The rest of the fourth level was mostly spent wandering around the barren landscape, with the occasional small event to liven things up. The sandy level seemed to be one of those floors that tested one’s endurance rather than their strength. That’s not to say that there weren’t tests of strength though, just that they were more of an afterthought, with there only being 2 more really difficult challenges that I had had to face.

  The first difficult situation occurred around hour 80 of my time on the level. I had gotten restless exploring the canyon area of the level, and I decided to check out the area that was filled with giant holes in the ground. By this point in time I had already gotten a firm grasp on the difficulty of the level, and I was much less on guard than I should have been.

  I was lazy and careless, not taking many measures to hide my presence, mostly because the level was basically devoid of life, and I had stopped hiding much of my presence tens of hours ago without any problem since. So I figured that if anything were able to detect my presence, like the dragon on level 2, that it would’ve found me by this point.

  I might’ve been careless, but that carelessness might’ve actually saved me in the end.

  I was walking towards the hole filled area, lost in thought, when I felt a slight tremor in the ground. The tremor pulled me out of my navel gazing and made me focus on my surroundings more while I headed towards the nearest hole. The hole was over 20 meters in diameter and almost perfectly circular, and the ground in this area was more rock than sand.

  I felt the ground tremble again, which made me pause. I started to wonder if there might be earthquakes in this level in addition to the sandstorms. However, the next tremor in the earth revealed that the source was not the earth itself, but a giant armored worm-like creature. The armored segments of the worm expanded and contracted like an accordion, and I could feel the surrounding mana, including my own, flow towards the giant worm in sync to the worm's contraction and expansion, like the worm was breathing in the mana around it.

  As soon as I saw this scene my instincts kicked in and I boosted my body to its limits while I dashed away at full speed. The armored worm didn’t seem to move all that fast, but something giant like that didn’t need to move nearly as much as I did in order to cover the same amount of distance. I felt the ground shake as I sprinted away, and while I didn’t look back I could tell that the armored worm was in hot pursuit.

  Thankfully the worm didn’t seem to be able to move very well on land and quickly gave up its chase. I wasn’t exhausted from running, but my heart was racing from adrenaline. I knew that the armored worm was maybe only a low Tier Rank 1, but Rank and Tier were more like modifiers than actual metrics of measurement, thus my decision to run rather than fight.

  It was the same problem that I had with the Dragon back on level 2. In essence, a squirrel with super strength would still be crushed by a normal elephant. In the Dragon’s case, I would’ve stood no chance even if it was a tiny Dragon, because of Dragon’s overwhelming Metaphysical might. In the armored worm’s case I would’ve stood no chance against it because of its overwhelming size and physical might. The same concept applied to the Vivid Vortex as well, I was only able to defeat it because I launched a sneak attack at it from the inside.

  Sure I might’ve been able to defeat the armored worm if I went all out and spent all my mana, but then I might not have had enough mana to endure the next storm by the time it came. In the end, it just wasn’t worth it.

  I steered clear of the area filled with holes from then on.

  The second difficult challenge was another Restless Ruby Tree that I came across, around hour 130, and wanted to collect. However this Restless Ruby Tree was mature and surrounded by large 3 meter long scorpion guards, which seemed to be one of the few animals populating this level. When I first came across this I was debating whether or not it would be worth it to fight, or lure away so many scorpions just to collect the tree.

  If it were another baby Restless Ruby Tree then I would fight as many guards as I needed to collect it, but this was a mature tree and wasn’t as valuable to me personally as a baby tree. This mature tree had already grown up and adapted to the environment and evolved to accommodate these scorpions. If I were to own this tree then the fruit would be practically worthless to me, because its mental capabilities, protection, and fruit would already be focused towards scorpions, not humans.

  It was a lost cause, but I hesitated to leave the tree behind for one reason, money. Just because it wasn’t valuable to me didn’t mean that it wouldn’t be valuable to someone else. The Restless Ruby Tree was a very beautiful tree in its own right, and a rich person would certainly pay lots of Credits for such a beautiful and exotic tree. I didn’t necessarily need the money I could get from selling this tree, but the thought of leaving something so valuable behind just didn’t sound right to me.

  However, luckily, or unluckily, I didn’t have to deal with the army of scorpions guarding the tree. This was because they all started to leave and find hiding spots for some reason. I had seen other animals do this on this level to get away from the storms, but a storm had just passed not 20 minutes ago, so I was confused about the scorpion's behavior.

  That was when I noticed that the roaring of the passing storm hadn’t faded like it usually did. Instead the roaring seemed to be increasing instead of decreasing. Down in the canyons and ravines I was unable to see the horizon, so I wasn’t sure what was going on, but from the scorpion’s behavior I could tell that a big storm must be coming.

  I debated whether I should find a place to hide from the storm like the scorpions, or if I should use this opportunity to collect the Restless Ruby Tree while it didn’t have its guards. Of course, I chose to collect the tree. I had weathered the storms many times at this point, so I was confident in my ability to weather the coming storm, unlike the pitiful scorpions.

  I stealthed myself, so as to not be noticed by the tree, and I began the massive project of excavating the tree’s roots. Though the massive project was made considerably easier through the use of magic.

  I had to excavate the tree’s roots because teleporting all of the soil around the tree’s roots would’ve been too much to teleport all at once, with my current capabilities and limitations that is.

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  So I began my work, expecting the storm to be upon me any second judging by the sound of the roaring in the air. However the roaring of wind reached the loudest it had been in the middle of the previous storms, but the sandstorm was nowhere in sight, and the sound continued to grow in volume. The crystal tree even started to slowly twist its branches together and reduce its surface area as much as it could, like it was expecting something big.

  The clues were telling me that this storm wasn’t going to be the same as the previous ones, and I began to excavate the roots of the tree as fast as I could. Eventually the roar of the storm reached the point where my ears started to hurt and I had to shove something in them to protect them from the sound.

  I could sense, with earth magic, that I had uncovered most of the tree’s upper roots by this point, but from the darkening of the sky I could tell that I didn’t have enough time to uncover the most fringe roots before the storm would be upon me. I remembered reading before that the most important roots of a tree were the upper roots, but I wasn’t so sure how much this applied to Restless Ruby Trees, but I decided it was going to have to be enough.

  I started to teleport the tree into my Internal World and fight to overcome its resistance, which was much higher than the baby tree I had teleported before, but it was still bearable, if a little bit mana intensive.

  However the storm had reached me as quickly as a whip, and it was nothing like the ones that had come before it. The beginning of this storm was as bad as the peak of the previous storms, and I could tell that it wouldn’t be long before it reached a point that I wouldn’t be able to endure, even with my max reinforcement.

  At this point I had to make a decision, either abandon teleporting the tree, or forget about teleporting the still buried parts of the tree.

  Due to the fact that the type of teleportation I was using was specialized in forcefully teleporting living things, and was terribly inefficient against barriers (such as the earth or even just water), I was having a hard time teleporting the parts of the tree still beneath the earth, and if the sand in storm grew much thicker I wouldn’t be able to penetrate even the air.

  So I decided to forget about the 15-20% of the roots still buried beneath the ground, and hope that the tree would be able to endure the loss. I had heard before that trees could handle losing that much of their roots and still live, but, again, I wasn’t so sure how much this applied to Restless Ruby Trees. Regardless, I was running out of time as the storm continued to escalate, so I sheared through the tree's crystalline roots, and succeeded in teleporting the Restless Ruby Tree into my Internal World before the storm grew too fierce.

  However, now I had to get out of the storm before its fury reached a point I couldn’t withstand. I started to head towards a nearby large cave that was maybe 7 or so minutes away, but the storm grew stronger much faster than I had anticipated. The air grew thick with dust and sand to the point that it made it pointless to open my eyes; I couldn’t see in front of me at all even with a light, and I had to rely on my (Space-Time Sense) to navigate the now dark world.

  The wind/sand blades flying through the storm started to take larger and larger chunks out of my exposed reinforced flesh, and my padded armor started to accumulate damage that bruised me even beneath its layers of protection.

  I knew that I wouldn’t be able to endure the storm for long enough to reach the large cave, but there was a shallow cave that was much closer. It wouldn’t be as comfortable, but I couldn’t afford to be picky. I activated the padded armor’s enchantments and increased my running speed, desperate to get out of the storm even one moment sooner.

  By the time I reached the shallow cave my arms and legs were covered in deep bleeding wounds and wet red sand. The wind swept the blood off of my limbs and into the storm, while it threatened to do the same to my whole body. I barely made it into the shallow cave before I used up my remaining mana to close off the entrance, while I collapsed to the cramped floor right after.

  I was on the ground coughing out dry sand from my lungs as I felt my own blood start to pool around my arms and legs. At first I wasn’t sure if I would be able to regenerate enough mana to heal myself before I lost too much blood, but without my mana to keep the misty ice-steel ring’s chilling effect at bay, everywhere not covered by my coat’s temperature regulation effect started to slowly freeze over. In this case it was a welcome effect, because it froze my bleeding wounds preventing further loss of blood, and after it stopped further blood loss I lessened its power, preventing my body from freezing to death but losing most of the ring’s healing effect at the same time.

  After a few minutes, lying there in pain, my mana regenerated enough to send a pulse of healing magic through my body, pushing out the foreign matter in my wounds, but not healing them. This opened my wounds once again, and I had to turn up the ring’s effects one more time to freeze my now clean wounds closed, making me shiver despite my core still being warm thanks to my new favorite coat.

  A long while and a few pulses of healing magic later, I was no longer in danger of bleeding out. The ferocity of the storm had far exceeded every storm before it, and it was still raging outside the rock barrier separating me from it. I started to wonder why the storm had suddenly become so fierce out of the blue, and my Cloud was happy to supply a list of possible reasons.

  Some of the reasons on the list my Cloud provided were funny because of how radical and strange they were, but one of the most likely reasons was very simple. Time. I knew that the levels got increasingly more difficult over time, but it seemed that I had underestimated the impact it could have on a variable like a storm. It seemed that the Time Requirement Challenge was more dangerous than I had initially thought.

  Thankfully the difficulty increases over time only applied to some variables, things like the changing storms or the monsters for example. However, the difficulty increase wasn’t distributed equally across all variables at the same time, which is probably why the storm had grown to such extremes while other things hadn’t changed much at all. But this difficulty increase only partially carried across levels, which was good news for me. I didn’t much like the idea of having such extreme weather conditions on the next level.

  When the storm outside had ended, and I had regenerated enough mana to feel comfortable going out, I opened up the wall and stepped outside. Looking around, the rock walls had large gashes in them, but the storm seemed to have swept away any debris created from the chaos, leaving behind only the visual marks of its violence. My own rock wall that protected me probably wouldn’t have lasted if the storm had gone on for much longer.

  In the end, my greed had almost killed me, but if greed doesn’t kill you it only makes you richer, wise words to live by.

  I had to shelter myself from the storms during my remaining time stuck on this level, and I didn’t manage to find much of anything during my time exploring after that. So my remaining time on the floor was mostly spent resting up for the next floor.

  I was thoroughly done with the sand and heat, and was ready to move on by the time the System message showed up.

  [Level 4 complete. All challenges have been met.]

  [Would you like to enter level 5 of the Dungeon of Tribulation, or leave the dungeon?]

  I had put on some nice shorts and some shoes that fit me, I didn’t know what the next floor would hold, but tropical clothes had never done me wrong in the past.

  “Enter the next level please.”

  [Affirmative. Now entering level 5.]