Chapter 178. Worm

Kim was holding Adom's forearm like it was holy.

Which, to be fair, was standard Kim behavior when confronted with new magical phenomena. The fact that the rune happened to be etched onto an arm, and that arm was attached to a person—his former student, no less—seemed entirely irrelevant to him.

He'd done the same thing with the recording runes they'd designed for the tower climb, examining the activation sequence for twenty minutes while Adom's hand went progressively more numb. Adom had learned to just let it happen.

"It's beautiful," Kim breathed, tracing his finger just above the lines of the rune without quite touching it. "Look at the flow here—do you see how it loops back on itself? That's not degradation, that's intentional recursion. And this junction point—"

"Professor Kim," Lysandra said from over his shoulder, "manners, please."

"I am not—" Kim looked up, indignant, then immediately looked back down at the rune. "Okay but look at this symmetry though."

Adom stood in the middle of the warehouse with his sleeve rolled up, surrounded by the four mages like he was some kind of exotic specimen. Which, he supposed, he was. The late afternoon sun cut through the high windows, illuminating dust motes and the faint shimmer of mana that still clung to the tattoo's lines.

Maria crouched down to get a better angle, her professional healer's gaze sharp and analytical. "The ink is holding the pattern stable. How long did you say it took to set?"

"About two hours," Adom said. "I've been experimenting with it since this morning. Maybe eight hours total? I healed a pigeon earlier. Broken wing. It flew off fine after."

"Of course you did," Lysandra muttered. "Test subject availability."

"It was convenient," Adom said.

"How broken was the wing?" his mother asked.

"Compound fracture, I think. It was dragging on the ground."

She nodded, processing that. "And it healed completely? No lingering damage?"

"Flew off like nothing happened."

"Good," she said, smiling at him and returning to examining the rune.

Kim finally released Adom's arm, but his eyes stayed locked on the tattoo. "I've once spent six months trying to understand one junction point on a third-circle runic array. One junction point. And you decoded the core concept of primordial healing magic in eight hours."

"It's not complete," Adom said. "The full rune is way more complex. This is just enough to grasp how it works."

"Could you please show us how it works?" Lysandra said immediately.

Adom nodded and channeled mana into the rune. The lines flared to life with that same soft golden light, and he pressed his palm against a small cut he'd made on his other forearm earlier for testing.

The skin knitted together in seconds. Clean. Painless. Perfect.

"Okay," his mother said slowly. "Okay, that's—that's definitely working."

"It accelerates natural healing," Adom explained. "Enhances it. Makes it efficient. But here's the thing I found—" He paused. "Mother, did you bring those potions I asked for?"

Maria stepped forward with a cloth bag. "Twelve low-grade healing potions. Like you asked."

Low-grade healing potions were the bottom tier of alchemical healing. Cheap, widely available, and largely ineffective for anything beyond the most minor injuries. Adventurers on tight budgets still bought them for dungeon runs because they could at least slow bleeding and prevent infection, but that was about it. The actual healing process took anywhere from fifteen minutes to half an hour, and even then the results were mediocre at best.

Mia's nose wrinkled as his mother handed one of the vials to Adom. "You're testing it with those?"

"Yeah."

"Those barely do anything."

"That's the point," Adom said. He looked at Kim. "Can I use you for this?"

Kim was already rolling up his sleeve. "Please. Cut me."

Hmm. That was a bit too enthusiastic. Was he okay?

"Are you sure—"

"Absolutely. I need to see this. Cut me."

Adom pulled out a small knife and made a shallow cut along Kim's forearm. Nothing deep. Just enough to bleed.

Kim didn't even flinch. He was too busy staring at the vial in Adom's other hand.

"First, the baseline," Adom said. He uncorked the vial and let a few drops fall onto the cut.

Nothing happened.

They waited.

Still nothing.

"It takes about fifteen minutes to start working," Adom said. "And even then, you won't see much. It'll just slow the bleeding a bit, maybe close the wound halfway after thirty or forty-five minutes."

"Riveting," Lysandra said dryly.

"Now watch." Adom dipped his finger into the vial while channeling mana into the rune. The moment his skin—marked with the rune—touched the liquid, the reaction started.

The potion began to glow.

It wasn't bright at first. Just a faint shimmer, like light through water. But it built. The glow intensified, pulsing in rhythm with Adom's heartbeat, and the pale pink liquid started to darken. Deeper. Richer. The color shifted from barely-there pink to a vibrant crimson, the kind of saturated color that marked some high-grade healing potions. The kind that cost fifty times as much.

"My, oh my," Kim whispered.

The glow peaked, then faded. Adom pulled his finger out. The liquid in the vial was completely transformed. It looked like liquid rubies now, dense and potent.

He poured it onto Kim's cut.

The effect was immediate.

The potion sizzled. Actual steam rose from the wound, wisps of white smoke curling up into the air. Kim's arm twitched.

"Ow—it stings—"

"Sorry," Adom said quickly, pulling back.

"No!" Kim grabbed his wrist, holding him in place. His eyes were wide, almost feverish. "Don't stop—it's working—look!"

The cut was closing. Not slowly, nor even gradually. It was sealing itself in real-time, the skin pulling together like it was being sewn by invisible thread. In ten seconds, it was gone. Not even a scar remained.

The warehouse was dead silent.

Maria reached out and touched Kim's arm where the cut had been. Her fingers traced over smooth, unblemished skin. "That was a low-grade potion."

"Was," Mia said. Her voice was very quiet.

Lysandra sat down on a nearby crate. She looked like she needed to sit down. "You turned a bottom-shelf healing potion into..."

"Something stronger," Adom finished. "A lot stronger. The rune does heal on its own—I cut myself a few times testing it. Just channeling mana through it works. But it has limits."

He held up his other arm, showing faint marks where he'd tested earlier. "I tried different amounts of mana. Small cuts healed fine. Deeper wounds took more mana but still closed. The pigeon's broken wing healed completely, which makes sense—smaller body, less complex injury relative to the mana input. I figured it would scale with humans too. More mana, more healing."

"But?" Mia prompted.

"But at a certain point, it just... stops. I kept channeling more and more mana into a deeper cut, and after a threshold, nothing changed. The healing plateaued. No matter how much power I fed it, the wound wouldn't close any faster or any better."

Kim frowned. "A hard limit on the rune's function?"

"That's what I thought at first. Then I got thirsty and touched some water to cool it down, and the rune activated. The water started glowing and—" Adom paused. "It purified it. Completely. I could taste the difference."

"Water purification," Lysandra said slowly. "That's not healing."

"No. But it's enhancement. Amplification. Taking something that exists and making it better, stronger, purer." Adom lifted the vial. "That's when I realized what the rune actually does. Its main function isn't just healing. It's amplification. So if it could purify water..." He looked at Kim's now-unmarked arm. "What could it do to a healing potion?"

Kim was staring at his arm like he'd never seen it before. "You could take any healing agent and supercharge it. Potions, salves, natural remedies—anything."

"Anything," Adom confirmed.

There was a silence for some time, as they were running the implications of this discovery in their head. This could change so many thing...

Maria was the first to speak. Her voice was carefully controlled. "Sam's mother."

Adom nodded.

There was a plant called 'Somnusbane Bloom', that was the primary component in the alchemical treatment designed for deep cognitive damage. It was one of the few substances that could address the kind of magical injury that left people catatonic, trapped in their own minds.

The bloom reconstructed neural pathways on a cellular level, but it required immense potency to work on extensive damage. Sam's mother's case had been severe. The treatment had shown minor improvement—small flickers of brain activity, some reflexive responses—but she'd never woken up. The issue had always been potency. The remedy simply hadn't been strong enough to bridge the gap her condition required.

Mia's eyes had gone distant. "If I remember correctly, Sam told me the bloom worked partially. She showed minor improvement. But the damage was too extensive for the flower's natural potency to bridge the gap."

"The healers said she'd need something ten times stronger," Maria added. "And that didn't exist."

Adom held up the vial. The transformed potion still gleamed like liquid gemstones in the fading light. "It does now."

"I can prepare the medical setup," Maria said. "We'll need to stabilize her before the procedure, run preliminary tests, make sure her body can handle—"

"And someone needs to get the bloom," Lyssandra said.

Everyone stopped talking.

They all looked at Adom.

He looked back at them. "Yeah. That would be me."

*****

If things were as easy as they could be, it would apparently offend fate. Or the universe. Or whatever governed this whole mess, if anything was governing it at all.

The Somnusbane Bloom wasn't particularly rare. That was the frustrating part. In dungeons with the right environmental conditions—humid, low-light areas with soil rich in mana—it grew well enough. Not abundantly, but consistently. The problem wasn't scarcity. It was demand.

Healers bought it the moment it hit the market. Alchemists hoarded it for complex remedies. Adventuring parties grabbed whatever stock they could find because cognitive damage was one of the few things standard healing magic couldn't fix reliably. The bloom moved fast. Always.

Adom had asked Css to use Wangara and check their dungeon venture stocks first. The guild had access to multiple dungeon harvesting operations now, so it seemed reasonable to hope they'd have some tucked away in storage somewhere.

They didn't.

"We had twelve stems last month," Cass had told him over the communication crystal. "Sold them all within a week. Good profit margin. Should I put in an order for the next harvest cycle?"

"How long would that take?"

"Three weeks, maybe four. Depends on the dungeon's respawn rate for flora."

Too long.

Adom had tasked Cass next. She knew every black market, gray market, and semi-legal market in the capital. If anyone could find Somnusbane Bloom on short notice, it was her.

She'd come back with leads. Five vendors had stock. But when Adom went to examine them personally, the quality was wrong. The blooms were old—not dead, but past their peak potency. The petals had started to fade at the edges, the stems were brittle, and the magical signature was weaker than it should be.

For most remedies, that would be acceptable. For what Adom needed—something he was going to amplify with the rune—starting with degraded material seemed like asking for complications. He wanted fresh blooms. Peak condition. No compromises.

Which meant going into a dungeon himself.

*****

A rooster screamed somewhere in the distance.

It was an angry, indignant sound, like the bird was personally offended by the existence of 3 AM.

Adom sympathized.

He yawned, wide enough that his jaw cracked, and rubbed at his eyes. The dungeon entrance loomed in front of him—a standard portal frame, inactive for now, surrounded by the usual security infrastructure. Guard posts. Mana barriers. A small administrative building off to one side where the guild managing this particular dungeon kept their scheduling logs.

The sky was still dark. Properly dark, not even the faint gray of pre-dawn. Stars were visible overhead, which would've been nice under different circumstances. Right now, it just reminded him that most reasonable people were asleep.

"Early pass secured," Cass had told him last night. "Rival guild owed me a favor. You've got access at three-thirty, before their regular morning teams deploy."

"Three-thirty."

"You wanted fresh blooms. You go in early, you get first pick."

She wasn't wrong. It still didn't make waking up at 2 AM feel any less miserable.

Anything for Sam though.

Adom rolled his shoulders one last time and walked toward the administrative tent. A single light was on inside. Through the window, he could see someone moving around—probably the duty officer managing early access permits.

The tent opened before he reached it.

A woman stepped out. Older, maybe late forties, with the kind of weathered face that came from years of dungeon work. She looked him up and down, unimpressed.

"You're the early permit?"

"That's me."

"Identification."

Adom handed over his adventurer's card. She examined it with a small crystal device, checked something on a ledger, then handed it back.

"Portal activates at three-thirty. You've got until six. After that, morning teams start coming through and you're on your own if there's congestion on the upper zones."

"Understood."

"What are you harvesting?"

"Somnusbane Bloom."

She raised an eyebrow. "That's all?"

"That's all."

"You know where to find it?"

"Windy peaks, near the water features."

She nodded, satisfied. "Good. Don't wander. Don't touch anything you're not harvesting. Don't antagonize the dungeon's ecosystem more than necessary. If you die, we're not liable."

"Standard terms. Got it."

She looked at him for another moment, like she was trying to decide if he was competent or just lucky. Then she shrugged. "Portal activates in twelve minutes. Wait by the frame."

She went back inside.

Adom walked over to the portal frame and sat down on a nearby bench. The air was cold. He could see his breath. Somewhere in the distance, that same rooster screamed again, even angrier this time.

He yawned.

Twelve minutes.

He really, really wanted some tea.

The appointed time arrived with a soft chime from the portal frame.

Adom looked up from the bench. The woman from the tent hadn't reappeared, but someone else was walking toward him—a man in guild operator attire, carrying a clipboard and looking thoroughly unenthusiastic about being awake.

"Law?" he called out.

Adom stood, brushing off his pants. "That's me."

The name on his forged identification was 'Law Meridian.' Not particularly creative, but it worked. Adom had deliberately hidden anything that could make him recognizable. The enchanted face mask he wore showed a completely different face—older, harder features, a scar across the cheek that didn't exist on his real skin. He was a Magus, after all. Quite well-known at that.

Not that he was doing anything illegal. But discretion in one's activities always felt better. This would be quick work. In and out. No one needed to know Adom Sylla had been here at three-thirty in the morning harvesting dungeon flora.

The man checked his clipboard without much interest. "Your time slot is active. Portal's open for the next two hours and thirty minutes. After that, you're competing with the morning rush."

"Understood."

The portal frame hummed to life behind them. Reality twisted inside the archway, colors bleeding together until they resolved into the characteristic shimmer of an active dungeon gate. Through it, Adom could see the entrance chamber—stone walls, torchlight, the standard staging area most guild controlled dungeons maintained near their entry points.

"Try not to die," the man said, already turning back toward the tent.

"I'll do my best."

Adom stepped through.

The transition was instantaneous. One moment, cold pre-dawn air. The next, the musty warmth of enclosed stone. The dungeon's ambient mana pressed against his skin like humidity. Not unpleasant, just present. A reminder that he'd crossed into a space where normal rules bent slightly.

The staging chamber was empty. Good. He pulled out the dungeon map he'd purchased yesterday—a standard commercial copy, nothing fancy, but it showed the layout clearly enough. The Somnusbane Bloom grew in the Windy Peaks zone, accessible via a vertical shaft that cut through the Cave Systems zone. Experienced adventurers could bypass the Fungal Groves zone entirely if they knew the route.

Adom knew the route.

He walked through the Entry zone without incident. The corridors were wide, well-lit by the dungeon's natural phosphorescence. A few slimes oozed along the walls, but they didn't register him as a threat or a target. He was moving too quickly, and his mana signature was probably too dense for them to process as food.

The Cave Systems zone opened into a network of interconnected caverns. Adom consulted the map, oriented himself, and headed east. The air shaft was marked clearly—a natural formation the dungeon had incorporated into its structure, leading straight up through what would normally require traversing the Fungal Groves and emerging near the peak zones.

He found it without trouble. The shaft was wide enough to fly through comfortably, maybe fifteen feet across, and disappeared into darkness overhead. Wind whistled down from above. Hence the name.

Adom channeled mana and weaved [Flight].

The spell engaged smoothly. His feet left the ground, and he rose into the shaft, accelerating as he focused. The stone walls blurred past. Wind buffeted him from above—not enough to destabilize the spell, but enough that he had to adjust his trajectory a few times to avoid scraping against the rough rock.

The ascent took maybe two minutes. When he emerged at the top, the environment had changed completely.

The Windy Peaks weren't actually peaks in the traditional sense. They were elevated plateaus of stone and hardy vegetation, separated by deep chasms that funneled wind through the dungeon's upper zones with enough force to make standing upright difficult. Moss clung to every surface. Small streams trickled between rocks, fed by condensation and the dungeon's internal water cycle. The air smelled clean. Almost fresh, if you ignored the underlying mineral tang of this particular dungeon's mana.

Adom landed on a flat section of stone and dismissed [Flight]. He checked the map again. Somnusbane Bloom preferred areas near water features with high wind exposure. There were three marked locations within reasonable distance.

He started toward the nearest one, moving carefully across the uneven terrain. The wind was stronger than he'd expected. It came in gusts, howling between the rock formations with enough force to—

The ground trembled.

Adom stopped.

That wasn't wind.

The tremor came again. Rhythmic. Directional. Something large was moving beneath the stone.

He reached out with his druidic senses, carefully extending his awareness into the earth. The skill had always been useful for reading natural environments, understanding the flow of life and mana through living systems. Dungeons were strange, but most of them mimicked his world's nature closely enough that the principles still applied.

What he felt made him take a step back.

Large. Very large. Moving through the stone itself like it was water. The mana signature was aggressive, territorial, and currently heading directly toward him.

A dungeon worm.

Adom had read about them. Native to the deeper zones, they burrowed through solid rock and ambushed prey from below. Mostly they targeted other dungeon creatures, but they weren't picky. Adventurers counted as food.

The tremors intensified.

He could try talking to it. His druidic senses allowed for rudimentary communication with natural creatures, and some dungeon monsters retained enough instinct to be reasoned with. It was worth attempting.

Adom knelt and pressed his palm against the stone, channeling mana into the connection. He shaped the intent carefully—non-aggression, passage, mutual disinterest. The mental equivalent of 'I'm just passing through, please leave me alone.'

The worm's response was immediate and unambiguous.

Hunger. Territory. Kill.

No negotiation. No recognition of his attempt at communication. Just raw, primal aggression.

Adom sighed and stood up.

No wonder even druids had died when the World Dungeon had arisen and monsters had come out. Some creatures simply didn't want to listen.

The ground exploded thirty feet to his left.

Rock and dirt sprayed into the air as the worm burst from below, its body coiling upward in a grotesque arc. The thing was massive—easily forty feet long, its segmented body as thick around as a barrel. Its head was a nightmare of circular rows of teeth, each one the size of a dagger, arranged in a spiraling pattern that rotated as it opened its maw. No eyes. It didn't need them. It hunted by vibration and mana sense.

The worm crashed back down, slamming into the plateau with enough force to crack the stone. Adom had already moved, [Flight] reactivated, lifting him twenty feet into the air.

The worm's head snapped toward him. It could sense him. Obviously. His mana signature was probably bright as a torch to its senses.

It lunged.

The worm launched itself upward with disturbing speed for something that size, its maw opening wide enough to swallow him whole. Adom twisted in midair, angling left, and the creature's teeth snapped shut on empty space. The sound was like a steel trap closing. Loud. Very loud.

Adom channeled mana into his hand and weaved [Arcane Arrows]. Three bolts of concentrated force materialized and shot toward the worm's exposed side as it fell back toward the ground.

The arrows impacted with sharp cracks. The worm's hide split where they hit, ichor spraying out in dark streams. It thrashed, slamming its body against the stone in what might have been pain or rage or both.

Then it dove.

The worm plunged straight down into the plateau, disappearing into solid rock like it was diving into water. The stone sealed behind it, leaving only cracks and a faint tremor as evidence it had been there at all.

Adom hovered in place, scanning the ground below. The tremors were moving. Circling. The worm was repositioning for another attack.

He descended slightly, stopping about ten feet above the plateau. Close enough to be a tempting target. Far enough to react.

The worm erupted from directly beneath him.

Adom had been expecting it. He shot upward, gaining altitude fast, and the worm missed again by a comfortable margin. But this time, as it reached the apex of its leap, Adom didn't just evade.

He dove.

[Flight] pushed him downward at speed, and he extended his hand as he descended, mana coalescing into a different shape this time. Not Arcane Arrows. Something with more stopping power.

"[Force Lance]."

The spell manifested as a solid beam of compressed force, five feet long and narrow as a spear. It shot from his palm and punched straight through the worm's body, entering just behind the head and exiting through the midsection.

The worm's shriek was a high-pitched, scraping sound that echoed across the peaks. It convulsed in midair, ichor spraying in thick arcs, and crashed down onto the plateau with a wet, heavy impact.

Adom landed a safe distance away and watched.

The worm thrashed for another few seconds, its segmented body coiling and uncoiling in spasms. Then it went still.

He waited. Dungeon creatures sometimes played dead.

After a full minute of no movement, he approached cautiously and nudged the corpse with a light kinetic push. It didn't react.

Dead, then.

Adom dismissed the spell and looked around. The fight had been loud. Other creatures might investigate. He needed to move.

He pulled out the map again, oriented himself, and headed toward the nearest water feature. The wind was still gusting, but it felt less oppressive now. Or maybe he was just getting used to it.

The stream appeared five minutes later, trickling between two rock formations and pooling in a small basin before continuing down a crevice. The water was clear, almost crystalline, and moss grew thick along the edges.

And there, growing in a sheltered cluster near the water's edge, were the blooms.

Somnusbane Blooms.

Adom knelt beside them and exhaled slowly.

They were perfect.

The petals were a deep, luminous violet, almost glowing in the dim light. The stems were firm and green, showing no signs of age or damage. Each bloom was roughly the size of his palm, with delicate internal structures that pulsed faintly with mana. There were seven plants total, which was more than he'd hoped for.

He reached out carefully, activating a minor preservation spell as he harvested the first bloom. The stem separated cleanly under his knife, and he placed it into a specially prepared container designed to maintain freshness.

One by one, he harvested them all.

When the last bloom was safely stored, Adom stood and looked at the container in his hands.

Seven perfect Somnusbane Blooms.

Enough for Sam's mother. Enough to try.

He smiled.