It had been months.

  At first, the regulars at the Lost were saddened by the girl's disappearance. After all, none of them had heard of her getting a Skill.

  There were rumors abound, such as that she got a scholarship with whatever guild the scout was working for, or that her parents had caught wind of her activities and put a stop to them.

  But nobody knew the truth, and eventually, she became just another of many odd stories that the 'grizzled' veterans told newcomers.

  Of course, said veterans were in their twenties, so it was more like a collection of memetics and inside jokes than campfire stories, even if they occasionally were told over campfire.

  Now that the whole forest was mapped, they could use their phones to navigate, and as a result, the place had steadily grown in popularity as an unofficial campground.

  The guild didn't bring proper anchors. Those would cost a fortune, and besides, the forest was pretty big, but not that big. They could just operate off of a short-ranged ad-hoc network to cover the whole woods.

  There was no internet in the dungeon without a fancy anchor, but it was good enough.

  Still, even though the little robed girl had already faded into legend, people were quick to remind others that she was the one who'd brought them that map in the first place.

  Whether it was the work she put in helping map the whole region, despite being perhaps ten years old at most, or the fact a map wasn't even planned until she gave the people in charge an excuse to push things along, she was the reason it was there.

  They were all thankful to the hardworking young girl who made it possible.

  Well... some of them were. Quite a few people had no clue what those so-called veterans were even talking about.

  ***

  Perhaps anywhere else, a strange boy wearing sunglasses and a hoodie would seem conspicuous, but in a public beginner's dungeon, there were always all sorts of weirdos, so nobody gave this one any special attention.

  Although, they did give him a bit of regular attention.

  "Woah, for a shrimp, he sure collects a lot of mana shards."

  "Maybe he's already got a Skill. He's not old enough to go to regular dungeons without an S-Class exemption."

  "If he had a Skill, he should be training with a guild, not with us losers."

  "Yeah, but maybe his parents didn't let him. Some kids get adventuring Skills and get pushed through college anyway."

  That was the regular attention these busybodies gave everyone who came by their dungeon.

  ***

  Despite my best efforts, I really didn't make any more money. Not only was one an hour my limit, but it was about as good as anyone else's.

  Some people did surpass it, but now that I could reasonably understand the local language, I could start putting names to faces, and...

  【Dirk Venway has gained the Skill: Swordsmanship I.】

  【Veni Vici has gained the Skill: Agility I.】

  【Kiki Tenebre has gained the Skill: Medic I.】

  Well, that last girl was a bit familiar, being that she was one of the first Terrans that I'd ever met, but basically, you really could just tell when anyone in the dungeon gained a Skill.

  There was no sensory data, just pure alien thought, like every time I see the portal and implicitly know what it is and where it goes to.

  It was a very small amount of information too.

  I knew, semantically, what the Skills meant, but nothing about what they did for those that got them.

  This, I'm told, is normal, and sometimes people don't even understand it themselves. There are apparently Skills for identifying and cataloguing Skills, and whole new Skills, while rare, tend to attract the imperial government's attention.

  And in short, people who managed to hunt that efficiently and cleanly that they could get more than a measly 50 an hour... were mostly the same people who eventually got Skills.

  So, if I wanted to improve my living conditions, I needed a Skill. Or, more specifically, I needed to become a candidate for one.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  For now, since I was back to earning money officially, I reduced my diet just a bit to match my actual income.

  And I focused on improvement.

  The only trouble is there wasn't much for me.

  Living countless past lives meant that while I didn't know when or where I'd mastered such things, my skills were generally refined already.

  I idly wondered how anyone was meant to make a living in these dungeons.

  Still, I kept at it for a long time.

  Meanwhile, I began to explore the northern caves, despite being warned not to.

  ***

  My explorations were rewarded.

  Deep in the tunnels, I found hints of ruins and stone engravings. Even stone tablets.

  It took quite a while to get there and back, so it was a very slow exploration, but I gradually began to copy the writings I'd found, storing them in notebooks back at my own cave home.

  I'd already learned one language, so I was hopeful I could learn a second.

  Perhaps a translation scroll would help, but even though I could technically afford one, I'd never actually seen any for sale no matter how far I searched in Terra.

  I could just ask, but my current identity had never seen one, and I wasn't sure how common or rare they were.

  I didn't want to reveal that I was Kid.

  After all, while it hasn't been that long yet, not quite a full year since I'd first arrived, they'd eventually notice that I wasn't growing up, especially since children grow up quite fast.

  I'm sure there were all sorts of pictures taken of me. That's just how it is in these technologically enlightened eras.

  Plus, I really stuck out back in those days.

  So... I did it the old fashioned way, trying to do frequency analysis and other such things, hoping I might eventually find something with actual context clues.

  Honestly, this became more important to me than developing a Skill.

  Improving my conditions was always a good goal, but as long as I guaranteed my survival, it wasn't necessary for me to rush things. I had all the time in the world.

  My income dwindled down to the bare minimum 1000 a week as I spent more and more time in those tunnels.

  Though, even far from the portal...

  【Telun Vincry has gained the Skill: Lancer I.】

  I could still feel the occasional person gaining a Skill.

  It wasn't frequent though. About one or two people a month.

  ***

  This continued for months.

  I was never anywhere closer to figuring out the strange language I'd found, and although I could try handing my transcripts over to the government or the guild overseeing things, that'd get them to ask questions which would probably lead to preventing me from exploring more.

  They might even lead to my death.

  Inquiries like that never bode well for an alien immortal.

  So I kept them to myself.

  One day, though, disaster happened.

  I'd shimmied down a narrow tunnel, thinking I could climb back up.

  I could not.

  Thankfully, I could always just, well... force myself to respawn...

  But I decided to head onward, since I did have a light and plenty of spare mana shards to power it.

  "Huh?"

  Oddly, in addition to there being subterranean water, there were also mushrooms.

  I wasn't sure if poison was protected by the respawn mechanism, but my body was pretty durable to toxins anyway, so I tried some. They were surprisingly good, edible, and even filling!

  Disaster had turned into a miracle. I'd found the first food the whole dungeon had to offer.

  And as hours turned to days, I confirmed that it really was food. It didn't just make me feel full, it really did contain some calories and at least some basic nutrients.

  The only problem is that I had finite light, and without it, no way to see.

  But it'd last a rather long time. Rationing light, I could stay down there for weeks. Maybe even a month. That'd be the limit though.

  Since there was not yet any possibility for long-term survival, I pressed on, exploring the maddeningly windy tunnels, uncertain I would ever find the passage again or the mushrooms that grew there.

  They say people go mad under isolation and sensory deprivation, but neither bothered me much. Perhaps I'd already gone mad during my countless reincarnations, and so any further madness was simply inconsequential.

  Either way, I quite liked it down there, climbing and crawling through tiny cracks, a knife always at the ready in case an untimely cave in ever dared trap me, though one never did.

  The rock tunnels were remarkably durable and solid.

  And wouldn't you know it?

  There were more engravings down there too.

  Less centralized, but they were there, almost as if serving as markers or a sort of map.

  I wondered what sort of people lived in these caves, but then I realized they could all be the writings of a single explorer like myself.

  I thought I would probably never know... but the tunnels began to grow more regular, as if artificial. Wider, too.

  My dim light and need to ration what little mana I had left slowed my realization down, but I still eventually began to notice that I was no longer in a giant, labyrinthine cave, but an actual subterranean mountain city.

  One devoid of people, but not of their remnants, which I thought peculiar given the world's nature. It brought back the dead almost heedlessly... and yet I'd found bones. Ancient bones.

  Without decay and rot, it was impossible to tell exactly how ancient.

  It was possible the resurrection effect only extended to the forest, and perhaps the western plains too, seeing as how I'd died there once. In other words, it's possible they did not reach these caverns.

  My assured way home was less certain, and so while I wasn't wholly afraid of death, since I knew what approximately awaited me after it, I decided to try and avoid gambling on an easy and quick return trip.

  But the city was, albeit not as massive as the one on Terra, still quite large.

  ***

  Still needing to eat, I grew accustomed to going back and forth between the pitch black tunnels and the equally dark city, without even using a light for most of the way.

  I took my fill of mushrooms each time, eating until I was full and shoving the rest in my handy backpack.

  Then, I blindly returned to the city, and very carefully used the light to mentally map the whole location.

  The tablet of light was handy, because I could use it in the dark, and it lasted much, much longer than my flashlight did. Unlike the fancy backlit one that Cierri had used, this was a dark background that I could use a tablet to draw in faint neon-colored green.

  It served as my rudimentary map of the city.

  It was woefully inadequate for such a task, as the city was three dimensional and it had only two, but it was better than nothing.

  Eventually, I found an unusual gate or door. It was pretty large, but I was still able to push it open, and my light revealed that I'd found a throne room.

  A fairly large one that didn't seem to fit the city it was built in.

  But as my light shone upon the likewise massive throne, I realized that I wasn't alone.

  That pesky, alien knowledge, the same that told me what those portals were, and the same that notified me each time someone had gained a skill, had something new to say.

  【King Kazzim, Boss of the Lost.】