Birth of the Demonic Sword

Exhaustion

Noah turned to face the spiders coming from his back.

He jumped on them, dealing three fast slashes.

Three rank 1 spiders fell on the ground cut in half.

His mental energy was aiding at full speed in his decision making while he brainstormed about the situation.

'What can I do? That rank 3 beast must have been in hibernation to evolve so it can't still control his body properly, that's why I survived so easily its attack, but I don't think I can face it even with this.'

Two other strikes were shot out from his figure, a rank 2 spider had its head pierced while the rank 1 was halved.

'There must be another way to the main corridor of the surface, there were other branches that we didn't enter, maybe one of these passages leads to them.'

Once finding that his theory was possible, he didn't waste any time and ran into the leftmost corridor.

Hordes of spiders kept going for him, but he would just kill them with the least amount of "Breath" needed.

He was too focused, in this time of life and death, his mind steeled like never before.

Even though he went through the treatment twice already, that only required to endure the pain.

This time had to find a way out, kill everything that threatened him, and still conserve energy in case the rank 3 appeared.

This pressure made his sea of consciousness as a whole focused only on survival.

The passage had many branches, but most of them had a blue light at the bottom of it that Noah linked to the lake, which is to say the rank 3. That's why he never took them.

Sometimes a branch that went upward appeared, Noah would take them and find himself back in some places he already passed, once he even found a corridor that led back directly to where he came from.

The cave was like an underground maze, and since there seemed to be no patterns in its passages, he could only test all of them from the ones that felt safer to the ones with the blue light at the bottom.

At no point during his exploration, spiders stopped from appearing.

Even though most of them were newborns of rank 1 they still required a little bit of "Breath" to be dealt with because their defense was high.

Noah was helpless about the situation, and even with his acupoints working at full speed in an environment with a higher concentration of "Breath", the one inside his body kept on diminishing.

He found himself again standing where Balor destroyed the passage.

'I mostly explored every ramification in the other passages. The only one left, if this one ends up as a dead-end too, I'll be forced to follow the blue light.'

He went inside the road on the left of the rightmost one.

The passage was large, it could fit three grown-up men.

Seeing the blue light getting closer, Noah was almost ready to turn back, but then he saw a cavity entrance to his left that went upward and in his opposite direction.

Noah was overjoyed.

'That must be the one, it's the only road till now that goes straight in that direction!'

He sped right to the entrance but found strange that no spiders appeared since he entered this corridor.

'Did I kill too many of them? Impossible, I mostly killed rank 1 spiders and only about ten rank 2. I have a bad feeling.'