Chapter 724 – Dreamweaver World 62

The scene before her eyes shifted abruptly. From the dim, narrow underground passage, she emerged into an enormous mine cavern several times more spacious than the stone grotto where Shadow Village was located.

The ceiling stretched so high that its details were nearly impossible to make out. Only the massive crystal clusters hanging down like chandeliers refracted their mesmerizing halos of light.

The magical energy flowing across the surfaces of those crystal clusters sometimes crept slowly like liquid, and sometimes burst forth in tiny sparks of electricity.

The most eye-catching feature was a cluster of purple stalactites, their interiors seeming to seal away an entire galaxy, pinpoints of starlight silently swirling within the crystals.

All manner of high-purity ore veins coiled like dragons and serpents across the surrounding rock walls, making it feel as though one had stepped into a treasury of minerals.

Crimson fire-patterned ore and scarlet-feather ore wound across the black bedrock like flowing magma; silver-white moongleam ore and dream-silver ore formed delicate feathered patterns; dream-gold ore appeared and disappeared like spiderwebs across the cavern walls… Even the ground was littered with fragments of various ores.

The forum guides had mentioned it — every magical ore found in the dream realm could be found within the Golden Mine Tunnel dungeon.

From the most common iron ore to the legendary dream crystals, they were all presented here in their most perfect forms.

Mo Lan, who had become thoroughly addicted to mining, could hardly withstand this kind of stimulation. She felt almost dazzled by the sight.

She had originally come here to practice Magic, but now she was genuinely tempted to challenge this dungeon.

It was just a shame… none of these ores could be mined directly! That took away a lot of the fun.

Resources inside dungeons each had their own methods of acquisition, different from the outside world.

In a dungeon like the Golden Mine Tunnel, these dazzling high-purity ores couldn’t be gathered through conventional means.

To take away any piece of ore from here, one had to defeat the corresponding ore monster.

Mo Lan’s ore detection and Mining Magic were useless here — completely unable to lock onto any target, as if these ores were nothing more than lifelike holographic projections.

She currently stood on a circular stone platform in the center of the cavern. The ores remained perfectly still, but the moment she stepped off the platform, she would inevitably come into contact with ore fragments and trigger a challenge.

This platform was the safe zone — the only place where she wouldn’t touch any ore.

The more common the ore, the lower the difficulty of the ore monster challenge it formed. The rarer the ore, the higher the difficulty.

Even more dangerous was the combination mechanism.

If multiple ore monster challenges were triggered simultaneously, they wouldn’t appear individually. Instead, they would randomly fuse together, forming entirely new composite ore monsters.

Mo Lan had seen on the forums that one adventurer had accidentally triggered fire-patterned ore and wind-chanting ore at the same time. The result wasn’t two separate monsters, but a storm lava ore monster wreathed in blazing hurricanes. The adventurer was instantly obliterated and spent several months recovering.

The reason this dungeon had no level cap was precisely because, in theory, one could touch every ore in the entire cavern at once, spawning a cavern’s worth of ore monsters that would fuse into one super ore colossus.

It had been six years since the dungeon was discovered. Adventurers had tested their way through the ore monsters formed by various individual ores one by one, but to this day, no one had managed to achieve a perfect rating.

The prevailing opinion on the forums was that the condition for a perfect clear was to challenge every ore in the cavern simultaneously and defeat the ultimate boss formed by the final fusion.

But Mo Lan wasn’t planning to attempt that just yet.

Although this dungeon had no level cap, the world level of the Dreamweaver World meant that the dungeon’s power ceiling wouldn’t exceed rank eight, corresponding to a Third Rank Explorer. Mo Lan’s Mana far surpassed Third Rank, but her Magic level still had a long way to go. Attempting it now gave her a chance of success, but also carried considerable risk.

She had come here to train and raise her Magic level in the first place — collecting ores was just a bonus.

Inside this dungeon, she could feel the suppression on her Mana weakening, allowing her to cast more powerful Magic and even attempt advanced techniques that would be difficult to control in the real world.

Most offensive spells could be honed through ore monster challenges, but she needed to choose her targets carefully.

Activating too many at once could turn training into suicide.

Her plan was clear: start with the ore fragments scattered across the ground, familiarizing herself with ore monster strength and combat rhythm while clearing the floor — lest she accidentally trigger unplanned ore monsters and end up facing who-knows-what kind of composite creature.

Only with an open field could she gradually challenge the rare ores on the rock walls. After challenging each one individually, she would then trigger multiple ores at once to face composite ore monsters, incrementally increasing the difficulty. That was the only way to safely achieve her training objectives.

If things went smoothly, once her Magic level caught up, she should be able to attempt a perfect rating.

Individual ore fragments on the ground posed little threat, but their sheer number was their advantage — like stepping into a minefield, it would be nearly impossible to trigger just one.

However, according to intelligence from the forums, even if all floor fragments activated simultaneously, the resulting composite ore monster would only be about as strong as a creature formed from a single piece of dream-gold ore on the cavern walls.

Mo Lan estimated that at her current level, she could handle it without any problems.

She first quickly cast every spell she had that could provide sustained defensive effects and various enhancement buffs on herself.

Once her protective and enhancement spells were all in place, Mo Lan finally took that step.

The area around the stone platform was covered in iron ore fragments. The moment her foot touched down, over a dozen ore monsters coated in iron plates materialized instantly.

They came in various shapes — some like scorpions, others like spiders — but the instant they appeared, they attracted and fused into one another.

Amid the piercing screech of metal colliding, they transformed into an iron-armored giant bear taller than she was, lunging toward her with grasping claws.

“Let’s test the waters first.” Mo Lan raised her right hand lightly as a fist-sized fireball coalesced in her palm.

She deliberately compressed the blast radius to ensure it wouldn’t reach the ores on the ceiling or cavern walls.

The fireball traced a perfect arc and struck the iron-armored giant bear squarely in the chest.

Boom! In the flash of the explosion, the iron-armored giant bear let out a shriek like twisting metal. Its massive body was blown to pieces, and a refined iron ore with a metallic sheen clattered to the ground, its surface still radiating lingering heat.

Before Mo Lan could get a closer look at her spoils, the entire cavern suddenly began to shake violently.

The explosion’s shockwave spread outward like ripples. Wherever it passed, every ore fragment on the ground began to tremble frantically, light up, and then gather together as if drawn by a magnet — ultimately coalescing into a monster the size of a small hill.

Its body was pieced together from various ores, covered in sharp, hard barbs. Like an enormous hedgehog, it curled into a ball and rolled straight toward Mo Lan.