World Seed

Author’s Corner: As I edited into the author’s corner from the last chapter(before the edit chapter button vanished with the update), I am looking for someone to help me write some song lyrics for later in this arc. For details, send me a PM, no spoilers here! Naturally whoever writes the lyrics will be credited with them.After resting up and recovering the two scales that I had spent during the boss battle, we moved on towards the next floor. Naturally, just in case we ran into more greed demons, both the axe and the mountains of coins were stored inside either mine or Sharon’s groves. But it was also from this point that we’d be gathering new data.“John, go ahead and pull out one of the sensors.” Celeste looked to me and nodded. Since we had to keep them out of inventories for the greed floor, the sensors that we’d be placing had to be stored in the grove until we were ready for them. Nodding my head, I pulled out one of several dozen devices I had stored in my grove, which appeared to be a long metallic spike with a camera on the end. As we left the boss room and moved on to the next floor, I through the spike into the wall to embed it in. We had to put one of those in every room and corridor, in order to make sure that we got all of the spawns from the floor.In the first floor, we saw the demons that we would be fighting on this level. I wasn’t sure whether to be glad that we had a counter for them already… or disgusted because of what they were. “This must be the Gluttony floor…”I could hear Sharon gagging next to me as she looked into the room, were dozens of baseball-sized flies with the faces of human babies on them. On this floor, the demons had one property, and only one. They consumed, everything. Whether it was a magical attack or a physical one, they would immediately begin eating it to replenish their health. There were only two ways to kill the fly demons… Either hit them with something they couldn’t eat, or hit them hard enough to kill them before they could heal.We went with the first option. Thanks to having Yin here, we could literally crush dozens of fly demons at once. Like regular flies, these demons were both fast, and incredibly fragile. It took hardly any effort for Yin to crush them with her telekinesis. Though, we made sure to take a break if she started building up a headache, so that she could recover.The worst part was when the gluttony demons came out in groups of over a hundred, and Yin couldn’t get them in time. Some of them would latch onto Yo’s body and began drinking her slime, while others tried to attach themselves to the rest of us. But, thankfully there weren’t any lesser devils on this floor, and the only thing we had to take care of were the fly demons.At least, until we hit the boss room. I was expecting many things from the boss of the gluttony floor, but a slime wasn’t one of them. Well… it was sort of a slime. It was giant, at least twenty meters tall, and very slime-like. However, along its edges were wide openings full of teeth, from which long tentacles came out to try and grab us.“Sharon… please tell me your divination can help us here…” I said after raising a stone wall, using every bit of energy to say nope to that fight. I was just fine standing outside that room, thank you.“Uhm… give me a bit, and I’ll let you know?” She said awkwardly, before sitting down beside the wall and focusing. I could feel the fluctuation of mana around her, so no doubt she was working some magic to try to get information about this boss.“Ugh.. well…” She started speaking again after being quiet for a few moments. “From what my spell said… it’s called a devourer… And… that’s pretty much it. It eats things… Everything.”Yin furrowed her brows as she listened. “Too big…”“Right, it’s too big for Yin to blast it with her telekinesis…. And it will probably eat our attacks faster than we can use them… So… Other options?” Celeste looked around to us as she asked.It was at this point that the answer came from the most unlikely source. “Why don’t we just avoid it..?” Yo asked, tilting her head slightly to the side. Her body was a bit shorter than it had been before, as she hadn’t been able to reproduce enough slime yet to finish rebuilding her body.Suddenly, everyone started looking at me, and I couldn’t help but sigh. Using my Earth Manipulation, I tapped into the stone around the boss room and began making a tunnel to circumvent the room altogether. “This feels like cheating…”