Leveling Endlessly with the Strongest System

The ancient sinkhole teleported Roy to a dark corridor, which had gray stones embedded in its walls and ceiling.

The second he appeared there, the ones overhead and on each side of his released moonlight and the darkness in which he found himself in was forced to recede to the corners and the edges of the corridor.

He was planning to light up this place using fireballs, but he withheld this idea as it was already partially illuminated and moved his eyes about, taking in his surroundings.

Because of what he saw, Roy's eyes widened in shock. The floor was covered with a carpet of red velvet that had the same drawings as the flame mark on his neck.

His eyes narrowed, causing a thoughtful look to appear on his face as he instantly determined that he wasn't the first to awaken the Power Boost bloodline ability.

Either one of his ancestors had the same bloodline skill as him, or power boost was a bloodline skill common among the pure-blooded Baldwins commonly of ancient times; otherwise, it wouldn't have been possible for him to see the flame mark in an ancestral land build several hundred years ago.

Roy looked around.

The walls and the ceiling were covered with a mosaic of tiles in different shades of blue.

The tiles were decorated with pictures of dragons and waterfalls dancing around each other, trying to tell a story.

Roy, curious as to what it might be, focused his gaze on the pictures, scrutinizing them.

『Ding! Congratulation. You were successful in inspecting the illustration on the tiles.』

『It's a painting made by a famous artist that went by the name of Jade Scholar. The dragon signifies Baldwins. The waterfall signifies the water celestials. Taken as a whole, it shows that this ancestral land was made by the Water Celestials for the Baldwins and that they were close friends.』

"So we even shared the layout plan of our ancestral land with the water celestials and allowed them to build it. We must have shared brotherly ties with the water celestials in the past. Then... What happened for us to become so distant that they haven't bothered helping us and watched indifferently from the sides as our number dwindled to merely a handful?"

Only the Water Celestial, an old friend of their ancestors, was known to have helped them, and there was no record or mention of the other water celestials ever seeking them out or providing them aid. They were too indifferent to their life & death. But you can't become indifferent to someone you treated as a brother over little disputes. Something must have happened in the past that soured their ties and put an end to their good friendship. Roy wondered what it might be.

...

It was a luxurious setting but not a good place to have a picnic if you weren't looking to freeze to death. He breathed in, finding the air biting cold. To ward it off, he ended up creating fireballs. They were floating around him like knights standing guard next to their lords or four brides next to their man.

Behind him was a dead end. It wasn't a normal thick wall as it was coated in Shield force.

Roy found that out when he inspected it, and he gawked.

Force is permanent, never aging, almost everlasting, like a stone.

Hearing it was one thing, but experiencing it was shocking.

On the other hand, ahead of him was a path too dark.

He didn't know where it led to, but there was nowhere else to go.

He walked forward, listening to the fading sound of the footsteps behind him. They were the only sound he could hear in this place, and they weren't the only thing fading. The luminous stone behind him shut down. The area behind him was swallowed by haunting darkness. But he didn't feel stiffened as his fireballs were illuminating his surroundings. Three steps later, a new set of stones lit up, adding light to his deadly, suppressing surroundings and further widening his field of vision. They seem to light up only if someone was close by.

Suddenly, the eerie feeling of being watched by someone from the darkness swept over him ominously like a cold frigid wind assaulting a naked man, planning to kill him.

His hair stood on edge.

His sixth sense tingled.

A chill went up his spine, and he felt a deep stabbing sensation in the center of his brows.

Whoosh!

A fierce arrow radiating intense sharpness burst out of the darkness in front of him, hissing sharply, piercing through the air, and reaching for his glabella. He tilted his head. The place was too narrow for a man his size to roll or jump to the side. He could only sidestep or tilt his head, and he chose the latter because he would have died if he had tried sidestepping it. It was too close to him and too fat to be sidestepped.

Thud!

It grazed his cheeks as it moved past him. His eyes subconsciously traced its figure, seeing it swiftly stabbing into the wall coated by Force!

"Fuck!" A curse escaped the young man's lips as beads of blood dripped out from the freshly created wound on his cheeks.

Seeing it embedded deeply on the Shield Force-coated wall, which he couldn't even touch, from the corner of his eyes, Roy felt so terrified that his eyes thinned to the size of needles.

He cringed as he noticed it was halfway inside the fucking wall.

He knew that it had left a nasty gash on his cheek and would have drilled through his head if he was any slower in tilting his head to the side.

'I would have been killed if I hadn't reacted to the surprise attack instantaneously.'

He vigilantly stared into the darkness as he pulled out his sword, standing alert.

A second arrow shot didn't pop out from the darkness.

Instead, the system's notification rang in his ears.

『You have been injured. You lost 1 HP. The bleeding effect has been applied to you. You will lose 0.1 HO every second.』

『Self-Healing has been activated.』

『10 HP has been consumed to clear your body of the bleeding debuff and close the skin wound on your face.』

The effect of the skill was instantaneous. His bleeding stopped, and his skin wound closed up. This was the power of the Self-Healing passive skill. It was an ability that would automatically activate when Roy was injured. He gained it when his HP bar crossed the threshold of 100 points. It could instantly heal all his small wounds in exchange for HP. More severe ones would take time to heal, and they will also cost him a considerable sum of HP.

Author here:- Adrenaline rush and creepy monsters. If you are in for that, stay tuned!~