Alice opened her eyes wide when the scenery changed and uttered a simple,

“Wow.”

Honestly, she had no words and this brought her quite a déjà vu.

"It's not a dungeon. Not my safe Node zone," murmured she staring at the ceiling four meters above.

Turning her head, she saw an old square room. Walls made of large rock blocks were covered in dried-up moss. The room had a strangely big stone table with a familiar notebook on it. All the girl's gear was piled up along the opposite wall with an exception of karate gi.

Smells of mountains, limestone dust, and moss were hovering in the air. Alice heard winds strolling through halls and cracks of an enormous building. The light in the room was coming properly through a window.

In her sleep, the girl had been wearing the karate gi.

Sleep... status, Alice called out for the system and read a straight off respond with a bitter mix of disappointment and relief.

"Anxious... yes, that's me."

Following a nervous laugh, Alice 'looked' inside. She knew where to search and so immediately discovered a number of tiny hidden injuries exactly in all right places: cracked ribs, torn muscle fibers, blood clods in ruptured capillaries.

"What a dream," with shaky voice rattled the girl. "What a crazy dream.."

Of course, she didn't mean her little soul journey god-knows-where. She regarded the whole dungeon war as a dream. Painfully obvious one now with a lucid head being a thing.

"Bigger than some dream."

Nine bright drops in her heart were circling a black dot. Qi was circulating in her veins, her bones and muscles still had numerous weak spots.

Tainted supreme blood, alien qi, impurities.

Thank you, As’heshal.

Between ignorance and all-powerful being Alice readily chose to listen to the latter.

"System, did you send me there to let him know about Leviathan's last drop of blood? To let the grudge go?"

Many doubts swarmed Alice's thoughts. There had been no guarantee that the farewell lesson would happen at all. Some profound visions would then be all the girl had witnessed. Even her own guess she wasn't so sure about.

"Who are you exactly? A sophisticated computer program or a true intelligence that hides behind..."

Alice glanced around and stood up. The floor was very cold, yet bearable. Barefooted, the girl felt every roughness and sharp little rocks biting into her skin, making her steps uncomfortable but not painful. Endurance above human limits included these little things. The girl was sure she could confront a taser hit, digest a horse share of toxin and so on, so forth.

The glaive she checked first. Alice caressed the shaft, noting several cracks on the wood. Collision with an alpha wolf left its marks. She pulled apart the blade and the staff to make sure the mechanism was fine. Generally speaking, it was.

With the blade in her hand, the girl then walked to the window. Frowned on the way more than once for her body seemed not her own. Sometimes her movements were too fast, sometimes too slow. To keep control, a real effort was mandatory.

Everything is easier in a dream. The girl punctured the crack in the blade's handle with a fingernail. Half-dream, okay.

Alice touched the window frame. It didn't have glass or anything, just a hole allowing winds traverse in and out. With the bed and table, the room was definitely sized for someone bigger than a human being.

Outside, she saw stars.

They covered the sky. Hundreds of stars stuffed in a small basket of cosmos. The smallest white dwarves had the size of a bean, the two largest blue and red giants together eclipsed one-tenth of all space. The light of the stars was colouring the sky into patches of red, yellow, white, blue and all tones in-between.

Alice saw protuberances traveling through cosmos, saw them being pulled into spirals of gravity wells, saw sun flares shining brighter than their suns.

With a struggle, Alice pulled her eyes off the fantastic astronomical phenomenon. Still disbelieving, she reached with her hand out, letting only slightly warm light shower onto her. The invisible filter seemed to be cutting off most of the radiation, and for the girl, it was ticker above the horizon line, where there were no suns, only blue.

As she followed with her gaze, she finally saw a desert far down. The outer wall of the building was wide, tall, directly connected to a steep mountainside below the girl.

Alice backed off immediately, her head a bit dizzy.

"Several thousands of feet," she gulped, not feeling safe in this stone room at all. It didn't even have a normal exit!

From afar, the girl still explored the desert. It had no visible landmarks and contained a lot of sand. Most of the desert was veiled by a gigantic sandstorm if a dark-yellow mist was the one.

"Okay. I have a way out. It's okay," Alice had a look she would prefer a number of dungeon's monsters to this her old enemy: height.

On a bit crooked legs, the girl walked to the system notebook and flipped it open. The screen showed her a cheerful:

"Thanks for that, I guess."

Alice tried to access the notebook menu but failed.

"System shop? No? System log? Aha."

The girl checked and indeed, the mission to reach her Node #8 was now counted as a success. Battle points also went into her status thrift-box.

It doesn't clarify, but sure as hell I cleared that dream with my last chat message...

At first, Alice had been really determined to go home and forget the dungeon like a nightmare as soon as she gets any semblance of how. Cold logic also dictated she wouldn't survive without fighting against constantly leveling monsters. Then the girl acted along with the flow, sometimes desperate, sometimes cold-blooded and sometimes without thinking things through.

Remembering, Alice didn't blush from shame though. Just said:

"Learn from this experience."

"..."

"Well, since I'm supposed to wait for others," she moved on instantly, "Might as well turn over some stones."

The girl walked to a wall and pushed the part that certainly looked like a door. A rock door, as a matter of fact. It didn't bulge. Twice taller than Alice herself, of course, why the hell would it?

I don't see any mechanism, the girl knocked here and there, but heightened senses failed her in finding any hidden cavities.

"Open sesame."

With a rumble, the rock lifted up and her jaw fell down.

"It worked!?"

Dubily Alice stepped into a long corridor. Outside, on the wall to the left of the door, she saw an '8' sign. It vastly contradicted the antiquity the girl nigh literally was breathing with, but at this point, she wasn't really surprised. Like, of course, her room would have a sign stating it hers, right? Right!?

Grinning slightly mad, she returned to her gear and picked up breastplate... then stopped.

Won't it be safe? Today, Alice felt especially brave. Or especially tired from wearing armor all the time. She did assemble her glaive though: brave didn't equal crazy. Her fingers touched one of the last life potions when she remembered the words 'alien qi'. After a little doubt, she left the vial be.

The curved corridor was short and Alice's room was at the end of it, so she walked left. No windows, only worn out stone blocks and gaps in the ceiling letting the light of the suns in. The girl goggled at them so hard she almost missed another room, without a door. It was empty. Completely. On the opposite side of it and her apartment, there was a hall.

Alice caught herself on looking at surprisingly smooth and nearly tatami-sized tiles and thinking, a good place for a dojo.

Also, another window. Can I finally look around?

So she looked.

At the naked courtyard of a giant castle, apparently. Enclosed by a round wall with very wide allure and high parapet. The gate had a bare hole instead of an expected draw bridge or a portcullis or anything else. As far as Alice could tell, the whole castle had an extremely practical architecture and even the most shabby late European castle was an artwork compared to this one.

What the girl was dumbfounded by, besides the idea of living in a castle, was the damn thing's size. Roughly counting, Alice's upper floor was forty meters high and the outer walls were reaching half this height.

The courtyard was also gigantic, easily capable to accommodate two-thirds of a soccer field.

There was a bastion, too, the only actual building besides the empty gates and the castle itself. A colossal white tower that felt not quite in its place, be it the colour or form of the building stones.