This Dungeon Grew Mushrooms

The misunderstanding was resolved quickly. A delegation of around a hundred people moving together among fire elementals was hard to miss.

“The rumors about the Daughter of Arama commanding an elemental army… they weren’t exaggerated at all!”

Duvalin Blacksteel, who had been entrusted with the crucial task of reclaiming the dungeon, held a position of great importance within the Mountain Kingdom. The intelligence at his disposal was naturally thorough and detailed.

However, the records concerning the “Battle of Dragonroar Valley” were much like the reactions of most dukes within the Empire when they read them—certain parts of the reports were simply too bizarre, to the point that people instinctively assumed they were misinformation or exaggeration.

Especially the line stating that “Inanna, daughter of Arama, commanded an elemental army.” Almost everyone’s first reaction upon seeing it was outright disbelief. It went completely against common sense.

As a result, when analysts reconstructed the battle afterward, they tended to interpret “the elemental army attacking the demon race” as humans using artifacts and clever schemes to divert disaster toward their enemies, rather than as the pure manifestation of an individual’s power.

It was only when Duvalin saw with his own eyes those unnaturally docile fire elementals clustering obediently behind Inanna that he realized the intelligence was actually one hundred percent accurate.

And the moment that realization sank in, Duvalin immediately understood just how much help Inanna could provide to the dwarves in reclaiming the dungeon.

That said, Duvalin did not directly request Inanna’s cooperation.

She was, after all, the representative of an envoy delegation, the daughter of Duke Arama, and a war hero on the human side. She was not someone he could casually command.

If he wished to secure her assistance, it would likely have to be negotiated later, at a formal bargaining table.

Since there might be opportunities for cooperation down the line, Duvalin naturally did not make things difficult for the delegation when it came to passage.

However, the two sides did come into disagreement over how to deal with this group of fire elementals.

Duvalin’s thinking was straightforward: eliminate them on the spot to prevent future trouble.

Inanna firmly opposed this.

These fire elementals had revealed themselves out of closeness to her. If she turned around and sold them out immediately, she would not be able to rest easy, whether emotionally or morally.

Back then, after leading storm elementals to attack the demon race in order to save the old man, she had felt down for a long time because of it.

In the end, Duvalin made a concession and allowed Inanna to lead the fire elementals back into the Moltenfire Dungeon.

When Inanna arrived at the dungeon entrance, the fire elementals that had been fiercely battling the dwarven garrison seemed to sense something. Their offensive gradually slowed.

Inanna released a luminous light orb into the depths of the dungeon. In the next moment, the fire elementals gathered nearby all turned in unison and chased after the light.

The dwarves did not waste this rare opportunity to catch their breath. They moved swiftly, retaking and reinforcing several key defensive positions.

After Inanna withdrew, dull impacts and bursts of magic soon echoed once more from the entrance. The fighting continued.

There was nothing Inanna could do about that. The conflict between the two sides was not something she could mediate at present.

In the end, Duvalin still assigned two squads to escort the delegation away along logistics routes that had already been repeatedly cleared.

However, as they were leaving, Inanna asked with some confusion through the fungus network, “Where is the knight?”

The knight was still sitting on the roof of the carriage, yet within the fungus network’s perception, there was no puji there.

A response came through the network from Aiden: “Miss Inanna, the knight has other business to attend to. This is an illusion I created—please don’t expose it.”

Inanna glanced toward Aiden, who had been mixed in with the accompanying soldiers from the very start, disguised as an ordinary trooper, and nodded without drawing attention.

To be honest, if not for the fungus network, Inanna might have suspected that this too was a fake person.

She could not discern Aiden’s illusion at all with her own abilities.

Meanwhile, the real knight puji, after taking a brief tour of the Goldflame City that had been devastated by the elementals, quietly slipped into the Moltenfire Dungeon.

Stonefort Dungeon also had a rift leading to this place. Unfortunately, not only had the exit been buried by rubble, even the rift itself was extremely unstable. After a brief expansion, it continued to contract and had now shrunk by half.

If the rift had opened within Dungeon Thirteen, Lin Jun could naturally have maintained its existence through his control over the dungeon.

But in the northern Stonefort Dungeon, Lin Jun only had usage rights. This was also why he had never actively carried out exploration on this side.

No matter how many results he achieved, once the fungus carpet was cut off, it would all be for nothing.

The first sensation upon entering was heat.

Of course, puji were not affected by environmental heat.

With the knight’s resistances, once layered with stone armor, he could even operate in magma for a period of time.

Still, if this kind of scorching environment were imposed on humans, it would likely block the vast majority of adventurers right at the dungeon entrance.

It could only be said that dwarves truly deserved their reputation as one of the races with the highest overall resistances, second only to trolls.

The invisible knight puji advanced along the dungeon ceiling, relying on the sticky mucus on his feet.

Below, various fire and earth elemental spirits were moving in waves toward the dungeon entrance, driven by pulses of mental energy.

Among them, Lin Jun also spotted the type of elemental spirit capable of creating embers. It was the kind with a core entity, which was undoubtedly good news for him.

However, the enemies were numerous and he was alone—this was not the time to act.

After Inspiration reached LV8, Lin Jun was now able to observe abstract things like mental energy fluctuations.

Clearly, something was commanding these elemental spirits. Most likely, it was the elemental lord.

Lin Jun was quite interested in this elemental lord.

From the information he had gathered, this fire elemental lord actually possessed intelligence and was capable of communication.

The two elemental lords Lin Jun had taken from the abyss were powerful, but in terms of intelligence, they did not seem much superior to ordinary frost spirits. They could not communicate and behaved more like wild magical beasts driven purely by instinct.

Of course, that might have been because they came from the abyss and were incomplete.

Unfortunately, the water elemental lord of the Tidal Sanctum, which had likewise served as a dungeon elemental guardian, had vanished into the fog before Lin Jun could even meet it. He had no idea whether it was dead or had been taken away, otherwise it could have served as a point of comparison.

Most importantly, Lin Jun wanted to know whether this fire elemental lord had a soul.

So far, Lin Jun had never seen a true soul on any elemental spirit.

In the view of Inspiration, they were like most monsters and plants, composed of a kind of gray substance.

This substance also existed on true souls. Lin Jun’s Greed would strip away these gray substances and return the naked soul to the world.

That was why, when Lin Jun disassembled plants and monsters, he truly ate everything—leaving nothing behind.

Lin Jun suspected that this gray substance was related to skills.

The Moltenfire Dungeon was far larger than expected. Its internal structure resembled a natural labyrinth within a mountain, layered and overlapping, winding and circuitous, sharing the same style as the surrounding mountain range.

During his exploration, Lin Jun also discovered fragments of metal rings scattered in corners or embedded in rock walls. He recognized these as pieces of “enslavement rings,” a cheap and not particularly reliable control device.

Clearly, the rumors that dwarves had enslaved elemental spirits for labor were not baseless.

Lin Jun did not think there was anything wrong with this. After all, elemental spirits did not even possess souls. However, the dwarves clearly lacked the ability to suppress a full-scale slave uprising.

After a day and a half of cautious exploration through the blazing maze, Lin Jun finally approached the lowest level.

Here, the temperature had risen to a terrifying degree. The air was filled with visibly distorted heat waves, and even the rocks faintly glowed dark red.

Even the knight puji, who possessed High Temperature Resistance LV10, began to suffer negative status effects.

“Who? Who’s nearby?” Before Lin Jun even saw the elemental lord, a roar mixed with rage and frenzy echoed throughout the massive space. “A bug has crawled in! Find him and tear him apart!”

A terrifying mental shockwave spread outward. In an instant, the elemental spirits nearby, which had been calmly enjoying the scorching environment, all erupted into chaos. Flames surged several times higher, molten bodies churning violently.

Unable to precisely locate the hidden knight puji, they adopted the most primitive and brutal method—

indiscriminate, wide-area attacks!