I stared at the massive body of water below me, gently floating mid-air as I blocked gravity from taking hold of me. Countless water bullets flew at me from the water, only to have their trajectory changed the moment they made contact with my [Multi-Layered Barrier]. I had learned how to infuse the skill with an element five or so floors before.

  After finding out the summoning ritual that killed me and made me reincarnate as a white dragon hasn’t happened yet, I almost broke. Finding them was the only goal I had.

  I barely took the time to understand the world around me, or get to know people in this mission I had placed upon myself. Only when I got trapped inside a temporal loop, twice, did I slow down somewhat, but even then, all I did was to help me get to my goal quicker.

  It’s something that I regret now, knowing what I know. Hindsight is 20/20, after all.

  I could have explored a friendship with Farahio and Karol, a powerful elf and dog person, both mages, I think. I’m not exactly sure whether Karol was a mage or just using a skill to create and control hundreds of elemental swords that she used to fight off Jack, a human who was set on killing me because he thought I was a mimic.

  I don’t blame him, though. My [Genetic Dysphoria] did allow me to shapeshift into other species, just like a mimic.

  I stared at the DNA list from the skill. It allowed me to fully change into that species, I even gained their racial skill.

  A water bullet passed right next to my head.

  Right. I was in a dungeon at the moment. After finding out my friends haven’t arrived yet, I asked Amity, the Witch of Pride, a very powerful elf, to drop me in a dungeon for a while. I needed to clear my head, after all.

  The goblin DNA I got from the first floor. It was a mistake.

  The goblin had jumped right into my mouth after they used some kind of dust bomb. I had opened my mouth to sneeze, and he tried to use the opportunity to… I don’t know what passed through his head.

  Whatever he thought he would do, the moment I sneezed, I closed my mouth right on his head, killing him instantly. Just the memory of the taste makes me want to throw up even now. It was foul.

  That was on the first floor. The shark I gained in the seventh. It was inside a river and was evading my spells, so I decided to try to brute force the kill. It worked, but the second head gave me a few broken scales near my eye that made me rethink my approach.

  Another water bullet flew by me. I looked at the source of the spell. A group of water slimes, just like the one that almost got me killed the first day I reincarnated in this world. But now I had more experience and was more comfortable in my own body and power.

  I looked around. I was floating over an ocean. There was no land on this entire floor. Looking upwards, I could see the sun and a few clouds passing by, but I knew those were fakes. I was floating near the ceiling of the floor. I could sense a barrier of solid space a few meters above me.

  Looking back down, I let gravity reassert its force on me, and I dropped like a steel ball. I had finished developing the spell on [Magical Programming Language], a skill that was essentially a code editor for magic and allowed me to program spells. The spell I had just made would allow me to deal with the slimes and not cause them to become more powerful, like I had accidentally done with my first-ever slime.

  Just before I splashed into the water, I opened up my wings and transformed all my vertical velocity into horizontal velocity, casting the spell I, unimaginatively, called ‘Ice Beam’. I just hope the lawyers from Big N don’t find me. I was sure they would traverse the universes to sue me if they did.

  At the tip of my claws, a magical circle manifested itself for a moment before it condensed and shot out a blue beam that froze everything that touched it. In mere seconds, I had frozen a large volume of water and all the slimes that were in it.

  With a few flaps of my wings, I landed on the ice and let out a relaxed sigh, only for my feet to slip because of the same ice, and I hit my head on the new ground.

  “Ouch,” I said, more out of habit than actual pain. “Thankfully, there’s no one here but me, and probably the dungeon itself, if it is watching me.” If the dungeon had access to a camera and the internet, I’m sure I would be on one of those compilation videos on YouTube.

  Even though I fell, I made no attempt to get up. I was physically exhausted after going through so many floors back to back to back. Each one I completed opened up the passage to the next one, and when I enter a floor, the passage back closes. I could only move forward.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  At least that helped me realize how to expand the [Genetic Dysphoria]’s DNA list. I need to eat part of the creature while it’s still alive. After all, that’s how I gained the goblin and shark DNA. When I ate other creatures I had killed on other floors, be it by cooking them, or eating it raw, it gave me nothing.

  I rested for five minutes before I noticed that the next floor’ entrance, which should have appeared after I killed those slimes, didn’t materialize.

  Sensing something was wrong, I got up and took a step. The moment my feet touched the ground, I felt something both rigid and soft at the same time.

  I took a step back and grabbed whatever I had stepped on to take a closer look.

  It was an ice chunk that appeared to be melting when I let it be, and when I applied pressure, it would harden, like a non-Newtonian fluid.

  It was only when it started to wrap itself around my hand that I used [Appraisal] on it.

  [ Water Slime (mutating to ice) - Lv. 67 ]

  My eyes widened from the result, and I punched the ground with the hand that the slime was on. It shattered and exploded into countless little shards of ice. I quickly cast [Appraisal] on those, but they returned just ‘Slime Fragment’.

  Doing the same around the ice, I discovered all of the slimes I thought I had killed were mutating into ice slimes.

  I, being the mature dragon that I was, began panicking and running around, punching every slime I saw, shattering them while slipping on the ice about 90% of the time.

  The last slime I killed wasn’t even by a punch. I had slipped on the ice, and my face crashed right next to it. I didn’t have the presence of mind to calmly get up and punch it again. The moment I saw it next to my face, I just snapped my mouth on it, exploding it into a million pieces.

  The taste wasn’t unpleasant. It felt a lot like a sweet jelly.

  A few seconds after that, I felt the ice platform shake.

  “Can’t I have 5 minutes to rest?” I complained to the dungeon, but it didn’t answer me.

  I grunted and lifted my head, looking around. I saw that a giant whirlpool had formed right next to me.

  I quickly grabbed a hold of space with [Spatial Manipulation] and flung myself in the air, right before the ice platform was dragged into it.

  Flapping my wings, I flew right on top of the whirlpool and saw the ground in the middle of it, below the water, about a hundred meters below the surface of the water. Right in the middle of the whirlpool, not touched by water, was a stone arc, something I recognized from the other floors. It was the entrance to the next one.

  I let out a sigh. I really wanted to rest for a bit, but the last time I stayed too much inside a floor, the dungeon wasn’t happy and almost collapsed the entire thing on top of me.

  I flew downwards and landed. Immediately, I felt a ping of pain in the hand I punched the slimes. Looking at it, I saw that some broken scales and green blood was dripping from the small wounds.

  Each drop sizzled as it touched the sandy ground, as the temporal energy inside it ran rampant on whatever it touched. Being an Ouroboros Dragon meant I had temporal energy coursing inside my veins alongside blood.

  I quickly cast a basic healing spell I had developed that didn’t do much, but it did stop the bleeding. I didn’t know why my healing spells were so bad, and [Knowledge Library], my skill that theoretically is connected to the universe itself, doesn’t give me straight answers.

  [Healing spells allow the transfer of life force to the target user]

  It just gives me that. What does it mean, or how does it work? I’m better off going to a healer and asking them directly.

  I look at the stone arc, which, from my point of view, revealed a stone stairway that I couldn’t see from up above, and extended past what it should be possible. The first time I saw it, I was amazed at how clean the spatial distortion was. I even looked at it closely for a few minutes before I felt the dungeon growing impatient with me. Now, though? It’s just the entrance to the next floor.

  I entered the stairway and started descending. The moment I crossed the threshold of the entrance, it simply vanished, and a stone wall was in its place. I was effectively trapped inside the place with only the option of going forward.

  As I descended, I thought about the pattern I noticed while I delved into deeper floors. The first floor was almost a desert, but with each floor I passed, more and more water I encountered. The seventh, there was a river, where I gained that shark’s DNA. The twelfth was a lake. The last floor, the fifteenth, was basically an ocean. I wondered what the next one was going to b-

  My thoughts were interrupted as I suddenly found myself submerged in water mid-breath. Thankfully, I was able to stop breathing in water. I looked around me, but saw only the blue tint of water.

  If I couldn’t feel the pull of gravity on the fabric of space with [Spatial Manipulation], I would have trouble orienting myself.

  I aimed upwards and started flapping my wings, trying to get to the surface. Unfortunately, I was not alone, because after ten seconds, something hit me, hard.

  I was spun around rapidly, and everything was a blur. I didn’t even stop spinning when I was hit again. My barriers cracked, but held.

  I didn’t know what it was, but I was being attacked and needed to fight.

  I opened up my wings to increase the drag and stop myself from spinning and started looking around, searching for the creature attacking me.