They Called Me Trash? Now I'll Hack Their World-Chapter 203: Demons!

We walked through the dark passage of the cave, the only light coming from the orb I’d conjured floating above us.

Scarlet took the rear position, her alert emerald eyes constantly scanning behind us.

I walked in the middle with Tessa practically attached to my arm, her fingers gripping my sleeve tight enough that I could feel them trembling slightly.

And Edric led the way.

The silence stretched for maybe five minutes before curiosity got the better of me.

"So," I said, keeping my voice conversational, "Your party went ahead with the mission while they left you behind?"

Edric shook his head without turning around. "No. They didn’t leave me behind. I stayed because I had some business to attend to. Things that needed... clarification."

I blinked. "Clarification about what?"

He didn’t answer right away. Just kept walking, his boots making no sound on the stone, deliberate.

Then he glanced over his shoulder, his sharp eyes catching the light of my orb.

"Didn’t you notice the shift before you came out here? The sudden increase in dungeon formations? The beasts abandoning their deep-woods hideouts to actively attack human civilizations?"

At his words, Tessa flinched. Her grip on my arm tightened painfully, her knuckles turning white.

"It’s true," Tessa whispered, her voice tight with suppressed emotion.

She looked down at the rocky path, a dark shadow crossing her face.

"Our village... it was attacked exactly like that. Just a few weeks ago, everything was perfectly fine. The harvests were good, the borders were quiet. And then they just... came pouring out of nowhere, tearing everything apart."

Her voice cracked on the last word. Her fingers dug into my arm hard enough to hurt.

Edric let the silence sit for a moment before he spoke again.

"Dungeons, under normal circumstances, form at convergence points," he said.

"Places where ley lines intersect, where mana has pooled and calcified over centuries into something dense enough to birth a seed. Old battlefields. Ancient ruins. Sites of mass death. Places where the world’s energy has been... disturbed, and never fully healed."

I was listening. So was Tessa and Scarlet.

"But during this phenomenon," Edric continued, "They don’t follow that rule. They crack open wherever the corruption finds purchase, wherever the ground is thin enough, wherever the mana in the soil is unguarded."

"And here’s the thing... we shouldn’t even be calling them dungeons."

I glanced at the back of his head. "What would you call them?"

He looked over his shoulder briefly. "Pseudo dungeons."

"...Pseudo dungeons?"

"They’re incomplete. A true dungeon has an ecosystem, a core that rewards those strong enough to clear it. There’s a logic to them, almost a contract. You fight your way through, you kill the boss, the dungeon acknowledges it."

He shook his head slowly.

"These have none of that, just beasts."

"Beasts that are drawn to the half-formed dungeon seed and begin to mutate around it, absorbing its energy, warping to fit whatever shape the incomplete core is trying to become. And the seed itself keeps growing, keeps pulling mana from the surrounding environment."

He paused. "Or from the beings that die fighting inside it."

That landed heavily.

I turned it over in my mind, the image of a dungeon seed drinking down the death around it like rain, getting stronger with every corpse, never closing, never completing, just festering.

"So they’re not dungeons," I said slowly. "They’re traps."

Edric said nothing. Which was answer enough.

I swallowed. Something cold was settling in my chest.

"The Silverpoint Mine... that was a pseudo dungeon too, wasn’t it."

Edric glanced back at me.

"Yes," he said.

Then he came to a sudden halt.

As the tunnel opened up into a massive, circular antechamber. In the very center, hovering a few inches off a stone dais, was a swirling, vertical vortex of muted purple and silver light. The portal to the dungeon’s first floor.

It pulsed slowly, like it was breathing, casting the stone walls in shifting, cold light.

There was something deeply wrong about the way it moved. Portals weren’t supposed to feel like that. They were supposed to be stable, clean tears in space. This one looked like a wound.

Edric didn’t hesitate. He stepped straight through the shimmering tear in space.

"Stay close," I muttered to the girls. We stepped through together.

The sensation was like stepping through a waterfall, brief, disorienting, a moment of weightlessness, then solid ground again on the other side.

We emerged into a massive chamber carved from dark stone, lit by glowing crystals embedded in the walls. The air was different here, cooler, carrying the distinctive mana-heavy feeling of dungeon space.

Edric was waiting, leaning against the wall near the portal exit.

"This phenomenon, has a name" he said, picking up the conversation like there’d been no interruption, "The Culling Tide."

I raised an eyebrow. "The Culling Tide?"

"It happens once every century. The pattern’s been documented going back at least a thousand years, probably longer."

Edric pushed off the wall and started walking deeper into the dungeon.

"Dungeon formations increase exponentially. Beasts become more aggressive, range further from their territories. Monster populations spike."

"Every time?" I asked.

"Every time. Without fail." He said it flatly.

Tessa looked between us, her scholarly interest momentarily overriding her fear.

"I’ve read about this! In Grandfather’s library. There were records from the last Culling Tide about ninety years ago. The texts said it was..."

She paused, clearly trying to remember exact wording. "...’The gods’ method of cleansing the world of accumulated evil.’ A necessary purge to maintain balance."

I narrowed my eyes, something about that explanation sitting wrong in my gut.

"By killing innocents? By destroying villages and slaughtering people who’ve done nothing wrong?"

My voice came out harder than I intended.

"That’s a pretty shit method of ’cleansing.’"

Edric looked at me, his expression approving rather than offended.

"Exactly." He turned back to face forward as we walked.

"That’s what the churches prescribe," Edric said, his voice dropping to a grim, dangerous pitch.

"It’s a convenient, packaged narrative designed to keep the masses terrified, obedient, and completely blind to the truth."

"And what is the truth?" I asked, the hairs on the back of my neck standing up.

Edric was quiet for a long moment. Just stared into the abyssal darkness of the dungeon floor.

"It’s the work of demons."