going to start firing toe bullets if all my fingers fell off.

Above all, my legs weren't even good as magical materials.

Wouldn't that be a disaster if I had to run?

If anything, I wished my head or heart had been the first parts to turn to sand.

***

And then came the remaining four days.

I repeated the same thing four more times.

I roamed the 14th floor, harvested fruit, turned it into elixir, and used it for training.

The first day's rampage must have done me some good, because the process of absorbing the elixir and controlling the mana became more skillful by the day.

Finally, on the fifth day.

I sat quietly in the middle of the room and closed my eyes.

It was time to check the results of the past five days.

When I focused, a familiar sensation rose from the tips of my toes.

Rustle.

Both feet turned into fine sand and flowed down to the floor.

But it didn't stop there.

The sensation of turning to sand climbed past my ankles, up my calves, over my knees, and straight to my thighs.

I opened my eyes.

My lower body was no longer made of flesh and bone.

From the waist down, only two pillars of sand remained.

Success.

I smiled in satisfaction.

I returned my sand-formed lower body to its original state.

Five days of focused training had come to an end.

Now, the next goal was clear.

The 15th floor. It was time to meet the old man who carves magic once more.