“Come with me.” The man touched a button next to him, causing a wall to open up and reveal a staircase. “Shortcut.”

He gave a strange smile before turning and walking away. He was a shady character, but I didn’t know a single dungeon master who wasn’t. I was a dungeon master. Let’s not get into thinking ill of them. I followed him down the staircase, although I maintained a fair distance and kept myself ready. With dungeon diver, I had a good awareness of potential traps, and there didn’t appear to be any.

The flight went down several levels. I wasn’t sure if that shortcut had always been there, or if he had created it with the intended purpose of taking me. It would have used up a lot of the dungeon’s remaining miasma to do something like that. The pair of us came out into that might have been a boss room, except that the room was refitted into something that instead of looking like a laboratory. There were various tables filled with chemicals, but it was the tables with straps that looked like they had once had people on them that caught my interest.

“Alright, you were doing experiments.” I declared. “What for?”

“The experiments were rather simple. They’re about obtaining immortality.”

“Immortality?” I blinked. “Not a weapon? I thought this had to do with the issues with the rabbitkin?”

“Perhaps, in a way, it does.” The man shrugged. “The King is getting on in years. He died recently from a sudden sickness, and had to be resurrected.”

My eyebrows began to rise. I had never thought about such a thing before. This was a world with resurrection. Exactly how did old age work here? I knew some lived for thousands of years, not to mention the dungeon copies like Elaya. Death was always a screwy thing here. For most commoners, getting resurrected was a costly business. Most died simply because they couldn’t afford to be resurrected. This wasn’t an issue for the rich though.

“If he was resurrected, is there an issue?” I asked, expecting there was.

“You may not understand this, but as the body grows older, so does our soul. Souls only become larger and more fragile the longer we go. The more bloated a soul becomes, the more fragile it becomes, and the harder it is to resurrect. The reason there is an uprising is that our King has become weak with age. Inevitably, he will come to his final rest. It might not be the next time, but he will only find himself more and more susceptible to death until it finally takes him. This is the nature of life. No one can avoid it. Of course, there are some that attempt rebirth, but are you even you after such an event?”

“So, the king set up research out here so that you could buy him time, right?” I tried to keep him on topic. “Why here?”

I wanted to ask why Miki, but I held off.

“You haven’t figured it out?” He asked, an arrogant look in his eye. “The foxkin. Who is closer to death than a tailed foxkin?”