“If you choose magic you will never be able to return to the life you once lived. Your world may be more... exciting... but it will also be more dangerous. Less reliable. And once you begin to walk the path of magic, you can never step off of it.
-Neil Gaiman
Creating all of the traps had taken quite some time. Any individual trap was fairly easy, but refining the details took a while. I took a moment to look at the progress of the mana crystals.
They were growing quite slowly, but there were thousands of them. I looked at my ambient mana, it had gone down to minimal. I could probably get at least a single mana from each one. Actually… I should test that. I absorbed one. It was the size of a pebble right now. It gave me three mana. Much less than what I thought it probably held, given that one about the size of grain of rice could hold almost a single point of mana, but still more than enough. I looked at all the thousands of crystals. Should I…? I warred with myself. If I did it would be easy to level up, but that could distract me. On the other hand I had received an enormous benefit from my last level, and I would be a fool to ignore that kind of benefit right now.
I looked at my creation that was siphoning in far more mana than I would generate normally. I was sure part of this was simply because I had such a mana rich environment, but I knew that was not all of it. Honestly that probably wasn’t even the majority of it. No, I was more intelligent than a dungeon was expected to be at this level. That was the first part, and maybe that was the only part. I had to consciously include mana stone into my designs and that made me able to make a material that stored mana using ambient mana. And it was obvious from this that the amount of ambient mana available was far more than I was drawing in.
My other thought was that mana crystal was really rare, or perhaps it was simply artificial and not something dungeons encountered in nature. Though, I had my doubts that it was that hard for dungeons to get a little bit of it. It would have happened by accident if someone used it. No, it had to be intelligence more than anything else. This wasn’t my only idea to get better mana generation, after all. I was already sending my aura toward richer territory, and I had stored mana even when I had been trapped. I had considered setting a few minds to push ambient mana together so it would forcibly create dense areas I could focus on absorbing. And I was sure that there were even more ideas I had overlooked.
I quickly started absorbing crystals and less than a hundred later Exsan pushed for a level up as soon as it was possible.
I quickly agreed and my level went up. Most of the details were the same, though the next level needed two hundred survival points, which was easy enough. I had gained another skill and title, but I didn’t look at it for the moment. So I pushed through and absorbed enough mana to acquire the next level.
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Your status has changed – Level Up
Status</u>
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Appraise II</u>
Manipulate Metal II</u>
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Swift Descent</u>
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Mana Diffusion V</u>
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couldn''t support this many. And some of the fish were double in size anything I had seen previously here. I looked upstream and downstream to see if I had simply discovered some kind of spawning event. Nope, the entire stream was like this, and there were large amounts of eggs everywhere.
Dungeon make monsters.