Ely and the rest didn't understand what Ning meant. "We will find our foe soon?" she asked. "But I can't see anything."
"You're not looking properly," Ning said. "Either way, since our foe is waiting for us to arrive, let us make them wait a little longer."
Ning sat down on the ground and closed his eyes.
"Master?" Blue called with a weird expression on his face. "Are you tired?"
"No, I'm trying to cultivate," Ning said.
"Here?" he couldn't help but ask. "But there's barely any Qi. We have to use our own Qi to fight. There's nothing to cultivate."
"I'm not cultivating Qi," Ning said. "I'm cultivating Mana. I want to improve my mage tier so I can use more useful magic spells."
"Hmm, this might be the right place to do so," Ely said and sat down next to him. "To be honest, I haven't gotten the time to rest properly since we came back. I want to just sit back and relax."
"Here," Ning said and brought out something. He created a few beds for all of them to lie down in. It felt quite weird to lie down in a place that reeked of evil, but what else could they do while waiting for Ning to be done with whatever he was doing?
Ning took out an SS-ranked mana stone and started devouring the mana in it to advance himself. Just a single one was enough for him to reach Tier 6.
The rest simply talked and waited while Ning did so.
Time passed slowly, but none of them cared. Every single one of them was used to spending a large amount of time doing basically nothing.
There were a couple of times that Sorlus and Blue tried to get into a fight to figure out who was the better water dragon, but thankfully Ely was there to keep the two in order.
Ning finally stopped a few hours later after finishing absorbing 3 different SS-ranked mana stones. He was Tier 6 by now and had made considerable advancement towards Tier 7. Just 2 more tiers were all he needed, but the tier 7 to tier 8 journey would take a lot of time.
'I'll need to find a way for that,' Ning thought. He hoped to be able to do that by killing many Tier 7 or as the humans called it 'SSS-ranked' monsters.
Ning didn't get the last SSS-ranked mana stone from the monster he fought since he ended up becoming its master. However, this time around, he was certain that he had no plan on becoming the master of anything like this.
"Let's go," Ning said and stood up.
The bed they were all standing on vanished, and the group began their journey toward the center of the dungeon.
"Light of Holy Grace," Ning said softly with his left hand pointed in front of him. In that very moment, a bright yellow flash of light shot out from his hand that pushed away the dark miasma that was blocking everyone's vision.
When it went away, Ning and the rest could finally see ahead of them, not that there was anything to look at exactly.
Or so they thought.
Blue took a few too many steps and suddenly the ground in front of them started making some sort of sound. "What's that?" he shouted in wonder. He wasn't worried in the slightest bit.
A hand pushed its way out of the ground as the dirt separated. The group looked at the hand and instantly realized what they were looking at.
"A Skeleton? Ew!" Saphandra said. She was the first one to react out of every one of them, even Blue.
She used her powers and both pushed and pulled the skeleton. She pushed its front side and pulled its back side.
Essentially, she crushed the skeleton with its own body, destroying it to pieces. Those pieces tried to move, but they weren't strong at all.
Soon enough, they stopped moving as the spell that animated them stopped working as well.
"Skeletons? We're going to fight Skeletons?" Saphandra asked.
"Yes," Ning said. "Although, hmm… that's a problem."
"What's the problem?" Ely asked. She couldn't see anything that could be considered a problem at all.
"Look at this," he said as he scattered around the skeletons. "It's not here."
"There's no mana stone," Sorlus was the first to realize.
"Hmm, that makes sense though, doesn't it?" it's like a puppet, puppeteered by some sort of corpse slaver," Ely said.
"Yeah, and that's problematic… slightly," Ning said. "I won't get any SS-ranked mana stone. If everything we fight ends up becoming a summon or reanimated skeleton, then we might have a bad time. And I promised the German government I would give them everything."
"Don't worry, we will figure something out," Ely said. "Besides, what's there to worry about? We're doing them a favor so they will have to accept whatever we tell them anyway."
"Yeah, I know," Ning said with a sigh. "But I don't want to go down that route. I don't want to antagonize the countries or I would have to fight them to even try and enter their SS-ranked dungeons afterward.
"As I said, we'll figure out something," Ely said. "We should continue moving."
Ning nodded. He had no other choice.
Skeletons popped from the ground one after another. Ning wasn't sure if the skeletons were prepared to jump out of the dirt in their presence or if the boss at the center was using its magic every single time.
Whatever it was, Ning and the rest were new fighting skeletons, and those were incredibly easy to destroy.
The first variation came with a skeleton with a sword and shield. It didn't know how to use it, but it was fighting. Then came ones with bows and arrows, daggers, and hammers. There was even one that could use some magic.
Then came the Death Knights, skeletal monsters that were fully clad in armor, and rode the skeleton horses.
Sorlus destroyed them with a single water spell.
"Let's go meet the boss."
