The next five days were some of the most miserable in Vivi's life.

The blight got worse the further Vivi went in. More poison surrounded her. More screwed-up trees and vegetation. Less water. More inedible agarics and fewer tall-headed mushrooms. Surges were rampant and common. Oftentimes, surges spawned within her vicinity multiple times an hour.

Monsters stopped making sense. Reanimations turned into total amalgamations. Not the named amalgamations Vivi had fought in Zand, but amalgamations in the sense that the monsters were freaks of nature. Vivi encountered a bird whose head was a large human hand with mouths on each fingertip. She saw a reanimated troll with two heads. The second head was a zombified tongue-devil. The troll itself was torn and destroyed, as if tortured alive. A cloud of poison gas pushed out from its wounds. Vivi didn't want to deal with that, so she ran until the monster stopped chasing.

Every monster was far tougher than anything Vivi had met in Zand's main dungeon. She required void ether to defeat most opponents. Abyss Destroyer still killed the amalgamations, thank the gods, but her opponents would also kill her in one shot. Vivi was forced to treat every enemy as potentially her last.

She did get poisoned once. A mushroom monster with four hands armed with rotten knives cut slightly into her arm. Her eyes turned red, and the spot in her skin was still black-ish. Lucius had protected her with ether, saving her from death, but the venom was a reminder that the slightest mistake here could kill her.

Vivi's schedule of searching for an exit and exploring had quickly switched to pure survival and rampant monster fights. Her days were spent searching for food and water. Once those were secured, she had to secure a sleeping position for the next day.

Some sleeping positions were safer than others. An unsafe location wouldn't let her fall asleep at all, as monsters would be attacking her constantly. The safe locations allowed her to get fifteen to sixty minutes of sleep before she had to kill whichever monster was lurking in the forest around her.

To create a safe location, Vivi cleared the vicinity of all monsters, hunting them down, until she ensured that nothing was alive within a mile of her. Then she hoped no surges spawned nearby.

Channeling ether had unfortunately come to a standstill. There was no time to head to Paradise to practice channeling. Lucius was forced to keep watch of her surroundings every night to wake her up if a monster attacked. He didn't have energy to bring her to Paradise. Additionally, waking up from Paradise took longer, which meant Vivi would further risk her life. She already had a few close calls with ambushes at night.

On the fifth day, after Vivi's monster battle, the first of what Vivi could consider good news came up. Lucius collected ether from all the amalgamations around her, and Vivi took a look into her reserves.

The sight was so absurd it almost didn't make sense. "I'm no longer in debt…"

Lucius smiled weakly. He'd been too tired for jokes lately. "At least something positive. That means we've gained two thousand ether now? The blight might be inefficient, but if you kill enough, monsters still drop ether. Congratulations, Vivi."

Vivi shrugged. "Hardly feels worth the celebration. It's already clear that the hunters won't respect me no matter how much ether I earn."

"But most importantly, you're alive," Lucius said. "You won't die on your eighteenth birthday. We'll make sure to celebrate. And now, we can actually start working on improving the endurance of our reserves. When I run out, you can offer me more."

"I guess…" Vivi said. This was technically good news. Vivi's debts were cleared. For the longest part of her life, curing her curse was all she really cared about.

With her debts cleared, she would live until something other than her debts killed her. That was about it.

Lucius floated beside her. Vivi gave him a smile in hopes to convince him that she was still sane. "The hunt continues. Let's see how much ether we earn before we find a way out of here."

The answer, it turned out, was a lot of ether.

***

Weeks later, Vivi felt herself turning into an animal.

She woke up on Lucius's spirit hammock with a headache. She scanned the surroundings for any monsters that could have woken her up. There was nothing, and Lucius wasn't giving her any signals. He was silent, half-asleep. It didn't seem like he noticed Vivi woke up.

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Vivi had woken up on her own. That was rare. She didn't sleep a full night's rest—Vivi had lost the ability to sleep for extended periods in the blight. She was perpetually tired, combating void ether's headaches by abusing regular ether.

Falling back asleep would be difficult. Vivi lay on the hammock and watched the sky. She didn't feel much except the pains all over her body. Emotions were hard to come by when living like she did: hunting for monsters, foraging hopelessly for food and water, and combating sleep and poison, utterly alone in one of the most dangerous parts of the world.

Vivi vaguely remembered days in the distant past, when she used to wake up in warmth and cuddles. She remembered Eem's voice, though the details of her face were slipping from her memories.

Memories prior to Zand felt ancient. Vivi could hardly believe that she used to once be a runesmith and her Grandpa's apprentice. Life in the blight had taken over Vivi's every instinct. She didn't craft weapons or fear bullies or guardsmen anymore. She didn't really feel fear at all. What was the point of fear when she already knew everything around would try to kill her?

Vivi didn't know how long she'd lived in the blight for. Probably around a month. Her swords were losing their sharp edges, and Vivi felt like her vocabulary and ability to deal with people was withering away. If not for Lucius keeping company, Vivi would have probably lost herself already.

She did have 9685 ether in her reserves on top of Lucius's 5000, and 3269 void wisps. If she ever returned to civilization, she could consider herself rich. At least wealthy enough to live lavishly for years.

The thought of returning to civilization daunted Vivi. She was far from what societies considered people. Vivi vaguely remembered what a bath felt like, or what it was like to visit a church. The most vibrant memories of society were from Paradise, or her encounter in the demon village. The one where she was kicked out and deemed a criminal.

I'll never find the exit to the fifth level, will I? Vivi thought to herself. She continued staring at the sky, waiting for a monster to wake up. Until then, she could do nothing in peace.

Moments of nothing were invaluable. She didn't need to eat, she didn't need to search for water, didn't need to worry about which plant would poison her next. She didn't…

She didn't need to think about her duty to bring Grandpa's invention to life.

Lucius flinched back awake. He focused on their surroundings. Vivi felt it too. Ether was finally approaching.

The ether didn't come from a monster. It came from underground. Fifty feet or so away from Vivi.

"Ah, hell," Vivi muttered when the surge of red wisps shot out from the ground, covering the woods near her in active ether.

"Good, you're awake," Lucius said. "Let's get out of here."

He called off the hammock and went into Vivi's core. She braced her legs for the fall and summoned her sword.

Vivi and Lucius had agreed they would run from surges or boss monsters. The typical surge in the blight was dangerous without much reward. Running back would draw some monsters, but Vivi could easily deal with a few stragglers.

For some reason, her legs didn't feel like running today. Vivi faced the surge and watched for whatever was about to spawn.

Amalgamations filled the forest, of course. Insects with limbs poking out unnaturally from places where they didn't fit. Rotting rabbits that looked like they'd already been eaten alive. A disgusting combination of a gnoll, ether stick, horse, and a lizard. That was far from the worst monster Vivi had seen, but it was probably on par with strength to a third elevation hunter.

Vivi reached into her void-core, and the monsters stopped being scary.

She dashed forth and slashed with her sword. The dozen or so monsters sent ravaged attacks in her direction, pouncing for her. Vivi's void senses predicted them coming. She could feel the entire battlefield at once; every obstacle or poisonous plant, every attack, and the location of every monster.

Her sword, combined with void ether, was the reason why Vivi was still alive in the first place. Void ether and venerium were impossibly powerful, letting Vivi fight whole surges at once.

A hundred void wisps were already exhausted. That amount would take days to recover.

Vivi jumped right to the centre of action, fighting every monster at once. Her fighting style had grown rather reckless. She weaved from monster to monster fast enough that attacks struggled to connect to her. Monsters often attacked each other, causing chaos in the battlefield.

Without void ether, the strategy would have been utter suicide. With void ether, however, Vivi could map out every attack coming her way and react accordingly. Most times, she reacted by killing whoever was trying to attack her.

She pushed more and more ether into her body. Her senses faded entirely. Vivi existed only in the realm of blackness and ether. Monsters died. Nothing could stop her. Before she knew, the monsters around her had died, and Vivi was dashing for the next monster a hundred feet from here.

"Vivi…!" a voice shouted vaguely in her head.

Vivi ignored it. She was in the zone now. Anything she came across, she could kill. The monster whose presence she felt was running away. She was the reaper of the blight.

"Vivi, stop!" Lucius shouted. "That's not a monster! He's screaming!"

Huh? Vivi thought. Her target had fallen on the ground and was crawling backward. Its ethereal presence was strong, comparable to monsters, but something was different about it. Vivi fought back the flow of void ether for five seconds, until her eyesight vaguely returned.

"You're…" Vivi said in shock when she could see again. "You're a demon?"

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