As the group heads back to their personal space, Donut immediately opens her floor-club spellbook prize and learns Astral Paw, a utility spell that lets her manipulate and eventually attack at range. Back at the apartment, Carl reviews achievements earned during the Grull disaster and the portal attack, including rewards for summoning a god, surviving a deity’s attack, and causing mass long-distance casualties. The resulting boxes confirm that the fight has made Carl especially visible to the gods and give the party more evidence that this floor will feature water and poison dangers.

The party then opens its loot. Donut receives water-breathing scrolls, which she hates, and learns Wall of Fire. Katia gains more water-breathing and antidote supplies, plus a skill potion that raises her Catcher skill. Carl gets healing items, another invisibility potion, a guided-projectile crafting item called Surefire, a valuable toe ring that grants wall-walking and debuff-spreading abilities, and an extinction sigil tattoo that may reduce hostility from some creatures but makes lizard-class enemies hit harder.

Carl’s most important reward is a legendary potion, Pawna’s Tears, which can add five levels to any chosen skill. Mordecai identifies it as Carl’s best loot since entering the dungeon and urges him to save it for the right skill later. Carl also checks in with Elle, who is struggling on a sailboat but received a dangerous ice-storm spell, and sends messages to see who else is in their bubble. Only Gwen replies; from the Land Quadrant, she reports that the Sandcastle of the Mad Dune Mage is heavily defended and that the other quadrants look dangerous and hard to navigate, making the bubble’s fifteen-day limit feel alarmingly short.

After a nap, the group resumes its strict training plan while Mordecai and Donut handle upgrades for their personal space. Carl goes into Hump Town to scout and visits a house with a rooftop telescope, where he meets Skarn, a changeling orphan being raised by a dromedarian named Flint. Through the enchanted gnome telescope, Carl studies the Air castle, the Wasteland: a huge, heavily armed floating island crowded with red-hatted gnomes, hanging structures, attached aircraft, and magical shielding around its balloons. He also inspects one of the gnomes’ unstable thermobaric bombs and learns from Skarn that the gnomes once destroyed his village with such weapons. Skarn says Hump Town is not bombed because something hidden in town hall is important enough that the gnome leader does not want it destroyed, giving Carl a new clue about the town’s real strategic value.