Wizardry 8 Retrospective, Continued

The Wizardry 8 retrospective on Tales of the Rampant Coyote continues, this time chronicling Jay's travels through the Water Caves to Bayjin.
We found some caves around her, with some monsters and treasures of various kinds. One of the caves went to Bayjin. There were also some skeletons and IUF ID tags that I thought might be the remains of the missing Umpani I was supposed to find (they weren't...)

We didn't completely explore Bayjin, mainly because we were getting our collective butts kicked. Even some of the dumb crabs here were just nasty, and made the Rayjin seem like pushovers by comparison. However, I did find a wrecked space ship with a nonfunctioning blaster pistol and a working black-box recorder.

I left Bayjin with the mission incomplete - and found the trip back to Mt. Gigas to be, if anything, worse than the trip there in the first place. Long, long, nasty, horrible battles. Mostly with Psi-sharks. Through tunnels with very little chance to avoid the suckers.

Returning, and finding the IUF ID tags were insufficient, I decided to run a few more quests and gain a few more levels to see if they'd help. Though, typically, I've found that most levels continue to throw harder and harder challenges at you as you level, so it's impossible to get ahead unless you get REALLY far ahead. I can teleport back to Arnika now, but I still end up getting into a lot of fights along the road. These fights aren't challenging anymore, just time consuming. Every once in a while I'll manage to dodge all enemies along the road, which makes my day. I've tried drinking Tincture of Shadows potions to be less visible, but they make very little difference. I wonder if they'd work better against psi-sharks?