3 Grinding and Arrival

The girl had been fighting slimes on the stairs for at least two weeks now. Each morning, she would rush out of her cave on top of the building and head down the stairs, but she still had never reached the end. As she repeated her descent that day, the girl grimly realized that these buildings were far, far larger than she had first assumed; the dim light in the massive cave made it difficult to judge the depth of distant shadows. As such, she had no real way of knowing exactly how many more stairs she would have to descend before she reached the ground floor. Exhausting... Thankfully, the slimes didn't seem intelligent enough or active enough to migrate further up the stairs, so she was able to make consistent headway each day.

As the girl explored further and further down the stairs, she encountered more and more slimes. The came in a variety of colors and with a variety of attacks or appendages.

There were the unsettling grey slimes that each had a long lavender tongue, and they constantly flicked it in and out of the top of their bodies to taste the air. Neon orange slimes would spit acid from tubular mouths that seemed to wander across their oily bodies. Transparent pink slimes with vague crimson innards launched their relatively small bodies at her, only to inflate suddenly and try to consume her!

However... to the girl, they seemed very clumsy, even pitiable. Very few of them had any eye appendages at all, and those without would occasionally fall off the stairs or off the building completely... Dodging their attacks was simple, as almost all of them lacked depth perception and seemed unintelligent. Killing them was even easier, as her sword seemed to really enjoy eating their slimy flesh...

Although she found it disgusting at first to see the slimes brutally dismembered by the intense perforating force of her spike plant sword, the girl began to slowly look forward to seeing how the spike plant would change.

The spike plant-covered blade had originally been quite short, but as she inevitably had to kill slimes day after day, it was constantly taking in "nutrients" and growing. During this short period of "nourishment," the blade length doubled to a bit less than a meter.

The plant seemed more organized now as well; the leaflets all formed orderly silver rosettes surrounding a pale grey central needle. When they sensed prey, the leaflets would eagerly wrap themselves around the needles to reinforce and strengthen the plant's vicious stabbing motions... Different leaflets had streaks of bright orange or deep purple, splotches of yellow and red, or veined patterns of blue and green. The slate tendrils from the depths of the plant were now lightning fast and sharp enough to directly harpoon heftier chunks. no longer just snatching scraps.

The most obvious development, though, was the large flower bud at tip of the spike plant, seemingly where the blade tip of the original intact sword would be... This bud was shaped like a short, fat cone, and the end was lethally sharp; the sword was now an incredible piercing weapon as well! With consistent use, she had begun to develop an affinity towards this strange sword, and no longer yelped or panicked when slaughtering slimes!

***

In the depths of the Ruined Jungle, a woman silently crouched in the hollow of a large mushroom clump. She reached into a comically small bag and pulled out a single onyx seed. She pricked her thumb with a small ivory knife, and as her hands glowed with a greenish brown light, she squeezed a drop of her blood onto the seed and buried it. Her thumb healed almost instantly afterword, and anyone close enough would have seen the leftover blood on the surface of her thumb flow back into the wound before it closed.

Soon, the seed had sprouted, and the woman's glowing hands began to trace runes and divine geometries with a hypnotic rhythm that coaxed the plant into shockingly fast growth. A pristine pitcher plant was quickly flourishing in front of her. She placed a slender, greyish hand inside the nascent crimson and black pitcher of the plant, her fingertips just touching the surface of the jet black liquid inside as they exuded a vague brown-green light. The carnivorous plant spread its runners far and wide, quickly propagating new pitcher plants throughout the cavern jungle around her for kilometers.

As the new plants matured, most of them grew with mottled green pitchers that developed eye-like organs that dotted the pitchers' rims like a scallop's eyes. These pitchers also exuded a gentle, hypnotic scent to attract prey. Around the nearest regions of jungle, inconspicuous plants with small, grey pitchers began to sprout, which gave off lethally noxious and hallucinogenic vapors from the limpid pink liquid within. A third strain of pitcher plant began to appear at certain sites throughout the hundred kilometers of jungle surrounding her hideout. These plants had very large yellow and navy pitchers that had a ring of natural runes along the inner edge of the pitcher's mouth. These runes glittered subtly, distorting the space within the pitchers into a passageway.

These plants produced many creeping tendrils and roots that searched for herbs, tubers, and minerals. Soon, there were thousands of interconnected pitcher plants in the surrounding jungle, forming a massive network.

The woman moved her fingers slightly within the main plant's pitcher, the greenish-brown light around her hand pulsing in dim patterns. The main plant began to slowly develop a new jet-black pitcher, which began to swell and grow larger than all the other pitcher variants. As the surrounding plants caught the abundant prey in the forest, they started sending nutrients back to the mother plant to develop this gargantuan pitcher into a walking plant demon!

The woman checked the development of the massive pitcher before sitting down in the lotus position. As she closed her ash-grey eyes, a vertical slit appeared in her forehead as her third eye opened. Although she only opened her third eye a sliver, a dazzling light emanated strangely from it and fell towards the ground like a heavy mist. In her hand she held an obsidian triskelion carving intricately engraved with countless minuscule runes. As the mist-like light diffused out of her third eye, it fell gently onto the triskelion, gradually filling the runes. As the final rune filled with a fine golden glow, the triskelion floated up in front of her and slowly began to rotate. As the carving spun, the runes seemed to be pulled into the three spirals on the triskelion, while the woman's consciousness was pulled deeply into the dark center of the triskelion, and to another place...

"Exenoura, have you successfully entered the death zone?"

In a formless space of infinite grey mist, an all-commanding whisper sounded out. In the mists danced a grey transparent fairy whose head was tipped in a violet flower bud like a large purple horn. The fairy curtsied, hugging herself with her ash-rose wings as she replied deferentially.

"Yes, master. I have just finished setting up my initial base. The space in the skylight was bizarrely folded and compressed into higher dimensions as you described, so I ended up rather far from the target, but in a relatively low-danger region. I decided to set up my primary base here, as my plant network has already detected some precious herbs and minerals nearby. After some reconnaissance and resource collection, I will move towards the Ruined Capital."

"Mm. Stay safe above all else. Contact me again when you have established yourself in the city."

The grey mist gradually began to fade to black, and Exenoura's third eye closed completely. She opened her eyes and stowed the triskelion before walking back over to the main pitcher plant.

She lifted her greyish hand towards the plant again, exuding a brown-green glow of cloudy energy. The main plant extended a runner and propagated a new yellow-and-navy pitcher plant a few meters away. However, the colors of the pitchers on this plant were the exact opposite of the others scattered in the forest. Soon, this new pitcher opened; the runes on its inner edge began to glow and distort space as the pitcher began to complete a spatial tunnel!

In the forest, the roots and tendrils that had found rare herbs and precious minerals began to snatch these items up, tossing them into the yellow and navy pitchers. In the hideout, the navy and yellow pitcher acted as an exit portal, spitting out an endless stream of resources!

Exenoura began to examine these various resources, stowing some of them away or laying some of them out near the growing pitcher demon. As she placed herbs and minerals in front of the growing pitcher, inky black tendrils would extend out from the pitcher's sealed mouth, surrounding the resources and dragging them in. As the growing pitcher demon digested these resources, its intrinsic quality began to increase as well! After stabilizing the development of her plant demon, Exenoura took out a meter-long, obelisk shaped crystal and began to meditate in front of it, gradually entering a transcendent state like a timeless haze.