Chapter 219: Reaching the Fifth Floor

Vlad climbed out of the pit, reaching the surface of the room.

"Now comes the moment of revelation," he murmured, swallowing hard.

His hands slowly rose to his face in nervousness, reaching his cheeks. He tapped his skin first softly, then more aggressively.

His brows furrowed, his jaw tightening. Still not convinced of his current condition, he took out a hand-sized mirror from his storage ring and closely examined his face.

"The fuck! It’s already been four years!" His voice gradually rose, echoing through the empty room. "Then why can’t I still grow a beard!?"

Forget about a beard, there wasn’t even a hint of hair on his face, like a shaved boiled potato.

The dream of keeping a masculine beard with long hair just like his dad now seemed even more difficult than becoming the Legendary Knight.

"Wait a minute," Vlad muttered, closely examining his face. "Except for my skin becoming more lush and flawless, I look exactly the same as I did four years ago."

Ignoring his narcissistic words, he really did look the same. If not for his hair almost reaching his lower back, he wouldn’t even believe that four years had passed. He hadn’t aged a single day, after all.

"It might be an aftereffect of the golden liquid in the pond," Vlad wondered to himself. "If I haven’t really aged, then doesn’t that mean there is still a chance that I could grow a beard? I shouldn’t lose hope just yet."

He clenched his fist in determination, putting the mirror back. He drew a dark key with the number five engraved on it as he reached the locked door on the opposite wall.

He inserted the key and rotated it clockwise. Following the familiar shifting of gears and groans of the heavy door, the room beyond was revealed to his eyes.

It was the largest room among all five, illuminated by a moonlight-like glow from the glowing stones embedded in the walls.

Surprisingly, there were two more doors on the walls to his left and right. Only one of them had a keyhole.

"Are there floors beyond the fifth one?" Vlad wondered, tilting his head as he stepped inside.

The door behind him closed, sealing shut.

At the centre of the massive hall stood a raised platform in the shape of a rhombus with a flat upper surface.

Surrounding the tomb, concentric metallic rings were embedded in the floor, each one intricately engraved with ancient runes.

Atop the tomb, a dark, obsidian-like dagger was stabbing into its surface, its shining surface reflecting the faint glow of the room.

Ding...

[You have entered the first phase of the fifth floor of the Ascension Dungeon.

Kill yourself to enter the second phase.]

"..."

No response came from Vlad for several seconds.

"Hahaha, the system has finally lost it," he laughed, shaking his head.

Slowly, his laughter died, veins bulging on his forehead. "The fuck do you mean, kill yourself!?" he demanded, grabbing the screen panel with both hands. "If I die, does it matter whether I clear the first phase or not?"

The system didn’t respond. Vlad pressed his temples with both hands. Ranting at an AI wouldn’t change anything.

None of the tasks of the Ascension Dungeon had been an easy ride. Striking the spheres several thousand times on the first floor, fighting a crazy puppet on the second floor, experiencing soul-shaking illusions on the third that put an unimaginable strain on his mind, and bathing in literal lava on the fourth floor for four freaking years.

Looking back, all of them seemed to have been designed by a psycho. But undeniably, these floors were the very reason Vlad managed to move past the limit of his D-Ranked body.

But still... the madness of the fifth floor surpassed them all. No matter how he looked at it, killing himself didn’t seem like a good idea at all.

He decided to look around the hall first. Perhaps there was another meaning hidden behind the system’s words. It wouldn’t really ask him to kill himself, right?

As Vlad analysed the array of over a dozen rings, each one over two metres wide, he couldn’t help but relate it to the array in the second cave of the dungeon where Daemoth was breeding the monsters.

The central tomb seemed to be the place for a sacrifice, and the array was most likely supposed to channel the blood from that tomb.

Now the only question remained. What was this array supposed to charge?

He reached the tomb and grabbed the hilt of the obsidian blade. It came out with relative ease.

Vlad decided to run some tests instead of blindly following the system’s command. He dragged his palm along the sharp edge of the dagger, leaving a deep cut.

He placed his hand on the tomb. A large rune that had not been visible before appeared on the tomb’s surface.

Vlad’s crimson liquid, with a faint golden glow, spread outward across the tomb itself, reaching the array on both sides. He felt as if his blood was being sucked into the tomb.

When the blood entered the first array, its runes flickered with a crimson light before settling into a steady glow.

More blood flowed from Vlad’s hand, reaching the outer rings.

Once all of them were illuminated, barely visible golden particles of energy emerged from the small hollow in the tomb where the dagger had been stabbed. They immediately dissipated into thin air.

Vlad pulled his hand back. The glow from the runes vanished, and the flow of golden particles stopped.

Vlad now had a vague idea of what this array was supposed to charge.

He climbed onto the tomb and lay flat upon it, positioning his back with the hole in the tomb.

His grip around the dagger tightened as he muttered, "If I really die, I’m going to hunt down whoever is the creator of this Legacy System."

With that declaration, he raised the dagger, holding it with both hands, its sharp end pointing at his chest.

He took deep, heavy breaths, feeling extremely anxious.

"I really don’t want to die," he muttered, closing his eyes and descending the dagger in one decisive motion.

It sliced cleanly through his skin and bones and stabbed into his heart, only stopping when its tip entered the hole in the tomb below.