THE OLD MAN CHALLENGES THE EARTH DRAGONS

I am stark naked!

Indeed! I have become accustomed to this stark-naked lifestyle!

My shame has long since gone flying away somewhere beyond the stars.

In fact, even I cannot be sure whether I had such a thing to begin with!

It has been some time since I began living among the spiders.

As the cavernous Great Elroe Labyrinth is untouched by the light of the sun, my sense of time has become rather unclear.

Thus, I know not how long I have been here exactly.

However, it has surely been no small number of days.

I say this with certainty, for all my skills have increased considerably.

Since I came here, my rate of growth has been remarkable.

Truly, I must wonder what I have been doing with my life until now.

As long as I can put this valuable time to good use, being naked matters not to me!

I have cast aside my clothes, consumed monsters, and slept amid nature.

Wonderful.

Truly, this is how creatures are meant to live.

I cannot help but wonder if building houses, donning clothes, and eating cooked food are exactly the kinds of actions that have caused humanity to degenerate.

If possible, I would continue living like this for the rest of my days.

However, there is a dark cloud that hangs over this lifestyle now.

The spiders have noticed, too, and are chattering about it.

It is a problem that affects all of us: a food shortage.

The spiders and I have hunted the monsters in this area so thoroughly that there is nothing left to eat.

The only possible food source in the Great Elroe Labyrinth is monsters.

If the monsters are gone, there is nothing left to eat.

We have nearly hunted the surrounding part of the Upper Stratum dry, and even in the Middle Stratum, one must travel some distance before finding any monsters.

It would be highly dangerous to venture into the heat-filled Middle Stratum.

Thus, the Upper Stratum is the only option, but there are no monsters left within the radius of one or two days’ travel.

If worse comes to worst, I can teleport back to town, but the spiders do not have that option.

The spiders have a considerably large family, too, which means they have many mouths to feed.

On top of that, their numbers have only grown since I first arrived.

There are far too many for me to count at this point.

As the spiders continue to multiply, they have begun to run out of monsters to prey upon.

Even if they travel elsewhere to hunt, they will be hungry again by the time they return.

The situation is essentially a famine, and soon it will reach a breaking point.

It seems to me that the only solution is for the entire swarm of spiders to migrate. What do they plan to do?

Naturally, the nine spiders who serve as their leaders have noticed the same issues I have.

As always, they talk among themselves using Telepathy in a language I still cannot understand.

Finally, they reach some kind of conclusion and address all the spiders with Telepathy.

Then the nine begin preparing a Large-Scale Teleport spell over the spiders.