Twisted, unstable edges.
Two completely different regions separated by just one side.
No matter how he looked at it, this was a rift.
And it was the size of a manhole cover—much larger than the one guarded by the two-colored slime on the sixth floor, which at most was only fist-sized.
The poor caveman hadn’t noticed the rift at all and fell straight into it. His chances of survival were slim.
Lin Jun’s plan to track the cavemen back to their home naturally failed as well. He could only hope to encounter them again later.
But the key point was still this rift!
Since he hadn’t found any rift on the seventh floor, Lin Jun had thought the one under the two-colored slime was the dungeon’s only breach.
He hadn’t expected to so easily come across an even larger one in the deep layers.
He definitely didn’t believe this was a coincidence—that the only rift in the deep layers just happened to be found by him.Most likely, there were already quite a few rifts down here…
Though he couldn’t figure out why the seventh floor—sandwiched between the sixth and the deep layers—had no rift at all, for now it was more urgent to investigate the one in front of him.
The other side didn’t seem cursed, so maybe it could be explored.
Of course, he couldn’t risk any of his relatively precious elite Pujis.
Luckily, this spot was directly connected to the cave he had just occupied, and soon a freshly spawned bat Puji came flapping over.
He had it jump in while using 【Sonic Detection】.
Then—
Nothing…
The sound waves spread out but bounced back from nothing at all.
And after the bat Puji jumped in, it just kept moving steadily away from the rift.
It tried to flap back, but it was useless.
Through 【Familiar Control】, Lin Jun sensed it drifting farther… and farther…
Until suddenly, without warning, the connection was lost.
Lin Jun couldn’t quite make sense of what had happened.
It wasn’t like his skill should be blocked—【Familiar Control】 had always worked even at great distances; he had suspected it had no range limit at all.
Yet this bat Puji had barely fallen any distance before being lost?
And it didn’t seem to have been attacked either—【Sonic Detection】 hadn’t found a thing.
No terrain, no creatures—the other side seemed completely empty.
Could it really be a rift leading to nothingness?
Like those tales from his past life, of the void outside the world?
Soon he sent in several more disposable Pujis. They linked together with fungal threads, one anchored to a rock while the rest jumped in.
The moment they entered, gravity disappeared.
If he had to describe it, it felt like outer space.
Lin Jun hadn’t expected that after transmigrating to another world, he would get to experience a zero-gravity space adventure. To be honest, it was pretty fun!
After playing around, he threw several Pujis off in different directions.
All of them, sooner or later, suddenly lost connection at some point.
So the first case hadn’t been a fluke.
The other side really was an uninhabitable void.
Strange, but apparently not dangerous—at least he didn’t need to worry about monsters or curses spilling out.
But that was only this rift.
Before long, he spawned another batch of bat Pujis purely to scout.
They flew into more than a dozen huge tunnels branching off from the cave, conducting a carpet search, and sure enough—they found a second rift!
But this one was tiny, like the eye of a needle.
If not for its distinctive twisted edges, Lin Jun might never have noticed it.
It was extremely unstable. He tried extending mycelium into it, but everything was shredded instantly by warped space.
In the end, he could only mark it for observation.
This proved the deep layers were already riddled with holes.
Everything had been fine before he left, yet the damage had spread so quickly.
Now he wondered—had those swarms of Thousand-Joint Mayflies really come during the last monster tide?
Could it be that some huge rift was still connecting to their homeland, letting them migrate here endlessly?
Either way, Pujis stationed at the fork above occasionally had to fend off stray mayflies probing over, which were quickly shot down by the defensive line.
Just thinking of those giant bugs—if such a rift really existed, how massive would it have to be?
The situation in the deep layers was grim. Lin Jun decisively shifted most of his Puji capacity there, preparing for a long-awaited grand expedition.
Since the Yellow Book claimed even it didn’t know the exact location of the dungeon core, only that it lay at the very deepest point, Lin Jun set the simple goal of going ever downward.
He thought for a moment, then brought out the vampire, Louisa.
…
“Where is this?”
Suddenly pulled out of the mine, Louisa looked uneasy.
Ever since entering this Amethyst Dungeon, nothing good had happened to her…
“Piggy, you’ve got a new job!”
“…”
“What’s wrong, don’t you want something fresh to eat?”
Fresh!?
Louisa’s eyes instantly widened.
She really hadn’t drunk fresh blood in a long time. Ever since being captured, she had survived only on stored blood without any life force in it.
After all, there were no living things to feed her on the fifth floor, and Lin Jun had refused to let her roam the sixth floor—what if she ran into adventurers?
“R-really?” Louisa asked carefully.
“Or I could just send you back? You seemed to enjoy mining well enough.”
“No no no! Boss, whatever you say! I’m Piggy, I want fresh food!” Louisa desperately seized the chance.
Seeing this, Lin Jun assigned her task—join the expedition and help expand territory.
After all, she was a diamond-rank vampire viscount. Fed properly, she would make an excellent addition to his combat power.
He couldn’t just keep her around to dig a few rocks.
Of course, restrictions still applied—she was forbidden from leaving the fungal carpet. Breaking the rule would mean being turned into a puppet.
Louisa nodded furiously, terrified he would change his mind.
And he didn’t shortchange her. He handed her the huge turtle that was still hiding in its shell, stubbornly outlasting Lin Jun’s patience.
A fat Puji bomb could have cracked it open, but Lin Jun felt that was wasteful. Better to give it to the vampire. If she couldn’t manage, then she was useless.
Fortunately, she wasn’t useless.
Her pale hand pressed against the shell, and before long the turtle’s blood was drawn out, red mist seeping through the seams and pooling into her palm.
When she finished, the shell slackened, revealing the shriveled corpse inside.
Louisa eagerly drank the blood—blood from a monster she once would have disdained. She even licked the last drop from the corner of her mouth, then broke down sobbing on the spot…