They fell.

  Sliding down the narrow ventilation shaft like garbage tossed into a drain.

  Li Wei landed first. His soles hit soft ground carpeted with thick moss. He rolled forward, absorbing the impact with the instinctive reflex of a feral cat, and came up instantly in a crouch. Dagger drawn in his right hand, smoke bomb primed in his left.

  His dark eyes swept the surroundings.

  Clear.

  No movement. Only an ancient silence that pressed heavy against the chest.

  "Ow..."

  A graceless thud behind him announced a landing that fell well short of elegant. Aria dropped hard onto her back, her expensive white silk gown now humiliatingly stained with purple mud and wet fungal spores.

  "Take it easy," Li Wei muttered without bothering to turn around. "You want to wake up the entire cave?"

  Aria grumbled, brushing at her gown. "Not everyone in this world has rubber bones like you, Mr. Guide."

  They stood now at the floor of the Cavern — the main chamber of the massive cave.

  And what lay before them successfully dismantled rational thought.

  If the world above felt dead, toxic, and gray, down here it had erupted into color. Thousands — perhaps millions — of glowing mushrooms crept across every inch of stone surface. The twenty-meter cave walls looked exactly like a night sky packed dense with clusters of purple and red stars. Their light illuminated the air, thick with floating spores that drifted slowly and gracefully like eternal snow.

  This wasn't just a wild mushroom field. This was a central bank vault with its door left wide open.

  Li Wei forced himself to swallow. His usually ice-cold eyes trembled, barely containing the surge rising inside him.

  A single intact Death Mushroom on the black market could trade a family out of starvation for a full year. In this place? There was enough to buy a small kingdom outright.

  "Stop gawking," Aria's sharp voice cut through the wild arithmetic spinning in Li Wei's head.

  She had already moved forward. Her eyes lit up blue as her Appraisal skill engaged. "We only have a short window before the passive Stealth buff from the moss in this room burns off."

  Aria drew a pair of shimmering silver silk gloves from her spatial ring. She moved toward the nearest cluster with the precision of an elite surgeon. She didn't pull the mushrooms carelessly. She trimmed each stem clean with a small silver knife, leaving the root system intact to regenerate, then stored each one carefully in a wooden case lined with velvet.

  "Very professional," Li Wei remarked dryly, though his scavenger's heart was privately forced to respect it.

  "It's called Resource Management," Aria replied coldly without looking back. "Only barbaric primitives yank herbs out by the root. Damage the root and the potency drops fifty percent."

  Li Wei exhaled quietly through his nose. He had no moisture-proof velvet case. No silver silk gloves. Only a secondhand burlap sack he'd taken from his uncle's kitchen.

  He drifted to the opposite side of the chamber from Aria. He targeted a cluster of mushrooms growing low along the wet ground.

  His rough hands moved like machinery.

  Pull. Into the sack. Pull. Into the sack.

  To hell with trimming quality. For Li Wei, quantity was the absolute king.

  Five minutes passed in drawn-tight silence. The burlap sack was already half full. His breathing had picked up, driven by the rapid pulse of adrenaline and greed.

  Everything was going smoothly. Too smoothly.

  Then the corner of Li Wei's eye caught something in a narrow gap between the rocks, half-hidden behind the massive mound of earth rising at the center of the cave.

  A mushroom.

  But its color was wrong.

  Where millions of other mushrooms radiated a calm, pale purple, this one was deep blood-red. It was tiny — no larger than an infant's thumb — but its glow was so intense it seemed to pulse in sync with a heartbeat.

  [ITEM: ???]

  [SCAN FAILED]

  Li Wei's system sight failed to read it. But his scavenger's instincts screamed loud enough to tear his ears: Extremely Rare Item.

  "Jackpot," Li Wei breathed.

  Without thinking twice, without recalling for even a second Aria's cutting remarks about the limits of his eyes, Li Wei reached out his bare hand.

  He gripped the red mushroom's stem.

  SZZZT!

  Not the sound of a snapping twig.

  That was the sound of fresh meat searing against red-hot iron.

  "ARGH!"

  Li Wei's breath locked in his chest. His scream died strangled in his throat.

  He wrenched his hand back on reflex, but the cursed thing wouldn't release. It was melting — not into sticky liquid, but into thick black smoke that immediately crawled up his right arm like a living snake.

  [ABNORMAL STATUS DETECTED!]

  [CURSE: PHANTOM NECROSIS]

  [HP: -50... -50... -50...]

  The blood along Li Wei's entire right arm went ice-cold in an instant.

  He watched with his own eyes as his skin dried out, shifting from its natural tone to a dead gray before darkening to a dense black. The veins along his forearm rose to the surface, turning deep purple, pumping a pain that made no rational sense.

  It felt like millions of fire ants — the kind that fed on carrion — were consuming his flesh and bone marrow simultaneously from the inside.

  "Damn it... damn it all!"

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Li Wei dropped to his knees. His burlap sack spilled everywhere.

  He clamped his left hand hard around his right wrist, trying physically to stop the black curse from advancing. Useless. The poison crawled past his elbow without slowing. Toward his shoulder. Toward his heart.

  Li Wei knew he was finished.

  The Basic Healing Salve in his pocket was useless here. This wasn't a physical wound. This was a magical curse.

  His brain was forced to work beyond its limit, reaching the most brutal conclusion in a fraction of a second.

  Amputation.

  The only option. Cut away the rotting branch before the whole tree dies.

  With his left hand shaking violently from nerve shock, Li Wei ripped his dagger free.

  He bit through his own lower lip until it bled, using the sharp physical pain to cut through the worst of it. He slammed his right arm down against a flat rock on the ground.

  Li Wei's eyes burned red, wild with desperation and fury. He raised the dagger blade high, taking aim at the vein just above his elbow.

  "DIE, YOU CURSED POISON!"

  The blade came down without hesitation.

  CLANG!

  Metal rang hard against metal.

  Li Wei's dagger deflected sharply away — not because it failed to cut through bone, but because the tip of a silver staff suddenly intercepted the blade exactly one inch before it touched his blackening skin.

  "Are you out of your mind?!"

  Aria's voice detonated like a shockwave, tearing through his eardrums.

  Li Wei's head snapped up, eyes wild. "Get out of the way! If I don't cut it off now, I'm dead!"

  The black had already crept past his armpit. His chest was tightening, beginning to constrict. His heart stuttered in an erratic, broken rhythm.

  "You ignorant fool," Aria snapped, her voice cutting. She didn't pull her staff back a single inch. Instead she dropped to her knees in the mud beside him, letting her velvet mushroom case fly off somewhere without a glance.

  "That's a Phantom Fungus! It doesn't attack your blood cells — it attacks your Mana Circuit. You could hack your arm off at the shoulder and the curse would still travel straight to your heart!"

  Aria raised her left palm, which suddenly blazed with blinding white light. She didn't touch Li Wei's skin directly, but held her hand hovering five centimeters above his numb shoulder.

  "Hold your breath," Aria commanded, absolute.

  [SKILL: GREATER PURIFY]

  [COST: 500 MANA]

  WHOOSH.

  A pillar of sacred white light detonated downward and hit Li Wei's body.

  It felt neither cold nor hot. It felt purely like having a bucket of boiling mercury poured directly into his veins.

  "AAAARGH!"

  Li Wei's scream broke free and echoed off every wall of the cave. For some reason, the pain of having the curse forcibly ripped out was far worse than when it had first crawled in.

  The black smoke clinging to his arm hissed and writhed, thrashing as though it were a living parasite refusing to release its host. But Aria's sacred light was more absolute. It incinerated the smoke particles completely, forcing them to retreat.

  From the shoulder... down to the elbow... ground back down to the wrist...

  Until at last, the final remnant of black smoke erupted from the tip of Li Wei's index finger and burned away into nothing in the open air.

  Li Wei collapsed face-down on the ground. His breathing came in desperate, broken gasps like a drowning fisherman just hauled onto a deck. Cold sweat the size of corn kernels soaked through every inch of him.

  He turned his head and looked at his right arm.

  The skin was badly red, raw, and trembling uncontrollably. But the dead color was gone. He was human again.

  Aria rose slowly. She brushed at the knees of her silk gown — now genuinely filthy with cave mud, past saving. Her porcelain face looked intensely annoyed, but behind her blue eyes, a flash of something she couldn't quite suppress had gotten through.

  "Physics is an extraordinary thing, Mr. Guide," Aria said, her tone sharp enough to cut glass, looking down at Li Wei still sprawled in the mud. "You can see mechanical traps. You can read the tracks of ground mice. But you forgot one fundamental fact."

  She pointed at the black liquid still hissing into the ground — what remained of the red mushroom.

  "This is a Fantasy world. There are many things here that will kill you no matter how much you rely on those laborer's arms. Never touch anything labeled high Magic Tier without Soul-Bound protective gloves. If I'd been two seconds slower reading the incantation, you'd already be a handless charred corpse."

  Li Wei steadied his breathing, forcing it into a controlled rhythm. He pushed himself to sit upright slowly, kneading his still-numb right shoulder.

  His male ego had taken a serious wound. But the cold logic underneath had no choice but to acknowledge the blunt truth.

  Without this insufferable woman... he would have cut off his own hand and died pointlessly as this Dungeon's most foolish offering.

  Score even. 1-1.

  "Thank you," Li Wei murmured quietly. Hoarse. Barely audible.

  "Keep it," Aria cut in immediately. Her eyes suddenly narrowed to a sharp point. She turned her head in a sharp snap toward the massive earthen mound at the center of the cave. "We have a much bigger problem."

  Li Wei furrowed his brow through the pain. "What?"

  "Your spell just now," Li Wei said, realizing his own stupidity in the same moment. "The light... it was too bright."

  They both turned at once.

  The brilliant white flare of Greater Purify had been extremely effective at purging a lethal curse. But its eruption of sacred energy had simultaneously sent a shockwave of magical force radiating into every corner of the deeply sleeping cave chamber.

  And something dwelling inside the earthen mound at the center had felt it.

  DUM.

  The ground beneath their feet trembled.

  Not a tectonic earthquake. That was a heartbeat.

  DUM. DUM.

  Dust and small stones began raining from the cave ceiling. The millions of purple mushrooms on the walls all dimmed at once, as though nature itself was flinching.

  "Hell," Li Wei breathed. "The Gardener's awake."

  The massive earthen mound at the center of the chamber began to split open. The tree roots as thick as a grown man's thigh that had coiled tightly around it snapped one by one, like broken threads of sewing cotton.

  CRACK. CRACK.

  Earth avalanched away, revealing what had been sleeping beneath.

  It was not a raging beast. It was not a mutated animal.

  It was a corpse.

  The corpse of an Ancient Giant, five meters tall, wearing the remains of bronze war armor long since rusted and fused to its rotting flesh. Growing from its hunched back was a massive parasite tree, its root system piercing through to control the dead giant's motor nerves like puppet strings. Its face was half-destroyed, leaving only a jagged lower jaw hanging open wide and one large yellowed eye swimming with pus that spun wild, searching for prey.

  [BOSS: THE ROTTEN GARDENER]

  [LEVEL: 55]

  [STATUS: AWAKENED]

  [STATE: FURIOUS (DISTURBED BY HOLY ENERGY)]

  The giant's yellow eye stopped spinning. Its pupil contracted to a needle point, locking absolutely and completely on Aria — the source of the sacred energy that had dared to wake it from its long sleep.

  "GYAAAAAAAAAAH!"

  The creature wrenched open its rotting jaw. No audible roar came out.

  What erupted was pure infrasound.

  A shockwave completely inaudible to the ear, but striking directly into the cerebral cortex like a massive sledgehammer.

  [DEBUFF: FEAR (STUN)]

  [DURATION: 5 SECONDS]

  "Ugh!" Li Wei clutched his head with both hands. Fresh blood poured immediately from both nostrils and ears. His legs locked rigid. He couldn't move a single finger. His brain screamed hysterically at his body to run, but every nerve connection had been severed at once by the shockwave.

  At the edge of his fading consciousness, he saw the giant's right hand rise. It held a rusted sickle the size of a fishing boat.

  The sickle swung back, lining up to split Aria and Li Wei into two asymmetrical pieces.

  Move... come on, move, you useless— Li Wei cursed his own legs silently. But the weight of a Level 55 Boss's debuff was too absolute for a Level 1 NPC's body to fight.

  Then a smooth, cold hand slapped him across the face. Hard.

  CRACK!

  The sharp physical sting successfully punched through a fraction of the Stun effect.

  Li Wei found Aria's face directly in front of his. Her small nose was also running blood, but both blue eyes burned bright with a ferocious, half-crazed will to survive.

  Aria raised her staff high, rattling off a chain of incantations at a speed that nearly tripped her own tongue.

  [BUFF: BLESSING OF WIND (AGILITY +50%)]

  [BUFF: HASTE (MOVEMENT SPEED +200%)]

  [BUFF: FEATHER STEP (WEIGHT -80%)]

  Li Wei's body surged. His weight vanished as though it had never existed. The paralyzing pain evaporated entirely, replaced by an explosion of raw energy bursting and crackling to be released.

  "Carry me!" Aria shouted in a panic. "This buff only lasts 30 seconds! RUN!"

  Li Wei didn't need to be told twice.

  The giant's sickle was already swinging down through the air. The wind of its killing edge hit their faces like a wall of ice.

  Li Wei grabbed Aria roughly around the waist, threw her body over his back, and channeled the entire blast of buff into his leg muscles.

  BOOM.

  Not the sound of an explosion — the sound of Li Wei's first footfall cracking the stone tiles beneath it from sheer force alone.

  Powered by the raging Haste Buff from a high-level Support, Li Wei no longer moved like a human running. He moved like a cannonball just fired.

  BLARR!

  The giant's sickle hit the exact spot where they had been standing a thousandth of a second prior. The stone floor was obliterated into a sea of dust. The shockwave of the impact nearly hurled them airborne, but Li Wei refused to stop. His legs kept tearing through the air.

  The world on either side of him blurred into streaks.

  He ran in hard zigzags at a speed that defied reason, dodging the parasite roots punching up from the earth trying to snare his ankles.

  "Left! Root directly ahead!" Aria shouted straight into his ear. Her right arm shot out ahead of them, firing a rapid chain of Magic Missiles into the wall of roots blocking their escape path.

  BANG. BANG.

  The roots exploded apart, blasted open, forcing a path for Li Wei's feet.

  They were no longer two individuals who despised each other. They had fused into one perfect combat unit.

  Li Wei was the chassis. Aria was the turbo engine and the cannon.

  "The ventilation shaft!" Li Wei shouted as his eyes locked on a sliver of fading purple light in the upper wall twenty meters ahead. "We won't make it! It's too high!"

  "Jump!" Aria shouted back just as loud, her hands digging into his shoulders. "I'll cast Levitate at the last second!"

  The giant behind them bellowed in fury for the second time. Enraged that its prey was too fast, it ripped a stone pillar the size of a horse cart clean from the wall and hurled it at them like a cannonball.

  The pillar's massive shadow swallowed their backs. Death was two seconds away.

  Li Wei ground his teeth until they ached. He drove every last point of buff remaining into his thigh muscles.

  "HOLD ON TIGHT!"

  Li Wei leapt.

  His body launched through the air, defying gravity's absolute authority.

  At the exact peak of his arc, just as he began to fall, the stone pillar screamed past beneath his feet and detonated against the wall ahead with an ear-splitting crack.

  "Now!"

  Aria's staff erupted in a burst of blazing light.

  [SKILL: LEVITATE]

  Their combined weight ceased to exist. A burst of magical wind slammed into their backs at the final instant, launching them both through the narrow ventilation shaft with brutal, precise force.

  THUD.

  They landed hard and rough on the ventilation corridor floor. Rolling and tumbling over each other in the cramped, dusty dark.

  Far below them in the cave, The Rotten Gardener's roar of frustration shook the foundations of the entire mountain.

  ---

  Li Wei lay flat on his back staring up at the stone ceiling. His breathing ground and rattled like a steam engine close to bursting. His heart beat so hard it vibrated his own ribs.

  Aria lay limp directly beside him. Her expensive white gown was completely beyond recognition — shredded and stained through. Her silver hair, always flawlessly arranged, was a tangled mess of dust and debris.

  Silence took over.

  Nothing remained but the sound of two sets of lungs fighting greedily for oxygen in that narrow, dark corridor.

  Gradually, Li Wei's chest stopped heaving. He turned his head. Aria — whether by accident or not — turned hers at the same moment.

  They looked at each other in the dim light. Both faces equally caked in filth. Both equally decorated with dried blood. A genuinely miserable sight.

  Then, entirely outside his own control, the corner of Li Wei's mouth lifted slightly.

  "You're heavier than you look," Li Wei said, his voice dry and hoarse.

  Aria scoffed. But there was no arrogance in it this time. No disgust. The woman raised her trembling hand and punched his shoulder lightly.

  "That's the weight of your sins, Mr. Guide," she shot back flatly.

  Aria slowly lifted her left hand above her chest, revealing the small wooden velvet case that she had somehow — impossibly — held onto and kept clutched through every second of the insane escape.

  Seeing it, Li Wei smiled faintly. He patted his hip and tapped his burlap sack — which, against all reasonable expectations, was still tied securely in place, though its contents had spilled down to roughly half.

  They had made it out. Both of them had gotten what they came for.

  And now, every debt of life and every transaction between them had been paid in full.

  Here in this narrow corridor between the living and the dead, the time had finally come to decide: where would their separate paths lead from here?