Chapter 1973: Revelations

"Interesting," Rui remarked as he beheld a simple three-tusked white boar before him.

Its danger level was on par with grade-one Martial Seniors.

At this point, Rui was so much stronger than it that he may as well have been an entire Realm above it.

It rushed towards him, leaping at him in a single go.

Yet, it never stood a chance.

BOOM!

A devastating blow to the head killed it in an instant.

"From this point on, we need to be more alert," Kane murmured.

Senior-level beasts, even if low-grade, had the potential to harm them. It was deeply unlikely, but even a moment of complacency could completely turn the tables over.

The two took their stances as a herd of three-tusked white boars rushed at them, seeking to kill them.

SPLAT SPLAT SPLAT!

Kane alone was enough to deal with them, yet he held back, leaving only flesh wounds. The goal of their ventures into the dungeon was not to eradicate all the creatures of the dungeon. That was a foolhardy and brute-force manner of doing things that wasted a lot of time and energy and didn't bring them closer to their goal of reaching the core of the dungeon.

It was because Rui knew that it was highly likely that the Master-level creature occupying the core of the dungeon probably came from one of the species that occupied the lower parts of the domain.

Thus, killing each and every single one of them without gaining enough data that could be useful for the Master-level guardian was foolish.

BAM BAM BAM!!!

He ended each of them mercilessly once he got what he needed.

"Are you sure we need to do this for each species in the manifold?" Kane asked, raising an eyebrow.

"...To maximize our probability of escaping this place, yes." Rui's voice was stoic.

"Why are you so confident that this will help you with the Master-level guardian of the Mellow Manifold?"

"...It's a nested inference based on the state of these creatures," Rui glanced at the corpses at his feat. "What question presents itself when we think of the fact that these creatures are made to be put in a trance state?"

"...'How?' and 'Why?' I guess," Kane remarked.

"Correct." Rui's detached gaze remained fixed on the corpse. "Fundamentally, it boils down to the fact that these creatures are being used for protection of the dungeon. It's a defensive measure. One that none of the dungeons we visited before had."

"Sure, but what does that have to do with the Master-level guardian?"

"...Like all dungeons, this place was created when the flora absorbed powerful esoteric resources, surviving and mutating, evolving to become something else entirely," Rui replied. "If we assume that this place was like the Mellow outside it, which is quite reasonable considering it was once one place, then the species it started off with were as weak as the sub-Apprentice-level creatures outside it. Yet..."

He gestured to the corpses around them. "...It now has Senior-

level creatures and Master-level creatures."

Rui turned to Kane with a stoic gaze. "How do you think that came to be?"

"Well, it is a drastic jump," Kane admitted. "To go from sub-

Apprentice-level to Master-level at its strongest. But you pointed out that this place has been evolving for hundreds and forty thousand years, right? That's a long time, so it's not crazy."

Rui shook his head. "...If it was a million years, I would have been less surprised. But a hundred and forty thousand is nothing. You would not seen an astronomical evolution of life so quickly, historically speaking. Species do not grow ten thousand times stronger on average in such a timespan under ordinary circumstances. The statistical likelihood of such a thing happening is extraordinarily low."

"Ok, but then what's the gig here?"

"This dungeon..." Rui narrowed his eyes. "...is selectively breeding them. Additionally, it's accelerating evolution by engaging in brutal survival of the fittest. Having these animals breed at an extremely high rate by placing them in a trance it is able to tolerate high death rates, which allows them to engage in large-scale Darwinian evolution measures. The Darwinian evolution filters ensure that each generation of species is decently stronger than the previous generation, albeit not too much. Doing that will yield some tremendous results over one hundred and forty-four millennia. Only that can explain this drastic disparity from species that evolved from the ordinary creatures we saw in the Mellow outside."

Rui knelt down to the three-tusked boars before him. "This species of boar is an evolved version of the ordinary ground boar that we saw outside in the Mellow. Yet, in this Mellow Dungeon, it has evolved to orders of magnitude stronger."

"How can you tell these boars have anything to do with boars outside? They look different and are way larger and stronger." Kane curiously asked.

"...The enlightenment of the Tree of Life not only allows me to predict the most optimal antithetical environments against a given lifeform, but it also allows me to understand the evolutionary distance and evolutionary position on the Tree of Life," Rui calmly remarked. "These creatures undoubtedly branched off from the species of boar we saw outside. Based on the titanic differences, I can assume some intense selective breeding and forced Darwinian filtering have been happening for a long time. It wasn't difficult to piece together the truth once I figured this much out."

His detached eyes slowly turned to Kane. "Thus, the strongest creature will be the strongest individual of the strongest generation of the strongest species. Most likely, some freak mutation, if I had to wager. You're bound to run into those over a hundred and forty millennia. Still. That is the long answer to your question. One of these species possessed the key to understanding the Master-level creature that guards the core of the dungeon..."

".When you put it like that, that definitely makes much more sense, to be honest." Kane heaved a sigh. "Just how many such species are there in this dungeon?"

"...Lots."

"Damn."