Deep beneath the hustle and bustle of the Labyrinth City of Orario, far beyond the reach of sunlight and human reason, lay a world completely isolated in absolute silence.
Floor 60. The Glacier Territory.
In this place, the cold was not merely air temperature, but a breathing and preying entity. The labyrinth walls were not made of ancient rock, but of giant ice crystal pillars that radiated a pale blue glow. This labyrinth of ice mirrors deceived the eyes, froze sanity, and howled with a wind that sounded like the cries of millions of souls trapped in the frost. This was a white hell, a floor created by the Dungeon to kill all forms of life that dared to challenge its depths.
However, at the bottom of one of the deepest ice trenches on that floor, the silence was broken by an entirely unnatural sound.
Thump...
Thump...
A heartbeat. Very slow, very heavy, yet resonating with the rhythm of the labyrinth itself.
At the bottom of the pitch-black trench, the purity of the ice crystals had been tainted. Giant, blackish-purple tendrils, looking like a cross between dead tree roots and rotting fleshy blood vessels, crept across the surface of the glacier. The tendrils pulsed rhythmically, pumping thick magic fluid toward a single central point in the middle of the trench.
There it hung. A giant cocoon made of a semi-transparent membrane, emitting a sickly blackish-green glow.
Inside the cocoon, a consciousness slowly formed from shattered fragments of memory.
Who... am I? A voice whispered in its mind. The voice sounded incredibly melodious, like the babbling of a spring in the middle of an emerald forest. Memories of the past flashed faintly. It remembered once being something pure. It was an elemental entity, a spirit born from the blessing of the world, dancing in the air, loving the light, and singing with the wind.
Then, that memory drowned in a sea of red.
It remembered fangs tearing it apart. It remembered being forcibly dragged into the darkness of the stifling earth. It remembered being digested alive by the jaws of the underground labyrinth. The Dungeon did not let it return to heaven. The labyrinth squeezed out its pure essence, mixing it with rotting monster flesh, endless hatred, and the foulest magic stones.
You... are my daughter.
A primal will echoed around it. It was not a voice, but the hum of the Dungeon's own will whispering directly into the core of its soul.
Grow. Eat. Become the incarnation of my wrath.
Inside the slimy membrane of the cocoon, the silhouette slowly opened its eyes. A pair of eyes that should have radiated the light of life, were now a faded gold with vertical pupils like a ferocious predator. Magical amniotic fluid dripped from its eyelashes.
Its form was a contradiction that birthed horror. The upper half of its body resembled an extraordinarily beautiful woman. Its skin was pale and smooth, with strands of moss-green hair hanging long to cover its chest. However, that beauty stopped at the waist. Its lower body merged with a disgusting hunk of giant monster flesh, covered in lidless red eyes darting wildly, and root-like tentacles digging into a giant Magic Stone crystal.
It was not a pure spirit. It was not an ordinary monster.
It was a Corrupted Spirit. The darkest experiment of the labyrinth to birth a weapon of absolute destruction.
The Corrupted Spirit raised its fragile hand. Its fingernails elongated into pitch-black claws. It stroked the wall of its cocoon, feeling the nutritional intake continuously supplied by the labyrinth.
For hundreds of years, it had merely been a deeply sleeping fetus. Its growth was extremely slow, nearly halted. During that time, the Dungeon was too busy focusing its energy on surviving the invasions of the strongest adventurers in the world—the children of the Zeus and Hera Familia who continuously pushed down, threatening the labyrinth's existence.
But now, that pressure was gone.
The Corrupted Spirit did not know what was happening on the surface; it did not care about the politics of gods or the roar of dragons out there. What it felt through the labyrinth walls was only one thing: that great threat had been annihilated. The sharp fangs of humanity that had been tearing the labyrinth apart were broken. The Dungeon now had excess energy, and that energy was poured entirely into accelerating the Corrupted Spirit's incubation.
Dozens of high-class monsters on Floor 60—like Ice Dragons and Steel Caterpillars—crawled toward the cocoon. Under the absolute command of the labyrinth, the ferocious monsters tore open their own chests, pulled out their magic stones, and threw them into the Corrupted Spirit's root network.
The thorny tentacles darted quickly, piercing the magic stones, and sucking their pure energy until they crumbled to dust.
The Corrupted Spirit sighed in ecstasy as the energy strengthened its demispirit form. It was getting closer to the stage of maturity.
However, amidst that ceaseless energy intake, the Corrupted Spirit's attention was not at all focused on the self-sacrificing monsters. Its faded golden eyes were instead locked onto an object located far at the end of the ice trench.
There, untouched by its corrupting tendrils, lay a block of ice entirely foreign to the labyrinth.
It was a giant ice crystal dome that radiated a soothing rainbow glow. The ice dome was so pure, rejecting all forms of domination and cold from the Dungeon simply by its presence.
The Frozen Garden of Talia.
The Corrupted Spirit let out a low groan. Its voice sounded like pieces of a glacier grinding together. It desperately wanted what was inside that dome.
Behind the absolute thickness of that ice, lay a little girl with golden blonde hair. Her skin was as pale as porcelain, her eyes shut tight in a sleep undisturbed by the passage of time. The girl emitted no magic; her power had not awakened at all. She was merely a frozen shell.
However, the Corrupted Spirit did not see the girl as a mortal human. Its shattered spirit instincts could not distinguish identity clearly. What it sensed from the girl was a scent. A very dense scent of wind, the lingering aroma of pure elemental essence clinging to the ice seal and the girl's blood.
Aria... whispered the Corrupted Spirit in its mind, calling that name with a mad obsession.
For a corrupt entity born of a low-level spirit like itself, consuming a Great Spirit was a highway to absolute divinity. It thought the girl smelling of pure wind inside the ice was Aria, the Great Spirit of Wind. Or at least, a vessel storing that essence of purity.
If I can digest her, thought the Corrupted Spirit, licking its pale lips with a forked black tongue. If I can eat Aria, I will evolve. I will become the absolute perfection of this labyrinth.
During the years it had been incubating in this trench, the Corrupted Spirit had sent thousands of its strongest tentacles to destroy the ice dome. It had ordered flocks of Ice Dragons to spew their deadly freezing breath, commanding giant monsters to smash it relentlessly.
However, the Talia magic seal created by that ancient mage was truly impenetrable. Time inside the dome had stopped.
But it was not just the thickness of the ice that made the Corrupted Spirit anxious and accelerated its growth. There was another far more pressing problem.
The Frozen Garden was slowly moving.
The structure of Floor 60 was not static. The ice in this Glacier territory was constantly shifting. The trench where the ice dome resided was connected to a frozen underground river—a giant glacier current that slowly flowed upward, pushed by the shifting plates of the labyrinth toward vertical fissures connecting it to the floors above.
The rainbow ice dome was like a small boat trapped in a slow-moving river of ice. Centimeter by centimeter, day by day, the block of the Frozen Garden continued to shift away from the Corrupted Spirit's nest, creeping up toward Floor 59, toward a route that would carry it further upward.
If the Corrupted Spirit let it be, someday—perhaps years from now—that glacier current would carry the ice dome through the middle floors, and out of its absolute reach. Its prey would escape.
No... I will not let you... growled the Corrupted Spirit. Its roots gripped the ice floor brutally, leaving long cracks. Aria is mine. Her flesh is mine!
The Corrupted Spirit tried to force its imperfect body out of the cocoon, but a harsh reprimand from the labyrinth jolted its consciousness, forcing it to continue eating magic stones so its form could become whole. It was trapped in an agonizing hunger and helplessness.
Until one moment, the absolute silence on Floor 60 was suddenly torn by a resonance.
TRING!
Not a physical sound, but a very high-frequency spiritual wave, sweeping away the cold air around the trench in just a fraction of a second.
The thorny roots sucking the magic stones suddenly froze in place. The cocoon that had been pulsing with a steady rhythm now beat crazily. The monsters surrounding the trench instantly stopped sacrificing themselves and began to howl in fear, pressing their bodies against the icy ground.
The Corrupted Spirit widened its faded golden eyes. Its vertical pupils shrank to the size of a needle.
From inside the rainbow ice dome that was shifting away, the protective magic threads that had been silent for thousands of years, suddenly emitted a blindingly bright golden gleam. A soul connection had just been established. An incredibly dense wind energy touched the seal from an immeasurable distance.
The Corrupted Spirit did not know that the resonance was the doing of Aria, who was checking on her daughter's condition from the surface of Orario. What it felt from the resonance was only an explosion of Wind element purity that was incredibly sweet and tantalizing.
To its corrupt monster brain, the resonance meant only one thing.
She... she is waking up? thought the Corrupted Spirit, its eyes widening in euphoria. The Aria inside there is trying to break her own ice?!
That misunderstanding became a deadly trigger. The Corrupted Spirit was certain that its prey would soon break out of the absolute ice shell that had protected her all this time. And when that ice broke, there would no longer be a barrier wall holding back its corrupt tentacles from tearing apart and absorbing the essence of the golden-haired girl.
It could not wait any longer. The glacier current continued to carry the ice dome away, and its prey was preparing to wake up.
I need hands... I need eyes out there... Inside the blackish-green glowing cocoon, the Corrupted Spirit began to sing something. Its voice echoed through the ice crystals. It was not an ordinary magic chant, but creation magic that had been twisted by the labyrinth's hatred.
The giant hunk of flesh on the lower half of its body began to throb painfully. From the cracks in the rotting flesh, clumps of magic crystals emitting dirty colors emerged. They were not ordinary monster magic stones, but parasitic seeds. Seeds of demonic gems created directly from the Corrupted Spirit's essence.
With a flick of its roots, the Corrupted Spirit threw the dirty gem seeds toward a pile of corpses of unfortunate adventurers who had died on the floor hundreds of years ago, as well as toward the living monsters around it.
When the gem seeds embedded themselves into the dead flesh and monster magic stones, a horrifying transformation occurred. The corpses moved jerkily, their muscles forced to knit back together by the demonic plant magic, giving birth to terrifying half-monster pawns.
Pioneer hybrid creatures.
Go... whispered the Corrupted Spirit, issuing an absolute command to its newly born army of creations. Its eyes glared sharply at the ice dome slowly being carried by the glacier current away from the trench. Chase that block of ice. Make sure it does not ascend to the upper floors. And as soon as the ice breaks... drag Aria to me.
The army of hybrids and corrupt monsters howled in response, spreading like a plague through the icy corridors of Floor 60, chasing the Frozen Garden of Talia that was slowly shifting upward.
The Corrupted Spirit closed its eyes again, absorbing energy at an insane speed. It refused to remain just a passive fetus. Its obsession with pure wind essence forced it to accelerate its incubation cycle.
The stage of death in the depths of the earth had been prepared perfectly. The trap was set, and the corrupt army was unleashed. Inside the absolute darkness of the labyrinth, the Corrupted Spirit waited patiently, waiting for the right moment when the ice broke, and it could devour the only thing that would make it a god in this lower world.
It was completely unaware that the connection it had just felt was not a sign of its prey's awakening, but rather a beacon signaling the arrival of other existences far more terrifying than anything the Dungeon had ever created.
The real storm from the surface had decided to descend, and they would bring hell before it.