Fingri had lied yesterday.
Truthfully, the Hasavi Party had never actually had a reason to head to the Gourmet Zone today. But yesterday, needing something to say to Elsa, he'd casually mentioned they were going — never imagining she'd take him up on it, let alone agree without a moment's hesitation.
Unexpectedly, that's exactly what happened. Which meant they now had no choice but to actually show up.
So — what were they actually supposed to do there?
Honestly, Fingri couldn't quite remember, which meant he'd stayed up late doing the research himself.
At present, adventure activities centered on the Gourmet Zone mostly broke down into organized, planned ingredient-gathering runs, alongside hunts for legendary cooking implements like the Eternal Knife, the collection of ingredients and recipes carrying special effects, and the exploration for even rarer finds.
All of it, though, tended to require a substantial amount of luck — not particularly well-suited for a group planning to be there for exactly one day.
So Fingri simply accepted a handful of regional commissions instead.
During that stretch, he happened to run into Sid, the Bedford Adventurer's Guild's branch guildmaster. After chatting a while, Fingri somehow talked himself into accepting the high-risk Collect Rainbow Fruit commission.
The Rainbow Fruit, planted at the deepest point of the Gourmet Zone, currently stood as the region's ultimate prize under normal conditions. Powerful monsters guarded it from every direction, keeping ordinary adventurers well away. Every so often, something even more valuable than the Rainbow Fruit rained down from the sky elsewhere in the Zone — but nobody could reasonably bet on that kind of luck showing up on demand.
"I keep wondering about that meteor shower in the dungeon yesterday. Everyone's been talking about it since I got back."
Fingri looked up.
It should've been morning by now, but Liurnia of the Lakes remained, strangely, cloaked in night. Countless meteors streaked across the dark sky — the exact scene he'd witnessed in Irithyll the day before.
The shower had continued, uninterrupted, straight through until now.
There was already a genuine meteor shower happening outside the dungeon. Why was Sein bothering to replicate it internally?
The strange sight had become the topic of every conversation in the area, everyone speculating about whatever enormous event Sein was apparently gearing up for.
The shower kept dragging his thoughts back toward the Glintstone Sorcerers of Raya Lucaria Academy. Glintstone Sorcery had become, by now, the most common school of magic among adventurers broadly.
Soul Magic ran a close second. Made sense — most people's mentors traced back to either Rogier or Sellen.
Speaking of which — what had ever become of the White Wolf and Ranni, back in Thops's Painted World?
Genuinely curious about that.
"Hey — hey! Something's happening, everyone! Get over to Firelink Shrine and see for yourselves!"
Right then, several adventurers teleported back beside the bonfire, already shouting the moment they materialized, barely containing their excitement.
"What's going on? Why're you so worked up — you look like you've seen a ghost."
Someone teased them.
The adventurers widened their eyes and shot back:
"Go see for yourselves! Don't cry when you get there!"
Which, naturally, was precisely the wrong thing to say to a room full of adventurers. Curiosity spiked instantly across the board.
Fingri included.
He rolled up his sleeves and glanced at the others.
"Let's go see what kind of demon or monster's shown up this time."
Bonfire teleportation always came with that strange, painless sensation of being pulled apart and reassembled. Jarring the first few times, but something everyone eventually got used to. When the brief, familiar melody chimed and the words Firelink Shrine appeared before their eyes, that confirmed the transfer had gone through.
Before anyone had even opened their eyes fully, the sound alone made clear something was off.
As everyone knew by now, Sein Dungeon operated, functionally, as a music anime. Easy to overlook, but the dungeon played score in specific, deliberate moments. Every region, every boss, even individual elite monsters carried their own dedicated theme.
Areas like Farron Keep — thick with genuinely difficult challenges — generally skipped background music entirely, avoiding anything that might muddy an adventurer's judgment.
Boss fights, though? Always scored. Always.
Meanwhile, calmer regions like the Gourmet Zone stayed perpetually filled with music, lulling travelers into something close to a pleasant daze. A handful of bards had already started transcribing pieces from Sein Dungeon directly — anyone able to perform them outside the dungeon stood to make a real fortune.
As the most tranquil region of all, Firelink Shrine carried its own distinct piece — something that left people relaxed while carrying an undertone of quiet sadness. Not especially catchy at first listen, but genuinely pleasant on repeat.
If Fingri had to name a single favorite piece from the whole dungeon, it would be Firelink Shrine's theme without hesitation. Every time he heard it, something settled into place — a real sense of safety.
Except now, the song had changed.
Quieter. More still, carrying the feel of an endless, open starry sky. Occasionally, cold, unusual notes flickered through — enough to make it feel as though something had locked onto him, a chill working through his whole body.
Fingri hesitated, then opened his eyes.
There was no mistaking it. Firelink Shrine — always bathed in daylight — now sat entirely swallowed by night. Meteors streaked across the darkness overhead, matching exactly what he'd seen back in Liurnia of the Lakes.
If that had been the whole story, though, it wouldn't have earned anyone a warning about crying.
What genuinely stopped everyone cold was the thing hanging in the night sky.
A black hole.
A pure, absolute black hole had opened directly amid the star field — like some enormous eye from beyond the heavens, staring down at the world below. Its gravity tore continuously at the surrounding stars, dragging them steadily into eternal dark.
"Gulp..."
Fingri heard himself swallow, entirely without meaning to. His mind blanked for a beat, sanity genuinely tested by the sight.
A tranquil lake surfaced in his memory, unbidden. The Lake Carian Rune etched into his mind helped him hold against the mental pressure.
Didn't know it could do that too.
[Cross to the other side of the starry sky and challenge the Aberrant Meteor?]
A line of text materialized before him — carrying the same energy as the Awaken the Abyss Watchers and challenge them? prompt back at Farron Keep.
Is there actually a monster inside that thing?!
"This genuinely feels bad. Until my friend Leon personally goes in first and confirms it's survivable, there's no way I'm setting foot in there, okay?"
Fingri blinked.
The world had already changed.
Firelink Shrine was gone. He now stood somewhere within an endless black universe, faint nebulae drifting on every side.
His mind froze for a second. Then his companions materialized around him one by one, and it clicked.
They'd been pulled inside.
Because they'd stared too long — and gotten sucked straight in as a result.
"Wait a second..."
Fingri's cheek twitched.
"If you could just suck us in directly, why bother staging the whole 'do you want to challenge it' routine first?"
What did this even feel like?
Something close to the Main God Space asking whether you wanted to become a Reincarnator and go searching for the meaning of life — while you were still deliberating between Yes and No, the choice would just resolve itself automatically the moment you'd stared at the prompt for five seconds too long.
Is this Main God Space secretly run by Super Earth Recruitment?!
It hadn't taken Fingri long inside Firelink Shrine to nail down the rule for himself:
[Staring at the black hole in the sky for more than five seconds forcibly pulls you inside. Resistance is not possible.]
No wonder the earlier adventurers had come sprinting back from the lake area looking so genuinely rattled. They'd probably been sucked in the exact same way — and seen exactly what he was seeing now.
"S-so... what are we actually fighting?"
The Bone Fang Party members asked nervously.
Even with their own Carian Rune protection, their spirits ran considerably thinner. Laying eyes on the black hole had landed roughly like getting hit with a group-wide Fear spell — their present courage sitting somewhere around rabbit-level.
"Careful, whatever it is. It's not going to be friendly."
Matilda cracked her knuckles, already anticipating.
Aleya prepared her seeds.
Elsa impatiently drew her greatsword — fully intent on cutting down whatever lurked in the black hole so she could get back to hunting adorable Pokémon in peace.
Fingri stepped forward.
Something shifted.
The dark universe before them began to churn. Dark-purple starlight flickered — and then an enormous shape surfaced.
A gigantic, alien skull.
Rigid, insect-like feelers flanked its jaw on either side. The blend of human and insect characteristics gave the whole thing an indescribably bizarre presence.
But the single most attention-grabbing detail sat within the skull's shattered forehead —
A lone eyeball, glowing with an eerie light.
It floated, ghostlike, staring fixedly at every one of them, both mysterious and grotesque at once.
Only the head had emerged from the darkness so far. Its full body remained hidden.
And yet this alone had already generated an overwhelming presence.
["Dark Meteor" Astel]
A title, entirely of Wade's own invention.
An ordinary person, staring at this, would've frozen in genuine shock for several full seconds. But the Hasavi Party and Elsa had all fought their way through countless battles by now. Shock had a considerably higher threshold for people tempered by every boss Sein Dungeon had thrown at them.
The instant Astel appeared, they'd already begun working out how to fight it.
"Run first!"
Everyone surged forward toward the massive skull.
They stood far too distant for any attack to land — closing the gap first was non-negotiable.
"Something this huge — get onto its body, and this fight gets considerably easier. So the plan is—"
Fingri laid out his strategy mid-sprint.
He'd overlooked one small detail, though: just because they couldn't hit Astel yet didn't mean Astel couldn't hit them.
Starlight gathered around the skull. Countless stars, threaded with raw magical power, coalesced into a massive orb of magic — something none of them had ever seen the like of before.
Several times the size of the pseudo-Legendary Life Sphere Eliphis had once struggled to summon.
Its raw power radiated something considerably more terrifying still.
"No way—"
Fingri stopped dead. The instant the orb formed, something clicked into place for him.
"BOOM—!"
The orb collapsed into an endless, devouring torrent of destruction, swallowing everyone standing before it.
A single flash of light briefly lit the surrounding dark.
Then faded.
Once Astel's opening greeting had run its course, the battlefield came back into view.
Every adventurer, dead.
An instant-kill this absurd, delivered on the very first engagement, had never once occurred anywhere in Sein Dungeon's history before this.
After a moment, Fingri and the others reappeared beside the bonfire.
Every last one of them wore an expression of complete, unfiltered bewilderment. Their brains, apparently, could only cycle the same sentence in a loop:
What just happened?
They'd barely started their sprint, discussed strategy, buffed each other — and then —
Instantly wiped?
Even Wolnir had the decency to wait until half health before unleashing Divine Wrath.
And Astel had opened, immediately, with an instant-kill move?!
Fingri looked up blankly.
Then, immediately, clapped both hands over his head, forcing his gaze down before he could accidentally lock onto the black hole again.
Anyone caught looking at that thing was just asking for trouble.
Everyone exchanged equally baffled looks.
One of the Bone Fang members finally asked:
"Is that thing going to stay hanging up there permanently?"
The moment the words left him, hearts sank across the group. If that terrifying presence remained fixed overhead indefinitely, that was —
Practically a Carrot of Damocles.
"Why does it feel like Sein Dungeon just keeps getting less and less comfortable?"
Fingri shuddered, remembering Astel's appearance all over again.
What exactly was that thing? Some kind of evil god from beyond the heavens?
He didn't dare look up anymore. Forced himself, instead, to shift focus elsewhere.
Right then, Elsa noticed something.
A shrine had appeared, abruptly, on the steps of Firelink Shrine.
"What's this?"
Everyone gathered, examining it carefully. A carved meteor sat etched across the altar's face. A message materialized in front of it.
[Offer up a Meteor.]
"Offer up a meteor?"
Fingri frowned, unable to immediately parse it.
Elsa, though, had already connected something. She pointed up toward the streaking meteor shower overhead.
"Maybe it means Miniors."
"Huh? How'd you land on that connection? Wait — actually, that tracks."
Fingri followed her logic and ran with it.
"So we're supposed to bring a Minior — the ones falling from the sky — over to the shrine?"
No point speculating further. Time to test it.
Everyone agreed to head to some nearby region and try capturing a Minior. They'd barely taken a few steps when a sound of something breaking through the ground stopped them cold.
They turned around.
A stone tablet had burst from the earth, still visibly growing. Words engraved into its surface, names stacked low to high, arranged by some kind of ranking.
[Roger — 4]
[Temud, Sword of the Burning Flame — 4]
[Teppi Bask — 2]
[Megan Bask — 1]
Before anyone could piece together what they were looking at, the tablet grew taller again — a new name added at the base.
[Leon Bask — 1]
Barely seconds passed before another name appeared, and the tablet grew again.
"Wait a second. I've seen this exact kind of tablet somewhere before."
Fingri's brow furrowed. A stele that grew with every new name — where had he seen that?
"Oh — right! Glory Dungeon!"
Matilda's voice carried genuine surprise.
"The Glory Stele, from Glory Dungeon? What's it doing here?"
Glory Dungeon was a genuinely old-established institution — famous specifically for the Glory Stele, which ranked adventurers by monster kill count and distributed rewards based on standing. The Stele periodically reset to zero, and some adventurers had grown genuinely obsessed with climbing it.
As the stele finished rising, a fresh magical rune unfolded alongside it.
[Before chasing the meteors, choose your starting supplies.]
The names of over forty separate dungeons scrolled out before everyone's eyes.
"W-what is THIS now?!"