10th Floor Exploration Resumes.

“Now that Paula is back with us, I highly want to spend today gathering various resources on the tenth floor.”

“It has been quite some time, everyone. I am pleased to be back.”

“Pau-sama~!”

“Meet up~!”

“Kyuu~!”

Because her high-tier taming matrix had been a mandatory requirement to engineer the irrigation canal on the fifth floor, Paula had been detached from our clearing unit for about a week.

However, the project successfully verified open yesterday, allowing her to finally resume her deployment with our squad.

Thanks to her pushing her systems to complete the project ahead of schedule, our arable acreage was expanding along a highly optimal trajectory. If everything maintained this momentum, half of the fifth floor’s surface metrics would be converted into functioning fields by the end of March.

Reassembling our four-person core unit after a long hiatus—myself, Paula the tamer, Mia the mage, and Ethan-san the hunter—we guided our steps straight toward the tenth floor. Our companion beasts and summoned monsters for this run were strictly restricted to Yoru, Kuu, and our two Blue Slimes.

We cruised through the sixth and seventh strata via the absolute shortest navigation routes, leaving any skipped monster signatures to be cleaned up by the trailing Chief and the youth alliance.

As for the wolves on the eighth floor, with the synchronized coordination of the fairy network intersected with our twenty-member goblin archery platoon, the entire culling operation verified complete in under a single hour. This massive spike in progression velocity was another direct dividend of Paula pushing her system to manage the logistical transport of the goblins down to that floor.

After rapidly dismantling the Wererat packs on the ninth floor, we made landfall on the tenth stratum while the day parameters were still highly vibrant. Although our eyes had become thoroughly accustomed to the landscape by now, the breathtaking, vast view never failed to make my heart skip a beat.

However, our primary objective for this deployment didn’t lie within that sweeping expanse.

“Alright, let’s initiate our standard route along the perimeter wall first.”

The massive wall behind us stretched far to the east and west. These exact coordinates functioned as the primary habitat for the Curved-Horn Sheep, while simultaneously serving as a natural cultivation node for an unexpected variety of medicinal herbs.

Ethan-san and Mia systematically snipped the sheep from the cliffside, while Yoru and Kuu aggressively targeted their facial zones to execute a rapid cleanup sequence. While it was our standard sheep-hunting routine, having Paula’s combat loops back in the matrix significantly optimized our progression velocity.

Perhaps because our processing speed had undergone such a massive spike, we managed to trigger a jackpot drop on our eighteenth kill of the day.

“Oh! The drop caught!”

The taxonomic name of the material that materialized smoothly on my inventory interface was Premium Fleece. It was a certified rare drop, boasting a $\star\star\star$ rarity rating.

Pulling the fluffy, cloud-like wool into reality, I handed the asset to Paula to run a sensory check. The exact fraction of a second her fingers brushed the fibers, the high-born lady of the Alvarez house widened her eyes in pure astonishment at its weightless texture.

“This is… an incredibly soft, weightless material. And this radiant luster… it completely captivates the eyes.”

Based on her diagnostic output, this resource possessed a quality standard that would easily command top-tier value even within high society exchanges.

Beyond their coarse outer coat, Curved-Horn Sheep occasionally manifest a secondary, hyper-supple layer of down directly against their skin; harvesting that exact sub-layer yields this Premium Fleece. Textiles woven from these micro-fibers boast an absolute premium standard of texture and thermal retention, functioning as a high-caliber cash crop that anchors a player’s financial loops through the mid-game content of Draclo 2.

The real-world biological inspiration for this creature was undoubtedly the cashmere goat, though because the game data lacked a rigid environmental restriction locking their spawn parameters strictly to cold zones, we could fortunately harvest the asset regardless of the season. The only real bottleneck was the drop matrix itself, which enforced an exceptionally severe, grueling drop rate of roughly one percent.

“Alright, next objective on the itinerary: flower gathering.”

“Understood~!”

“Kyuu~!”

Approaching Yoru, I looped a harvesting basket around her neck, adjusting the straps to ensure the container rested comfortably beneath her belly. Her older sister’s loadout properly secured, Kuu masterfully locked her talons onto Yoru’s shoulders and flapped her wings, vaulting smoothly into the airspace.

The stone facade of the perimeter wall was broken up by jagged rock formations jutting out at various intervals. Carpeted thickly around the base of those formations were clusters of herbs bearing pale pink foliage.

Approaching the coordinates with exceptional dexterity, the two little entities systematically ripped the leaves from the stone and tossed them into the basket. After a brief chunk of runtime, the container verified full, and they glided back down to the ground, their features filled with a massive volume of satisfaction.

The exact fraction of a second they made landfall, I stepped forward to unbuckle the gear. The two beast-girls immediately buried their noses against my chest and arms, happily indulging in their standard affection routine. Disengaging the basket, I initiated a diagnostic check on the harvested specimens.

“What species of flora is this, My Lord?”

While the color profile was highly atypical, the structural layout of the plant made it look like a perfectly ordinary weed. Faced with Paula’s curious head-tilt, I provided the pharmaceutical data.

“This is taxonomically classified as Dream-Viewing Grass. It functions as a primary base ingredient to synthesize high-grade sleeping drafts.”

“This basic weed does that?”

This herb, engineered to induce an immediate, short-duration slumber loop, also happened to function as the primary dietary staple for the Curved-Horn Sheep. Granted, because their systems possess an absolute biological resistance matrix against the compound, the sheep can continuously graze on the leaves without ever accidentally triggering a sleep cycle.

However, by maintaining a constant dietary intake of Dream-Viewing Grass, the Curved-Horn Sheep unlock their signature active ability: <Soporific Breath>. It was an exceptionally tedious AoE move capable of plunging an entire raiding party into a sleep state in under a few seconds.

“Ah… which explains why you enforced a rigid tactical directive to block them from breathing toward us.”

Exactly. If a unit continuously hammers a sheep’s facial quadrant, the monster succumbs to sensory disruption and refrains from venting its breath, defaulting instead to its physical <Stampede> maneuver.

While I formulated that explanation rather casually, this tactical blueprint had required a massive chunk of trial and error before our hunting loops were flawlessly optimized. During our initial deployments, our entire platoon had been systematically put to sleep all at once, forcing us to engage the hostiles in a state of absolute, chaotic panic.

Recalling how Ethan-san had been forced to aggressively slap my cheeks to manually override my sleep state was quite a fond memory by now. Then again, this data simply proved that our core unit hadn’t spent the past week strictly running behavioral audits on the Boss Wererat’s reproductive cycles.

“My? What about these specific blossoms nestled inside?”

“Oh, magnificent visual tracking.”

Interspersed within the pink foliage were tiny, drab, mud-brown flowers that had been swept into the basket. Their aesthetic parameters were so completely minimal that any ordinary unit would have guaranteed omitted them from their sweep.

“That is Insect-Repellent Blossom. Calculating the environmental data of this stratum, this asset might actually represent the absolute highest-utility material in our inventory.”

The plant continuously vents an aromatic profile that triggers an absolute evasion response across all insect taxonomies. Thanks to this localized botanical shield, secondary monster demographics flatly refuse to cross into the coordinates enveloping the perimeter wall. This precise environmental layout was the exact reason why the Curved-Horn Sheep had successfully established this sector as their primary habitat.

Deploying my alchemy loops, I flawlessly executed an <Extraction> process to isolate the active chemical properties from the Insect-Repellent Blossoms, before running a <Mixing> loop with standard dungeon water to synthesize a high-tier Monster Repellent specialized against insect sub-types.

I systematically sprayed the solution over everyone’s gear, rapidly checking off our final deployment preparations. Secure in the knowledge that our safety parameters were completely locked down, I extended my hand, pointing straight toward the massive, shimmering expanse of water dominant at the center of the tenth floor.

“Well then… shall we guide our vector toward the main objective of today’s itinerary?”