After a dozen minutes, Richard was holding the hilt of his sword, his body half leaning against the fence, his wheezing becoming heavy and unbalanced, forcing him to pause and adjust his breathing.

"It's uncomfortable......"

He thought.

Even if it is not life-threatening, the process of fighting monsters from another world for the first time is still not easy. Richard felt exhausted.

There was a river of blood under his feet, and a large number of stumps and severed arms lay silently, and the rolling skull was inlaid with rotting faces and hideous expressions. The tissue fluid and plasma that burst out of the human body splashed a tragic picture on the gray earth.

Richard lifted his foot, and the sticky touch came from the sole of his shoe, kicking aside a slippery mass of flesh that he didn't know what organ or viscera was.

The cages were wide open, a disgusting stench filled the air, and the darkness still pervaded endlessly, but there was nothing inside, and there was only a dead silence around them.

You have to take a few more steps to hear the screams of a cage in the distance. Apparently the smell had reached the noses of the monsters in front of them. They yearn for the same moment of liberation as their kind, even if it ends up being chopped off.

He killed all the half-dead patients in the vicinity who had become bloodthirsty monsters under the plague.

The long sword of the alchemical weapon was covered in a thick scarlet red, and it slid down little by little.

Richard could feel his growth vividly

From the initial panic, to the rapid immersion in the blood boiled by killing monsters, and finally slashing people until their hands were soft, and they became mentally exhausted, so they became more and more numb and indifferent.

In just ten minutes, he felt as if he had been promoted from a rookie recruit to a veteran of previous wars. Actually, it's certainly not that simple, but if you compare the number of heads in his hands, Richard is by no means less than the soldiers who have been through several wars.

And most importantly......

"Sure enough, what is needed to improve the ability of the knight profession is physical training and actual combat."

He closed his eyes and felt the blood rushing through his body, and his heart was full of realization.

Taking potions, stimulating the secretion of hormones in the body through exercise and fighting, to speed up the digestion process of potions, the body and even the deepest genes are gradually changing; Wait until the digestion is completed before taking a higher-level potion is probably the upgrade route for the knights.

Richard slowly clenched his palms, and he could clearly sense his wrist strength, which was much higher than before he first entered the dungeon.

On the one hand, this is related to the extremely high quality of the potions he obtained, and on the other hand, according to the content of the captured knight's honest explanation under the control of the spell of "high hypnosis", like wizards, low-ranking knights also have a "golden life", which is like a novice welfare period in online games.

If this continues, he is not far from escalating.

Yet, while Richard's physical fitness has increased imperceptibly – including physical strength and endurance – the fatigue has not gone away. This is more due to mental stress.

Even if the consumption and replenishment of physical strength can maintain a long-term operation like every gear, there is still a gap in the strength of willpower, which cannot be changed overnight.

After resting in place for a few minutes, Richard exhaled slightly, shook off the blood from his sword, straightened up, and looked into the depths of darkness.

He didn't know where the end of this place was, and he didn't know how many "zombies" there were in front of him, and if he chose to fight his way out of the patients like he did just now, there was a high chance of an accident.

He came here alone to train himself, not to die. So, when Richard realized that the "experience" he had gained was enough, he decisively chose another path: to open the way with spells.

After walking to a prison cell and making sure that the fence above it was sturdy, Richard began his own attempt.

……

A peeled monster was desperately trying to reach him with bloody claws. The patient's skull, presumably from the previous desperate impact on the fence and wall, had been partially lifted, revealing the gray brain tissue inside.

Richard was expressionless, pointed the snake staff at him, and began to mobilize the prototype of the spell recorded on it.

- "Advanced Hypnosis".

The zombie was stunned for a moment, and soon reverted back to its hideous appearance of grinning teeth and claws.

"Isn't it useless......"

Next, the results of using the "emotion spectrum" are only chaos, and "screening lies" and "advanced anti-psychic peeping" are not used at such times. The "Mental Storm" must have the ability to destroy the immediate target, and it can even steam all the brains of creatures within a few hundred meters in one go, but it is really a bit of a waste to use it on such a brainless monster.

As the most destructive signature spell in the realm of mind, which even a true master of mind cannot use frequently, this is the biggest hole card in Richard's hand, and even in himself. The other six spells only need to cool down for ten minutes to half an hour, while Psychic Storm takes a full day to recharge.

"Since they can't cast spells like they did when they were alive, it means that their brain tissue is likely to have been destroyed or decayed, so the spells in the mental realm can't work on them," Richard thought with some regret. In fact, the natural realm that can change the environment of the physical world on a large scale is the most suitable for the current situation. "It's just that, according to the laws of general zombie works, I don't know if there will be a special type that can retain intelligence."

After several more attempts, Richard finally discovered that the most useful spells in this situation were "Shock Humanoids" and "Ranged Fear".

In fact, the effect of the two is similar, but the group is different. The former is used against humans and other intelligent races, while the latter is developed by psychic wizards to target non-human aliens.

"Zombie patients have really become beasts...... No, rather, should it be a demon? ”

After entering the dungeon, he used the "Magic Trace Detection" in the Prophecy Realm, and the result was that there were traces of the "Plague Domain" spell, one of the two evil realms, remaining. Richard thus determined that the epidemic was indeed caused by human factors.

And the essence of the plague should be a virus that can transform people into low-level demons - in the end, the real demon group is also very likely to be caused by the technology developed by humans in the past but then out of control, and artificial demons in the field of life are not uncommon.

In this way, the manipulator behind the scenes is another dark wizard. It is not known whether the intrusion was carried out at the behest of the hangman.

After choosing a plan, Richard no longer hesitated, raised the snake staff, and an invisible ripple spread through the air. A few seconds later, the countless "moving corpses" who had been frantic and trying to squeeze out of their cages all shrank back into the darkness as if they had met a natural predator.

The long empty corridor suddenly became silent.

All that remained was the muffled wheezing of the patients.

……

Richard breathed a sigh of relief and ignored the monsters.

These patients who can transmit the plague are pathogens that need to be destroyed. Richard had checked that their brains were rotten and there was no chance of being rescued, so it was better to simply burn them down.

But it shouldn't be now, it won't be him.

He strode into the depths of darkness.

*

Richard walked forward at a steady frequency as he counted time and distance by passing steps until the spell on the serpent's staff had cooled.

Soon after, a hundred meters away, he saw a figure crouching on the ground in front of the cell.

After getting closer, Richard could finally hear the voice coming from the other man's mouth.

“…… How's that, little girl, do you still like the taste of this meat? Hmm, I look a little disgusted...... Sure enough, fresh human flesh is better to eat? ”

Richard narrowed his eyes and saw a human head emerge from the bars of his cell, and his mouth was wide open, revealing the bloody teeth and gray gums inside, opening and closing frantically and repeatedly, and the man crouched in front of the head, as if not at all worried that the other would bite it.

He held a bloody muscle in his hand, waving it in his hand like a pet dog in his own house, luring the "zombies" stuck in the fence again and again.

After a few minutes, as if he had lost interest in amusing a man-eating monster who had lost his mind, he threw the meat into the zombie's mouth, and watched with a smile as the patient "rattled" the piece of flesh and tore it into pieces and swallowed it down his throat.

The man snapped his fingers.

In the next second, the connection between the head and the shoulder, as if it had been cut by some invisible blade, fell and rolled on the ground.

But the hands and feet of the zombie who lost control were still dancing wildly in the air, including the head that had rolled to the ground, and was still trying to move without the support of its body, until the man stomped his head under his feet.

The mouth of the patient's skull opened and closed as if it were a spring, and after a while it gradually lost power and stopped moving.

"The body loses its function later than the head, and sure enough, not only the central system in the brain has undergone abnormal changes, but even the cervical nerves are ......."

The man muttered to himself as he got up from the ground.

It was a young man in a black tuxedo, with a thin figure, a straight back, a white bow tie on his chest, and a monocle on the bridge of his nose. He didn't fit in with the atmosphere in the dungeon, and seemed to be more likely to be seen at a banquet or university class for the upper class.

…… Is this the messenger sent by the "hanged man"?