This Dungeon Grew Mushrooms

Gains and Losses

“Um… can this be taken out later?” Lin Jun asked as he looked at the staff firmly embedded in the seal, feeling a wave of heartache.

“As long as the seal is repaired, it can be removed,” the old fishman explained.

“Then you—”

“Puji Lord, regrettably, I know very little about this seal.”

Great. The biggest gain of this trip had, in the blink of an eye, turned into a seal patch that could only be looked at, not used.

And with the loss of the staff, even the advantage of freely coming and going through the hidden passages was gone as well…

Wait, how did Tanaka—the one who betrayed the path of the hero and chose to consort with the Demon King—manage to use the hidden passages?

Lin Jun immediately gave the order to gather all the magic items Tanaka had dropped and bring them over.

After testing them one by one, they quickly locked onto a plain-looking silver ring.

With a small injection of magic power, intricate runic circuits surfaced on the ring’s surface. No matter which hidden passage entrance it was aimed at, part of the runes would resonate with the activation patterns of the passage. It was clearly a universal key crafted specifically for the Tidal Sanctum.

Although the rune integration was extremely high and the structure complex, the difficulty of its craftsmanship was not actually that great. Replicating it would not be hard at all.

Lin Jun could easily have his craftsmen make a batch of imitations based on this sample.

But that also meant there might be other holders out there, also possessing this kind of key.

Hidden passages could no longer be assumed to be an exclusive advantage. Otherwise, they would suffer losses like this again.

Aside from this key ring, the remaining items—protective bracelets, underwater breathing pendants, stealth rings, and the like—might be a considerable fortune for a lone adventurer, but they were nothing special to Lin Jun.

What really stood out was the seal-breaking slab. It had actually been able to damage the Demon King’s seal!

The puji dungeon also had a portion of the Demon King sealed within it. Lin Jun had studied that seal carefully—it was tightly integrated with the dungeon’s structure and was almost impossible to destroy by brute force.

Yet this slab had managed to do exactly that.

Without question, it was a treasure.

The only uncertainty was whether its effect was limited to Demon King seals, or whether it was also effective against all magical seals or even magic formations in general. That would require careful analysis later.

Lin Jun noticed that the old fishman had been staring blankly at the shattered metal ring nearby and asked, “Is there something special about that thing?”

From the old fishman’s explanation, Lin Jun learned that there had previously been a water element lord guarding this place.

That massive ring, over ten meters in diameter, had belonged to that lord.

Yet even such a powerful water element lord had vanished without a sound during the period when the mist enveloped everything.

So there really had been a watchdog, but it had been taken away by the mist!

Thinking about it that way, dungeon cores seemed to all have similar guardians.

The stone fortress dungeon’s ancient relic, which had already declined to the point where it couldn’t even maintain its rules, could be ignored for now.

The puji dungeon had two S-rank battle constructs. The Divine Wood Dungeon had those Pale Pilgrims—or simply the Divine Wood old bastard himself standing guard at the gate. The dwarf dungeon had yet to be fully explored, but that fire element lord that had turned the dwarven lands upside down was probably, in essence, also a gatekeeper.

What about the Scarecrow Abyss?

To this day, no one had ever found the true location of its core. That dungeon’s mechanisms were far too bizarre, involving multi-layered spatial overlap. Its exploration difficulty exceeded that of other places by far.

As for the dungeons within the Empire, Lin Jun didn’t know much about them.

“Boss, that… magma-slime person earlier—who was that?” Norris asked.

Lin Jun thought about it and decided there was no harm in telling the core members. “Just a lump of Demon King.”

“The Demon King?!” Norris shuddered instinctively.

Almost simultaneously, fragments buried deep in his memory surged up—bits and pieces of stories he’d heard from bards and drunken old adventurers back when he’d still been hounded by debt.

It was said that humans had once lived for generations on the fertile central plains.

Then the Demon King descended, commanding countless evil races and unleashing boundless slaughter.

The survivors were forced to abandon their homeland and flee south, to what had then been untamed jungle, struggling to survive between miasma and monsters.

Yet even that wasn’t enough for the Demon King.

He sought to bring the entire continent under his control, enslave all races, and leave only the Empire standing.

That was just too…

For some reason, at that moment, Norris’s mind conjured an image of mycelial carpets spreading across the land, and of all races living in symbiosis with the fungal threads.

He shook his head hard, throwing that abrupt association out of his mind.

Although Boss loved tormenting people, constantly scheming to spread the mycelium to every corner of the world, and secretly conducting scalp-tingling experiments on criminals… deep down, Norris still believed that Boss was, in the end, a good person.

At the very least… probably… he couldn’t be compared to a legendary embodiment of evil like the Demon King, right?

Once he realized that the earlier phantom had been the Demon King, the faint goodwill he’d felt from being “recognized as human” instantly evaporated.

No human failed to loathe the founder of the Empire.

If not for the hero’s appearance, humans today would likely have long since been reduced to blood clan livestock—or worse.

The Demon King’s name filled Norris with fear and unease. Ming’s reaction, however, was completely different. He felt almost nothing at all.

If Xinghuo, Shou, or Qiong had been present, they might have fallen into brief silence and reflection.

Although this new generation hadn’t personally lived through the era of the Demon King’s rule, they’d still heard of that age’s glory through elders’ recollections.

Now, with sides changed, having to face the legendary Demon King as an enemy would inevitably stir complex emotions.

But Ming was different. He was a pure mushroomkin. He had no feelings toward the Demon King. To him, the Demon King was simply Boss’s enemy—a powerful and detestable enemy.

Little Pig’s reaction, on the other hand, was far more interesting.

When she first heard the words “Demon King,” her pupils shrank sharply, and an instinctive trace of fear crossed her face.

But then, as if she thought of something, that fear quickly faded.

In its place, a nearly scorching light flared in her eyes. The corners of her mouth lifted uncontrollably, revealing an excitement she could barely suppress.

Lin Jun had no idea what she was excited about, but it was still better than simple fear.

As for the seal and the staff, there was nothing to be done for now.

However, the cleanup of the Tidal Sanctum was not yet complete.

They had successfully taken control of the main gate and established defensive lines, killing all the mist monsters that wandered into the dungeon one after another.

These mist monsters seemed to lack intelligence. They didn’t even understand the logic of gathering into a wave before attacking together.

Although the gate was secured, there were still quite a number of mist monsters roaming throughout the interior of the Tidal Sanctum that needed to be cleared out.

This wasn’t just for the sake of trade with the fishmen—the Tidal Sanctum itself held considerable value.

The underwater environment allowed Lin Jun to use it as a base to develop a puji navy.

And the dungeon’s built-in auxiliary space was equally tempting to him.

If he could gain control over this auxiliary space, there would be no need to go out of his way to search for that unknown space within the Empire—at least not urgently.

Moreover, the exit of the Tidal Sanctum was now quite close to the edge of the mist, which was precisely why so many mist monsters appeared here.

For others, the mist was a calamity to be avoided at all costs.

But since Lin Jun intended to save the world for himself, the mist was an unavoidable problem.

Rather than waiting on the continent for the mist to spread back and threaten his core territories,

it would be far better to take advantage of a forward-base-like location such as the Tidal Sanctum to study the mist in advance.

If one day the mist truly swallowed the Tidal Sanctum, Lin Jun could always retreat. The losses wouldn’t be too great.

With a single order from Lin Jun, Little Pig began sweeping operations throughout the Tidal Sanctum.

At the same time, far away, the envoy led by Inanna finally arrived at the border of the Dwarven Mountain Kingdom after a long journey.

Only, the looks the dwarves cast toward the delegation did not seem particularly friendly.