Chapter 8: Investigation Mission (1)

O began to open the door with his trembling hand. If he had sweat glands, his whole body would be wet by now. A growling sound from behind the door traveled through the air, reflected off the walls of the room made of hard and compacted earth.

Have you ever been to a safari park and seen a male lion roaring from your safari car? O have experienced it. The iron bars and thick glass of the safari car that ensured his safety could not prevent the lion's roar from shaking his guts. This time too, the sound that came from behind the door was like the roar of a lion, even more sinister than O could remember. 

Behind the door, O found a large passage. This passage was exactly like the first one he had entered after returning to life as a Lich. O thought, if every area was made with a similar architecture like this, the existence of a map probably wouldn't help him at all ...

But O kept going foward anyway. If the architecture of this area was the same, then after the dimly lit large hall, there would be a long and dark small passage. However, he had barely taken a few steps when five zombies walked out of the darkness. 

“Hey! Come to me!" O said defiantly, "Narrator, show the Lapis and Ignis formulas!" 

The five zombies responded to O's cry with a loving embrace. Of course, the embrace of love here meant that the corpses would pounce on O, crushed him to pieces, then chewed on the pieces of his bones. However, O has prepared everything. A brown magic circle appeared under the living corpses. 

“Lapis!” 

Three stalagmites pierced two of the zombies, piercing them from the bottom up. The two undead were impaled and became a fence that separated O from the other three undead.

The three undead that were moving at high speed crashed into the stalithic railing and piled on top of each other. There was actually still quite a gap, but the undead didn't have enough intellegence to notice it in such a short time.  

“Ignis!” O launched his next attack. A fireball blew up the pile of corpses and burned them. 

WHACK! BHAM! 

O pounded the undead that still struggling in the flames. A zombie manages to break free, but O immediately finishes him off with a single vertical swing of his staff. The zombies immediately turned into a black liquid which O immediately absorbed. 

“Bone appétit!” O jokingly said. It's a shame no one was listening to his bland jokes.   

This battle was made easy with magic, thought O. However, the zombies just now gave too little assimilation points. His assimilation rate after absorbing the black liquid just now had only risen to 3.1%. Apart from that, there was nothing left by the undeads except shabby clothes which had also been charred because of his Fireball magic.. 

“Wow, looks like the fire magic just now damaged the loot!” O stroked his chinbone. He had no regrets about the incident, because the weapon he had now was far better than the other items he had found so far. But still, he had to be more careful in using fire magic later on, lest something valuable dropped from the monsters.

RAAAWRGH! 

The growl had became the roar it was meant to be. Now the sound didn't just appear occasionally, but many times and the duration was longer too. It sounded like a lion struggling to drive away enemies that entered its territory. 

O swallowed hard his saliva, though he had no throat. “Hey, Narrator. This mission clear requirement is just to investigate, right?” 

""That's correct, Master."" 

Despite this answer, O was still feeling uneasy. He had to be very careful, because he could only rely on himself now.

O was afraid to die (again), even though he was technically no longer a living being. He thought to an extreme: what if he stored his core crystal somewhere so his body could roam freely without worrying about it. O then asked the Narrator about it. 

And of course, the answer he got was as expected. “”It can be done. However, the farther the core crystal is from your body, the greater the energy used to move your body. It will also be very difficult for your shattered body to reunite into the core crystal.”"

O nodded. It made sense. If the body and the core crystal were too far apart, then how could the body return to the core crystal safely? O imagined pieces of his body scattered and stuck everywhere. 

O stopped thinking about death. He moved forward slowly. Apart from being on guard in case there was a sudden attack by the zombies, his fear of the roar had not subsided yet. 

"Come on, you can do it. The zombies don't look scary anymore, do they? This monstrous beast that roars like a huge lion about to tear its prey to pieces will surely do the same.” O spoke his mind again. People who listened to what he said just now would naturally get more goosebumps instead of being moved. O really was mever good at motivating anyone, especially to himself. 

After walking very slowly through a narrow, dark passage, O arrived at a large, well-lit hall. At the end of the large hall, there was a wooden door. In O's imagination, behind the door lied a very scary monster that could swallow anything whole ...

Of course O was in no hurry. He acted with great care. His mission was only to investigate, not to fight. The important thing was he knew what's going on behind that door, right? So O looked for a gap in the wooden door just to peek a little. 

O could easily find the gap he was looking for, because from behind the door, small amount of light flashed. A ray of light from the flashes penetrated a sizable gap in the door and gave O a hint as to where he could take a good peek. O knelt down and closed his one eye, while the other eye peered through the crack in the door … 

O's eye widened. Not because the monster behind the door was even scarier than he imagined, but because a new message appeared in his vision. 

“”Mission clear requirement changed: save the monster inside the room!”” 

~To be continued~