Portraits revealed through your current reading position.
The dungeon's strongest, coldest crawler — who chooses to leave the game entirely, sucked into a pet carrier and shipped to the Cabaret to spare everyone she loves.
Li Na, the poisoned, grief-hollowed Changbi who maxed all base stats and installed her dead brother Li Jun's celestial eye, becomes the first live test of Carl's Pineapple Cabaret escape. Because a Changbi can worship no god, she alone can pass into the god-free oasis — where her incurable Left to Fester poison should halt and a rumored surface-exit might even cure it. Hovering a foot off the floor, glowing, her clockwork eye whirring, she agrees to go: she will clear the Cabaret's path for the crawlers who follow and keep the war mages from turning on them.
The mechanism is a Rube Goldberg of dungeon rules — she consents to be sucked into an XL pet carrier, which the cleaner bot Suckira absorbs into its weight-based storage, and which Princess Donut then lists for sale so Herot can buy it inside the Cabaret and release her. Before she goes, she gives Zhang a devastating farewell: she is 'no child to protect,' he owes her no apology, and she confesses she used to smile at him only so he would smile back, secretly pretending in her mind that they were married. Then she is zapped into the carrier and vanishes with a beep — leaving the dungeon, to be marked 'lost,' her fate now readable only through the cactus beacon of her dread trap.
A young woman hovering a foot off the floor, glowing faintly, one dark natural eye and one twitching clockwork celestial eye whirring; drained, poisoned, grey with sickness yet serene.
The strongest crawler, who leaves the game by consent to spare her friends and pioneer the Cabaret escape.
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