168 Getting stuck
It took the whole night to separate and categorize all the toxins Yunan brought back home. And only from dawn to sunrise to synthesise the newest toxin that Yunan wanted.
As a thank you, Yunan gave all the toxins left from the digestion to Ophelia and said " the guild would love to get antidotes for these toxins, use these to get some money, no need to split the reward, just keep the money from the antidotes and spend it wisely" after those words, Yunan made sure he could reproduce the toxin they have been working on all night and then tested it on one of the fishes in his aquarium, the results were exactly as he wanted.
Yunan used phase shift to return to the coral reef from then on he used echolocation to find the nearest shark, but what he found was a group of adventurers swimming away from him towards the deeper part instead of the further parts. Yunan decided to follow them from a distance and see what he can discover. Yunan was disappointed to see that they kept avoiding all monsters until reaching a depth of 5000 meters.
The crushing weight of the water made him feel breathless and confined, he could not move as freely nor could he see much in the ensuing darkness, if not for the mage light spell they party was using he would have been blind for a while now, other than that he found that the monsters that are closer to the shoreline are much smaller than those in the open water, he had dove 5000 meters down and did not see a single shark that surpassed the 10 meter mark, let alone a school of them.
After diving another 5000 meters the party entered a cave under water and started to swim up, halfway to the surface was an air pocket and the cave changed from vertical to horizontal, when Yunan popped up from the water, he found the party resting so he pretended to rest as well, he used echolocation and the mapping function to find that this cave led straight to the downward spiral staircase, it was the path to the next level. Yunan was very happy he did not have to fight any bosses to get here. Also the fact that he could control the size of his pray by how far he goes was certainly fun.
The first challenge he set up for himself was using swords to kill a shark in the deepest possible location. So first he had to get used to fighting in 3 dimensions instead of only two, and so while looking for a shark near the shoreline and about 200 meters deep, he found three 7 meter long sharks and decided to fight them. The sharks had a two part attack, one is lunging forward towards the pray and second is sawing what it bit out of the pray by twisting left and right.
So all Yunan had to do was to dodge the lunge and he should be fine, but moving suddenly underwater was very hard, even though Yunan had to teleport a few times to save himself, he still managed to learn to swim better and use less teleports over time.
Yunan also did not forget about hunting as many monsters as he could so he kept inching towards the open waters and encountering tougher and rougher enemies, he also found special monsters as well, for example some bioluminescent jellyfish that can be used as lanterns ny injecting mana into them however they were too fragile to handle so Yunan only fed them directly to the armor.
The deeper Yunan went the more he could find such special beings, however he was still slowly advancing towards the location where he found those giant sharks from earlier. The further he went away from the shoreline the bigger and the more monsters could be found in the same location, and the more aggressively they fought. By the end of the first day, Yunan could handle 3 charging sharks of any length below 12 meters easily, however that was his current limit, since the sharks change strategy in groups. Not only they stop lunging teeth first, instead they would use body slams and tail strikes to stun the prey and make it spend energy to run away, and when the prey is tired they use the same moves for body slam to take a bite out of the no longer struggling prey.
Yunan had seen this tactic so many times and he survived mainly thanks to his armor that now had enough teeth marks on it proving how tough it was, not even sharks could break through its defence. Yunan did not stick to only using swords and daggers, he also used his crossbow with the toxic bolts to turn a dangerous situation into a manageable one.
For the next few days Yunan hunted at a depths of 1000 meters and around 2000 meters away from shore, the monster sharks in this place were around 10-15 meters long with 2-3 meter wide jaws, and corresponding teeth, Yunan trained until he could handle 5 sharks at once at this pressure zone and then moved to higher pressure zones bit by bit while trying to keep that record up.
After almost a month of hunting and training Yunan understood that he could only increase his ability by eating more and more monsters, to increase his stats to become corresponding to the level of the floor. Yunan's attribute were still at 4300, something that is a bit lower than the requirements to be level 30 and he had more than 350 points to reach, and with monsters that could provide only 7 points per week, it would take a year to eat his way to the required numbers, this limit on being able to get points from the same monster only once per week was to keep the lazy ones from paying their way to lower floors.
With that in mind, Yunan changed his strategy to fighting all the time he was in the water in the ten kilometer mark and take on one more shark tham his current tolerance. If he wanted to evolve, he must work hard for it.