Editing/Standardisation: kubor04
Formatting/Extras: APM
Original Translation: Blastron
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I stealthily move along. If I kept watching these guys fight, after all, I’d definitely have gotten dragged into it, so getting out of there immediately was the best idea. Maaaan, this lower stratum… That praying mantis… I thought it was ridiculously strong, but it’s really just kind of average down here. There’s not only the spider that devoured the mantis, but also winged lions and even a giant serpent that is probably the evolved form of one of those snakes from earlier. Truly, a peerless collection of monsters. Nai wa.
I’ve been sneaking along, trying to avoid drawing attention to myself, and so far I’ve been able to slip past everything without being detected. Well, if I had been detected, it would have been all over, anyway.
For a while, I forced myself to keep moving constantly, not even stopping for sleep. After a while, my red stamina meter finally started to decrease again. I still have no idea what was keeping it maxed out before, but it seems like there’s some kind of time limit on whatever it was. Before these thirty-eight points disappear, I’m definitely going to need to find myself some food.
I couldn’t find a target that I could actually defeat, though, so I tried to force myself to sleep. Let’s be clear. I couldn’t sleep at all. Obviously. Before, I could guarantee my safety while sleeping by building a basic home and sleeping in there. In a monster lair like this, though, I’d need more than just a basic home to guarantee my safety and, of course, anything more sturdily built would be way more conspicuous. I don’t want to stand out at all.
If you have to ask me why, it’s that the Earth Dragon is terrifying. If I build a decent nest, the Earth Dragon is probably going to come straight for me. What’s that? I have a persecution complex? I don’t know… The Earth Dragon is terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. Nope, nuh uh, no can do.
And, so, for the first time in my life, I slept without the comfort of a home. This was waaay too stressful! Until I tried it, I never could have imagined sleeping in the open was going to be so terrifying. Every time I started to nod off, the slightest sound would shock me awake, and then I’d start to nod off again. I got basically no decent sleep like that. Next time, I’m going to make a simple home, just for the peace of mind. It’s not bad now, but if I wind up super sleep-deprived, something bad might happen. Ah, well, in my previous life I only really got four hours of sleep a day, so this might be okay after all.
Well, that’s just my sleep problems. The real issue is food. I need to find a way to secure some food in this monster lair. This might be me being overly enthusiastic, but I think there’s a simple enough way to make this happen. After all, there’s a kind of food that I can obtain without breaking a sweat.
I thought it was a little odd, earlier. The strength of the monsters here is ridiculous! But, mixed in with those are some monsters that are way weaker, comparatively, the kinds that I saw back in the upper levels. Take the snake, for example. Ahaha, I never thought I’d be calling the snake weak!
Well, if there’s weaker monsters, what do they eat? After all, the weak don’t eat, they get eaten. That’s the law of the jungle, and this dungeon follows it to the letter. But there’s a tiny stream of weak things down here, the kinds of things that the wasps focus on as their main target.
So, after spending some time observing these weaker monsters, I’ve realized the common thread between all of them.
They’re all extremely poisonous.
It’s so obvious once you realize it. I was born with a little bit of [Poison Resistance] skill, so I didn’t mind eating poisonous meat very much, but an ordinary person wouldn’t want to eat poison! These guys might be weak, but any stronger monsters that don’t have [Poison Resistance] would avoid eating them. This might even work in my favor; if I get spotted, they might leave me alone because of my poison! Well, I say that, but it’s really better not to be spotted to begin with, so I really should keep sneaking around.
So, what do these weak monsters eat? There’s two kinds of food, as far as I can tell. The first is, of course, other weak monsters. This is the big one. The weak monsters have to compete with other weak monsters. If I stumble across one, and I know there’s no weak monsters nearby, I can easily finish one off with a sneak attack.
The other one… well, it’s what the weak monsters eat when there’s literally no other choice.
{Elroe Gestruch – LV3 – failed to appraise status}
These things look like flat, black bugs that somehow remind me of snails. They cling to the dungeon walls and slowly creep along them, exactly like a snail. Let’s call them… snail-bugs. These snail-bugs are abundant down here. No matter where you look, you’ll see at least one, stuck to a wall. That’s how many there are. After learning about these things, I foolishly wondered why none of the other monsters were eating snail-bugs when they were so omnipresent.
This was before I actually ate one.
Yep, that was foolish. My mind was made up, fighting this thing was inevitable and, well, this isn’t the kind of thing I can take back. It was only after I ate it that I realized why the other monsters used it as an absolute last resort.
Yep, I ate one. I really ate one. Killing it was easy; I yanked it off the wall with a thread and finished it off immediately with [Poison Fang]. I had yet to uncover its true horror, however. “Time to dig in,” I blithely thought. Ugh, why did I do that?
Snail-bugs are un-freaking-believably disgusting.
So, yeah! That taste was not of this mortal world! Sure, I’ve eaten a ton of rather gross things since I was reincarnated as a spider, but those flavors pale in comparison. It was so disgusting that I lost a few points of health! That was not food. My [Rot Resistance] skill went up! Under any sane criteria this is not a good thing for your food to do! If “waste not, want not” wasn’t such a deeply-held personal belief, I wouldn’t have taken another bite.
So, as you can see, there is food that I can easily obtain without breaking a sweat… but it comes bundled with such extreme pain. Well, if I had to pick between starving to death and eating food that merely makes me wish I was dead, I’d have to pick the option that doesn’t involve actually dying. So, if I am out of literally every other option, I’ve got snail-bugs to eat. Let’s pray it does not come down to that.
APM - Translation 