SQUELCH, SQUELCH.

Feeling the utterly repulsive mud cling to the soles of his feet, Kyle checked his condition.

'What a fucking shithole.'

Born into a great family and raised with love from an early age, he had done his best to curb the swearing that had been his constant companion in his previous life. But there was simply no other way to describe this place.

'My mana won't circulate properly.'

The mana flowing through his circuits was sluggish, like mud hardening. He tried different circuits, but the result was the same. Calmly, Kyle focused on the mana in his lower energy center. Astonishingly, it had already stiffened.

'Hmm... '

Frowning, Kyle tried breathing according to his cultivation method. The putrid air, astonishingly, tasted foul as well. He endured it and drew a deep breath, only for Jorm to scream inside his middle energy center.

["Aah... Aaaaaah..."]

It was a scream steeped in terror. Even as he screamed, however, Jorm faithfully performed his role. The mana that descended after its initial purification in the middle energy center was pitifully scant.

'This world's... air? Something like that is suppressing the mana inside me.'

Kyle continued running his cultivation method with a frown. When he raised the mana from his lower energy center to his middle one, its circulation improved a little.

'Now I see why entering the Realm of Intent is the minimum requirement for challenging the Floor of Asceticism.'

Without knowing how to use the middle energy center, one would be unable to circulate mana in this world at all.

"This really is a fucking shithole."

Kyle muttered with a hollow laugh. His mana circulated sluggishly, and the amount he gathered through breathing was minuscule. Even with his spiritual root of chaos and Jorm working together to refine mana efficiently, this was all he could gather. That meant most people would be unable to accumulate mana here.

'I have to go back to the room to eat, and to replenish my mana. I can't move around freely at high tide, either.'

The place was riddled with restrictions. It certainly lived up to the name Floor of Asceticism, but frankly, this felt excessive. And wasn't this only its lowest floor?

["Ugh... Uhhhh..."]

He felt a trembling deep inside his chest. Coiled in his middle energy center, Jorm had tucked his lowered head between the coils of his body and was shivering violently.

["M-Mas, Master. It's... s-so, so scary here..."]

His stammering voice was filled with terror. For a spirit, a life-form made of mana, this space must have been a dreadful place where he did not want to exist for even a moment. The only reason Jorm could exist here at all was that he resided in Kyle's middle energy center.

["Th-this place... is full of corruption and... and distortion. Th-this place is scarier than hell..."]

Whimpering, Jorm burrowed still deeper into the middle energy center, like a child trying to hide under a blanket.

In truth, Jorm was a child. Kyle patted his chest to soothe him.

"Don't chicken out. I'll be doing the fighting here anyway."

["B-but... M-Master. Up there... Those very, very frightening beings..."]

"Ignore them."

Kyle glanced upward as he spoke. Thanks to the remarkable spiritual root he had awakened a year ago, he could feel those gazes from above all too clearly. Having spent the past year being influenced by Kyle's spiritual root, Jorm must have felt that terror even more keenly.

But Kyle crushed the fear that tried to creep back up. Blood trickled again from the wound he had opened on his head earlier. Scrubbing it off with the back of his hand, he squelched onward through the mud.

'What the hell was that Dragon King thinking, connecting the inside of the Sword Tower to a place like this?'

Even the residential district on the fourth floor was too vast to believe it was inside a tower, but this Floor of Asceticism was definitely not inside the Sword Tower. It connected to another world entirely.

The Sword Tower had supposedly been a gift to Ruin Alastor. Kyle could not help having complicated doubts about that magnificent artifact—so splendid, convenient, and grand—being connected to somewhere so horrific.

Had it really been a gift of goodwill? Or was this some kind of test? Perhaps it was an act of malice meant to screw over Ruin Alastor and his descendants. The Fragment had called the Dragon King an "obsession-ridden old monster." Indeed, walking through this place made Kyle think the Dragon King might not be right in the head.

SQUELCH, SQUELCH.

As he walked, turning those thoughts over, he felt something subtly different beneath his shoe. It was not simply mud. Something hard lay embedded in the unpleasantly yielding stuff.

The instant he felt it, Kyle leaped into the air.

RUMBLE!

The mud quivered, then erupted in every direction. Black things began crawling out of the hole beneath it.

SKREEEE!

The noise was as unpleasant as fingernails scraping a sheet of metal. The mud thrown into the air rained down, revealing the creatures beneath.

"Wow..."

Kyle landed well back, his face twisting. He had seen and cut down all sorts of monsters in his previous life, but the creatures before him felt like a different breed altogether. Their appearance alone inspired revulsion, yet it did not feel as though their looks were the only reason.

How could he put it? They felt like some primordial repulsiveness given form.

They resembled enormous crabs, but had no shells. Their bodies were masses of rotting gray flesh, bloated and split from soaking in water. Dozens of eyeballs were embedded haphazardly in every crevice, each moving independently.

Grotesquely bent legs jutted from both sides of those masses. Pressing both hands together and wriggling only the fingers might have produced a similar shape. As for their two pincers, those looked like human arms stuck to their bodies.

SKREE... SKREEEE...

A cleft down the middle gaped open to expose sharp teeth, yellow slime dripping and streaming from them. Merely looking at that hideous sight made his head throb and his vision swim unpleasantly.

"You lot really are hideous."

Had it understood his assessment? One of the monsters charged with a bloodcurdling shriek. Its fingerlike legs twitched as it moved with speed that belied its bulk.

Kyle drew up his mana. It still circulated sluggishly, but he did not consider that a major problem in a fight. A thin layer of aura flashed over the blade of the wooden sword Lucia had given him.

It only looked thin. Compressed as tightly as possible in this hostile environment, the sword aura supplied more than enough of the sharpness the wooden blade lacked. A writhing pincer—or rather, a pincer-hand—whistled toward him, but Kyle evaded it with a slight shift of his upper body.

The pincer-hand passed just before the bridge of his nose, reeking of rot. His nose twitched as he swung his wooden sword. The blade plunged through the creature along the cleft where its flesh clung together.

Split in two, the monster collapsed. Kyle vaulted over its corpse and headed for the others.

This was his first time fighting monsters since reincarnating, but whether his opponent was human or monster, his task with a sword in hand remained the same.

Thrust, slash, thrust, slash.

'Mana circulation is restricted. I can't replenish it through breathing, either. What matters in a fight here isn't aura, but how well you use your sword.'

This was the edge of the Mudflats. What sorts of monsters would appear? For now, he had encountered only these hideous crabs. Perhaps they had a name, but Kyle decided to simply call them "hand crabs."

He carefully took the hand crabs apart, searching for weaknesses.

'They die if you split their bodies in half.'

Most things would.

'Their pincer-hands and legs regenerate when cut off. There's no point getting behind them. Those eyeballs between the folds of flesh can turn to see behind them, too.'

He thrust his wooden sword.

'Piercing the very center of their bodies kills them as well.'

That would do.

He slaughtered ten hand crabs in an instant, yet his breathing remained perfectly steady. Standing amid the pierced and sliced flesh, Kyle shook the pieces clinging to his wooden sword loose.

HISSS...

Black smoke rose from among the chunks of flesh. Rather than dispersing into the air, it drifted toward Kyle.

He did not need to breathe it in or run his cultivation method. The smoke clung to his skin and seeped into his body on its own.

"Hmm..."

For a moment, it felt as if heated needles were stabbing his entire body. Then the pain gave way to a refreshing sensation.

'So that's how it works.'

That little bit of swordplay had not tired him, but it had consumed some stamina. The small amount he had spent was restored.

'My body feels a little stronger, too. And... the hardened mana has softened slightly.'

This place offered more than trials. The more monsters he killed, the stronger his body became and the softer his hardened mana grew. In other words, the longer he fought and the more he killed, the better he would be able to fight here.

'The difference is slight... but even the air isn't as sickeningly foul as it was at first.'

As the Fragment had said, the reward of the Floor of Asceticism was a stronger body. Killing monsters and absorbing that smoke strengthened the body, while allowing it to gradually adapt to this environment.

That reward was available to everyone who entered the Floor of Asceticism, but Kyle could go further. Crouching down, he stared at a piece of hand crab flesh within reach.

"..."

The Fragment had told him to kill the monsters and eat them. Kyle closed his eyes briefly. In this life, he had eaten nothing but excellent, delicious food. In his previous life, however, when he had been poor and destitute, he had eaten all sorts of things to fill his belly.

'What was the shittiest thing I ate in my previous life... dumplings made from minced cockroaches?'

Or had it been the stew made by boiling maggots harvested from corpses? Both had been inventive and disgusting, but at least they had been made from insects, not monsters.

"They say crustaceans taste similar to insects... so, well..."

Muttering as if trying to convince himself, Kyle opened his eyes and confronted the problem anew. Hand crabs were lumps of rotten flesh shaped like crabs, not crustaceans.

"Ugh..."

A sigh escaped him involuntarily, but his gaze settled calmly. After a few blinks, a strange madness glimmered in his golden eyes.

It looked like eating the stuff might make him sick or kill him, but neither would happen. The Fragment's blessing now resided within his body.

Kyle reached out and picked up a piece of flesh. The rotten meat crumbling between his fingers looked, to put it kindly, like rich cream. Yes, this was cream. Repeating that to himself, Kyle opened wide and stuffed the flesh into his mouth.

"Urgh..."

It tasted horrific. Like rotten fish guts mashed just enough to retain some texture, then mixed with vomit... Disgusting, fishy flavors burst throughout his mouth, enriched by a bitterness that stabbed and scraped his tongue and palate like an awl, as though it were seasoning.

He chewed and chewed.

Holding his twitching lips in place, Kyle forced his jaw to move. He firmly suppressed the nausea threatening to bubble up from his stomach and gulped down the flesh. He took care not to throw up while swallowing, but surprisingly, it slipped down his throat without resistance—then vanished.

["Aah, aaaaah! M-Master! What are you eating?!"]

Jorm screamed in horror. The flesh that had disappeared on its way down Kyle's throat turned into pure power and reached his middle energy center.

"Get. To work."

Kyle spat out the words. There was the master-servant contract they had formed when Jorm was still an infant spirit, and the mana Kyle had fed him over the course of a year.

Jorm had no right to refuse.

WHOOOSH!

Heat spread from the middle energy center and slowly worked its way down to the lower one. Energy incomparably denser and more powerful than what he had absorbed through his skin reached his lower energy center, then spread throughout his circuits.

He felt his spiritual root being stimulated. A creaking crack came from deep inside his body, as though something were twisting. His mana remained hardened, but the circuits inside him had "moved" a little.

'Aha... '

Mana circuits extended outward from his energy centers. Thanks to his unusual spiritual root, Kyle possessed far more circuits, and far more complex ones, than most people.

However numerous and complex they might be, those circuits were separate. Now, though, he had felt those individual circuits move slightly.

'If I keep stuffing myself with this flesh and moving the circuits, will the separate circuits join up... and connect to one another?'

If that really happened, he would no longer need to select the shortest, most efficient circuit when using his cultivation method. If every circuit connected, he could instantly open the shortest, fastest, most efficient route no matter which circuit he sent his mana through.

"Guess I'll have to eat a whole fucking lot."

Chuckling, Kyle reached for another piece of flesh. It tasted like absolute shit, but its effects were undeniable. This revolting meat was a more extraordinary tonic than any elixir he had ever eaten.

Not that he could imagine ever getting used to the taste, no matter how much he ate.

* * *

Crabs were not the only creatures found on mudflats. Ragworms, clams, octopuses, and gobies were also common parts of their ecosystem.

Perhaps this place was a mudflat after all, because the monsters he encountered resembled those creatures.

Granted, they had their own distinctive traits. The ragworms were elongated tentacles of flesh; the clams looked like enormous jawbones fitted together; the octopuses were masses of mucus as floppy as slime; the sea slaters were the size of bulls and reeked; and the gobies bristled with nail-like horny growths.

As with the hand crabs, Kyle gave the monsters names of his own: jaw clams, floppy octopuses, rot slaters, and blade gobies.

"Hand crabs taste the best. How does that make any sense?"

Astonishingly, it was true. Kyle heaved a sigh, experiencing the revolting fullness of a stomach stuffed with filth.

'I don't have the faintest idea how long I'll have to keep eating this shit.'

He had eaten roughly ten of each kind. There had been changes since the beginning, but the circuits that shifted little by little had not connected at all.

'Still, by now I can feel my body getting stronger.'

His swordsmanship was so exceptional to begin with that hunting was not particularly difficult. Even by a conservative estimate, today's gains alone were greater than what he would earn from a full week of strenuous training outside.

'Besides, I've spent so much of the past year in the library trying to develop a cultivation method... I haven't been able to focus on training my body.'

The Fragment would handle the difficult, arduous work of developing the cultivation method for him. All Kyle needed to do now was diligently hunt monsters and eat them.

"Hm?"

He was full, but thought he could eat more if he forced himself. Just as he started to move on again—

RUMBLE...

The mud beneath his feet trembled. This was not the vibration of a monster about to emerge. The entire Mudflats began shaking as though struck by an earthquake.

ROOOOAR!

From far away came the sound of waves.