Before he could do more than fantasize about his leveling, his foot landed on something different to the rest of the ground. It didn’t show up on his Void senses, meaning that it was in some way connected to the mysterious beasts that plagued the challenge floor. He reached down, and set his fingers on what felt like a slippery crystalline object, like a diamond covered in butter. Lifting it up, he felt a sudden resonance with the gem. There was a flash of light in the darkness, and the gem cracked, energy leaking out and into his flesh.

  For the first time on the dungeon floor, his vision returned, but at a fraction of its normal level. Shades of black and white were the first to return, and Jonathan was suddenly treated to a disturbing sight. The ground that he had been walking on was not, as previously thought, muddy earth, but rather a sea of weeping flesh, blood leaking out of massive wounds etched into what looked like the body of a titan.

  The corpses that he had seen with his Void senses were revealed to be growing out of the flesh beneath, half fused with the ground, their sightless eyes gazing into space as hands twisted and torn reached for the sky above. Jonathan looked up, and saw a strange mass of waving shapes far above. The sliver of eyesight that had returned to him was not enough to make them out fully, which was perhaps just as well.

  Now that he could see, albeit barely, he was able to spot a few of the monsters roaming around. They looked more like blobs than anything else, what with his limited eyesight, but there was something off about their movements. It looked as if they were incorporating invisible body parts into their gait, with their main bodies, cylinders of featureless flesh, floating a bit above the ground.

  Jonathan made a beeline for the nearest one, knowing that with the ability to see them, battling the monsters would be far easier. The creature that he had set his eyes on turned as soon as he was about a hundred feet away, before exploding into motion. Like a cannonball of quivering flesh, the strange beast skittered along the ground on invisible legs, sending up sprays of blood as it tore into the skin below.

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  Jonathan cracked his knuckles, and drew back his fist, feeling his muscles tense as he did so. Stamina spiraled down his arm, culminating in his fist before bouncing back up the appendage. With a roar, he shot his fist forwards, straight into the bulk of the charging beast. Seemingly unprepared for its foe to be able to see it, the monster faltered for a moment. Jonathan’s fist impacted the center of its body a moment later, and with a noise that sounded uncomfortably like a balloon popping, ruptured the sack of flesh, splattering gore everywhere.

  Jonathan felt something brush up against his leg, even with his armor. Something invisible had extended from the creature’s body at the last moment, and nearly reached him. Snatching at the air, he found nothing to suggest the presence of anything there, and he withdrew his hand, frowning.

  “What is this place?” He wondered out loud. “It’s so strange...” Naturally, there was no response.

  ***

  A few hours passed, with Jonathan gaining another two levels for his troubles. Unfortunately, the essence gain had changed, diminishing in accordance with his newfound ability to see. Rather than scaling off absolute strength, the System instead made the rewards commensurate with the challenge, supplementing the dungeon denizens' strength with its own special effects.

  The dungeon grew stranger and stranger the further he went, with a slight upwards curve accentuating the gory backdrop. It was as if he were inside the stomach of a massive beast, and climbing up out of it.

  After the dozenth monster, he finally bothered to scan the things, only to come up with a strange result.

  Juvenile *^%# Spawn

  Level: ???

  The text flickered in his vision, the second word of the name completely impossible to make out. It certainly fit with the theme of the dungeon, but it did nothing to help him understand what he was facing.

  A few minutes later, he found another of the crystals, nearly stumbling across it. There was almost no radiance off the object, contrary to what he had expected. Whether that was because his vision was still impaired, or because using one of the crystals for the first time had been an illusion, he could not tell. Nothing was what it seemed in this place.