Ichor Cell-Chapter 38: Looking to the future

“Wait-” Duran’s tried shouting, but his voice was immediately drowned out as the world broke.
The instant Alex lifted the boot, reality around them twisted like wet cloth being wrung dry. The cavern’s walls folded in on themselves, lines of stone and root bending into spirals before snapping flat again. The sound was indescribable—not thunder, not wind, just pure, mounting pressure on their eardrums.
Grenil shouted something, but his voice was lost in the roar of collapsing space. Duran reached for Alex, his hand distorting mid-motion, stretching and splitting into impossible shapes before reforming again.
The air itself warped. The guardian’s corpse rippled, stretched thin, then folded into a point and vanished.
For one dizzying instant, Alex saw everything—every corridor, every tunnel, every hollow root chamber—compressing inward like the pages of a book closing around them.
Then the ground disappeared.
It wasn’t falling, not exactly. It was as though gravity had forgotten what direction meant. Up, down, sideways—each changed by the heartbeat. His stomach turned over and over, the world dissolving into a blur of violet light and jagged afterimages. His senses screamed.
And just as suddenly as it began, it ended.
Alex hit the ground hard enough to knock the air from his lungs. He gasped, blinking against the rain pouring from the sky above. Grey clouds swirled overhead, heavy and dark. Cold water pattered against his back, mixing with the blood still crusted on his skin.
“-we should take cover.” Duran finished, voice rough and distant.
Alex turned his head. Duran was kneeling a few feet away, staring in relief at the sky. Grenil lay nearby, clutching his stomach as he emptied its contents on the side of the road.
“What do you mean by that?” He asked the ghoul. “And why do you look more relieved now than when you found out we won?”
“We are so lucky.” The man turned to look at him, the relief in his eyes shifting to reproach. “Me, specifically. I’m lucky. You almost killed me.”
The young man arched a brow. “And how do you figure that?”
“Because,” Duran threw a stick at Alex, which he dodged, “If it hadn’t been raining, I’d have burned to death by now.”
Alex paused as he realised what the other man meant.
“Oh… my bad.” He looked up sheepishly at the sky, extending a hand to catch the falling droplets. “That was stupid of me.”
“Yes, yes it was.” Duran agreed. “So, I’m relieved because I didn’t turn into a pile of ash as soon as we finally got back from the dungeon.”
‘He’s right.’
He finally took a good look around.
‘We are so back.’
The same narrow dirt path they’d walked days ago stretched into the misty distance on both sides. To the right lay the scattered treeline that had grown into an impenetrable maze wall. To the left, a crater.
A small, shallow pit had formed in the center of the road, no wider than half a dozen feet across. The ground within it gleamed faintly, the soil melted into a thin layer of dark glass.
“What’s this?” Grenil muttered, slowly approaching it.
Alex followed, peering into the crater. “Looks like something hit it from above. Hard.”
He frowned, squatting beside it. The center had an indentation, presumably from whatever had created the crater in the first place. Something small lay beside the indent as well—a blackened mass the size of a fist. Alex almost leaped out of his skin when he realised it was a massive spider.
Or had been.
Its legs were curled inward and broken, the body cracked and shrivelled, as though it had been smashed to death with a hammer. A faint, green fluid pooled in a circle around it. It also had fifteen legs.
“Is that what I think it is?” Duran asked after a moment.
“Nah, there’s no way, right?” Alex nervously waved his hand in front of his face to deny it. “There’s no way we almost died to a literal spider that got juiced up on mana.”
The others stared at him with pity in their eyes.
The young vampire slumped to the floor in defeat. “You’re kidding me.”
“It’s okay.” Grenil clapped him on the shoulder commiseratingly, though he couldn’t hide the twinkle in his eye. “Nobody will know you almost got killed by a common wood spider.”
“Thanks.” Alex slapped his hand away with a snort. “But does this mean…”
He reached for the core—the boot—that he had dropped when the world folded like an origami. Examining the shape, he hesitantly reached over and placed it in the crater, fitting the heel perfectly into the indent.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
They sat in silence for a moment.
“God damn, dungeons are weird.” Alex broke the silence, shaking himself out of his surprise. “Should we get going? We should be safe now, but I wanna put some distance between us and this place, just to be sure. Our journey has been delayed by at least a day, and if someone’s chasing us that’s not good.”
“Would also be nice to get out of this rain.” Grenil squinted up at the sky, shielding his eyes from the water droplets. “I suggest we go a bit further down the road and wait out the rain. The tarp is waterproof anyways.”
Everyone reached a consensus.
Due to circumstances outside his control, Alex ended up being the only able-bodied member of their group. So, while Duran and the old man talked and laughed in the cart, protected from the elements, he had to pull the cart under the cold, miserable rain.
“You alright there, Alex?” Grenil asked in mock concern. “We wouldn’t want you to catch a cold so soon after facing such a big and scary spider.”
The cart exploded into chuckles and snickers.
“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up.” He grumbled under his breath. “At least I can do a push up.”
Turning back to the road, he focused on putting as much distance as he could between them and the dungeon. As the monotone journey stretched on, his thoughts inevitably started to wander.
‘Now that I’ve had time to calm down and recover, there are several things that I need to investigate.’
He pondered as he pulled the cart, placing one foot in front of the other.
Indeed, as he mulled over his memories of the fight, a few things stood out to him.
‘First, have I finally discovered a way to fix my shrapnel issue?’
Alex remembered the moment he had been impaled, specifically the part where he had blown it away by filling himself with mana like a pressure cooker.
‘Sure, it’s a bit messy and quite painful.’
He remembered how he had basically exploded to get rid of the foreign object.
‘Ok, maybe very messy, but it is
a
solution to the problem, and it’s still better than what I used to do. Regrowing a hand is still doable, but what do I do when I have something in my chest, or my head?’
He shivered at the thought. “Yeah, this is definitely an improvement.”
‘Second, have I entirely skipped the triple infusion stage and immediately gone to four?’
Alex studied his hands, still unwilling to use any more magic due to his mana sickness.
He was of course referring to the fact that after blowing a hole through his torso, he had suddenly gone from only being able to empower two parts of his body—either a whole limb, or two separate halves—to four. It was true that growth in the face of adversity was a real thing, but didn’t this seem a bit extreme?
‘Maybe the pressure cooker method helped somehow?’
He theorised. ‘
I was forced to use my mana in a way I never had before, so maybe that’s the key to rapidly growing my abilities.’
If he was right, then whenever he got the chance to truly start training, he shouldn’t just try to force mana into more limbs; he’d have to get creative.
Shrugging, Alex looked up at the sky, noticing a distinct lack of rain. While the heavens were still overcast with clouds, there was no way to know how long that would last, so it would be better to start looking for a place to wait out the rest of the day now.
After another ten minutes of walking, he found a small clearing where the road bent around a cluster of low hills. A patch of trees had grown close to the roadside—thick enough to break the wind, sparse enough for the cart to fit in between. The rain had mostly faded by now, leaving the air damp and heavy with the scent of wet earth.
“This’ll do,” Alex said, pulling the cart off the road and onto the grass.
Grenil poked his head outside and nodded approvingly. “Not bad. Close to the road, hidden from view. Flat, too.”
Duran grunted, swinging his legs off the cart with some difficulty. Alex moved to help him down, but Duran waved him off. “I’ve got it. Don’t make me feel any more like a cripple than I already do.”
They set up quickly—spreading out the tarp as a makeshift shelter, stacking a few stones for a firepit that would probably never see use, given the rain. Once everything was ready, they sat together in the fading light, the rhythmic patter of droplets still falling from the branches above.
“So,” Duran said after a while, leaning back against the cart, “what exactly are we supposed to do with that thing?” He gestured at the boot lying beside Alex.
Alex glanced down at it. The boot still pulsed with mana, its purple and black exterior positively
reeked
of wealth and power. He had no point of comparison, but the difference between it and the dagger they sold could very well be greater than the difference between the dagger and a mundane kitchen knife.
“Not much we
can
do. I don’t think it’s very useful to only wear one boot, no matter how powerful or expensive it may be. Unless you’re Doom Foot himself.” He chuckled at his own joke.
Grenil shrugged. “We could sell it.”
“Sell it?” Alex raised an eyebrow. “And where do you propose we do that? I for one do not know a trader willing to purchase a ridiculously expensive piece of equipment at a fair price with no questions asked. Especially since we don’t even know what this thing is worth in the first place. I refuse to be scammed again.”
“Better than lugging it around for nothing,” the old man countered. “That thing is useless to us as is, so it’s better to sell it off for something we
can
use instead.”
“Probably,” Alex admitted, but then shook his head. “Which means whoever buys it will definitely lowball us. No thanks.”
“So what’s your amazing plan?” Duran asked.
“We keep it.” Alex decided after a moment. “If we ever need money badly, it’s our emergency fund. Until then, it stays with us.”
Grenil shrugged. “If that’s what you think is best. You’re the one who cleared the dungeon, so it’s your decision.”
With that, the matter was settled.
“So what’s our next move?” Alex asked. “I don’t know this place so I couldn’t tell you which way we should go or what we should do.”
“North-east,” Grenil said without hesitation. “South and west are ocean, and if we stay here too long, we might get caught by anyone that might be after us. We keep moving until we’re out of the country.”
“That’ll take a couple of weeks, if the roads are good,” Duran argued. “And longer if they’re not.”
“Then we better start ASAP.” Alex said. “We rest for the rest of the day, then move at sunset.”
The three of them got up and settled under the tarp, with the old man falling asleep as soon as his head hit the ground. It was impressive that he’d held on this long, considering he hadn’t slept at all inside the dungeon.
Alex huffed a quiet laugh and leaned back, letting the soft drum of water against leaves lull him into something like peace. For the first time in what felt like weeks—though it must have only been a day or two—there were no monsters waiting in the dark, no roots crawling toward him from the walls. Just rain, cold air, and the cloudy sky.
He didn’t know what the future held, who he might meet, the places he might visit, or the dangers he might face. Tonight, they would move, running further from his mistakes and deeper into the unknown. But for now, he could sit here, and enjoy the moment.