Chapter 31 - Going Deep

"Well, what I should do right now..." Tom spoke out loud, pretending to be confused about his choices.

In reality, though, there wasn't that much that he could do. With the private capsule just waiting for him to enter it and get into grinding, the perspective of actually doing so was pretty compelling.

With all the snacks and automated system for ordering fresh food from the restaurant above and all kinds of other conveniences, only a madman would have any doubts about what to do now.

"Well, I guess it's time for me to leave then," Tom smiled before turning around on his feet and pushing the doors open. He stayed inside only for long enough to be sure that Marvin would leave the hidden basement.

'In the end, I wouldn't want to explain to him why I'm not into private capsules at all,' Tom thought, closing the doors to his private chamber and locking it.

But leaving the room wasn't equal to ignoring the advice of rapidly rising his avatar's level. Once back to the level above the ground, Tom casually made his way to one of the playrooms before registering himself for one of the standard capsules at the automated counter.

Only then did the former top player dare to enter the game.

"Dang, it was a while," Tom stretched his avatar's limbs before going through his standard procedure of feeling the entirety of its body. He knew that the avatar wasn't some kind of technological projection in an artificial world. With his memories now returned, he knew that it was nothing else but a biomechanical tool his brain would synchronize with!

'But to think that they would think I would be so naive,' Tom though while shaking his head. 'Did they think I was unaware that every single personal capsule is monitored?' he asked himself, unsure whether Peter took him to be naive or just gullible.

"Well, it's not like it matters," Tom said while shrugging his shoulders. Now that he connected to the so-called game through the normal capsule, there was no reason for him to bother with the potential surveillance anymore.

"Let's not waste any time," he said to himself before pushing forward.

With the three skills that he understood and the trusty spear to top it off, Tom didn't need to exert almost any strenght to reach the fortieth floor of the dungeon. Yet, despite the ease of conquering those floors, it still took him over two hours to reach further than he did while setting up his skills.

Because rather than trying to set his avatar's abilities anew, now he had to actually level up to get another ability.

"I'm three levels away from the new skill, and from reaching the level they asked me to reach," Tom muttered, plunging his spear into the heart of the humanoid boss of the floor.

Yet, rather than rejoicing the end of yet another part of his journey, Tom breathed heavily. Given his experience and insane skills, conquering the floors was of no trouble for him.

The same couldn't be said about mining the 'data' stones from the walls of each of the boss rooms.

In fact, this time-consuming activity towards which Tom had no special tools or predisposition was the reason why it took him so long to reach the same level as before.

With no other tools at his hand, Tom had no other way but to use his spear to chip away at the stone bricks.

"Fuck this thing," Tom uttered when the first out of the seven spawned data stones finally came loose. He grabbed it and then pulled it out.

"Just getting a single one is already harder than fighting the boss," Tom complained, yet there was no one there to hear it.

This problematic part was also the reason why Tom's previous main avatar had a skill allowing for easier mining of those stones.

'From what I heard, pickaxes belong to the most expensive category of tools on the auctions. Now I see why,' Tom thought, starting to work on the second stone.

On the floors forty and above, there was no longer grade two stones appearing. Given his current level, there was no reason to pick them at all, as it simply wasn't worth the time needed to mine them. Yet, being on the forty floors, Tom was now faced with stones of third grade only, forcing him to spend a considerable amount of time to mine them all.

By the time Tom reached the forty-seventh floor, one equal to the current level of his avatar, the dungeon's difficulty had started to spike up. While this phenomenon has yet to be explored and explained, it was common knowledge that levels higher than the level of one's avatar would turn harder than they should be.

It was as if some hidden force was stopping players from farming the levels above their own. Most of the players believed it was a stop-gap measure implemented to prevent people from farming the high-grade stones and quickly raising their levels.

'But if this dungeon isn't a game... Then just how does this happen? Some limitation enforced on the avatars by its creator?' Tom asked himself, puzzled by the problem.

In the end, it was one of the many questions Tom had no hopes of answering. It simply lingered in his mind as he continued to delve deeper and deeper into the dungeon, making short work of the monsters and wasting more time than he wished on mining the stones.

"So that's it," Tom muttered once reaching the boss of the forty-seventh floor. Given how the floor itself corresponded to the level of his avatar and the boss had the strenght of the monsters one level lower, the coming fight would no longer be as easy.

"I need to figure out just what the hell this origin mage skill is," Tom muttered while gripping his spear harder and pushing forward. "If I don't do that soon, who knows if I will be able to reach level fifty anytime soon!"