Aria stopped dead. Ten steps from the cave mouth, her usually imperious porcelain face drained to a bloodless white.

  To the naked eye of any local inhabitant, the place was nothing more than a dark, damp hole gaping between the roots of a massive banyan tree. But to Aria's eyes — and Li Wei's — the cave entrance was sealed shut by an enormous blood-red system warning that pulsed like a diseased heart.

  [WARNING: RESTRICTED AREA]

  [DUNGEON: ROOT OF DESPAIR]

  [RECOMMENDED LEVEL: 50+]

  [SURVIVAL CHANCE: 0.00%]

  "You're insane," Aria hissed. She stepped back instinctively, her staff rising into a defensive stance. "This is a Level 50 Dungeon. We step inside, we're dead in seconds."

  Li Wei stared at the blazing red text. Painful to look at, yes. Mentally crushing. But he chose to look through it.

  He saw the green moss growing thick at the lip of the stone — proof of decent air circulation. He saw the crisscrossing tracks of ground mice moving in and out without hurry — living proof that no instant-kill aura lingered at the threshold.

  "That's if you walk in through the front door and challenge the Boss to a duel," Li Wei replied flatly. "We're not here to fight anything. We're here to steal."

  "Zero percent, Li Wei! The system says zero percent!" Aria's voice climbed, losing its composure entirely. "The Boss in there could kill me just by sneezing!"

  Li Wei didn't argue. He picked up a handful of small round pebbles. Without warning, he pitched one straight into the belly of the cave's darkness.

  CLACK. Tack. Tack.

  The stone rolled deep, bouncing echoes off stone walls.

  Silence.

  No ancient dragon roaring awake. No hellfire erupting. No massive HP bar suddenly filling the cave ceiling.

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  "Boss is sleeping," Li Wei said calmly. He stepped forward, crossing the imaginary red boundary of the system warning without hesitation. "As long as you don't step on its tail, that thing is just oversized decoration."

  Aria bit down hard on her lower lip. She needed those mushrooms. Reluctantly, with visible reluctance, she tapped her staff and activated her defense.

  [SKILL: MANA SHIELD — ACTIVE]

  They stepped inside.

  The air in the earth's belly ran far colder, carrying a dense smell of rust and ancient metal. The muddy floor gradually gave way to old stone tiles laid with lethal precision.

  Aria's eyes lit up blue, scanning the darkness ahead.

  [SKILL: TRAP DETECTION (MAX LEVEL)]

  "Clear," Aria whispered, her tone carrying a thread of recovered confidence. She pointed to the long stone corridor stretching before them. "No Mana fluctuations. No Trap Runes. My system says this path is safe."

  She stepped ahead of Li Wei, her stride steady and elegant as she crossed the dragon-scale patterned tiles running down the corridor's center.

  One step.

  Two steps.

  As Aria's sole hung in the air, poised to land on the third tile, the corner of Li Wei's eye caught something.

  Not a sorcery flare. Not residual Mana energy. A physical imperfection. Small. Fatal.

  The grout line between the third tile and its neighbor was fractionally wider than all the others. A thin wire of rusted metal — no thicker than a single strand of human hair — ran low across the floor, barely a centimeter above the surface, buried cunningly under a thousand years of accumulated dust.

  Li Wei didn't shout a warning. He acted.

  GRAB.

  His hand seized the back of Aria's silk collar.

  YANK.

  Li Wei hauled her body backward with full force. Aria lost her footing completely and dropped hard onto the dirty stone floor.

  "What do you think you're—?!"

  CLICK.

  A quiet mechanical groan sounded from beneath the tile Aria had nearly landed on. The vibration of her footfalls on the previous tiles had already been enough to prime the spring tension buried underground.

  WHOOSH. WHOOSH. WHOOSH.

  Three thick iron spears erupted from the dark gap in the left wall.

  Fast. Silent. Absolute.

  CLANG. CLANG.

  The killing shafts buried themselves a hand's length deep into the right wall. Their iron bodies vibrated hard, bleeding off the last of their momentum. Positioned exactly at the height of an adult's neck and chest.

  A silence as cold as a grave settled over them.

  Aria's blue eyes had gone wide enough to leave their sockets. Her porcelain face was now less than a hand's width from the rusted spear blade still trembling directly in front of her nose.

  Her Mana Shield hadn't responded at all. Her max-level Trap Detection had said nothing.

  "W-why..." Aria's voice shook badly, her breath coming in uneven bursts. "Why was there no Red Marker? Why didn't my system trigger?"

  Li Wei released his grip on Aria's collar. He dusted off his palms against each other with an expression as flat as a wooden board.

  "Because that thing doesn't run on magic, Miss Fairy," Li Wei said, his voice as cold as the stone floor. "That's just an old spring. Corroded gears. And gravity."

  He gestured toward the gap in the floor tiles with his chin.

  "Your system can only smell Mana. But in this world, old iron and rust don't have any."

  Li Wei moved forward again. This time he hugged the cave wall tightly, keeping completely clear of the smooth, inviting center path.

  He glanced slightly back at the high-level Healer still sitting stunned on the floor, arms wrapped around her own knees.

  "Turn off those fancy eyes of yours. Use your real ones," Li Wei said, absolute. "Or you'll be cut in two before we reach the first bend."

  Aria swallowed with difficulty.

  She stared at Li Wei's back — thin, mud-caked, wrapped in torn cloth. For the first time since she had logged into this world, the Level floating proudly above her own head felt entirely meaningless against the Level 1 belonging to a backwater NPC.

  In absolute darkness, your Level doesn't save you. Street instinct does.