Chapter 103: The Alchemist’s Garden
He absolutely refused to skip them. He dragged aggro from across massive rooms, ignoring the regular Spire Sentinels just to single out the knights.
He used his shield to reflect their heavy blows, shredded their armor with Guillotine, and let Isolde blast them down to the execution threshold.
On floor twenty, Levi cornered the final Dreadknight.
He didn’t even use a skill. He just battered the knight with basic physical strikes, his 1,736 Speed making him a blur of silver and black. He battered the 100,000 HP pool down to the red zone.
"Soul Harvest."
The fiftieth spectral scythe dropped. The knight’s head hit the glass floor, and the Elite shattered into polygons.
The final crimson aura ripped out of the corpse and slammed into Levi.
[Supreme Harvester triggered.]
[Obsidian Dreadknight’s primary stat is STR (1,500).]
[You have plundered 3% of its core stat.]
[Gained +15 STR permanently!]
Levi let out a massive, exhausted laugh. He had done it. He had hit the exact quota. The cumulative stats from plundering the remaining eleven Dreadknights today fed an absolutely massive chunk of raw power into his avatar.
Plus 165 Strength from today’s kills, bringing the total plunder to +495 STR across the entire arc.
A second later, the experience points dropped. Killing eleven Level 60 Elites with a seven-level gap applied the massive underdog multiplier.
[System Notification: Slain 11x Level 60 Elite Obsidian Dreadknights. Gained 110,000,000 XP.]
The golden pillar of progression light crashed through the ceiling of the Spire. It hit Levi, instantly washing away the physical pain in his arms and completely refilling his health and mana pools.
[System Notification: Level Up! You are now Level 54.]
Levi dismissed the prompt and opened his status menu. The 110 million XP easily cleared the 140 million threshold, leaving him with 14,500,000 XP carrying over into his next bar. He needed 150,000,000 XP to hit Level 55.
He had 5 new free stat points to allocate. He dumped them all into Strength.
He ran the final math for his newly maximized character sheet.
His previous Strength was 2,055. He added the massive +495 from the total Dreadknight plunders, plus the 5 free stat points from leveling up.
His permanent Strength hit exactly 2,555.
His permanent, unbuffed Total Attack is now a staggering 6,732.
"Six thousand, seven hundred and thirty-two attack," Levi whispered, staring at the translucent screen.
He closed his menu and looked up at the dark, winding staircase leading to the next block of floors. His stats were practically maxed out for this bracket. There was nothing else he could squeeze out of standard mobs.
"Alright," Levi said, resting the massive Platinum scythe on his shoulder. "Time to go find the King."
***
Levi’s Gold-tier boots hit the top of the dark, winding staircase. The claustrophobic walls of fused bone finally ended, opening up into a massive, wide-open space.
Floor 40 of the Midnight Spire wasn’t an empty boss arena or a torture chamber. It was a sprawling, overgrown botanical garden suspended in the middle of the dark tower.
The ceiling was made of thick, clouded glass that let in a faint, sickly purple light. Massive stone planters lined the walkways, completely choked by dark, mutated plant life. The VR engine pumped the smell of wet dirt, rotting leaves, and heavy ozone straight into Levi’s helmet.
"A greenhouse," Levi muttered, resting the Platinum Scythe of the Eclipse against his shoulder. "This tower just keeps getting weirder."
Isolde glided up the stairs right behind him, her plain gray cloak untouched by the dirt. She looked around the massive garden. Her blank, robotic eyes processed the environment.
"Scanning flora," Isolde stated flatly. "Detecting high concentrations of aggressive biological entities. Approach with extreme caution."
"I don’t do caution anymore," Levi smirked.
He didn’t just stumble into this room by accident. He remembered the progression routes from his past life. Unlocking the Hollow King’s ultimate class skill required a very specific consumable item called the Elixir of the Black Sun. You couldn’t buy it from an NPC, and you couldn’t get it from a random mob drop. It had to be crafted natively.
The raw materials for that elixir only spawned in this exact room.
Levi stepped off the stone landing and walked onto the overgrown dirt path.
The garden instantly reacted. The thick, dark vines wrapping around the stone pillars began to violently slither and uncoil. They looked like massive snakes covered in jagged, bleeding red thorns.
The system threw up the red nameplates.
[Blood-Vine]
[Level: 55]
[HP: 20,000 | ATK: 1,800 | DEF: 400]
Dozens of the thorny vines snapped toward Levi like whips.
Levi just stood there and ran the combat math in his head. He was Level 54. The Blood-Vines were Level 55. That was exactly a one-level gap.
After dealing with 100% and 85% walls outside, a 5% penalty felt like the game was giving him a free pass.
’Six thousand, one hundred and twenty-nine Final Damage per basic strike,’ Levi grinned. ’Against a twenty thousand health pool. Four hits and they die.’
But Levi didn’t want to swing four times.
"Hollow’s Guillotine!" Levi shouted.
His Platinum scythe erupted in a blinding, dark-gold aura mixed with pure white light. He twisted his hips and ripped the heavy blade in a massive ten-meter-wide cone that smashed directly into a cluster of incoming vines.
The skill math triggered instantly. 6,732 Attack multiplied by the 3.5 modifier gave him 23,562 raw damage. Minus the 280 effective Defense left 23,282. Applying the 5% penalty dropped the final skill damage to exactly 22,117.
[-22,117] [-22,117] [-22,117]
Massive red numbers exploded into the humid air. The 20,000 HP health bars of the Blood-Vines were instantly vaporized. The thorny tentacles didn’t even have a chance to recoil. They were completely severed, shattering into glowing blue polygons before the pieces even hit the dirt.
"Yeah, that’s what I thought," Levi said.
He blurred into motion. His 1,736 Speed made him entirely untargetable by the slow-moving plant mobs. He dashed through the overgrown garden, hacking the Blood-Vines to pieces. He didn’t even need Isolde to drop her True Damage blasts. He was one-shotting everything in his path with his skills and carving up the rest with basic strikes.
His 25% Lifesteal kept his health bar perfectly locked at 26,180. The combat was completely trivial.
But clearing the mobs was only the first part of the job.
Once a section of the garden was clear, Levi had to drop to his knees and physically dig through the cursed dirt. He was looking for a specific flower.
He brushed aside a pile of rotting leaves and found it. It was a beautiful, pitch-black lotus flower that seemed to absorb the dim light around it.
[Gold-Tier Midnight Lotus]
[Rarity: Gold]
[Material Effect: A highly toxic flower that grows only in the presence of abyssal magic. A required catalyst for shadow-based alchemy.]
Levi carefully plucked the flower and tossed it into his spatial inventory.
"One," Levi grunted, standing back up. "I need twenty-six more."
The next three hours were pure, tedious labor. Levi turned into a digital landscaper. He ran through the massive greenhouse, triggering the aggro of the Blood-Vines, instantly turning them into polygons with Hollow’s Guillotine, and then digging through the mud to harvest the lotuses.
The physical toll of VR gaming was real. Starfall’s engine didn’t just simulate pain; it simulated exhaustion. Swinging a heavy polearm hundreds of times and digging through wet dirt made his real-world shoulders burn with lactic acid. His virtual stamina bar constantly dipped into the red, forcing him to take short breaks just to catch his breath.
He hacked through another thick cluster of vines.
[-22,117]
The plants shattered. Levi dropped to his knees, dug his gloved hands into the soil, and pulled out the final black flower.
[Loot Acquired: Gold-Tier Midnight Lotus]
He opened his inventory and checked the stack. Exactly twenty-seven.
"Done," Levi wheezed.
He dismissed his Platinum Scythe. The heavy weapon vanished into his inventory. Levi stumbled over to a large stone fountain sitting in the center of the greenhouse. The water flowing out of the stone gargoyle’s mouth was thick, black, and completely corrupted by the dungeon’s magic.
Levi didn’t care. He just slumped back against the cold stone of the fountain, letting his legs stretch out in the dirt. He was completely drenched in digital sweat. He closed his eyes, his chest heaving as he tried to regulate his breathing.
He heard soft footsteps crunching on the dirt path.
Isolde glided over to him. She didn’t have a stamina bar, so she looked completely pristine. Her gray cloak was perfectly still.
She stood in front of him, her blank eyes scanning his hunched posture.
"Your stamina parameters are currently operating at three percent capacity," Isolde stated flatly. "Physical exhaustion is severely limiting your combat readiness."
"I know," Levi groaned, keeping his eyes closed. "Just give me a minute. Digging in the dirt sucks."