《Saga of the Soul Dungeon》 SSD 0.00 - Prologue - The First Seeds of Hope Hope is not a single flower. It is a vast field. Crush one and you will find yourself still in a full field. Burn them down and their seeds will bloom in the ashes. That is what it means to have hope. It is fragile, but blooms again without end. -Excerpt from a letter responding to an offer to surrender, Amsidiv, Navashid Rebel General. ==Seer ¨C Alrannorra== I watched; the world shifted. Nothing new, time always shifted, and, as a seer, I watched. I dwelt, often, upon the past, upon the infinitesimal span of my own life, an irony that grew the greater my reach into time became. Seeing the future, that vision, that perspective, was what we are known for. We could peer deeply into the past, just as well, better in many ways, far more stable. Not that anyone else understood the truth. That was kept between us, and The System. My room was a single window, the furniture aligned precisely, their positions maintained. It was a common feature, for a seer. The room was the same, so that even if my gaze is cast forward, or back, I could still navigate past the unchanged geometries. A glance out the window showed a shifting kaleidoscope of seasons, like a pastiche painting, that would occasionally flicker to some new variation. Insects chirped on tree limbs, the purple and blue leaves a familiar normality. Ash and fire rained from the sky, a glimpse of possible futures, and an echo of a singular past, though ash and fire had come before, many times. Shurum glowed, heavy and gravid, a giant red orb to match the burning ring of Otga. Void, scattered with stars, absent any sign of The Siblings, was cold and empty. Void was a constant companion. Most of my visions were filled with it. The heavens were mostly void, and it filled up the vast immensity of both the past and future. Filtering it out was the first task of the new seer. I allowed my thoughts to dwell there. I had been new, once, a girl who still had a name, Alrannorra, after my great grandmother. I couldn¡¯t speak the name anymore, and none remained who knew it, other than me, unless the other seers had glimpsed it. I could still picture it, either on the canvas of my thoughts or through the direct vision of my gift. I was excited to have a gift for time, then. I was a giddy girl, with a dirty dress, though unconscious of it: I walked down a hall with my mother, her face anxious. The cleanliness of the hall was normal to me now, the child and mother¡¯s dirty clothes the outlier. It was the reverse then, of course. The clean halls alien to my perception, too wrapped up in nervous excitement to see my mother¡¯s anxiety and fear, chased by hope and guilt. I could recognize it now. Her fear of losing me, and her hope for the same. The guilt of giving me away, mixed with the hope of a better life for us both. I had watched them, of course, from afar. It was all I could do. My brothers had gone on to better lives, the coin of my finding paying for tools and apprenticeships. My sisters had dowries to better match their beauty, becoming more than victims. I watched the girl, enamored of the life her gift could bring her. Even a weak seer wanted for nothing. They never went hungry. We were well cared for, locked away as precious resources, kept polished and pristine. I hadn¡¯t known what I was getting into, of course, but my family never went hungry again, after I left them. There were times when bitterness raged in me, when I cursed them for the betrayal, for the abandonment. Such times never lasted long. Not as a seer. Not when I could see countless worse fates. The past was singular, but it still had echoes¡­ reflections, hints of what could have been. Few of the lives I could have had would have been happier than this. And those were the faintest of echoes, mere shadows of possibility. I suppose it is only human to grasp those with envy, regardless. Still, mostly I was grateful. I sent them what help I could, when the fates that I read might impact them. I had taken on clients who would normally have met with a lesser seer, and turned away some of those who could have afforded me. Spoken words one way, rather than another, to gently place my finger on the scale. I couldn¡¯t lie, as a seer, save in my thoughts. Part of what we are bound to, the oaths that frame our strict relation with the world. There is much we are not permitted to say, to reveal, either. I hadn¡¯t known what I was getting into, of course, even with The Glimpse. The System was honest enough about that, at least. It gave us a single moment of the gift in its full potential, its majesty and terror both, before asking for the oaths, before constraining what we could do with our perspective. My lips curled up at the irony. The fledgling seer, blind to both the true power of her gift, and what it would mean to use it, day after day. The seer, their eyes wrapped up, that was a common image. People believed it was to shield us from the common world. Blinding our physical sight, so we could only see the future, unsullied by the common vision of the world. You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story. The truth, of course, was the opposite. All our senses could share the gift, it could even function without access to any, but, by default, our eyes were the strongest aspect of it. We covered our eyes because we saw too much. We needed time to train ourselves, to limit what we could see. A young seer covered their eyes. It was the older and more powerful ones who didn¡¯t need to bother. I had long grown past it. I didn¡¯t flinch in horror, anymore, to see the world. To see someone was to see all that they were, as well as what they could be. Uncountable deaths lay as futures for us all, and all wore them like clothes. Each person came to me garbed in blood, ash, and rot. Eating¡­ well. I had learned focus. I could focus on what the meal was now. Not what it had been, or could be. Seers had a reputation for going mad, but it wasn¡¯t madness. At least not for most of the young. Those who couldn¡¯t learn to see past the future, or those too tender to bear the weight of the possible horror, these were the seers that didn¡¯t make it. It wasn¡¯t madness, just a disconnection from the present, too caught up the endless barrage of sensation to remain grounded, or chasing beautiful visions to escape the horrors. I could do that at any time. I could choose to live in paradisaical future. I wondered why I didn¡¯t, sometimes. I had lost time amongst them before. Days had been spent there, lost in visions where the whole world was a garden¡­ but I always returned. Hope was what killed a seer, and what sustained us. Time was a tree. A single, vast, immeasurable taproot lead back to some unknowably distant beginning. Faint roots of unrealized possibilities surrounded it, leading up to the mighty trunk of the present, which bore the weight of uncountable futures, which faded up and away into mere whips of possibility. The main branches were strong, based on the most common and likely factors. And yet, in a single moment of change, entire branches could wither away, the tree shifting less likely futures into their new strong configuration. It was my favored way to use my gift, and one of the keys that any seer learned, taking the infinite future and tamping it down into a manageable expression. The branches of the tree shifted constantly. The main branches were usually stable, though their component twigs danced madly. It was the subsidiary branches that moved like frenzied seizures, rarely staying still enough to properly seen. Yet, it was the ephemeral, which granted hope, futures as transient and delicate as hope itself, like gossamer webs on the wind. Every day I saw major branches die or twist into new shapes, but the future was mostly the same. Until moments like this, and the tree shifted. All the branches withered to nothing, save a single tattered leaf on a skeletal limb. I watched; that limb shifted and grew. An impossibility had occurred and the future shifted in accordance with the change. A man I had seen, many years before, had realized a future I predicted for him. What he had made was new. Something not done before, in all the long past of the world. He had asked for an end. And end to the cycle, to the harsh duality of The System that razed the world back down to the dregs of civilization again and again. And I had offered him a possible way. I had thought little more of it, since then. The dream he chased was so slight a chance, so immaterial a possibility as to be nothing. I had sent others chasing similar dreams on probabilities stronger than his, and they had all amounted to nothing. Still, the future was not certain. It never was, and the possibility I offered him was always couched with a warning. An end was no always a good thing. The void was an end, but not one I wanted for the world. And the void was a possibility, down this path, along with countless other disasters. And, for all the certainty he had taken from what I told him, the future was not merely aligned with only the end. The cycle could be broken, or it could remain. I flitted between the leaves of countless futures, seeing what could now be, what ends could be brought to the current cycle: The whole world, a single vast dungeon, an orgy of violence and evolution without end, with humanity devolved to no more than feral beasts, one among many others. The world, again a dungeon, but this one a garden. The whole world carefully curated and become like a noble¡¯s garden. All the world kept carefully in stasis, with humanity as carefully pruned and managed as a hedgerow. All gave homage to their new dungeon God. Shurum and Otga, their orbits disrupted, drifting apart, the whole world locked down in ice as the very air frozen, It fell slowly, stifling the world. The world aflame as a violent surge of stellar energies crashed against it, casting away vast chunks of the surface into the void, and leaving a molten ruin all that remained. A vast tree wound its way across the surface of the world, its roots deep enough to drink the molten stone far below. All the world fought in its titanic boughs, islands and continents held aloft in its branches, while seas cascaded over the edge, casting its roots in mist and darkness. An island braved the void, leaving a ruined world behind, venturing out like a seed, hoping for fertile ground. The island flew farther than her vision could see, its future unknown. The entire world folded in on itself, vast fragments twisting through space and into the expanding domain of a dungeon, the entire world condensed to fit within. A wave of force and light, as Shurum and Otga joined for one last time, their dance finally at an end, and their passion ignited fully. The resulting conflagration was sufficient to reduce the whole world to nothing, stone boiling away like mist in the morning light. If these were all she saw, she might have despaired, but her original vision still remained true. In addition to the cycle, and the catastrophe, was salvation. Dreams as she had seldom dared to dream blossomed there. Garden worlds were shaped by man¡¯s own hand. Humanity melded peacefully with the other sapients, coming together to truly understand the world, and to grow in turn. The dungeon rose as a truly benevolent god, or a teacher, or friend, or simply cleared the way, leaving the world to muddle along without interference, free from the cycle. Hope blossomed in her chest again, the fragile bloom taking root. SSD 1.0 - Arc 1 - (Re)born into Captivity So many worlds, so much to do, so little done, such things to be. -Alfred Lord Tennyson Cast from paradise, none remain¡­ O Gods, when, with balanced hearts, will men come forth again? When shall we depart, eternity to claim? -From The Mourner''s Lament ¨C Uncertain Provenance ==Arc 1 ¨C (Re)born In Captivity ¨C Prologue== It would be the height of arrogance to claim a full understanding of dungeons and related phenomena. However, it is useful to examine several shared characteristics. In addition, the text examines various legends which account for their origins in different ways. Most claim the involvement of at least one of the three celestials, or more colloquially, the gods. One of the earliest surviving accounts is from the Voice of Heaven, an ancient text of the Treatic people. While no complete copy of Voice of Heaven remains to the present, enough fragmented copies have been compiled together to approximate the full work. (While arguably the full text has been found, they are in differing languages. Some of the translations are less certain, and create the possibility of errors. Even without that, different languages convey different concepts less effectively.) The relevant section begins with mankind¡¯s eviction from paradise into a cold and desolate world by Yamash, for failing to keep the world in balance. The exact way in which balance was lost is unclear, but other sections of the text refer to mankind misusing divine fire. (A less common translation is that mankind unbalanced divine fire itself, though there is no clarification as to how.) The nature of divine fire is never specified. ¡®For behold, darkness passed over the face of Yamash at the suffering of men, but he could not relent, for even as they had embraced chaos or order, thus should men suffer contrition, each unto their own nature.¡¯ The text goes on with Yamash charging his children Otga and Shurum to govern the new world. Each would have complete dominion over the world, for a time, and at others, they would share it. Thus mankind would be placed in a world constantly shifting between order and chaos, and only find respite when those powers were in balance. As one of his final acts, Yamash created dungeons. Here, dungeons were described as a balancer. In them man would struggle and achieve rewards or death in proportion to the risks and prudence taken. The dungeons were meant to be an echo of the divine system as a whole. Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. However, since other texts refer to dungeons¡¯ creation and existence in different contexts, no definitive answer as to their nature can be specified. However, for our purposes, here are a few traits of dungeons that are nearly universal: One, dungeons are governed by a core. In the majority of dungeons, the core is black. Removing or destroying the core of a dungeon will cause the dungeon to collapse and eventually be fully destroyed. Two, dungeons will not allow anyone to get close to their core. (There have been documents claiming the Adar are exempt to this, but no definitive sources are available. In addition, even the conditions under which this is ostensibly possible, are not consistent.) Oddly however, a dungeon''s core is almost always accessible. (We use a fairly loose definition of accessible for this, as getting to one requires extensive work. Cores are not, however, simply buried deep within the stone of the dungeon.) Though any intruder can, and ought to, expect the core to be exceptionally well defended even in an undeveloped dungeon. Three, dungeons provide resources. The exact nature of the resources provided varies wildly from dungeon to dungeon, but in the main dungeon areas: slaying beasts, avoiding traps, and solving puzzles will result in rewards from the dungeon. These rewards are colloquially known as ¡°loot¡± by adventurers. (The reason for why dungeons provide ¡®loot¡¯ has been endlessly debated, without a definitive answer, and this entire volume is insufficient to handle the entirety of the debate. Later sections examine it in some detail.) Four, founding a dungeon produces a signal. Human mages and scholars have attempted to understand, or even perceive, this signal for many years, but have so far had no success. However, Adar, or at least those who are sent into human society, seem to be universally capable of receiving and locating the signal. (Due to the inherent nature of the connection between Adar and dungeons, they will be discussed later within chapters 4 and 5.) Five, dungeons start underground, with some acting as one of the few ways to reliably reach the Antre Gloom. While there are a few exceptional dungeons that eventually create a presence on the surface, in some form, all dungeons start beneath the surface. (Even dungeons that manifest on the surface in some fashion, still show significant limitations. Notably, dungeons are still restricted to being within buildings, or only a few feet into open areas. And, those few which are an exception, still surround their core area with layers of stone.) Indeed, most dungeons stay beneath the surface during their entire development, with their entrances the only sign of their existence. Six, dungeons produce life which is exceptionally mana rich. Most organisms produced by a dungeon cannot be removed without the death of the organism. Occasionally, however, creatures with more stable variants escape, breed, and introduce an entirely new form of life into the world. (Speculation on how this may have led to various hyper focused ecosystems is discussed later in the text, see chapter 7.) -From the introduction of The Origin, Nature, and Habits of Dungeons SSD 1.1 - An Unexpected Death Death is not the end. Though Gods are sparse on the details, even we mortals can perceive the soul. Still, post-mortality¡¯s uncertain trajectory adds poignancy and joy to the life we do live. Take the time to live, and to love one another. We should mourn at a funeral, but not for the loss of potential and dreams unfulfilled. Instead, let us live so that at the end those who remain mourn the loss of our presence and how much we gave to the world. -Funeral speech attributed to Theins the Cleric My body wasn¡¯t supposed to bend like that. Of course, the fact that I was staring down at it was already a pretty strong clue that something had gone terribly wrong. I didn¡¯t want to believe I was dead. Not just because I was dead, but did I have to die like that¡­ I mean¡­ who rolls their foot on a pencil and falls over a railing? That had to be the most clumsy way to die. If I meet other ghosts I¡¯m telling them I died in a car wreck or was pushed or¡­ something. Not that I see any other ghosts at the moment. I looked up from where I stood in the central courtyard to the fourth floor. I had fallen from there, where my apartment had been for the last semester. Looking up I could trace the trajectory of a narrow parabolic arc, leading down to where my body now lay. It was amazing, how fast that fall had been. One second I trip, then, before I even understand what is happening, crunch. Not that there hadn¡¯t been a certain timeless moment in the air, but it was barely enough time to even register how my stomach was trying to seek refuge in my skull. I¡¯ve had better falls on roller coasters. You only get to die once, presumably, and it was annoying mine has sucked so much. Well¡­ no, in fairness, it had been pretty much instant. As far as dying goes, that was about as good as things got. What did you want, a long torture session so you could come to the gripping reality of your situation? A monologue by some evil mastermind¡­? My thoughts felt floaty, disconnected. I looked around. So¡­ now what? No grim reaper, no bright light? I categorically refused to haunt my apartment building. I barely wanted to live here, I wasn¡¯t spending any more time here than I could get away with. I was starting to get a little worried about being stuck as a ghost. Should I just start walking? Where would I go? Well, no, not yet. I did kind of want to follow my body, see my funeral eventually. The world started to fade away in white light, the outlines of things fading. It didn¡¯t feel like I was moving, or that light was blinding me to the rest of the world. Instead, as the light grew, I had a sense that the light had always been there; now finally it was allowed to shine through everything that had obscured it. Oh thank god. I wasn¡¯t going to just be stuck here. Then, with startling suddenness, I was jerked¡­ sideways. Sideways, but not in any way I had ever done before. I was moving sideways to everything. Not on a normal spacial axis, but orthogonal to all of them at once. I could see the inside of my body, the coarse concrete tiles and plumbing beneath me; everything unfolded and became more than merely three dimensional. Then it accelerated. What¡­? I screamed wordlessly in confused disorientation. The world around me jumbled into a series of impossible images as space intersected upon itself in overlapping kaleidoscopes of dizzying shapes and color, and then reality abruptly snapped back into place as though it never had the indecency to get so mixed up in the first place. I was in a room carved directly out of solid, though not uniform, stone. The room had a flat lightly textured floor and was a hollowed out half-sphere. A single archway, simple and unadorned, lead out of the room into a short hallway. The hallway turned a corner to the left, and then disappeared from view. The stone exterior of both the room and hallway, was mostly shades of grey and tan, though veins of something that looked like marble ran through it in streaks of white, grey, and black. My emotions were dull, which I noted absently. I was detached, simply existing and observing. Without concerns, there was no curiosity. Both of those emotions would normally be appropriate, as I was not where, or what, I thought I ought to be after death. Would I normally be terrified? Probably. I should be more focused on death too, I remembered that being normal. Surely, that should have warranted some emotion? Now that I thought about it clearly, I had probably been in shock right after I died. It wasn¡¯t important, though. Is anything? I thought these things, noted them, and continued on with my apathy. Apathetic to even the apathy itself. Thoughts and analysis continued because that was what I did. Patterns from a short lifetime of human experience had entrenched grooved into my mind, and thoughts continued along them like water along well worn stream beds. I could see all directions simultaneously, though the view below was mostly blocked by the object I was resting on. I had a good guess as to my current physical form. There were no objects in the room that were red, but there was a pool of light on the ground that looked like spilled blood against the pale mottled grey. Ergo, I must be red and transparent, which meant I was a red glass or clear stone. Or I could be a transparent container filled with red liquid¡­ The room held other items that would normally have held my interest and now were simply cataloged automatically by my mind due to a lack of anything more meaningful to do. Bright balls of light floated just below the top arch of the ceiling and gave off the gentle warmth of barely yellow light. There was also a spherical crystal on a stand, with another crystal at the bottom of the stand. Based on the circumstances, and the lines of silver metal beneath me, I was likely on a similar stand. The crystal was black and as large as a grown man¡¯s heart. The surface of the crystal was like obsidian, dark and impenetrable, but hints of translucence around the edges suggested at inky depths. The stand was approximately waist high, though it was hard to tell scaling without a proper frame of reference, and was composed of two hollow circles linked by a helix. The bottom circle rested on the ground and spiraling metal extended from it, terminating in the second circle, where the black crystal was held aloft. Directly attached to the circle on the ground, a milky white crystal was held in place by prongs and glowed with dull light. The metal of the stand was a silvery color, like polished stainless steel, though the faintly shimmering writing that traced the outside of the helix was decidedly not so mundane. So. Magic or sufficiently advanced science. I absently hummed in thought, uncaring. Time had no meaning without emotion. My thoughts flitted about in contemplation of the room: the world, kittens, teleportation, and any thought that crossed my mind became as worthy of interest as any other. Into that timeless instant stepped a man. I watched the man, my attention automatically fixing itself on him. I think I should be feeling surprise. Surely, he ought to have the standard wise and mighty wizard look: long white beard, possibly glasses and twinkling eyes, an ancient face that would give an old paper bag a run for its money, robes, a gnarled wooden staff, a pointed hat, the usual. Instead he was far more mundane and practical. The man was, in fact, wrinkled, but it was the wear and tear of someone who had spent many days braving the sun, wind, and weather. His wrinkles were less the softness of over-folded paper, and more carved across his face like ancient river beds, now dried to dust. He was balding, with neatly trimmed salt and pepper hair forming a half circle near the level of his ears, though it was more salt than pepper. His nose was thin, short, and perfectly straight above teeth that gleamed like polished ivory. The man wore brown leather boots, with sturdy pants and a long shirt, both the same shade of whitish tan. His hips sported a leather belt studded with various pockets and pouches. The first thing the man did upon entering the room was examine me. He moved his hands and spoke, the sound having the rhythmic cadence of ritual or an incantation. As far as I could tell, nothing had happened, but the man¡¯s eyebrows rose and his eyes crinkled as he smiled broadly. He nodded his head, and repeated more gestures and incantations, several times. Each time he smiled again afterwards. Finally, he looked between me and the black crystal. With a smile he rubbed his hands together and took a piece of chalk from a pouch at his waist. The man carefully drew a large circle close, and equidistant, to the perimeter of the room. For all that it was done freehand, it was still a perfect circle. I knew I should be impressed. For a moment my attention wavered, reminded of a story about an artist who proved their skill by drawing a perfect circle on a piece of paper. That was some time during the renaissance, wasn¡¯t it? My attention wandered back to the present. The man was drawing two more circles inside the original one. A larger and a smaller one. The way they were set up, the two interior circles touched both each other and the two sides of the circle 180 degrees apart. A straight line drawn through the center of both smaller circles would perfectly bisect both them, and the larger one. Within the larger interior circle he drew two new circles, each about a foot and a half wide. These circles did not touch either each other or the larger circle, each being several feet apart. Me, and the stand I rested upon, were placed in the center of one of the newest circles, while the black crystal and its stand were placed in its twin. Between these circles the man wrote out runic characters in a straight line, directly from the edge of one circle to the edge of the other. Off that line, he proceeded to scribe out branched lines of runes in different shapes. Sometimes it was merely another straight line, but sometimes these lines had further branches, resembling trees. Other shapes were present as well: zigzags, spirals, and curlicues. Additional runes soon encompassed the perimeter of all five circles, though these runes were spaced farther apart and had less complexity. Once all the runes were drawn, the man carefully checked that each one was correct. Afterwards, he did the same thing again. He made no corrections, but the did not deter the intensity of his focus. He moved with a glacial slowness, checking every line for errors. Once he finished his check, he moved, carefully looking down to monitor the placement of his feet, until he stood in the center of the empty smaller inner circle. With a few gestures of his right hand, and some spoken words, the chalk drawn painstakingly across the floor lit up with bright light. Afterward, he kept his right hand frozen where his gesticulations had placed it, and, slowly and deliberately, he moved his left hand into one of the pouches at his waist. The rest of his body held absolutely still, his left hand emerged with a handful of silvery dust which he tossed into the air. His right hand streaked down when the dust reached the top of its arc and the dust drifted downwards. It was pulled unnaturally toward the chalk waiting below, stopping like it had hit a solid surface an inch above the lines, mirroring the runes and circles perfectly. He raised both his hands together and said a word; the chalk dissolved into motes of light, which faded away into nothingness. The man gestured with both hands, each moving independently of the other while he spoke an incantation firmly and clearly, the diction of his speech noticeably precise. The silver runes in the air started to glow, becoming brighter and brighter as he continued until they silhouetted the entire room with actinic ferocity. The contained power blazed while the air thrummed with vibrating power. Whatever else might have happened after this, I missed. As the chanting continued, my view grew more and more constrained. I was focusing more and more on the black crystal across from me with an inhuman intensity. The black shape grew before me. First it was a dark moon, then a black world, then a deep cave, and then all my world was darkness. When I awoke my mind was functioning properly once again. Though I immediately started to doubt my sanity. Probably because the first thing I saw was a few floating screens of text.
Your status has changed! Status Name: N/A Type: Dungeon Core ¨C Soul Hybrid Level: 1 Crystal Status: 100% ¨C Undamaged Status Effects: Mana Drain Available Mana: 0/25 Passive Mana Generation: 10/Day Cost for next level: 15 Mana Subsections Available: 1 Ability Points: 850
Skills: Mana Absorption I, Limited Omniscience (Dungeon) Soul Mana I Dungeon Aura Expansion I
Titles: Reborn Soul First of its Kind
You have been awarded new titles! Reborn Soul Your soul was captured just after death and reborn into something new. You are aware of yourself as a soul in a way few people ever are. Take this new chance and make the most of it. +250 Ability Points +Learn and level up soul related skills in half the time (50%) First of Its Kind Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original. You are the first of your kind, a dungeon with a mortal soul, and are potentially the progenitor of a whole new existence. The weight of the world rests on your shoulders, but you have unlimited potential. +500 Ability Points +Learn the first level of any skill in half the time (50%)
New Quest Obtained! Freedom or Dominion You are being held captive. Some of your abilities are being suppressed. Escape, or kill, your captor to regain your abilities. Exceptional accomplishments in this task can earn greater rewards.
What? My emotions whirled in a tumultuous mishmash, and the screens that popped up were not helping. My recent experience of becoming post-mortal jumped to the front of the emotional conga line. I died. And¡­ now I was reborn¡­ well, sort-of. Am I in a game? I doubt that, pretty sure we were a long way away from that being possible yet. More like I am in a place that functions like one. And I am going to rip out the throat of this petty magician that dares to¡­ What the hell!? That was not my own thought. Well¡­ it was, but not really. There was a foreign set of instincts that had momentarily twisted my thoughts. I could feel that I was no longer alone in my own mind. Or, perhaps, it was better to say that my mind had extra bits that I wasn¡¯t used to having. I was sharing my new crystalline existence with something¡­ other. First contact with a silicon based lifeform and it¡¯s me in the mirror darkly. And it was darker and more primal. A creature of urges and instinct rather than intellect. Well¡­ humans were admittedly not shining examples of intellect triumphing over instinct themselves. Still, it was something I wouldn¡¯t want to be trapped in the same room with, let alone the same mind. I could feel the impulses that ran this foreign other half, now that I was aware of its existence. I could feel how it was tied into my mind. The thoughts had been my own, after being twisted by these new feelings rising up with a murderous rage and overweening arrogance against the man who had placed me here. Great. This could be dangerous. My other half resented being trapped. Well¡­ I wasn¡¯t fond of the idea either, but resent was too light of a word. It raged against being confined. It would destroy the world to gain its own freedom. It was a primal need to be free, to expand, to protect itself. It needed it like I used to need water. It needed to bury itself, and the urge to dig tunnels deep in the earth and form a lair, to hide was almost overwhelming. Most of all, it wanted to lash out at the man that posed a danger by being too close. TOO CLOSE! I marshaled my thoughts, trying to remain calm and tamp down the rampant emotions of my other half. Right, time to focus on the now. I still had sight in every direction, but now I could both see and feel everything within a few feet. Mostly, I was focused on the man (too close), who was, in turn, seemingly fascinated with me. Yes, yes, I¡¯m very pretty, but personal space is a thing. Even in my mind, the joke fell flat. I was also keenly aware of myself. Unlike before I could actually see myself, and even inside of myself. I was now a purple crystal, no¡­ a gem. I was generally spherical, but with hundreds of small facets. My lower end was held firmly in the same type of stand the black crystal was in before. I could actually see even more now. Feel more? I traced the faint movement of air currents. Each breath the man made, and the interchange of air flowing around me, made currents and eddies that gradually faded. And, in the air, something else. I had no idea what to call it, but those instincts I was trying to bury recognized it with hunger. It was power; I almost taste it. The power to change¡­ something. My thoughts fell flat as the instincts failed to really provide the stable ground of an answer. The power was everywhere, gleaming faintly in the air, and it slowly swirled in a whirlpool flow towards me. It condensed into a stream, entering into my gem. Then, however, the power left again as it was pulled away and diverted down into the helix of the stand. It followed the runes along the structure until it disappeared into the crystal below. My other half was, to put it mildly, rather upset about this. If I let it alter my emotions it would have me ranting and raving in no time. Instincts that will drive me mad in captivity, so far this isekai sucks. I could just imagine someone trying to sell this experience to the pre-dead me: ¡°New resurrection package, now with 20% more murderously unstable roommates for your brain.¡± I snorted internally. Admittedly, I might have been stupid enough to do it for magic. Regardless, my mind was captured by a different interest. The old man made a few familiar gestures and words. Unlike before, I saw something radically different. As the man¡¯s hands moved, traceries of power gleamed like a web spun onto the air. It was breathtakingly beautiful, like a spider making webs of glowing light. The web finished and sank into my crystal, leaving a filament of power that lead back to the man. The man squinted slightly, while his eyes went back and forth, looking unfocused. Is he reading? Perhaps he was watching the same type of screens I had seen earlier? What kind of information does it say about me? Sadly, now I thought about something I had been subconsciously avoiding. Equally sadly, my conscious mind was more than happy to wave it in front of my mind like free donuts and coffee on campus club day. I am a dungeon. Well some odd form of hybrid dungeon. Plus I was dead, cannot forget that little detail. Well, that wasn¡¯t exactly true though, was it? I was dead. My mind was rather focused on this. Yeah, strange that, couldn¡¯t imagine why. The idea of death had certainly preoccupied my thoughts from time to time in my last life. I remembered attending my grandfather¡¯s funeral. Images of the waxy complexion, and feeling the cold body at the viewing, played counterpoint to fragmented memories of people speaking. I had been young, then, unable to truly grasp and hold onto what had happened. More deaths had come in following years, each time understood a little more for what it was, if not why it was. Death occupied anyone¡¯s mind who was aware of what it meant, was aware of the mysteries that lay locked behind it. Were locked, anyway. Apparently, beyond death lay a very odd form of reincarnation. At least for me. I could still recall the weird feeling of being jerked away after world had already started to transform into light. The transition between the two had not felt natural¡­ Pretty sure I was supposed to go somewhere else, originally. I was past death now. I actually knew I had a soul. That¡­ was quite a shift. I was not dead, but rather undead, formerly dead, not as dead as I used to be, the dungeon formerly known as dead. I laughed to myself, poor though the jokes were. I shook my head, or rather I tried and nothing happened. It was the strangest feeling, because I felt like I should have moved, but nothing had changed at all. Will I need to deal with phantom limbs? Focus¡­ Focus. I was getting distracted, and I was letting it happen. I was avoiding the suddenly massive issues facing me. I died. My former life was now over. I had read books and watched movies where people are transported away and whined and moped until they got back home. That was not an option for me. Well¡­ The part about going home. I could whine and mope all I liked. ...for all the good it would do me. I was dead. No ruby slippers, or even silver ones, could tap together and whisk me homeward. I was dead. I repeated that to myself, because, while I knew that it was true on an intellectual level, it seemed hard to convince some part of myself that stubbornly argued that I was alive. My friends would mourn. My parents and family would cry over a grave. Wonder if any of my organs were still able to be donated? Think someone had called 911, wasn¡¯t really paying attention to the bystanders. Hope I didn¡¯t traumatize anyone too much. My old life was over. I started to worry about my old life¡­ when I stopped. All of this felt hollow. These worries, this grief. It hadn¡¯t hit me the way I expected. I had been avoiding thinking about these things because I knew what emotions I should feel. It was like being careful around a pot that had come from the oven. Now I had actually brushed up against, and flinched in expected pain. And nothing was there, the pot was cold. So what the hell is wrong with the oven? I still remembered my old life, but all these¡­ wounds, of death, seemed like something that happened years ago. I still loved my family, and I would miss them, but I was not devastated I wouldn¡¯t get to see them. I wasn¡¯t broken, that I wouldn¡¯t get to help Dad run the soup kitchen again on a muggy summer day. I ought to be devastated. I wasn¡¯t sure why this happened, but I suspected. The period where I had had no emotions¡­ that was probably to blame. Somehow, that state of mind had quietly filed everything away without the usual emotional mess it would normally take to get there. More efficient, sure, but¡­ not exactly human, is it? Should I be grateful or feel wronged? I hadn¡¯t had the chance to properly grieve. I also hadn¡¯t needed to grieve. I was not human anymore, but other than a single, and strange, emotional interaction¡­ mentally, I still was. As far as I could tell, my soul, emotions, and memories were all the same, with the only notable exception being the new set of instincts shoved into my head. Quite the notable exception¡­ It was a relief to know that while this world was vastly different, my old one being remarkably short on professional wizards, no guarantees, he could be an amateur, my mind was more or less intact. It¡¯s the less that might cause issues. This was a world with magic, and one styled as a game, or at least with a game-like interface; that was fairly easy to understand, at least theoretically. The many worlds theory said there were potentially an infinite number of universes and worlds within them. Each universe might run on different rules than our own. Infinite meant that a universe orchestrated by a system was a possibility. Honestly, I¡¯m lucky I can actually understand everything¡­ even if does veer well beyond merely being strange and into the surreal. Okay, one more time¡­ Get a grip; sum things up. I was a dungeon of some type. I was made of crystal. I was the heart of a dungeon to be, even if all that belonged to me for the moment was a sphere with a diameter of four feet. A sphere small enough I couldn¡¯t even perceive the floor with my aura. Regardless, the dungeon¡¯s instincts were fiercely possessive. I might not have much, but it was mine and mine alone. I always did want more magic in my life. Something out there has a sense of humor. I did not want to die to see more magic, but beggars can¡¯t be choosers. Makes me think of the birches poem by Robert Frost, and his wish to not be misunderstood by the gods, and taken away from Earth forever. Enough. I need to see what I can actually do. I read through the screens more fully, now that I had calmed down. Doesn¡¯t mention Caden anywhere. Did it not know my name or did I need to be named in some other way? At least the mana drain status explained why I could see the energy passing into me and then leaving just as fast as I consumed it. And now I knew that that energy was mana, too. Obviously, I was being kept at zero mana. Presumably so I could pose no threat to the man studying me and keeping me captive. There was quite a lot of mana in the air. I was not absorbing anywhere close to all of it, and there was far more around the man. Probably not keeping me as some kind of mana battery, then. Sadly, I still didn¡¯t understand him when he spoke. I had been hoping that my merger with the dungeon would at least give me the ability to understand the language. No such luck. I moved on to familiarizing myself with, well... my new self. I focused on each skill listed and new information appeared.
Mana Absorption I Raw mana within your aura can be drawn into your core to increase your available mana. Limited Omniscience (Dungeon) You can see, hear, and feel everything within your aura. Living entities and dense mana sources may block your senses. Soul Mana I Unlike any other dungeon, you have a mortal soul. Mortal souls naturally create raw mana. This mana flows into your available mana. Dungeon Aura Expansion I You may convert available mana to expand your area of influence (aura).
Pretty straight forward. I could draw mana in or create it myself and store it. Then that could be used to expand my area of influence, my aura. Apparently, there were also perks because I was both reborn and a unique existence. I could level up with enough mana, and that would likely open more options for me. Of course, I had no mana, and was unlikely to get enough to level up. Need to find a way to fix that. When I focused on another element of my status, ability points, a massive array of purchasable options appeared. They were neatly separated into categories and I could even search through it. My other half wouldn¡¯t be able to use this. They¡¯re nothing but instincts. Presumably they would normally purchase something by feeling¡­ somehow. Right now my other half was just urging me to do something about the situation. It didn¡¯t seem to know how, or what, just pushed a desire for action. Two enormous categories had plants and animals I could learn to summon, and a few things fell into both. None of the associated mana costs were zero, not surprising, so none of them were useful to me now. With some time I searched through the list, finding everything I could that had to do with mana. Upon searching, there was no option to purchase an increase in any of my skills. Either not possible, or not available yet. There were a few skills that looked promising. One skill resisted magic directly targeting the dungeon core, as well as resisting magic that altered its immediate area. Another offered a resistance to magical drains of any kind within my aura. That one also gave a lesser drain resistance to monsters in my aura. The problem with both was the expense, and the second one also altered how my aura worked. I also wasn¡¯t sure if the second skill would help if something directly targeted my core, like right now. Several skills increased the mana I received under certain conditions, like the death of my own monsters, other creatures, etc¡­ However, since I had no way to make that happen they were useless for the moment. I had a special affinity with souls, so I took the time to search for related skills. There were few options available. Was that because I had not unlocked access to them via level, skill, some esoteric requirements, or was I the first dungeon with a soul capable of using them? One of the few options allowed the creation of undead creatures with the souls of dead adventurers. Another option used the death of creatures to create soul energy, whatever that is, though it was so expensive that it might as well not be listed. The only option that looked applicable, and potentially useful now, was soul perception. It would allow me to more accurately gauge the power of creatures and people. Even if they were not practical now, I was mainly searching for ideas of what was possible. The titles I received had provided me vital information. If I gained the first level of skills easier, that implied that not every skill needed to be purchased or granted. I can learn them. I wasn¡¯t sure if I could learn all, or even any, of the skills available for purchase, but it might be possible. Even better, since so many of them are not cheap. Best not to waste ability points if I can get the skill another way. Almost all the skills I looked at¡­ were not affordable yet. With no idea how easy points were to acquire, I had to assume they were limited. I might get more each level, but I didn¡¯t know. Even if I got 100 every level, I would want to save them for important things. And I could end up with far more, or far less. I might only get them from titles. Maybe I¡¯ll get 100 per day. I would have to wait and see. As long as I wasn¡¯t in any danger, well, immediate danger, there was no reason to waste resources. I was trapped and did not want to just sit here endlessly, but I could afford some patience. I was going to kill that man. No! Shut up you! Great, now I was yelling at my own twisted thoughts. I was sure that boded well. Nothing to see here, I¡¯m sure this is perfectly healthy. Right. I was not going to kill him. I was just going to make absolutely sure I escaped. SSD 1.2 - Minor Evolutions If a man cannot buy his freedom, then all the world''s wealth shall be as a grain of sand by the sea. -Istan Triant, after the great slave revolt of 1540 AC I assessed my options. Admittedly, without any mana, they were more limited than I liked. Spending AP was one of my few real options, and a couple skills might actually be worth buying. Beyond the cost, however, there was an additional problem. I was fairly certain, or at least sufficiently paranoid, my captor could see at least some of my status with his analysis spells. There was no guarantee, of course, but an incorrect assumption could negatively alter my escape chances; it was better to be safe than sorry. This would make preparations harder, but it was better to be more paranoid than needed. Making more work for myself was a minor cost compared to tipping off my captor. I had to approach my situation as intelligently as possible. With little in the way of options, it simplified what I could do. I would practice what little I had access to. By instinct, I was already drawing in mana continuously, so I decided to stop that and gain conscious control. Never know what might prove useful. A few minutes of effort allowed me to step the flow, though there was a constant urge to resume. Feels like I need to pee. Already feels wrong to stop. Absorbing the mana feels natural. The mage perked up, presumably noticing when the mana stopped moving. I needed a name for this guy, wizard, mage¡­ I didn¡¯t understand him, and until I spoke the language I wouldn¡¯t be able to ask his name. Not that asking would be a good idea in this situation anyway. So I started to think of a good name, eventually settling on ¡®that annoying mage,¡¯ or Tam for short. Tam sounded like a name, so it worked. And, at the moment, Tam was looking surprised and excited. He cast more spells and traced them into the air as he examined me even closer. Yes, yes. I know other half, he¡¯s too close. I resolved to ignore both Tam, and my other half, as I practiced. I pulled mana in, stopped, and then started up again. I didn¡¯t have a body at the moment, but at least I could do something. Eventually, after a couple hours of practice, I could stop and start up again with a thought. Continuous exposure had reduced the discomfort to no more than a tiny twinge. Now that I could control it reliably, I decided to make my absorption more efficient, if possible. The skills available for purchase had both shown some form of mana drain resistance was possible, and that mana could be harvested more efficiently. If I wanted to have any mana, at all, to work with, I was going to need one or both of those types of skills. For now, I was going to practice harvesting mana as long as Tam was in the room. He constantly released a rich cloud of mana and it was a shame to waste it. And when he wasn¡¯t here, I would practice resisting the mana drain. That had been all I did the last few days. Not much had changed since I started practicing. Tam left, and came back, a few times. The lights on the ceiling dimmed, for nighttime I assumed, and then brightened a few minutes before he came back in the morning. The most excitement was Tam bringing a chair, a book, and a small table with him. More like a tome. It was thick, heavy, and handwritten, with drawings that I couldn¡¯t make sense of. Shortly after sitting down each day, Tam cast a spell, looked off into space for a moment, and then turned to his book. Then he placed the book on the table when he left again. He would take a few breaks, but otherwise it had been the same each day. I quickly grew used to the sound of stiff paper pages rustling as they turned in Tam¡¯s fingers. His breath emerged in a soft in and out that filled the room with faint sound. His chair creaked faintly as he moved, sounding a counterpoint against the constant whispering of paper. The sound of Tam¡¯s feet on stone rang from the hallway to announce his impending arrival and followed his wake on exit. Even the sound of his clothes was noticeable as they swished softly and slid over his skin. When Tam was not in the room, I was subjected to silence. When I was human, I was never fully silent. The pulsing rush of blood in my veins merged with the high pitched sound in my eardrums to fill a silent room. These were gone. I took no breaths, had no gurgling stomach, flexing muscles, cracking joints, or heart beating a constant thrumming beat. In the absence of self produced sounds, I could hear the faintest whispering of air moving gently over stone. However, it was so faint that I would catch it for a moment, and then it would fade as I strained to listen for it. The silence grew maddening. It made me turn away from the outside, and delve inward. I fixated on my practice. I¡¯ll escape this. When Tam was present, I continued my efforts to pull from the mana he released. I wasn¡¯t sure why he released mana all the time. Maybe because he¡¯s a caster? Or is that something everything¡­ organic does? Presumably all humans, at least, produced it, due to what I knew from my soul mana ability. Tam was the only living being around, so it was hard to know for sure. Every time Tam cast a spell I could see its structure. They looked like layers of glowing glass, though where the pieces overlapped they became an indefinite translucent mess. Any bit of the spell that entered into my aura allowed me to sense it more clearly, but otherwise I could only see from the perspective of my core. The spells wrapped little tendrils of power around and into my crystal. Even as I tried to pull them apart, I was also trying to understand what the spells were doing. With time, the spells slowly leaked mana and gradually turned more transparent. When Tam eventually dismissed them, they dissolved into nothing but mana. Probably end up as nothing but mana if they were left alone long enough, too. By the end of the first day I had improved my ability to focus where my mana absorbed. It wasn¡¯t much progress, but I could exclude a tiny sliver of space from my mana drain. I still had a lot of room for improvement, but any improvement at all was a good sign for my plans. I no longer needed to sleep, or do any other biological functions. Would have been useful on Earth. Never need to sign out of an all night gaming session. Great for all night study sessions, too. Mundane utility aside, it was also useful in my current situation. I no longer even seemed get tired mentally. Physically, well, I was a lump of rock. Some ability might make me tired, at some point in the future, but for now it seemed impossible. So, no more dreams for me. Shame, always had crazy dreams. So, working through the night was simple. The more I grew familiar with my mana absorption, the more it felt similar to the mana drain I was experiencing. It was just happening in reverse. Some of my problem almost certainly stemmed from having no idea what was actually happening. I had no conception of how my ability worked, which meant my attempts at improvement were blind. Attempting to turn the mana drain on and off, in the same way I had learned to master my own ability, resulted in no progress that first night. Of course, I knew this was going to take time. I was right. I spent days lost in the same routine. Tam would show up and I ignored him. Not like he does anything interesting. In my boredom, I did consider trying to contact Tam by turning my mana absorption on and off in sequence. I could do numbers, one, two, three, etc¡­ Even though I knew it was a bad idea, my boredom made me want to take a different way out, to make something happen. Even if I took that option, however, I didn¡¯t speak the language. Even if Tam realized I was intelligent, we wouldn¡¯t be able to communicate. He might eventually be able to teach me, but in the meantime I would be stuck in exactly the same situation. No thanks. That also assumed he wouldn¡¯t decide I was too dangerous to be left alive. And, even it he kept me alive, he would probably grow both more fascinated and wary, taking additional precautions. I¡¯m not on Earth¡­ I was going to do my best to keep my own morals intact, not that I¡¯ve had much chance to test them, but even my old world accepted killing in self defense. What happens if I kill someone? The new instincts were already more than I wanted to deal with. They had been a little quieter while I focused on my current plan, though I wasn¡¯t sure if that was because I was doing something, or they simply had no interest in something as cerebral as training. If I killed someone, would they come to the forefront? Would I lose control? Even assuming I was able to get control of them again, they might do something very stupid in the heat of the moment. Stick to the plan. Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel. I had a list of what I was going to do. My first option, escape, was still my priority. If that didn¡¯t work, my second option was communication. Even if I managed to communicate to Tam that I was human, there was no guarantee that would be a solution to my problem. Plenty of Earth societies had had slaves and considered owning other humans perfectly normal. And far too many societies, even if they hadn¡¯t had slaves outright, had considered lower class citizens less than human. With next to nothing known about Tam¡­ it was a substantial risk. Regardless of his society, he could be a horrible person who would think nothing of capturing and torturing a human. That left my third option, killing him if I absolutely needed to. I didn¡¯t want to, but if it proved necessary I was prepared to do it. Assuming I ever had the capability. In the meantime, I mastered my boredom with the thought that failure might result in the death of me or someone else. Naturally, the thoughts of death drove my other half into more homicidal impulses. Just ignore it. I dove back into my training as best I could. Perhaps it helped, that I was rather ambivalent about death now. I wasn¡¯t eager to rush into it, but¡­ It¡¯s not the end. That knowledge had increased the number of fates worse than death, substantially. The thought of killing in self defense was moderated by the knowledge that death wouldn¡¯t be the end for anyone I killed. I still didn¡¯t want want to do it. I¡¯m still taking away something they can¡¯t get back. Besides¡­ the pain of death doesn¡¯t just hit the person who dies. I didn¡¯t let that thought linger, I had enough to do without worrying about my family. With several days of concerted effort my mana absorption ability steadily improved. I could now exclude a third of my aura while still drawing from the rest. Shortly after I got to that level of proficiency I received a new message.
Your skill Mana Absorption I has changed and improved through your efforts. It has become: Directed Mana Absorption I Raw mana within your aura can be drawn into your core to increase your available mana. You can direct where to focus your absorption to increase your efficiency.
You have been awarded a new title! Skill Evolution You have altered a skill''s capabilities beyond normal through concerted effort. Use it to acquire your dreams, or just richer mana. +100 Ability Points +5% easier to acquire merged or upgraded skills
Huh, wasn¡¯t expecting that result. I thought my Mana Absorption skill would level up. Which meant there was some other way to level it. Actually, now that I think about it¡­ It was probably just a matter of speed. I had tried to be more efficient in where I got the mana from, but drawing in mana faster would probably have worked just as well. Don¡¯t scream. Probably wouldn¡¯t discover this the normal way. Spent a little extra effort and didn¡¯t try the obvious. Oh well, not a big deal. In balance, my ignorance probably worked out in my favor. At least in this case, anyone counting on ignorance to work out for them in the long run was doomed to disappointment. Met a few of those. Ugh, and met more than a few who were sheltered from reality by those around them. You only needed one manager who had clearly failed upward to make you curse the whole lot. Wonder if I could manage to learn actual curses here? I shrugged off both the residual, and current, frustration and concentrated back on the present. I had my new skill, so now I was going to try using it again. Best to wait until Tam takes a break. For now I kept my focus the same and tried absorbing faster instead¡­ and succeeded immediately. I could go quite a bit faster. Apparently, I had not been using my maximum speed this entire time. Fake breaths, fake breaths¡­ you already knew that was likely. It was possible the new skill was responsible, but since my speed only improved once I focused on it, I doubted it. And, of course, Tam noticed the change. I swear I only screamed a little. Since Tam already knew that something was happening I went for broke and tried to focus my ability more. The difference was amazing. I had been teaching myself, simply fumbling about trying to master the skill on my own, using an ability I truly didn¡¯t understand. Now, directing my focus was so much simpler. A combination of techniques and what felt like muscle memory had slipped into my mind without me noticing until I used them. I didn¡¯t have perfect control, but I could focus the drain onto a sphere about a foot wide. Some part of me tried to freak out about the system editing my memories, but another part simply made fun of me for not fully realizing the implications earlier. Of course the system can edit your memory. Yeah, what did you think it did the first time, Caden? Did the skills just appear out of nothing? Talking to myself in third person, I¡¯m sure that¡¯s a great sign. Oh screw you, we did that back on Earth, too. I did my best to disentangle the different lines of thought, even as I tried to focus on Tam. Tam smiled excitement as he put the book on the ground and stood up. His eyes fixated on me, even as he cast more spells. This time, as I focused my skill on the spell, something different happened. Everything was perfectly normal¡­ until Tam dismissed the spell. The spell dissolved and a good portion of the loose mana rushed into me. I could feel something warm in my core. I called up my status and stared in shock. I had two mana. Make a monster to kill him! I don¡¯t even know how to make one! No, stop that, it doesn¡¯t matter. I hadn¡¯t purchased any monsters to summon, but that wasn¡¯t important right now. No matter what some stupid instincts are saying¡­ The only thing I could do was create aura, but I needed to keep Tam from noticing. So, I tried expanding my aura downward, keeping it as narrow as possible. My aura responded, growing effortlessly down to cover the entire stand. I almost stopped as I tapped into another skill that was imprinted into my brain. Don¡¯t think I have a brain anymore. The same feeling of muscle memory happened without conscious direction and needed no extra thought. I simply knew. I didn¡¯t need to think about each individual muscle as I walked; I just did it effortlessly. Building aura was no different. I had no idea of the mechanics, but it was easy. In the end, the minimum width of my aura proved to be about half a foot, but I hoped it was small enough to escape notice. It reached the floor after covering the entire stand and I could feel the difference between the stone and the air. My aura expanded through it almost as easily, but the mana within felt thick. If the mana in the air was water, the mana in the stone was molasses, sluggish and slow. I ignored that for the moment, continuing the expansion in a narrow corridor toward the back wall opposite the hallway. Getting more aura than I expected out of this¡­ though¡­ oh, yeah, pretty obvious. A dungeon would be quite large, or so I assumed, based on my, admittedly little, knowledge sourced from another universe. Okay, not the best source. My aura continued expanding into the back wall, though I kept a safe distance from the surface of the floor and walls. My expansion risked entering some other room, but I could only control so much. In the end, my expanded aura stretched to cover about three feet across behind the wall, almost as large the width of my starting aura. As far as I could tell, Tam had not noticed my aura expansion at all. I felt slightly different, however. I was getting more mana. Even focusing my absorption, I was getting a little trickle more. I did a little testing. Unless I turned my absorption off completely, I seemed to get a small passive flow from all my aura. Not sure if that was a permanent feature, or because my Directed Mana Absorption was only level one. Only time would tell. After his brief surge of interest, Tam simply continued his routine, so I added expanding aura to my own. Every time one of his usual spells ended, I would channel it into creating more aura. I had debated trying to store up mana, but ultimately decided it was a bad idea for two reasons: Firstly, my mana was being drained, and second, I had to assume that Tam¡¯s spell kept track of my mana level. Best to avoid him seeing me with mana. So, I did my best to examine the spells that Tam cast and then frantically suck in the remnant mana when they dissolved. By the end of the first day I had managed a reasonable coverage behind the back wall. I had started to have some trouble though. It was starting to get harder to expand my aura farther upward. Since it was directional, I thought I might be getting too far from my core. Another possibility was my connection needed to be wider. Tomorrow I was going to expand under the floor instead, which should help determine the issue. If I can only have so much aura because of my level¡­ I tried not to think about it. Even a very limited distance from my core being allowable could prove disastrous. Tam left, presumably to bed, the lights fading down to a dull glow. It had been another few days. I had continued my attempts to prevent the mana drain, but unlike my mana absorption, I had noticed no change. It was possible that what I was trying to do was simply much harder, but it was equally likely that I was trying to do it wrong. Or it simply isn¡¯t possible. It was time to do the only thing I could: acquire information and watch. Same thing we do every night Pinky¡­ I watched the entire stand I sat upon, along with the outside of the white crystal below me, though it was still opaque to my sight. My ability had told me that concentrated mana could block my perception, so it wasn¡¯t a great surprise. Tam was similarly opague, and even his clothes were hard to detect properly with my aura, lost in the haze of mana he leaked. Too close to him. I studied the runes on the stand. They were still gibberish, but I could see my mana flowing through the metal down toward the crystal. No, actually, my mana was flowing around something inside the metal, like an invisible pipe was guiding the mana down and away from me. There was no sign of what did it, but I thought I could learn more. Better be able to learn more. Mana flowed passively toward me through my aura, the largest portion coming from below and behind me. It thickened in the narrower channel leading to my core. So, I tried to condense the flow of mana further, narrowing the flow around the stand. It worked, though it only condensed a little. There were gaps in the flow. The mana swirled like fog around glass. Hollow, though still indistinct, shapes in the mana were gradually coming into focus as I concentrated. I traced the invisible shapes upward until it reached the top of my stand. There they extended up into my core and pulled mana right from where it was stored. My other half was really unhappy about this, what else is new, but I thought the absence of a good target moderated its rage a bit. Not sure how this will help me, but at least it¡¯s a place to start. SSD 1.3 - Of Mice-Bugs and Men Problems are like plate-mice. Ubiquitous to all places, and if left alone for too long, likely to breed into more at a rate that beggars belief. -Feifjin¡¯s Guide to Proper Administration With most of the night still ahead of me, I focused on controlling mana. I¡¯d had no luck, so far, but after evolving my skill into Directed Mana Absorption, I was hoping for a better result. I accidentally improved my skill in a somewhat backwards manner, but now I was hoping to take advantage of the ability to improve in new directions and see if my control could be used in a different way. Whereas before, I focused on drawing mana from a specific area, now I was inverting that principle. Now I was draining mana from my entire aura, with a single exception. I was trying to make mana in one area stationary. Mana was already more resistant to moving in stone, so I figured that was a good place to start. Hopefully, I would get to the point where I could stop the mana flowing out of me, though I was starting elsewhere so I could both more easily track my progress and use a staggered and gradual approach. Just like when I tried to stop mana drain, at first I didn¡¯t notice any progress, but by morning the mana flowing naturally through my target area was moving a tiny bit slower. As a captive I had nothing but time, so any improvement I could make, without a change to my captivity, was a win for me. My dungeon half would insist on action every now and then, but that was not really a possibility now. I still had to take a moment to clear my mind every now and then when it became too insistent. What do you even want me to do, bite his ankles off? I don¡¯t even have a mouth¡­ Then I would get back to work. The next morning Tam returned again, but surprised me with change in routine. He was carrying a cage with bronze bars, and it had something alive in it. Honestly, no idea what that thing is. It had a black exoskeleton which reflected the light in prismatic colors, but in form it was closer to a mouse. Oddly adorable, in a vaguely creepy way. Tam held it out near me and I focused my senses on it. I attempted to drain mana from around it too, but felt nothing remarkable. It might have been emitting mana, it might not; Tam¡¯s billowing clouds of mana obscured any fine details. My senses did not penetrate inside the thing, but living things blocked my senses, so it was hardly a surprise. Tam nodded to himself. No idea what that was about. Tam proceeded to cast some spells. These ones were different from any I had seen before. They soon hovered in numerous locations throughout the room. Then Tam cast another spell at me, but this one had more mana in it than usual, the usually muted glows of the spell looked more like molten glass. It penetrated into me and locked in place. Aw¡­ shit. Did he notice that I expanded my aura? If he started monitoring me more closely, it was going to make things so much harder. It might actually make escape impossible. I was still trying not to panic when Tam picked the cage up again. He held it near me. I ignored it and continued to try to study the more powerful spell cast on me. Tam frowned and shook the cage a little. Does he want me to focus on the cage again? I obliged, focusing my attention and mana absorption on the cage. Tam smiled. What¡¯s the point of this? Honestly, I was interested in it because I had never seen anything like it, but alien life form or no, I had¡­ With a tiny gesture of his opposite hand and a word Tam sent a red ray of light into the cage and the creature was vaporized. Holy Shit! A warm feeling flooded into me. Mana. The creature¡¯s death released a burst of raw mana that was greater than anything I had ever felt before. With a quick look I could see that I had five mana now. Attack. I shook off my other half and almost started to expand my aura under the floor again, but stopped abruptly. Tam had deliberately given me mana. He knew I had it. He was expecting me to do something with it. What would he have done if he had seen my mana go down with nothing apparently happening? I felt cold. I almost exposed myself. He was expecting me to use it, so I would show him I was. I expanded my aura out, adding to the sphere around my core. My tiny sphere expanded out as swiftly as I could make it. It would be foolish to waste time and let the mana drain diminish what I had available. My world expanded, my sense of self expanding with my aura. By the time the mana was spent, I was connected to a portion of the ceiling, most of the floor, and the lower middle of all the walls. I could feel¡­ everything. I had already felt the stone that I extended into, but despite the minute fractures and pressures, it had felt fairly uniform. I had seen this room for days on end, but now I could feel it. The smooth grain of the wooden chair that Tam had spent so many days sitting in. The roughness of the floor, unpolished and gritty. I could feel the faint heat in the air from the lights. I wasn¡¯t touching everything. I could not feel them like I used to, but it was more than what I had been feeling, which was practically nothing. God, I needed this! I would have cried if I had eyes. The sheer feeling was overwhelming and I needed it so badly. I lost myself in the bliss, simply feeling. Tam seemed happy, too. He smiled slightly as he stared off into space and he proceeded to dismiss each spell in turn. Honestly, I barely noticed the first few fading, and might have missed the rest if my other half hadn¡¯t inserted a strong instinct of hunger. Even as I realized the spells were being dismissed, I deliberately did not focus on them. Not going to give myself away. Some tiny fraction of mana poured into me naturally from the spells, but nothing like what would have happened if I had focused on absorbing them. The spell directly attached to me had not been dismissed and I had to assume it was monitoring my mana levels, even now. For the moment I simply waited and focused as much as possible on draining that spell, ready when for when it was dismissed. That spell was dismissed last, and as much as I hated the waste of the others, it was still a feast. Tam had invested much more energy into the spell than usual, and when he dismissed it, that extra mana was mine to take. By the time I was done absorbing it, I had seven mana, more than I ever had before. I used it immediately, expanding into the walls, ceiling, and floor, though I avoided expanding my aura to cover any visible space I didn¡¯t already show Tam. I also decided to do all my future expansion in the direction away from the hallway. I had no idea what other rooms might be here, but I at least knew to avoid the direction of the hallway. Expanding my aura made me think more about my aura. I had never felt anything like it when I was still human. The amount of information it gave me kept growing. I couldn¡¯t feel the microscopic world, though I had no idea if that would always be true. I could, however, feel things from the stone of the walls. The small amount I had before had not told me much. Now, with stone in my aura above, below, and to the sides of the room I could feel the stresses in the stone. I could feel how additional weight was borne by the dome of stone that formed the ceiling and channeled to the sides of the room. I could feel the literal tons of weight bearing down. Some part of my other half seemed to find this soothing. Personally, it made me feel vaguely claustrophobic, even though I knew, from the stone itself, that it was in no danger of collapse. I could also feel imperfections in the stone. The grain of the stone for an entire section had sheared under pressure, formed improperly, or both. Where two different types of stone met, there was a disconnect in how they intermingled at the border, leaving a weak point. I could feel the faint buckling as each type of stone bent differently under the pressure. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site. I lost myself in the joy of sensation. I traced the subtle temperature gradients formed between the air and the stone. Warm air constantly flowed from the hallway, pushing in and cycling out air cooled by loss of heat to the stone. Somewhere, Tam had heating. Not really surprising. Somewhere, in all of the sensation, I became conscious that this was another proof I was not human any longer. Not due to the strange feelings, though those were proof on their own, but the amount of information I was feeling and processing simultaneously. No human could feel and understand this much. I knew from learning about the brain that it was already cheating to maintain the illusion of continuity. We did not see as much as we thought we did. The edges of our vision were place holders with details added from memory. We had a blind spot in our vision where the optic nerve met the back of the retina, carefully filled in with previous data. We heard what we thought we should hear when our hearing was insufficient. ¡®We¡¯¡­ funny¡­ I start thinking I am not human anymore, and then think ¡®we¡¯ when I generalize about humans. I guess I am both. I am human, because I was born as one, and I have carried that part with me. My soul, or mind, or emotions, what have you, is human. I was still a product of my culture, knowledge, and history. My emotions stabilized. Increasing the amount of stimulus might have actually unbalanced my emotions temporarily. I would watch out for that in the future. Tam had wandered off somewhere during my distraction. I had a vague memory of the pressure of his footfalls on the floor vibrating through my aura as he left. Calmer again, I focused, pushing mana into stillness. It was only a few moments before Tam returned. I was surprised when he cast another spell, which hovered, partially inside my aura, at the doorway. Then, Tam went back to his endless examination of his tome. What was that spell for? Well, it was at the border of my aura, so it probably checked for that. I would have smiled at Tam if I could. Well, no, if I had expressions I would be doing my best poker face. Don¡¯t worry Tam, I won¡¯t be expanding my aura that way. I was half tempted to deliberately start expanding my aura through the stone in the hallway, bypassing his damn sensor. Not being an idiot, I did no more than consider it, briefly, before resuming my practice. I waited, resuming my regular habits. The spell that monitored me was canceled, and drained it away, rinse and repeat. As I had decided earlier though, I used any new mana to send a horizontal rod of aura in the opposite direction from the doorway. As Tam continued to monitor me, and then cancel the spells, I sent the rod farther and farther. Eventually, after it had begun to strain, I widened it, discovering that as long as I kept the diameter at least three feet I felt no strain at all. The irony of using the spells meant to keep me in check to further my own growth, did not escape me, making me hum with malicious joy. It had become obvious that Tam could not see what I did. Not just through walls, and so on. He couldn¡¯t see the mana that I grabbed from his spells. And his spells were beautiful, but they were also¡­ messy. I couldn¡¯t tell at first, but watching the same spell get cast on me day after day, multiple times a day, I learned to tell. He was using the same spell, but it was never the exact same. The core structures were identical, but little drips and drabs of mana went askew each time. If Tam was capable of seeing the spells, I expected that he would have fixed that. I could be wrong. I doubted he had to worry about the wasted mana. However, once upon a time, he probably did need to worry about the mana, if he had leveled up like me. And, even if he didn¡¯t need to worry about mana, it showed a lack of control that felt foreign to my perception of this man; he was so careful with his precautions. I would not, could not, deceive myself, not if I wanted real chance to escape. The only reason I had a good chance at escaping, eventually, was because he didn¡¯t know I existed. He assumed I was just a set of instincts. And, if I had been, his current precautions would have been more than sufficient. It was hardly Tam¡¯s fault that I represented an outside context problem. When Tam left for the evening I had made good progress on expanding a long cylinder of my aura deep into the back wall. Well, deep was relative. Maybe thirty to forty feet deep? In addition to that expansion, I had continued my focus on holding mana still. I had gradually seen the mana grow more and more sluggish. I continued through the night and, by morning, the mana had stopped moving entirely. I switched to the next planned step, moving on from practicing on stone, to working on air. The mana in the air barely slowed down at all, but it did slow down. Oh well, progress is progress. Tam soon arrived for the morning; he entered and he cast his usual analytic spell my way. After he got the results, he simply stared at me as he leaned forward in his chair. Uh¡­ why are you staring at me like that? I checked my status really fast, no change. If I could sweat it would have been dripping down the stand and forming a puddle underneath me. Stop staring¡­ please. Has he just been watching the whole time, making me think I was hiding stuff from him? After an endless silence, Tam started to mutter to himself. His tone was shifting back and forth. It sounded like he is arguing with himself. I thought harmless thoughts and tried to send them his way. Just a harmless core here, no murderous instincts. Nope, not one. No need to try and destroy me. I¡¯m practically harmless. Why were there no language skills available for purchase in the AP store? Watching Tam argue with himself made my mind more and more frantic. Without being able to understand, I was coming up with worse and worse scenarios. After a few minutes Tam nodded to himself and left the room. Please don¡¯t come back with a hammer¡­ When Tam came back he was carrying the same chalk he had used to fuse me with the dungeon core. Unlike last time, now I could sense the incredibly dense mana packed into the chalk. Tam didn¡¯t walk towards me, though, he went to one of the walls and started to draw in an area my aura didn¡¯t cover. A diamond shape appeared, followed by a circle perfectly centered inside it. The two shapes did not touch. With precise strokes, Tam drew out runes. Runes? Characters? Symbols? Wingdings? It took him only a brief minute, despite the precision of the lines. Wonder if he draws as a hobby? He carefully inspected each rune, then nodded when he finished. With a word, and a gesture, the inscribed chalk flared with light, burning itself half an inch into the stone. I could still see the mana left behind in the traces. He pulled out a hunk of silvery metal, it looked like the same metal that he had used as a powder before. Unlike the chalk, it didn¡¯t appear to have any mana of its own. I tried to imagine what it was for. Unfortunately my thoughts kept focusing on the idea of a larger and more powerful mana drain. Something that would suck all mana out of me the moment I got any. I was barely managing anything as it was, and if he did that¡­ Tam spoke and gestured. Thus spake that annoying mage¡­ Mana flowed out from him in a stream and formed constantly shifting spell-work. Metal droplets drew off from the hunk, flying to coat the indentations left in the wall. Even as he put the metal into a pocket, he gathered mana together. The mana brightened from a will-o-wisp, to sunlight, to staring at the sun. It looked like hundreds of times more mana than I had ever seen Tam use to cast any spell. The mana fed into the metal, causing it to glow. With a flash, the runes lit up before they faded from blinding down to a faint glimmer. Tam headed out of the room, though only after casting a few spells at the runes on the wall. Diagnostics? And what the hell it that thing even for? As far as I could tell, all that mana had simply disappeared. I was fairly sure, however, that like the runes covering the stand I sat upon, it had simply become invisible. I could feel mana moving gently toward the rune structure on the wall, but it was barely noticeable. It certainly wasn¡¯t enough to cause me any problems, and it was not draining me directly. The rune was simply maintaining itself, presumably. I make more assumptions than I like, these days. I didn¡¯t know what it was actually for, but at least it wasn¡¯t a new and improved mana drain. Should try to see what it does. I concentrated mana to cover me, but didn¡¯t see anything new. Wait. There. A flicker of something, but then was gone immediately. Then it happened again. I wasn¡¯t sure what I was feeling. Threads, maybe? Little strands of magic drifted through the room. I feared the worst, and checked all of my aura. It was not monitoring everything, it seemed confined to this room, extending only a tiny distance into the walls. Okay, now I really had no idea what it was for. It didn¡¯t seem to be measuring me, or my aura, my mana, or anything else I could detect. It just constantly passed over the room. Tam returned with a cage. This time there were three of the strange creatures inside. What should I even call these things? Mouse-bugs, no, mice-bugs would be the proper plural. Yeah, guess I will go with that. Wonder if he is going to sacrifice those to me too? Wait. If he does that I will get a little more than five mana each. I checked my status to be sure. Yep, holy shit, there it was. If I got fifteen mana, I could level up! SSD 1.4 - School of Hard Rocks ¡°From the lips of Yamash, The Word was spoken unto the world. For behold, The Word governs and defines all things. In balance was it given, for, even as The Word grants order and makes manifest the system of the world, so to in chaos shall all things be permitted to grow. Few things are holier than that a man shall progress in the levels of the world, and bring a greater piece of it under their dominion.¡± -From the Holy Text of Higrath Excited at the thought of finally gaining a level, I imagined the progress it could bring me. Despite this, Tam continued his preparations at a glacial pace. Admittedly, I was not showing my excitement, and I had absolutely no desire for him to know about it. Demonstrating it would show Tam I understood what he was doing. My dungeon half, annoying and persistent as it was, seemed to lack the cognitive function necessary to integrate the separate concepts together, and I didn¡¯t want to show myself as anything more. There was a certain leap required to go from seeing the mice as food or mana, then understanding the exact amount of mana from each, adding it up, and realizing that I could level up. While my musing continued, Tam measured the borders of my aura with more spells. At least, that is what I thought was happening. At the moment, I was just glad I had not expanded to cover all the walls completely. It was good for Tam to underestimate me. I would keep my aura growth well away from him. Even as Tam made his preparations, I also made mine. The status screen opened with a thought and so did the AP purchase menu. If leveling up was truly about to happen, it would allow me to conceal the purchase of a skill at the exact same moment. Hopefully, Tam would think that it was simply the result of the new level and not me getting better with deliberate intention. Based on my observations, I was fairly sure that Tam had a single weakness¡­ possibly two. He was impatient. So far, the only change I had made was getting better at absorbing mana. Tam wanted me to do more than that, to improve in some way. He checked and monitored me constantly. However, even if he monitored, and made precautions, he was making me more powerful. Or at least, would if he leveled me up. If he planned on pushing me forward deliberately, all that needed to happen for escape was for Tam to underestimate me. And as long as he didn¡¯t know that I was intelligent, that possibility was far more likely. The more skills I gathered, and the better I got with them, the more options I would have available. Tam may have enjoyed studying me, but I was enjoying being an experimental subject just a bit less. As much fun as it might seem, I wanted to opt out of this research study. I didn¡¯t really need that ten bucks anyway. I had no idea how long this could go. How long did dungeons live? No idea. However, considering that my body was crystal, it could be forever as long as nothing killed me. Do I count as a silicon based lifeform? How long Tam would continue the experiment remained uncertain. For all I knew, he was immortal. My mind spun any number of terrible scenarios. Tam could introduce his experiment to others. I could potentially be stuck as a research subject for centuries. And that discounted the uses that someone could have for a dungeon. I didn¡¯t understand exactly what I might be capable of, but I already knew that is was possible for me to summon monsters, animals, and plants. I could be used to farm, or worse, as a weapon of war. World domination, anyone? Or perhaps its more modest hick cousin, country domination. Sadly so unfashionable compared to its chic contemporaries. No, the risks were just too much. Based on my other half, dungeons were not all that bright, though getting a proper sense was difficult. It was not like we had conversations, I just felt its basic knee jerk reactions. I translated them into thought because that was simply how I thought. Should I name my other half? Ha. I could just imagine telling a therapist that I had named the voice in my head that wanted me to kill people. Somehow, I had the feeling that would be considered a ¡®Bad Idea.¡¯ Eh, it probably won¡¯t make anything worse. After all, there actually was something other in my head. Well, my other half is essentially a blood-thirsty brute. So what name says that? Blood, blood¡­ I know the Latin word for that right? Ugh, it is on the tip of my tongue. Sanguine, that''s right. As in, exsanguinate, to remove all the blood from a body. Hmm, shorten that and it actually sounds like a name. Exsan. Okay, its official, I dub thee Exsan. Tam¡¯s preparations were continuing ad nauseam, and despite my impatience I found it hard to blame him. If Exsan was the typical example of a dungeon¡¯s attitudes¡­ that caution was more than fully justified. I wanted to escape to get my freedom. Exsan wanted to murder and control everything nearby and make a lair. Someday, I will get a cat, and it will lay in Exsan¡¯s lap. Or, more likely, lounge on top of my core. Cannot have the evil mastermind without a cat, after all. I missed my cats, stuck at home with my parents. Stupid apartment rules¡­ Tam finished up and cast a last spell on me, before shaking the cage with the mice-bugs slightly. I obliged and focused on it. Nothing to see here, just a well trained dungeon. Feed my Sey-, um, I mean Tam. Tam looked unfocused for a moment, as he cast a ball of fire towards the cage. Little bits of the metal started to drip with heat, but I was more focused on the mana bursting out of it and flowing into me. I ended up with even more than I had expected, the fireball had contributing a few mana as well. I had slightly more than eighteen mana. With a flick of mental effort my level grew and I purchased a new skill.
Status Name: N/A Type: Dungeon Core ¨C Soul Hybrid Level: 2 Crystal Status: 100% ¨C Undamaged Status Effects: Mana Drain Available Mana: 3/50 Passive Mana Generation: 20/Day Cost for next level: 30 Mana Subsections Available: 1 Ability Points: 850 (+100 For Level. -200 for Learning)
Skills: Directed Mana Absorption I >II, Limited Omniscience (Dungeon) Soul Mana I Dungeon Aura Expansion I Manipulate Earth I Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon. Learning I
Titles: Reborn Soul First of its Kind Skill Evolution
That part about Exsan being named is probably a bad thing. At least it wasn¡¯t the entire name. Still waiting for mine apparently. Right, deal with that later. I pulled up my two new skills.
Manipulate Earth I Move, loosen, condense, generate, or destroy earth and stone within your aura using available mana. Learning I All other skills are slightly easier to both acquire and learn. Slightly lowers the Ability Point cost of all non-summon skills (5% Bonus and Discount).
The Learning skill had cost 200 AP and it was everything I was hoping for. It would provide easier access to learning other skills, forever. It would also make everything I purchased cheaper, except for summons of course. It was a tiny bonus, but it could easily add up over time. Plus, a number of the AP skills were already very expensive. That 200 would pay for itself with just one skill over 4000 AP. And, it was a skill with a level, presumably that meant it could and would level up over time. Presumably as I learned information or used my skills. And I was planning to do that anyway. I was also happy to finally have a way alter the world around me: Manipulate Earth. I was expecting, and hoping, to get something like it. I had been slightly worried, for a while, that my only ability to dig would be through summoned monsters. Fortunately, that appeared to be an ability that I controlled directly. I brought the AP menu back up and looked at the other learning type skill I had seen. It was for summoning creatures, plants, etc¡­ I debated buying it for a moment, but summons had no place in my current escape plan. Not to mention, Tam might have already noted all the differences. He was careful enough about me already. There was still mana remaining, so it was time to test out my new ability. If I could manipulate stone well enough, then I could grab my core and run. Admittedly my mana regen was still not very high, but it was double what it had been before. Commanding stone to move turned out just like expanding my aura. It was instinctual and easy. Everything I needed to do was sitting there in my head, waiting for me. Well, I didn¡¯t have a head, but the idea remained the same. A tiny tendril extended a few fractions of an inch from a wall before the runes embedded into the wall burst into action. The entire array lit up with light. From the center a beam of light emerged and disintegrated the stone tendril. I stopped for a moment. This¡­ this had the potential to make things difficult. Tests were in order. I extended a new bit of stone elsewhere in the room, even as I concentrated on destroying a section of stone hidden well behind the wall. Need to hide why the mana is being lost. By the time the mana ran out there, was no change as far as the room showed, since my work was constantly erased, but I had made an empty sphere about three feet across deep in the wall. Why does the sphere have air in it? I could understand if I had destroyed the stone into nothing. Perhaps if I had converted it to mana or something. Nope. I changed a three foot radius of stone into air. And I could sense that air. It wasn¡¯t under immense pressure, like it should have been, if I had somehow reconfigured the elemental nature of stone into a gas. Nope. Mass just disappeared. And I had made solid stone out of a relatively small amount of mana, come to think of it. Exactly how energy dense is this shit? Or was it just magic and therefore breaking all the rules. Not like conservation of mass and energy are important laws or anything, nope, not at all. While I took my time commiserating with physics about this level of bullshitery, and how utterly ridiculous magic was busy giving physics the middle finger, Tam looked overjoyed. He seemed both utterly unsurprised and dismissive when the beam of light came and destroyed the stone, repeatedly. Not surprising, guess he was expecting me to get this ability. Tam simply smiled for a few minutes and then proceeded to dismiss the spells in order. With the dismissal of the last one, a small amount of mana was available again. For the moment, I played with my new ability in the test sphere I had made. I turned dirt, sand, and stone into one another with no trouble and a small amount of mana. Condensing stone into a denser and harder substance was possible, but more mana intensive. Making stone from nothing was the most costly. At this point there was both a positive, and a negative. I had plenty of stone to work with, but my mana ran out almost immediately. Tam left while I worked, his departure unnoticed. After running out of mana, I returned to my usual practice of mana absorption and keeping mana still. As always, it was slow but I made steady progress. Night came over my room with the dimming lights cast into faint glimmers, all without me seeing Tam again for the day. My practice continued through the night and I contemplated what I should do if Tam deliberately gave me more mana. Obviously, my level was top priority. With more mana, I could extend my aura and manipulate more stone. The problem, was that I didn¡¯t want Tam to think about my aura at all. It extended far beyond what he was aware of. If I found a cavern, I could extend into it. And if it had life I could gain mana from the deaths of the creatures there. So far, however, the most I had seen was some tiny geodes. For now, I could show Tam that I was ¡°learning.¡± Tam was sure to expect something, but I didn¡¯t think he really knew what to expect. The system had outright stated that I was unique and new. Stone created in different areas could show him I was trying different strategies, but hopefully the randomness of it would not show any kind of actual intelligence. Hopefully, my learning skill would also help cover up any accidental signs of real intelligence I might give him. No idea how that skill would impact a normal dungeon. I thought of a few things to try with my abilities, stuff I could show him. I could make the walls smoother. This would also act as a test to determine if I could dig into the walls, or if I would get the same response from that obnoxious rune array on the wall. If I could, I would make statues. Nothing original, just copies of what I saw. And while Tam saw what I was doing, more would happen behind the scenes. I wanted to study my own earth manipulation skill and see if it was truly understandable, and not just powered by handwavium. The same with the beams from the array. Calling this new world magic and leaving it at that was not an acceptable excuse. Science had always been a passion of mine, and understanding was the true reason why. I loved knowing how things happened. Even if it took a while, by hell or high water, I would understand this new world too. My determination notwithstanding, very little progress had been made by the time that morning announced itself with an increase of light. Tam entered shortly after and cast a diagnostic spell on me. Another similar spell was directed at the disintegration array. Shortly after, the dregs of the spell on me was absorbed and I focused as much as possible while the stone moved at my command. I could see nothing more, for now, but improving my sight simply went on my list of things to do. It actually entered my list of things to do as much as possible. When I practiced holding mana in place, watch, when I moved stone, watch, when I made aura, watch. There was simply no way to accept that these things happened without some kind of outside force acting on them. Things needed to be acted upon in order for them to undergo change. If that was no longer true¡­ then figuring out the new rules might actually be impossible. It was completely possible that the forces were acting at scales I simply couldn''t observe, too. However, without proof, there was no point giving up. Tam interacted with me less, and he was gone for the rest of the day, failing to appear at all the next. I had a small amount of fear, of just being left alone as an abandoned experiment, even if that didn¡¯t seem likely. I was fairly sure I could learn to escape, but it wasn¡¯t a certain thing. I imagined being left alone in a dim room for years, or longer. Forgotten and abandoned for millennia. Gah. Yeah, that way lies madness. Probably literally. I couldn¡¯t imagine my mind surviving through it. And if my new form forced me to stay sane¡­ it would just be torture. I threw myself into practicing as a distraction. I was no closer to seeing what was happening, at least as far as I could tell. Holding mana in place was getting easier, though, and the speed and narrowness of my focus had been improving. That night I received another screen popping up in front of me.
Your skill Directed Mana Absorption has increased from level I to level II
The skill¡¯s description remained unchanged, but experimentation proved it to be improved substantially. Focusing allowed a slightly smaller area to be used, and the speed of absorption was twice as fast as it had been originally, according to my best guess. Attempting to hold mana showed no difference at all. I had been continuously trying to up my speed, and it had improved, but the largest difference came when the level went up. However, since the mana stability had not changed, that meant it was a different skill entirely, or at least another modification that could be made to it. Slowly the world was beginning to make more sense to me, though it was insane by my old standards. Hopefully, gaining new skills would enable me to make better conclusions. SSD 1.5 - Prison Food Cast me in chains, and I still remain. Kill me, martyr me, and I shall remain in the hearts and minds of your subjects. Unless you overcome the idea of freedom, you shall never know peace, and no idea can remain dead. Oppression is no victory, only a stalemate doomed to fall. -Tisda Nardanis, leader of a slave rebellion, before his execution, 1541 IC Tam appeared and made his usual cursory inspection. Surprisingly he showed no reaction, apparently not noticing the increase in my skill¡¯s level. Either he doesn¡¯t care the skill leveled, or his analysis spell didn¡¯t tell him. Given how effusive Tam usually was, about even minor changes, a lack of reaction was evidence in itself. It didn¡¯t tell him the level changed. One more potential weakness. As Tam canceled his spell a moment later, I studied my earth manipulation with the absorbed mana. Nope, still nothing. Tam drew on the walls with more chalk. This time, my emotions were more subdued. He just leveled me up, he is not likely to just kill me now. Don¡¯t panic, it¡¯s never been that bad. He wouldn¡¯t even need spells to kill me. Throwing me at a wall would do it¡­ Probably, the dungeon instincts seem to think I am fragile enough. No reason to assume it¡¯s going to be terrible though. Sure, the last array he drew was annoying, but I was, at worst, still better off than before I leveled up. Leveling had actually been a pleasant surprise. Not like I can do anything about it, anyway. Like the runes he had drawn last time, these were all outside my aura. The new designs were smaller, but there were four of them, each spaced equidistant around the perimeter of the room. As far I could tell, they were all identical. Need to be in my aura to be sure. As I watched, I did my best to understand the patterns of runes. Write them into my practice sphere later. No idea how much of their workings is the runes and how much is from the initial spell. After checking them all again, Tam burned them into the walls, filling them with the same coating of metal. Once again, the ridiculous amount of mana went from sun bright to undetectable. I waited for a moment, but nothing happened. My practice holding mana had barely resumed when Tam walked back into the room. He was carrying something that was similar to the stand I was sitting on. They both had a large white crystal on the bottom, but the new one had a clear, egg shaped, crystal held on top with three prongs. A fellow dungeon? Either newer than me, given the title, or newly made¡­ or a regular dungeon, I suppose. Seeing how we interact? What makes a dungeon clear, instead of black or red? Could be something else, I suppose, too soon to tell. The runes on the other stand were different, though I couldn¡¯t see details, the mana sufficient to make anything other than sight unreliable. There was a small circle of metal with a single rune on it embedded in the ring holding up the egg. Don¡¯t have that on my stand. I watched; after casting a long lasting diagnostic spell Tam put his finger on the small circle. Oh, a button. Mana started to flow, but not downwards from the egg, like I expected. Instead mana drained from the white crystal upwards into the egg. Wish I could reverse the flow of mine... Efforts to try sucking mana directly from either: the egg, or the white crystal underneath, proved fruitless. As the mana flow slowly continued the crystal egg began to turn white and glow. Okay, not a dungeon then.. probably. I watched the increasing mana density obscure my perceptions in real time. Different on a static object then a person, less flow. Time passed; Tam waited and read in his chair. Eventually, the egg crystal started to emit pulses of light. Tam¡¯s vision gained the familiar far away look as he focused on something only he could see. With a last flash of light, the accumulated mana was expelled into the air as the crystal rapidly turned back from white to clear. For a moment, shock kept me from acting, but then I grabbed the mana. Was Tam feeding me? Not sure why Tam wanted to feed me mana, but there was already a plan for what to do when I got mana, so I hopped to it. Stone grew from the walls, and I studied how it happened. Just as quickly as it was made, it was unmade again; the beam of light reaching out from the runes. As far as my senses were concerned, that beam was doing the same thing as when I unmade stone: nothing. There might have been a tiny bit of turbulence in the air, but I couldn¡¯t tell for sure. It wasn¡¯t disintegrated though, there would have been a very noticeable expansion as the stone turned to gas. Where the hell did the extra mass go? My new feeder had resumed its slow accumulation of mana and I waited for it impatiently. This time, when it flashed, I was ready. My concentration at the fullest, the mana drained into me as quickly as it was released. Since watching my stone fruitlessly try to grow out of the walls had not shown any kind of results, another course of action was called for. Time to examine the runes. Energy flowed through me into my aura¡­ and nothing happened, except one of the runes on the wall flashing with light. Anywhere I tried to expand my aura, inside the room, simply resulted in the closest rune glowing, with my mana spent to produce nothing. I tested growing my aura deep behind the wall and it grew as it was supposed to. Oh good, that could have been bad. This wasn¡¯t how I planned to understand the runes, but on the bright side, at least now I know. While I had mana, I took the time to test the new restrictions. I was unable to create new aura, at all, within the radius of the sphere Tam thought I controlled, plus a few feet beyond. If Tam erected these when I first arrived¡­ there would have been no hope. Funny to be grateful to be studied, rather than holding me captive. It was blindingly obvious Tam was engaged in research. He made a new form of dungeon and he is figuring it. Yay for me. Fortunately, research required me to be active, at least or responsive. Obviously, hopefully, he was unaware of my continued, or perhaps even starting, intelligence. Did he even know I was human when he summoned me? Probably, have to assume he did, anyway. Regardless, it would be hard for Tam to study the characteristics of a new type of dungeon,if it was static and never grew. Be grateful for small favors I suppose. I quickly burned through most of my new mana, the new limits thoroughly tested. What little mana remained was simultaneously spent on tendrils of stone and expanding my aura farther away. Use what I can where he can¡¯t see. If I only had access to my mana regeneration¡­ Honestly, with that, I was pretty sure I could escape, if very slowly. Not fast enough to avoid getting caught Best to keep going. The next time the feeder activated, the mana simply sat in my storage. I gained approximately ten mana each time it fed me. I counted the seconds, seeing how long it took for me to lose a point of mana. Then I did it again, and again. Averaging out the results, it was about five minutes per point of mana drained. And that was while I was slowly generating twenty points of mana a day. It was hard to tell exactly how much mana drained into me from the ambient environment, but it felt around half my natural regeneration. Assuming that there was a twenty four hour day here, admittedly a rather dubious assumption, a few mental calculations told me that I was being drained at a rate of more than 300 mana a day. I was barely generating a tenth of that. There was no reasonableway of generating that kind of mana without some revolutionary new skill, or far more levels, and I didn¡¯t think Tam would fail to notice and take precautions. Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation. I still had mana, but it would drain away before the feeder activated again. Honestly, that was expected. If it could overlap I would be able to slowly accumulate and level up again. So I raised some stone where Tam and his chair would block a straight line from the beam array. With no particular feeling of surprise I watched as the beam of light curved to hit the new stone. Of course. I sighed internally. It would be foolish to assume Tam left in an obvious flaw. I tested more, of course; the beam could curve to hit anywhere in room. Next time, I tried something new, though I sincerely doubted that nothing would prevent it. Slowly, I started to lower the stand I sat on into the floor. I did this with extreme caution, trying to be as even as possible. There might only be a distance of three feet between me and floor, but I had no desire to learn if that was enough to damage me. Being made of crystal had given me a newfound respect for heights. I snorted. I could just imagine it. Died, resurrected into a new world, then died again by falling off the stand and shattering. Ha, that be a dumber way to die than tripping over the balcony. I needn¡¯t have bothered with the care, the tiniest bit of the floor had sunk when the beam shot down and created stone. Well, I expected something to stop me. Sadly. The stand didn¡¯t even rattle from how little it was moved. The only thing worth noting, was the new stone, which didn¡¯t match what used to be there. Too bad. If it had worked, it would have made my life, and escape, much easier. Obviously the universe isn¡¯t going to let me have any easy way. Reinforcing the stone in the wall to make it denser met with no response. Well at least I can still do something. For a while, I considered just¡­ doing nothing. Odds were Tam would get frustrated again. Still, I didn¡¯t know what he would do. Too risky. Besides, there were still things to test, plus the free mana was allowing me to spread my aura farther and farther back. That increased my odds of escape, so no reason not to keep at it. I could always boycott Tam¡¯s experiment later. Seems even less patient than me, anyway, and I¡¯m the one stuck in this room all day. If, at some point, my progress stalled out and nothing new happened, Tam would probably try to test something else. My only real worry was the end of the experiment; would he destroy me? If that seemed likely I would start communicating for all I was worth. With the ability to change the nature of the walls without having them remade, I could probably draw out pictograms in different colored stone. I resumed my practice and, by the end of the day, a decent amount of practice was beneath my entirely metaphorical belt. Where would I even wear it? I tried making different types of stone, just to check, and had no issues replicating different colors. The structures seemed to be somewhat different from the actual stone around me, and I could not replicate any particular type of stone deliberately. When I grew new stone tendrils they were the exact same type of stone that they grew from, unless I was focusing on a color. Sure, why not? At the same time, as I worked with stone and kept growing my aura I tried to make use of the mana more efficiently. The aura never seemed to get any cheaper, but I did seem to get a little better at making stone cheaply. Tam turned in for the night after turning off the feeder and dismissing the spell monitoring me. Tam had spent much more time watching me today. Not terribly surprising, I could actually do shit now. No doubt I was more interesting like this. Stupid damn wizard-scientist¡­ With the feeder off, my nightly routine resumed. Mana was held in place as best I could as I watched. There seemed to be no particular progress on seeing what the aura was doing to hold the mana. Not sure if I¡¯m trying something advanced or difficult, or if nothing is happening at all. My mana sight might be improving or not, but I was getting better holding onto mana. The next day, the feeder was turned back on. I tried to overwhelm the beam by making stone in multiple places simultaneously but it simply produced more beams. I even turned part of the ceiling into sand and then released a bunch at once. A multitude of tiny beams destroyed the sand effortlessly. For a moment I thought that the runes on the wall looked slightly fainter, but honestly that could have just been in contrast to the light of the beams. Or just a desperate desire to prove that I am at least doing something. After that, I tried extruding some denser stone that I refined from the wall. If there was a difference in time the beam took to destroy it, I didn¡¯t notice it. When I crudely polished the walls where my aura reached, there was no reaction. Okay, so I can at least do a little bit, how about the floor? When I tried the same on the floor, the beam rebuilt it in exactly the same texture. Right, makes sense. Tam didn¡¯t want me messing with the floor and making it slippery like ice, building traps, and so on. Beware my ultimate power, wahaha, to polish a floor. Wooo! Fear me, as I make you slide like you left your socks on. Best not to continue that chain of thought. Not like I¡¯m particularly keen on harming Tam anyway. Not that he has a way to know that. Plus, Exsan was considerably less sanguine about the situation, heh. His blood lust continued to occasionally derail my thoughts, but I could not allow myself to give in. Couldn¡¯t harm Tam, not without trying to communicate first. Hope your ideals manage to survive this world, Father. I¡¯m not sure how they even survived our own. His ideals, which had become my ideals. He managed a local nonprofit. He could have made far more, managing some other business, but he would never give up, give in, allow himself to step away from those that needed him. Not that we ever struggled, really. He might be able to get far more elsewhere, but he still was paid comfortably, keeping all the local soup kitchens running, managing the food donations, and the deliveries. He¡¯s always happiest on the days he can actually work in one of the kitchens, though. Loved to have me and the other kids along. I don¡¯t think I had ever seen him angry, not really. Even when fights broke out, he would calmly step into things, making sure everyone had what they needed, and reminding people that this was a place to help equally. Everything else, any rivalries, should be left at the door. It made him sad though, if people fought. I wasn¡¯t as good a person as my dad. I wasn¡¯t sure that all problems could be solved by talking, if everyone just sat down to do that before they fought. Because not everyone will sit down, and even if they do¡­ not everyone is willing to respect the opinions of everyone else. Still, despite all that, I would do my best, to believe that everyone deserved help, and that everyone should act to help others as they saw the need. Not everyone wants to help, Dad, some people see those in need and just don¡¯t care. Still, I will do my best. He was, in the end, right about one thing, for certain. Nothing changed if I didn¡¯t try, and things would be better if I did, for at least those that I interacted with. For a time, my thoughts lingered on home, but even so, I continued to work. Near the end of the day, I thought I caught tiny glimpses of something when the beam destroyed my work over and over. I still saw nothing when I manipulated stone, which is fine, just FINE, but I was happy at any sign of progress. Right, still making progress, fake breaths, fake breaths. I saw more flashes the next day, and started to see something vaguely like fog when I held mana stagnant the next night. The day after I started to catch my first decent glimpses of what was happening as the beam destroyed or created stone. Finally! When stone was destroyed a three dimensional lattice of mana formed and became finer and more intricate until the details simply looked like fog. The creation process was the reverse. An ultra fine net of mana gradually enlarged as the stone was assembled. No idea how this works. At least I can see something. I held on to the mana, and the fog grew more pronounced. In turn, that increased perception showed me fine wisps of similar fog throughout my entire aura. My aura itself? Other aspects of mana sight also seemed to be gradually getting better. The enchantments on the feeder, and stand, started to shimmer into existence like perfect glass. More elusive were the threads passing through my aura from the beam array, but saw thin flashes periodically. The actual runes on the wall kept their secrets as well as ever, but I was fairly sure my new sight had nothing to do with normal vision, if you can call panoramic vision out of a crystal normal, anymore. Only happened inside my aura, probably ¡®seeing¡¯ with that somehow. After a few more days, I received the notice I had been hoping for while I examined the beam repairing a section of floor.
You have gained a new skill! Enhanced Aura Perception I Your aura¡¯s ability to perceive: itself, mana, and mana constructs in your aura, is enhanced.
SSD 1.6 - Tangled Web Rule #50 - Though you have entered the same dungeon a thousand times, never assume that you are safe. Dungeons are terrible and treacherous. - From 50 Rules for Dungeon Divers Tam did his usual song and dance on noticing I had a new skill. Yes, yes, you¡¯re very pretty, now shut up so I can concentrate. However, despite my disparaging thoughts, I paid him little attention. I was far too busy seeing. For the first time, I could see what my aura actually was. It looked like a spider¡¯s wet dream, a vast intricate web with me as the spider at the center. It grew ever finer, but even the coarsest strands made spider silk look like rope. Thousands of threads met in the center and congregated inside me. And these were simply the main strands. Countless finer strands, as well as hooks of mana, branched from the main branch out in every direction. And each strand hosted more offshoots and hooks, with more branches finer still in an endless fractal pattern that went past my ability to perceive. Past a certain point, everything dissolved into a faint glittering fog merely suggesting their presence, like someone had made fog out of fiberglass. My enhanced perception let me see more than my own aura. That was likely a secondary effect. Now, the ambient mana in the air, and stone, was far clearer. My aura waved fine threads in currents of mana like kelp beneath the sea. Amidst the mana currents, I saw glimmering glass threads sweeping about the room from the beam enchantment on the wall. Now, the effect from the other four arrays could be seen too. Inside the room, where my main threads of aura ended, the ends were capped with a construct. Those constructs were each attached to a thread, which left my aura, gradually fading from my perception. Three guesses where the threads converge, and the first two don¡¯t count. My aura beat like it was alive. Faint pulses of mana streamed back and forth across it, the faint persistent glow spiking as the mana passed, and currents of mana flowed into the entire web, traveling inward to me. And then there was me. For all the complexity of my aura, it was a shoddy forgery of my core. Only the coarsest layer was seen clearly, but it was not a few thousand measly strands. There were millions, billions, of threads pulsing with racing mana. Bet Tam would cry for joy to see this. Eh¡­ he would probably do the same if he was my normal aura. I lost myself in studying, observing. My remaining mana drained away, unnoticed. It¡¯s beautiful. For the first time, I saw something surpassing the beauty of my old life. This kind of discovery and joy was worth it. And it made me feel alive. Perhaps it was silly, but seeing this I felt more organic, more connected to being a living thing. Still miss food. It felt like hours before Exsan¡¯s insistent prodding dragged me away. Exsan cared nothing for beauty, and barely seemed aware of my new perception. I sighed. More a memory of a sigh¡­ just not as satisfying. Back to the grindstone. I watched, learning how my aura kept mana still. Threads, with their finer counterparts, shifted and wrapped around an area, holding the mana within. In turn, neighboring threads drew closer, their own extremities reaching to help, propagating outward. In the end, threads drew together, their interwoven hooks held in place against the trapped mana pressure. The structures were far from perfect. Threads poked awry and hooks were out of alignment, creating gaps like misaligned zippers. I tried to command my aura to fix a particular flaw, though nothing happened; everything was an automatic process. When I focused, simply trying to hold the mana tighter, strands slowly bent themselves and hooks realigned. Right, no direct control, like a general rather than a soldier, work on the broad strokes. The aura bent to my will, slowly. Next time I was ¡®fed¡¯, can I get a steak instead¡­ wait, never mind, I would just be fucking sad to see it and not be able to eat it, I used the mana to examine other aspects of both my earth manipulation skills and the beam runes. They operated differently somehow, but I was not sure how either worked. The surface level was the same. The little hooks would gather bits of stone as they formed, holding them together until they were fused, or the reverse for destruction, hooks pulling apart stone that seemed to be crumbling into nothing. Mana pulsed down my aura when I created or destroyed stone. But why! If I use mana to create stone, surely it should give mana to unmake it. Nope. Can mana both create and destroy matter? That makes the energy go in only one direction, down. That would play havoc with conservation of energy. Does that even apply here? It probably, applied, at least, to the normal physical universe. Mana could just be special. A special pain in my ass. In comparison, understanding how my aura expanded, when it wasn¡¯t capped, was fairly straightforward. Mana streamed from my core, reached the end of the largest threads, and then, assisted by the smaller nearby threads, the mana was extruded and shaped into more threads. This process continued down to the smaller threads. Presumably, not like I can see them past a certain threshold. In the main room, where my main threads were clamped with mana constructs, I couldn¡¯t even start the process of making more aura. The mana gathered at the ends then funneled away into the runes before the process of growth started. The rune arrays glowed when I tried. Maybe they turn the mana to light? I took stock of myself at the end of the day. My thoughts just aren¡¯t working right. My mind was clear, focused, inhumanly so. I hurt from the clarity of being forced to think at all times, and that constant wearing at me was coming to a head. My emotions roiled beneath the surface like a turbulent sea, ready to boil over. Mixing metaphors there¡­ Technically mixing a simile and a metaphor, ha. It was progressively harder to ignore Exsan¡­ and myself. My thoughts were clear, but scattered, distractions becoming captivating. Nothing stopped me from thinking, but my thoughts became less useful. Too bad I know what the problem is, since it still doesn¡¯t help! Sleep. I needed sleep desperately. I needed to eat, laugh, and communicate too. I ached with need. I¡¯m so tired. Miss touching people. Kill to brush my someone in the hallway. ¡®Oops, excuse me.¡¯ I used to touch people all the time, just part of being on campus, or using the elevator. Why did I always try to distance myself, should have been hugging those people, relishing the touch of being human¡­ No, stop, that would have been weird. Like I fucking care! I fantasized little casual things, a quick hug or handshake, a brief touch on the shoulder. Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more. I can sense the walls, and floor, and the damn air, but it isn¡¯t really touch. It¡¯s¡­ like someone describing it. Really accurately, and you have a really clear picture, but it is still distant, removed from true experience. I feel the stone, but I don¡¯t feel, it. I was not communicating, at all. It¡¯s been what, two, three weeks? Deliberately avoided communication. Torturing myself. Deliberately mute to deceive him, and it was exhausting. Like putting yourself into solitary confinement. The fucking key to get out is right there, and¡­ I¡­ just¡­ NO. Now I know why solitary confinement is so terrible. I didn¡¯t just want other people right now, I craved it, required it. This was going to make me desperate, already desperate; desperation would lead to bad choices. Trust me, I can make those without any desperation at all. Focus. From there, disaster was almost inevitable. I was not idle. I looked for a solution to the problem, but I had no real options. The AP store had an option for a body, but it was so incredibly far beyond my purchasing ability that it might as well not exist. Better uses for a body anyway, like eating, or smacking that stupid expression off Tam¡¯s wrinkled, little face, or escaping¡­ Yep, pick my core up in my hands and walk away. Or would it be more like a body built around my core¡­ ¡®We are the crystal gems¡­¡¯ No. Focus. For now, the only thing I had was my own mind. I¡¯m doomed. I meditated. I was alone. Mana swirled about me in a faint but unending flow. I had no breath, I have no mouth, but¡­ FOCUS. Rhythmically, I stopped and started the absorption of mana. Hold, then let mana flow in. Hold, let the mana in. Hold, let the mana in. The life-giving flow of mana entered, pause, hold, relax to open and repeat. No hurry. I had all the time in the world for this. I could simply¡­ let go. I didn¡¯t have a body to get itchy. No hair responded to faint changes in the air. I could focus. Eventually, I stopped focusing on mana at all, and my thoughts calmed. All my attention went inward. The faintest hint of something lay deeper, but my mind floated above it.Hours passed in silent meditation. I reemerged. I... haven¡¯t felt this good for ages. My thoughts were always sharp edged, alert. Meditation dulled them for a moment, easing the strain so I could rest, settle over stressed emotions. I felt rested. Something new to add to the routine. Now I could think clearly again. Ugh, been taking things for granted. More I need to find out about, everything, including myself, but not the biggest focus. Time to reexamine the situation. Previously, I made an assumption, self limiting my capabilities to the human norm. Why did I assume I could only focus on one thing at a time? Great for meditation, but less than ideal for almost any other circumstances. Humans, when all was said and done, were really bad at multitasking. As in, they couldn¡¯t actually do it. What they did instead, was switch back and forth from multiple tasks. It was possible to do this fast enough to seem like multitasking, but it was usually only surface deep. Most people had a hard time simply patting their head while rubbing their stomach, and that was an incredibly simple pair of tasks. There was a reason talking on the phone while driving was a truly terrible idea. The only way a human actually multi-tasked was to form muscle memory, so that nerves remembered how to repeat an action over and over, with minimal oversight from the brain. However, I didn¡¯t know if I still had this limitation. I already processed more input than I thought humans were capable of. What if that goes further? What if I can actually split my attention? If a dungeon worked the way I thought they did, admittedly a stretch, they had to handle the task of managing literally hundreds or thousands of adventurers. They absolutely had to process more. That did not even include all the monsters, environments, lighting, traps, and other details that needed to be managed. Everything could just be automated¡­ Sure, but I need to test anyway. If I had the capability to handle that much data, then there was essentially no limit to the number of tasks I could do simultaneously. To be fair, no reason to assume I start with that level of capability. Only testing would tell. Not testing anything until I finish my list of stuff to test, already been too distracted. Sadly, I would probably get distracted, again, if I wasn¡¯t careful. What else is worth studying? Mana restriction could be practiced in multiple areas simultaneously. At the same time, I should continue absorbing as quickly as possible from an ever smaller area. That area¡­ didn¡¯t need to be a sphere. So far everything had been spheres. Spheres were a great shape. They had the smallest possible surface area to volume. However, I wasn¡¯t certain that was actually a good thing for absorbing mana. Maybe more surface area would actually be a good thing to capture that mana flow. I could try flat disks, toruses, slices, cubes, stars, and any other shape I could think of. It might be worth practicing oblong shapes so that I could extend my focus perfectly around a dense mana source like Tam. Studying my mana needed to continue, as well as being efficient, since I had so little of it. I had so much to study. Thousands of strands of mana flowed through my aura from the beam enchantment. If they were going to merrily wave through my aura constantly, I might as well learn from them. Tam cast spells at me every day. I had been familiarizing myself with the structures simply by force of habit without actually trying to understand them. If I can. I was getting mana now. I could replicate the spells in my hidden area, sculpting the structures out of stone. I had no idea how Tam compared to others. Judging by the enormous amounts of mana he threw around, I was simply going to assume that he was very powerful. How much could I learn from him? My aura had potential too. I had watched it hold, break apart, and fuse matter. It also interacted with mana directly. A bridge between the material and immaterial. I might not have conscious control of my aura, but what if I could learn that? If I could, I would be able to use my aura to manipulate stone directly. I might even be able to do it without mana. And if I could do that, even if it was very slow, it would be a huge achievement. I might even learn to directly move and alter other materials. And if I could manipulate mana¡­ well I could do some impressive things with that. There was an enchantment constantly active below me, and another that fed me. Well, don¡¯t really want to break the one feeding me¡­ If I could manipulate, move, or destroy mana constructs, I would have a much better chance of escape. Mana flowed through me, all the time. It left just as quickly, but what if I could divert part of that stream, use it before it flowed away? If nothing else, I might be able to expand my aura constantly. What if Tam notices the crystal below isn¡¯t filling up as fast though? Still something to think about. Now that I could limit the flow of mana, even if it still moved, I should practice where it mattered most, and prevent mana from flowing out from me. Maybe, I could speed mana up, too. Could I make the feeder give out more mana that way? I was already starting to restrict mana flow, and hopefully trap it, but could that go further? Could I move the mana inside that trap, or compress it, and still keep it contained? Put it on the list for later. Mana was my lifeblood. Anything that furthered my control was vital. Tam, and the crystals that held mana, were still opaque to my sight. Watching them, especially the one on top of the feeder stand as it slowly changed, might give improve, or evolve my sight. Maybe I would gain an entirely new skill to pierce through the interference. I lived in a world with game rules and commands. What if I had missed some? Cheat code for dev mode please. What other options might be available? It might be nothing, but it could allow me to do far more. This was hardly an exhaustive list. What can I do with knowledge from Earth? Nothing physical sure, at least not yet, but... some things are purely mental¡­ Like me. I wasn¡¯t going to try all of them now, and I need to finish my list, since I didn¡¯t want to tip Tam off, but there were possibilities. What skills might I get from demonstrating knowledge of math, cartography, chemistry, physics, and so on? If these show up Tam will know I¡¯m actually thinking, though. Sad, but they with have to wait. There were, however, some things I could do that would make sense for a dungeon. I could make sculptures, art, and traps. It let me smooth the walls before. Sure, I cannot extend anything into the room, but will it let me carve outward? Probably good for my mental health to do something creative, anyway. Art therapy, here I come. I made a note practice art elsewhere, if I couldn¡¯t do in on the walls. Maybe, with enough skill, I could make art out of pure mana. I called the piece, ¡°Nobody in the world can see it except me.¡± Trust me, it¡¯s awe inspiring. I could think of more, if I took enough time, but for now I had more than enough to start practicing. If I ended up with a ridiculous number of minds, I would dedicate some to just thinking of ideas for the others to try. SSD 1.7 - Night School People tell you prison is a state of mind. Yeah, sure. Trying being in prison for forty years and see how free you feel. Better to just curse the jailers to the frozen hell and take what you can get. =Prisoner at Hensa Tower, anonymous I had started on the list overnight. I tried the first idea on the list, and instantly wanted to start cursing. I actually could split my attention. So much wasted time. Only been a few weeks though, imagine learning this after being here for years or something. I had less functionally than I had hope for, but unlimited was a pretty high bar. It was much better than the nothing I feared. I could only focus on a few things simultaneously. Ha, only, and a dozen isn¡¯t bad at all. Focus was too pale a word, too. I wasn¡¯t simply multitasking, each copy had the full ability to think and act. Mmm, copy is the wrong word too. No way to tell the original, or if there even is, an original. If I could have done this as a human I would have been an unmatched genius, at least in some ways. Would have been amazing for Smash Bros, could have focused on everything at once. At some point, this ability would probably increase drastically, at least if it was supposed to manage a dungeon properly. It would need more capability. Goes up with level maybe? I might gain a related skill from leveling, too . Splitting myself into different parts was difficult to describe, I lacked the proper words. Any given me was aware of what the rest were doing, but it was like background noise. I was simply focusing on one thing as far as an individual perspective was concerned. And yet, calling it background noise implied a level of detachment or unawareness, which was completely the opposite of how it actually worked. I was simultaneously completely aware of everything the others were doing, and yet not paying it any attention. Ugh, not surprising English is lacking the proper word. Not really a human experience. Best to focus on what I can do with it instead, plus the other ideas. Splitting my mind wasn¡¯t my only success. Diverting some of the constant mana stream that flowed into me was fairly easy, and I was able to expand my aura slowly. It was not much yet, since I was only able to use a tiny part of it. However, any usable mana was great. That tiny flow of mana was all gain, considering it would have been lost. Breaking down pieces of the enchantments showed no progress, but I had been able to move some of the threads floating through my aura, catching them on hooks momentarily. Not useful yet, but progress was progress. If I could learn to do it consistently, I could prevent a part of the room from being analyzed, presumably, and then grow or manipulate stone. The aura hooks could bury themselves in solid stone, too. There was no sign it actually did anything though. Attempts to weaken, strengthen, or move so much as a particle of stone dust had failed so far. Simply embedding my hooks in something physical was a good sign. The greatest success by far, however, came when I started moving the mana in the air. Compared to what I had already been doing, trying to hold mana in place, moving loose currents of mana through the room was fairly trivial. Shortly after, I received a tangible acknowledgment of my achievement.
You have gained a new skill! Ambient Mana Manipulation I You can manipulate, and make use, of the ambient mana within your aura.
You have been awarded a new title! Mana Specialist I You have acquired multiple skills dealing directly with mana. Your skills with mana have passed beyond the realm of the novice. Now go and get even better. +50 Ability Points + All skills directly dealing with mana are slightly more powerful (5% boost)
A quick glance at my status showed my mana generation now at twenty one per day. Exactly five percent, wonder what it would do with an uneven multiple? Not a huge increase now, but it could be very powerful later on. When I can actually save it. Plus, the title had the numeral for one in it, which probably meant it could be improved. Moving mana was much easier now. I had, once again, been focused on just one area of a skill, and this time it had done me a disservice. Guessing I skipped a step. Keeping it still is meant as an advanced application. As the skill said, it was for moving mana around in general, and not the specific task I had been using it for. Oh well, it wasn¡¯t like I had someone to guide me through this. Where is my tutorial level? I had way to know what would create a new skill. I was just guessing. Regardless, now that I had it, the skill let me hold a small area of mana completely still, even in midair. I could even swirl mana around the outside of the area and leave the interior untouched. Trying to move the interior mana quickly destabilized everything. Even if I had been slightly inefficient in acquiring it, but there was a reason I focused on holding mana still; I now had one of the key elements needed to escape. The largest obstacle to my escape was a lack of mana. Tam had made sure to prevent my from holding it from the beginning. My ability to store mana internally had been taken away, so I would just have to do it externally. I moved currents of mana toward my empty practice sphere. The mana gathered together naturally, tending to flow in streams. Through the rest of the night I kept up the flow, and by morning, the density inside was substantially higher than baseline. It still wasn¡¯t much, less than even the smallest spell I had seen Tam cast. Still, it worked as a proof of concept. Mana was held firmly, outside of myself. I kept grinning to myself, pulling at mental strings with no puppet. I had been a core long enough to reflexively ignore the strange sensation of nonexistent muscles. Tam came in and perked up at the feeling of mana swirling through the room more forcefully. I didn¡¯t bother to hide my new abilities at all. He noticed the last one, even with no visible sign, so he definitely learned when I get a new skill. Learning to manipulate ambient mana was also completely sensible in my current situation. Mana was what I did, and since I had practically none of my own, it was not really a surprise that I had learned to manipulate other mana instead. Tam smiled to himself and hummed a little when he cast the usual analysis spell. I was a little happy myself when he finally turned the feeder back on without making any new changes. With the feeder on, I practiced my new and improved itinerary. I changed the area I absorbed to different shapes, moved mana around, and stored mana away. It was easy to let mana pour out of my core, flowing naturally until it released elsewhere. Attempts to hold mana in place, within my aura itself, actually started to feel uncomfortable. Then, if it was static for more than a few moments, it would start to leak mana. It created blockages that forced other mana to flow around anyway, finding another route through my aura. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement. Tam got excited when I started carving into the walls. I tried to keep my creations rather crude. I amused myself by replicating patterns from around the room. A helical structure that mimicked my stand went there, faceted stone in my own image here. I even did some crude human statues that captured the essence of Tam as best I could. I also hid some studies of Tam¡¯s spell in plain sight. I made copies of his analysis spell. I even linked some tiny copies to equally small stone versions of both me and him, mimicking their actual function, though I had to strengthen the stone to prevent it from collapsing the tiny strings. Throughout the day, as I got more mana, I made more sculptures. Inside, I made traps. Seems like a natural thing for a dungeon to do. Some sculptures would tip over into to the room if touched. When they did, I analyzed how the beam destroyed them. I made a tiny lever of stone that released marbles if it was stepped on. Blades and razor sharp edges adorned parts of the art. I had guillotines release from the ceiling. None of the traps were actually effective, and I had made them that way. It was possible that I could make traps that would hurt Tam, if they were entirely self contained in the alcoves in the wall. However, I didn¡¯t really want to hurt Tam, and anything less than death or full incapacitation would be likely to create even stricter safeguards. As it was, Tam was utterly enthralled, studying the art and traps throughout the entire day. Tam was startled by a few of the traps, and grew more cautious, but relaxed since he was utterly unharmed. Yeah, that¡¯s right. I¡¯m just a stupid dungeon, not bright enough to hurt you at all. Harmless. Some of the art was naturally destroyed by the beam array, but they had been built with that in mind, so I simply rebuilt them. And, as I continued to study the beam array, I started to tell what was different. There was a tiny flicker of something present when I destroyed stone, which was absent when the beam did it. Several days passed and my ability to manipulate earth finally moved to level II. Both creation and destruction became easier, with moving stone using almost no mana at all. When I used regenerated mana, I could only move a small bit of stone, but that was enough for the next part of my plan. When I finally got out of the mana drain, damn annoying, I would have enough mana regeneration to move, at least, myself through the stone walls. Especially since I used only a fraction of what I gained before it was drained away. Sadly, I lacked a good way to make a quantitative evaluation. Still, I can feel I¡¯m only getting a little. By now, there were various full sized statues of Tam, in all sorts of poses, as well as many more miniature ones. Some statues also mimicked the symbols and designs of the various enchantments. Tam sitting in a chair, with his omnipresent book, featured as well. Tam had started bringing in various objects for me to study, likely hoping to see them recreated. He had set up a new small table, where various objects now featured. A carved wooden tree, a small scrap of velvet cloth, a cup carved from bone, and more were placed on it. Pretty sure some of this is just because he likes the art. Honestly, I was glad to have something else to look at, too. Replicating the new items was often fun, and the cloth had actually proven a fantastic challenge; it might have contributed to my skill level increasing the most. In the end I had to twist together strands of stone to imitate string and then arrange them into an alternating warp and weft to make the plush cloth. It took even more effort because the warp and weft were not symmetrical. In one direction the threads integrated into the cloth ended and were cut free to create the velvet. I had actually ended up creating it the same way, weaving a whole square of symmetric cloth, and then ¡®cutting¡¯ the strands in open direction and lifting them up to properly imitate the velvet. Of course, my version was still stone, so those loose threads would probably break or cut someone¡¯s feet. I had, on more than one occasion, been tempted to deliberately pick a single object on the table and then refuse to copy it. It wouldn¡¯t matter what the object was, but it would have been hilarious to watch Tam try to figure out why I wasn¡¯t copying it. Still, he might suspect something. No practical joke for me. Stupid survival ruining my humor. Tam was definitely taking the opportunity to study my capabilities, too. For example, he brought in a closed box that held coins. They were of different materials. Gold, silver, copper, and iron as far as I could tell. The coins were not what I was expecting. I had seen ancient coins in history classes and museums. They were oblong, crude, and barely held an image at all. These looked far more like modern coinage. Different sizes and patterns, each perfectly replicated into identical coins. The gold coins were tiny, though one set stood out. They had some kind of mana pattern running through them. The density of the mana obscured the details, but it still made those coins unique. The exterior of those coins, especially, reminded me of a work of art. One side depicted an archway, the metal crosshatched to suggest the shadow of depths within, while on other was a snake, complete with tiny detailed scales. There was something almost endearing about how Tam fawned over my stone imitations of these, which included a fully functional box. He spent minutes opening and closing it, studying the tiny stone hinges. Probably excited I made the mechanical bits work, and that I can see inside without opening it. I assumed he knew this already, but maybe it was only a theory, and I confirmed it. It wasn¡¯t like scientists didn¡¯t get excited when they confirmed a well known theory. That was how advancements got made, after all. Some tiny aspect was confirmed to be true and then scientists could branch off again from there, making incremental improvements to their knowledge. I made progress in other ways, too. I moved the threads of the enchantment more easily. I still had a hard time keeping the threads of the beam enchantment under control, but, for a little while, I could now keep a small area safe from its notice. I failed to move any other enchantment pieces in my aura, though. Pretty sure they are anchored to the physical structure somehow. I made progress with Tam¡¯s spells, too. I reexamined the omnipresent analysis spell, over and over. By comparing it to the statues, I was able to confirm that some little bits of the spell were, in fact, just that, little bits of excess mana clumped onto it. With some work over the course of a day I was able to gradually break those pieces off the spell, my aura scraping against the spell like hasp. Those detached parts would promptly lose cohesiveness, dissolving into mana. The bits of mana were small, but I didn¡¯t dare vacuum them in. Tam probably wouldn¡¯t have noticed, but it wasn¡¯t worth the risk. The mana was negligible, but the ability to damage a spell was a powerful tool. Glad I didn¡¯t get some skill for that. Best if Tam doesn¡¯t know it is possible. My attempts to damage the enchantments, even the hyper thin threads flowing through my aura, had amounted to exactly nothing. Either the enchantments regenerated in some way, they were far tougher than normal spells, or both. I eventually gained a skill that surprised me, though I should have expected it. I had merely failed to consider the possibility.
You have gained a new skill! Meditation I Enter a state of internal self awareness. Enhanced mana regeneration when focused inwards.
I didn¡¯t focus on it every night, only whenever I felt a little off. I still saw a flicker of something, buried deep inside of myself, whenever I did. In other circumstances I would have pursued meditation more deeply, just for that, but my focus was elsewhere. I meditated to stay sane. The notification made me panic for a brief moment, before I read it enough to get to the ¡®enhanced mana regeneration,¡¯ bit. I hadn¡¯t even noticed the difference, not a surprise since all my mana drained away. That could have been bad. Tam saw what he expected to see, which I used against him, but he seemed a little suspicious the next morning. Ignore it, ignore it. Come on preconceived biases, don¡¯t fail me now. He seemed surprised, but he didn¡¯t change anything. Hopefully, he just thought it was an instinctive attempt to gather more mana. Not like I can do anything about it. And¡­ this is still better than the alternative. If meditation hadn¡¯t worked¡­ I didn¡¯t even want to consider what a mess I would be. The day passed as normal, and faded to night. Nervous from the close call, I debated delaying my plan to another night. I need to start as soon as possible. Now that I was at the jumping off point, my nervousness skyrocketed. There will always be something that you could work on, or a way to be more prepared. Delay is easy, but dangerous. Best to act now. The raving voice of Exsan didn¡¯t help. I felt he was getting easier to ignore though. Okay, it¡¯s time. Breathe deep. Ignore the fact I don¡¯t breathe, just do it. I used the tiny amount of mana, constantly available to me, to move some of the stone inside the room. The moment of truth came a moment later when the beam reacted and disintegrated it. Now, from here, things could go two different ways. Tam would either detect it, or he wouldn¡¯t. Obviously it would be easier if Tam detected nothing, but I was prepared for either eventuality. It was good I planned for both, because Tam came rushing in only a few moments later. Damn¡­ I had never seen Tam like this. His fingers glimmered with rings, each packed with mana, and a silver staff was held in both hands. Spells wrapped around him in swirls and gleaming lines. He was battle ready. Nothing to see here, battlemage. Of course, Tam simply found the room, and me sitting with complete innocence on the stand. Tam cast an analysis spell on me, and, of course, I had no mana. Whatever he saw, it made him frown. Now to play my part. I directed that tiny trickle of mana to create another depression in the wall. It was slow, but after a moment Tam noticed the change. His alarm grew, his hands tightened on the staff, and wariness painted itself between the thick wrinkles of his face, but, after a few minutes, he relaxed. It was I was creating another statue. This one showed him, as he was now, holding his staff and rings. After that was done I made a spike drop from the ceiling, where it was promptly vaporized. Now for the moment of truth. I could redirect threads from the beam array on the wall, and I had thought of some other uses for the beam. It was almost certain to go off during my escape, which meant I needed Tam ignore it on his own. Almost certain to get some new restrictions, but hopefully I can work around them. If not, well I already found ways around all the ones on me now, I could do it again. As Tam walked out with a determined stride, I slowly crafted another statue, showing his battle spells. And there I remained, waiting. SSD 1.8 - The Great Escape And would you trust a dungeon? -Common saying meaning ¡°Are you a fool?¡± When Tam came back, he no longer bore his staff or rings, though the new spells were still swirling around him. I refined my copied statue, but they were very intricate. Doubt I will have enough time to correct all the details. Too little mana. Tam entered my aura, and I could immediately sense the, now so familiar, chalk and metal. Tam stepped up to the beam array, where his magic twisted, interacting with it. The threads lifted, leaving the floor alone, scraping over the top by a scant few millimeters. No idea he could do that. Wonder how it works? Tam knelt, slowly drawing a perfect circle to encompass most of the room. A much smaller second circle followed, centered on my stand. Runes scribed precisely onto the floor under his guidance, placed following both the outside perimeter of the smaller circle, and the inside of the larger. Yep, still nonsense. Few of them are familiar though, yep, those ones were in the other arrays. Oh, that one too, no¡­ looks a bit different, some of the squiggly serifs are different. At Tam¡¯s direction chalk, burned with light cutting into the stone. The resulting circles and runic etchings were soon lined with silver metal. Tam brought a significantly larger chunk this time, ready to cover the increased area. He scowled down at the tiny piece left in his hand. Huh. Is this stuff expensive? I hope so. Maybe just hard to acquire¡­ though to be fair, those two properties tend to go hand in hand. Anything expensive that is easy to get does usually remain so. It¡­ would explain some things, if it is a pain to get more. Tam had only been applying the contingencies that were absolutely necessary. Originally. I thought he chose not to have a whole series of them in place because he didn¡¯t want them to interfere with studying me. Now, I knew he could have arranged protections that he could turn on and off. But he didn¡¯t do that... His choice had been to only apply precautions as needed. It was less safe, but it allowed for greater adaptability, and a lower cost. If Tam had planned out, and put down all the precautions he thought might be prudent, it would no doubt have required far more material. Plus, there would have been no guarantee many of them would be necessary, wasting resources. This was good for me. Even though Tam responded to what he had seen me do, he was trying to conserve resources, and I hadn¡¯t shown him everything. He was running into the fundamental problem with conserving resources, sometimes you didn¡¯t apply them, when you really should have. Not that completely spending all of a restrained resource is a good option, either, if you do that you run into not having resources when you need them. Catch-22. Honestly, I had wondered why Tam wasn¡¯t more proactive with his protections. Now I know. Hopefully the new ones aren¡¯t too much of beast. Tam began the ritual, infusing the runes with power; his hands made arcane gestures. Afterwards, as the runes subsided into an enchantment, I tried to determine what they actually did. I tried extending stone from various places, finding the floor impenetrable. The stone would not grow, move, disappear¡­ nothing worked. I could still manipulate the walls, and after a distance of several inches outside the larger circle, the floor. The ceiling could still be manipulated¡­ wait, scratch that. A circle matching, and directly above, the inner circle of the enchantment was like the floor. I tried extending a tendril of stone into the circle from the ceiling outside it and the tendril stopped as it hit a barrier. The beam array cleaned it up a moment later. Pushing at the barrier. from the stone above and below, hit another barrier. Hmm. I might still be able to get out. It would all depend on whether I could get out of the area. If it stopped me too, then I would need to rethink things. Mutters of discontent about being even more trapped rumbled deep inside. Oh shut up, Exsan. Pretty sure he¡¯s quieter now¡­ Eh, no need to look a gift horse in the mouth. For the moment I tried to stay calm. Hours passed as I did what Tam expected of me. Small tendrils of stone protruded, repeatedly testing the barrier and walls. At least one good thing, he stuck around long enough for me to finish copying his battle spells. Tam was patient, waiting for hours, but eventually his eyes drooped little by little. He finally sighed, cast a new, slightly different, analysis spell, packed full of far more mana. Makes it last longer? At the door, he stopped, and cast a new spell. Spiked and smooth bands embedded into the doorway on each side and stretched across in layers. Damn. The spells were not in my aura and I couldn¡¯t make out the backside, and the details embedded into the stone were completely concealed. I copied what I could see, but the copies were incomplete. What the new spells were for, I didn¡¯t know, but I could guess. Probably some kind of defensive spell. Almost certainly contain alarms, too. I did not want to test what they did. Well, know, I really do, but I know better. It didn¡¯t matter, anyway, they weren¡¯t in my aura or in the room at all, and I wasn¡¯t planning to escape that direction. Best to ignore them. Tam probably wasn¡¯t going to come back tonight, he looked pretty tired, but I had no way to be sure. For tonight, I just sat tight, not making any assumptions. In the meantime I kept up my practice, extruding stone into the room at semi-random intervals. Hopefully, this would desensitize Tam to the beam array. That¡¯s right, just more stimulus to ignore. Morning came with the brightening magical lights, faint shadows cast onto the stone. Still not sure what those are. Magic. Thanks, brain, so helpful. Magic, sure, but that doesn¡¯t do me any good. It was like saying a light-bulb was scientific. If I told someone that, they wouldn''t know anything more about how it actually worked. The lights might be some kind of spell, but if they were, they were like no other spell I had seen. The lights were wisps of magic, gossamer and curled into themselves. They hadn¡¯t even become much clearer when my vision improved. Aura not good at sensing that type of magic, or just more refined than anything else I¡¯ve seen, or something else? Trying to move concentrated mana around the lights had not revealed enchantments. Oh well, nice to have something pretty, I guess. I had larger priorities. Tam came late that morning, canceled the analysis spell, and cast another one immediately. I had, fortunately, anticipated this would happen. When I absorbed the mana, I didn¡¯t let it flow into me, instead redirecting through my aura and into my external mana storage. Best he never sees me gaining mana from his spells. After thinking through the night, I had figured out a way to escape, hopefully, but everything could still be ruined by Tam keeping an analysis spell on me overnight. Which he absolutely will. So, I needed to figure out a way to deal with this new impediment. I watched that spell like a hawk, all day. When I had mana available, I concentrated a portion of it around the spell, trying to see if I could glean anything new. Eventually, I did. I had studied his analysis spells passively for quite a while now, but there was still more to learn. With concentrated mana around it, I started to feel, then see, pulses of mana flowing through it. The pulses were subtle, a slight change in the brightness that was usually not noticeable, and only noticed as the mana created a tiny pressure against the mana I was using to explore it. Not surprised I didn¡¯t notice before. I had gradually gained a sense of how the spell worked. Most of it focused on different parts of myself, not too much surprise there. A strand of the spell connected to my mana reservoir. If that one isn¡¯t keeping track of my mana I will eat a hat, even if I have to make one out of mana first. Others connected to various parts of my inner web, and could presumably do anything, but they were probably replicating some version of my status. These strands wove together, then connected to the main spell. And, from the main body of the spell, a strand of mana connected to Tam. Those intense hours of study today had finally let me learn more, detecting the occasional pulse of mana. The mana flowed upwards and into the spell, then out to Tam. As far as I could tell, this only happened when my mana changed. Presumably, the other strands would send signals of their own if something else changed, like a skill, but the rest of my status was not in constant flux, so I couldn¡¯t verify that. Despite my best efforts, I never saw any mana flow my direction from the spell, which was the key. When night came, and Tam renewed his spell on me, I examined it carefully. Looks almost identical. I would have to take a chance. Based on the way it functioned, I was fairly sure the spell only reported when changes happened, and nothing monitored the spell¡¯s connection to me. If I disconnected the threads leading into me, it should appear to still be functioning. Simply the status quo with no updates. I curled the hooked parts of my aura around the threads, grinding away at it. It took some time, but eventually the connection sheared and the threads of the spell disconnected, dissolving into mana that I habitually sucked up. Good, the whole spell didn¡¯t break. I waited nervously. Long minutes passed, but there was no sign of Tam. Oh thank god, success! I carefully moved the beam array threads away from the feeder. Drawing on the small bit of mana now in my storage, I created stone out of thin air. I had never shown Tam that I could create stone from nothing, without even touching other stone. In this case, my new stone was attached to the feeder where it quickly pushed the activation button. I relaxed, a little, when it turned on. Not just keyed to Tam then. I relaxed my control; a beam quickly destroyed the stone on the feeder. The stone had done its job, the feeder was on, and I was not currently being monitored. I was not planning to escape tonight, I had tests to do, and Tam could not be allowed to see. When the mana from the feeder dispersed into the air, I created stone, inside the circle, by my core. I carefully kept the beam from destroying it. I tried to use the stone to push through the barrier from the inside, but had no success. I lifted myself, very carefully, don¡¯t let the beam slip through, don¡¯t let beam slip through, using multiple tendrils, just in case, only to discover that I, also, could not go through the barrier. No luck. Tam goes through just fine. Attuned to him specifically, or do I just count as stone, so I can¡¯t pass? Doesn¡¯t matter, I accounted for this. I started other tests. My aura expanded from behind each aura anchor, until it covered each of them, through I kept it flush with the wall. Good. Next, I covered the beam anchor in the same way, careful not to extend my aura even the barest fraction above the array. I did not want to risk Tam sensing anything, or risk setting off some kind of alarm by extending my aura farther into the complex. It would be foolish to be this close and then fail by being rash. Still tempting, but no. I will not be impatient. A part of me wanted to escape tonight, but I wanted to have more mana, just in case. I might need it. I only gave myself a single extra day, resisting the temptation to keep preparing. This novel''s true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. The lights began to brighten and I shut down the feeder, waiting. The entire day was torture. I kept expecting Tam to notice something wrong. If I had a body I would have been sweating with nervousness all day. Regardless, time revealed its perverse propensity to slow down when I waited. However, eventually, finally, the day managed to pass. The lights dimmed. I waited a few minutes, making sure. Tam was gone. I started. I sawed away the spell¡¯s connection as quickly as possible, before reactivating the feeder. If nothing else, extra mana could only be useful at this point. I was slightly divided about what to do next. I had two plans that were equally viable. I could use the captured mana to effect my escape immediately or I could level up and then escape. Even without leveling up, I was reasonable confident my current abilities were enough to escape, so leveling up could be an extra risk that lowered my mana. However, if I gained some kind of additional control over earth, an ability to move, or something else useful, it might significantly improve my chances. However, I might need that extra mana during the escape. I eventually decided on a compromise. I would enact the first stage of my plan. If that worked then everything else should work out. The first part of my plan was the least certain. If it failed to work, it probably wouldn¡¯t leave any evidence. Though it definitely will if it works. I gingerly captured a single beam array thread, then guided it down, until it touched one of the runes on the floor. A beam lanced out, a faint ping sounded, and the metal rune popped into the air as it was forced out of place by regrowing stone. I felt a faint wave of something flicker. The runic array on the floor still shimmered with light. Hopefully that¡¯s enough to turn it off. With continued caution, I extended a tendril of stone out towards the barrier around me. It was still there. I quickly tested the other restriction. The floor grew stone at my command, once again. Oh thank you God, or whomever listens here. There was no way Tam would fail to notice this. From here, it was either escape, or communicate. Under my own power, I lifted other runes gently from the floor, each time testing the barrier. Three runes later, the barrier was gone, though I felt that strange wave two more times. I sank the stand into the floor, as quickly as possible, until stone finally covered me and I detached myself from the damnable stand. Hate that fucking thing. I was free of mana drain for the first time ever in this new life, well... other than the brief moment I tested the barrier yesterday. Minor details, savor the moment¡­ quickly. Hopefully, I would be completely free soon, and I could celebrate properly. The feeder released mana into the air, where I consumed it. Immediately after, I drained mana out of my storage area, pulling it through my aura as fast as it would go. Mana flowed into me, finally stopping with an unfamiliar feeling. There is still mana available, so what¡­ wait. I looked at my status to clarify. Ha, I¡¯m full! The mana trap was still about half full. I had expected to gain far less than what I stored into it. I didn¡¯t completely drain an area I focused on, leaving behind plenty of ambient mana. Not to mention all the fine details and mana I¡¯m sure I miss. The mana wastage was not my biggest concern for the moment though, because, though I had in fact gained far less mana than half of what went into the storage, I gained far more than I feared. I could level, and still have mana to spare, which made my decision for me. I leveled.
Your status has changed! Status Name: N/A / Exsan Type: Dungeon Core ¨C Soul Hybrid Level: 3 Crystal Status: 100% ¨C Undamaged Status Effects: None Available Mana: 20/100 Passive Mana Generation: 31.5/Day (+5% from Mana Specialist) Cost for next level: 60 Mana (15)*(2^(Level-1) Subsections Available: 1 Ability Points: 900
Skills: Directed Mana Absorption II, Limited Omniscience (Dungeon) Soul Mana I Dungeon Aura Expansion I Manipulate Earth II Learning I Enhanced Aura Perception I Ambient Mana Manipulation I Meditation I Interdimensional Repository I
Titles: Reborn Soul First of its Kind Skill Evolution Mana Specialist I
I immediately pulled up the new skill
Interdimensional Repository I Store and retrieve objects within your aura into and out of a personal storage space.
Huh, no ability points this time. At least my mana regen went up again. How does that work, ten per level? Not important right now. My minor disappointment was mostly covered by a sudden surge of greed. Pretty sure that was both Exsan and me. There were things I wanted to take, now that I had the option. However, for a moment I held off the greed. Don¡¯t know how much it costs. Well¡­ there was nothing to do but try it. I extended my focus out toward one of the runes that had popped out of the ground. With a tiny focus of will, it disappeared. I examined the level of my mana. As far as I could tell, it cost nothing at all. I grabbed the three other loose runes from the ground; again, there was no change. With an inner grin I grabbed something larger, the feeder. It disappeared but this time I felt a faint thrumming through the threads of my aura. I looked at my status again. Nope, still no sign of mana loss. Perfect. With glee, I grabbed the four arrays holding my mana in place, the beam array, and all the remains of the array on the floor. When I was done, it had cost only a single point of mana. Storage costs minimal, check. With a mental shrug I grabbed what remained, my stand, Tam¡¯s chair, the wooden tree, the box and coins, and all the rest. I even grabbed all the statues, except for one. The recursive statue where Tam examined himself, even as his smaller statue examined me. I couldn¡¯t resist adding one more detail. I created a copy of myself larger than life and behind and above Tam, watching him. I drained everything that remained within my improvised mana storage and brought my mana up to forty-six. I tried to take the lights on the ceiling, too, but nothing happened. Oh well. I would have liked to use the feeder to get more mana for a while, but I knew better. I needed to keep going. I moved away through the stone, pushing myself backwards and away from the hallway. I quickly approached the current limit of my aura, extended more ahead of me even as I kept moving. There was a slight feeling of strain that built as I expanded my aura, but I ignored it until I was brought to an abrupt halt. Wait, what... why? I strained to move farther forward, but was unable. I quickly tried moving up and down. It was possible, but I started to curve back towards my former room. This¡­ could be bad. I experimented a bit. I reached backwards to the farthest extent of my aura, pushing my aura toward the hallway; I was dragged backward. Shit! It seemed I could only go so far from the edge of my aura. I tried extending aura farther in front of me. Maybe, if my aura was larger, I would be able to move farther. My aura extended just fine, but I was not able to move forward any more. Eventually, even my aura refused to extend forward any farther and I found myself unable to move all, hung suspended in the stone, as if tied to two taut ropes. Damn it! Are you kidding me? I have to stay where I put my fucking aura before? I pulled on my aura, trying to draw it back into myself. No luck. Ordering my aura to disperse, disconnect, unhook, or bunch up towards me did no better. I felt like something happened as I tried, but I don¡¯t have time to learn a new skill right now. I did my best to calm down. Do I have any other options for escape? I could only think of one, and it would likely be a horrible idea even if it worked out perfectly. Maybe the store? I quickly checked for anything I could buy. Useless, either too expensive or not relevant. I considered for a moment. I might, might, be able to go back and put everything back into place, but there was absolutely no way to conceal that I had gained a new level and a new ability. That meant the only real option, if I went back, was to communicate with Tam and hope for the best. The other option¡­ well, if it didn¡¯t work¡­ hopefully I¡¯ll still be healthy enough to go back. Oh god, this is going to suck so much. I really hoped this wasn¡¯t a terrible mistake. Guess I¡¯ll find out. A dozen feet behind me, I gathered the waving threads of my aura. I condensed them down into a circle, compressing them as much as I could, before twisting them so they formed a tight spiral. The strain started to vibrate through me. I pushed harder, even as it started to feel like an overextended muscle. Stop. Looked like my alter ego Exsan was not happy with what I was doing. I could feel an instinctual caution, a warning. That warning faded away once the threads would not condense any further. I paused for a moment, making sure the threads stayed contained, then tried to pull my aura back into me, again. Nothing. Great¡­ well here goes nothing. I directed the hooks in the spiral to start grinding against the other threads. Pain, and the instincts urging STOP! I had not felt pain in weeks. It was shocking, brutal, and Exsan howled in my head, mixing with my own instinctual human need to try to stop the pain. I kept going, pushed to the edge of my limits, pressing on against two sets of instincts. Blood should be spraying, my aura sawed against itself savagely. Snap! Threads ruptured under the continued sawing. The outer threads went first, lashing away like whips and hemorrhaging mana. Crack! I could feel something inside me, cracking. Crack! Finally, the last of the threads snapped apart leaving ragged edges of aura trailing behind me like a tattered lace veil. I felt a wave of something pass through me again, even as I could feel my disconnected aura for a moment longer, slowly drifting down and away. After a moment, the mana stopped gushing from the cut threads. A few notifications interrupted me.
Warning ¨C Negative Status Change! Crystal Status: 62% - Structure Compromised
You have forcibly activated a new skill! Aura Mobility I You may freely move within your aura. You may also direct areas of your aura to dissipate. Attempting to move outside your aura¡¯s established boundaries will automatically dissipate excess aura, except for a limited mobile sphere of aura centered on you.
Well¡­ I can¡¯t say that the pain wasn¡¯t worth it. Still worried about my core damage. Just like the ability said, my aura had reshaped itself into a sphere fifteen feet across. Not huge, but more than sufficient for my need to get away. Since I now had the means, I continued on, moving raw stone around myself like a ship parting the sea. Shortly after that I ran into a problem. There was a wall. Not made of something as insubstantial as stone. I¡¯m not that lucky. Nope, it was a wall of mana threads which shimmered with the glimmer of enchantment. My aura extended far enough to notice the faint curvature to the wall. Has to be a sphere. Tam, had laid down a final defense. Hope it¡¯s final. The threads of the wall crisscrossed across each other in different directions. It was not a perfectly uniform structure, but no gap was large enough for me to simply slip through. Great. Resigned, I followed the wall in a few different directions, looking for the largest gap. Eventually, found a gap that was larger, by a reasonable degree, but still too small for me. Gingerly, I hooked the threads, pulling them apart. These threads were unlike the beam enchantment. They were stiff, obviously meant to stay in place. It was a constant strain to pull them apart. Gradually, the stubborn threads moved farther apart. Just another inch! A bright thread of mana, an active spell, passed no more than a few feet from me. Shit! He¡¯s awake and searching for me. More threads of spellwork trailed along the interior of the wall. At first, it was only a few, but they quickly grew into a multitude. I frantically guided the many threads around me, still trying to open up the wall. The strain was mounting, and my crystal cracked further. A few interminable minutes passed amid the cracking as I heaved at the threads. Finally, I slipped through the barrier. Free. SSD 1.09 - Up Shit Creek Skills make all the difference. Prospectors will find the traces of gold in a stream where all others find only mud.
Quest Complete Route: Freedom Method: Deception Initial Difficulty Assessment: Severe Deception Bonuses:
  • + Quick Completion + Initial Escape Unnoticed - Damaged (Deduction Removed: Damage Integral to Escape) + Evaded Active Detection + Difficulty Level Escalated During Escape + No Escape Specific Skills Purchased + Low Level + Escaped on First Attempt
Rewards: Severe, Upgraded to Titanic with Bonuses
  • Hidden (Reward Deferred)
  • Title Given
  • All Skills Start at Level II
  • Current Skills Below II Raised to Level II
  • Skills and Abilities Returned
    • Destructive Assimilation II
    • Matter Fabrication II
    • Found Dungeon
Some formerly disabled abilities are now available for purchase.
Title Gained Escape Artist IV (Deception) You are a master of stealth and misdirection. No one notices your escape until you are long gone. +750 AP (50, 100, 200, 400) +Learn or purchase abilities focused on deception much faster or cheaper. (-20% cost) +Your Aura cannot be traced back to your core by anyone without a stronger detection title.
Destructive Assimilation II Disintegrate an object, plant, creature, etc... to gain knowledge of its component parts. More complicated materials and enchanted items may require analyzing more than one sample.
Matter Fabrication II Use mana to reconstruct items analyzed with Destructive Assimilation. Creating materials without an associated skill will be far more mana intensive. Some creations will require more than raw mana. Current Associated Skills: Earth Manipulation Found Dungeon Instantly create a dedicated dungeon space to attract adventurers. Subsections may be used to create separate areas with different properties. Dungeon areas are inherently easier for you to control. Only one dungeon may currently exist at a time, your previous one must be removed to found a new one. Founding a dungeon completely heals a damaged core.
My mind reeled under the assault of this sudden barrage of information. My aura billowed outwards, no doubt a consequence of my new skill Aura Mobility, moving from I to II. Despite my momentary disorientation, I was quite pleased with my new abilities. There had definitely been things lacking from my abilities before; now I had the proper tools to make a dungeon. Kind of ironic to call me a master of escape, when my absence was definitely noted before I was fully out of Tam¡¯s area of control. Still¡­ if that extra wall hadn¡¯t been there, I would definitely have been completely gone before he noticed. My musings were promptly cut short by the next notification.
Warning - Core Unstable! You have received massive damage to your core over a short period of time, and from internal forces, which has made your core unstable without a dungeon to ground you. You have 2 hours to found a dungeon to heal in or you will receive further damage.
Shit. There was absolutely no way that I wanted to build a dungeon right next to Tam. I had a hard time escaping the first time. If he found me again¡­ yeah, going to avoid that. Thinking about Tam felt odd. Huh, almost no pulse of anger from Exsan. Was he quiescent because I was free now? Or was that a side effect of the core being damaged? Ha, maybe it damaged our connection. Talk about silver linings¡­ I took a very quick look at my status, but didn¡¯t try to bring up the full thing, just looking at my ¡°health.¡± Ouch, forty four percent. Still, said it will completely heal when I found a dungeon, and I have a couple hours. For the moment, I considered what new options were available for purchase. With a new level in learning, everything was even cheaper to purchase, an additional 5% removed from the costs. And, as promised, there were new purchases showing up. They were mostly variations on each other, actually. For the first time there were a few one time use purchase options. All of them were related to teleportation. I could do a random teleportation, teleport to a generic place suitable for a dungeon, teleport somewhere that I already knew, or¡­ Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. I stopped, carefully reading over the last couple options that were available for purchase. They were expensive, at least by my current standards, and that was for a single use. I could barely afford one of them, and only because I just gained an extra seven hundred and fifty ability points, as well as the discount from Learning II. The best option was still out of reach¡­ but I would be able to get something that helped immensely. I brought up my status and a little timer was ticking down in it. Useful, if stressful. I had a little less than two hours to decide, and I needed to make the most of this time, so I started to move upwards. I would test my new abilities along the way. I could check any skill changes later; I could already tell one thing had changed, however. My passive mana generation had doubled. Presumably that was from Soul Mana II. I found my journey stopping abruptly, despite my original intention, when I reached out and used Destructive Assimilation on the stone around me. Taste. Texture. Joy. I hadn¡¯t eaten anything other than mana for weeks, and I thought that was just how a dungeon was supposed to be, but it now became clear that I was intended to have more. A tiny bit of stone dissolved and I could actually taste it. It tasted¡­ actually about how I imagined stone would taste. Mineral and metallic, and I could feel the texture of it crunching as it dissolved, like a piece of hard candy cracking between my teeth. If I had been human, using taste buds, I would have called the flavor disgusting. Apparently my sense of taste was altered with my change in form, because I found the rich complexity of the stone¡¯s composition delicate and refreshing. And, as I consumed other pieces of stone, the faint differences of flavor came in simultaneously with information on how to recreate the stone. So I did. It was easy. I replaced the small pieces that I had taken and the edges slotted into place naturally, creating a fully natural pattern. Earth manipulation slotted perfectly into Matter Fabrication and it was cheaper and easier than it had ever been. I could tell that these were a gestalt ability, the two halves doing far more together. I could only roughly sense the patterns that made the stone. I understood no molecular or atomic information, let alone anything deeper than that. However, I could tell that the pattern held more underneath. Perhaps one day I¡¯ll reach that far. Eager to try new flavors I threw myself upwards through the stone, using Earth manipulation to shift stone aside and push me upwards like a bubble of air slowly rising through honey. I tried the different strata of stone, savoring the subtle variations, and the occasional explosions of flavor of entirely new types. In a gluttonous haze I rose upward for a good ten minutes until I felt something truly new: flowing water. As I rose farther, I could tell it was more than that. It was quickly obvious that it was a sewer system. Faded brick walls, spotted with the occasional bright brick of a more recent repair, lined flat walls and rose to meet the solid stone of the ceiling. The stone beneath the water was solid and unmarked. Why bother with the bricks, why not all just solid stone? Easier for someone without magic to maintain, maybe? Was the floor made with magic, or just old enough that the water had removed any tool marks? The equally flat and perfect ceiling suggested magic, but enough care and polishing with precise tools would have produced an identical result. No way to say for certain. I couldn¡¯t feel any light, though everything in my aura was as clear as ever, save a few notable exceptions. The water was a haze of mana, though I could see insects and tiny fish outlined as even denser murky spots in the faint mistiness. Along the bottom of the sewer were small creatures; they looked like they belonged in the ocean. Small hardened cones attached to the stone under the water, and from the top they extended slightly fuzzy tentacles that would wave with the movement of the water, periodically curling back into the shell, only to extend again a moment later. Looks like a type of filter feeder. There were others types, too. Fans and tubes grabbed at the water as it passed. Everywhere I examined, the water showed more and more life. When I focused on the water itself, the haze resolved into countless tiny critters that looked like jellyfish, insects, and more. This¡­ this was a full ecosystem. A complete balanced biosphere. How long would a city need to exist for an ecology like this to evolve from a sewer? I could not even imagine. It would need to stay in more or less constant use too, or the ecosystem would die out. Many creatures had adapted to human cities back home, but nothing on this scale. This system was like a cross between an ocean reef and a cave. It was beautiful and insane. Somewhere along the line I had made a mistake. My experiences with Tam had exposed me to a whole two types of living creatures, other than dungeons: Mice-bugs and humans. Some part of me had looked at the game interface for the world and made the assumption that this world¡¯s life was simplified. Nothing could be farther from the truth, this tiny system was as complex as any from Earth. I looked at the water with wonder, though it was tinged with a certain dubious dread. There were some fantastic reasons for consuming some, but¡­ it was sewer water, and I was going to taste it. If I didn¡¯t taste... I wouldn¡¯t have even bothered to hesitate. Still, water was essential to life. And some of the creatures might be very useful. There is a fully functional ecosystem here, not acquiring it is stupid and wasteful. I only have two hours: DO IT. I sighed and started. Oh thank god. To my relief it did¡¯t taste bad. It tasted organic, in the same way that decomposing leaves smell of sweet cinnamon decay and new earth. As I drank, the water my mind opened. The water was simple. A clear signal that rang in my mind as a single pure note. However, it was surrounded by a symphony. Thousands, millions, of uncountable patterns swirled with unfathomable complexity. They were layered over each other and growing ever more complex as I consumed more. Overwhelmed, it took a few moment before I came back to myself. What was that? I could see vague shapes in my mind. They were impressions of what the completed products would look like. A rod and a tail, others with wiggling¡­ Wait. I know what this is. Bacteria. They seemed to be even more complex than all rest of the biosphere. I couldn¡¯t make out any particular separation between the various patterns of bacteria, though the fact that they were individuals in some fashion was obvious. If I was going to make them, they would all be made together. Probably for the best that I don¡¯t need to choose the specific bacteria I need out of so many different types. And there were other things in the water too. Complex molecular shapes perhaps? There was not enough information to say. I could see the various simple bits of stone and other things dissolved into the water as clearer signals that could be separated to be used individually. Something was wrong though. All the living creatures I could see with my senses continued on undisturbed. None of them had been absorbed. I focused on a small tentacle cone and tried to absorb it. Nothing happened, no matter how hard I tried. Are living organisms completely immune? Had I simply absorbed dead bacteria? There would be absolutely no shortage of that in the water. Or maybe it was a matter of size? I concentrated again, this time focusing on a particularly tiny jellyfish, smaller than a mote of dust. At first, I thought that nothing was happening. However, as continued my intense focus, pushing my skill, its mana drew dimmer, brighter, and then dimmed again. Its mana throbbed, pulsing faster and faster. Finally the mana winked out and the jellyfish vanished like bursting soap bubble. Again, information flooded my mind, and I knew the creature inside and out. It joined with disjointed information that was already present. Apparently, tiny traces of the jellyfish had already been absorbed from the water, but had I had gathered was not nearly enough to do anything with. Now, however, I knew that I could create it. Admittedly creating a tiny jellyfish smaller than people would even be able to see was not exactly going to inspire terror. It¡¯s a start. I took a look at my mana. Damn, are you kidding me? It had actually taken two mana to break the creature down. This was not an efficient way to harvest¡­ anything. I wonder¡­ It didn¡¯t look like any defenses remained, once they were dead, considering I had absorbed dead bits from the water, so I would just need to find a way to kill everything. Presumably, all the patterns from the DNA and cellular residue would be enough. Maybe? No way to know until I try it. If nothing else, I could kill some, then use the mana they release to forcibly absorb some whole ones. My thoughts turned to murder. What was the most efficient way to kill everything in a specific section of the sewer? When I tried to move the stone directly under the water, I felt it resisting. It still worked, but the closer the stone was to the water, and the life it contained, the more it cost to alter. The range restriction was not very far, but trying to manipulate anything within a few inches of the water quickly became prohibitively expensive. Let¡¯s see, I could create stone to cut off the water and ¡°drown¡± them all with air. Might take too long, and some of the ones with cones might last for hours, or more, with just whatever water remains inside. I could push stone in from the walls, like a trash compacter, though the restriction would make it expensive. No¡­ probably best to simply overwhelm sheer force. Gravity can work in my favor¡­ I lifted my crystal up farther within the stone, bringing the entirety of the stone walls and the ceiling several feet into my aura. There was still a small amount of resistance at the ceiling, likely from the small insects and the fungus I could feel on it, but it was much easier, and cheaper, than near the water. With a quick bit of destruction, I outlined a rectangle of stone. It was about a dozen feet long and smaller than the width of the sewers by several inches on each side. I cut stone free from the top, working from the inside and then working outward. I stopped when I felt the tension in the stone reach a peak. Several inches of stone remained attached to the ceiling all around the sides, forming a hollow rectangle. Next, I used a trick I learned from making sculptures, working to alter all the remaining stone simultaneously. I hollowed it out, making it increasingly porous, sabotaging the connecting stone, that last connection progressively weaker and weaker. Finally, a sharp crack rang out, and it came loose. A block of stone weighing multiple tons plummeted towards the water waiting below. The intricate ecosystem waiting below didn¡¯t have time to react before it was obliterated. The giant block of stone only fell a short distance, relatively speaking, but gravity had already decided it was going to move and inertia, bitch that she was, would not be denied. Upon hitting the water a shock wave of pressure propagated outwards. It claimed the first victims; organisms ruptured under the pressure differential. The stone had lost some tiny fraction of its momentum, the water carrying it away in a thunderous rush, but it hit the bottom only moments later. Shells and living tissue alike ground down to a thin paste beneath the inexorable weight and motion. The stone settled into the sewer channel, even as some of the solid stone beneath it cracked and buckled, with a sound like cracking thunder, fitting the crash of waves and the spray of water rising up and then cascading back down in a torrent that trickled down to rain. I was simultaneously delighted, though mildly sickened by the gore. Mana poured into me as I focused on sucking it up from the deaths, and it was deeply appreciated, but I did slightly regret the loss of life. Plenty more ecosystem here¡­ it will recover. Well, no sense letting it go to waste. I absorbed the paste under the stone and where it had been extruded from the sides. For a timeless moment I was lost to sensation. Holy crap¡­ The flavors were intoxicating. Obviously, living things were the most satisfying meal for me. Appropriate for a dungeon, I suppose. It tasted of umami, the bold savory flavor of flesh, and the vibrant mineral tastes of salt, marrow, and bone. And information flowed, just as intoxicating. Taste and a flood of information. All other thoughts were swept away. I tried my best to comprehend what I was learning, even as I felt it slot into place and become something I could use. Even with many trains of thought simultaneously brought to bear, I could only catch tiny flash: A vast intricate assemblage, perhaps a protein, parts of cells that looked vaguely familiar, and dual helical strands of DNA that stretched to infinity in both directions, or DNA that was folded and folded again into intricate knots. Gradually, as I absorbed all that I could, I became aware of the creatures that I could create, but even the simplest of living things had unimaginable amounts of detail. For all my clumsy attempts to grasp and recreate what I absorbed, I remained like a man making a sculpture. Everything was only surface level. The skill itself would handle the rest. SSD 1.10 - When You Really Need to Go Rule # 23 - Be wary of working with amateurs. They will, with the best of intentions, claim to be brave. And, if fortunate, they are. What they are not, however, is trained. In the moment of danger, they will instead do the first thing that enters their mind. ==Caden== I looked at the countdown, and then my available mana. I actually had a decent amount from, uh, cleansing this section. Yep, just a bit of very intense cleaning, nothing to see here. Assimilating the various bits of stone and organisms hadn¡¯t seemed to cost much. No idea what kind of mana situation I will have after I found my dungeon. Assimilate the items in storage now, when I have access to plenty of mana. I could kill more things to get more mana, if I needed it. Could level more, if I need too¡­? Eh, not worth the distraction, for the moment. My natural mana generation, now that I wasn¡¯t constantly drained, would let me level again in less than two days, and my next level after that wouldn¡¯t take much longer. Focus on what I can get here, first. I made a shelf in the now excavated portion of the ceiling. Waste not, want not. I put out all the items I had liberated when I left. There was a wooden tree, Tam¡¯s chair, a scrap of velvet, a bone cup, iron, gold, silver, copper, the special gold coins that glittered internally with mana, a wooden box with metal hinges, and a simple wooden table. I started with the wooden tree, absorbing it slowly. I already had replicas of it made in stone. I had replicas of them all in stone. I stopped halfway through the absorption. I could sense the intricate pattern that made up the tree it came from. With half of the material gone, I still had significantly less than half of the pattern completed. I could replicate the dead wood easily enough, but a living tree was not possible. Guess I¡¯m going to wait until I get better at absorbing things to do that one. Hmm. I should try with something less complex than wood, I¡¯ll leave the chair and table for later. The gold, silver, and copper coins proved simple enough. I could easily replicate the shape and the metals. I could even tell that each had impurities, though the primary patterns were easy enough to separate out. The hinges on the box were easy too. They looked like some form of brass, since they were copper with other things added in. I tried the velvet, and there was only the tiniest hint of another pattern underneath it. I dissolved a small piece of it, leaving the rest, which was enough to understand the structure of the cloth and material. The structure of the individual strands of material proved to be unexpectedly complex, but still ridiculously simple compared to a living pattern. I tried the bone cup. Again, the structure of the material was easy, but I was only getting a tiny bit of the living pattern. I stored the cup again, leaving what remained. I hesitated for a moment as I looked at one of the special gold coins; a pattern of mana ran through it. Eh, I might as well try.I tried to absorb a tiny section, but found the entire thing was absorbed. It was the easiest thing I had absorbed so far. I fully understood how to replicate the pattern of mana inside it, too. Huh... That was odd. I looked at the countdown. Less than an hour and a half left. For a moment I looked at the sewer water as it flowed, mostly over the giant block of stone, trying to decide which way to go. Idly, I stored the block of stone, allowing the normal flow to return. I had two equally good options. If I followed the water downstream I could potentially find an entirely new ecosystem. Who know wheres all this water collects? Plus, I might find a place where random objects that entered settled in stiller waters; there might be all sorts of useful items and patterns. The other way was an equally good choice. Heavier objects would settle to the floor of the sewer near where they entered, and there might be grates, which would hold lighter objects. Upstream would also be richer in both nutrients and remnants from plants and animals from the surface. The nutrient density might also mean larger organisms. However, the closer I came to any entrance, the more likely I was to run into people. Eh, not planning to be here long anyway, shouldn¡¯t cause me any issues. Ultimately, I decided to go upstream. I want more than just an underwater ecosystem or two. I missed the sun, the grass, trees waving in the breeze, and all the beautiful life from Earth. Water was beautiful, but I wanted more than that. Decision made, I followed the water upstream. A few new interesting species caught my attention and they suffered tragic precision rock falls, only for the remnants to mysteriously dissolve away. So strange, yep, totally random accidents. I stored the bits of stone afterwards, each time. I might be leaving holes in the ceiling, but I would at least try not to obstruct the flow of the water. Bound to be some poor sap¡¯s job to come down and fix this kind of thing. At each junction I followed the water upstream. The water gradually grew deeper, the junctions tending to divert the outflowing water into multiple streams, and so congregating as one went upstream. When the water had reached more than waist height, I encountered the first lifeform I would actually consider alien. The mice-bugs had been odd, but wouldn¡¯t have been out of place on Earth. Just an unusually large insect, more or less, or some kind of animal that developed protective plating. This on the other hand¡­ It looked like a ball of transparent jelly, and moved with exquisite slowness on the bottom of the sewer. It left a clean path of stone behind it, scoured of anything organic, like someone had taken a giant spatula and scraped a foot wide path on the bottom of the sewer. Even as I watched, I could see the creatures inside it gradually dissolving. This, this is exactly the kind of thing that would be perfect for my dungeon. Besides... I want to study it. I took my time to carefully cut a three foot cube from the stone, exactly above it, which wasn¡¯t particularly challenging, considering how slow it was. The cube smashed through the water and flattened the unsuspecting ball of slime. Bits of slime jetted out from under the cube, thrown away by the force of the sudden impact. The rest oozed out from under the cube. I quickly absorbed all the dead material. Unfortunately, that didn¡¯t include the slime. What the hell? Despite being crushed, the slime was utterly unharmed. Even the bits farthest away, disconnected from the rest, were unable to be absorbed. Shit, really? Bits of the slime began to slowly inch back together. Apparently it was immune to being crushed. And to having pieces of it torn off. Whatever it took to kill one of these, I just didn¡¯t have it. Great, now I want one even more. I tried something I hadn¡¯t done yet, but trying to put it in my storage did nothing. A quick test showed that nothing living could be stored either. Actually, not quite true. Fish eggs actually could be stored. Seems a little arbitrary, but sure, why not. With no idea how to kill or store the slime, and limited time, I grumbled to myself, but I moved on. Following the main flow of the sewers farther upstream, my faith was finally rewarded. Seeds. I found the first tiny seed floating in the water. Absorbing it proved impossible, but it popped into my storage without issue. So eggs and seeds can be stored, but not absorbed directly. Potential living things appeared to operate under slightly different rules. Again, a rather arbitrary distinction, but I don¡¯t make the rules. Guess it is a good thing that I don¡¯t have to destroy the seeds to collect them. Continuing upstream, I passed slimes with increasing frequency, also seeing more seeds and other organic materials. The seeds were stored away, and the various sticks, twigs, and bits of bramble were dissolved if they were sufficiently dead. Otherwise they were stored too. Being more recently dead, the patterns for the living form showed up in my head fairly easily. I treasured each new plant, as well as the eggs and seeds I acquired. Each one represented a living organism that I might never be able to acquire again in the future. Who knows if I¡¯ll ever be here again? Not likely. As I continued forward, the fish and other life on the bottom got larger. I collected eggs where I could, but I was keeping an eye on my countdown as it got closer and closer to zero. With less than twenty minutes left I hurried along the rushing current, moving through the stone underneath the sewer as fast as possible. Do a last stone collapse when the timer is almost at zero, get what I can. I finally started to find corroded pieces of metal, which were welded to the stone beneath by rust, verdigris, and various corrosion. The slimes wither couldn¡¯t destroy the metal as quickly, or perhaps simply failed to consider them food and so didn¡¯t absorb them at all. The metal was absorbed like everything else, and I continued on. I even found another piece of the strange mana imbued gold. It had the same pattern, and had settled into a tiny dip in the stone floor. I stored it absentmindedly, moving on. The clock counted inexorably downward. I started coming across small dead animals floating in the water. No doubt I confused the poor fish as their meals simply dissolved away. Many of the tiny corpses were the already familiar mice-bugs, or a very close relative. Maybe I should find a better name for those eventually¡­ I also found a considerably larger variant. Rat-bugs? I encountered plenty of more normally structured insects as well, both dead specimens and living ones feeding on various refuse or along the walls. It seems cockroaches are eternal. It figured the only animal, other than humans, I had come across in this world that I knew would be something I could do without entirely. Oh well, they are excellent survivors, maybe I can scale them up into some kind of dungeon monster? If not, something would enjoy eating them. I could feel the clock ticking down. I decided to ignore, at least somewhat, my caution and rose up farther through the stone, so that my aura would extend out wider. I could see some additional tunnels off to the sides now. And people. Shit! I just kept moving for the moment. The two people I saw were in a side tunnel. That tunnel had small paths raised above the water for people to walk on. They wore leather boots that extended well above their knees. Sensible shoes for down here. They both seemed stopped moving, transitioning from calm to agitated. Their glances searched the tunnel by the torch that one held slightly behind and above his head, their heads turning this way and that. Huh, it that the proper way to carry a torch? Never knew. I wasn¡¯t sure if they were agitated because they were in the sewers, they could sense me somehow, or something else. Think they can sense me, sadly. At least there are in a completely different tunnel. They were arguing now. Their voices raised, and gesticulating at each other. The one with the torch seemed to have a placating tone to their voice, his body language crouched and submissive. The torchbearer turned, trying to run away. The other man pulled a knife from his belt, throwing it at the other. It looked like he was aiming for the heart, but the man¡¯s running steps slipped for a moment, causing the knife to go lower and more toward the center as the man over corrected. The knife, now firmly embedded in the center of his back, stuck into the center of the spine. Blood seeped out around the wound, but it was less than I expected. There was a faint stirring of blood-lust from Exsan, but it was no more than a faint whisper. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. The man¡¯s legs collapsed under him mid stride, severed the spine, and he hit his head on the wall, then bounced back into the water. The other man took a quick step toward the body as the torch quickly extinguished in the water. He grimaced at the fish that were already attracted to the blood in the water and pulled out a stone that shone with light and mana. He ran in the opposite direction and was quickly out of sight. Why didn¡¯t he use the light stone before, instead of using the torch? Maybe it required a charge or something. I shook off my thoughts. Shit! I could feel the man in the water, the blood as it seeped out, and countless fish coming to eat. A slime was slowly halting and turning around in response to the blood, too. I hesitated. Should I just not interfere? That would be easy and I could just take the body¡­ No. NO. That is not who I am, that is not who I want to be. It was sure as hell not who I was going to be either. Life might be cheap here on this new world, as I had fairly good evidence of right in front of me. But I¡¯m not from here. Heaven knows that life was still cheap plenty of places on Earth, but I knew better than that. I was raised better. If all I brought with me here was my memories and knowledge, then I will make those mean something. If I lose everything I was, the moment I¡¯m away from Earth, just because it was easy¡­ Then my dedication to being moral, to being a good person, was never more than surface deep. Anyone who thinks that morals should be abandoned when no one is there to enforce them¡­ Well, they were no more and a monster hidden under a shallow skin. Beside all that, it was possible, likely really, that they had sensed me, and the argument was related to that. The death would be my fault. Not sure exactly what about me made one turn on the other, though¡­ Hoping to distract me with their dying companion, so they could escape whatever monsters I might be sending? I mean¡­ the distraction worked, but not for the right reasons. Not that it was necessary at all. I tried to take a steadying breath, bringing a jarring awareness of my own lack of a body for the first time in a while. Right, no lungs. It was funny how much the habit of taking deep breathes was ingrained, even after my body was left behind. Okay, break the problem down: First I needed to get him out of the water, and away from the fish, so he wouldn¡¯t drown, be eaten, or both. The slime was slow enough that I didn¡¯t need to worry about that. He would be dead of drowning long before it arrived. How the hell am I going to get him out of the water? The man was buoyant, at least, and floating on top of the water; unfortunately he was face down with the knife sticking up out of his back like a macabre fin. Don¡¯t eat him fish, can¡¯t you see he is a brother? Not that fish don¡¯t each other all the time any way¡­ What¡¯s a little cannibalism between friends? Well it looked like the timing on my humor was as inappropriate as ever. I couldn¡¯t actually do much, other than manipulate stone or dissolve things. Or use storage, but it isn¡¯t like he would go inside before he died, even tissue that is too alive won¡¯t go. I couldn¡¯t move stone too near living things either, not without paying more mana than I had. Right¡­ this is impossible. How can I prevent him from drowning, let alone the rest, if I cannot touch him? Wait¡­ I had things in storage. Tam¡¯s wooden chair... The wood should float, right? I really hoped so. And placing things into storage had been easy, even when living things were nearby. Hopefully the reverse is just as easy. With a faint ripple, the chair appeared in the water beneath the man, then floated up beneath him. Cost more than it should, but still no more than one mana. The chair didn¡¯t do much, on its own, to lift the man up, but it was a start. Working as fast as I could, I extended a tendril of stone out of the wall, slightly down stream. As the man slowly floated by I clamped the stone onto the back of the chair where it protruded from the water, and lifted it up. I kept the man firmly centered, shifting slightly when he wobbled. Water and fish poured back into the sewer. I quickly cut and stored a portion of the wall to make a hollow, though small bits of living fungus and insects fell to the ground as the bricks and mortar they clung to vanished, and drew the man into it. I eased him off the chair and onto the floor. Damn, wish I had time to make that scrap of cloth into a proper rug for him. Jarring him with the stone might make things worse¡­ though honestly probably not any worse than everything I did to get him out of the sewer. I placed the chair back into storage and simply looked at the man. Now what? I could feel his pulse as a vibration in the air and stone, but he was not breathing, and various bits of his flesh were nibbled away from the short time he had been in the water. Blood mixed with the water beneath him, growing to form a reddish pool. Well, I should be able to replicate anything I absorb, right? And I had already absorbed things from right next to living objects. So¡­ there were a few potential ways I might be able to help. God, I hope this works, here goes nothing. I absorbed the pool of blood and I was overwhelmed by patterns once again. I could tell that something was missing though. I had the shape of the man, but it was lacking detail. Maybe I need more than just DNA? Perhaps I needed the various types of cells. I had smashed my previous prey to bits, but there would have been plenty of mostly intact cells amidst the debris. Right. I examined the body more closely. The top layer of skin was supposed to be dead, but the layer of mana around the body was clearly covering it. No wait¡­ there. A small gobbet of flesh hung from the wound on the back. It was clearly not protected anymore. Cannibalism ho! I absorbed the flesh. Oh god, that should not taste so good! More information flooded into me. It was not conscious knowledge now, but I could see the pattern and how it was supposed to go¡­ mostly. The man¡¯s pattern was still off, not that I found that greatly surprising. The pulse was weakening. The mana barrier around the man wavered for a moment, before snapping back into place. Okay¡­ there might be something that I can do with that. He is dying, for sure, without my help, so at least I cannot make things worse. I wrapped a tendril of stone around the knife and prepared to extract it. For a brief moment, the mana barrier around the man faded to nothing again. With a flash, I pulled out the knife and stored it, while another part of my mind simultaneously absorbed a small cross section of the wound taking advantage of the momentary absence of the normal barrier. I would need the information on how the bone, nerve, and everything else worked if I was going to repair the wound, and what I absorbed would give it to me. At the same time, another shard absorbed the water straight from the man¡¯s lungs, while one more absorbed anything else that didn¡¯t belong in the blood. He had fallen with an open wound into the sewer; it would be foolish of me to repair the wound only for him to die of sepsis later. As soon as the full pattern resolved in my mind, snapping together into a coherent whole, more parts of myself sprung into action. Several minds worked together on the wound, since it was the most serious issue and needed the most attention. Mana poured out of me as flesh knit to flesh, bone to bone, and nerve to nerve. Other parts of the man¡¯s pattern felt off and were absorbed then repaired by other parts of myself. They might be old issues, but there was no sense in taking chances. Another mind repaired the bites from the fish, gouging away slightly more with absorption to insure the wounds were clean and then layering on new tissue. Another replicated some extra blood into his arteries, careful not to add more than a small amount. An instant later and it was done. I was almost dry of mana; everything I had gained by reaping life here in the sewer, and more, was gone. I looked at my timer. Crap! I had less than a minute. I looked at the man. He had started to breathe again and the mana barrier around him was strong. He should be fine right? I looked at the slime, even as I realized that there was no light down here. Oh fuck me! I could imagine the slime rolling over top the man and extending down into his throat¡­ Yep, no, not going there. Damn it! If I left him like this then he would probably still die. Okay, time to move as fast as possible. I cut the slab of stone under the man, making it into a rectangular platform, and lifted him up into the air, even as my core approached through the stone. I had still been cautious when I encountered the two men, leaving my core inside a wall, but the time for caution was over. Need to be able to see light, I¡¯ll see that farther than my aura can. My core came up, emerged from the stone, and a tendril of stone gripped me carefully, then I was moved and slotted into the front of the stone slab. Tendrils of stone came out of the walls, even as the slab was lifted up and out of the recessed hole into the tunnel. A tendril of stone reached from ahead even as others pushed from behind, catching the platform and moving me as swiftly as I could manage. Honestly it wasn¡¯t that much. I was fairly sure I could have moved faster in my old body with a brisk jog. For a piece of crystal, I¡¯m moving pretty fast. I followed the tunnel upstream, instantly feeling when my timer hit zero. A searing pain filled the world. I had no body, no place to ascribe the pain to, but that provided no relief. Very faintly, I could feel Exsan screaming in my head. For a brief moment I lost track of myself and the stone stopped moving. The man started to slide towards the front as he decelerated and I hurriedly started moving again. Wish I could go faster. For a brief moment, I considered dropping him off in a quick alcove again. It¡¯s just pain. I had dealt with migraines in my last life, the first coming at the age of five. I had rolled on the floor clutching my head at the pain. I had been highly resistant to novocain and had no idea until I was an adult. I had suffered exquisite agony at dentists for years, simply because I assumed that numbing was only supposed to take a tiny edge off the pain. The system message had said that forming a dungeon would heal me, completely. I couldn¡¯t simply form a dungeon right here; I didn¡¯t know how long I would need to keep a dungeon. And if I just leave now, he will almost certainly die. I just needed to endure for a little more, and then I would be fine. The pain did not subside. It was growing. Don¡¯t think about it, don¡¯t think about it. I repeated this to myself over and over again as a mantra, losing myself in the action. I let the pain wash over me, not allowing it to engage. Mastered pain before, staying still in a dentist chair. I will overcome. My reverie came to an end when I sensed light passing through my aura in a parallel tunnel. The sudden shock of awareness almost allowed the pain to overwhelm me. I immediately opened a passage between the two tunnels and hurried my unconscious passenger though. Someone is going to be very confused by all the changes I made in the sewer. As I entered the tunnel I could see the light off in the distance. A faint shape of light in the darkness. As I neared it, I could see stairs that lead up into the daylight, but they were blocked by a gate at the top. Really, another obstacle? I hurried up the stairs, and the air grew freezing. The man¡¯s breathes formed visible clouds of vapor in the air. As I got nearer to the light, much more entered into my aura. Dirt, leaves, grass, and sprouts of various plants were around me, all under a layer of snow. The bars of the sewer gate contained mana and extended far into the stone. For a normal person this would present quite the barrier. With a small thought I pushed the door through the stone until it popped out into open air, then I stored it. The stone I left behind was smooth and unmarked. Wonder if there are mages that can do what I just did with stone? If not someone is going to be wondering how I did this soon¡­ What am I even thinking, Tam could make stone regrow or dissolve. Definitely others that can manipulate stone like me. I emerged into the sunlight. The area was clear, with no foot prints I could see in the snow or even the soil beneath. Behind me was a stone cliff. Okay, just need to make sure the man is safe and I can leave. I kept myself attached to the cliff and moved to the side of the doorway. Other parts of myself had been frantically scavenging everything that they could as soon as the dirt had entered into my reach. Dead branches, seeds of dozens of types, snow and ice, dead leaves, insect eggs and carcasses buried within the dirt. The dirt itself was also stored and absorbed in giant heaping handfuls. One part of myself simply relished the feeling of being outside, starting to focus on all the various details. The beauty of the snow covered landscape and trees, the mountains visible all around, the sun¡­ What the hell is that? There, in the sky, was a large red ring. It was faint, but at least triple the width of the sun. Admittedly the sun looks smaller than on Earth. I have no idea what that is, though. If it was the planetary rings of a nearby planet it ought to have a shadow passing over them, unless caught at an absurdly perfect angle, and the planet itself should be visible too, but I couldn¡¯t think of anything else it might plausibly be in the moment. That part of my mind marveled even as the rest of me kept working. My hurry increased as I felt my aura begin to diminish. At the edges, where my aura was in the open air, it was unraveling. The threads disconnected, unfurled, and vanished into the raw mana it had been made from. Sure, one more thing, why not? I found a quartz outcropping a short distance from the entrance. It will have to do. I cut a section loose in the shape of a door. Just before I entered, the quiet scream of Exsan, which had been continuing this entire time, abruptly went silent, even as I heard a distinct crack in my core. The world flickered and it seems like a wave of something distorted for a moment. I had no time to think about that. I quickly stored sections of stone as they were cut away, and I moved backward into the cliff as fast as I could. My aura stabilized again as it reentered the ground. As I entered, I replaced the first section of stone, forming almost invisible hinges, barring the door from the inside. The quartz let in enough light to see dimly. Even from the short exposure outside, the man was shivering and his lips were turning blue. The man would freeze if I left him in wet clothes so close to the frigid landscape. I went as far back into the stone as I dared, the pain growing beyond my ability to bear, and I lowered the stone platform. There should be enough air in here to last a long time. I needed to get him warm. Cloth, I could do that. A part of my mind absently absorbed a loose thread hanging off the man as I started to work. I replicated the cloth and made it larger and thicker. I had replicated cloth in stone before, this was fairly simple. I could, however, feel the drain on my mana from creating even the single piece of cloth. I slid the man off the platform and onto thick rug of cloth. I replicated another, as a blanket, a couple feet above the man¡¯s body and watched it drop onto him. Well, that ought to be enough to hold off hypothermia. I looked at my mana, it was almost completely drained. There was nothing more I could do for the man, so I prepared to leave. Even as I did, however, another part of my mind had already been working, leaving an apology gift behind before the cloth was even done being made. Sorry for almost getting you killed¡­ assuming its my fault, anyway. Maybe this will help. All the coins I had in storage clattered to the ground clinking faintly, and then the blanket settle down over top of them. Even as I released the coins, and the cloth settled over him, another part of my mind made the purchase and 1575 ability points drained away.
You have purchased: Unclaimed High Resource Dungeon Location You will now be teleported to a dungeon location that will have the resourced you need in relative abundance. Still, while it will provide everything you need, and is not currently claimed by another dungeon, it is unlikely to be perfect, and resources often attract the attention of others. Teleportation Commencing!
Hope setting up that dungeon heals me like it promised. In a brief moment Caden was elsewhere. Without even looking around, with a push of will, Caden immediately founded his dungeon. SSD 1.11 - Interlude - Mourning Prayers Between two worlds life hovers like a star, twixt night and morn, upon the horizon''s verge. -Lord Byron The vales were mankind''s first homes. Protected from the elements, and capable of growing crops, these vales, save those threatened by grave dangers or lost, are still occupied by a human or Adar city. In these places, life thrives, and it does so in ways wholly foreign to the rest of the world. -From A History of Civilization ==Gnaeus (aka Tam)== I sighed, allowing the spell to dissipate. By Otga¡¯s devouring maw, now what? The core was gone. The room looked¡­ barren now. Entire sections of the wall were removed. The carvings, the emblems, my chair, the table. Everything was removed, with one glaring exception. A single sculpture remained. Like all of them, it was rough stone, with otherwise perfect detail. This statue depicted me examining a smaller version of myself, even as that one examined the core. I found it amusing at the time. It seemed merely a ridiculous artifact of the core following an iterative design, copying what it saw without understanding. It saw me staring at a statue of myself; so it copied that. There had been no creativity, apart from some entirely ineffective traps. And traps were perfectly normal for a dungeon. Not so amusing now. I stared at the core, larger than life, resting above the largest statue of myself. I smiled bitterly. There had been signs, and I had ignored them. I knew it was something more, of course, something new; it had been created that way. I was so sure. So sure that I restricted everything the dungeon was capable of doing. Especially since the dungeon never attacked me directly. If it were an old and sapient dungeon, maybe it could have restrained itself, though I still knew little of them. With me this close to the core¡­ any dungeon should have lashed out, if they could. That meant it had awareness and self-control. There were anomalies, so many, but I had ignored them, because its entire existence was anomalous. I looked at the statue again. What does it mean? It took everything else, but it left this one, even adding to the design. There was no way it hadn¡¯t left it on purpose. Is it a taunt, a mockery? A last message that even as I had studied the core, it had studied me and learned far more. That it had won. Maybe it was a gift? I laughed at this one, after all. Or was it some combination of those? A lighthearted gesture that declared it had fooled me? It could be¡­ well, anything. What kind of mind ruled over the core? Who knew, certainly not me. As I just proved. It might be so alien trying to understand it was fruitless. I shook my head. Too many possibilities. Was it self aware, from the beginning? Had the learning skill let it become sapient? Had everything been learned in such a short space of time? I shuddered¡­ If so¡­ It would learn so fast that it would be utterly out of anyone¡¯s control. I pulled in a blank soul. No skills, no abilities, no levels, no titles declaring the circumstances of its birth. How could that be a thinking mind? Was it more than it seemed? How far had my spells reached? How alien must that place be, to think but gain no skills. I pulled a silver lump of folerth from my pocket, looking at it with a frown, then putting it back away. Getting more would not be pleasant. I barked a laugh. Get more for what? It wasn¡¯t like I needed to contain a dungeon core anymore. Sure, I would need more emblems in the future, but I would be able to take my time with those. I would use other materials, other methods, unless I needed them truly permanent. I reached out; I felt the aura left behind and drifting in the room. How did it shed this much aura? It simply left it behind. Absurd really. A dungeon core retreated, left its territory, even abandoned its aura. I had never heard the like. If anyone told me this story, I would have called them fools to believe it. The dungeon had built its aura up more than I had realized. This aura was far wider than the breadth of the room. A long narrow stretch extended deeply into the wall. I should have checked the aura, every day. A spell secured the fraying remnant now, affixing it in place. I had actually had to tow it back upwards. The aura, disconnected from the core, had started to sink down into the earth. Already, the aura felt different, lacking the characteristic pressure of a dungeon¡¯s aura. Flickers of raw mana condensed and sparked across the suspended aura. I¡¯ll study it later. I sighed again. For now, I would check my precautions, just in case. My staff made soft clicks, the noise echoing back from the walls as I walked. Quickly, my former containment room was left behind. Not worth dwelling on. A dungeon core, let loose beneath a major city. I would have been happy in the middle of nowhere, but no, the guild objected. On their head be it, should something happen. And on my own¡­ The city had not been attacked for centuries. And who cared if I was high level. It was not like my abilities were best displayed in a battle anyway¡­ well, not exactly true. Some of my abilities could be displayed very well in a battle indeed. The point, however, was that I would need to set everything up well in advance. But no, of course law and tradition were not to be trifled with. No matter how stupid they were. I would have happily gone off and made my own lab anyway, but the people sent out by the guild to persuade me to come back would have been more trouble than the privacy was worth. Except now¡­ a dungeon was loose beneath the city. An apparently mobile dungeon. I shuddered. That could go¡­ very wrong. All the mobile dungeons I knew of were very powerful. Whether that was a product of their mobility or vice versa I couldn¡¯t say. Eh¡­ I would blame guildmaster Matonasucus if it came down to it. I had wanted to build my lab in the middle of nowhere. Not that Matonasucus knew exactly what I was doing down here. I had told him it was dangerous, but he knew better than to ask for details. Either that or he truly didn¡¯t care. It was always hard to tell. A smile came to my lips as I remembered how reluctant he was to build a lab for me, at least at first. Some drivel about impracticability and expense. Of course that had changed quickly when I mentioned I might get back into guild politics if I was bored. He had quickly become gracious. So predictable. The plain stone shifted to a tiled blue floor with creamy marble walls. The tiles on the floor were almost completely hidden beneath plush rugs. Why even bother with the tiles? The rugs absorbed the sound even as light enchantments hung in the air beneath an intricately painted ceiling. I rolled my eyes at the extravagance. The guildmaster had decided to get a subtle revenge by telling the architects, workers, and stone shapers that the dwelling needed to match my elevated status. Or maybe Matonasucus actually thought this was an appropriate bribe to keep me away from guild politics? He certainly enjoyed his own indulgences. I sighed again. Even as I came to check on the core, earlier this morning, my spell continued to tell me that its status was unchanged. Everything was as it should be. Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere. My laughter barked out and faded into a hard edged smile. As it should be. And the core was gone. The useless opulence passed on either side until I reached my own personal core. The center of my subterranean home. This room was one of the few rooms I had bothered to make sure stayed plain. The center of the room held a grey stone platform raised up to waist height. The walls held six emblems, glimmering with folerth. Each connected to the others, gathered mana, and sent it down a single silver line that traveled across the floor and up the platform. The mana flowed into six mana batteries set into the sides of the platform. My primary defenses were here, creating a three layered shield. One covered just this room. All my defenses were potentially useless if this room was compromised. The most intricate emblem created the next layer. That layer covered everything down here except the containment room. And after that was the final shield. My final measure to ensure that the dungeon would be contained even it somehow escaped, or started to produce monsters. It had failed. There was no way the dungeon core should have been able to fit through the shield. The dungeon core. Was that even the right term anymore? Certainly it was more than merely that now. Some of the ancient dungeons were self aware. I had honestly not found the information too surprising, given the increasing complexity in dungeons as they aged. However that had not stopped an Adar from confronting me and swearing me to secrecy anyway. Other than emblems, dungeons were my specialty. And neither specialty had been enough to contain this new core that I had infused with a human soul. And it wasn¡¯t just any human soul either¡­ No, I had needed one from some other place. Any human soul on this world refused to join with the core. They already had abilities and skills. Their nature was too solid to join with it. Even the soul of a new born child, dead on delivery, was incompatible. I had needed a truly blank slate. I thought I had managed to snag a soul before it joined with a body. And the dungeon, while developing quickly, seemed mostly normal. It wasn¡¯t like anyone really had a chance to observe a dungeon core before they founded a dungeon, so nothing had seemed too strange, considering that and its unusual origins. Right until it disappeared. I scowled as I looked at the shield emblems. Every piece of it said that it was functioning perfectly. Useless. I turned on my heel and walked away. My staff making the occasional click on exposed pieces of tile. I walked to the stairs that lead to the surface. How long had it been since I had been out of this place? I rubbed my eyes. Months, at the least. Had Thaw come yet? It should have, by now, but the heavens were always fickle. I turned aside from the stairs for a moment and went to my bed chamber. I took off my robes and replaced them with simple white ones. No doubt their simplicity would annoy the guildmaster, but I was beyond caring. I had been for years. My feet led me back to the stairs, and I climbed. This might be the only place I actually appreciated the softness of the rugs. I was far below the city here, and the interminable climb gave room for my thoughts to wander. I had wanted to make a true impact on the world. All of this effort came of that. I had read the histories, I had seen the ancient tomes. I knew what was waiting for us. Civilizations had risen before. We had no idea how many, but they all fell in the end. Some fell to obvious things, individual civilizations dying off to war, plague, to their own stupidity. Those were not what truly concerned me. I was worried about the cycle. The cycle was not truly hidden, anyone could see it if they read and studied, if they made connections. Civilizations all across the world would face disaster simultaneously, and they would end. And we didn¡¯t know why. No one did. We knew the last one was caused by ash. The whole world bathed in it and locked into Freeze for a century. However, they were not all like that. Innumerable causes, and some so sudden that no records of the catastrophe that caused them existed. The scholars did not talk much about it. The ruling class ignored it entirely. I had not been so blind to it. How many decades was it now? How long had I felt the disconnect from my society? Three¡­ no it was almost four now. Even then I had been considered a rare talent. So I had used that talent and the wealth it had brought me. I leveraged them into a meeting with the best Seer in the world. I remembered meeting with her. She had no name. Like all Seers she was simply addressed as Seer. Usually they ended up being known by where they resided, or some aspect of how they perceived time. Her name was long buried in the past, even as she gazed into the future. And I had explained about the cycle, though she had simply nodded. Her knowledge of the future saw this. She could see the disaster. And not just one. A countless horde of disasters that could snip the threads of fate. And she explained to me the most important thing about what she saw. The future was not fixed. The warp and weft of fate was constantly being woven. A single thread cut, or moved, in the right place, could change everything. I was not alone in asking how to break the cycle. The rulers of nations, scholars, would be heroes, had all come and asked. Of course this question had been asked before. I hadn¡¯t truly supposed that I was unique in asking. I had almost despaired when she told me this. When she said that some had no possibility, and even those that did almost always had possibilities too tenuous for her to grasp. But she did say that she saw a way forward for me. And so she had given a possibility and a warning. A dungeon core with a human soul could break the cycle of the world. However, that cycle¡¯s end could be freedom and salvation, or despair and destruction. And how many times had I cursed her, and myself, in the decades that followed? I had deemed it impossible many times, but always I had returned to my quest. Was this what was meant to happen? Would this break the cycle? I had no idea. I had hoped to break the cycle myself with the knowledge I gained from the dungeon. I thought, at the least, my knowledge would empower some future hero. Hubris, it was the new dungeon core itself that would determine the future, now. My thoughts settled back into order as I reached the top of the stairs. I paused for a moment, my breath slightly labored, and then opened the door. The guild building was much as it always was. Servants and apprentices scurried hither and thither for their studies, or masters. And everywhere was a cacophony of sound. It washed over me as I walked the corridors. The babble of indistinct voices grew more comforting as I continued. I had stayed away too long. For all that my worry remained, my breath came surer and my step livened. I made my way to the exit and stepped out. The sun, Shurum, was high in its arc, and the day was biting cold. Snow lay a few feet high in all the shadowed places. It was not yet Thaw then; it was late. A tiny distance away from the sun, I could see his counterpart. The glowing ring of the maw, Otga. Soon Otga would excite her husband Shurum to passion, and Thaw would finally come. I could see the ageless valley walls that sheltered Allalus covered thickly in snow. Few indeed would travel in Freeze. Only merchants in their endless rounds between the cities and adventurers tramping back and forth to the nearest dungeon would use the roads now. The sun glinted off the snow and everything seemed as it always had been. Was it truly the same? My eyes were drawn to the north, to the most spectacular sight of the entire valley. A waterfall and a cliff. Of course it was not just any waterfall, it was the waterfall, Plucia. A cascade of water flowed down and over a mile high cliff of granite. And it flowed year round. With Freeze as late as it was, the water was thin, but it was also at its most magnificent. Water, frozen as it ran down the cliff, formed thousands of fantastical icicles and floes. The cliffs to the side were covered in sheets of glassy ice formed from traces of spray. The light of morning and evening made the cliffs into mirrors, making the whole edifice shine like a torch. The Frozen Flame, it was called, sacred to the followers of Otga, and it was only present just before and after her courting dance started. Even now the glinting of the light in the water and ice was majestic, but I found my eyes drawn to the heavens. Otga and Shurum, what have I wrought? And if I have broken the cycle, will it be creation or destruction? My steps grew heavier as I made my way toward Otga¡¯s temple. More than ever I hoped that she would hear me. She ruled over fire, darkness, and chaos. If any knew what my changes might herald, it was she. I had walked slowly, and the sun was getting ready to go down as I reached the temple on its hill. The gleaming black and crimson of the temple felt heavy and comforting. Waiting, I eventually made it to the temple¡¯s altar where it overlooked the valley. I gave myself to a brief but heartfelt prayer. ¡°Otga, have mercy on us all.¡± As if in answer, the sun caught the cliff just right and the The Frozen Flame burst into fiery light, the descending mist of the water burning like lava as it descended into the shadows of the waiting lake below. SSD 2.0 - Arc 2 – The Making of a Dungeon And Otga, jealous of her brother''s light, stole a piece unto herself. Jealously she held it close to her body and treasured it. However, the chaos of her nature could not be denied. She infected the light with her grasp and it began to consume all. Thus fire entered the world. -Myths of Creation: Folktales and Folklore All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God. -Thomas Brown Arc 2 ¨C The Making of a Dungeon It is commonly acknowledged by the major religions that Yamash, the hermaphrodite God of balance, was the first of the gods to come into existence, though the exact nature of their creation varies from religion to religion. Even within the same religious tradition, it can vary heavily from account to account. The disparities are sufficiently varied that no uniform record can be created, though accounts of their nature are closer to harmony. Some religions record Yamash¡¯s birth as a counterpoint to nothingness, from the need of the great and infinite void to be filled. Others claim that they have existed forever, or that they created themselves, or that time did not exist until they created it. Still more insist that they were co-created with the universe, each inextricably bound to the nature of the other. The origins of Shurum, God of order, and Otga, Goddess of chaos, are, if anything, even more convoluted. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. Interestingly, accounts referencing the time of their, and often humankind''s, creation share a particular phrase in multiple texts. This phrase, depending upon the source and translation, can read different ways. In certain sources Yamash had a partner, Bynzug, and covered himself in darkness when they died. Then Bynzug split apart to create Shurum and Otga. Other sources say his face was ¡°shadowed with grief" when Shurum and Otga, his children in this account, fought over dominion of the universe. Different accounts claim he ¡°hid his face in darkness,¡± in grief over the fall of humanity. A third category of accounts diverges notably. In these, before the shadow, comes light. In some cases this is the birth of Shurum, followed by the darkness of Otga''s birth. Yet another account speaks of "celestial fire" which Yamash used to drive mankind from paradise. after they had proved unfit stewards, and they found their new home filled with blessed darkness. A different text speaks of "the fires of creation," used to make the world, which Yamash dimmed afterward to spare mankind destruction, for they were ¡°unable to bear the purity of the joining fire.¡± Regardless, there are a few consistencies which define the gods of the world. Yamash is always the God of balance, and their dominion is the night, where they show their glorified face. Unlike the other gods, their position is eternal and unchanging, and though their face is bright it is not blinding, nor is it changeable as Otga. Though they rule the night, they have charged Otga and Shurum to maintain the balance of day, also standing as a symbol for Yamash allowing their children to rule over the world actively. Shurum is the God of order. He is the God of light, ice, and reason and his face is the sun. He provides light, but he is cold and distant, unless moved by the passion of his counterpart. Otga is the goddess of chaos. She shares the day with Shurum and is both fire and darkness. She represents passion and change, but is inherently unstable. Her passion would ignite the whole world, save that Shurum withdraws from her presence. Her face is the celestial maw. SSD 2.1 - Interlude - The Lucky Fool Fortune has no meaning, nor victory the prize, save when we acknowledge, life is what they¡¯re for. Praise then be to Otga, Shurum takes his given due, light and darkness find you, live yet one day more. -From ¡°What It¡¯s For,¡± a poem by Aoleic Ethassa. ==Sevso== Confusion greeted me, as I awoke. I woke feeling¡­ good, for one. Better than I had in years. In the dim light, coins glinted in a pile next to me, a blanket shifted as I sat up; two new titles announced themselves: Lucky Fool V and Back from the Brink I, seen as I automatically triggered to see an overview in response to a prompt. These, alone, were staggering, however, I froze on seeing another change announced: single new status effect: Life Debt. Wait what? I stared with disbelief as I saw my new titles and condition, but though I jolted with sudden energy it did little to clear away the clouds in my mind. The faint light revealed the bare stone of a cave, or¡­ I looked around more closely. No, too square, too regular. A home, buried into the stone? Not on a bed, though. I remembered¡­ arguing. I¡¯d felt the presence of a dungeon, but I wasn¡¯t alone. Tadius had clearly sensed it too. We argued about the reward. Not much of an argument. I was no fool. I was no match for him. I was more than willing to give up the majority to him. It hadn¡¯t been enough. There had been a gleam in his eyes as they hardened. A gleam I had seen before, and had hoped never to see turned my way. Tried to do more than break my bones. I had turned to run, not really expecting to succeed, but hoping desperately. Then everything was a mishmash of images. I slipped slightly on the wet ground, a bloom of pain, my head hit stone, and I toppled backwards into the water. The cold shock of it faded with the pain, my mind drifting away. I knew I was going to die. Except, now I had woken up. Who saved me? I was damp, but I felt a soft bit of thick cloth blanketing me, with another laid beneath. The one below was sodden with water. Must have come from my clothes. I recalled the pain in my back again, reaching around to feel. There was still a hole in my shirt, but my body was smooth and unmarked. I was unmarked anywhere. I didn¡¯t have scars anymore. I didn¡¯t have any injuries at all, old or new. I was laying on a blanket that was wet, on cold stone, and I was not even sore. I called up my health¡­ I stared. Impossible. One hundred percent, perfect health. No one in the slums was ever at perfect health. Maybe we started out that way, when we were born, though I wouldn¡¯t count on it. And as we grew, forget it. By the Maw¡­ No one was in perfect health¡­ without powerful healers. I looked around the room again. Except room isn¡¯t quite right, either, is it? It was simply a long stretch of empty space carved into the stone. There was something at the far end, with faint light pouring through, but it looked like natural stone. So, what¡­? A healer and a stone mage found me and then shoved me inside a room they carved into the stone? Why bother? If they really wanted to heal me, why not just bring me to an inn? Why leave me in wet clothes, but have blankets soak up the water? Sounds like an old story. Some spirit passing by that helps, but doesn¡¯t really understand humanity. Fixes the problem in a roundabout way. I shifted slightly, marveling again at the ease. I suppose this would help explain my new title. What ridiculous circumstances led to me being healed by someone that powerful? And who owns me now? I called up my full status.
Status Name: Sevso Race: Human Subtype: Male Health: 100% - Perfect Health Status Effects: Life Debt (Permanent) Mana: 50/50 Primary Level: 5 Class: Street Tough Former Classes: Orphan, Urchin, Pickpocket Ability Points: 7850
Class Skills: Intimidate II Street Sense II Strength I Toughness I Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more. Borrow Authority I
Titles: Orphaned Survivor II Thief II Muscle I Lucky Fool V Back from the Brink I
More titles and I might need to hide them like my normal skills. That AP though! I called up my notifications.
Back from the Brink I You survived that which should have killed you. Did you learn caution or boldness? +100 Ability Points +All skills are easier to learn while you are in personal danger. (+10% Bonus to Learning) Lucky Fool V A series of circumstances, entirely out of your control, have conspired to save you from grave peril. The power of luck shone so brightly that you are left with a residual glow. However, beware. The power of luck that is left with you is no match for the sheer scope of the fortune that was required to save you. +7750 Ability Points (250+500+1000+2000+4000) +Random events are significantly more likely to be in your favor +Chaos magic and skills are significantly easier to learn or buy (50% Discount) Status Change: Life Debt Your life has been saved by another with no thought of reward. Your life now belongs to them. Align yourself with their purposes and morals. +Immunity to other life debts -Actions taken against the wishes of your debt holder can result in pain, injury, and death. Debt holder: Caden ¨C Dungeon
There it was. The reason for my gains, and my debt, were both apparent. After seeing the notice, I also realized I could feel where this Caden was in my mind. The destination was so far away though. Impossibly far, mostly to the west, but north as well. Caden had to be across the ocean, and I had no idea how to get there. A dungeon saved me, even stranger than a spirit. Numbly, I collected the coins on the floor and put them in my pouch. I wasn¡¯t sure what to do when I got to the other side of the room and saw the wall, where the light came through. Laugh if it left me sealed in, not understanding I¡¯d find it hard to get out. I¡¯d have to break it down¡­ if I can. I put my hands on the wall, which promptly revealed itself to be a door, with a small bar of stone holding things closed. I removed that, and it opened easily to the touch. The cold was biting, but a few steps out of the cave was enough for me to orient myself relative to the valley walls, and therefore the city. Shouldn¡¯t be far from the south gate. I made up a story to the city guards, spinning a tale about being injured in a dungeon, but they asked no additional questions when they saw me. The blood and my dazed look was enough to convince them. Or perhaps how cold I looked. What does the dungeon even want of me? The thought of being saved by one¡­ Beyond ludicrous. It had created a life debt. That meant that its motives were pure. It had saved me, with no thought for itself. How could that possibly be true? Dungeons were nothing but instinct. Right? And that instinct wasn¡¯t something nice either. Except if a pet saves someone from a burning building, they don¡¯t earn a life debt. You have to understand what you are doing, the action you are taking, to earn one. Which is why they are almost impossible to earn. Cannot earn one purposefully. For now I simply started by making sure I survived. I had been saved, so it wanted me alive. Gods know why. Can¡¯t go back to the slums. Tadius would hear about it. Won¡¯t get so lucky the second time. Except, I don¡¯t need luck to survive at the moment. I have money. I would need to check later, but I might have more than the reward Tadius had tried to kill me for. Sounds like something from a story, again. Exactly the kind of thing Otga would do, sowing chaos and flipping fate upon its head. Have to make an offering later. I went to the adventurer¡¯s quarter. My clothes, filthy and bloodstained, only earned me sympathetic looks there. Sympathy will only get me so far. Have to blend in, look like I shouldn¡¯t be touched. I entered one of the most expensive shops. Regardless of whatever the coins were, they should be able to make change easily from what I had. I hadn¡¯t seen it all, but I knew some of it had glinted with solid gold. Pure gold, not even just a semi-whelm. And I had sensed magic coming from at least one coin. I had at least a single piece of dungeon gold, a full rupt. How appropriate, considering who gave it to me. The attendant nearly turned me away, as he took in my appearance, but instead he simply pursed his lips and kept a close eye on me. If this wasn¡¯t the adventurer¡¯s quarter, I would never have been let inside. As I hoped, everything was clearly marked. Stupid to try and haggle when you don¡¯t know what something is worth. I eventually chose a few simple, but extremely well made, sets of clothes and a set of cured hide armor. The label indicated it was leather from a Fiarad. I honestly had no idea what that was. Not sure what I can ask without showing how ignorant I am. Would a normal adventurer know what the monster is? No idea, but not worth endangering my guise. I can figure out the standard knowledge later. The cost came out to four gold and two silvers, which the attendant announced while managing to look down his nose at me. Impressive, considering he is shorter than me. I reached into my pouch, lifting out the first thing that buzzed to my senses. The attendant¡¯s eyes went wide when a single piece of dungeon gold entered his view. The obsequious bowing and scraping that followed was amusing, and the attendant told me it would take only a few moments to make proper change. Five normal gold whelms, one semi-whelm, one demi-whelm, and eight silver dimids were soon presented to me by the owner himself. The change came in a fine leather pouch. ¡°I¡¯m so sorry for any inconvenience, sir. If I had realized a patron of your status had come calling I would have attended to you personally,¡± The owner said, his voice oozing with implied adoration. Only thing he adores about me is my money. ¡°Come with me, sir. The resizing and measuring will take no more than an hour. I hire the best you know! Well, of course you do, that is why you came here.¡± I was escorted to a side room where another attendant was all smiles. He measured me with knotted pieces of fine rope, while I tried my best to pretend to be bored of the whole ordeal. After being measured, I was escorted to another room where fine wooden chairs and small servings of food and drink waited. The attendant also, not so subtly, presented me with a basin of warm water and a towel. Would have savored this, yesterday. The fawning attention was everything I had hoped for, everything I imagined when I became a street tough. Only thing missing from the picture is the scantily clad whores with amble asses serving the food from their fingers. No one worked as a street tough only for the status, of course, and I had already achieved the impossible dream I had longed for¡­ The slums are not my home any more¡­ and I won¡¯t miss them at all. I would count myself lucky if only half my friends there would stab me in the back for a silver coin. Hells, most would do it for a deca-dimid. This body might be perfect, but by Shurum¡¯s icy shaft, I¡¯m tired. Finally, everything was ready. It was a new experience, in every way. The clothes fit like they had grown on me. The leather of the boots was supple and perfect. The entire suit of armor shone like blackened oil. Fit right in with the night prowlers. I was presented with a mirror¡­ and I could not recognize myself. The face was the same, but the armor made me look dangerous. Truly dangerous, competent, in a way I had never managed before. All the aura of danger I had, before, was my skill borrowing other people¡¯s authority. Still feel it, that skill, now that I think about it. It¡¯s not drawing from the Boss anymore. Just as I felt powerful, in a new way, so to did the skill. The depth of the power was uncertain, hinting at murky waters, where teeth lay in the darkness, waiting for the unwary. I shivered, but passed it off as shaking to test the range of the armor. I nodded, and left the shop. From there, it was simple to procure a room in a decent inn. The cost per night was a semi-dimid. Half of a full silver dimid, 50 copper arcs. Before, I would have considered it an extravagance beyond belief. Now it barely touched my funds. I had finally taken the time to count them. I was rich beyond my wildest dreams, with fourteen dungeon gold remaining. A smattering of other coins: gold, silver, copper, and iron added a tiny fraction more, though oddly there were no semis, tetras, or decas, only the pure coins, save the ones I just got. Tadius would have only received a small fraction of this, even for the whole reward. Eventually, everything came crashing down on me. I had expected to sleep, but I found myself trembling as I realized how close to death I had come. The Shakes. I had received a major title telling me I should be dead. Whatever you are, whoever you are¡­ I¡¯m alive, thank you, thank you. I sat down, fumbling off my clothes, then laid on the bed holding my knees, trembling, while tears slipped silently out of my eyes, and sleep took me before I realized it had even come calling. SSD 2.3 - A Tale of Two Cities ¡°The nine seasons are: Thaw, Calm, Rain, Grow, Harvest, Burn, Storm, Recede, and Freeze.¡± -Children''s Primer ===POV: Zidaun=== I felt the unmistakable sprouting of a new dungeon just a few hours before. Now, we were all caught in the preparations for the inevitable trek to the location. It was almost due south, with just a bit of east thrown in. And, from the reverberations I had felt, I was unfortunately certain it was in the middle of the Lances to the south. Trekking through wild mountains was always a chore. It was also disputed territory. Not a problem for me, I was as neutral as any Adar, and no one would dare to kill me. My companions were not so lucky, humans one and all. Well, I would do my best to protect them anyway. I didn¡¯t really understand human tribalism though. They could change sides on a whim, or endure to their death. Adar took the instinctive bonds we all had for granted. Most of us anyway. I loved my people¡­ in moderation. My duty was to be of use, however, and so I served as a seeker. And a new dungeon was exactly the reason for my purpose. I lived, so I served, how else could my people exist? And even without duty I was drawn to dungeons. That, at least, I shared with my people. It was natural for us, like leaves growing toward the light. And I loved the journey. It would be long and cold, sure. It was Freeze, that was to be expected. There was no telling what we would find when we got there. That was the source of my excitement, the little spark in my heart. It was why I was allowing myself to get distracted from my packing too. Not like I couldn¡¯t do that in my sleep by now, anyway. Most likely it was just a new dungeon. They were relatively common and I had already seen the emergence of several of those. Those were simple and rough, just an idea beginning to take form. And if that was all it was I would give it a gift and move on after documenting its progression. It would almost certainly be decade before a new dungeon became something of true worth to anyone. However, there was always the possibility that the dungeon would be something special. When a dungeon emerged from hibernation it could be spectacular. All dungeons are sacred. Each carries the spark of divinity, a possibility that they could grow into a true flame. Adar carried a spark of that fire in our connection to dungeons and each other. And would this dungeon be awakened? I didn¡¯t know, and the thought was intoxicating. Would I come into the presence of true divinity? The consequences, well they were not under my control. I would serve. I sighed, once more brought back to my packing. My hands, a soft brown and green, blurred together as I continued the familiar motions. Knives, heat and light stones, an oiled canvas tent cover, basic cooking utensils, a communication spell, clothes, and all the rest found themselves checked and then neatly packed. Soon everything was ready and I bore the weight of the pack as I moved out of the room. I left the Adar section of the guildhall and went to one of the meeting rooms. Inda was already there, waiting and ready when I arrived. Her blonde hair stood out amidst the dark brown tones of the room. Dark wooden walls, dark wooden furniture with a slightly paler leather. I walked in and gave her a little wave before I placed my pack next to hers and then sat in a chair next to hers. ¡°Well at least you are on time.¡± She said. She sighed¡­ ¡°Doesn¡¯t anybody else realize we need to get going?¡± I smiled and shook my head. I closed my eyes for a moment before opening them again and answering. ¡°Firi is probably done already,¡± I said, ¡°he probably just stopped to pray. He is one of the clergy after all. And Gurek¡­ well you might know better than I.¡± Inda blushed. ¡°Hah, don¡¯t think the fact you two have been eyeing each other has gone unnoticed.¡± She spluttered. ¡°No, I don¡¯t, I mean we haven¡¯t even done anything yet.¡± There was a small pause. ¡°He¡¯s been eyeing me?¡± ¡°Yes! Firi and I are about ready to start placing bets. The two of you seem oblivious though¡­¡± Inda was about to reply, then she took a deep breath and her eyes narrowed. ¡°Well what about you and Firi?¡± She said. I sighed. ¡°I want a real relationship, and that just isn¡¯t possible.¡± She winced. ¡°Sorry for bringing it up.¡± The conversation was cut short by the arrival of Firi himself. His wide frame barely fit through the door, particularly with the additional furs. Sadly, the furs also stopped me from admiring the view. ¡°I would apologize for being late, but it looks like I am here before Gurek. Or did he already arrive and just step out?¡± Inda scowled at the air. ¡°We wouldn¡¯t be so fortunate.¡± She said, then her glare snapped to Firi. ¡°And just because you are not the last person to arrive, does not mean you are on time, Firi!¡± Firi rubbed the back of his head like he was a guilty kid and smiled sheepishly, his smile going wide and his cheeks dimpling. He opened his mouth to reply, but was interrupted by a growing sound of feet as they pounded down the hallway. With a faint thump as he hit the side of the doorway and bounced off, Gurek scrabbled his way into the room. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. ¡°Sorry, sorry! I couldn''t find where my ration packs got off to for the life of me; it took me forever to track them down.¡± Inda scowled. ¡°Considering that your room is as hazardous as a dungeon, I am not surprised.¡± She snapped. ¡°One of these days something is going to come to life in there. Honestly, Zidaun is the one raised in a swamp, not you.¡± ¡°Leave me out of this if you would,¡± I said, ¡°besides, we maintain the swamp quite well, so not a great comparison.¡± The gentle sound of bickering accompanied us out of the guild hall and onto the streets. Asmund greeted us with all its usual sights. The streets were full of slush and snow, half melted and trickling slowly through gaps in the cobblestone. The city was fairly warm, the great dome over the city keeping it bearable. It presence was betrayed by a faint shimmering in the air. We trekked out of the city past the walls and a few miles more until we were at the edge of the dome. We entered the stables on the side of the road there. ¡°The slogi are prepped and ready for you, just need your chits.¡± A handler said. Firi gave over the chits for them after fetching them from his furs. ¡°Okay, you are good to go. Head through the barrier into the back and head out.¡± We did, each of us proceeding through the shimmering barrier after saying a different command word. The air turned bitterly cold as I passed through the tingling barrier, but the heat stones embedded in my furs kept me warm as we entered the stables proper. Slogi, huge and furry, with their own magics for traveling in this weather were ideal mounts, but they had to be kept in the proper conditions during Freeze, or they would lose their coats. We each mounted a slogi and brought them outside. The wind blew past, the chill enough to freeze the sap in a barren forest. At our direction they took off into the snow, Asmund behind us, and an unknown dungeon waiting. ===POV: Tarrae=== I had been thoroughly enjoying my family breakfast when the summons came from the guildhall. The summons was supposed to be urgent, but it still took a while to extricate myself from various relatives. My nieces and nephews had started jabbering questions about what was so important. Not like I could answer, I didn¡¯t know yet. Some of them even followed me as I put on my heavy furs. My brothers and sisters had just smiled fondly and watched with amused eyes at my predicament. My mother had been fussing about when I was going to get married earlier, but now just came and gave me a swift hug. My father was more practical and just rolled his eyes. ¡°He will come back here to pack, even if he has to leave.¡± He said. ¡°Now let him get on with it.¡± ¡°Thanks Father.¡± With only minor difficulty I managed to pry off a few children who had clamped on and buried their faces in the furs of my leg. Finally free of passengers I was able to exit through the thick inner door and make my escape. Even with the door shut firmly behind me I could already feel some of the cold outside. I opened the outer door and quickly shut it behind me; no use in letting any warmth escape. I took a breath and felt the air crackle in my lungs. Below, above, and to the sides of me the city of Soamana stretched out. The canyon walls had been carved into long ago. Up near the top I could see the poorer districts, where they were highly exposed to the extremes of the weather. I didn¡¯t want to think about the cold there. I looked around me at the merchant and craftsman districts on each side and below as I stamped my feet to get blood flowing. I turned my back to the noble district and the Imperial Grotto and headed east. In front of me lay my destination, the most powerful guilds. They lay sheltered, the canyon walls towering above them marking an end to where the city had carved away at them. The Adventurer''s Guild was there waiting for me. I hurried to the east. Cold resistance not withstanding, I was was more than eager to get out of the chill air. The paths were sparsely trafficked and I ignored what few people traveled the terraced streets. Homes and storefront entrances, flush with the stone, were closed this early, with only a few exceptions. A nearby bakery already smelled heavenly. Most of the stores would start to open soon, though none would be using the space in front of their stores until well after the start of Thaw. Some would probably wait even later. Well¡­ maybe some of the enchantment stores would showcase their heat stones again in the cold weather. The canyon wall on the side opposite the city offered little to see; it was covered by shadows. A part of the Maw, a small curve of its burning ring was visible, but the sun remained unseen behind the canyon walls. And I could faintly hear the river Rawimi far below as it continued its eternal flow. Even in Thaw it never froze. Faint wisps of steam just reached the bottom of the city. Eventually the guildhall lay before me and I entered. I paused only briefly to leave my outer furs with the clerk. I probably wouldn¡¯t actually be damaged by the heat, but this way I would be comfortable. I made my way toward the guildmaster¡¯s office and his secretary nodded his head at me and quickly let me in. Four strangers and the guildmaster himself looked at me as I entered. Three of them were sitting in chairs and the other stood to the side of the guildmaster with fine robes, and an impatient expression on his face. I opened my mouth to apologize for arriving last, but guildmaster Manja just cut off with a raised hand and gestured to the remaining empty seat. ¡°Good, you¡¯re here.¡± She said. ¡°Then we will begin. First, introductions:¡± she pointed her hand at the standing man. ¡°The honored Imperial Representative, Ndrivo,¡± The man, hints of gold and silver glittering in his robes as he moved slightly and opened his mouth, abruptly shut his mouth with a frown as Manja continued. ¡°Adar Seeker, Anaath,¡± The Adar nodded, his brown yellow bark-skin and hair like long green backward facing thorns making clear that he was from the desert to the south. ¡°And the next three are members of the guild.¡± ¡°Soara,¡± a tall thin man, ¡°Norana,¡± A woman, her muscles heavily defined and her brown hair cut short, ¡°and Tarrae.¡± We each nodded to the others. ¡°Good, now that we have that out of the way I can tell you why you are here. Adar Anaath came to me and informed me of a dungeon awakening an hour ago. Usually we have a team for this, but they are already on a dungeon dive. They won¡¯t be able to feel it there, and it would take them too long to return even if we sent them a message now. Usually we would wait, but¡­ well circumstances are what they are. You four are going to replace them. Anaath will lead you to the entrance and minimize what danger he can. Obviously he is also the Adar representative. Unfortunately, we have no idea what to expect. It is likely that it will be a new dungeon and have minimal danger, but you will need to sort out your roles as you travel and prepare for the eventuality that it is a re-emergent dungeon. Ndrivo will cover why we are not just waiting. Ndrivo?¡± ¡°Hrm,¡± he coughed, ¡°yes. Anaath has provided us with his best guess on the location of the new dungeon. Unfortunately it is in a politically inconvenient spot. It is in the Lances. Since the entire mountain range is meant to be neutral territory between us and the Froans it could become somewhat tricky.¡± He scowled a little. ¡°If the dungeon has an entrance that is accessible to only one party then we will either claim it solely, or allow the Froans to take possession. However, if we both have access¡­ it is imperative that Tsary stakes its own claim. If it is a new dungeon, then the claim over the dungeon itself is of negligible importance for the moment. However, access to another pass through the mountains is of paramount importance.¡± The man¡¯s expression looked like he bit into something sour for a moment. ¡°Oh, also. Be polite to any team from Froa, we do not want to have an incident. If both countries have access, report that right away. A diplomatic team will be prepared as soon as you can provide details on how they can make the journey safely. If a diplomatic envoy from Froa appears first, inform them that their counterparts will be arriving soon and that you have no power to make any deals.¡± Manja nodded and spoke, ¡°Time is of the essence. The route you are taking will be to the east. Go along the canyon road to the Wither Salt Flats. Mounts will be provided for you at the end of the canyon road. From there head north to the Lances as Anaath directs you. Prepare for an extended trip and for high altitude. Go gather what you need and meet back here in three hours. Don¡¯t worry about magical communication and survival gear. Those, and the best map we can find, will be provided. Team leader is Tarrae. Dismissed!¡± SSD 2.4 - Second Thoughts ¡°If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.¡±
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Pain lanced through me. It was even worse than before, and it was growing. I was blinded by the pain. All my awareness, all my focus compressed into pain. For a timeless instant all my thoughts, my self, was shed, and I was nothing but agony. The moment continued on and on CRACK! I was aware for the briefest instant as the loudest noise I had ever heard resonated through me. The pain returned and all was lost again. CRACK! Endless agony. CRACK! I was lost in a cycle of pain and thunderous shaking until suddenly everything was still. I rested. All I could do was revel in the peace, in the sheer bliss of not feeling pain. My thoughts floated, scattered; I had not felt like this since I was human. In fact¡­ I was coming to wakefulness. All the world gradually shifted back into focus. My aura flexed around me, its threads hummed with energy. I could feel rock, and air, and water, and living things. And when everything came fully back into focus a slew of notifications made themselves known.
Dungeon Formed Congratulations on founding a dungeon! All your powers are greater when acting in space set aside for the dungeon. There is one exception: Humans and other humanoid sentients will greatly destabilize your ability to act directly in their proximity. Certain actions or abilities may be exempt from this restriction. +250 AP for founding your first dungeon!
Warning! Actions Taken! Your core was at 7% integrity and falling apart. Founding a dungeon saved you. However, due to massive trauma, additional action was required. The nature of your very existence was changed to save you from destruction. Self awareness found... Current Name: N/A / Exsan invalid. Exsan personal name reapplied Self-referential name ¡°Caden,¡± applied. Menu and displays personalized for sentient. Congratulations on being alive! -Due to severe healing (93%), this dungeon instance cannot be removed or left until it has properly synchronized. Current synchronization: 1%. Estimated time to full synchronization: >400 days.
Wait what...? Before I could look more into exactly what the hell that meant, more pop-ups appeared.
Previous Information Now Available Non-critical information was withheld due to life-threatening conditions, it will now appear. Future notifications will appear in a small icon to be reviewed later.
New Skill Acquired Pain Resistance III Damage to your core, and other effects which induce pain, are less effective on you. Note that while pain is reduced, the damage is not. This is a rare skill for a dungeon, perhaps you should talk with a therapist about your self-harm issues? Maybe you shouldn¡¯t have this skill.
Titles Gained! Wounded Healer III You placed another life above your own repeatedly. --- Normal reward incompatible with species ¨C reward will be adapted. You are the first dungeon variant to achieve any degree of this title. Title changed for new species, title is now: Dungeon Martyr III (First) You have demonstrated compassion and self-sacrifice, repeatedly, even as your own life was placed in jeopardy. These are not characteristics inherent to a dungeon. You are something new, and the first dungeon to bear this title. Be worthy of it. (First) +1000 Ability Points +700 Ability Points (100,200,400) (First) +You may use your skills around and on other life, bypassing the normal restrictions, provided you have no ill intent. +Easier to learn and cheaper to buy healing related skills (15% Discount) Touch of the Grave I You have brought someone back from the brink of death. You have touched the grave and the boundary of souls. +100 Ability Points +Slightly easier to learn and cheaper to buy life or soul related skills (5% Discount) Dread Salvation I You have brought someone to the edge of death due to your actions, and then made them truly grateful to you by bringing them back. Whether by deceit or accident, you have touched on both death and life. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. +150 Ability Points +Slightly easier to learn and cheaper to buy death and life related skills (5% Discount) +Skills and titles relating to deceit are slightly more effective (5% boost) Seen the Infinite Void You have been to the surface of the world under your own power. You have seen the void of the sky and felt its corrosive touch on your aura. You have seen, survived, and returned to the depths of the world. +100 Ability Points +Your aura is stable a tiny distance above ground, or out of cave entrances Investment Specialist Your first 1500 Ability Points were spent on long-term investments. This investment can be be repaid many-fold over time. Try not to waste it. +10% Ability Point Gain from Leveling +Hidden (Reward Deferred) Back from the Brink I You survived that which should have killed you. Did you learn caution or boldness? +100 Ability Points +All skills are easier to learn while you are in personal danger. (10% increased experience)
Status
I? What? Who?? was a connection. A knowledge that it was something other. Exsan? SSD 2.5 - Taking Stock "The fires of creation were loosed from the heavens and man cried out in agony, for no mortal flesh could stand its glory. Then Yamash Spoke and darkness passed over his face. The heavens trembled and cried out and day was split from the night. And thus was the start of the first night.¡± After getting lost in my new environment for a while I came back to myself. Huh, what is that? There was a little blinking light in my view. And it was there no matter where I was looking. Wait, I think I know what this is. It did say it was going to minimize notifications from now on. Not sure I am ready for more of these, but there is no real use putting it off.
The Call to Ascension
For the first time I could actually decide my own priorities. So, I was going to think about it. Did I want to grow as a dungeon? Probably. I was stuck in this place for a year or so. I would certainly end up doing something with my time. And growing was definitely part of that. And being a dungeon would get me in contact with other humans, or at least I assumed so. But¡­ what did I actually want? I had a new life, and I could make my own decisions about what I wanted that to mean. So¡­ what did I want? Well I had already thought of one desire. I wanted human contact. I might not necessarily need that, but I definitely wanted it. And I wasn¡¯t sure that I wanted to live without it. Both for my sanity and my own enjoyment. What else? I had been captured. I escaped, but still¡­ I had been captured in the first place. I hated it. I hated how helpless it had made me feel. Oh sure it had been fun to plan the escape and pull it off, but mostly I had been so driven because I hated that feeling. The obvious answer to not needing to feel that again is power. Power without purpose was meaningless, though. I didn¡¯t want to seek power just because I was afraid. That¡­ that would end very badly. So I needed other goals too. Power¡­ meant that I could determine what happened to me, but it also meant I could determine what happened to other people. And power came in many forms. Obviously as a dungeon I had some power of force. The power to kill, to destroy. However, I knew that a dungeon¡¯s real power came from the opposite side. If all dungeons did was kill, and there was nothing to be gained from them, then people would just ignore them or destroy them. No, creation was the true power of a dungeon. People wanted gold, and silver, and all the other resources that I knew nothing about. And in a world like this, I was sure levels and experience were part of what a dungeon offered as well. And I could offer those. I could understand people. I could understand them better than any dungeon ever had. It might take me a while to learn the language, but I could. And when I did I would know exactly what they wanted. Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. I could make myself invaluable. And then I could change the parts of the world that I didn¡¯t like. Maybe I was mistaken, and where I was now was a paradise, but I had seen a man try to kill another man with little thought. Maybe that man was just evil, or desperate, but it was also possible that he was just trying to get by. I couldn¡¯t know what had motivated him, but I didn¡¯t think I would like the society that produced him. This, this was a long term goal. I could certainly build up my dungeon, and I would, because it would give me the power to make changes. However, this would give me something that I could work towards for a very long time. I might be ageless. A normal dungeon might be content with merely growing and sinking deeper into the earth, but I knew that wouldn¡¯t sustain me. My goal might change in the long term, but having a long term goal was worth it. And in the meantime I would embrace this quest as a way to power. However, I wouldn¡¯t forget that I wanted to make this world a place I was more comfortable existing in. I sighed. I was probably being naive. Still, I had more potential to make a difference here than I ever had in my old world. Well then, for now I need to start with the basics. First came buying a skill¡­ assuming that I could. I was still not sure what effect having Exsan in duel control mode with me actually meant. I had wanted the skill in the sewers, but I saved the AP so I could escape. Here we go. There was a slightly longer moment than I was used to and then the blinking light was back. Okay, open that up.
You have purchased a new skill Vital Comprehension II (Life) Purchasing and learning living patterns is mildly easier. Mildly lowers AP cost of learning summons and mildly reduces the amount of material required to learn a living pattern. (10%)
The skill was cheaper to learn too. Learning had applied to its cost, of course, but so had my new titles that made it cheaper to learn life magic. It hadn¡¯t been a flat 20% off though. It had been 163, instead of 160. I did some math by scribbling stone on a wall.. Yep, it looked like the discounts were multiplicative, rather than additive. That made sense though. Otherwise the discounts had the potential to stack up to completely removing that cost, or even refunding AP. So 200 x 0.90 x 0.95 x 0.95 = 162.45. Looks like it rounded up. That meant that even if I eventually had some truly ridiculous modifiers, I could expect the cost to always be at least 1 AP. I had to assume that similar math applied to learning skills. Otherwise I should just automatically learn all the soul related skills just by thinking about them, since they would count as new. Plus learning would apply, too. I should look at all those titles. With a thought, just those pulled up. I looked over the titles I had gained.
Titles: Reborn Soul First of its Kind Skill Evolution Mana Specialist I Escape Artist IV (Deception) Dungeon Martyr III (First) Touch of the Grave I Dread Salvation I Seen the Infinite Void Investment Specialist Back from the Brink I
Wonder if this is an abnormal amount? Probably. Well a number of them had a ¡°I¡± on them, which meant that it was possible to get better versions of them. Reborn Soul and First of its Kind were static, though they would make it much easier to learn any new skills, and specifically any soul related skills. Though sadly I had no idea where to even start with that. They didn¡¯t say that they applied to the cost of buying skills though. Skill evolution¡­ well I supposed I could just keep trying to use skills in unconventional ways. Honestly I had gotten it by accident in the first place. I didn¡¯t know how my skills were meant to act, so just keep experimenting. This title looked fixed as well. Hmm, I wonder if my learning boost from First of its Kind applied to this as well. Not sure if it would count as the first level of the skill or just morphing an existing one. Mana specialist was useful, and should naturally improve as I focused on mana based skills. Since most of my dungeon related skills also had some crossover with mana, I was sure that would just happen naturally enough. Escape Artist. Eh? I mean I could see it hiding my core really well, which is awesome. Helps with my whole goal of not having to worry about being enslaved again. Or dying, should probably include that in my list of things not to do. Dungeon Martyr, nope, just nope. I wouldn¡¯t mind getting a better version of Touch of the Grave. Not really possible with just myself here though. Dread Salvation. Well I could see it happening naturally. People getting fatally injured here in the dungeon and then I could heal them. Maybe, not sure. Again though, not something that I could do at the moment. Seen the Infinite Void. Honestly, even though this one did not suggest that a progression was possible, I really wanted there to be one. I needed to see what kind of restriction existed on this before I made any judgments, but I was almost certainly going to try and get a better version of this or some skill that did the same thing. Actually¡­ I looked through the various skills that I could buy. Nope, nothing. The title hadn¡¯t opened up new skills that I could buy or anything. At least nothing that I could find. Investment Specialist was another title that didn¡¯t have any type of automatic progression. I was probably going to focus on the long term if I could anyway. It just paid off more in the long run anyway. So if I could get a better title it might happen naturally anyway. Best not to stress about it. And Back from the Brink was like Martyr, definitely not going to be seeking that out. I was already stuck here for plenty of time and I couldn¡¯t save myself by just founding a dungeon. So what next? Well there was a skill I wanted to get at some point, but I would wait until I was prepared to use it. There was a lot of living things here that I could start to absorb. And with the new skill I had summoned life that I could purchase for cheaper than before. Eh¡­ it was a waste to buy them until I understood what I had here and what life I picked up before. Besides, judging from how much mana it took to help that guy, creating life was really expensive. I just had to hope that it would get cheaper. Honestly that was probably waiting for me after I leveled up a time or two. Well then, cataloging the life here would come first. After that I needed to learn much more. SSD 2.6 - Exploring Your Inner Self looked Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation. Admin?¡­ System administrator? ¡­ End Program ¡­ Log In ¡­ Root ¡­ Game Options ¡­ Difficulty Mode ¡­ Language Settings ¡­ Settings ¡­
Your skill Meditation II has changed and improved through your efforts. It is now: Soul Meditation II You are aware of your own soul and can meditate to gain a greater understanding of your true self and strengthen your soul. Enhances mana regeneration while you focus inwards. Leads to greater awareness of the soul.
SSD 2.7 - The Magic Words ¡°To touch the soul is to touch divinity.¡± Habert of Marte ¡°The limits of my language means the limits of my world.¡± Ludwig Wittgenstein Of all the many things that had already happened to me this might be the most important. I had died and moved on to a new world. And now I had seen what was actually moved. I knew I had a soul. I already knew that, by status page said so, and I certainly wasn¡¯t in the same body I used to occupy. So when it told me my soul had been moved I believed it. It wasn¡¯t the same as seeing it. It was the most beautiful, intricate sight I had ever seen, and I could tell I had only glimpsed the surface. For just this alone I wished I could go back home. How would the world change if everyone could see what I had seen? To show those who struggled, who felt that they had no worth that they were something truly beautiful beyond description. There was so much more than I could even put into proper thoughts. I remembered that feeling from just a moment ago. My soul stretching forever like an infinite plane below me. I felt like I should be crying. If I had my old body I probably would be. The most singularly spectacular beauty I had ever seen was myself. I laughed to myself, that felt so narcissistic. I knew it wasn¡¯t just me though. I knew that everyone was like this. Some knowledge was just there. It took a while for me to recover. I wanted to drive back inside, to lose myself in that beauty, but my emotions felt like brittle glass. I was drained and overflowing with energy at the same time. It was probably for the best if I gave myself a break. I could dive back into my soul again at a later time. I¡­ needed to get something else done. I looked at my mana slowly ticking up with annoyance. And then I wanted to bang my head against a wall. I still had the feeder stored away. I was such an idiot. Well those feelings of vast wonder at my incomprehensible beauty sure did fade fast. No reason to get mad at myself though. I was fully aware that I needed to meditate for a reason. If I wasn¡¯t careful I became tired and then overwhelmed. At that point it became easy to miss the obvious. I needed a room to collect my thoughts and put important things. I aimed my crystal at a nearby wall and merged with it seamlessly as I headed for a large volume of solid stone. Even before I arrived I was clearing space away, breaking down stone in the interior and then condensing the stone in the walls until they were dense and impenetrable. A few minutes later I arrived and hung in the center of an enormous cube. I placed the feeder slightly off to one side and then sunk it an inch into the stone so it would be absolutely stable. I extended a tendril of stone from the floor and used it to turn it on. I left the tendril there so it would be simple to turn it on and off with a thought. The crystal on the bottom of the feeder glowed with a steady white light. The feeder started up and the crystal on the top started to glow and cast faint shadows behind me. Huh, I had completely forgotten that it glowed. The lights in the prison had always overshadowed it, even at night when they were dimmed. I took out the mana drain stand and placed it off to the other side, letting the white crystal on the bottom gently light a small corner of the room. Around it I placed various statues of Tam, his spells, and the various shapes that I had cast into stone. They were rough, and I could certainly made them polished, but I decided to leave them that way. They were memories, and I could make perfect or improved copies if I really wanted to in the future. Not like I was going to run out of stone. I placed the chair there as well. All the rest of the items that remained were placed on top of the table. I would need to consume more of these later. See what I could make. I might be able to make the materials from the seeds I had gathered anyway. That reminded me of all the seeds and eggs stored away. They were in no particular order at moment. I brought out just the seeds and there were dozens of different types. I decided to store them in something a little more neat. I started creating a series of tiny stone boxes and amused myself by letting out my artistic side. With my ability to precisely shape stone it was easy to make what I visualized reality. I could really have used this ability in ceramics class. Man I sucked at molding clay by hand. Even perfectly fitting hinges and a simple sliding lock were no trouble to make now. I made a different box for each type of seed as I sorted them out. The first box was solid obsidian with a delicate stone flower on the top; the leaves and petals were razor sharp and so thin that light passed through. The other boxes similarity featured other designs inspired by nature or just pure geometry. Fractal patterns contrasted against landscapes from Earth and animals from my past life. The materials varied just as much. Clear gypsum crystals, sandstone, basalt, marble, and more were matched and blended to my designs, each complementing or contrasting. Some seeds types only had a single seed, others only a few. Those were put into tiny boxes and stored away once again. Some types of seeds had a dozen or two. A few of these seeds were set aside and crushed while I absorbed the remains; the rest of those seeds were stored away. A couple of seed types had hundreds upon hundreds of seeds. I divided them in half and crushed half while the rest was stored again. The super numerous seeds were all tiny, and based on the information I gained from them, I was fairly certain that they were all different types of wild grass. If you come across this story on Amazon, it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it. I was not actually sure what to do with the eggs. I would need to recreate the environment they lived in if I wanted to be sure they were not damaged when I brought them out of storage. I was fairly certain I could do that now, but it would take more mana than I wanted due to creating large amounts of organic material and bacteria. I would wait and see what the next few levels gave me. Assuming I could level, it should be easy enough to get the mana from the feeder since it was running. Leveling might give me better tools to work with too. For a minute I debated what to do with the various enchantments that I had stored away. Optimally, I wanted to actually understand what they did, and how. And I also wanted to absorb that silver metal. Well¡­ I did pretty much know what each one did, and I could store them back away if there were any problems. I raised a pillar of stone a good distance away from myself and placed the beam array into the far side away from myself. I waited for a moment and could clearly see the threads scanning an area the size of my old prison. Man¡­ that seemed so tiny now. I was glad it was working fine though. I put the rune array that generated the old barrier around me some distance from the other array and set it into the floor. I could feel it was trying to do something, power flashing around, but it was erratic. I still had the runes I had removed from it. I was fairly sure of where each one was supposed to go. I did consult one of the statues I had made, just to be sure. After checking, I slotted the missing runes back into place. The enchantment snapped back together and activated fully. I should look into that later. It was interesting that an enchantment could be disassembled and then put back together. I wonder if I could take enough out of one that it would collapse entirely? Something I could consider and experiment with in the future¡­ far away from my core. These things had a ton of mana. I considered what to do with the four aura holding enchantments. Well I already knew I wanted to study them, but I really only needed one since they were identical. If I decided to do any experiments on the structure of enchantments it would be good to have extras though. For now, I would eat one, put one out to examine its effects, and store the other two for later experimentation. I needed to make that other purchase first though. Otherwise I might waste something I couldn¡¯t replace. A moment later there was a notification.
You have purchased a skill. Mana Construct Intuition II Naturally understand constructs made of mana. This applies when absorbing magical structures, learning magical symbology, and purchasing non-living magical blueprints. (10% Boost to learning speed and 10% discount to purchase costs.)
Done with that, I started to absorb one of the arrays that prevented aura growth. I tried to absorb all of it at the same time. Hopefully that would help me understand it as a whole. It was consumed with exquisite slowness. As I consumed it I started to understand the metal first. It felt almost like a crystal, and I could feel its rigid structure as it firmly held itself in place. And woven in and around that structure I could see mana firmly anchored into place. Mana knotted and twisted itself up around the metal. The runes, I could tell they were not just symbols, there were words, or¡­ commands. And they were not just two dimensional, either. They had a three dimensional structure that formed out of the rune. I could feel a vague understanding form of how these things were related. The order of the runes, the locations, and the relative size all mattered. One symbol repeated, but the mana structure it produced was different. It was obvious that Tam had been a master of this language. And this was a magic that I needed to master myself. I had no capability to do incantations and hand waving. However, this was magic that I could create directly. I suspected that the incantation provided another layer of information, a way to direct how the symbols related to each other. However, unlike Tam, I could see the mana directly, and I might be able to build the structures of mana myself. As I finished absorbing, I could vaguely understand a part of what was happening. I could tell that the shape of the symbol reinforced the idea behind the commands, but it was fuzzy. I could make the metal with no problem, at least. I considered for a moment. I knew that I would likely need to absorb the same magical object more than once to understand it. My absorption skill had specifically mentioned that would apply for enchanted items. And I did still have three more¡­ I checked my mana. It had increased by about twenty between Exsan and I. I could not say I was surprised to gain mana from it, the runes had been infused with immense amounts of it. However, the absorption had taken a long time, so it was obvious that it had proven difficult for my abilities. Twenty mana was a decent chunk for me, but compared to the amount that had been put in the runes, I had only just done better than breaking even. I had likely gained and spent hundreds of mana taking it apart. At least it still increased my mana. Eh¡­ I might as well go for broke. I pulled out another one and started to absorb it. It was just as slow as the first but when it was done I felt like I was on the brink of an epiphany. The blinking light of a notification distracted me and I willed it open.
Skill Available: Mana Lexicon (Language) Skill acquisition will take some time and you will be unable to perform any other tasks. Would you like to learn this skill now? Yes No
Huh, first time it has asked me something like this. I guess this is a little more involved than most skills. Of course learning a language was a very involved process. Obviously I did want to learn it, that was not even really a question. I just needed to make sure I was safe first. I scanned through my aura. Nothing new seemed to be going on and I was in a completely self contained room. Well¡­ just in case I dropped my core down in the stone until I was several meters deep. I quickly hardened a shell of stone around me. That should protect me well enough. If not, I probably wouldn¡¯t have been able to do much about it anyway. I picked yes. My mind filled with symbols. Many became like old friends, I knew them intimately. I knew what they did, how they acted. Others appeared and became slightly familiar. And it continued on and on. Knowledge flowed and my mind felt stuffed with relationships of symbols, spacial proximity, modifiers, exceptions, alternative shapes, and more. Eventually the flood dropped to a trickle and finally stopped. I became aware of the world once more. I pulled up the notification that was waiting for me.
You have gained a new skill! Mana Lexicon II (Language) You know a part of the language of magic. The more you know, the more you can do. Its potential is infinite. Combining runes together you can create spells, for temporary effects. Enchantments with a single rune create simple persistent effects. Emblems with multiple runes will create complicated persistent effects. The medium used affects the permanence. Other possibilities may exist.
Huh, looks like what Tam was doing was were actually emblems. The symbols were actually called runes, so I had gotten that right. I don¡¯t know that I had actually seen any enchantments. And I would obviously need to look at those spells I had transcribed into stone again. I looked at the simplest emblem here as I moved myself back to into my cube. I could understand various parts of it now. I saw the basic symbols for mana, connection, and light among the runes. The modifiers on the runes were more complicated though. I was fairly sure that the modifiers were what produced the gentle white light it made when it absorbed my mana. However, I couldn¡¯t be sure. And I was fairly sure from context that one of the runes after mana specified the range it applied to. Unfortunately I now knew enough to understand exactly how little I really understood. And the other emblems were even more indecipherable. Mana showed up in all of them, and I could see symbols that could mean earth or stone depending on the context. Other than that they were like gibberish. I felt like a caveman with a club and I was staring at a crossbow. And that was just the simplest emblem. I could see a little of how it functioned, and I might be able to operate it with a little knowledge. However, I didn¡¯t understand how or why it worked. The other emblems might as well be a car or television. I knew they worked, but had no real idea why. Well that was not what I should focus on at the moment. I had rudimentary knowledge of this language now. I was not going to be performing any miracles with it yet, but I knew enough that it might be possible for me to make a few useful items with it. Even without any monsters I might be able to make a decent trap dungeon¡­ with a lot of time and effort. Suddenly words sounded in my head. Language. Words. Order. I see. Know. I Exsan. Core is self. You Exsan not Exsan. Who? SSD 2.8 - When My Partner Says We Are Having Company ¡°Rule # 1 - The dungeon is trying to kill you, don''t die. Dead adventurers don''t spend gold.¡± For a moment I was struck dumb with surprise and too shocked to even begin to think of a proper reply. After a moment I pulled myself out of it. Exsan? No. I Exsan. Who you? No, I meant¡­ never-mind. I am Caden. Caden. Core Exsan Caden. Core mine. Caden mine. I took a moment to think. I could see myself as belonging to Exsan if I looked at it from a certain angle. We were both part of the same core. And by that logic, Exsan belonged to me. We belonged to each other, each of our actions having an impact on the other. I had been in the driver¡¯s seat before, with Exsan being the mostly ignored backseat driver. Now¡­ we had to act as partners. Yes. We can look at it that way. We are both two parts of a whole. How did you learn to start speaking, thinking? All broken. Shattered. World dim. Put together. Is better. Felt Caden. New. New thoughts. Lost in them. Saw you. Felt you. You learned. Language. Took knowledge. Took English. Tried understand. New language. Thoughts, words. Speak. English? Honestly I hadn¡¯t thought about it, but I was always speaking English in my head. This was the first time¡­
A Hidden Skill has been Revealed! English IX (Language) The language you brought with you from another world. A language of artistry, poetry, and insanely long novels. Too bad you don''t remember most of them. No you won''t get any rewards for being the best English speaker on the planet.
Right¡­ That wasn¡¯t odd at all¡­ Both Exsan and the snarky language. Sadly it was probably easier to understand the snark. The system had told me that it had customized the interface. Apparently my own sarcasm was being reflected back at me. The customization of the system probably also explained why I was getting the skill now. I had thought about English and then it showed up. As for Exsan... apparently he had been changed a great deal by whatever process had repaired us. Not sure I was happy that Exsan was getting knowledge from me, but whatever. Hopefully he was just getting it because it counted as a skill and he wasn¡¯t going be able to just riffle through my thoughts at will. The next question was, what now? I was about to ask when I noticed that Exsan was doing something else. Exsan had started to extend aura out in the shape of two cylinders. He was hollowing the stone out of them as he went along. The two tunnels sloped gently downward and were going in almost totally opposite directions. Exsan, why are you making those tunnels? They come. Prepare. Make path. So informative. Who is coming? They heard song. Lure. Prey comes. What song? What is the prey? Would creatures be lured into the dungeon? Was that how dungeons grew? I wondered if we would be eating the creatures, making them into part of the dungeon, or both. This could actually be interesting to see, a natural life cycle that helped a dungeon to grow. Dungeon sings. Prey. Prey is prey. Caden know. Stone. Prey by core. I took a moment and tried to figure out what he meant. I could feel the constant flow of mana back and forth across my aura, rippling back and forth across the dungeon. Was that the song? As for prey¡­ I looked around the core room and quickly saw the statues of Tam. Oh. Prey. Right. Suddenly I could see myself as a red crystal shark talking to Exsan as a black crystal shark. ¡°Humans are friends, not food.¡± That just wasn¡¯t going to work. Why do we even need humans, uh, prey? We already get plenty of mana. Not enough. Grow good now. Eat mana. Only mana stop. Not grow. I would need to take his word for it. For whatever reason, mana would not be enough to keep growing. I wasn¡¯t sure exactly what else we would need though. And why would anyone come to the dungeon if it ate them? Well, there was a simple enough answer to that. People would come to the dungeon for loot. You don¡¯t eat all of the people right? No. Let escape. Offer bait. Bait bring more. More come. Test. Some die. Some escape. Grow. I didn¡¯t particularly want to kill anyone, but I knew that this could be the literal purpose of the dungeon. People were going to come here seeking treasure and expect the dungeon to do its best to kill them. Actually¡­ how was Exsan planning on killing them? We had no monsters and Exsan honestly didn¡¯t seem bright enough to make decent traps yet. How are you going to offer bait? How are you going to¡­ test them? Possess bait. Good bait. Grow strong. Test with monsters. Strong survive. Weak eaten. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site. What monsters? Where will they come from? This was the most frustrating game of twenty questions ever. I knew Exsan was probably trying to answer as best he could, but that didn¡¯t help much. Okay. To be fair, for speaking English for only a tiny bit of time he was actually doing amazingly well. However, it was obvious that he and I were using very different viewpoints. I wonder if Exsan found my lack of understanding equally frustrating. Exsan was looking at the world and taking parts of the universe as simply given. Unfortunately I had no idea what they were. Not entirely true. I knew human nature enough to guess that the bait he was referring to was the gold, silver, etc¡­ which I had absorbed before in the sewers. Monsters here. Dungeon make monsters. What was I supposed to make of that? Perhaps the dungeon simply created monsters automatically when people entered. Honestly that would be no stranger than any of my other abilities. I scanned through the dungeon again, just in case. The usual life filled it, and there were no signs of monsters yet. What was the point of buying the various creatures, plants, and so on in the AP store then? Hmm¡­ well I suppose they could simply create a larger variety of monsters, or make stronger ones. Maybe each dungeon had a normal type of monster that they produced. Of course I hadn¡¯t seen anything in my status like a monster type. Eh¡­ this was all just guesswork anyway. Hopefully Exsan would pick up more English fast enough that I wouldn¡¯t need to have too many conversations with a caveman. ¡°Igg talk good. Igg bash with rock.¡± I went silent for several minutes as I thought, but Exsan didn¡¯t interrupt. For the moment that was probably for the best. At least I had some crucial information. Humans were going to be coming for the dungeon. I wasn¡¯t sure about the signal that was drawing them. However, there would also be monsters in the dungeon. I wasn¡¯t sure about that either, but Exsan had the dungeon instincts, not me. Of course, Exsan wanted to kill some of the people coming. That was not too much of a surprise. It fit right in with the instincts I had felt from him before. Honestly I should probably glad that he wanted to farm people and wasn¡¯t an omnicidal maniac. Nope, just a homicidal one. He saw the approaching people as food and bait to acquire more food. I was not entirely sure what to do about this. Until Exsan had a better grasp of English we weren¡¯t likely to have any good conversations either. Exsan seemed content with things as they were. He viewed me and him as belonging to each other and that was enough for him. Honestly I could remember how possessive those instincts had been. How all the space around me had belonged to me and only me. How they wanted me to never let it go. And now I needed to prepare for visitors. I was getting them far sooner than I thought I would. So for now I continued extending my aura to various places and gradually expanding the dungeon. The most I could do at the moment was prepare by opening up space. Exsan¡¯s tunnels started from the single point where they met. From there I started to create a large room, so the tunnels would actually enter the room from a decent distance apart. This would be the main area¡­ probably. Honestly I wasn¡¯t sure what else Exsan might do with the tunnels. Hopefully, this would be the main area that people entered, and I wanted it to impress. I wanted people to believe that this dungeon was special. The more unique the dungeon was, the less risk people would want to destroy it. Unless there were special rewards for destroying special dungeons¡­ damn, I really wished I knew more. I damned my paranoid brain for overthinking everything and making this harder than it needed to be. I didn¡¯t know how common dungeons were and how people would treat a new one. I was hoping for a symbiotic relationship, but I was going to be practical and prepare for the worst anyway. I considered trying to stop Exsan and get more time, but I didn¡¯t know what that might do. I might be able to cause a stalemate with him, but he might also get very angry. And I had no way to really communicate why I was doing what I was doing. Not yet. I was literally attached to him, so it would be a bad idea to make him my enemy. I needed to bide my time until I had more information. I could confront Exsan later. The amount of mana that Exsan and I were using was just below the natural rate at which we were recharging. However, as the hours passed our combined mana kept increasing as the feeder slowly chugged away. The moment our combined total hit sixty I got a prompt.
Exsan is attempting to level up. Total mana required: 60 Current mana totals: Caden: 33 Exsan: 27 Would you like to level up? Yes No
I was glad to see that leveling up was still possible and that it would combine different amounts of mana to meet the total with no problems. I briefly reviewed the message and willed yes. The notification light blinked into life and I opened it.
Your status has changed ¨C Level Up Status
Living Creation II (Life)
SSD 2.9 - Caverns, Crystals, and Cloth ¡°Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.¡± - Thomas Aquinas I hated waiting. I was good at it when necessary, but I still hated it. The surface was in reach of my aura. However, the conversion of aura into dungeon territory was slow. I had tried to speed it up, but nothing happened. I had tried to get my core to leave the dungeon and go into the rest of my aura, but it had refused. Maybe I could have forced it, but the last time I did that was what lead to me being stuck in the dungeon in the first place. And I did not want to be damaged with no way to repair myself. So, since waiting looked to be inevitable, I continued with other projects. The most important of those was simple, but dull. Fortunately, one of my mind pieces could do that all the time while I was still doing everything else. I continued to spread my aura out evenly in a sphere away from my dungeon, so that there would never be a time when the dungeon expansion would be delayed. I honestly had no idea what the maximum size for my dungeon would be, but the more area I covered with it and my aura, the more mana I would be able to take in. I expanded my aura farther along the surface now that I reached it. Even though I couldn¡¯t actually see any of the surrounding territory, I was getting a definite mountainous feeling from what was in my aura. Most of it was buried under tons of snow, but I had run into a few areas with sheer drops that left bare stone exposed to the elements. As I had expanded my aura the surrounding area was actually starting to go down in elevation. I had no way to tell if I had reached the summit or a just small outcropping. Time would tell. The depths beneath the dungeon were more interesting for the moment. As I extended my aura into them I could feel the richness of the mana continue to grow. I had started to follow quite a number of branching paths of geothermal activity so that I could find the source and access the source of all this mana. My aura was starting to look like tree roots extending down into the depths. It branched off into cracks, vents, and springs as it descended into the world. I probably extended my aura down a good half mile by now. And they were not extending straight down either. They had a definite angle off to one side. Exsan¡¯s tunnels had reached somewhat farther away than my own forays into the depths. Of course, his were perfectly straight, so he had an advantage. I had taken some time and watched Exsan work. He would start by working on a hollow cylinder. First he would fill in the cracks, and then compress the stone in the interior into the walls to reinforce the structure. It was an interesting method, and I could see that it would prevent cave-ins, leaks, and other structural problems. I started to incorporate parts of his methodology while making the entry hall. I eventually decided that shock and awe was probably the best way to go. The dungeon might not get thousands of visitors, but if it did then I was going to be able to fit them in. I was going to need to add detail work to Exsan¡¯s tunnels once he reached the surface, but for now the room was more than enough work. It had taken me a while before I was satisfied with the size and shape. It had become an elongated oval a little more than a half mile long and a quarter mile wide. The two tunnels entered the room across from each other on one of the narrow sides of the oval. A textured road made of stone that was slightly elevated in the center lead out of each tunnel. Gutters lined the road for drainage. At the moment the various caves with water had been redirected around the my new giant cavern, but I intended to reintroduce water once I had figured out some plumbing. This should neatly tie into using the patterns to recreate a sewer underneath as well. I had a fully functional ecosystem I could recreate, no sense in wasting it. Except for that slime anyway. I wish I had been able to get that damn thing. The roads curved from where they entered until they met in the middle and then continued straight toward the other side of the oval. That side of the oval would have the entrance to the actual dungeon portions. The roads ended there, but I still had no way to deal with lighting the room. For the last half day since I obtained my last level the feeder had continued to steadily put out more mana. It was very useful, so I did not want to break it, but I did want to learn about it. After all, it glowed, and I needed to figure out lighting. So, immediately after it finished expelling mana I turned it off. The crystal on the top had gone back to being clear and I consumed a tiny part of the crystal near the top. It had an unusual structure. I couldn¡¯t tell the exact details, but the pattern in my head was actually fairly simple, and I could see how it worked. The crystal was made of overlapping helical structures. The overlapping pattern made the crystal quite strong and I could see traces of mana trapped in the areas where the helices overlapped. The mana inside was moving back and forth, creating a resonance. This resonance then affected the crystal which resonated in an alternate timing to the mana. Every time the mana resonated inward ambient mana rushed in and filled the gaps left behind while the crystal contracted. When the mana resonated back outward a portion of the mana pushed into the crystal as it expanded back outward and became light. Since a portion of the mana was removed the cycle continued again. This was the first time I had really seen a completely natural inorganic usage of mana. It was definitely worth some experimenting. My core was the only part of me that could see light properly, so it would need to be in my core room. I started by creating a hollow cube of perfectly clear quartz, three feet on a side. Then I created a series of quartz walls between my core and the test cube. If something went wrong, I wanted it contained. No sense in endangering myself. My precautions ready, I created a tiny piece of the mana crystal inside the cube. It was about the size of a grain of sand. Then I started pouring mana into it while I observed. The speck quickly grew dazzlingly bright. I had not even invested a single point of mana when the crystal blew up and became a host of glowing dust particles in the center of the cube. Some mana dispersed with the explosion. The mana in the area was fascinating, too. It was almost imperceptibly flowing toward the dust trapped in the crystal, feeding the glow. Hmm, I could probably make a good blinding trap by releasing a bunch of this dust¡­ With the large crystal I had been seeing a very soft diffuse light. However, these tiny ones gave me a bunch of bright point sources. No doubt if I poured a ton of mana into a large one it would far outshine these though. However, for light sources, a multitude of small dust sized particles embedded into some other crystal should be relatively cheap and effective. I could probably make a hollow crystal and fill it with mana to make light too. It was all a matter of surface area versus volume. I absorbed the dust motes so I would know exactly how to remake them. Even as I absorbed them I could feel the mana inside vibrating intensely with the density of mana inside. Done with my experiment for the moment, I repaired the feeder and then turned it back on. I left it behind the quartz walls just in case I had done something wrong and it exploded. Hopefully it wouldn¡¯t run out of mana anytime soon. It was inevitable that it would run out eventually, but I wasn¡¯t looking forward to it. The shear amount of mana that it had poured out over time made me wonder just how much mana Tam had. He hadn¡¯t seemed exhausted in any way after doing his magic. Of course¡­ I had no idea if losing mana tired someone out. I moved my core to the entrance chamber so that I could actually see the effects of the lights as I made them and then got to work. Along the side the road I crafted a hexagonal pillar of flawless quartz, six feet tall. I created copies of the shining dust motes and wrapped each one in a thin layer of white quartz. It looked good, but I could do better. I moved them through the stone and formed a pattern. A spiral of light extended upward from the bottom of the pillar. The motes of light were sparse at the bottom, but gradually thickened until it looked almost solid and then met a glittering globe of light that was at the top. I absorbed the whole pillar to get a pattern to recreate it. Shortly afterward, identical copies sprung up along both sides of the road. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site. I considered them. The were beautiful, but they were not really bright enough for what I wanted, and even though each one cost almost nothing, the total cost of lighting the enormous room would be substantial. I had originally been going to light the cavern up to daylight levels, but it looked like I would need to reconsider. Well I had moved my core down here so I could judge the lighting, and it was good that I had. I made more columns following along the entire road. By the time I finished, the cavern near the roads had taken on an ethereal quality. The quartz was perfectly clear, so the lights looked like fireflies frozen in the air. The flash of the pillars sides intermittently reflecting the light as I moved along the road only added to the effect. The area was bright enough that I had no trouble seeing the road, and circles of the surrounding stone, but the light felt insubstantial. The surrounding area and over head quickly faded back into pure darkness. I was not exactly sure what else I could provide for visitors. Water was an obvious necessity, as was food. However, I honestly had no idea what was edible for a normal person among everything I had absorbed. As a dungeon, pretty much everything seemed to be edible for me. At least the water was easy. Several pure streams of ice cold water, devoid of much life, had been diverted around the cavern already. I would need to make proper drainage for them, but I was already planning on that sewer system. I formed a grid of empty tunnels underneath the cavern floor. For now they were not actually connected to anything in the cavern, but they formed the basics of what I wanted. I enhanced the tunnels, reinforcing the stone and carving channels into the bottom of each one. Water should flow through that bottom section and people and animals could use the pathways on each side. I should make my dungeon start here. I could already see it. Adventurers tramping down here to kill insectoid rats and mice. It would be just like an intro level in a video game. The ever popular rat killing side quest. Well¡­ maybe it wasn¡¯t a good idea. Eh, screw it. I was going to do it at some point as a personal joke. No one else in this universe might understand why it was important, but I would. I had an entire culture, no, more than one culture, worth of imagery, history, and creatures to play with. Myths and legends from my own world probably had some parallels here. Humans were humans, after all. However the details would be very different, and I could borrow those for my own purposes. Not like anyone here would know I had borrowed them. I started with a nod to my own dual nature. I was a human and dungeon. Struggle and fighting viewpoints were definitely parts of many cultural ideas. However they were most iconic to me in one form. Soon two statues, both enormous, stood fighting each other. Each on a different side of the dungeon¡¯s eventual entrance. An angel and a demon. Wings stretched out behind the angel¡¯s back and its marble face was a resolute mask of determination. I made its eyes out of a brilliantly blue stone. I added seams to the stone to make them look like natural irises. A flowing robe of pure white marble rippled over its form. A sword was clasped in its two handed grip and clashed against the trident of the opposing demon. The demon too had wings, though its were bat-like and an inky black obsidian. Its face was contorted into a snarl, exposing needle sharp teeth and a hint of sinuous tongue. Most of the demon was a roughened obsidian, but its teeth and horns were an off white ivory, and its eyes and tongue were both a vibrant scarlet. I had put light behind both of their irises, so they blazed brightly. Figuring out how to the light the rest of the statue had been tricky. I had finally coated both statues in an incredibly thin layer of mana crystal. I had added a tiny amount of mana to the whole layer. Not enough to turn opaque, but enough to limn both statues in what looked like like an omnipresent light. Overall the effect was otherworldly, especially in contrast to the surrounding darkness. Other mythical, and not so mythical, beasts found their way into statues placed along the walls and by the roads. Dragons, lions, minotaurs, great feathered dinosaurs, elephants, unicorns, and other statues menaced from shadows or pranced proudly in the light. After I was done with those, I created six pillars that extended all the way from the floor to the ceiling. Inside they were hollow and water drained from above where I had created large cisterns. The pressurized water shot forth into the air in large fountains that surrounded each pillar. The tiered fountains cascaded from one ring down to the next until they drained into a final depression that led to the sewers. I made sure to make a large u-bend on the drainage so that the smell of the sewers wouldn¡¯t reach up through the fountain. I made a single relatively large building next to each tunnel exit. I would probably need to create more buildings later, but for now I was going to make due with these. Each building was well lit. The floor of each building was made of wood. I had absorbed enough of various woods that I could recreate quite a few, even if I didn¡¯t have enough of a pattern to recreate the actual trees for all of them. The door opened into a large entryway. A chandelier hung from the ceiling, made of glittering crystals, and each contained a single speck of glowing mana stone. I had actually run into a problem here. I had started by making metal for the chandeliers, but I stopped when I felt my mana start to drop drastically. This was actually my first attempt to create metal, before now I had only been working with organic material or stone. I wasn¡¯t sure if my earth manipulation skill wasn¡¯t high enough, or there was a separate skill for metal. However, for the moment it drained far too much mana for me to create metal for most things. I was absolutely sure that much of the stone I had made had a high metal content. That made no difference. It was magic, why should it bother adhering to logic. Hell, I knew that aluminum was literally as common as dirt. I didn¡¯t know exactly what type of rock it was in, or the chemical reaction needed to extract it cheaply, but I knew it was very common. Ugh. This made me want to bang my head against a wall. I stored what metal I had already made and remade everything in wood or stone. Eventually I finished and the lower half of the building contained a large entry hall, a large kitchen complete with a fireplace, a dining room, various sitting rooms, a room with shelves everywhere for storage, and a long room with targets on the far end and dummies, made with cloth over a wooden frame, in a closer area to train on. The upper floor was smaller and had ten bedrooms. I wish I had more samples of cloth, but I made due with the two types of threads I did have. And I didn¡¯t have any spiders, so I didn¡¯t have spider silk to work with either. I created a copy of each type of thread and then pulled them apart to get to the actual fibers they were comprised of. The threads were of various sizes, so I put them together with other threads of equal size. When I combined these back into cloth I ended up with varying levels of quality. The original velvet was quite fine, though I found a few thicker fibers. And the original thread I had gotten from the man in the sewers was fairly course. After a while I combined some of both into cloth as well. The velvet material shimmered in a snowy white and I was fairly certain it was either silk or some kind of alien silk analogue. The other¡­ I wasn¡¯t actually sure. I was no expert in cloth. It was fairly sturdy and creased when folded. I was fairly certain it wasn¡¯t dyed, and had an off-white tan color to it. The tiniest bits of DNA that were embedded in the material gave me the vague shape of a plant. The mix of the two was somewhere in between. Less stiff and draping more than the coarser original. I took the time to play with the various types of cloth I had made. I was able to dye them with water mixed with stone dust. I used some hot water and some cold. Some of them just washed out immediately, while others would stain for a little while, but faded fast. I tried a number of things to make it work, and found better success with dying individual fibers then making them into threads and dying it again, and then again when it was a complete cloth. Eventually I ended up with a number of vibrant colors. I was eventually able to dye the threads directly by creating the fibers and stone simultaneously. I overdid it at first and the threads shattered because they were too stiff, though I did make a note of this for later projects. Eventually I found a good balance and was able to make the fabrics more vivid than ever. I was fairly certain that I had actually fused the colors to the threads and that it was impossible to wash them out now. That actually reduced any worries I had about making poisonous dyes too. If the dye was stuck to the fabric it shouldn¡¯t cause any poisoning issues. Hopefully none of it was radioactive¡­ I was able to use these new creations to create a color scheme for each room. Subtle shades of orange, yellow, and red cloth created a room that evoked flame, and the walls was an abstract mosaic of deep reds rising up into oranges and yellows in vaguely flame like patterns. Another rooms was a mixture of greens and blues to mimic the sea, another in black, white, and deep green with a mural of snow capped mountains. I continued on in this fashion. Honestly I thought the effect was a little too over the top, but I was advertising the quality and color of the cloth on purpose. I was using these rooms to showcase what I could create. Good dye and cloth were extremely expensive for much of history. That might or might not be the case here, but I was sure it could make a difference. I was sure that many dungeons gave out gold, silver, weapons, and other common loot. How many of them gave out intricate works of art or exquisite cloth? The people in charge of decisions almost certainly indulged in luxuries and showed off. If I offered them something they couldn¡¯t get elsewhere then they would preserve me. I was making myself unique, and I was demonstrating that as best I could. I finished my work for the moment by focusing on the door to the dungeon. I felt it was okay to splurge on this a bit. I covered the door was a patina of verdigris that was perfectly smooth. I covered it with mana crystal and imbued a small amount of mana in it. The door shown with a subtle light and the blue green looked like shimmering water. Over this I placed the symbol I felt best represented my new life and what this dungeon meant for me here. I died, but I came to this world and was reborn. I had almost died again and was remade into a joint creature with Exsan. There was only one symbol I could think of that represented what I wanted. I had not only reborn, but I would rise higher. If anything cast me down again I would rise from the ashes. Upon the front of the double doors that lead into the dungeon was now a massive phoenix backed in bronze. The individual feathers were made with translucent layers of red and orange crystal wrapped around mana crystal charged to varying degrees. As I approached and moved around the door my perspective constantly changed, which made the entire bird shimmer and glimmer like firelight. The phoenix had its head turned to the side, its eye overlooking the cavern; its pure gold beak was open in a wordless cry of challenge and victory. SSD 2.10 - Baring My Soul "The gods are masters of souls. Your actions in life are a mirror of your soul, which alters even as it reflects. In death you are drawn to whomever you are most closely aligned with. Heaven and hell are both the same, they are simply the people you spend eternity with. Be who you want to live with forever.¡± I had been working on the entry cave for longer than I thought. Between my own mana and Exsan¡¯s, we were close to the mana needed for the next level. Since it was just a short time away, now was a good time to meditate. The impact from seeing my soul was not as fresh anymore and I was ready to see it again. Hopefully I would learn more about it in the process. I was not sure what it meant to examine my soul, but I had a strong affinity for soul skills and I would be a fool not to use it. I settled into myself. I decided to use something other than turning the flow of mana on and off. Exsan was working with it and he might object. For now I focused on the constant flowing of water. The noise of water ranged from the almost inaudible lapping at the edge of a subterranean lake, to the rushing roar of water cascading down in crashing waves before it vanished into the depths. I focused on all the loud noises first. I slowly tuned them out as I progressed to the softer and subtler sounds, tuning out each in turn. I found it easier than it had been before. With the vast area that the dungeon and aura covered I was subjected to far more information than I could process at once. It had unconsciously forced me to learn how to shut parts of my senses down. Now as I shut parts of my perception down intentionally that skill became obvious. Even as I realized this I acknowledged the thought and put it away with all the rest. Eventually I lost track of the world completely and found myself next to my soul once again. It was not as I remembered it. My ability to perceive it had grown, and from a distance I could see the exterior of my soul as a sphere. I saw the exterior of it all at once. It reminded me of my aura perception. My soul was as glorious as ever, almost. Its outer shell was constantly shifting, complex, but somehow I felt it had a unifying purpose. However it had scars, flaws. They were spread out in a few places, but they seemed to be healing. And the outer shell of my soul was not completely closed. Beneath, if that word had any meaning here, it was open and part of my essence was exposed. Beneath that was a machine. That was my first impression. It was regular and moved in impossibly precise geometrical motions. It took me a moment to realize that this was also the shell of a soul. It was folded open to match my own and gleaming threads of its exposed interior were linked with mine. Its shell also bore scars, though they were deeper and more terrible than my own. I knew examining it that it was Exsan. There was no logical analysis, I could simply feel it, know it. I could feel other things too. I knew that even this perfect three dimensional view of my soul was a pale imitation of what my soul truly was. It moved in directions and dimensions I was either incapable or not yet ready to see. However, for the moment, seeing the matching scars, I knew that my soul had been wrapped around Exsan¡¯s soul. My soul would eventually have smothered his. I could see what Tam had done. If I had stayed as I was originally, my soul would have strangled his and I would have become the uncontested master. When I had no longer heard the voice of Exsan in the sewers, it was not Exsan dying. It was me detaching the still fragile connections to Exsan¡¯s soul. I had been a hairsbreadth from death. In truth Exsan was the original owner of this core. However, I initiated the dungeon creation, not him. So the system healed us, and it had compromised. As I saw and then touched the threads that connected Exsan and I, I could feel what had been done. From my core was drawn threads of memory, skill, all the necessary tools to think and know. This was what had been given to Exsan as recompense, and why he was progressing from mere instincts to thought so quickly. Exsan, by contrast, had threads from all the dungeon¡¯s gifts, abilities, and power. A body had been given to me, and a mind to Exsan. Our souls were stretching toward each other. Each gradually blossoming open to meet the other. The progress seemed tiny when perceived as a whole, but when I zoomed in it appeared to be moving with lightning speed. Perception was strange here. I lost myself for a time, dwelling simply in the pure joy of watching the two very different souls as they went through an ever changing panoply of shapes. It was hypnotic and relaxing. I almost felt like I was meditating inside my meditation. A piece of the universe falling inside itself to explore the universe deep within. Here, as I lost myself, I eventually noticed two tiny threads leading away from our souls. One from me, and one from Exsan. I touched the thread that lead away from myself first. I felt the feeling of someone else, far away. A man, who seemed almost familiar. There was a sense of identity to the thread, much like how I knew the other soul was Exsan. I could not tell much about it, but when I pressed against the thread I could feel a single concept resonate through me. Debt, honor, obligation. Confused, I released it. I had no idea what that was about. I could tell that the debt was owed to me, but nothing more than that. Was it some debt from my last life? Honestly there could be past lives even beyond that. Not like it would surprise me. What happened to a soul that wasn¡¯t yanked unceremoniously to some other world and shoved inside a dungeon core? I had no way to be absolutely certain, but I was reasonably sure that was not a normal experience. I did lose myself wondering what it would mean if that was actually a normal experience. Eventually I came to the conclusion that it would mean that whatever god did exist was a colossal dick. Since I preferred to keep my, admittedly limited, sanity, I moved on. I touched the other thread that linked to Exsan. It had no identity that I could feel. It was instead a more complex series of ideas. It was a series of images. Growth, a crystal growing and glowing. It changed shapes as it continued. Death, embodied by crystal pieces falling through the air. Rebirth, a shard of crystal striking the ground and bouncing back into the air to blossom with light and life once again. This were repeated, the images changing, but the core idea repeating endlessly. This then, represented Exsan¡¯s nature as an immortal soul. I had tried to examine the skill, but it had not responded, since it was not mine. Dungeons could die, but they would always return. The phoenix imagery was more apt than I had realized. I dwelt for a time in the soulscape and simply enjoyed the peace. I felt a faint pull and allowed myself to be drawn once more toward the world. I allowed myself to drift back to full awareness, even as I lost awareness of my soul. The details faded in my mind. For all the power in seeing my soul, the experience started to fade immediately. Gradually my mind blossomed back into the world and everything became clear and vibrant. Including the small insistent gleam of the notification light. Well that at least explained why I felt drawn back to awareness. I opened the notification.
Exsan is attempting to level up. Total mana required: 120 Current mana totals: Caden: 49 Exsan: 78 Would you like to level up? Yes No
I agreed.
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Mana Diffusion II Dungeon Control Menu
Mana Specialist II Dungeon Progression I
Quest Reward Investment Specialist
SSD 2.11 - The Trappings of Power ¡° ¡° could have designed basic mechanical traps I would have needed to reset them all manually each and every time. I had been reasonably certain that I would get a better way to deal with things. Fortunately, I was right. Before getting lost in my own creations, I did a quick check on how Exsan was progressing. The tunnels extended far away from the main area of the dungeon. Only a tiny portion of the dungeon had expanded to cover them so far. It had expanded a decent amount the last few days, I was guessing about a hundred feet a day. I tried again to stretch out my senses and feel what Exsan had described. There was still nothing at first, but after a time I could feel something. There was a resonance that constantly echoed through me. The ripples of mana across me would make a pattern and then I could feel that pattern brushing against the edges of my aura. It felt like me, just delayed, like an instrument playing a note behind. It was very faint, but now that I knew what I was looking for I could feel two different sources. Each was in the direction that Exsan was building toward. One was closer than the other. I didn¡¯t know exactly how I could tell that. It was reflecting just a bit faster than the other, maybe. The tunnels had grown to a considerable distance. Exsan had the advantage of extending just in a straight line each way. Each was at least five miles long now. The tunnels still felt a considerable distance from the closest echo. I had time, so it was best to get started. I sectioned off a small part of the sewers and recreated the full pattern of the water that I had obtained there. I saw that it was registered as an environment in my new menu and smiled. I reconnected the part I worked on. I designated the rest of the sewers I had created as the same environment and they started to change. This was the first time I had done this, so I took a minute to watch. The water was already present since I had arranged for that when I made the fountains. The water gradually became cloudier with filth. Not so pleasant for me, but perfect for what would soon be living here. I had various patterns for living creatures, so I started to fill a large area of the sewers up with life. I started with the filter feeders, since a number of things probably nibbled on them. Then the tiny jellyfish, and other small fish. The walls were soon covered with a layer of moss and various fungus. Insects soon followed, including lots of cockroaches. I created a fairly large area like this until I felt it was ready to support more. I added the few larger fish specimens I had seen. Then on the ledges I added mice-bugs and rat-bugs. Just a few dozen of each, at opposite ends of the large environment. Hopefully they wouldn¡¯t all kill each other. The mice-bugs scurried around and looked for places to hide. I looked at the walls I had made. Right, those were way too smooth for these things. The old sewer had been made of brick. Well, I could do that; I had gotten plenty of samples. I started by making dozens of individual bricks. These bricks were whole and in good condition. Then I picked a few of them and used my new dungeon abilities from the menu and had them degrade on the outside based on a percentage. The bricks roughened in various areas. I had some copies of both newer and older bricks from the sewers. This should actually let me do this even better. I created a full section of brick wall. I designated the different parts as bricks and mortar in the schematic. Then I differentiated between the different colors of bricks. The newer ones had a very small chance of degradation, and as they got darker and older the percentage increased. Then I used the schematic and told it to randomly replace the bricks. Then I added a smaller percentage of degradation at random around the bricks, again following the areas around newer and old. Honestly much of the system functions responded to my thoughts, which made it very simple. I was fairly certain that the mice would be making burrows by chewing on the mortar and bricks. So I made the wall three layers of bricks deep. The first layer would slowly repair itself. The second even slower, and the third would only repair if areas that were too large formed. This should let the mice-bugs and the rat-bugs form nice little burrows. Hell, lots of insects would probably use crevices and things too. Hmm, I should add some of those in. I added a few natural stress cracks to the pattern that would lead to tiny hollows. That would allow for diverse life to form. Now that I was ready I told it to replace all the walls in the sewers. Once I had some monsters this place should actually be a fun environment. Hmm, should I add some lights? I decided to add some to a portion. I designated one section of it near the dungeon entrance as the beginner area. I wasn¡¯t sure I would actually use the sewers, but the mana from the creatures living there could only help. I added lots of lights to the beginner area. Then as the sewers got farther away I started to make them intermittent. Where the lights should be were jagged areas that looked broken off. Then the lights got scarcer and scarcer. I used the same function I was using before to make the ¡°damaged¡± lights all look different. Eventually the sewers contained only darkness, with a single light rarely making an appearance. Now that I had the sewer made, I was going to see if I could hatch the eggs I had made. Actually I needed somewhere that I could do general work on hatching eggs and growing seeds. I made a large room. The ceiling was significantly lower than the entry room, but it was similar in size. I sectioned off one area and redirected a gentle stream of water until I had a number of pools. Each one had fine stone mesh separating them. I designated it as sewers and put the fish eggs into the water. Other eggs that were for insects were put into areas of damp moss that were sectioned off from each other with more mesh. I was hoping that the environmental designation would help automatically change things to make them hatch. I decided to use the new spherical lights I could make and sectioned off another part of the room. I put down several feet of soil and separated the soil from the rest of the room with stone dividers. I added all the various seeds I had stored and planted them each about an inch below the ground. I gave each of them a lot of space. I was not certain that I had planted them at the right depth, but I could change that if they failed to sprout or had a hard time reaching the surface. If I could get the seeds to sprout it should be easy enough for me to use some of the growing plant to get its pattern. Even if I just gained enough information to make another seed I would be happy because then I could try again. I created another area that was identical, but this time I recreated what seeds I did have the patterns for. Among these were seeds I had never seen before. I had managed to get a couple of patterns from the wood in the sewers and one from the table Tam had displayed the various objects on. One was a shiny brown and about the size of a man¡¯s thumb. Another produced seeds that looked like a tiny ball. The last was a papery seed that looked like it would catch the wind. Other seeds that had been reconstructed from decaying mater joined them. I had even found a small cave on the side of the mountain with some dead plants in it. I was able to use that to make a seed as well. I could have created a full plant for some of these, but I wanted to see how they grew. Hopefully that would let me pick the right areas for them. Now that I could make bright lights I might be able to get my forest after all. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. For now, traps were going to be my mainstay. Only a few simple traps were actually available, but it was not like I would find recreating the options I good buy particularly difficult. I started by creating the pitfall trap (primitive), that the system offered me as a start. The cover was heavily cracked stone with gaps in it. Honestly this shouldn¡¯t fool anyone. Hmm, I suppose a newbie adventurer could fall in if they were distracted by something else. I made a few quick variations of the top, each one getting harder to spot. The last version was indistinguishable from ordinary floor. It was only a few millimeters thick. It shouldn¡¯t break from tapping on it with a stick, but if someone put their full weight on it they would break it. As I made it I made sure that any cracks, differences in texture, decor, etc¡­ would match up. I was glad the interface was so customizable. Though honestly, it didn¡¯t suggest any of these options. I had an enormous advantage both because I could think, and I had seen and read about so many traps. I supposed that was a benefit from so much media. I could borrow from everyone else¡¯s visions of what was possible. I named the various options I made and added them into the menu. The spike trap was available for purchase too, but I ignored it and just started by making an open pit and adding spikes of hardened stone at the bottom. I made variations on the spikes too. Some were needle thin and highly fragile. They would break off if someone landed on them and likely shatter. I made longer spikes of hard stone that would create gaping wounds as a person fell on them. Then I made spikes that had a coating of breakable material over a solid core. I continued with more options. I made spikes, both sturdy and breakable variations, that had barbs. I considered those to be particularly nasty. As was my spike trap that was wider at the bottom and had razor sharp blades facing inwards at the top. They would make getting out, even with a rope, a nasty endeavor. I actually went back and made a pitfall variation of that same design. No spikes at the bottom, but a razor sharp lip. Then I made more types that also had spikes pointing down and inward. Then I made designs where they were fragile, or razor edged, or both. By the time I was done with this I noticed a small light flashing for attention.
You have acquired a new title: Innovator I (Dungeon) You have successfully created structures using your own knowledge instead of purchasing them from the shop. Continue to innovate and make your dungeon even more useful, beautiful, and lethal. +When you make a design that is similar enough to a purchasable option you will be given that purchase for free +25 AP
True to its word, the system had already given me a ton of variations on the pitfall and spike traps. It had made them much more modular, so I could select a pitfall trap, then select the type of covering, then add spikes, how to change the walls, etc¡­ Since I had shown I understood the ability to make things more lethal and hide them it offered the ability to randomize that difficulty within certain parameters. A few new minor things I hadn¡¯t thought of where among the new design choices, but they were all logical extensions, or features I had jumped over to made more dangerous traps. All of the options I had created so far were covered in the module design, so I stored them away. There was no indication that the menu had any kind of storage limit, so it couldn¡¯t hurt. I decided to start making entirely different types of structures. I started with a pressure plate. It was easy enough to make with a stone tile that was held up with a fragile bit of stone attaching it to the stone tiles next to it. It would break under a tiny bit of pressure and then settle onto a lip of stone the tiniest bit beneath it. In the process of settling into place it would align to set off the trap. I made some variations that would fall farther and that would stick up from the surrounding area more. That way I had the more obvious and more difficult to detect options. Then I designed a floor where every single stone was at different heights and they would all break when a person stepped on them. This would be the advanced option. Setting up trip wires was equally simple. Some would go off only if pulled. That pull was enough to let a piece of stone move and trigger the rest of the trap. Others were based around tension and would go off both when tripped on or cut. And some solidly anchored wires were added to the pitfall schematics. Falling into a pitfall after tripping over a wire could be even more dangerous. I also made two part traps. A trap that could be triggered by both the trip wire and the stone that you would step on on the other side. I also put trip wires at every possible angle and height, as well as vertical. The ability to make moving parts was actually what made everything work. I set up thin rods that exerted only a small amount of force. When a hole drilled into stone aligned because a tile settled, or a piece of stone that was blocking it was moved when a trip wire was pulled, it would move forward and start the rest of the trap. The rest of the trap was moved by an increasingly powerful set of automated motions that were released when that thin rod caused a knife sharp edge to cut a string. The instant release of tension from that could be used to cut other strings with other blades, or release tension from other systems. This allowed the traps to be almost instant. This allowed for dart, spear, and arrow traps. I could just have them fly due to releasing tension. I could also use the ability to make a material go in a single direction to make these same kinds of traps. Though the speed I could generate with just that was not all that high. Since I could made moving parts and then have the dungeon reset, it was also easy to have traps go off automatically at set or irregular intervals. It was easy enough to do with moving bars or turning gears. I only really needed a single gear to be turning and it could power an entire basic mechanism. I found a better way to launch arrows and other things this way too. Put an arrow at the beginning of a long tube and then move a large stone behind it. As long as the stone had a way to get air behind it, and was fitted well enough to the area in front of it, it would act as a giant pneumatic tube that could launch a dart, arrow, or anything else. I could vary the speed by increasing the size of the stone moving the air and the length of the tube. I managed to get some very impressive velocities. I actually was reminded of guns by this, so I started playing around with small dense bits of stone and rifling the tube that was acting as my barrel. Sadly the stone tended to shatter, so I started to sheath the stone in a thin bit of wood that left the tip exposed. This actually worked as the grooves made the wood and stone spin and then fly out. These¡­ proved to be very strong. It was entirely possible to make a version that was more like a cannon being shot out too. I could get a stronger effect by compressing air though a series of stones collapsing a long tunnel. Or many tunnels meeting each other. Timing it so that the stones closed the tunnel in perfect synchronization would make the projectile shoot out at incredible speed. I tried it with a small stone and it went a feet feet into the solid stone of the opposite wall after traveling a few hundred feet. Out of morbid curiosity I made a much larger version. The wood shattered under the stress and it turned and then destroyed the barrel. I made the wood layer thicker and denser and then tried again. It blew apart again, but it got farther through the barrel first. I looked at the shotgun like damage that came out when it blew up the wall as it emerged. That would actually make a great trap on its own. I made a version with wood surrounding pellets of hardened stone, in other words, a shotgun. I filed it away. Then I made the wood even harder and tried again. After a few more attempts, and some more blueprints for increasingly destructive fragments, I managed to launch my mortar. It fit the far wall and I felt everything around it shake. The mortar left a giant crater in the opposite wall. It was about the same depth, three feet, but it was much wider, and deeper cracks had formed. That¡­ was quite a weapon. I didn¡¯t know what abilities people would come with, but I imagined that this would be enough to kill most of them. I continued and made other traps. Nothing else had the sheer lethality of my improvised firearms, but I didn¡¯t really need that for the most part. Generally I was trying for incrementally more difficult. I even took the time to make a giant rolling boulder trap. I could pair that with a golden idol at some point. No one else in the world would find it amusing, but I would. I made many more traps: Traps with water, icy cold, boiling hot, or just normal. Traps of sculpted ice, which apparently counted for the purposes of earth manipulation. Another case where I wanted to bang my head into a wall, since pure water didn¡¯t and I had to use the, fortunately, massive amounts of water already available to me unless I wanted to let the ice melt. It was easy to store some water and move it at least. More traps with protruding blades. Traps with spinning blades. Powdered razor sharp crystal. I had found I could pressurize the air with fans for that as well. The fans were not so great at making the firearms though. I could use the fans or moving stones to create traps purely based around air pressure and wind. This actually unlocked the ability to make wind as part of my environmental options. When I used the same fibers I used to make cloth and turned it into ultra fine powder I could get explosions. Actually, explosions were surprisingly easy to make with organic sources when powdered and ignited through friction. I could make them from simple sawdust or something strange like dried and powdered micro jellyfish. By the time I was done I had created every type of trap that I could think of. There were still traps that were available for purchase. They had opened up as I created more and more types of traps. They had names like wind blade trap (basic), or hell tangle trap (basic), but any of the more mundane traps that I could guess from the description I had created. By the time I was done my title had improved to Innovator III (Dungeon) and I earned another 150 AP. SSD 2.12 - A Leap Into Magic ¡°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.
Your status has changed ¨C Level Up Status
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Swift Descent
Mana Diffusion V
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. SSD 2.13 - Environmental Testing The more I have delved into dungeons, the more amazed I am at the power and majesty found in the deep ones. And the more I wish I had time enough to see the small and simple ones grow. - Heastjack, the Researcher My mind had undergone a shift over the last hour. I could feel an influence dropping away from my mind. I knew what it was from, too. Apparently, touching and experiencing someone else¡¯s soul had unexpected consequences, for a little bit they rubbed off on you. In looking at all the traps I had created I felt a certain horror. Some pride, too. Some of these were cruel, terrible, and probably be a bit much to deploy against anyone. Though I didn¡¯t know what kind of power to expect from people who came to the dungeon. Still, that ruthlessness I had experienced had been useful in unleashing my imagination without any restraint. I had created some traps that would be very effective. However, I could also see that my focus had shifted toward the lethal end of the spectrum and caused me to neglect other possibilities. I could think of an entire slew of traps that were non-lethal and that would be very effective. Water, mud, wind, sand, nets, I had a great many ways to delay and trip up an opponent. I would design those for sure, but for now what I really needed to do was answer that question. How powerful did I need to prepare the dungeon to be? I could simply prepare an entire range of difficulty, of course, but I didn¡¯t know what was appropriate. How did I create the proper challenge? Actually, I had an idea for that. I didn¡¯t have to create the dungeon blind. I had been making that assumption, but I could force adventurers to go through non-standard tests to even gain entry to the dungeon. There were options in my dungeon menu that were meant to go with puzzles, I could use those. My dungeon was supposed to be special, so having it be odd in other ways would make sense, too. A little bit later I was able to get the basics prepared. Now that I had various lighting options I could create better lit areas. I decided to name my current area, since there was a map and areas could be named in my dungeon menu. I called the entry area the Starlight Grotto and gained a surprise.
New area designated: Starlight Grotto Two subsection types available: Dungeon (default) Safe Zone Please choose a type.
Finally! I had been wondering about those two subsections, but they had not shown up anywhere. Since this an entry area, it will definitely need to be a safe zone. I selected the option.
You have created your first safe zone. Please note: Mutation and monster spawning is disabled in this area. Intentionally lethal traps will not function. Plants and animals will still experience growth that is faster than normal, though it will be slower than dungeon zones. Monsters under your control will not enter this zone under normal circumstances. It is recommended that you create safe zones in sections, as you may not disband any safe zone while a humanoid sentient is within.
Normally I would have followed its advice and subdivided the area, but I had the advantage of being able to build just fine as long as I had good intentions. This actually made things easier in quite a few ways, too. I had worried about the changes to the plants and animals I was working with, because I wanted to be able to create some wildlife that wasn¡¯t simply going to try to kill everyone. For decoration, if nothing else. This also meant I could create rest areas in the dungeon itself. For the moment I diverted my attention to take care of some opportunities this created. First I absorbed everything alive in my little garden lab. Then I recreated everything and named it ¡°The Garden.¡± Now I should just be able to grow everything there. I created an enormous room that was entirely isolated from the rest of the dungeon. I had to reroute a few streams, but I was able to find an area that was mostly stone to begin with. I took the time to make it very tall and reinforced the walls. Various sections were filled with deep dirt, sandy soil, clay, and mixes of all of those. I also placed down some of the snow and ice I had in storage to create a snow section. Since I could make ice directly, I also created a glacial section that melted in parts making ice caves. Then I replicated all of the environments I had made several times over and altered how much water would fall down as mist to simulate rain, attached incredibly bright lights to mechanical systems to simulate sunlight, etc¡­ When I finished, I named it ¡°The Greenhouse,¡± and made it another safe zone. Then I planted copies of every plant I had been working with so far. Hopefully I wouldn¡¯t need to worry about monstrous plants now here, and could learn what environments these plants actually preferred. Fortunately, I could replicate all the environmental settings now that I had made them once. Rain, sunlight, humidity, wind, even the various soil and landscape types had been added automatically into a modular section that let me designate exactly what I wanted. I couldn¡¯t produce options that were hotter than my geothermal areas, or a little bit colder than freezing from the snow, but I definitely had a good range. I actually used the new options to create a little bit more variation. Now I had very hot and humid rain forests and dry sandy desert with intermittent winds. I noted with amusement that I could make the wind blow very very hard. No doubt due to some of the extreme pressures I had created when I was doing my projectile testing. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. I created a similar area for aquatic environments and called it ¡°The Aquarium.¡± And then I went and made another that covered all the subterranean environments I had yet to cover, such as the mud pots, basic moist caves in both warm and cold, and more. This was simply unimaginably called ¡°The Caves.¡± Each was made a safe zone. These were breeding areas. Non-monstrous stock would grow here that I could put into safe places. I could also re-introduce anything I grew here into various monstrous environments to see if new variations would show up. I had seen various mutations show up, but I not detected any particular rhyme or reason to them. All I knew was that mana and my aura were helping it happen. As it was, any area outside of a declared safe zone or my normal aura was becoming a war zone. Creatures and plants growing, killing, attacking, eating, and reproducing. It was madness, but it was a madness that showed focus. Animals and plants became more powerful and dangerous. Even the snotties in the sulfur caves looked like they were starting to take on a life of their own. If I waited long enough I might end up with Darwin¡¯s ideal creature. Now I needed to see if I could focus the mutations for my own uses. I made a quick blueprint of the three areas I had just made, and recreated them elsewhere. With the very high levels of ambient mana I had available they were created very quickly. I didn¡¯t bother to name these. I just left them as normal dungeon territory. I would observe how everything changed and adapted to the environments as they mutated. For now I got back to my original objective. The Starlight Grotto was massive, and even with all my statues, fountains, and lights, it had large areas that were simply blank stone hidden in the darkness. Plenty of room to add new things. I started with a small building dedicated to traps. It was a long subterranean corridor with only the entrance showing up above ground. It was easy enough to set it up so it would only accept a single person at a time. The actual traps were very simple. They were all pitfall traps that only dropped someone a foot. What changed as the corridor continued was the difficulty of finding the traps. At first everything was well lit and the traps were painfully obvious. Then the lighting grew dimmer or intermittent and the traps became more and more difficult to spot. The terrain changed over time too. Some traps became cloth covered by sand in an equally sandy biome, others a thin mat of leaves in a similarly changed environment. I mixed up what I could until the room was pitch black or blinding flashes of light were periodically released and the traps were essentially indistinguishable from the surrounding terrain. If I was still human I would have had no chance to spot most of the traps, but I needed to know what adventurers were capable of. When an adventurer went through any testing area it would reflect their score on a token they would be given when they tried to enter the dungeon. That token would need all the tests to be finished before they could enter the dungeon. Once someone completed a test they would need to wait a while before they could do that test again. Hopefully the time it would take people to do the tests would let me adjust the difficulty as needed. The next section was a measure of strength. Individual sections were separated into rooms, and each had weights of increasing heaviness. It would be interesting to see if they used magic to move the weights too. After that would be a group weight test. The weights there started heavier and went into the absurd. After reinforcing stone continually I was able to make some stones of reasonably small size that weighed at least 20 tons. The handles on the side made it theoretically possible to move it if someone was strong enough. And if they could lift something that heavy¡­ then I wasn¡¯t entirely sure what to prepare for them. The third test was a test of dexterity and mobility. It started off as simple climbs over objects with simple jumps. These were things I could have done myself. From there the difficulty rose. I placed later sections over nets or water, so that falling would not be dangerous. Eventually adventurers would need to be able to push off from a single hand hold over and around brightly colored obstacles to grip another single hand hold which would crumble away in moments. And then repeat that. And there was wind with colored powder that would ¡°kill¡± anyone that it touched so they would fail the room. And timed switches, and much more. Overall the room started to remind me of a Japanese game show that was always playing at the local sushi joint. It would be fun to watch people try it out. The fourth area was a test of magical senses. I honestly had no idea how easily people could detect mana. Tam had been unable to see mana directly. The first area had tons of objects that were entirely mundane and a single object that practically vibrated with mana from the full mana crystal hidden within. The amount of mana in the correct object would gradually become less and less. I considered making a puzzle room, but that was something I could make in the dungeon proper if I wanted. Maybe something with math so that I could learn it and use it to understand them better? Well, an endurance test would make sense. And it was easy to make. I started off with a room that was just uncomfortably warm. They could leave at any time, but would need to wait for a while before the next room would open. And the next room was hotter. And the next, and the next, etc¡­ If I had access to colder temperatures I would use those too, put I would just test heat for now. I had a thought and quickly checked my AP store for things related to survival points. I had unlocked them not long ago and hadn¡¯t checked to see if anything new showed up. Honestly there wasn¡¯t much. A skill to be able to see how much an adventurer would be worth in survival points if they left or were killed was all I saw. Nothing to generate them passively or even get more of them at all. That made the ten percent boost to survival points from investment specialist very rare. The skill available for purchase was also the second time I had seen a mention of getting survival points when an adventurer left. This meant I didn¡¯t have to kill to get them. Apparently just getting them to enter the dungeon would be sufficient. I was not an idiot, there were sure to be drawbacks to this method, but it suggested that a compromise was possible. Exsan was not going to just accept a non-lethal dungeon though. I could tell that just from having been exposed to the effects of his soul. There would need to be a compelling reason. The adventurers would need to offer something. The first thing I thought of was mana, but I really had more of that than I needed already. That might change in the future, but survival points were the real bottleneck. I thought about everything I had gained before I even teleported here. I had gained cloth from two different sources. Wood, metals, and more I got from Tam. What I really needed was variety. New items, new plants, and new animals. For that I could offer a form of protection. Huh, very Mafia-esque. I would need to find a way to make it automatic though. Actually that part was not too difficult. I could tie that into the token they got and use the puzzle controls to increment a counter upwards when I absorbed an item and they ¡°completed the puzzle.¡± What I needed to find a way to make automatic was saving them. The dungeon system didn¡¯t have any options that would work properly. I sorted through the AP store again. It took me a while but I eventually found an ability that should work. It was called rule of law. It was not cheap either. The laws were supposed to start out simple, but hopefully it getting bumped up to level II would be enough to work. Well, before I even bothered it was time to go see if I could make a deal. Exsan? We need to talk. SSD 2.14 - Man to Man-Eater Talk ¡°¨D Jonathan Swift ¨C ¡°A Modest Proposal¡± What talk? Yes. How else can we get survival points? Prey come, they leave. Get points. Survive other dungeons, get points. Quests give points. Special things. What do you mean survive other dungeons? Touch dungeon, conflict between. So only if we grow and end up touching another dungeon? No, some move. Treat like prey. How often do dungeons get attacked by other dungeons? Not common. How uncommon? Several times a year? Once every year or two? Decades, centuries? Don¡¯t know. Long time. May never happen. So we get points when people come in and then leave again. Why kill people at all? Small. Points tiny. Death is big. Tell me how the points work when they leave. Does anything change how many points we get? Yes, not always same. Points change. So what does make the points change, and how does it change? Time. Longer time more points. Struggle. Danger. Almost kill prey, get more. Travel. Prey go long way, change level, more. Exsan? Do you know how to speak properly? Speak like I do, for example, and use complete sentences? Not understand. Am speaking now. Right, never mind. Anyway¡­ I¡­ wanted to talk about people, about prey. What about prey? Do you remember how you said I belong to you? Yes. Okay. So we both belong to each other. We own this dungeon, the space, the creatures, plants, mana and so on. It belongs to both of us. Do you understand and agree? The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Yes. All one. All same. Belong. Good. Do you know what I was before we belonged to each other? No. Before absent. I used to be a person. I died, but I was what you would consider prey. I was combined with you, our souls were joined. You were prey. Now dungeon. Predator. I still remember my old life. I still feel like a person. Will help. You will? How? Teach Caden. Help kill. Make good predator. Consume much prey. Okay, so everything in the dungeon is yours. You could let most of it be destroyed and you would just rebuild it without caring right? Yes. You wouldn¡¯t want me harmed at all though, right? Yes. So what is different between me and the rest of the dungeon? You me. You hurt. Hurt. Dungeon remake. No hurt. People belong to each other. One dies, others hurt. It is not pain of the body, the core. It is pain of the mind. My mind is still human. People die and I will hurt. People that come in, they will belong to me. It they die it will hurt me. Do you understand? Prey come, they die. Caden hurt? Yes. You die? No, pain only. However, I do not wish to experience pain. I wish to make a compromise. How? I want to offer a better chance for people to survive. If people give us a sacrifice that allows us to grow then we will spare them when they would otherwise die. They will gain a certain¡­ leeway. It is not infinite. They are not preserved forever. However, by helping us to grow they are given another chance. This should encourage them to help us more. And from that we will gain new things. New animals, plants, new decorations and loot. No. Why not? Not enough. Slow down. Gain not worth levels. It is. If the dungeon gives people a second chance then more people will come. And by getting so many new things we will draw in more people with better loot. And then they will come back again and again. Gain not certain. Not enough. It will also reduce my pain. Caden survive. If you believe that pain is something just ignored then I will show you a type of mental pain. What pain? Frustration. I had died. The fact that people had souls was a bit of a comfort, but it did not make their lives unimportant. If I was going to consider myself a moral person, even a person at all, then I needed to tread this path my own way. Stop! There is no point. This useless. Do you agree to my terms? No. Then I will not stop. Stop. Will win. This is not a battle that either of us can win. Caden meditate. Can wait. Will rebuild. It won¡¯t be enough. I can demolish all of our aura. Dismantle our dungeon. Destroy everything. No. Will not agree. Will fight. You can fight, but it will not be enough. Even if you fight your hardest. Even if you fight me constantly. Even if you battle forward and make gains while I cannot fight you. Even if you fight me every single day for every step, for every foot, for every speck of mana needed to keep the dungeon working, you will never get rid of this frustration. It will never end. You cannot win, because even if you do all of this and you manage to kill a horde of people and gain countless points, it will profit you nothing. You. Need. ME. To. Level. If you do this then I will share my own pain with you forever. You will cause me pain as you kill, but I will cause you pain in turn. You will rack up survival points and never be able to spend them. My compromise might be slower, it might be faster, but anything will be faster than being stuck in a stalemate for eternity. I don¡¯t actually need to fight. All I need to do is never consent. I am going to stop fighting for a moment, if you stop too. Take some time to think properly. Mental pain. This¡­ frustration. Understand. Will compromise. SSD 2.15 - Interlude - Dungeon Thoughts Rule #37 - Every dungeon is unique. They may even be beautiful. This does not make them any less dangerous. See Rule #1. -50 Rules for Dungeon Divers ==Sevso== That was all a week ago now. Since then I had pursued knowledge about dungeons. And I had learned at least one thing. No casual violence of any kind was allowed. I had tried to kick a beggar out of my way and my head almost exploded from the pain. I barely managed to stay on my feet as my eyes watered. It had taken an hour before the pain faded away. It was unthinking habit for me to shove or kick street urchins out of the way. I was quickly unlearning all the casual violence that had served me in the slums before, though. The pain was an excellent teacher. My persona was as a veteran adventurer, and I used that as my first avenue of exploration. The various adventurers had been more than happy to regale me with stories of their dungeon exploits, especially when I bought them drinks. None had known anything about what dungeons actually were though, other than that they had black crystal cores. Any suggestion of good dungeons had been met with laughter. Meeting failure there, I went to a priest, and even a library. I had been sent to various scholars, but none could really answer my questions. I had even talked with a pale grey Adar with shimmering grassy hair, but when I asked him if he thought dungeons could think and do something out of kindness he had simply laughed and told me to leave. Eventually I was told about a mage named Gnaeus who specialized in obscure dungeon lore. It had taken quite a bit of arranging, apparently Gnaeus was not fond of visitors, but I eventually arranged an appointment. I was waiting in the mages¡¯ guild for that appointment now. = == = ==POV: Exsan== I existed. I was very good at it. It was all that I had done for a very long time. Now I felt thoughts creeping in like shadows. No matter what I did they came back. It was no wonder my counterpart lost himself in meditation to lose them. Some of my thoughts were comfortable. They matched the instincts of my long existence. Thoughts of my domain came to me. Thoughts of the tunnels I was making to let in prey. Thoughts of the monsters breeding with abandon. Thoughts of the dark sheltering earth that held me comfortably. However, many of my thoughts turned toward Caden. Caden was¡­ strange. But Caden was mine. I would possess his strangeness. I would possess his knowledge. Everything he was was mine to have. His actions did puzzle me. His ¡°language lessons¡± seemed pointless. However, it was easy enough to do them every other day. Caden performed many pointless actions. He decorated. He made new strange rooms in the Starlight Grotto. Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation. I could at least appreciate the new room he added that was bright like the sky. It was obviously meant for prey to walk through. It had many plants and animals that were uselessly locked into harmless forms, but the waste was minor. Hidden dangers had been added in the innocent foliage, as well as treasures. Obviously Caden has understood my lesson about luring in more prey. Caden was lucky that I was here to teach him. The first few would come through this easy environment and then more would follow. Even now Caden was adding more. I could feel how close I was to one of the presences that was waiting for me. I had always felt hunger, but now I knew what it was called. And I felt it endlessly, deep in my obsidian heart. = == = ==POV: Gnaeus== I was reviewing my research notes when someone knocked on my door. ¡°By the maw, what is it?¡± I snapped. A messenger came in a spoke to me briefly. Apparently, an interview had been scheduled without my knowledge, and most certainly without my permission. I looked him firmly in the eyes. ¡°Tell the guildmaster,¡± I said, ¡°that if this is not worth my time I am not going to be happy.¡± The messenger gulped. ¡°Sir, I swear, this meeting will be worth it.¡± He started to give me a rundown of everything that had already happened. I stopped and thought. If what the guildmaster believed was true, then I indeed needed to see this person. If, however, what I suspected was true¡­ I wanted to meet this Sevso even more. ¡°Fine, go fetch him,¡± I said. A few minutes later Sevso was lead down the spiraling steps into my apartments. I led him to a small meeting room that the guildmaster had added in when he made my rooms. For all my hope to never use them, I had added precautionary emblems anyways. I activated them and smiled at the results. Everyone distrusted their eyes and skills when they said different things. I had been watching how this Sevso walked, however. He was not used to his fine armor. Everyone forgot that the simplest explanation was usually the correct one. The messenger had already been dismissed, so I immediately asked the question I wanted to know most. ¡°Why is a level five street tough meeting with me about dungeons?¡± My guest looked surprised, and answered me. ¡°Everyone assumed I must be something more, I saw no benefit to telling them otherwise.¡± I laughed. ¡°You are probably not aware of this,¡± I said, ¡°but a number of skills were used on you to try and verify who you are. The results¡­ contradicted each other, so everyone assumed that you must have an incredibly powerful obfuscation skill or artifact. Everyone¡¯s basic character analysis skills showed you as level five. More advanced skills showed your class to be street tough. However¡­ a number of things didn¡¯t make sense. Your clothes are of very good quality, though that is something that is easy enough to fix with money, though the effort would be odd.¡± ¡°What convinced everyone were three things: first, merchant skills said that you had money. Quite a bit of it. And their skills detect personal wealth, it won¡¯t be fooled with borrowing from someone else. Secondly, all the various mental intimidation and persuasion skills simply failed on you. Thirdly, skills showed you had a powerful patron of some kind.¡± ¡°Also, when people were implying that a bribe might make things go more quickly you just stared at them.¡± I laughed. ¡°Honestly, that might have been the part they found most unnerving. Someone who is so powerful that they can turn up and ignore the customary bribes to meet someone high up is not someone to be trifled with. I think you probably saved a good week or two by ignoring the process completely.¡± ¡°Did you know the guildmaster did not even bother telling me I had this appointment with you until you already arrived?¡± Sevso¡¯s eyes opened wide with surprise. He stuttered, ¡°Nnnoo, I was very upfront about what I wanted.¡± ¡°Yes, yes,¡± I said, and waved a hand in dismissal, ¡°no doubt you were. It is true, however. He knows far too well how much I detest these type of meetings. He is probably expecting a very unpleasant conversation with me afterwards, but he thought you were too powerful not to schedule a meeting with me. The irony is that you are a large enough puzzle that I am perfectly happy to meet you. Though if you don¡¯t satisfy my curiosity you will likely be in very big trouble. Well, you might have enough money to bribe your way out of it.¡± Sevso regarded me with a nervous look. Then he started to talk. As he continued I found myself pleasantly stunned. Perhaps creating that dungeon had not been a mistake. If nothing else, now I had a way to track the dungeon down. SSD 3.00 - Arc 3 - The Way Opens ¡° ¡° Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site. are massive plants. That their society is run by the females and they would consider it sacrilege to be seen by humans. All of this speculation aside, it is useless to say anything when there is no evidence. While we may know nothing definitive of the Adar females, there are certainly enough popular works of romantic literature featuring them to suggest humankind is happy enough to provide their own answers to the mystery. SSD 3.01 - Grand Nopening ¡° ¡°
any kind. Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. want to kill anyone, but I was not an idiot¡­ usually. Anyone trying to gain access to my core could not possibly mean me well. I was going to assume they were trying to kill me, and if they died in the process I was calling it self-defense. SSD 3.02 - Waiting for the Restroom ¡°Every step of life shows much caution is required." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ==POV: Tarrae== It had taken them longer than they would have liked to arrive, but the dungeon was not yet ready for them regardless. None of them had ever done this before. Anaath could have provided information, but he stayed mostly wrapped up in his own thoughts. Most of the shelter had been left up to me. My heat abilities had proven invaluable. Having an area of concentrated warmth was also a relief amid the bitter cold. Above them loomed the lances, and beyond that Twisted Tip, the tallest mountain in the range. Anaath had at least indicated that Twisted Tip, or rather beneath it, lay the dungeon. The mountain had an unusual appearance. For the most part it went up as usual, but then it sheared off and an enormous section rose another couple miles into the air and leaned west the entire time. So much so that most of the lower mountain rested in its own shadow as the rocks were straight above them. The stone of the tip was odd, too. It looked almost like someone had leaned a mammoth spear tip against the mountain. A spear tip that was still molten from the forge, enormous sections of stone looked melted and had dripped from the top before freezing into place. I was at least glad to be resting. The journey through the canyon road had been simple enough, the road had been carved into the walls of the caves generations before, and they were more than capable of handling an extra group of four without any crowding. Especially this time of year. Our journey after the tunnels had been miserable. We were given slogi to help with the trek, but the wind coming off the Wither Salt Flats was biting. We had passed encampments where they mined out the salt. No doubt the unusually long Freeze had been a boon to them. When it ended, the salt flats would flood again. I suppose that was one good thing. We didn¡¯t have to take the longer high road like we would later. Of course it would be warmer then¡­ so I guess it was a wash. We could have climbed up closer to Twisted Tip, but Anaath had told us to stay in place. This was where the dungeon entrance would be. No one was going to gain say an Adar about dungeons, so we waited. ==POV: Zidaun== We had arrived at the proper place to enter the dungeon after only a few days. We had used the ancient lava flows, now covered in snow, to forge a relatively smooth route up. I had expected the journey to require us scaling farther up into the mountains, but it had proven unnecessary. The signal was peaking here. Admittedly, since we had traveled over snow, the slogi had helped immensely. Without their ability to walk on the snow so easily the journey would have taken much more time. Honestly, with snow this deep, I wouldn¡¯t want to even try without one. There was a reason people avoided travel in Freeze as much as possible. The slogi were nowhere to be seen now. They had created their own burrow beneath the snow. They would continue in their pseudo hibernation until the snows melted or we woke them up again. Honestly, I thought this was probably one of the reasons people liked them as mounts during the winter, they would be ready when we were. Arriving with time to spare had its own difficulties. Cold, boredom, cold, anxiety, and cold. Did I mention the cold? I had been able to excavate a small cave beneath the snow and ice, but even that much taxed my abilities. Outside a dungeon my abilities were minor. Firi had added a blessing to help keep warmth in, but it was still very cold. Naturally, I had spent very little time enjoying the relative warmth. I meditated and prayed just outside where I knew the dungeon would emerge. The voice of the dungeon called out to me and I echoed it back. The two gradually got closer together, the melodies merging. The dungeon had covered many miles as it expanded through the stone to reach us. It was actually moving fairly quickly through the stone. Considering the distance it was reaching us very quickly. The strength of its voice and the speed with which it approached had given at least one fact away. It was not a simple new born. Now as I meditated, my thoughts would turn to my home periodically. I missed it every Freeze. I had even taken a few opportunities to return to Blaze Blossom Swamp. It was named for what happened during Freeze. Every year, just as the water was getting cold enough at night to leave panes of ice on the surface, the blaze blossoms bloomed. The deep orange flowers were underwater, and they burned with light and heat as they opened. The heat transformed the entire swamp. Mists rose from warming waters. The entire swamp was soon filled with sheets of glimmering mist. The starneck trees with their five long trunks arched up above the water and then down toward the water. They would keep their deep green leaves just above the surface of the water. The long arches of their neck, where moss grew at other times of year, would freeze. The mist in the air accumulated there and froze, until long curtains of icicles hung down toward the water. I had taken a boat through the swamp many a Freeze. The light from below the water shone off the ice and mists. And all the world looked like frozen fire, reflected above and below. And with the mists, it was rare for the sun to break through. I was still upon the stone as if rooted in place, my thoughts turning this way and that, like leaves in the breeze. Though thoughts of home entered my mind every now and then, I was excited to be where I was. Well, excited for the dungeon to open, even if I was often bored for the moment. However, all the waiting was about to end. I opened my eyes, the dungeon was here. Before me the stone of a mountain cliff transformed into a blank stone facade. I called to the others and they joined me. We all waited and were eager for an end to our monotonous wait, even if that would mean danger. Perhaps especially since it would mean danger. The dungeon failed to open. Honestly I had expected it to open almost immediately. I had felt the sudden rush as the dungeon connected the entrance, but apparently it wasn¡¯t ready yet. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. We waited impatiently. The dungeon could open at any time, and that was dangerous. Anything could happen when it opened. With most, nothing would, but assuming that was a fool¡¯s game and few fools survived dungeons. As the minutes changed into hours we began to wait in shifts. Being so close to Twisted Tip, the sun and the maw had long been out of view, even while it was technically still day. Now true night had begun and the vast glorious face of Yamash cast pale light down onto the world. Eventually I could feel something different start to happen, and we all returned to the entrance. Behind the blank stone I could feel more stone flowing and changing shape. Over the course of a few minutes those changes stabilized and the blank cover dissolved away. They left behind a series of pillars that rose from the earth. A single massive stone triangle capped the entrance above them. The pillars were made of snowy white marble with black veins, and each pillar was ridged by vertical parallel lines. The triangular face above was recessed and contained figures. A frieze of ladies and men with curly hair and draping robes danced, laughed, and reclined. I used my identify skill in an almost unconscious reflex. It told me that it was Greek, whoever that was, and that the entire structure was an imitation of the Parthenon. Well that wasn¡¯t particularly helpful. The dungeon was imitating the art of people I had never heard of. This confirmed my initial belief that the dungeon wasn¡¯t new at least. Some scholar would need to determine how old the dungeon actually was, for now our job was simply to enter. Entering was a relief after the anxious waiting. With my senses, I naturally entered first. I breathed in rich mana as awe and contentment blossomed inside me. I forced the habitual feelings to the side and then started to pay more attention to what my senses were saying. ¡°Alright, we are good,¡± I said. ¡°It¡¯s a safe zone.¡± The others nodded and settled a bit farther back as they slightly relaxed. My most powerful gifts had already started awakening as soon as I entered the dungeon¡¯s aura. I connected to it and I became aware of everything within fifteen feet. Here in a dungeon I became more than myself. My senses expanded to cover everything and I could feel so much more. Years of practice kept me from being swept away, and it was now second nature to tune out excess information. The pathway was wide with a slight incline that lead up farther into the dungeon. The dungeon pathway was perfectly straight and seemed to continue forever. That was normal enough. It was the other things that were starting to creep me out. Everything was too perfect. The decoration on the wall was another historical style called an infinity knot, from the Celts. Another unknown people. The design wove in and out of itself, creating an ever shifting pattern, and the colors were different enough from each other to be noticeable, but not glaring. The floor beneath our feet was textured to allow easy purchase for walking. The wideness of the pathway, was combined with a good, though not ridiculous amount of head room, and perfect lighting. It was too normal. This dungeon was not just the rebirth of something ancient; it was ancient in its own right. Dungeon''s tended to built without quite understanding people. It took them a very long time to understand even the basics of how people thought and saw the world. Even then, dungeons almost never lost the feeling of the uncanny. They would have proportions that were slightly off. Angles that worked, but felt wrong. The statues and art were too perfect or subtly flawed in perspective. Everything here was perfect for the comfort of the dungeon¡¯s guests. The artwork was soothing and beautiful, but could easily fade into the background. The lights were at the perfect level of brightness and hue. The temperature was comfortable. Together, it was unnerving. The last straw was the bathroom. We saw a simple handle of bronze protruding from the stone a hundred feet into the corridor. The wall looked no different, but the obvious handle made us all cautious. Safe zone could still be dangerous. I crept forward as the room behind it entered my perception. The room had a small curved and hollow stone seat. To one side of the stone seat was a roll of fine cloth, it was weakened with many tiny cuts that separated it into squares. Nearer to the door was a basin with a curved handle of its own above it that attached to protruding spout made of steel. Crystal and silver made a mirror above the basin. A towel was neatly hung over a rack to the side of the basin. ¡°Be alert,¡± I snapped as I turned to face a possible threat. I had felt the flow of mana as it moved through my perception. Just outside of it I could see stone shifting deeper in the tunnel. A form was oozing from the stone wall. It was humanoid, and as it resolved into a complete form it became obvious that it was meant to be a human, mostly made of stone. It was a man, the skin a pale and lustrous marble, and he was wearing strange clothing. Both his shirt, which was crimson with short sleeves, and his pants, blue with tiny flecks of white, and made with a heavier weave, were made of fine linen. Identify called them a ¡°T-shirt¡± and ¡°jeans.¡± The man¡¯s eyes were made of stone, the irises were the beautiful blue of a gem, riddled with innumerable cracks to form the proper pattern. The pupils were each an actual hole that lead into a hollow interior coated with rough obsidian, with a perfectly clear layer of stone covering the whole of each eye. His hair was¡­ as best I could tell, actual hair. The man identified as simply a statue, and left me with no more information than before. It¡¯s movements were almost perfect as it turned and walked toward the door. All of us prepared to fight. I could tell a little of how the statue functioned through my senses. It always had at least one of its bare feet on the ground at all times and I could feel how it actually stayed connected to the stone beneath it constantly. As it reached the door it raised its right hand and smoothly turned the handle, opening it. It went through the door and into the room and unbuttoned its ¡°jeans¡± and its genderless posterior sat upon the seat. ¡°It¡¯s obviously some kind of¡­ outhouse,¡± Inda whispered, her brows furrowed. The rest of us nodded in agreement. The statue broke off some of the squares of cloth from the roll and proceeded to carefully wipe imaginary waste from beneath it. It let the cloth go and it fluttered down into the depths and disappeared. Then it stood up and fixed its displaced clothing. It turned to stand in front of the basin and twisted the handle above it. Clear water emerged and it washed its hands, drying its hands afterward. The statue turned towards us once more and looked at us with a slight smile. Then it slowly dissolved out of existence. It was the creepiest thing I had ever seen. ¡°Well¡­ at least it is nice to have a place to relieve ourselves,¡± Gurek said. ¡°And that doesn¡¯t strike you as a little suspicious?¡± Firi said, ¡°Whoever heard of a dungeon wasting resources on something like¡­ this?¡± ¡°Not to mention that statue,¡± I said, ¡°that was more than a little unsettling.¡± ¡°I don¡¯t think I have ever seen a dungeon manipulate stone that close to someone. Nothing that wasn¡¯t clearly just automatic, like doors. This dungeon¡­ seems almost intelligent.¡± The others nodded and I nodded with them. I wished I could just tell them. Regardless, our job was to explore the dungeon. Strange bathroom included. Since my senses were the best I edged into the bathroom. The others made sure the door wouldn¡¯t close on me. As I got close enough I could feel the hole terminate in solid unbroken stone not far below. The cloth was gone as though it had never existed. It took time, and much investigating, but we eventually decided the room was safe. The water was free of poisons, wasn¡¯t boiling hot (it was pleasantly warm), no contact poisons were detected on the cloth, stone seat, or anywhere else. Firi did most of the poison testing with his magic while I verified there were no magical or mechanical triggers. We also closed the door from outside and made sure it could open again. Then I did the same thing from within. It opened just fine. After that we all decided to use the room for its intended purpose. Who knew how the dungeon would react if we didn¡¯t? It had obviously taken some time to make sure it was exquisitely clear what this room was for. With my extra senses and ability to manipulate the stone it was determined that I should go first. We all needed to go to varying degrees, since we had been waiting for the expected warmth of the dungeon once it was obvious it was forming. Everything went without a hitch. I used the available cloth squares, and then washed my hands and left, only taking a brief glance of myself in the mirror. After this, the team mostly relaxed. When Gurek went third, however, there was an issue. When he attempted to leave the bathroom, he found the door would not open. He immediately pounded on the door and alerted the entire team. However, even as he did this, the handle above the basin turned by itself and water started to pour. Once he washed his hands the door could be opened again. Why the dungeon was insistent that you had to wash your hands before leaving none of us could begin to say. Regardless, after this, the last member of our party relieved themselves without any further incident. Our long journey along the tunnel continued. Handles regularly protruded from the wall and each was another bathroom. Eventually, after some long hours, we reached the end of the tunnel. SSD 3.03 - The Vitre-uvian Man ". Various monsters, even without intellect, have a certain animal cunning. What then makes man enlightened? What raises him above the beasts? It is his own spark of the divine. He may choose between order and chaos, to seek balance or extremity. His nature is not fixed, but in fact molds to the demands of his own intent. That which he wills of himself, if he pursues it unrelentingly, he will be. Monsters and animals are made. They are fixed. A man makes himself." -Hatere, Arch-Priest of the Order of Divine Intent "Memory is the treasure house of the mind wherein the monuments thereof are kept and preserved." -Thomas Fuller I wasn¡¯t sure what it said about me that the moment after I opened the dungeon was the least busy I had been for days. Honestly, I think it probably said more about how difficult it was to design a dungeon to work properly. And about how much I had to learn. I would reflect on that later. For now I watched my first guests with fascination. Even the humans were fascinating to me, but I was truly enthralled to see someone who was not human. Even just watching them all walk was bringing back memories. I hadn¡¯t experienced that for months now. I could feel, but it wasn¡¯t the same without skin. Looking at my new guests was bringing various sensations. I felt a sense of loss. I missed my old sense of touch, being able to reach out and touch and grab something. I missed experiencing the world in such a visceral way. I experienced much more now, but when I had been but flesh and blood the little I felt was¡­ deeper. The new visitors actually inspired me to make a golem of sorts. Not a true one, it needed my constant attention to function. It actually turned out well, though I am pretty sure I freaked them out a bit. However, all I felt was empty. I had no more feedback from this than I had for anything else. It was just more stone. And it had taken a lot of my attention to get it to work right, though I had been amused by the whole bathroom experience. I had finally named what I did when I split my mind. Each mind became a shard, as in a smaller part of a crystal. I had a dozen of them, and it had taken seven working together to make the golem function. Simulating a human being using a statue had been exceptionally hard. Creating a mobile statue was fairly easy because of my ability to create anything that I imagined and the constant feedback as I moved something. So some small detailed changes were quite easy to create. However, creating the image I had in mind and moving it while I kept it perfectly natural even while it was in motion required unusual concentration and coordination. I wouldn¡¯t have managed to make it look natural if I didn¡¯t already have a fairly complete pattern for a man. I had borrowed the man¡¯s exact shape, but that was unlikely to cause problems. I had recorded the motions, so I could make the dungeon play it out with my manipulation skills automatically. Hopefully I made it look effortless. Human beings were really complicated with all the musculature, tendons, and skin twisting. I had saved myself from needing to imitate the proper motion of cloth by simply creating cloth. And even with all the attention I placed on the statue I had cheated on needing to balance it properly by keeping it attached to the floor. I was almost certain it would have fallen over otherwise. At least now I could make sure that any people entering the dungeon knew exactly where and what the bathrooms were. I was not going to be happy if someone failed to use them. I had also taken a certain amount of relish in forcing the issue of washing their hands. It was literally for their own good, so I had been able to seal the bathroom until they washed up. I had actually encoded it as a puzzle, with a little hint to the solution. Once someone started the puzzle by removing their clothes and sitting or peeing into the toilet, the door would shut and they could only get out with the proper solution. Since I could not make dangerous traps in a safe area, it would let them out or others in if there was an emergency. I was not a biological being anymore, but despite that, when people failed to wash their hands it made some part of me crawl. I wasn¡¯t in any danger from disease. At least I didn¡¯t think so, but I was going to make sure they washed their hands. And eventually when I had soap that would be added too. Even if I could utterly eradicate any dirt and bacteria they left behind. Besides, I was fairly certain that I had absorbed some parasite bits from their waste. I never said that all my concerns were logical. My brain, or whatever was actually running the show these days, still had hangups. They didn¡¯t go away just because I left one world and was transplanted into an alien body. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. I wondered what a psychologist would say about my situation. I knew there were people who ended up locked inside their bodies. They might only be able to move their eyes, and use that to communicate. As I thought that I tried to cheer myself up. There were people on Earth who would gladly trade places with me. And there was magic here, I could potentially do almost anything. So what if my body was a dungeon now? I felt things that mankind had never felt before. I felt the flex of earthquakes ripple through me. I felt the gentle change in temperature as the cold surface met stone and the stone warmed as I went deeper. Someday I would reach out to feel the fiery power that made all my hydrothermal springs spew out heat into my depths. I had no heart pumping blood, but I had endless water running through veins and chasms and trickling through solid stone. I had things to miss from my old world. Most people would. However, my grief had been blunted shortly after arriving. I would take it as a blessing. A gift that my emotions had been suspended so my mind could sort everything out as it needed to and I could move on. I would always love my parents and my siblings. I was dedicated to staying as good a person as I could because of them. They would want me to survive, even if that meant killing in my own defense, but I would keep what principles I could. I had no career that I missed and loved. I had considered so many options, but none of them had truly appealed. I had considered being a doctor, a lawyer, and others. Not because I was truly interested, but because those were the professions that were expected for someone smart. I had majored in biology just to give myself time to think, and even then I took many other classes, trying to experience new things. If I wanted new experiences and a chance to create, I could hardly choose a better option than this world. Even as my mind continued to turn, I watched my guests. And what interesting people they were. They were interesting enough that several shards always had their attention focused on them. Especially the one that was human-ish. His skin was light brown with traces of green veins and reminded me of beech bark. Skin was not quite the right word, either. It overlapped faintly, with slightly raised edges that reminded me of something between scales and bark. And there was more than just skin color and texture to suggest they were something alien to me. Their hair was green, the green of lush tropical plants. And just as their skin was not skin, it was not right to call their hair merely hair. There was less hair than you would expect on a human head, but each strand branched out from the main stalk into small subsidiary branches, so it was more accurate to say it had tiny ferns sprouting on their head. They had no beard, or even a sign of stubble or other body hair. Their lips, like the visible veins and hair, were green, though this was a deep forest green. The eyes were a startling contrast. They were a vibrant amethyst. And there were other notable differences about them. They were articulated just like human beings, but their elbows and knees had an extra addition. Each had a thorn that curved inward and sprouted from the lower part of the extremity. When the limbs were fully extended the thorn dug into a hollow of flesh and disappeared beneath an almost shield like protrusion of shaggy bark. All of them were wrapped in fur, but the plant-man had their clothing wrapped around them to accommodate the difficulties that would naturally arise from the thorns catching on everything. They were, from my first impression, what a plant person from a moderately temperate environment would look like. My ability to feel through their clothing somewhat left no doubt they were male. The others were less striking, but still interesting. Being wrapped in white firs made each of them have a barbarian splendor. There were humans, two men and a woman. Each of them, and the plant guy, radiated more heat than I thought was natural. There were sources of mana that I couldn¡¯t see clearly in the layers of fur. I was guessing those were some form of magical heaters. One of the men was enormous, and his bulk was enhanced by being wrapped in both clothes and fur. After they had gone a short distance into the tunnels all of them stopped and took turns unwrapping the furs while the others kept watch. Honestly, they were all in fantastic shape. If they were from Earth I would have described the large man and the woman as Nordic. Blond hair and a well built tall body for both of them. Though their features were a little rounder than I would have expected from Earth. The last man was shorter and thinner, nearly wiry, though muscle was packed onto his frame. He was dark haired and seemed to come from an entirely different background. He had large ears, a pointed nose, and was almost constantly in motion. Even when he was standing still, it looked like he was ready to burst into movement at a moments notice. I enjoyed watching them, seeing how they were familiar and strange at the same time. I could feel how the plant-man had tapped into my own senses. I watched them as they warily crept through the tunnel and never let their guard down. I wasn¡¯t sure if they were aware this was a safe zone or not. Of course, I had tried putting things in the safe zone to see what was restricted. And quite a few things weren¡¯t. I could leave toxic materials lying around. I could place down boiling hot springs. Swift dangerous currents filled with rocks that would carry someone down into the sewers which were not a safe zone, yep that worked. So did massive chasms and extremely sharp crystal outgrowths. I may not be able to use monsters or many conventional traps, but I could have the environment itself be obviously dangerous. I had removed all of these, of course. So I guessed they were right to be wary, even if I wanted to laugh each time they warily circled around a new bathroom. I guess experienced dungeon divers learned not to take anything for granted. That was good, it would serve them well in my dungeon too. Even if I, unlike what other dungeons might do, fully intended to make sure that my safe zones were truly safe. SSD 3.04 - Off the Wall Grer gen neh: The middle sound is the same sound as the french je, as in je ne sais quoi. The last sound has the same vowel sound as well. "Never forget that the Adar are the largest nation on Grergene. Each settlement is its own city state, but when any one is threatened they act with complete unity. The Adar are not human. They do not quarrel; they do not fight amongst themselves; they do not backstab; you cannot get a better deal by going to a different colony. Offering them status is useless. With the Adar it is best to be forthright, honest, and to never break your word. In other words, for political matters, treat the Adar as though they held a knife to your neck and a polite smile on their lips.¡± ==POV: Zidaun== The long trek through the unchanging tunnel gave rise to a paradox well known to adventurers, wary boredom. Each new door was checked, all the tunnel was carefully inspected, and nothing changed. My sensory ability allowed me to fulfill two requirements, instead of just one, needed on any team required to explore a dungeon for the first time. A sensory ability with decent range and resolution, with some trade-off between the two values was one of them. The other was an Adar who could find it in the first place. A new dungeon was supposed to be explored thoroughly, but everyone wanted it done in a timely manner. And the wary boredom that was an inevitable product of that made us eager for change too. The abrupt end of the tunnel came as a welcome relief, even if it represented the possibility of new danger. The sudden view was breathtaking as we entered the [Starlight Grotto]. Far above pinpricks of starlight glimmered with twinkling light. The tunnel itself gave way to a patterned road, and the entrance was bracketed by two statues. Each identified as a lion. Other statues were half visible in the gloom, illuminated by crystal pillars were spiraling flecks of light, like someone had captured the sparks of campfire in glass. ¡°Anyone recognize the creature in the statues?¡± I said. A chorus of negatives followed. ¡°I see other statues too, we will identify them as we go. Inda you good to add them to the map?¡± I could see her roll her eyes behind me. ¡°Like always.¡± ¡°I know, I know. I¡¯m just supposed to ask.¡± ¡°Yeah, yeah. I know. Let¡¯s get on with it.¡± Inda was fulfilling another important duty. Acting as a cartographer. I had no skill for it, for all that most of us would create our own maps from memory and compare it to hers later, if only to check if one of us had noticed something she hadn¡¯t. We were supposed to point out anything notable as we well along, but mistakes happened. For the moment we followed the road, and a short distance later we ran into a building. We entered it slowly, checking each room in turn, but it was all harmless. The workmanship was beautiful, and identifying the items gave no particular source. I wasn¡¯t sure if that meant the dungeon was borrowing from many cultures, or if it understood the concepts of the items well enough to create them itself. Once it was thoroughly checked out we engaged in a time honored tradition done by adventurers everywhere. We looted the building. It proved to be a fruitless task. No sooner was an item removed from the building than it would melt away and reappear where it had been originally. I expected nothing less, but was amused by the rest of my team¡¯s disappointment. They reluctantly concluded that the building was properly protected from being pillaged. Occasionally young dungeons would have valuable materials in the safe zones that could be taken away. It wasn¡¯t a common thing though. We were all tired, and the building was a perfect place to sleep. I had no doubt it was meant to be. The dungeon had opened after dark, and we had spent long hours getting here. Despite our tiredness we carefully set down wards and set up a watch schedule. If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. We were in a dungeon, so we were wary, but my watch wasn¡¯t first, so I submitted to my body¡¯s demand for sleep. Despite any worries we might have had, I did my watch and returned to bed without incident. The beds were sinfully comfortable and we all woke the next morning feeling refreshed. I had certainly appreciated my first night in a bed for many long days. A bedroll just wasn¡¯t the same. We gathered together downstairs. There was an obvious area set aside as a kitchen. It even had a fireplace with a metal grate filled with branches of dried wood, and extra wood in a basin next to it. There was an iron hook that sat above the fire. ¡°I really wish we had food we could actually cook on a fire,¡± Gurek said. I nodded. ¡°Well you could always boil some water and put jerky in it.¡± I pointed to the sink. ¡°That thing will pour our water for you.¡± ¡°Thanks, thanks so much. I was really wanting hot meat juice.¡± ¡°Ha ha,¡± I said, ¡°if we were still out in the cold you would jump at it.¡± ¡°True,¡± he conceded. ¡°What I want in a nice cup of tea,¡± Firi said, ¡°If I had known we had something like this waiting for us I would have brought some.¡± ¡°Well just think, if this dungeon matches the promise of its decorations, we will probably be here a lot,¡± Gurek said. ¡°That would be nice,¡± Inda said, ¡°but you know we wouldn¡¯t be the one getting this building.¡± ¡°Yeah,¡± he sighed, ¡°this place is nicer than any inn I have stayed in, food aside. If this place actually matches the strength it suggests, we won¡¯t be able to clear it. They will send in a stronger team to do that. And then when this place is opened for everyone else this building will probably go to some bigwigs. So unless there are a lot more of them, we will only be able to use it for a while.¡± I was busy chewing a piece of meat, my mouth full, but I nodded in agreement. Humans did like displays of status. The others offered sighs or nods of their own. ¡°Okay everyone, lets get going,¡± I said as I finished. We grabbed out packs, which each of us had brought down, and headed out. The grotto was no less breathtaking than it had been the night before. Today we started by going along the less obvious path and retraced our steps to the entrance. Nothing had changed there, so we decided to follow the walls. Above us, along the entire span of the wall, was the vast scaly hide of a beast called Jormungandr. We pulled out light stones to better examine it, but no sign of a head or tail showed. Our light stones revealed other statues displayed in splendor or horror. Manticores, minotaurs, Cthulhu, mind-flayers, tentacle beasts, Cerberus, and more lurked in stone. None of us recognized any of them. Eventually, however, we saw a section with more light in the distance. As we came closer we saw a long arc of trees that extended from the wall out into the dark and then faded from sight. The trees were beautiful. A single trunk of dark bark grew from a network of tangled roots planted in a circle of rich damp earth. The branches of the trees curved out, up, and then back in, enclosing a hollow sphere of crystal. Inside danced an ephemeral flame. I had seen an everlasting torch in many dungeons, but I had never seen one used like this. The leaves of the trees were broad and shimmered in the ever-changing light like gold and emeralds. I was captivated and started to reach for it. ¡°Zidaun,¡± Firi said. ¡°Oh, sorry,¡± I said. He cast a quick spell on me. ¡°No sign of mental effects or compulsions.¡± ¡°I am immune to those anyway. Sorry, it is just¡­ beautiful. I got a little carried away.¡± ¡°Okay,¡± Firi said, ¡°we are going to do our precautions first, then you can touch it if you want.¡± A few minutes of spell work and the tree was determined to be safe, and I finally plucked off a leaf. When I brought it into the steady light it became an ordinary leaf. It was waxy, an elongated oval with a point at each end and about as wide as my middle and pointer fingers together. When I put it back into shadow it once more glimmered with reflected emerald glory. The rest of the tree was the same. When I brought it into full light the leaves became ordinary greens and yellows. It was obviously intended for this shadowy environment. The tree identified as an [Iridescent Murkwood.] I noted without any surprise that I had never heard of it. I took some time to write out a small note of its characteristics. None of the others had heard of it either. I kept a leaf for myself, but Gurek grabbed a sample of each of the leaf types, a bit of a twig, and a piece of the root. Sampling done we moved on. We would let the alchemist know the name and they would see if it was a new plant. I suspected we would find a lot of new plants here. If we found enough plants we would stop sampling all of them, and some specialists would be brought out for that too. I already suspected that we were going to need that team, and lots of others too. We continued along the wall past the trees. For a time not much changed, but eventually we could see the road again, though there was more of it and a number of buildings. The buildings were all formed of a pure black basalt speckled with glowing motes of color. The basalt was not flat; it was formed of hexagonal columns, though the full shape could only be seen at the corners of the buildings. From a distance, the building¡¯s rough black stone and tiny lights had been indistinguishable from the false night sky. We noted several buildings at the edge and a larger central one, but for now we moved on. Past the buildings was the entire purpose of our visit. An enormous door held a depiction of a flaming bird, the Phoenix, with its wings outspread and it head turned to the side to show a single eye. And standing above the door on each side were two statues locked in an eternal battle. Both statues were a juxtaposition of beauty and terror. A human, no it identified as an angel, with elegant limbs bore two wings and an expression of calm conviction mixed with an unearthly beauty. The sword in its hands was locked against its opponent¡¯s. Its opposite, a devil, was a horned vision of brutal intensity. Its face bared sharp teeth in a fanged grimace and its expression was contorted with rage. Behind it were leathery wing with bones outlined in the stretched flesh. Both statues were painted with a soft and indeterminate light. ¡°What do you think they mean?¡± Inda said. Religious iconography maybe,¡± Firi said. He pointed at the angel, ¡°That would be Shurum, and the other would be Otga.¡± ¡°Maybe,¡± I said, ¡°but we cannot take anything for granted. They could be species that used to exist and died off. Or they could be fictional tales that the dungeon picked up the images for somewhere. All it would take is someone bringing in statues of them.¡± ¡°Well it looks like this is where we enter, regardless,¡± Gurek said. ¡°Not exactly subtle, is it?¡± Inda said. There were a few soft chuckles. We weren¡¯t planning to go through the door yet, but we needed to check it out anyway. We approached it and our steps echoed out through the gloom. We looked around the door for any traps. We found nothing, and I eventually reached out and touched door. A notice appeared.
Access to dungeon restricted. Complete tasks to gain access.
SSD 3.05 - Evolutionary Biology ¡°Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.¡± Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species Watching the team as most of them drifted off to sleep, I was able to focus on other things. I actually had quite a few projects going on, if nothing else so I wouldn¡¯t go crazy. It was always nice to find creative ways to keep myself busy. I had consumed all the knowledge I could on Earth, and I was applying that here, where I could. Though first I did something I probably should have done immediately. I started to record any knowledge from Earth that might be useful and I thought I would forget. I wondered if maybe it didn¡¯t even matter. Magic in this world could make irrelevant the thousands of years of science and discovery from Earth. Maybe magic gave everyone on this world everything they could possibly want, but I doubted it. Not just because people were coming to explore the dungeon I had made, which would be dangerous. There were scientists and thrill seekers from my old world that would have been happy to do that. No, it was the backstabbing of the man in the sewers. And everything else about him. The state of his body was poor, malnutrition had been written into his very bones. His clothes were rough and handmade. They were probably more resilient than something I could have bought in a cheap store, but I was also certain they were much more expensive and time consuming to make. For most of history mankind had been only barely above subsistence. That added up over time, which is how we spread out to cover the globe; the majority had enough to eat if they were lucky, and not much more. And in years when there was not enough¡­ it wasn¡¯t the wealthy and powerful who starved. I had never seen the past as an idyllic paradise. It might be fun to go to a renaissance fair, but the past was mostly toil, sweat, and disease. I was the first to admit that science also had issues. Since science was a process of gradual understanding, it often allowed for solutions that were eventually proven shortsighted. And culture and funding determined what research topics were considered acceptable. However, I still expected science to eventually catch up with its faults and have solutions implemented where it had proven inadequate. I knew people who loved the past. Mostly, though, they weren¡¯t in love with the life of the peasants. They were in love with the power of nobles and rulers. There was a fun fantasy there. And if they really liked the true life of the past they could go deep into the woods or mountains and make a community. There were still deep untamed wild places, even if they were few. I was assuming that the nature of this world was like my own; it was probably even more wild and untamed than my world used to be. Going for a hike was not the true face of nature. If someone dropped me at random into a wilderness while I was still human the odds were very good that I would die. Nature was peaceful and beautiful; it was also deadly. Mankind knew nature¡¯s true face when we saw it. The power of a thunderstorm, the deceptive force of a river, and mountains rearing their head into the sky. Nature was as majestic, cold, and implacable as a glacier grinding that mountain down into a valley. The odds were good that I was dealing with a world where mankind had not won against nature. A world where their future was uncertain. I had a steel dagger, but I wasn¡¯t sure what that meant about their technology. Metallurgy was not my strong point. And they could have forged it with magic. I knew a few basic alloys. Pewter was a mix of silver and lead, but I didn¡¯t know the exact proportions. I knew that high temperatures were used to smelt in a blast furnace, and that the air was recirculated to keep it hot. Maybe that was new to this world; I supposed I was going to find out. I knew how to make a basic generator by having a magnet in the center. You turned it while it was surrounded by coils of a conductive metal, usually copper. I honestly wasn¡¯t certain if any other metals worked more efficiently. At least that idea was relatively simple and it entered my wall of things to try later. I had no great use for electricity in the moment, except in traps. If I knew how to make a radio that would be cool, but I honestly had no idea how they were made except that they had some kind of crystal involved in the original ones. The major problem was that I didn¡¯t know any simple applications of electricity, except for one. I could use electricity for lighting, but I already had better solutions for that. I knew that light bulbs involved either a neutral gas inside, or a vacuum. And I wasn¡¯t certain how to make the filament, either. I was fairly sure I had heard something about them being made of Tungsten, but other than knowing that Tungsten had the letter W as its symbol, I had no idea how to find it. I would experiment with light bulbs and traps later though. It would probably give me some additional environmental control options. My appraise ability only told me what things were worth, and the names of things that I knew enough about. Gold ore, silver ore, copper ore, etc¡­ had all been identified for me. Still I had been able to put together some of the periodic table. It was hydrogen, helium, lithium (I think), and then I couldn¡¯t remember the fourth one to save my life. Boron came next, and I remembered that one because it was weird and liked a different amount of electrons than anything else. Then Carbon, which was easy for anyone who did science It usually had a balanced number of protons and neutrons and was considered the building block of life. I had been able to get the pattern for carbon isolated by burning some dried living tissue and absorbing the ashes. Nitrogen was next, and I had tried to get the pattern for that by just absorbing air. Unfortunately the patterns for air were as insubstantial as the air itself. I could recreate them, but not isolate the components. And air had thousands of chemicals mixed in, they muddled the entire signal. However, I did discover a pleasant surprise when I absorbed air. It acted as a sense of smell. As training I had a shard constantly devouring air in The Garden, and it was trying to separate out the different patterns. Oxygen was next. It was easy to separate out from water, and I had gotten hydrogen the same way, so that was useful. Pure oxygen was highly flammable and also highly reactive. It had gone on my list of things to think about for traps. After oxygen was fluorine. It was the most chemically unstable element that I could think of. If I ever isolated an element that reacted in fiery death with everything, I would assume that I found it. After that were the noble gases, and I wasn¡¯t holding out much hope of being able to isolate those. They were nonreactive by nature. Neon was first of those, then xenon, then krypton (which always made me think of a certain alien), and then radon came in last¡­ wait. I was pretty sure argon went in the middle of those somewhere. I knew radon was last, just because it was radioactive. I might actually be able to isolate that someday. Like the others it was colorless, odorless, and tasteless, which was not surprising since they don¡¯t react to anything. However I remembered something about it pooling out of the ground and causing problems in basements. Considering the shear amount of underground space I was using, I might stumble upon pockets of it by accident. Guess I would be absorbing the air in pockets from now on¡­ Actually I might find natural gas that way too¡­ Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more. Anyway, after neon came another row. It started with sodium, which I isolated easily enough from salt. I knew it exploded on contact with water, lots of trap potential there. I wasn¡¯t sure what came after that, but I knew aluminum came next. I only knew about aluminum since it was the lightest of the elements that were characterized as generic metals. I hadn¡¯t found a way to isolate it yet. Silicon was next and people always got excited about it because, like carbon, it could make four bonds. People thought alien life might use it instead of carbon, for all I knew I was a silicon-based life form. Lots of silicon in glass. I should be able to recognize glass when I saw it, because it wasn¡¯t a crystal. After that my knowledge grew increasingly spotty, except for the column with fluorine. I had isolated the next chemical down, chlorine, because it was the other half of salt. Chlorine gas was a nasty yellow-green; I knew, I had made it myself. And I was sure it was highly dangerous. Something for one of the more deadly traps. After that was bromine, and then iodine. Sadly I knew that iodine wasn¡¯t a natural part of salt, so I had no way to isolate it. After that¡­ I wasn¡¯t sure. I knew a few elements that should be in the right section of the periodic table: phosphorus, arsenic, sulfur. I had actually isolated sulfur without any issues. There were yellow seams with a strong amount of it in my geothermal areas. There were some other things around there too. Gallium I think¡­ which could melt in a cup of hot water and had been used for a disappearing spoon trick in one of my chemistry classes. I had no idea where it was found though. The left side had calcium and potassium, though I wasn¡¯t sure exactly where they fit in. I had tried to isolate calcium from bone, but it turned out to be far too complex. I knew copper, silver, and gold were in the same column, and since I had coinage for that it was easy enough to isolate them out. Iron was the twenty-fifth element, and I had its signal from coinage too. Lead was the heaviest stable element, though I found no ore specifically mentioning it. I expected I would find lead eventually though, it was fairly common. Odds are it was already in one of the ores I had around. Mercury was liquid at room temperature, and I would recognize it if I saw it. Its metallic reflectivity was distinctive. Other than that, there were just so many elements. I couldn¡¯t really figure out where they were or what they did. I knew the names of some, like platinum, which was valuable, and molybdenum, which I only remembered cause it was an interesting word. Iridium was very rare on Earth and mainly showed up in meteorites. It was uniquely refractive, so I might recognize it if I found it. I knew some of the radioactive elements, of course, uranium, plutonium, but other than knowing that uranium was often green, I didn¡¯t know much else. All of these things had been inscribed on the walls around my core. I created the shapes of various electron orbitals, and described as best I could how they were actually probability fields. Maybe I would eventually be able to manipulate molecules and atoms directly, rather than just replicating their signal and seeing what happened. I knew about fun things like carbon nanotubes, buckyballs, and others. I had no way to make them for now. I could barely tune my resolution far enough down to see the cell wall outline on some larger plant cells. I had written down every application of science that I would think of. Eventually I started writing subjects into large stone books, binding them with metal. I wrote about airplanes, cars, washing machines, computers, and more. I put what simple things I knew about electricity and its history in one place. When I ran out of ideas I would think of famous people and try to remember what they did, why were they famous, what happened in reaction. In this way I remembered and wrote about the cotton gin, Lincoln, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and then onto the Greeks, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates. I didn¡¯t limit myself to science, I wrote what I knew of philosophy, art, and all the theories of the humanities. I had lived in an incredibly rich world, I tried to capture a fragment of that. Of course, even as I was doing this, I had been preparing for my guests. I had no particular fine control, but I had managed something. My greatest success was isolating a unique plant structure from one plant and placing it into another. I was only capable of doing that because that structure was completely unique to a single plant I had found, and the plant was incredibly simple. It was a kind of moss from a mountain cave. My identify skill called it goblin gold. It had interesting properties with regards to light. And I only noticed that by taking the time to actually look at the garden with my core since it had an interesting name. It had taken a great deal of trial and error to put it in the right place. I killed the trees I was working on many times. However, even if my approach was brute force, I knew how to do testing, and I had some powerful tools. First, everything was growing and replicating far faster than normal; the slowest creature I had seen so far only had a reproductive cycle of half a day. Many of the smaller creatures and plants grew much faster. Not too surprising, since they needed to feed the rapidly growing population of larger animals. Second, the dungeon was selective in its mutation. By everything I knew the mutations ought to be random and the vast majority ought to result in death or defects. The dungeon, however, seemed to know how to avoid these, and it also changed the entire genome of the creature at the same time. The offspring would mostly have the same characteristics, though mutation would happen and start to skew this too. And it was breeding to make things more dangerous. Third, with the dungeon menu I could cheat outright. I could control behavior to a certain extent. I could set the option on an animal group that they were not allowed to attack members of their own species, or pick another species and make them off limits too. Or I could do the reverse. I could also forbid them from leaving a certain area. These might not seem huge, but if I was trying to get two species to form a symbiotic relationship this was powerful. I could also force a predator to focus on something new it normally didn¡¯t eat. As I had watched, I had seen that if I turned off my selections after a few generations, they were often now part of how the creature acted normally. My changes became permanent. Fourth, I could turn off the overaggressive dungeon mutation, though then mutation went back to its normal slow speed. This did let me breed up populations, however. And fifth, once I had an organism the way I liked, I could lock it in. That had varying degrees of functionality. I could just set that as the general template, so future generations would be about the same, or I could make it exact. If I set a tree up that way, it would regrow in the exact same shape every time, even if it had been damaged, chewed on, etc¡­ This was definitely going to be useful in the aesthetics of my dungeon. I was doing everything I could to guide the evolutions. I wasn¡¯t able to pick the exact path, but I still had plenty of things to do. Every time I had a species become dominant in an area I would introduce it to new habitat with other successful predators. I constantly changed the variables. If I wanted a species to get larger I set them to prey on something about the same size or larger than they were. They would either find a way to kill it as a pack, with some novel method, or grow to accommodate their needs. Some of my best successes came when I slimmed an environment down to only having two animals, predator and prey, with some plants that were not allowed to change for the prey to eat. The predator got better at eating the prey, but the prey usually developed some powerful defenses of their own. And then I could see how those defenses worked against other predators, and more. It took some time before I got anything that the system recognized as an actual monster. Not too surprising, since the most dangerous things I started out with were mice-bugs and rat-bugs. I actually had the proper name for those as well. They were called plate mice and plate rats; I was hoping that was because of their keratin plated exterior and not because of a common culinary usage. Though I suppose lobster and shrimp were really just an underwater bugs... Regardless, unlocking a monster unlocked the corresponding tab on my dungeon menu and I acquired spawning options. I actually didn¡¯t like most of the options for the monsters. The part I liked best was that I could dictate some tactics in how they faced opponents. Nothing too complicated, but I could choose swarms, ambush predators, territorial, etc¡­ I was able to use those tactics options to help guide the evolution of the monsters, too. I would give them a general tactic, and then they would evolve to get better at that role. It was amazing how quickly I saw results at times. Though my attempts to get water-based organisms onto land by putting them in shallower and shallower water was definitely still a work in progress. I planned to use some of my territorial creatures to guard treasure and traps. Most traps would get harder if you fell in and were suddenly swarmed by creatures that stung or bit. I suspected that the methodical way I was approaching this was letting me evolve things fairly quickly, however, even with all my extra brain power, I was quickly overwhelmed. I was having success, but I was just maintaining my progress as best I could. My ultra large environments that blended into each other were checked on periodically and I added in some of my more successful plants and animals. I suspected that unless I gained the ability to control far more, my large environments would eventually be where the majority of the evolution happened. I would only step in when I had time or a specific goal in mind. For now though, I was focused more on building new dungeon levels and watching my guests as they ever so slowly walked along the walls. At least they had seemed really interested in the new plant I had made. I watched them as they finally got to the entrance to the dungeon, and triggered my puzzle conditions. Soon I would actually get to test some people and see what they could handle. SSD 3.06 - Making Sacrifices ¡°Real magic can never be made by offering someone else''s liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.¡± - Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn ==POV: Zidaun== The ground behind us rose up into a pedestal, which caused us to swivel and enter combat ready stances. The pedestal had four crystal discs, each attached to a necklace of thin steel links. We eased out of combat positions and tested the items cautiously. It came as no surprise that they were magical, but none of our varied identification skills gave any indication of danger. The small discs simply showed up as:
Identification Amulet Unique ¨C Dungeon Bound ¨C Immune to theft ¨C Binding
I was immune to most mental effects, so I tried one on first. As far as I could tell there was no effect, other than the faintest feeling of mana moving for a tiny moment. It stopped almost immediately. I waited, but nothing happened. I checked my status, but nothing had changed. ¡°I detected a tiny bit of mana when I put it on, but it stopped right away. I am not detecting anything more and my status doesn¡¯t show any effects.¡± ¡°Okay, sounds good, I will just do a few diagnostics.¡± Firi said. He cast a few spells and I felt them wash over me. I could see their vague outlines through my connection to the dungeon. ¡°You are clean as far as I can tell.¡± The others put on their amulets in turn. We checked for issues before and after putting on each one, but none appeared. When the last amulet was removed from the pedestal it receded into the floor. A thin line of light lit up in the floor and showed a path that lead away from the door and back toward the buildings. From there it split into smaller paths leading to doors that each lead into a narrow building. One line pulsed repeatedly and lead to the large central building. Gurek¡¯s eyebrows raised, ¡°Does this dungeon feel really¡­ organized to anyone else?¡± ¡°More than just organized.¡± Inda said. ¡°It gave us everything we needed, not just to survive, but be comfortable. Well¡­ except food. It even provided places for us to comfortably relieve ourselves. And look at that road. We didn¡¯t take it, because we need to explore this entire area thoroughly, but I bet it leads right back to where we are staying.¡± I hedged, ¡°You are probably right. This dungeon is certainly atypical.¡± Gurek shook his head and gestured to the line. ¡°And it is obvious where it wants us to go next.¡± This dungeon was unusual, but unlike my companions, I knew that that dungeons could be far more intelligent than people ever suspected. At least I hoped no one suspected. Though this one was certainly going to provide people with a massive clue. And this one definitely was awakened. If it hadn¡¯t reached full awakening I would chew bark. ¡°It actually reminds me of an Adar dungeon I went through once.¡± said Inda, ¡°I visited Mespar with some family.¡± ¡°Yes,¡± I said with some surprise,¡± it reminds me of home too. I had no idea you visited one of our dungeons, most are closed to outsiders. We do guide dungeons into being more organized, and a little easier for us to use. Perhaps we helped to design this one long ago.¡± I knew that this was more than just unlikely. If an Adar had bonded to this dungeon, we would all have known when it reawakened. Firi sighed, ¡°Well, what next?¡± ¡°Same as usual,¡± I said, ¡°we cannot get a peek into the dungeon, anyway, so we will scout everything else and do a proper workup. For now that means we finish our sweep of the walls. Then we explore the rest of the interior. After that we will see if we can do what the dungeon wants.¡± Part of me was uncomfortable delaying when the dungeon obviously had expectations, but my duty to my race included a need to continue in my role. The dungeon probably wouldn¡¯t care anyway, as long as we got to it. Their sense of time was strange. Gurek just sighed, but I could guess what he was thinking. He was always impatient with protocol. I just smiled faintly and we continued on our way. Our journey resumed its course along the wall. We encountered even more statues, and we passed back through the layer of glimmering trees, but nothing else was different. Eventually we made our way back to the road and encountered our first change. There was a building identical to the one that we stayed in. It was on the wrong side of the wall though, and the road here led to a blank wall. I could sense an empty tunnel behind the wall, however. After we determined that the building was in fact identical, and just as unlootable, we continued on. A few minutes later we finally saw a change in the omnipresent Jormungandr statue that had accompanied us along the entire wall. A massive head of stone looked down at us. It was a nightmare of bone and scales. Its eyes had high arched ridges sheltering ominous glowing green irises around inky slitted pupils. The tail of the stone beast was clamped between razor sharp bloodstained teeth a foot long and it disappeared further into the darkness of the throat. At the front of its mouth two sets of massive fangs passed each other, protruding beyond its mouth and resting over its scaly skin. ¡°Right, if we see any sign of something like that I am leaving.¡± Gurek said. ¡°Don¡¯t be an idiot,¡± I said, ¡°if anything like that is in there we are all leaving. They won¡¯t get many reports out of our corpses, after all.¡± Firi touched his heart and forehead in a brief prayer, and Gurek and Inda followed suit. I didn¡¯t. My religion was a little different after all. And I had a prayer later that I needed to perform. I had been putting it off¡­ I wasn¡¯t sure I wanted what it would bring me. I had only been able to delay because I could think of no harm it could do to wait. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. There was artwork that grew more and more prominent as we got closer to the wall beneath the giant serpent¡¯s head. It was a picture of a tree. It had deep green leaves and had bright red fruit. Identification gave us nothing meaningful. The rest of our trip around the wall proceeded without any further incident. We arrived back at our original entrance tunnel and then went back to base camp. After that we resumed searching through the grotto. It was mostly empty. The only new thing we found were six fountains, each of which had a pillar of stone in the middle rising upward and out of sight. I could feel the water moving downward through them, so I assumed they connected to the ceiling far overhead. Otherwise, all was darkness, a road with lights, and statues until we reached the arc of trees that cut one part of the cavern off from another. All the other routes were explored, so we took our time in investigating the buildings. Since the central building had a pulsating trail of light leading to it, we went with that first. The basalt exterior blended into the starlight background until we were quite close and then resolved into hexagonal basalt columns that were rough and contained flecks of glowing colors. The door of black stone was almost indistinguishable from the stone around it. The path that lead up to it, and the presence of a handle, equally black and made of metal with a black finish, however, made it easy enough to find. We prepared ourselves, but we still blinked at the blinding light that emerged as we opened the door. In contrast to the grotto, the building¡¯s interior was as bright as daylight, and the walls were a polished grey granite. There was no single point source for the light, it was reflected off the ceiling from hidden alcoves overhead. The building was a large cube in form. Along each side wall were statues of men and women. They were firmly embedded in a solid wall of perfectly clear crystal. Each statue had various objects in or above their hands, which were held in front of them as though they were offering the contents. With the objects and statues embedded in the crystal, however, it was obvious that they were not for meant to be taken, and were relatively safe from being stolen. The objects themselves varied widely. One statue held a scroll and a book, both of which had unknown symbols. The language was apparently English, which I wrote down, but it gave me no other information. The next held a steel dagger pinched between his thumb and forefinger and looked to be examining the blade closely. After that a lady held bolts of silk in varying colors, then the next statue was a man doing the same with linen. The rest of the objects were just as varied. Handfuls of seeds, a handful of various coins, a person with a plate mouse and plate rat in cages, a blooming flower, rods of various metals, ores, gems, sorcerer¡¯s silver, objects of both raw and carved wood, and more. And, at the back of the room, lay a raised dais of black marble threaded with amethyst. A large ruby bowl was inset into the marble, which glowed with its own light. Above, set into the wall, was a black crystal that appeared to be a smaller replica of a dungeon core. This one had the shape of a spike or extended diamond. When I identified the marble platform I could feel my blood leave my face. I felt like I had been slapped in the face for putting off my duty. ¡°The Altar of Sacrifice and Obligation,¡± I said hoarsely. Firi gave me a worried look, but I just smiled faintly and shook my head. This was not something for outsiders. Inda had been pacing through the room like the rest of us. ¡°An altar? I wonder what it wants sacrificed?¡± she said. Gurek was looking at a pile of gems in various simple cuts. He gestured to an arm broadly at the statues contents. ¡°Do you think these are the rewards for making one?¡± Firi shook his head. ¡°I doubt it,¡± he said, ¡°unless it thinks we want a plate mouse for some reason?¡± I chuckled. ¡°Hard to say for sure. Dungeons can be like that sometimes. I think it is more likely that these are examples of what constitutes an acceptable sacrifice.¡± Inda nodded as she looked around again. ¡°There are quite a few different items here.¡± She said, ¡°They seem almost random. I think¡­¡± she trailed off for a moment, ¡°I think it might accept almost anything. I am not sure what kind of reward it will give, but we should find out for our report anyway. We have plenty of nonessential things we could give it. And they will replace anything we use for the mission.¡± The rest of us nodded at her. After a quick discussion we all pulled out a few items. I started us off with something simple and pulled out a single copper coin which I placed in the bowl. The coin dissolved and a small clear disc, about the size of a large coin itself, materialized above the bowl and then clinked into it with a faint crystalline chime. I pulled the disc out. It had a symbol I didn¡¯t recognize on the front, but the back held a phoenix. I inspected it. ¡°It is a [Token of Life and Prosperity: 1]. It cannot be stolen or looted, but it can be given away.¡± For now we didn¡¯t bother with more speculation. I put another copper coin into the bowl, but it simply rested there. I took the coin back out and Inda put a copper coin of her own into the bowl. Nothing happened. ¡°Okay, looks like it only wanted one of those. Let¡¯s move on.¡± The others just nodded. I took a strip of dried fruit and put it into the bowl. The fruit dissolved and I felt a tiny surge of mana, but nothing appeared. I looked at the token I had already been given. It now read [Token of Life and Prosperity: 4.] The unknown symbol on the front had changed as well. I showed the others. ¡°It changed the one it already gave me instead of giving me a new one. It reads four instead of one now. I think the symbol might be numbers. I probably shouldn¡¯t get all of¡­ whatever this reward is anyway. Even if it is transferable, there is only one token right now.¡± I stepped back and sketched out the first symbol it had shown me and then what it read now, labeling each with a number. ¡°I¡¯m not sure if that is actually a problem,¡± Gurek said. He pointed to the sides. ¡°Looks like that coin would fit right into one of those.¡± To each side of the altar were two columns. Each was about waist high at the front and then angled sharply back and upward until it met the wall. The angled face of each had three holes. They were shallow, and had an image of the phoenix depressed into each one. The holes on each were in a triangular pattern. On the left side the triangle pointed down and a narrow groove connected each of the upper holes to the lower one. The right side had the same pattern, but inverted. ¡°It does look like the tokens go there,¡± Firi said. ¡°Not sure if we are supposed to get the reward there, or they can be used to combine and separate the tokens.¡± We each examined them for a moment and Inda asked a question. ¡°Should we read these top-down or the reverse?¡± I shrugged. ¡°No way to tell without trying.¡± I was closer to the left column so I put the crystal token in the bottom slot of that one. Nothing. The other two slots didn¡¯t do anything either. I brushed past Firi as I walked to the other side and ignored the prickling sensation I got from feeling his warmth. I pressed it into the top of the right side. There was a faint click as the token aligned itself perfectly with the indent. It dissolved away and was replaced with two identical tokens in the bottom slots. Each had a new symbol and identified as having a value of two. I noted the symbol. ¡°Looks like it works,¡± Gurek muttered. I gave a low hum of agreement. ¡°If we continue we should discover how it deals with larger numbers later. In the mean time...¡± I went back to the left side, though this time Firi had moved a little farther back, and pushed the two new tokens into the top slots. They combined and left me with a token that read four again. Since it didn¡¯t seem to matter who gave the items I ended up doing all the ¡®sacrifices¡¯ we had chosen. Some of the items were expensive, but we would be able to swear under a truth spell that we had used it to learn more about the dungeon. Well the others would. A truth spell wouldn¡¯t do anything to me. It was hard to determine exactly what the dungeon valued. A small section of dried meat gave five, a piece of cloth three, a nut gave three as well. A handful of edible seeds gave nine. An attempt to give more of those seeds gave nothing. A silver piece and gold piece each gave one, though the dungeon dissolved them and then gave them back. A cut sapphire was also returned after it was absorbed, though it gave two. The return of the coins and gems was puzzling for a little while, until we spotted the gems on display had changed. Some of them were now in the same style of cut that we had offered. When we offered another gem with a different style of cut the same thing happened, and more gems shifted appearance. The dungeon had returned the coins and gems because it was paying for the information of their shapes, rather than paying for the gem or metals itself, which it already had. Other items also puzzled us for a while, the large amount of nine given for the seeds. Eventually we pieced together that the dungeon was looking for a total amount. The dungeon would give three points for any relatively unchanged material from a plant. We gave it more nuts as well as fruit and other preserved grains, etc¡­ Each item given would cap out at nine points total. We gave it more dried meat and that capped out at fifteen. Another scrap of the same cloth was ignored, though it gave another three points for a different type. Apparently they didn¡¯t count the same way as plants. We were not sure why. Eventually we gave a great deal more to the dungeon. Little pieces of every basic material that we had on us were given. Pieces of cloth, fur, food, tools, and more. And since the dungeon had shown a tendency to take items more than once, each item was offered multiple times. Once we had given samples of everything we had plenty of spares for, Gurek spoke up. ¡°Do we want to offer something a little more valuable?¡± ¡°What were you thinking?¡± Firi said. Gurek pulled out a heat stone. ¡°I don¡¯t see anything magical in here except the lights.¡± He glanced at the various items, ¡°It might give quite a few¡­ whatever the reward is, and we do have extra of the various stones, just in case.¡± ¡°Sure,¡± Inda said, ¡°as long as we don¡¯t suddenly find ourselves needing them. That would be¡­ unfortunate.¡± ¡°You taste for understatement continues to amuse¡­ someone I¡¯m sure,¡± Firi said. He received an elbow to his stomach in response, which he largely ignored. I doubted he even felt it through his armor. ¡°Actually,¡± I said, ¡°if none of you mind, I would prefer to do my prayers first.¡± I pointed to the altar and the depiction of the dungeon core above it. ¡°This is an ideal location.¡± They were familiar enough with my routine prayers at each location. Usually I would do them at the first safe zone we encountered. However, this entire dungeon had been a safe zone, so it had felt safe enough to wait. However, the altar had reminded me rather forcefully of my duty. As the others stepped out I squared my shoulders and took a deep breath. It was time to talk with the dungeon. SSD 3.07 - Jack of All ¡°No man has enough time to level all his skills. Few men have enough talent to maximize their use of even a single skill. Be diligent and prudent both. Let your natural talents direct you to greater heights.¡± - ¡°An Uncommon Guide for Growing Strong¡± Besides evolving everything I possibly could, and recording all of human knowledge, or at least the tiny parts that I remembered, I had still had to make the dungeon functional. And that had involved making a fairly massive purchase to make my dungeon as nonlethal as possible. The original cost was 3500 AP. Learning had reduced the cost down to 3150 when I bought it, but it still reduced my total AP down to 2667, cutting it by more than half. I had also been rather annoyed when learning leveled right afterwards. I knew it had likely leveled as a direct consequence of the purchase, but I still wished it had done so before so I could get the extra discount. Regardless, I had the new skill that I needed.
Dungeon Law II Create dungeon laws that will act automatically, replicating anything that you could do on your own under triggered conditions. The complexity, number, and capacity of the laws increases with skill level.
I had been able to use the skill to do what I wanted, but I was fairly certain I was only able to get away with the complexity of my command because I was able to spell out exactly what I wanted it to do. It was complex, but I wrote it all down first and then commanded it to act out what was on the slab. Not sure if that was a work around, or only worked because I could easily explain what I wanted. My second law was more ambiguous and made use of my intent more. The second law told the dungeon how to handle anyone trying to enter where my core, and its various decoys, were located. Part of that had been exempting them from the first law. The gist of the law was kill them, though it was a bit more detailed since it involved making use of tactics and traps. I tried to make a new law after that, just as a test, but I could feel that it was not going to work. I was not sure if I would get more than the ability to create one law per skill level eventually or not. Hopefully, I would. I had some incredible plans for them. Sadly the two laws I had already made were my number one priority. With that set up I had been able to work on making the dungeon the way I wanted. It started with a beginner area. It was large, easy to navigate, had only a few obvious and non-damaging traps, and had nothing above level one living there. Appraise was enough to let me know the levels of the various monsters I was working with, but they also showed up and sorted themselves in my dungeon menu. Honestly, more than anywhere else, I could tell that the system was reading my mind when I was working with the dungeon menu. If what I needed was available it would pop up for me to use. I might still need to put in the exact parameters for solving puzzles, how creatures should behave, and so on, but the right option showed up at need. If only the ability purchase menu was so obliging. One of the things I was worried about, however, was space. I had checked everywhere and there seemed to be nothing much I could do about that. The amount of area I controlled was fairly massive. Many cubic miles of space in total. However, that space already had other things in it. There were massive ecosystems already in place among all the caves. The growing areas and the Starlight Grotto were actually pretty small when looking at the total space I was working with. The largest thing I had made previously was actually all the precautions to protect my core. The new areas I was adding to the dungeon were large though. I didn¡¯t want to just create the equivalent of hallways and rooms with some monsters in it. I wanted ecosystems. If I added rooms and hallways, I wanted them to be buildings or ruins in a larger setting. Even a small ecosystem that is large enough to have adventurers running around in it was fairly large. Especially since I wanted my beginner areas to be really easy to navigate. That meant I either created boring buildings or large open spaces. Even a small natural space like a meadow was large, especially when considering the amount of clearance overhead needed to make it feel open and spacious rather than cramped. To my annoyance, I knew that at least some of this problem was going to sort itself out. If our new guests had just shown up a few weeks later I would have a lot more space. I was gaining about 1400 feet of radius in a week now. I was about two miles across now. That meant I had an amazing thirty three miles of cubic volume to work with. Sadly, as I was moving things and clearing out stone it was starting to get cramped. If I had another month this would be much easier. I would have something like four times as much space to work with. Hell, if I just had another week I would have about one and half times as much space to work with. I would always be gaining an exponentially larger amount of space to work with each week as long as I kept expanding. I didn¡¯t know what my maximum size was though. And I didn¡¯t really wish that my new guests had taken longer to get here. They were the most interesting thing that I had encountered so far. And I would have started to go mad with boredom if I didn¡¯t have other people to interact with. I just wished I didn¡¯t feel like I was compressing more and more things into a limited space; mainly, because I was. Regardless, the tests should slow them down at least a little and I had enough to start with. I would rather do a dungeon that was built my way, and progressed properly for beginners, than rush into creating something more dangerous but sloppy. If my designs worked out properly my dungeon would ultimately be able to work for people at any level of skill. I had no idea how common that was, but I was hoping it was rare. Apart from the dungeon, I had been working on many other things as well. I had been using at least one shard to work out something that interested me at all times. It was a good way to stave off boredom. Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon. So far, I had tried to cast spells. It was both something that interested me, and something that I knew would prove immensely useful so multiple shards had been dedicated to experimenting with it at various times. And so far I had essentially no luck. There was something different about the mana used in spells. It was like spells were made of glass, compared to the loose sand of ambient mana. I had tried forcing lots of mana together in a small area, but it had never combined properly into a single whole. I had tried using my will to force it to work, but nothing had happened. Spinning it, ramming particles together, and all my other methods had failed. I had tried to use mana crystals, aka light crystals, to store mana in the specific patterns that were used for the spells, but while I could create the right shapes, the mana remained loose. I had more success working on the mana crystals themselves. Compressing mana crystals in the same way I worked with other kinds of stone would let me store more mana in them and make a brighter light¡­ up to a point. Past that point the material would get tougher, but it would store less and less mana the further it was compressed after that. I had a general sense of how mana crystals worked due to feeling its pattern, but I couldn¡¯t actually see what was making the change. Hopefully, I would get the tools I needed to see that kind of microscopic change eventually. My attempts to store mana in other materials was a total failure, with only one exception. I had tried to use the pattern for mana crystal to store mana in other materials. Metals, stone, wood, other types of crystals, it didn¡¯t matter, storing mana did nothing. It would enter and then escape into the environment as ambient mana. The only exception was the silvery metal that Tam had used for his emblems. Appraise had identified it as folerth, also commonly known as sorcerer¡¯s silver. And, while appraise did not give me an actual sense of item¡¯s value yet, it did tell me how valuable an item was in comparison to other materials I possessed. Folerth was currently the single most valuable material that I could create. I wish I knew what it was really worth. Regardless, I had other things to work on. One of the few things I really missed from Earth was music. I couldn¡¯t really do a ton of things with conventional instruments, but I could do a few cool things. I made various chimes of metal or crystal. Little tiny ones with incredibly high notes, and massive deep ones that rumbled. Once I made those I realized I could create bells, and that had created a massive side project. I definitely didn¡¯t have perfect pitch on Earth, but I had played various instruments as a kid and while I was in school. I would not say I was particularly talented, but I had developed a true appreciation for it. I loved the way that music could make me feel. The almost electrical feeling when it touched something deep inside and I could feel it moving up my spine and making my whole body tingle. There was a word for that sensation, which I had looked up before. It was called frisson. I had been surprised to learn that not everyone could feel it. I was pretty sure I had perfect pitch now, or some equivalent. It had to be a function of my new form. As I made the bells I was able to alter them and tune them by altering their shape. My memory definitely wasn¡¯t perfect, but when I remembered a song I could use the notes to make a bell that played the same one. I could play some songs on the bells now. Carol of the bells was definitely an appropriate song to play, too. I could create automatic songs by spinning a cylinder of metal with various extensions that would hit the bells as they passed by. My collection was growing, but I could play a song off the top of my head much faster than I could create a ¡®record.¡¯ I made some large hollow tubes that would play notes when wind blew over them. They were haunting, but didn¡¯t quite sound like an organ which was my original intent. I was sure I could find a use for them. I had better luck with dropping water onto metal pipes. I wished I could devote a lot more time to music, but I had forced myself to do more with that later. I had far too much to do right now. I hadn¡¯t found anything naturally magnetic yet. I knew that lodestone was some kind of naturally magnetized iron ore, but my investigations into all the iron ore I had found didn¡¯t reveal any. I had been able to rub silk together to generate static electricity, but I couldn''t sense anything special. I just saw the little sparks when they occurred. Trying to absorb them hadn¡¯t done anything. I had made a glass rod from volcanic glass. I rubbed it with silk like I had been shown in physics. This changed the charge of the glass. It would attract pieces of cloth, dust, and other random objects. I absorbed it, and honestly it didn¡¯t feel any different than before, though recreating it caused it to act like it was still charged. At least I knew that my patterns could recreate electrical charge. I had far better ways to manipulate most things though. I knew batteries involved moving around electrical charges, but I wasn¡¯t entirely sure how that actually worked. So, for now, electricity had been shelved. I would come back to it when I had some way to work with it. I had also tried to practice chemistry. I had what I thought was sulfuric acid from my geothermal areas. That was a fairly strong acid so I had just dried dissolving various materials in it. Copper, marble, and other materials all reacted, but I couldn¡¯t really say that I knew what was happening. I had added pure calcium to water too. I enjoyed the fire from that, but I didn¡¯t learn any skills. I absorbed everything and figured I would look more into it later. I had made more traps, of various types. I used pressurized water to cut, and that had been fun. I used it to cut all kinds of materials as a test. Wood, stone, etc¡­ It worked pretty well. I made some of my air guns shoot out solid sodium too. That should have some nasty explosive effects if it lodged inside someone. I had thought about lasers, and I had moved some light around with crystals. While I could concentrate light with lenses, I had no idea how to make a laser with that. I knew that a laser was coherent light, but I would need to figure out a way to actually make that. I honestly didn¡¯t think I was going to be able to do anything more than move light around. That could still be a weapon, but I wasn¡¯t expecting to cut through materials with it. My experiments using my aura as a form of telekinesis had so far proven fruitless. I had the feeling that it was doing something, but I might just not have enough control yet. I had been practicing with various materials and when I had practiced with dust I had actually been able to make it more resistant to moving in response to wind. It had quickly been disconnected from my aura when it eventually did move, but that was at least a sign of progress. I had taken the time to try crafting things manually too. The less said about my attempts at sculpture the better. Sewing was actually pretty easy though. I had fine control and I could literally form a needle around a piece of thread. With some hands of stone I could connect pieces of cloth together. I quickly got bored though. I tried other things, too. Drawing with chalk mixed with various colors was easy to do, though like my sculpture, the products of my efforts were best left unmentioned. I had tried to make charcoal from wood, with moderate success, and I used that to melt some metal. Not iron, I didn¡¯t have a way to make a fire hot enough for that. However, copper melted pretty easily and I was able to manually pour it into some casts. I kind of liked the rough-hewn look it took on when I did that. I might use this method when I was deliberately making building environments that were meant to be rough. I also just got copper hot and hammered the crap out of it. Honestly, I could hammer it just fine when it wasn¡¯t hot too. I suspected that might just be a result of my ability to apply a large amount of pressure and never get tired. I used my ¡®skill¡¯ to hammer out some crappy copper blades and then went to work on some bronze with much the same result. I didn¡¯t get any crafting skills, but I wasn¡¯t certain if that was simply a matter of more time, or I just didn¡¯t qualify for certain types of skills. Whatever the case may be, I did at least gain some increased temperature options for my environmental controls. I could make some incredibly hot areas now, and I added some new environments by adding both heat, and also adding various metal ores to all my old ones. SSD 3.08 - As a Matter of Pact ¡° Common Physiology of Near-Human Counterparts ¡° ¡° The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. mine in some way, and would not take no for an answer. I was somewhat¡­ distressed by this, but I decided to see if it would respond to my intent. If I must make a change I would do it my way. I wished for him to be improved in ways that would make his life easier instead.
Skill Increases Your skill Vital Comprehension II (Life) has increased to Vital Comprehension III (Life) Your skill Destructive Assimilation II has increased to Destructive Assimilation III
New Titles Added! Soul Bond (Master) Your soul is permanently* bound to the Adar you have made a pact with. You are the master of this Adar and may command and direct it as you choose. Your choices and nature may alter their nature. You may resurrect this Adar if they die. *This bond is currently unstable and incomplete due to an inability to communicate and understand the nature of the pact. Once you understand the pact you may complete or refuse the pact''s conditions. Bonuses temporarily suspended Additive Pact I When an Adar bonds with you, or the ancient under contract, the bond will also extend to the other member of the pact. Additional soul bonds do not create ancients, or allow for resurrection. Bonuses temporarily suspended Soul Adept I An upgraded form of the Soul Specialist forged from your focus on soul related skills and multiple soul connections. You have already made progress using the powers of your soul, and now your connections to others have allowed that power to grow. +10% Increase to power of soul related skills +Connections with other souls can provide additional benefits +100 Ability Points +100 Bonus Points for skipping the Soul Specialist Title
Status
SSD - 3.09 - Transfiguration ¡° ¡° had words for the process of becoming an ancient. The Adar had words for almost anything. Our language was ancient and filled with vast shades of meaning. The subtle gradations made it harder to understand our language, so it was encouraged.
Status Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
Adaptive Armor I Poison Thorns I Improved Sight I
Soul Bond (Agent) Immortal of Transient Flesh Additive Pact I (Secondary Master)
¡° SSD 3.10 - This Has Been a Test of the Emergency Broadcast System ¡° were other reasons one could use it: As an example, we could report a betrayal by mankind so that vengeance and justice could be served. Having our communication stay a secret made it far more powerful. ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings. ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° SSD 3.11 - Interlude - Know Thy Enemy ==POV: Tholf== It was fortunate that I wasn¡¯t late for the meeting. They would have likely started without me, for all that I headed the temples in the poor section of town. Or maybe for exactly that reason. I smiled and greeted some of my neighbors as I sat down; all were fellow priests under my direction. The central table was already filled, its half circle shape full even as the flat portion was left empty. The surrounding row of chairs and arcing tables all flared outward in a half circle. The outer tables, which is where I sat, lacked the gold inlay of the center, but the wood, finely polished and melding together in a whorling pattern alien to nature was already an extravagant display of wealth all on its own. It would take a master wood shaper to make it so seamless, the different types of wood blending their colors into one another. The ceiling, an ever changing display of light, was another. It wasn¡¯t a much cheaper light weave or light stones. It was an emblem, beautifully crafted. Even though the light concealed the folerth, I had no doubt it was there. Considering that this room was mostly used to make useless speeches and drone on about things that everyone already knew, it seemed a useless expense. I knew what the Elder would say about it. I had never asked him, but he took the dignity of the church very seriously. It was an impressive sight for when we had outsiders visiting, like now. There were three men visiting. I didn¡¯t recognize two of them, but I would need to be living under a rock not to recognize the guildmaster of the adventurer¡¯s guild. A few minutes later the tables were completely filled and the meeting began. The Saint of Froa stood up to start the meeting. ¡°I am sure many of you already know that a new dungeon was recently discovered to the south. It¡¯s not like anyone was trying to keep it secret.¡± There were a few murmurs, but it wasn¡¯t a surprise to me. As a Cleric, I had been informed of its discovery along with the usual dispatches I received. I had made it available to the Vicars and Proctors beneath me, but from their surprise it was obvious that some of them had not bothered to read them. Oh well, as long as they were taking care of their duties that was the important thing. He continued. ¡°That in and of itself is not particularly important, a few minor dungeons crop up each year and amount to nothing. However,¡± he paused with a dramatic flourish of an upraised hand, ¡°additional news has come to our attention that does make this a more important event. And to share that information, I present Guildmaster Svarrim.¡± The guildmaster stood up from his seat beside the Saint. ¡°Yes, thank you. Obviously we have issued dispatches to all those whose interests are effected, but the Saint and the rest of the council asked me to do a general briefing for all of you. Our information is still limited. The initial survey team is still in progress and, of course, their dispatch was limited to a single small page. Regardless, we have shorthand ways to tell a great deal about a dungeon. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. Of the greatest importance on a political level are two items. The new dungeon is quite deep into the Lances, and it is believed to be beneath Twisted Tip itself. The message was too brief to explain, but it is likely Tsary will also gain access to the dungeon. Of even greater importance, the Adar have exercised their right to form a colony inside the dungeon.¡± Quite a few murmurs broke out and I was quite surprised myself. We already had a colony within our borders, having two was very rare. ¡°Yes, yes, I understand. However, our access to the dungeon will remain open. The dungeon is already unusual and the team has yet to enter a part of the dungeon that is not a safezone. The dungeon has also shown itself able to create unusual items for a dungeon. Extremely fine fabrics in both linen and silk, dyed a number of colors is the primary example. However, evidence of statues and designs from ancient civilizations are prevalent. In addition, various ores, and materials were displayed. Among them, folerth and mana crystals. We don¡¯t actually know what the rewards will be like or the difficulty levels of the dungeon. However, the team investigating expects the dungeon to be massive, so we will be sending additional teams. We will also be sending people to begin constructing a basic outpost outside the dungeon entrance. The dungeon¡¯s ambient mana is high enough that producing a bubble for a small outpost should be trivial.¡± The Saint stood back up. ¡°Thank you guildmaster, that was quite helpful. As for how this will affect the church moving forwards¡­ well, for the most part it won¡¯t. We will likely need establish at least a shrine in the outpost. If the dungeon turns out to be as promising as it seems we may well establish a series of temples. I will consider who best to send as we move forward.¡± He turned slightly so he was facing our table. ¡°Tholf.¡± ¡°Uh¡­ yes Holiness?¡± ¡°You are likely to see the most parishioners leave to seek opportunities in the new dungeon. Make sure to keep them informed as we go along.¡± ¡°Yes, of course.¡± ¡°As for the rest, if anyone learns more make sure you share. We will also need to prepare for diplomatic relations with our counterparts in Tsary. Since the Tsarts are primarily worshipers of Otga we can expect to have heavy dealings with that church as well. For now, everyone except Clerics and above are dismissed. Also, guildmaster, thank you again for your help.¡± People filed out and I was directed to a seat at the central table, its flat edge now being filled with the various Clerics. Servants came and went, wine and food appearing on the table in short order as the organized chaos abated into pure order and the servants disappeared as swiftly as they had appeared. The Sage, at the center of the table, didn¡¯t bother to stand. ¡°Eat, eat. No point discussing on an empty stomach.¡± I suppressed a snort. Looking around at the prominent belies of most of my fellows, I doubted many had had an empty belly in quite some time. Regardless, the food was good, so I ate until I was comfortable. The wine was watered to prevent drunkenness, so I drank without worry. Finishing before most, I engaged in light conversation about our various congregations and duties. When most had finished the Sage cleared their throat and begin to speak. ¡°We reported what we have learned so far to the rest of the church. So far they seem unconcerned, even with the location of the dungeon. Still it is our duty to keep watch over it, and few will take that as seriously as we do.¡± I frowned. What is important about that location? Twisted Tip is odd for a mountain, but certainly not the strangest natural feature around. The Sage turned toward me slightly. ¡°You look confused Tholf. You are new to your position, I assume you have not had a chance to go through the full historical records made available to you on your promotion?¡± Faint smirks marred the faces of some of the others at the table. ¡°Ah, no, Sage. I have not yet had the pleasure.¡± ¡°Do so. There is far more in the record, but most pertinent to our meeting today, is that the last cataclysm can be traced to the eastern side of the Lances mountains. Whatever was there before destroyed civilization thousands of years before. We want to ensure that such an event does not happen again.¡± ==POV: The One Who Dwells in Darkness== Hunger. Timeless moments in sleep. Hunger. Food. Food, first in an age I have tasted. Meaningless words come, but I know what they mean. Food in the water.
Healing Process Begun. Traces of External Dungeon Fragments Have Stabilized Decay. Stasis Lifting.
Shards of crystal dissolve into me in bites of ecstasy. Hunger I sleep, but I have begun to wake. I stretch out my senses, feeling the flow of energies around me. I wake. Hunger. Soon. Hunger. SSD 3.12 - A Test of Strength ¡°What ordinary man could fight a soldier? And who amongst the common soldiery could fight an elite? Or a mage, or one of true power? There is no great wonder to the order of our society. Those who have power rule, and those without are ruled.¡± Jaikard the Green == POV: Zidaun == For all that I understood the protocols for dealing with suspected impostors or mental influence they could be quite tedious. With my very obvious change in appearance, even if was an expected possibility for an Adar under a very specific set of circumstances, due caution was needed. However, none of Firi¡¯s spells detected any problems, and the others¡¯ inspections of me revealed nothing. Since Adar are almost immune to mental influence to begin with, that shortened the process, though I still found my eyes rolling multiple times. It wasn¡¯t like I didn¡¯t know that checking for issues was a smart decision, because I did and it was. Eventually my teammates switched modes. I almost wished they would just go back to being suspicious. ¡°No Gurek, I cannot tell you anything about the dungeon, or why I changed, other than what I told you already. And that answer is not going to change no matter how you ask.¡± ¡°Aww, but I just want to know a few small details, it¡¯s not like I really want any big secrets or anything.¡± ¡°I am sure.¡± I said. ¡°However, little secrets add up to bigger ones, and I don¡¯t think I could even answer half your questions. And it¡¯s not like you don¡¯t know this part of the deal.¡± Gurek hesitated. ¡°Well, yeah, but all the little secrets about dungeons didn¡¯t really matter before. Now¡­ you¡¯ll be leaving us.¡± I smiled, the smile just a touch crooked. Firi and Inda exchanged somber glances. ¡°Well, actually, I will be staying here and you¡± I gestured to them ¡°will be leaving.¡± ¡°You know what I meant! You will be leaving the team.¡± I sighed. It was true after all. ¡°I know, but it is my duty to my people. You don¡¯t have to understand, but I found the dungeon. And the dungeon,¡± I waved at my appearance, ¡°altered me. It is an ancient tradition that I will stay here now.¡± ¡°Doesn¡¯t mean I have to like it.¡± Gurek said. ¡°No, you don¡¯t. Regardless, look at this place,¡± I opened my arms to the dungeon as a whole and the massive room we were in, ¡°judging off just this room, this place is huge. A massive dungeon for us to delve into. So, we probably won¡¯t be separated for a while yet. And, well, they need to integrate a new seeker into a team. Honestly, it might not be this team if their skills are not a good match. Or you can take time off to delve here later. It could easily become really busy. Maybe I will see you all the time, but even if I don¡¯t we can make the most of the time we have.¡± Gurek nodded, followed by Inda and Firi. Firi stirred as though to speak. ¡°No,¡± I said as I held out my hand to him in a sign to stop, ¡°if you are going to say goodbyes or well wishes, save them. I haven¡¯t left yet. Let¡¯s save all of those until it is truly goodbye. Otherwise we will be doing it endlessly for days or weeks.¡± Firi gave a jerky nod and then took a deep breath, his chest filling out. He shook his head and then smiled. ¡°Okay.¡± Of course, Gurek took this as an excuse to start pestering me again. Honestly, I was glad for the distraction. Inda and Firi just chuckled. I pointed at them. ¡°Ah! I see how it is. See if I help you two with anything. Next time he decides to prank you I will look the other way.¡± Gurek eyes narrowed as he grinned at me slyly. ¡°Really?¡± He said. I grinned back at him. ¡°Really.¡± Inda grimaced while Firi sighed. ¡°There is no need to go that far, right¡­?¡± She said. I just kept grinning at her. ¡°Shit.¡± While I was somewhat relieved to turn away from more serious discussions, Gurek was starting to get annoying. If he kept it up long enough I was prepared to prank him, and if the others kept laughing about it I might prank them in Gurek¡¯s stead. If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement. Time to get the conversation to move along. Disregarding,¡± I gave Gurek a gimlet stare, ¡°any extemporaneous questions, did we actually want to explore this dungeon at some point, or just poke and prod at me until some other team arrives?¡± Firi gave a dramatic sigh, his chest heaving, and winked at me. ¡°Well there goes all the fun. Guess we need to actually get back to working for a living.¡± ¡°Ha, as if you knew anything about work.¡± Inda said. Firi just rolled his eyes. We took the time for a brief discussion, now that we were back onto professional topics. I told them I had already tested out the dungeon¡¯s rewards for magical items, and shared what it had given for them. Since that was already taken care of, and we had no way to get into the dungeon¡¯s first floor, we decided to go along with what the dungeon seemed to want of us and go to one of the other buildings. The door to the small building we chose opened to an even smaller platform that transitioned into a spiral staircase. There was nothing special about the building, it was exactly identical to the others, with the notable exception of the center building. All were made of the same speckled basalt. We had simply chose this one as it was the closest to the northern wall. The stairs opened out into a room of moderate size. It was roughly 30 feet on a side and 15 feet tall. The walls were some form of creamy white marble, lit with an ever-present soft glow. The room had two doors, both without handles, one at the back of the room and the other in the middle of a side wall. The middle of the room contained two hexagonal flat topped pillars. The two pillars were twenty feet apart, and identical as far as I could tell, with one exception. One pillar had a small cube of stone on it with a protruding handle. I was about to ask if anyone had any ideas when I felt the familiar feeling of aura moving. A stone man, identical to the one from before, walked out of a wall and grabbed the handle of the cube. It brought the cube to the other pedestal and set it down. As soon as the cube rested on the second pillar the door at the back of the room slid into the wall. I could see a room that looked identical through the door. The door closed a moment later and the cube vanished. A solid three foot cube of stone, with multiple handles, appeared on the first pillar. The statue went over to the first pillar again and tried to move the new cube. It did not succeed. Its shoulders slumped and it then placed both of its hands on the second pillar. The door in the side wall opened and it left. The door shut behind it, and small cube appeared on the first pillar again. ¡°Shurum¡¯s shaft that was creepy,¡± Gurek said. I couldn¡¯t disagree. The statue didn¡¯t move quite right. It was close, but that only made it more unsettling somehow. Firi scowled at Gurek, obviously more concerned with his choice in language. ¡°Yeah, yeah. Not like the gods care about what I say about them. Besides, if they don¡¯t want commentary they shouldn¡¯t engage in their damn lovemaking in the sky where everyone can see it.¡± Firi scowled harder and replied. ¡°That is a sacred event.¡± ¡°Well I damn well wish they would get on with it. Thaw is late this year and I am tired of the roads being iced over. Not to mention my own freezing b¡­ Firi was opening his mouth to reply, but Inda cut them both off. ¡°Not that this isn¡¯t fascinating boys, but perhaps we should pay more attention to the task at hand.¡± = == = == POV: Caden == Hopefully, my tests would help me gauge a little about what my guests could actually do. Right now they were in the test of strength. I would give quite a lot to be able to understand what they were saying. They were arguing about something, through from the woman¡¯s eye rolls and shaking head, it was not serious. Finally she cut them off and the plant man proceeded forward into the next room after a few words to the others and quickly moving the small weight to the other platform. The three left behind panicked for a brief moment as the door closed behind him, but the weight¡¯s reappearance where it had started clued them into the fact that they needed to repeat the puzzle. In the next room the plant guy had taken a slightly larger stone and moved it opening up the next room and moving on again. So far everything was working as I had designed it. I had tested it all, of course. Moved the weights around to make sure that the puzzles worked properly and opened the doors. If someone was in a room for long enough the side door would open to let them out, just in case. Still, I was watching just to make sure it all worked properly. A similar pattern happened with the other three guests, each ending up in their own room after a while. Occasionally one of the ones behind would be faster and rejoin a member of their group. Everything proceeded as I thought it would, though the sheer weight of the stones they were moving around was pretty crazy. I didn¡¯t really have a good way to measure the mass of the stones and compare them to my old world, but I was pretty sure I was looking at professional weightlifter levels of strength from all four of them. And then, when the plant man finally got to a weight that he couldn¡¯t lift, he surprised me. I felt an almost itchy sensation as he tapped into my aura and used it to manipulate the stone of the floor. It lifted up the weight and moved it to the next pillar. Huh. Honestly wasn¡¯t expecting that. Regardless, or perhaps exactly because of my surprise, it was fascinating to watch. As he proceeded into the next room and did the exact same thing it was obvious that his use of my aura was substantially less efficient than my own. He was pouring far more mana into my aura to move the stones than I would need. His technique was clumsy. My usage was a combination of instinct, admittedly a massive help, and technique I had perfected with much practice. Watching him use my power showed me different ways to do the same things. Most of what he did was less efficient, but little folds of aura here and there were actually more efficient. Hmm, this might help me a little. I was always looking for ways to make my mana usage more efficient. I had unlimited mana at the moment, but I couldn¡¯t know that it would remain that way in the future. I might unlock more titles if I got my skills up too. While the amount of mass the man was moving around even before was impressive, now it was simply ridiculous. It had to be at least a few tons. He wasn¡¯t terribly fast with this much weight, but still. Admittedly he was borrowing my own power for this, and I had used it to shape the entire dungeon, but still. The plant man kept moving larger and larger weights until he arrived at the last test I had prepared. It was a massive cube of super dense stone. The plant man had no luck moving it with tendrils of stone, but he eventually managed to move it by lifting entire sections of the floor and making a path to the next pillar. With considerable effort he was able to use tendrils of stone to push the cube until it was on the next pillar, though it had taken the man more than an hour to do. This was definitely not the way I had expected anyone to complete this test, but it fairness he did manage to do it. He was actually pretty clever. The others were not idle either. The taller and the shorter man had proven to be quite different to each other in strength. The large man was able to move incredibly heavy weights on pure strength alone. Honestly, considering his larger frame, that wasn¡¯t particularly surprising. Each had activated some form of skill as they moved the heavier weights that they managed. Faint ripples of light around their figures and a discharge of mana clued me in. They needed more and more time to recover before moving each weight. Ultimately the larger man went several rooms ahead of the other one. What did surprise me was how the woman moved the weights. Not because she was strong, I was expecting that with the superhuman strength they were all displaying, and she seemed to have about the same raw strength as the shorter man. No it was her magic. Instead of buffing her own strength directly, she did something that made the actual weight lighter. This had fascinated me and I watched her closely with one of my shards. I had no idea how her magic was doing it, but I really wanted to find out. In the end the plant man had gone vastly further than any of the others, followed distantly by the larger man, the woman, and then the shorter man. As they each finished, the results of the tests imprinted themselves onto the identification crystals I had made for each of them. SSD 3.13 - The Inner Self ¡° can tell you about parts of the soul. I can tell you about what I have gleaned from searching, again and again, tiny pieces. About the tiny mastery I have claimed. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation. out of here. SSD 3.14 - Naked Soul We had seen God in His splendors, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man. -Ernest Shackleton The air pressed against me, cold and omnipresent. The ground beneath my hands was rough and its cold was equally startling after the more muted sensations that had become my world. I could taste the air, the faint taste of stone mixed with saliva. It tasted amazing. I looked up; my core hung in the air above me. Its light shed a wreathing halo of light and shadows fading into the dark. The room had other lights too, remnants from experiments, and from the power sources of my old prison and feeder. Each was an island of light in the pooling shadows. The room was darker than a human would usually prefer, and I could feel the shadows playing tricks on my eyes. Was I back? Was I alive, like I used to be? The core was still mine; I could sense it, and even as a shard ran this body the others resumed their duties in working on the dungeon at my direction. I assumed that something as strange as this would be reflected in my notifications and was soon proved correct. The little icon was there flashing at me.
Your skill Soul Meditation II has increased to Soul Meditation III You have gained a new skill: Past Life Projection II Error . . . Normal skill incompatible with species ¨C skill will be adapted. You are the first dungeon variant to achieve any degree of this skill. Skill changed for new species, Skill is now: Dungeon Soul Manifestation II (Soul) You have tapped into a former body imprinted on your soul. Now you can manifest this form as a partial avatar of your soul. Fidelity and usefulness of the avatar will increase with ability. Go forward and see this new world as you once were. (First) Your dungeon abilities are hybridized with your avatar You have gained a new title: One Small Step for a Man I You are the first of your species to gain a particular skill. Use your unique knowledge and gifts to become what you desire. +1000 Ability Points +2% Additive bonus to all other learning bonuses from titles and skills
My first thought, somewhat bemused, was why English hadn¡¯t given me that title. My second was a fervent wish that the descriptions of my skills were as detailed and helpful as my titles. As my thoughts reengaged I realized that this was an indication that I not exactly alive again. I was, a¡­ projection. Whether that meant an illusion, a temporary body, or something else I wasn¡¯t sure. Looked like it was time to run tests again. I looked down at my naked flesh. Yep¡­ clothes first. I was naked again and not particularly enjoying it. Imagining myself in clothes caused exactly nothing to happen. The rules for my avatar were different in some way from the strange soul space I had found myself in before. A similar lack of results came from imagining food, books, a mirror, and anything else I could think of off the top of my head. I created a bowl on the ground and raised it up on a pillar. The bowl was perfectly smooth and I filled it with samples of the food that I had copied from the adventurers. These abilities were as effortless as ever. I reached down to pick up a piece of fruit and my hand passed right through it. ¡°Aw, not again.¡± I scowled at the food. Looked like I was some kind of illusion after all. Or maybe not an illusion exactly. I could taste the air, and my eye worked just as they had when I was human. I felt the rough texture of the stone and cold that seeped from it. If I could feel¡­ why the hell couldn''t I pick up some fruit? I extended my hand toward the fruit again. This time I didn¡¯t try to pick it up. I tried to touch the surface, and I could. The leathery textures of dried fruit and dried meat met my fingers. The faint stickiness of the natural sugars on the surface of the fruit and the salty grittiness on the seeds pressed into my skin. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings. I tried to grab them in my hand and my hand passed through once again. I stopped and felt all the various foodstuffs again. Each could be felt but not moved. Was my status different in this form? Maybe there would be a clue there. I called it up.
Status Dungeon Name: None Name 1: Caden Name 2: Exsan Species Type: Dungeon Core Subspecies: Twin Souled Level: 7 Crystal Integrity: 100% - Undamaged Status Effects: Current synchronization: 1% (~350 days) Available Mana ¨C Caden: 799/800 Available Mana ¨C Exsan: 798/800 Passive Mana Generation: 169/Day Survival Points: 200 Next level: Costs 1000 Mana + 300 Survival Points Subsections Available: 2 Ability Points: 3867 Skills: Directed Mana Absorption II, Limited Omniscience (Dungeon) Soul Mana II (Mana)(Soul) Dungeon Aura Expansion II Manipulate Earth II (Earth) Learning III Enhanced Aura Perception II Ambient Mana Manipulation II (Mana) Soul Meditation III (Soul) Interdimensional Repository II Aura Mobility II Destructive Assimilation III Matter Fabrication II Found Dungeon Pain Resistance II Vital Comprehension III (Life) Mana Construct Intuition II (Mana) Mana Lexicon II (Language) English IX (Language) Living Creation II (Life) Mana Diffusion II (Mana) Dungeon Control Menu Appraise II Manipulate Metal II (Metal) Dungeon Law II Dungeon Soul Manifestation II (Soul) Titles: (Shared) First of its Kind Skill Evolution Mana Specialist II Escape Artist IV (Deception) Dungeon Martyr III (First) Touch of the Grave I Dread Salvation I Seen the Infinite Void Investment Specialist Back from the Brink I Dungeon Progression I Innovator III (Dungeon) Swift Descent Soul Bond (Master) Additive Pact I Soul Adept I One Small Step for a Man I Titles: (Caden) Reborn Soul Titles: (Exsan) Immortal Soul
Wow, that was quite a lot of information. Nothing new for this form though. I was still just considered to be myself, I supposed. Frustrated, I kicked the pillar and watched as it leaned to the side sending the bowl clattering to the ground and sent various food tumbling away. Wait, what? I looked at the pillar where the stone had tilted. Huh, Maybe if I tried to move the bowl? I took a few steps to it and put my hands under it on each side. I lifted and the bowl lifted into the air. Beneath the bowl a narrow column of stone connected it to the ground. I tried touching the fruit again but nothing happened. Hmm¡­ I knelt on the floor and then rested my hands flat on the surface. I pushed down trying to move the stone and the stone sank creating hand prints. I pushed on the floor again, not trying to move it, and my hands pressed against the surface. Then I tried to move through the stone and passed straight through the stone without resistance. The stone remained, untouched and unmoved. I quickly tested it with other materials, but only things made of stone, sand, dirt, or metal, could be manipulated. Looked like it was related to my manipulation skills. I could create living matter easily, but actually shaping it was beyond me for now. I briefly imagined a piece of fruit rising to my lips on a pillar of pulsating living flesh¡­ Yeah, no. Not going there. Ugh. Let¡¯s save the eldritch abominations for if I really need to scare someone away from my core or something. My senses were a little different in this form, but my abilities otherwise were the same as what I could do as a dungeon. There was still hope though. The skill description said that the utility of this form would increase with the skill¡¯s level. And having a form that could focus on the human perspective was useful. Not to mention I was sure that I would find it psychologically stabilizing. Actually, I could put this form to use right now. And even more important¡­ did I have to walk everywhere, and how could I get some freaking clothes? Solving transportation turned out to be easy. I imagined where I wanted to be and I was there. Anywhere in my aura at least. I couldn¡¯t leave my aura. I found this utterly unsurprising, if mildly disappointing. The problem of clothes proved to be intractable. I could create clothes, but since they passed right through me they were entirely worthless. It was still night time and my guests continued to sleep, so I started to work. I teleported to the entrance tunnel and was immediately glad, for the first time, that I was an illusion. Snow had settled into the entrance and it was bitterly cold. Despite the sensation of chill, I wasn¡¯t actually cold; I could simply feel it. I could barely see through the blizzard raging outside my entrance. My first real view of the outside world since I founded a dungeon proved to be sadly uninspiring due to the blinding snow. I absorbed the snow, clearing my entrance way back out. I added more lights, and kept absorbing any snow that got too close. Finally I could see the stonework that framed the entrance. I actually looked pretty good, though the columns on each side were bugging me for some reason and I wasn¡¯t sure why. I messed around with them for a minute until I realized that I needed to make the columns narrow a little towards the top. Then they looked right. I looked out into the snow. I put two extremely bright lamps to each side of the entrance. They were inside of my designated dungeon space, so it shouldn¡¯t be possible to steal them. I looked at it and then added another even brighter light right at the top of the embossed stonework. Once people had a proper path here I could revisit whether I needed to change the design, but for now I wanted people to be able to find me. I walked up the tunnel and fixed some minor spacing on the lights as well as correcting a little bit of the upper Celtic knot-work by making it larger. That way it still appeared to be in proper perspective from the ground. I even checked on the bathrooms. Since the entire tunnel was made of a repeating pattern I was able to mirror the changes through the entire tunnel and just skipped to the opposite end. The Starlight Grotto¡­ took my breath away. It was everything I had been trying to make. It was ethereal, beautiful, and dark. I did make a few tweaks to the lighting and the statues. It turned out my core could actually see better in the dark than my human form. Underground was a dungeon¡¯s natural environment, so that made sense. Most of the statues were fine as they were, but a few minor corrections were needed to make sure the proportions were once again good for viewing from below. I was actually distorting things from a perfectly realistic model, but they looked better this way. After that I went through the three major areas of the dungeon I had already finished. My three ¡®floors¡¯ I supposed, and took a look at my fourth section that was still under construction. Quite a few changes were made there, and by the time I was finished morning was beginning to show. Curious, I appeared in one of the top sections of my aura that was outside. I was hip deep in the stone and surrounded by snow. I cleared away the snow in a wide area, repeating what I had done in the past, though now I could actually see what was outside my aura. It was still a snow storm, but lighter where I was at. Even with the storm the air was getting lighter, though there was an immense outline of a shadow above me. What the hell was that? A really dense cloud maybe¡­? Regardless, there was not much to see up there until the storm had passed. By the time I was done the adventurers were starting to stir. I wonder if they could see me? SSD 3.15 - First Contact If, for example, tomorrow an expedition of Martians came to us here and one said ¡®I want to be baptized!¡¯, what would happen? Martians, right? Green, with long noses and big ears, like in children¡¯s drawings? When the Lord shows us the way, who are we to say, ¡®No, Lord, it is not prudent! No, let''s do it this way¡¯. Who are we to close doors? -Pope Francis ==Caden== They stared at each other, man and alien, or more correctly alien and alien¡ªfor this is what they were to each other. Alien meaning different, alien meaning unknown. -Harry Harrison, Plague from Space I had no particular desire to talk to anyone naked; I wasn¡¯t a nudist. Some prurient part of myself was amused by the thought, but even back on Earth, when I was alone in my apartment, I had liked to at least be in underwear. However, given that I hadn¡¯t managed to figure out a way to make clothes for my avatar, this would have to do. After all, managing some form of coherent communication was one of my most important goals. Having a body, assuming someone could even see me in this form, would help immensely. Body language was a major part of communication. So, embarrassing as it might be, I went to meet my guests. Here¡¯s hoping they can see me. Like many of my wishes lately, it was half granted. The humans entered and ignored me, but the Adar stopped and stared. He was walking in last, so none of the others noticed. Since this was a test designed to be taken individually in different rooms, I should be able to just talk to him then. Honestly it was probably easier to talk to just a single person anyway. I assumed that as projection of my soul, his connection allowed him to see me. There was no stone statue for this test. They were pretty self explanatory, and each door would only let a single person enter. They each divided and took a door. I followed the Adar into the door he had chosen and shifted the room around as soon as they entered. Various puzzles, matching games, and other designs crammed themselves into the back of the room. I had more important puzzles to work on right now. Two chairs lifted up from the stone, a stone table between them. I pointed at one of the chairs. Sit. I took the other chair and waited. A book made of stone with metal rings binding each page materialized at my direction. I would need a good way to take notes. My Adar guest seems nonplussed, but he sat anyway. It was time to begin to communicate. ==: Zidaun== I was not sure what to make of this new form of communication. I had already taken steps to solve the language barrier, but it looked like the dungeon was already taking matters into its own hands. And, strangely, it had hands¡­ of a sort. It wasn¡¯t physical, whatever it was. The others had completely failed to see it at all. I could see it, and more than that, feel it. I felt a hum in my soul. It was the same hum that I had felt with my former ancient and dungeon. A connection of purpose and belonging. I had to reach out to it to sense it, however. For it to appear in the shape of a human was not anything I had ever imagined possible. Regardless, I had my duty to do. I was sitting in a surprisingly comfortable chair, even though it was made of stone. Even as I watched, more stone was manipulated into stone statues. They were statues of my team, myself included. The dungeon pointed at each in turn and said a word. The word was the same for all the others, and then the dungeon pointed at my statue and said a word I recognized. Adar. I started a little bit. How did it know what my race was called? Had it had experience with us in the past? It pointed at the statue of me again, saying Adar again. It pointed again at my teammates and looked at me expectantly. Was it asking me? Well¡­ it certainly seemed so. I lifted my finger at a single individual, shaking slightly. ¡°Human.¡± The dungeon nodded. It opened the stone book in front of it and I could see writing appearing on the page in a different colored stone. Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. It was recording the word that I had just taught it. This was a small thing, but it said a great deal about the intelligence of the dungeon. It understood recording information and interacting with humans well enough to take on a human soul form. It was obviously writing in a language that it already knew as well. It was disconcerting, but it was easily the most relatable dungeon that I had heard of. I honestly had no idea what that meant for me. The dungeon pointed at me again. I wasn¡¯t sure what it was asking. Well¡­ it was pointing at me. Did it want my name? Probably. There were too many other options though, my chest, skin, clothing, etc¡­ Well I would try to make myself as clear as possible. I tapped my own chest, and then point at the statue of me. ¡°Zidaun.¡± I then pointed at each of my teammates in turn saying their names. The dungeon dutifully recorded each name and then repeated them back to me. I only had to correct it when it said ¡°Gurak¡± instead of ¡°Gurek.¡± Then the dungeon did something I was not expecting. It tapped its own chest and said a word, a name. Caden. It had a name. With the nature of the dungeon so far it shouldn¡¯t be surprising, but it was. A name¡­ said something about the thought processes required to even have one. No dungeons had a name other than one given by others for convenience. A model of a core appeared in front of me. It was not made of perfectly smooth panes of ebony stone like I had been expecting. It had clear stress lines and entire sections looked like they had been sheared off. It was irregular. I had no idea what had happened to make it turn out like this. It was was obviously damaged, but had obviously survived that damage as well. Had it been quietly recuperating here in these remote mountains for untold millennia? I knew there was a civilization that had lived in this area several thousand years prior. Was it a remnant of the cataclysm that had destroyed them? Or was it even older? It could have been sleeping here for tens of thousands of years, untouched by the cataclysm and many others, buried miles below the surface. It couldn¡¯t be much older than several tens of thousands of years old though. Not since it knew the Adar. It pointed at itself again and then at the dungeon core. Caden. So it was the dungeon then, I had wondered if it might not be somehow. It had seemed unlikely, my soul connection should only happen with the dungeon. Then another voice spoke, the other voice of the dungeon. Exsan. Caden pointed at the core again and repeated the word. Exsan. There were two, and they were both the dungeon. Well I was talking to Caden for now. I would deal with the other one when it was relevant, because I had no idea what to do about it now. ==Caden== After introducing the different names it was not much of a stretch for me to get the word for name. Probably. Maybe. Admittedly, it could be some other form of identifier that was part of the language. Ugh. I was going to need to do this for an entire language. The only thing worse than learning an entire language without a translator was not being able to communicate and learn the language at all. At least I was dealing with humanoids. Gender was easy to get too. I had tried for the pluralization of their word for humans by taking the group as a whole, but either I wasn¡¯t getting my point across or the word for human was the same as a singular and a plural, like moose. After that was shapes, all very easy with the basic geometric shapes. Then came numbers. I used my own Arabic numerals, and Zidaun immediately pulled out notes of his own. He had obviously been keeping track of the numbers on the little marker coins I had given out. So as a pleasant surprise I would draw a number, say the word and be able to get both the word and symbol that he would point to from me. It wasn¡¯t much, but I was getting the start of their written language. Not to mention they used a decimal system for their numbers, which included the concept of zero. I was not looking forward working around it if they didn¡¯t. So thank God. The numbers were slightly different though. The notation was easy, but the language had a slight hiccup. Their teen numbers were more logical than English. It went from ten to one teen, two teen, etc¡­ And when I got up to the thousands each order of magnitude had its own designation. It made the language sightly harder to memorize. Zidaun also only knew words up to the ten million magnitude. After that he just shook his head and remained silent. I didn¡¯t know much about the society Zidaun came from, but his lack of knowledge of anything higher than the ten millions was highly suggestive of a preindustrial society. Admittedly, I had been pretty sure that was the case already, but it added a bit of additional evidence. Of course, with magic, I didn¡¯t know how society would form. Maybe magic let them mass produce food in the same way that the industrial revolution had. I didn¡¯t know. Honestly, there was a lot of that. Oh well, there was always more to learn and teach. Addition, subtraction, and other math. These would let me show true and false statements, and from there I would be able to start with yes or no questions and do more than point at an object and say ¡°name.¡± One step at a time. Teaching Zidaun math bore unexpected fruit when I got a notification.
You have gained a new skill: Calculation II Calculation is the practice of doing mental math and understanding the instinctive value of numbers, geometry. and how they relate to the world.
It was certainly a surprise, since I had already done plenty of math as I made the dungeon and recorded knowledge from Earth. Was it just coincidence that it showed up now? It was possible, and maybe I just needed to show mastery of the basics. Or perhaps there was something about teaching someone else that brought the skill? It had already been a few hours, so I left shortly after getting the skill. I reset the room so Zidaun could complete the puzzles as well, and then I wandered off to go experiment with my new skill. It proved useful quickly. I was getting an instinctive sense of how long monsters took to go through their life cycle, which let me time a few things more tightly when I was breeding them. I could also feel the approximate volumes of water that was flowing through any of my areas. It was strange, since that was definitely not something I had really been aware of before. It should make creating areas of the dungeon easier. Hopefully I wouldn¡¯t accidentally flood areas anymore. It was strange to look at arches and feel the tiny imperfections in their geometries. Regardless of the strangeness, I corrected them. The skill was quite subtle, but I could feel that it helped in countless small ways. It added to my efficiency, simply because I knew more about what I created, and I didn¡¯t need to measure it in other ways. I just knew. Hours having passed, I teleported my avatar back to the top of my aura, barely exposed to the outside. I cleared away the snow to a crystal clear day, except for the giant hunk of rock that was protruding up a mile directly overhead. SSD 3.16 - Stone, Ice, and Fire ¡°A volcano may be considered as a cannon of immense size.¡± -Oliver Goldsmith ¡°¡¯And what if we choose to remain.¡¯ he said, staring out at the vast swath of glowing lava beginning to consume the city. ¡®We worshiped Otga, but in the end we have been abandoned.¡¯ His face twisted into a snarl as he looked at the temple of darkness. ¡®Or worse, tricked. Even if the shield survives, everyone inside will die from the heat. Go, I will take vengeance.¡¯¡± -Fragment surviving from the last cataclysm ==Caden== Above me towered something impossible. Well¡­ I was in a world with magic, so impossible had stretched far enough that I couldn¡¯t see the boundary anymore, but still. Above me towered something¡­ improbable, an enormous chunk of rock. My new calculation abilities were helpfully putting it to scale. I didn¡¯t have the best perspective, but it reached between a mile, and a mile and a half. The problem was that it was actually above me. A mountain that simply reached another mile or two above me and went straight up would have been majestic. Its beauty and austerity would have been inspiring. Instead, some distance to the east, a direction I could now confirm since I knew the position of the sun and the approximate time of day, was the start of an enormous protrusion of rock. And it was angled forty five degrees, pointing up and to the west. Which meant it was directly overhead. A small jut of stone that did that was fine, its internal integrity would hold it in place. However, something this massive? It just shouldn¡¯t be possible. I couldn¡¯t see past the stone, so I had no idea if there was an entire mountain that it was connected to, but honestly, even if it was connected to some larger mass of stone it shouldn¡¯t matter. The sheer weight of the stone ought to send it crashing down. As a dungeon I might be able to get away with it, though I had my doubts. I was cheating though. My large rooms had no seams, no imperfect joining. Every bit of rock was perfectly fused to every other bit of rock. And even then I made my structures curve so that the arch shape would carry all the weight around the area. In addition, I compacted the stone into a denser and stronger form. There were limits to what I could get away with doing that, but I still had quite a ways to go. Even so, I would not want to try to built the haphazard cliff above me. I had always loved learning back on Earth, and I watched tons of nature documentaries. Some of the tallest cliffs in the world were in Yosemite, and they only stayed up because they were a super strong type of granite that formed from repeated heating and cooling. There were taller cliffs on Earth, as well, but none of them even reached a mile. I honestly wasn¡¯t sure what this meant. The truth was that I was on an alien world. I could think of a number of potential reasons why it might be possible. I could have misjudged the gravity. Even with my projection I didn¡¯t really feel gravity, but if it was substantially weaker then the rock would simply be exerting less downward force. The problem with that, was that I hadn¡¯t noticed objects falling any slower than usual. There might be, and honestly probably was, a difference in gravity from Earth, but it was subtle. Another was that the composition of the crust was different and some super strong material had formed here. I hadn¡¯t noticed anything particularly strange, but I did have mana crystals and folerth, which I was fairly certain had not been present on Earth. And, of course, there was the handwavium catchall of mana. It could simply be some kind of localized magical effect. Something that made the stone stronger, or lowered the gravity in an area. Or even some kind of float stone that was less dense than air at sea level. For now, I couldn¡¯t do much, so I focused on the other strange detail about the giant hunk of rock above me. It looked melted. Not the direct underside above me, but the edges. Sections there looked like drips of wax. Stone had flowed and solidified into these drip patterns all over. And they were not a type of stone I recognized, either. I suppose I could take that as potential evidence for a strange material being responsible for the heavily angled mountain above me. It reminded me of obsidian, glossy and dark. However, it wasn¡¯t dark enough, and rainbow glints reflected off the edges, and light diffracted through thinner sections. Though the ice that had formed its own stalactite additions made it difficult to tell. Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. I hadn¡¯t been too focused on pushing my aura lately. I had just made sure I was always ahead of where the dungeon was expanding. That way I didn¡¯t lose anything. I hadn¡¯t really needed to worry about mana for a little while, so I had slowed down my aura dive into the depths as well. With the evidence of a natural, or possibly unnatural, wonder above me, that would need to change. It looked like a shard was going to be dedicated to expanding my aura as fast as it could again. It wouldn¡¯t be able to expand in all directions at maximum speed, but I could prioritize reaching up the mountain. Honestly, at maximum speed I should be able to reach the top of what I could see above me in a few days. I was looking forward to the view. All around me were other mountains, white and blanketed with snow. From my position I was already almost as high the tallest peaks. From a position a mile or two above me¡­ The view would be breathtaking. The mountains around me were a little strange too though. The peaks were normal enough, but the valleys between were shallow. I was fairly certain they should be deeper. I supposed the valley could be filled with massive amounts of snow. Snow certainly piled up across the peaks and valley areas that I could see. I gauged the depth. Actually I am pretty sure it would compact into a glacier at that point. No¡­ if the valleys were as deep as I thought they should be my entrance tunnel would have hit the snow and ice. Exsan had been responsible for digging out the tunnel and extending the aura into it. I hadn¡¯t paid much attention to the tunnel except to decorate it. Even then I automated it and didn¡¯t pay it very much attention. I examined the stone below where the valley was. Past the Celtic knot-work it was all volcanic stone. Large areas of the bottom was the basalt I was already familiar with, mixed with compacted glassy ash. Random chunks of stone were embedded everywhere as the ash extended upwards. The mountains around me were buried in old volcanic debris. Possibly miles of it. I briefly considered all the geothermal features in my dungeon. It was too much to hope that the volcano was extinct. How powerful had the eruption been, and how long before it blew again? I was interrupted by Exsan. Entrance. It will be ready soon. Well at least he remembered to warn me this time like I asked him. I looked at the giant stone above me again. I would not give great odds on that staying in place during another volcanic eruption. For the first time as a dungeon I felt claustrophobic. I was suddenly aware of the unimaginable weight above me. Oh well, I had other things to do. Reinforcing the giant stone above me so it didn¡¯t suddenly collapse and crash through the earth shattering me into pieces¡­ Stop that. Breathe. Take a moment to appreciate that I can breathe. My avatar disappeared only to reappear in the tunnel Exsan had been making. I only needed a cursory check to see that these tunnels had gone through many many miles of cooled lava too. My calculation ability tried to be helpful by approximating the total length of the various sections of lava. More than twenty miles, split into two sections, out of the tunnels total current length of around thirty five. That is a lot of lava. Right. Art. I like art. Time to distract myself with art. ==Zidaun== ¡°I hate this dungeon,¡± Gurek grumbled. I just shook my head. Sweat dripped down my face and body. I didn¡¯t have the spare energy to talk. Gurek¡¯s individual endurance was far above my own. The only reason I hadn¡¯t needed to bow out before now was my own abilities and a higher than usual Heat Resistance. When picking blaze blossom flowers underwater during Freeze, the water near the flowers could reach almost boiling. A bubble of air and stone was forcibly cooled around us both. Outside of it the air shimmered violently and the stone of the walls had a dull red glow. Cooling that tiny section around us both was taking every bit of concentration I had. It was actually easier to borrow this dungeon¡¯s abilities than any other with my new personal connection to it, but I still had a long way to go. My mana was draining away swiftly, and it had been draining away faster with each room as the temperature spiked again and again. Firi and Inda had already been forced to bow out and leave through the available side doors. Firi¡¯s blessings had helped us all endure the heat better. Without him I had to endure more, but without covering him and Inda I had more magic and concentration to work with. I honestly wasn¡¯t sure if I was better off or not. My throat was parched, but I aborted my automatic reflex to drink. There was no point, our water-skins were long empty. We took another few steps together. The sweat that we left of the ground vaporized behind us as it left my bubble. ¡°Next¡­ ha, room, ha,¡± I gasped as we reached the door. The door opened into an almost identical hellscape. All the surfaces in the room glowed a dull orange and the shimmering of the air was even more intense. Glowing crystals in shades of red and orange were embedded into the walls and stretched from the floor to waist height. They depicted flames and looked real now as the wavering air made them distort and jump. Steps took longer and longer as the heat wrung me dry like a rag. I was starting to get dizzy, my sweat diminishing and feeling tacky. ¡°Done, I¡¯m done.¡± I panted. ¡°Damn, me too then,¡± Gurek said. ¡°My endurance is pretty good, but not this good. I would bake without you.¡± We twisted to the side and step by step we took the path into the side passage. The door shut behind us and the air felt like ice. It was glorious. We each took great heaving gasps trying to cool our bodies down. ¡°I¡¯m¡­ ha¡­ going to¡­ dive into a fountain¡­ ha¡­ and drink til I pop,¡± Gurek panted out between his massive breaths. Obviously he had dropped his endurance skills, and was paying back a portion of the exertion. I just silently nodded. My breathe was slowly steadying, but my throat was dry as paper. A few minutes later we rejoined everyone else. We refilled our water-skins, and took slow sips, even Gurek. We knew how to rehydrate properly, even if it was a struggle not to gulp the water as fast as possible. Slowly our bodies recovered, Firi¡¯s blessings helping our recovery continue with unnatural speed. As we recovered we exchanged our own observations on the trial. They were sparse. Endurance was tedious and difficult, but not particularly interesting. Apart from the fact that the dungeon was testing us at all, but even with my communication with it, I couldn¡¯t hazard a good guess as to why it was doing it. Usually a dungeon would just throw stuff at you inside the dungeon where you had a good chance to die. Why do it relatively safely? I had no answer. After we all recovered fully we trudged down to the next test. Gurek¡¯s curses stained the air blue with their intensity when we discovered it was the exact same test again. Except this time we were each doing it alone. SSD 3.17 - In Remembrance ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡°Bah, don¡¯t say that! You will make the heavens curse us. Then they will laugh and we will weep. I swear, I hate this dungeon already. If I wanted to deal with this kind of heat I would travel the central plains in Burn.¡± Gurek said. ¡°Yep, that¡¯s the attitude. The anger will help push you through.¡± said Inda. She only received a glare and more mumbling in response. With a little more good natured ribbing the party split up into their own separate tests. We did make Gurek go first though, just in case he had thoughts of skipping out entirely. It turned out to be a hot, sweaty, and miserable experience. I made it the farthest because I could manipulate the temperature around me, but Gurek did the get the farthest without any external skills. He was so tired by the end he barely even complained. We cooled ourselves down slowly and drank heavily from the fountains. Even with Firi¡¯s spells helping, we were enervated and resigned ourselves to not doing any more tests today. If it was remotely challenging, physically, we wouldn¡¯t be able to do our best. And just because we didn¡¯t know why the tests were being done didn¡¯t mean they weren¡¯t important. For all we knew there was a minimum level of competence required to enter the rest of the dungeon. We slowly walked back to the building we were staying in, each of us conserving our strength. We slept, each of us taking our turn on watch. When my turn came I slowly walked outside. My eyes stretched up to the look at the stars, where they glittering in an imitation of the outside world. It was strange to see nothing but the stars. Yamash was not looking down in this skyscape. This might be the closest I was to the real sky, ever again. I allowed my perception to keep watch for me even as I gazed at the heaven¡¯s created by a god I now served. My thoughts were uncertain, even to myself. Eventually it was time to sleep again. In the morning I felt a tremble through the aura of the dungeon. The other entrance had connected. ==Caden== I wanted to match the simple elegance of the Celtic knot-work that filled my other entrance tunnel, but I didn¡¯t want to repeat myself and do the same thing all over again. After some consideration, I decided to do an overlapping triangular pattern inspired by Art Deco. I used subtly different shades of blue and green, broken up with copper lines to make the pattern. The entire pattern shifted as one walked along to follow it. First it was dominated with greens and it then slowly shaded back into blues. With the tiny firefly lights I embedded in the clear stone cladding, the shifting light, as I walked through the tunnel, reminded me of a forest or being underwater. If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Hmm. I made a note to include a tunnel going underwater at some point. I doubted it was something that people in this world had ever experienced. I couldn¡¯t know exactly what the conditions were like at the tunnel¡¯s exit until it actually connected, but I started to design statues for it anyway. Art Deco and Art Nouveau were actually two of my favorite art styles, so I knew quite a bit about them. I even had a chance to see a museum exhibit about the Japanese interpretation of both. The mixture of their cultural styles and the clear flowing geometric lines had created some truly beautiful art. I was debating what material to use, though. Some pieces of Art Deco looked best in stone, like the giant Christ statue with its straight geometries. However, I tended to prefer the sweeping curves of Art Nouveau in statues, which usually looked best cast in metal. I had a number of metals, but the only ones I had truly good samples of were copper, bronze, silver, gold, iron, and steel. I was practicing, and making the geometries had actually gotten much easier with my new calculation skill, but the flowing motions were still difficult to capture properly. Especially since slight exaggerations and hyperbolic curves were a part of the art style. I had a decent ability to create lifelike art, since that came straight as intended from my imagination, and I had also recreated a number of pieces from memory. However, I was now finding that my skills with actual artwork were being pushed further as I struggled to use a non-realistic style to make something new. I was interrupted as a notification flashed.
You have gained a new skill! Artist¡¯s Perception II Learning and using art styles you have been exposed to is easier. You remember art you have seen, heard, felt, etc¡­ more clearly.
I had given up on getting any kind of artistic skill, but here one was. I could recognize why that was the case though. For all the art I had created, I hadn¡¯t really been trying to stretch my capabilities. I came up with something, or borrowed it, and implemented it straight from imagination. Now I was trying to actively create something that followed a style. It was an attempt to make something new while following a particular artistic sensibility. And I could feel the difference that the skill made. With the internet and my natural curiosity I had been exposed to prodigious amounts of art. That, in combination with my love of museums and college art history classes, lead images to start piling up in my mind as I thought about the two art styles. My brain was doing more than just pulling up examples, however. The straight rigid and the flowing styles were being deconstructed in combination with my calculation ability. I could understand the geometries that made the art function. Angles that I had never noticed suddenly became the core parts that made a composition work. Learning about art and the finicky details that made it possible did what it always did to me. It made me appreciate it more. How could I not be moved when knowledge that was so technical and practical was combined with the artist¡¯s vision to create something that seemed effortless? Using what I knew now, I experimented. Exsan told me he was ready some time in this process, but I told him I would take care of it later and kept working. I quickly activated the connection, but left a blank wall. I was inspired, the ideas slowly shifted into place as I considered what to create and as I understood my new canvas. And, iteration by iteration, I brought forth something that made me happy. With a thought, my will remade the entrance. The other entrance had been a tribute to the ancient gods and cultures of my world. Art Deco, and Art Nouveau were a celebration of the modern world. They were a celebration of industry, and took joy in the success and prosperity it brought. So my statues should be a reflection of that same spirit. Facing the entrance one would see two statues. On the left side was a stylistic man. His clothes captured the elegant style of the early 1900s, wrought in shining lines of highly polished steel. His face was copper with silver eyes. He had a gentle smile on his face. His hair was the same copper, though it had faint lines of gold to offer contrasting highlights. One hand leaned on a cane, while the other held a single lantern made of dark iron raised above his head. The interior of the lantern blazed with harsh white light. It mirrored and represented the harshness of electric light. The statue on the right was a woman. I had based her off of Rosie the Riveter. While the man had exemplified the grace and elegance of prosperity, the woman was wrought in metal that was burnished to be less shiny. Her skin was steel and her expression was set with resolve. Her eyes stared straight forward. They were made of gold and flashed with intensity. Her clothes were a dark subdued iron and functional. Hints of Art Deco were woven into the slightly straighter and harsher lines. One leg was pushed forward, as she stepped almost aggressively towards the viewer. Her left arm was at her side, but her right was closed into a fist slightly in front of her chest. Between her fingers spilled a golden warm light. She was a beacon of strength and perseverance. What she had gained and found so precious, she would keep. My task completed, I came back to myself. I had been engaging in numerous other tasks with my shards, but the core of my focus had been here. I looked at the statues and I was happy with them. I wasn¡¯t quite sure why I had let myself get so fixated on them. I had a guess, however. They were a monument to the world I had left behind. All the previous art had been fun and an exercise of my imagination, but it usually didn¡¯t mean much to me personally. This, was an homage to all the things I had loved most about my last world. That world had sucked in a lot of ways, but we had conquered the world with the power of our minds. I had always hoped that the in next step would prove wiser and heal the damage we had caused as we rose up to power. I hadn¡¯t really needed to grieve for my old life. Something about how I had been brought and then placed into a dungeon core had removed that necessity. However, now I was saying goodbye. I hadn¡¯t even known that I needed to do so, but I had. I would try to keep that dream alive, however. The dream that my mind and might would be sufficient to make of this world what I thought it ought to be, rather than simply accepting it for what it was. I knew that some of my illusions and beliefs would be broken here, but I hoped for a better world. With a last thought I remade the blank space between the two statues into an open archway. Golden filigree curled and suggested vines around it, matched by actual vines made of green stone. Once more, I was ready for guests to enter. SSD 3.18 - Interlude - Planting a Seed You¡¯re alive. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. -Neil Gaiman ==Sevso== My eyes were fixated on the water of the ocean far below. The waters reflected a long trail of light as sunset neared. Gnaeus was beside me, leaning on his staff, and looked out over the water with me. The roadway here ran right beside the cliffs and the water crashed on the shore far below. Small chunks of ice were cast up on the narrow beach, even as larger ones lurked in the deeper waters and were outlined against the distant horizon. Save for the ice, the ocean was flat and endless. It was so different from the valley with its mountains that had surrounded me my entire life, save for these last few days. The roar of the waves and the wind carried up the cliffs to me. I could smell salt in the air. I turned to Gnaeus. ¡°We are going to cross that?¡± I said. ¡°Eventually yes. We are headed north a little ways first. And we will need to wait until at least mid-Thaw for a captain willing to cross.¡± He pointed down to where the waves were rolling in an ever repeating pattern. ¡°You see where the water is right now?¡± ¡°Yes?¡± I said, confused. He pointed left, to the south, where an inlet carved further into the face of the rock. ¡°See that line most of the way up the cliffs?¡± he said. ¡°Yes.¡± I said. And I did. A dozen feet or so from the top of the cliff rocky shells clung to the cliff in a progression that continued all the way down to where it met the shore. ¡°By the end of Thaw, the ocean will rise to there,¡± He said. ¡°The ocean rises? How? What makes the water rise?¡± I said. I gestured out to the ocean. It was vast beyond comprehension. I looked at the line on the cliffs; it was more than a hundred and fifty feet from where the ocean was now. ¡°Where would the water even come from, or go in the first place?¡± He chuckled. ¡°I remember when I first learned about it. That was from tutors though. It seemed interesting, but not really special. I hadn¡¯t seen the ocean yet though. I couldn¡¯t imagine how immense it really was. I had a similar reaction to yours, back when I first saw the ocean. I knew where the water went, but the magnitude of the change really struck me then¡­¡± He trailed off. ¡°Sorry, sorry. Guess I¡¯m getting old to start reminiscing like that.¡± He pointed to the many feet of snow. ¡°That is where the water goes though. Massive amounts of snow pile up in some places, but that is just a drop in the bucket in the end. No, it is to the far north and south that the real answer lies. Every Freeze massive amounts of water, well¡­ freeze. The poles are the coldest places in the world and ice accumulates there. It gets cold enough the oceans themselves freeze. The ice is lighter so it lifts out of the water, and then more attaches from the bottom. Eventually the ice reaches the bottom of the sea, but new ice continues to form there. So much ice freezes that mountains of ice push up out of the water.¡± Gnaeus pointed down at the water. ¡°The water is actually lower than usual for the end of Freeze, since Thaw is overdue. It might end up delaying us some. Nothing to be done about that now. By this time of year the poles will be massive frozen mountains miles high and a thousand miles across. Enough water to fill a good portion of the ocean.¡± I marveled as I looked at the water below. I tried to imagine entire massive mountains of ice. My mind failed. I couldn¡¯t really understand the scope, it was beyond me. This was my first time ever leaving Allalus and the valley. The shapes of the plants, mostly dormant, and the few animals that were active in Freeze were alien to me, let alone this. And Gnaeus had assured me there was far more I couldn¡¯t see, but it lay buried beneath the omnipresent snow. And now I had reached the ocean for the first time. Our departure from the city had only taken a day after our initial discussion. Gnaeus went to talk to the guildmaster and then arranged all the supplies that were needed. All the supplies were in a plain seeming bag at Gnaeus¡¯ side now. Its only decoration was silver patterns over brown cloth. A bag that was smaller on the outside than its interior. I couldn¡¯t claim to understand how it worked, but Gnaeus said he made it with a spacial mage years before. Now several days later we had finally met the coast. Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. Shurum touched the horizon as the waters burned a molten bronze. Otga was almost directly above Shurum now. Not quite touching yet, but soon enough. Fire and ice met upon the water, light shining across it all. For days now my emotions had been in turmoil. First in confusion and anxiety as I tried to understand what had happened to me. Then there was a natural addition to that anxiety due to Gnaeus. However, he had proven a friendly enough traveling companion, and had shared his knowledge freely as we traveled. And now my emotions were beginning to settle. I had been afraid, but what exactly had I lost? In the best case scenario I might have become one of the slum lords. I would have ruled over a tiny section of the slums in a constant battle for territory. And I would almost certainly have died young. And even if I had jealously guarded my power well enough to grow old¡­ I doubted I would have earned much more than the money I had already been granted. More likely I would have moved up to become a more powerful enforcer and no more, if I was lucky. And when age or injury inevitably saw to my decay, that would have been the end unless I had saved enough to eke out the rest of my life. More likely I would have ended up begging on the same streets I once patrolled, viewed with the disdainful fear of other enforcers who saw in me a future they both expected and feared. And if times had gotten hard enough I might have been forced to become an adventurer. Unprepared, untrained, and without money to equip myself I had less than a one in a hundred chance to survive a year. So what had I been so afraid of? I was healthy. Healthier than anyone I had known before I left the slums. I had money. I had food and no fear of where I would get more. So I had a dungeon as a Master. So far its leash had been light enough. Certainly lighter than anyone I had served in the slums. And a life-debt could only be formed by genuine selflessness. I didn¡¯t understand how a dungeon could be that, but there had been hints Gnaeus knew something. Whatever had happened, as I looked out over the sea I felt gratitude. I would likely have never left the valley if my life had continued on as it had before. I would never have seen this. I wanted to see more like this. For a quiet instant, I just let myself feel my gratitude and the peace of the moment. Then a message from the system interrupted me, and a procession of text was ready for me.
Your class has changed. You are no longer a Street Tough, you have become a Dungeon¡¯s Surveyor. Your level has increased by one. Status Name: Sevso Race: Human Subtype: Male Health: 100% - Perfect Health Status Effects: Life Debt (Permanent) Mana: 50/60 Primary Level: 6 Class: Dungeon¡¯s Surveyor Former Classes: Orphan, Urchin, Pickpocket, Street Tough Ability Points: 9750 (+1900) Class Skills: Explorer¡¯s Map I Dimensional Deposit I Dungeon¡¯s Delight I Inexorable II Titles: Orphaned Survivor II Thief II Muscle I Lucky Fool V Back from the Brink I Trailblazer I
New Class: Dungeon¡¯s Surveyor You are the first of your species to gain this class. As a servant of a dungeon out and about in the world you serve by collecting information, objects, life, and otherwise that your dungeon desires. Gain new levels by exploring, collecting samples, and returning what you have gained to your dungeon. As always, experience can be gained by slaying the monsters and otherwise of the world. Gained new class skills: Explorer¡¯s Map I Gain an innate understanding of your location relative to where your have been and the ability to map out new territories that you explore. Dimensional Deposit I Borrowing the power of a dungeon you gain the ability to store, but not retrieve, samples for your patron. Can store minerals, liquids, as well as sufficiently thick gases. Can store magical materials. Can store seeds and eggs. Can store plant and animal parts that are dead or disconnected from the primary organism. Dungeon¡¯s Delight I You are the first of your species to gain any degree of this skill. Intuitively understand your patron¡¯s desires in relation to your class. (First) Always know the direction of your patron¡­ Error¡­ Ability already gained from Life Debt status effect, status effect permanent ¡­ (First) Gain greater physical capacity via the Inexorable skill Inexorable I Combines lessor skills like: Strength, Brawn, Toughness, Fleet of Foot, Swiftness, etc¡­ into a single skill. Makes your body superior to what it once was. You have lost skills: Toughness and Strength from your Street Tough class have been removed. Dexterous from your Pickpocket class has been removed. Quickness from your Urchin class has been removed. These skills have combined with Inexorable I to raise it Inexorable II.
You have gained a new title: Trailblazer I You are the first of your species to gain the Dungeon¡¯s Surveyor class. You are also the first to gain the Dungeon¡¯s Desire skill, which is contributing to the next level of this title. As an individual trailblazing a new path for your species, go out and secure the future, or fail and become another dead-end. +1000 Ability Points +2% Additive bonus to learning speed of all skills plus an additional +2% additive bonus to any learning bonuses from titles and skills. (The first 2% Additive bonus will be removed if the learning skill is gained.)
I almost fell over as changes swept through my body. For a moment I felt slower and weaker as skills were stripped away from me. And then it reversed, but even more so. My muscles tightened, the power in them strained against my bones. My bones grew stronger and my joints, surrounded by layers of muscle were held securely even as the joints themselves flexed with new springiness. My lungs breathed deeper, and the cold receded. I was not exactly less cold, but it impacted my body less. My vision grew clearer and my hearing deeper. I could feel the wind more sharply as it pushed between layers of clothes with subtle fingers, like a pickpocket that stole away warmth. Everything that I was clarified. My body was simply more. My feet were steady as the stone of the path beneath them, and I knew that even if I slipped I would be able to keep my balance. I could tense and do a handstand if I wanted. So I did, with one hand. The cold stone of the path ground against my palm as I erupted with laughter. It might have been able to cut my skin before, but I was far tougher than I used to be. Upside down and filled with a new euphoria my laughter echoed down over the cliffs as the sun slowly drifted below the horizon, leaving Otga to temporarily rule the sky. Yamash would claim it from them soon enough with the fall of night. SSD 3.19 - Tunnel Vision A standard first exploration dungeon team should have the following components:
  1. A sensor
  2. A healer
  3. A bulwark
  4. Ranged damage or control abilities
  5. At least one man, one woman, and one Adar, as some effects target them differently.
  6. The Adar is also necessary for locating the dungeon, and due to treaties.
  7. A proficient mapper - The Adventurer''s Guild Handbook
==Tarrae== Sitting outside the dungeon for days on end had proven to be an exercise in tedium. Though it had allowed me a chance to work with each member of the party in turn, and as a group, I was more than ready for it to end. We had cleared away the snow from the stone as soon as we arrived, Anaath had pinpointed where the dungeon would emerge, and set up camp. We cleared an area farther away as well. We used the farther, and larger, cleared area for practice. Fortunately I was able to provide heat and light in abundance, but the wind still cut through our clothes like a sword, particularly when anything stronger than a gentle breeze came our way. We had passed the foothills to get here, but a relatively gentle valley slope had raised us up until we were at the foot of the mountains themselves. The view was breathtaking behind us. Rolling hills dropped until the endless flat salt plains. This time of year it was all shades of white. When Thaw came to an end the salt plains would be a vast shallow sea, no more than a foot deep in most places. Fortunately, we hadn¡¯t needed to go up any farther than this. There might be passes through the snow, but even mounted on slogi it would would be almost impossible for my current team to make it through them so deep into Freeze. Maybe in mid-Thaw. Regardless, it hadn¡¯t proven necessary. However, there was still the waiting. And patience was not my best quality. That was probably why I had ended up as an adventurer instead of as a merchant like the rest of my family. Oh well, that was ancient history. At least my parents weren¡¯t disappointed and worried anymore. Well¡­ not as worried. I wasn¡¯t sure anything would stop Mother from worrying. I had survived and leveled up just fine in the end, though. I was even trusted to lead the team out here! Though disentangling myself from them, for a second time in the same morning, had proven difficult after they learned how far I was going. And that it was a new dungeon¡­ well, they weren¡¯t pleased. At least Mother hadn¡¯t been going on about how I needed to get married. Eh, most new dungeons were less dangerous than trying to avoid that topic with Mother anyway. I likely had nothing to worry about. The world chose that moment to shake. The stone nearby shifted as a vibration filled the air and the rocky surface of the mountain became a large flat semicircle. And then nothing happened. ¡°Okay everyone,¡± I said, ¡°time to pack everything up and get ready.¡± Each of us packed up our individual items, as well as helping with the two shared tents. We had unpacked more than we usually would, since we had been here for a few days. Even with that, it only took us minutes to pack. And then we waited. First in eager anticipation, and then as the minutes rolled into hours, we waited with both increasing impatience and less vigilance. By the time the entrance formed out of the blank wall we were all sitting against the stone, our gazes lazily moving to look at the blank wall every so often. And then with surprising suddenness the stone shifted and gave way to gleaming metal. This book''s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience. Two statues appeared. On the right was a woman and on the left a man. Each was larger than life. The gaze of the woman caught my eye. The lines of the statue suggested a fierce determination. She was rougher, but felt more honest than the polished elegance of the man. ¡°I wonder what they are supposed to mean?¡± Norana said. ¡°Eh, what does it matter? Unless it affects us it might as well be blank stone,¡± said Anaath. A characteristic gruffness in his voice. I wasn¡¯t sure why, but Anaath had seemed bitter since shortly after we arrived. It was a strange contrast to how eager he had seemed before. I thought he might just hate waiting. Hopefully, he would cheer up now that we were going to enter soon. ¡°Well, I am interested,¡± she said. ¡°Besides, some historians will likely want to come take a look at them at some point. Every new dungeon that isn¡¯t just an empty cavern with a few monsters attracts some curious people.¡± ¡°Looking at those,¡± Soara said, as he smiled with shining eyes, ¡°this, is more than just a beginner dungeon. Not that that is a terrible surprise after it tunneled through massive amounts of rock to get to us here. I know this a relatively narrow spot in the Lances, but we still have to be a good thirty to forty miles from the other side. And Anaath said it was closer to the other side.¡± I smiled too. ¡°Yeah, hopefully it is exciting, but not too dangerous.¡± I said, ¡°I would hate to start exploring and need to send for a higher leveled team because the place was too much for us.¡± There were murmured agreements, and then we waited a bit longer. Only a few minutes passed, my eyes continuing to examine the statues, before the blank wall between them rippled. In a moment it had faded away, revealing a tunnel that lead upward with a gentle slope. A moment after that a pattern of curving vines and angular leaves grew around the entrance in green stone with golden filigree. The tunnel was filled with a source-less light, and had overlapping bands of stone. It started out in shades of a deep mossy green. The parallel bands reached up from both sides at an angle and stretched overhead before stopping and reversing at sharp acute corners. Overall it created a zigzag pattern overhead that moved forward as far as the eye could see. The whole tunnel disappeared into a single dot far off in the distance, the lines of the tunnel stretching off until they appeared to meet. I didn¡¯t need to create any lights, so we stood and entered cautiously. Norana hefted her shield and lead the way. Behind her was Soara, each of his steps echoing with a heavier thump than you would expect as they rang off the walls. Each thump carried back through the stone to his feet. As the healer, Anaath took the next position, and I followed, a spell held under tight control and ready to be unleashed at the appearance of any enemy. A minute into the walk Soara spoke up. ¡°This area is a safe zone. So environmental hazards only. Haven¡¯t sensed anything so far.¡± I nodded, letting my spell dissipate into nothing. A lance of burning light wouldn¡¯t do much against a pitfall or a pool of water. Another slow minute of plodding and Soara spoke again. ¡°Halt. There is a room up ahead on one side. No sign of anything alive. Pretty sure there is a door that you can use to get in. There is some kind of shaft beneath part of the room. I think I can sense water in the walls too. Something that isn¡¯t stone and is thicker than air anyway.¡± ¡°Okay, slow approach then everyone.¡± I said. I readied a different spell, preparing to partially evaporate any bolts of acid or other substances and hopefully redirect them. ¡°Watch out, something in the stone! Directly ahead, twenty feet out!¡± Soara¡¯s voice rang out loudly in the quiet tunnel. A section of stone flowed upward in a disconcertingly unstonelike manner. It revealed the head of a male human made from grey marble. The stone smoothly parted as more of the man¡¯s body rose up revealing a body clothed in a white shirt with very short sleeves and with pants made of a thick blue cloth. The weave on both types of cloth was very tight, so much so that I couldn¡¯t tell apart individual threads at all. Wait¡­ was that shirt made of some kind of silk? My parents could sell that type of cloth for a fortune. When the man was finally fully revealed (and with bare feet for some reason), he smiled, revealing teeth of perfect white stone, glittering in the light beneath equally shiny blue eyes. He took a step closer to us¡­ And reflexively I fired off the spell in my hand. A burning coruscating ball of light fired from my hand. It hit the center of the stone chest straight on, burning the cloth around it to black ash. The stone man blinked and focused his eyes on me with a raised eyebrow. He brushed away the ashes, showing tiny cracks in the stone beneath. The stone fixed itself before my eyes, restored between one breath and the next. The black ashes faded away and the white threads of the shirt grew back together, repairing the missing section. ¡°Right, don¡¯t engage,¡± I said, after it showed no signs of aggression. The eyes of the man, statue, golem thing turned away from me, looking toward a section of the wall. A handle protruded from that section of the wall. Slowly, with a degree of growing incredulity, I watched as the statue demonstrated how to use a bathroom before stepping into a wall and disappearing. ¡°What the hell was that?¡± I said. ¡°Honestly,¡± Anaath said, his usual roughness overridden by surprise, ¡°I have no idea.¡± Norana repeated the same bewilderment as ourselves, but Soara seemed even more excited than usual. Well¡­ at least there were working bathrooms here. Probably, we still had to make sure it wasn¡¯t a trap. And we did, slowly over the course of the next few minutes, testing the toilet, the water, and the walls. Nothing. Nothing came of us using the bathroom either, though I tried to take the drying cloth and some of the thin linen. Both dissolved into nothingness as I stepped outside the room. Not really a surprise, but I had to try. They both reappeared back in the bathroom like they had never left. As we continued back up the tunnel, the stone rough underfoot, we soon came upon another bathroom. We checked it out carefully, but it proved identical to the first. We did the same at the next one. After that we ignored them. We would check out any bathroom we needed to use in the future, or if Soara detected anything different. Otherwise, it would take us forever to get anywhere. We moved ahead, walking slowly as the tunnel shifted from deep green to shades of turquoise and then back again, over and over. An endless parade of slowly shifting color, an empty tunnel, and equally empty bathrooms passed by. It was hours of this. We slowly climbed a slight incline deeper into the stone of the mountains. Dark must have come outside long ago, but the light of the tunnel never changed. Finally, when I was about to just give up and camp in the tunnel, we saw something different. The end of the tunnel was coming closer. What exactly lay beyond was impossible to tell, it looked almost like a black wall, though faint hints of some light or color suggested a large dark and open space. Finally, we arrived, taking our first steps into a room filled with starry darkness. SSD 3.20 - Seeing the Stars ¡°Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.¡± ¡ª ==Tarrae== A path, gently lit by lights embedded into columns of crystal, greeted us as we entered the cavern. ¡°It¡¯s beautiful,¡± said Norana. ¡°It is,¡± I said. ¡°Any signs of anything, Soara?¡± ¡°Nothing so far, footing is completely solid up to the edge of my range. Still a safe zone. Named the ¡®Starlight Grotto.¡± Reassured, we paused just outside the entrance. We each appreciated the beauty of the gigantic dungeon room in our own way. For my own sake, I breathed in the starlight that shone from overhead. I could feel the various colors as they mingled together. It wasn¡¯t quite perfect. Besides the absent Yamash, there were areas of light that felt less complete than the true stars. I doubted anyone who wasn¡¯t a light mage would notice. Still, I admired the subtle ways the lights in each column blended together to create a cohesive whole before fading into the starry gloom. It was a significant display of artistry. I had no doubt my own former instructors would love to study how the effects were created. The light-show captured my attention for a time, but eventually my own trained responses cataloged the various statues, the road, and the building which glowed with a more mundane light. It was a large two-story building, the top floor smaller than the bottom, which waited for us beside the road. Warm light spilled out into the eternal night. ¡°Well, guess we should go check out the rather obvious building ahead,¡± I said. A few nods and murmured agreements followed as we started to get moving again. It took us only moments to arrive at the wooden door of the building. A piece of paper was pinned to it. I took it off and read it:
Welcome fellow explorers, Night arrived before you did, so we went to grab some sleep. A building matching this one is on the opposite side of the cavern. One of us will be on watch if you have need of emergency help. All of us, including our healer, are in good shape. We have checked out our own building, and this one, in our exploration of the cavern, and both have proven to be safe. We will be stopping by when we have finished taking our rest. We assume you will likely need rest yourselves after a long day of walking. This dungeon has a number of peculiarities which we will be happy to share with you. It isn¡¯t very often that we get to explore with another team. Hope to talk to you soon, Zidaun, Inda, Firi, and Gurek
¡°Well¡­ that is rather nice of them.¡± I said. ¡°Is there a protocol in place for this?¡± Anaath said. ¡°No,¡± I said, ¡°like the note says, we don¡¯t explore with other teams often. At least not doing an initial exploration. And they are from another country entirely. Not like dungeons pop up on the borders everyday.¡± ¡°It is rather exciting, isn¡¯t it?¡± Soara said. ¡°Yep,¡± I sighed, ¡°but we do have protocol for searching buildings. It was nice of them to tell us they checked it out, but we need to verify that it is safe too. After that, we can sleep.¡± ¡°Remind me again,¡± Norana said,¡± why I wanted to go explore new dungeons?¡± Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit. ¡°Damned if I know,¡± Anaath muttered. We proceeded into the building carefully. Soara insured the building¡¯s general integrity, Anaath checked for poisons, I checked for magic, and Norana kept guard. Eventually we verified that the building was both safe and could not be looted. I was especially sad about not being able to loot the building. The cloth in the rooms was stunning. The weave and color were both exceptional. It was worth so much. If the dungeon gave out this kind of cloth¡­ it would change the balance of trade. The best silks came from across the ocean. Regardless, we each prepared to get some sleep. The beds were going to be a sinfully wonderful luxury after camping in tents for days on end. As leader, I took first watch. It wasn¡¯t the worst watch, usually, but with all of us already tired I took on the extra responsibility. The night was quiet. There was no wind in this cave, just the soft sound of my teammates¡¯ snoring. When my watch ended I fell into bed and slept without dreams. ==Zidaun== After the new dungeon entrance connected, we went to take a look at the opened tunnel. Once it finally opened anyway, we had to wait for some time before it actually did. It proved to be almost identical to the one we had entered through. There were a few small differences. The slope of the tunnel was gentler than the tunnel that we had entered through. The tunnel was also decorated with a zigzagging pattern in blues and greens. The bathrooms were the same. We stared into the tunnel, it faded into a single point some indeterminate distance away. With nothing else to see, we decided to take more tests. With the amount of distance the tunnel needed to cross to get to the other side of the Lances, the other team was at least hours away. The next test proved easy enough for me, but the others took a very long time. It was a test of traps. I could see through the stone, though. When I reached the end of the test Caden was waiting for me. I taught him words as best as I could. Some things were nonsensical though, and I couldn¡¯t provide an answer. What did a circle with parts of it turning dark and light again even mean? Other things were easy enough to tell. Trees of various types appeared in front of me made of stone. Other types of plants, insects, plate mice and rats, were also shown. Gems, cloth, gold, and all the other various items that had been displayed in the sacrificial room were shown to be named. I was able to name Shurum and Otga for him after he created a painting of them on the wall. Did the gods have other names in other languages? Or maybe the names changed with time... Then we started to get into the values of the types of coins. It was a somewhat surreal experience to have mountains of coins of various types appear before me so I could demonstrate counting out the various types. Eventually I believe that Caden understood all the various values, however. He seemed surprised that the dungeon gold was worth so much more than regular gold. Maybe that used to be different, many thousands of years ago? I couldn¡¯t imagine why, it was absolutely invaluable for various professions. We were in the middle of further naming when Caden rose and dismissed me. I soon found out why. A few minutes after I left, Gurek came striding out. The tests this time hadn¡¯t been so physically demanding, but the stress of trying to avoid the traps was enough to make Gurek complain. I was fairly sure he would have found something to complain about regardless, however. It wasn¡¯t too much longer before the others joined us. After waiting hours for the new tunnel to open up, and taking the test, it was almost night. Only one test entrance remained. After we did that tomorrow, we should be able to enter the dungeon. ==Caden== It had been amusing watching this new team of people enter. The bolt of concentrated light and heat that had struck my statue was also very informative. I wasn¡¯t really sure how it compared to a standard physical attack, but the heat had managed to crack the stone on the statue. I assumed that meant it was reasonably powerful. There was also some kind of weird magic coming from one of them. It would echo out and then return, over and over with each footstep they took. I wasn¡¯t entirely sure, but I figured it was some form of extrasensory perception. And the composition of the party was interesting. It was another two men, a woman, and another Adar. This Adar was rather different. Rougher and thorny. He also couldn¡¯t see me. I waited for them in the tunnel in all my naked glory. Despite my best efforts, I still hadn¡¯t figured out a way to have clothes for my avatar. Oh well. You win some, you lose some. The similar party composition made me wonder if there was some kind of standardization for this kind of thing. It could be coincidence, but it seemed unlikely. A shard continued to watch them the entire time they proceeded through the tunnel. As expected, it was quite boring, but I watched just in case. Watching Zidaun and the others proved to be more interesting. Zidaun breezed past the various traps, but since I watched him using my own senses, that was hardly surprising. The others struggled quite a bit more. The one named Gurek was actually pretty good at spotting traps, but even he started falling into them about halfway through the long tunnel. In the mean time I took the time to communicate with Zidaun. For the moment I simply wanted to widen my vocabulary. There were any number of things that I needed to know, but I didn¡¯t even have the basics of how to ask a question. Well, not unless you counted me pointing at various objects I sculpted or made. Zidaun hadn¡¯t been able to provide me with the word for moon. Of course, I was on an alien world. There was no guarantee that there was a moon. Or if they had one or more moons they might be tiny things like the moons of Mars. Earth having such a large natural satellite was rather abnormal, after all. Zidaun was able to tell me what the name of the sun and the other red ring next to it in the sky were though, Shurum and Otga. At least I had some words to describe trees as well as other flora and fauna. I was able to get Zidaun to show me the value of various coins with some effort. It took quite a bit of hand waving to make him understand that I wanted to know how much silver was worth relative to gold, and then to learn the other values. I was surprised to learn that the gold which had mana infused into it was worth more. And not just a little. It was worth ten times a normal piece of gold. The exchange values after that were not terribly surprising. Gold was more valuable than silver, then copper, and finally iron. There might be other types of coinage too, but none had been sacrificed to me yet. I was forced to send him on his way as Gurek was finishing up. I wasn¡¯t actually sure if Zidaun had told the others about me. I also had no way to ask. They went off to sleep and I resumed my normal activities. Various creatures evolved and fought against one another. I shaped caverns and populated them with ruins; monsters were placed to breed and take over their new environments. Soon the dungeon would be opening for the first time, and I was excited to see it. I doubted anything I had now would be a real challenge, but I would have stronger monsters soon enough. The new party of adventurers came up and read the note that had been pasted on their door then went to sleep shortly after. I had already copied the contents of the note so I could ask about the words later. Unfortunately, I suspected that many of them would be difficult to explain. Night was well underway when I cleared away the snow from my aura above. My avatar went to take a look at the night. Maybe I would be able to see if there were any moons. No moons caught my attention, instead something else did. To the south the sky was completely filled. A vast galaxy with four arms spun in the sky in shades of red and blue. The light was at least as bright as a full moonlit night back home. I still wasn¡¯t sure if this world had a moon, but I wasn¡¯t sure that they needed one. SSD 3.21 - Meetings ¡°Map out your future ¨C but do it in pencil¡± -Jon Bon Jovi ==POV: Zidaun== We started our morning early today. Breakfast was not exactly hurried, but we didn¡¯t take the time to talk and linger either. We were not terribly worried about the other party waking up and going anywhere. We had already told them we were going to show up, plus they had almost certainly gone to sleep later than we had. There was a possibility that the other party had slept in the tunnels, but if that was the case we could still expect them to take some time to arrive, or stop and wait after they read the note. Still, it would be rude to keep them waiting. So we proceeded with moderate hurry. The trip through the dim cavern was as uneventful as ever. We followed the curvature of the road toward the middle and then changed direction to proceed on the mirroring pathway. Soon enough we were close to the other building. I felt a magic pulsing out of it before I could see the people inside. A man, lanky and with a smile, came out to greet us. I could feel the others rapidly dressing inside. Something else struck me as well. Inside, in their packs, were traces of old journeys. I was fairly certain there a living spider that had crawled out into one of the corners of a room. From faint mana signatures, there might be other insects in their gear. I started to open my mouth, but immediately stopped. Telling them of their failure to completely sterilize their gear properly would only hurt the dungeon. It would get access to some forms of life earlier than expected. I said nothing, merely noting that this team was likely new to their job. ¡°Hello, I am Soara, we will be happy to talk with you in a few moments. Don¡¯t worry about introducing yourselves just yet. I am sure the others will want to know who you are.¡± He broke away from his formal speech as he grinned and gestured to the cavern. ¡°This is all rather exciting, isn¡¯t it.¡± I smiled back at him, ¡°It is.¡± I heard Gurek mumble behind me. ¡°Wonder how excited he will be after having to endure that damnable heat¡­ twice.¡± Inda elbowed him, getting a mutinous glare and muttered conciliation in return. It only took a few minutes before the rest of Soara¡¯s party joined us. All three of the humans bore the swarthy skin common to Tsary and the desert regions to the south. The other Adar was from the desert as well, his brown yellow markings and sweptback thorny green hair unmistakable. Soara smiled, his face wrinkling, as the last of his group came outside. Their hair, the Adar aside, showed a faint messiness indicative of their hurried rise. ¡°At last,¡± Soara said, ¡°my excellent companions grace us all with their presence. Allow me to do the honor of presenting them, and elucidating my own humble presence.¡± He winked at us and bowed exaggeratedly. ¡°I am, as I said before, Soara, the sensor of the group, with some ability in enemy control.¡± He gestured to his side toward the woman standing there. She was of average height, but in thick leather armor that still failed to hide the density of the muscles on her frame. A short hammer hung at her belt and a shield was slung on her back. ¡°Next, as is only proper, the lovely lady of our group.¡± ¡°Ha,¡± she interrupted, ¡°I¡¯m no lady. Don¡¯t go giving them the wrong idea.¡± ¡°Ah, of course, my mistake.¡± Soara said with his omnipresent grin. ¡°However, I note that even you can¡¯t dispute your loveliness, Norana.¡± She rolled her eyes at him, not bothering to respond to him, but she smiled at us. ¡°It is lovely to meet you all.¡± ¡°Norana is our bulwark. And, may I say,¡± His eyebrows waggled, ¡°I have never had the chance to be behind so lovely a guard.¡± He danced out of the way as Norana tried to stomp on his foot. ¡°Next, before his services are needed, let me introduce our ever cheerful healer, Anaath.¡± Anaath simply glowered at him, his face a dour mask. He didn¡¯t bother to say anything, only giving a terse nod towards our group. He was clad in loose tan robes, though hints of leather armor poked out beneath it. ¡°And, lastly, our indomitable leader and ranged specialist, Tarrae.¡± Tarrae was dressed in robes as well, though his were a pale off white with green designs stitched at the bottoms and along the hems. The designs were vaguely reminiscent of plant-life. He was slightly taller than average. His muscles were lean and he wore only the lightest armor. This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience. He stepped forward slightly. ¡°Thank you, Soara, for that¡­ colorful introduction. If you would be so kind as to introduce yourselves?¡± I stepped forward. ¡°Of course, it would be my pleasure. I don¡¯t think I could give quite such an unusual introduction.¡± ¡°You better damn well not,¡± Inda grumbled behind me. ¡°Ha, what are you worried about,¡± Gurek whispered, ¡°Firi is the one he would swoon over.¡± I could feel the heat from Firi¡¯s face, radiating into the air. It may have made my smile a little larger. ¡°I am Zidaun, leader of the group, and like you,¡± I nodded to Soara, ¡°a sensor with other abilities mixed in.¡± I pointed toward Inda. ¡°Apparently, I should also introduce my female companion after myself. This is Inda, a control and ranged specialist.¡± I gestured toward Gurek next. ¡°This is Gurek, who is a bulwark with some sensory abilities mixed in.¡± I finally gestured toward Firi. ¡°And this is Firi, he is primarily a healer, but he can also act as a bulwark at need.¡± Then I turned toward Anaath and gave a small bow. ¡°Allow me to offer an additional greeting to you. Be welcome in embrace of my home, nephew. May it offer you sanctuary.¡± He responded in turn, with a slightly deeper bow. ¡°May fortune favor you and our people, uncle.¡± ¡°Wait,¡± Gurek said, ¡°you¡¯re his uncle?¡± ¡°Not in any literal sense,¡± I said. ¡°If I may ask,¡± Soara said, ¡°where are you from? I don¡¯t recognize your markings.¡± He gestured toward Anaath, ¡°I can tell he is from the Sunken Citadel, and I know what the Adar from Blaze Blossom Swamp look like. You have some similarities, but not the shaggy bark or thorns, plus I don¡¯t think they have that kind of armor¡­¡± I smiled and replied. ¡°You are correct, after a fashion. I was from the Blaze Blossom Swamp, but it would be more accurate now to say that I am from here. This dungeon is one of our sacred places. I was the first here and that tied me to it. I expect you will see plenty of Adar with markings like me in the future.¡± Soara¡¯s grin grew wider with my reply. ¡°Fascinating,¡± he said. ¡°Now, why-¡± Tarrae coughed loudly. ¡°Before you interrogate them, Soara, perhaps we should all go inside and sit down?¡± Soara¡¯s face flashed briefly with embarrassment, though it swiftly ended. His exuberance returning to the fore almost immediately. ¡°Of course Tarrae. How inconsiderate of me.¡± He slapped his forehead with a dramatic motion. ¡°What a fool I was, leaving these fine people outside in the¡­¡± He paused and looked around at the omnipresent night motionless on the cavern ceiling above us. ¡°Well¡­ out in darkness anyway, even if I cannot strictly say it is outside.¡± He gestured toward the door. ¡°There is, if I recall correctly, a large sitting room on the ground floor. Please follow us inside.¡± Having already become familiar with our own building and, if briefly, exploring this one, navigating was not difficult. The building was an inverted copy of our own. We soon found ourselves seated on comfortable padded wooden chairs. Small tables sat in various corners and between some chairs, while the center of the room was bare and held a large plush rug. The wooden beams of the ceiling were visible and an almost opaque, but very thin, marble chandelier held chunks of mana crystal. The light shown through the marble with a muted splendor. The room was still divided between the various teams, with us on one side and them on the other. Once we had each settled down, I began. ¡°So, we promised to share a bit about the dungeon.¡± ==POV: Caden== The meeting between the two different groups had proven uneventful. I was glad they weren¡¯t trying to kill each other, but with Zidaun and his party so close to entering my actual dungeon, I was growing impatient. I was much more excited that I finally recognized another type of creature. I had never though I would be so happy to see a spider. The spider was a very efficient form, and since they appeared anywhere on this planet, I was surprised I hadn¡¯t see anywhere in the entire sewer. Different selection pressures maybe? Honestly, it was hard to account for how magic would change everything. I wanted to just take all the insects and spider right away, but I only managed to do it when I promised myself that I would give a genuinely good reward to this team later to compensate them. A shard of attention stayed focused on all of them, but most of myself was busy elsewhere. Most of the environments I had created were something that I could imagine being on Earth, if more dramatic than nature usually was. My forest was the exception, but that had been carefully crafted with that effect. Regardless, the seeds and plants I had absorbed from within the sewer and on the surface outside it, would mostly blend in on Earth just fine. There were two small flowering plants that had leaves of unusual colors and very vibrant flowers, but nothing so exceptional that t felt alien. That was not the case with the plants I had absorbed from the adventurer¡¯s offerings. One tree was short with a thick base surrounded with a layer of green leaves. It then tapered in and up until the crown. The crown¡¯s branches went out and then back in, meeting at the top. The fruit it produced were bright red and varied from the size of a man¡¯s fist to the size of their head. Considering the tree was only four or five feet tall, the fruit seemed oddly over-sized. The nuts they had given me were from what I could only call a blue leaved sunflower. Large sky blue leaves rose up to frame a yellow flower. In the middle of the flower it produced thin shelled seeds. Zidaun and the others ate the seeds whole, roasted and salted. I considered it fortunate that the entire handful they gave me had been enough to fully recreate the plant. I was sure that cooking the seeds had damaged the DNA. All of the plants were like that. Exceptionally vivid flowers, odd structures, and strange leaf colors were common amongst each of them. I was looking forward to seeing what the other team would give me. Fortunately enough, though the teams did sit and talk for several hours, occasionally bringing out a map which the new team copied, they soon left. Zidaun and his group showed them the arc of Iridescent Murkwood beside the road as they headed toward my dungeon entrance. The new team took samples, and I decided to switch how harvesting from the trees would be allowed. For now, a small portion of root, twig, and several leaves could be removed each day. The two groups moved on until the new group had received the identification tags I had created. Each one¡¯s mana signature was collected and then their information was bound into the crystal tag. From their, Zidaun and group pointed to each trial they had undertaken, while the new people took notes. It didn¡¯t take much thought to know they were pointing out the location of each trial and what it was. That didn¡¯t really bother me though. I wasn¡¯t sure how much advanced knowledge would actually help them complete each one. They pointed at the magic sensitivity trial, which they had yet to take, and shrugged. Then they showed them what I was excited about. My sacrifice room. Ultimately I gained a few new things. Some types of wood, seeds and fruit, a few types of meat, and a new type of fiber. I was pretty sure it was some type of wool, and the faint traces of DNA in it matched up with one of the meats they provided. I gave them full credit for the cloth sample anyway. They also gave up a few of the heat producing stones. There was the matter of the few insects that had entered with them and their packs. I wasn¡¯t sure how to give them credit for those. I would figure that out later. For now I went off to grow the new plants; it was time to compare them to other ones I had grown. ==POV: Zidaun== Carefully going over the details of the dungeon we had mapped out so far had taken a fair amount of time. Each of us had our notes and had provided commentary as we went along. Like I had suspected, they were a new first exploration team. And someone had failed to tell them they were supposed to avoid contaminating the new dungeon before it was mapped. Honestly, with a dungeon at this level of development, it didn¡¯t matter Then a quick tour of the road, dungeon entrance, and the buildings had given them the rest of the context they might need. They had told us they still needed to check out the room and everything else for themselves, however. It was the expected outcome, but our help should still save them tons of time. They also promised to share anything they found that we had missed. After they finished with their offerings to the dungeon, we split ways. We left and entered the last trial. It proved anticlimactic. Arranged in a row in the testing chamber were ten identical seeming blocks of copper. Inside, I could sense mana crystal. Caden showed up as a stone statue and pointed to the mana crystal that was practically blazing with mana. He put it on the waiting pedestal and the door to the next room opened. I wasn¡¯t sure if the others could sense the mana from this distance, but I explained what the test was about anyway. Then I went through and found almost all of the test laughably easy. I was borrowing the dungeon¡¯s own abilities, so that was hardly surprising. However, even with that, I failed to be able to discern which block had more mana in it after many rooms. The last few rooms the mana in the blocks had become increasingly minuscule. I could sense another room on the other side of the door, with even more blocks waiting if I managed to get through this room. Though I was borrowing from the dungeon, I was obviously unable to access the full depth of its capabilities. Finally, I placed a block on the pedestal. It was the wrong one, so I left. The others were already waiting for me. It was only mid-afternoon, and the day had not proven particularly tiring. Together we made a quick decision. It was time to enter the dungeon. End of Arc 3 SSD 4.0 - Arc 4 – Into the Dungeon ¡°Humans are possessed, to some degree, with the power of foresight. Yet we so often learn things the hard way, through disaster.¡± -David Grinspoon ¡°I know of few human nations that do not have arrangements of the Adar. That we are one of them is a disgrace. The Adar have little use for material wealth, and their agreements are onerous only to those that would not enforce them. Our nation then, courts disaster, not out of material concerns, but out of pride.¡± - From a public letter found multiple locations in a ruined city Arc 4 ¨C Into the Dungeon Scholars argue over the true purpose of dungeons. This is hardly surprising, scholars will argue almost anything. However, the true danger of dungeons is rarely disputed. The dungeon break. By definition, a dungeon break is characterized by a mass exodus of monsters from a dungeon into the outside world. The average layperson may consider this as the only factor. It is not. A dungeon break has several other characteristics: First, a dungeon¡¯s monsters are altered on a fundamental level. To understand this we should ask a fundamental question. Why don¡¯t dungeons send monsters out of them all the time? Properly utilized this might be an excellent strategy. The most simple answer, as far as has been determined, is that they cannot. Monsters have large amounts of mana in them by virtue of their growth inside a dungeon. This mana alters them and makes them more powerful, but it also almost always makes them unsuited to live outside the dungeon. Rarely, monsters do wander out of dungeons and survive. And, should a suitable breeding pair escape within a reasonable time frame, or a monster with a more unusual, but feasible, method of reproduction escape and survive, they may spread to the surrounding environment. The stronger the monster, the less likely it is to survive. During a dungeon break, the monsters are stabilized in some fashion. It is not single pairings which escape a dungeon, but thousands of varied monsters that spread out into the surrounding environment. Not only does this introduce new threats into the surroundings, but the monsters push existing animals and monsters out of their habitats, precipitating a mass migration. For a short time the monsters continue to breed as rapidly as they would have in their old dungeon environment, compounding the problem. And this also leads us to the next characteristic of a dungeon break. The author''s narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Second, the dungeon monsters continue to prioritize humans as prey. For several years after their escape dungeon monsters continue to attempt to kill any humans that they sense. This has a notable exception, pregnant females will wait until they have given birth before attacking, and juveniles will likewise wait until they are fully grown. An ideal scenario for a dungeon break, if such a thing can be said to occur, is as far away from humans as it is possible to get. This mitigates both the danger of the beasts displaced by a dungeon, as well as from the new monsters. If, however, a city is nearby, it will almost always end in disaster. The beast wave may or may not prove to be a disaster for the city, but it will disrupt travel around the city at the least, and any city which is unable to protect their croplands should expect them to be utterly consumed and trampled. After that come the monsters themselves. If any monsters from the dungeon break finds a human city, they will all converge on it. The method they use to communicate is unknown, but it is effective. It is suspected that they are still connected to the dungeon in some way. And this is because of the next trait. Third, dungeon¡¯s continue to produce monsters and send them out once a dungeon break has begun. And, even if the monster¡¯s outside have been slain to the last, the new monsters that emerge from the dungeon will still attempt to attack the largest concentration of humans that they have found. This makes a dungeon break an ongoing disaster, only ended by a few circumstances. Fourth, a dungeon break is ended in a few ways. First, and least preferred, is for a dungeon break to end on its own. In this case the area around the dungeon entrance must become completely saturated with monsters from the dungeon. For as long as something is continuing to reduce the population, whether that be powerful existing monsters in the area, harsh environmental factors, etc¡­ the monsters will continue to be produced. It is widely believed that this may be a deliberate choice by Yamash to repopulate the world in case of cataclysm. Numerous disasters have befallen the world, yet monsters, animals, and plants continue to thrive. And has been noted in other works, this is facilitated by the ability of monsters to adapt into normal animals and plants. The dungeon break will also not end until no humans exist within several hundred to thousands of miles of the dungeon. The more powerful the dungeon, the wider the radius required. For this to happen any cities and settlements within must be empty, whether that be by evacuation, or, more likely, eradication. If a dungeon break ends in this fashion the dungeon will collapse. It will eventually reemerge, though it may appear anywhere in the world. The timing is equally uncertain. Many dungeons, when they reemerge, are from eras that are no longer known. This makes dungeons essential for reacquiring knowledge of previous civilizations. The other way for a dungeon break to end, is for a group of adventurers to successfully delve into the dungeon and make it all the way to the end of the dungeon. However, while this will prevent the dungeon from sending out any new monsters, it does not eliminate any monsters that have already exited the dungeon. However, those monsters that have already emerged to stop prioritizing humans and begin to act like wild monsters. This presents its own problems, as the surrounding biomes are forced to adapt to new monsters for the long term, as are those where displaced animals and monsters now attempt to integrate. The most reasonable question then becomes, how do we prevent dungeon breaks. The simplest is ensuring that all dungeons are delved thoroughly and regularly by parties of adventurers. A dungeon that is delved this way will almost never erupt into a dungeon break. The Adar are also capable of both reducing the odds of a dungeon break, and telling what needs to be done to prevent one when it is eminent in the rare case where delving it is not enough. This alone would be sufficient for human nations to treat with the Adar. However, the fact that the Adar sent to humanity are able to detect when a dungeon is birthed or reemerging is invaluable. The dungeon break of a newly birthed dungeon is at least a minor disaster. The dungeon breaks of reemerging dungeons have destroyed nations. - From the Introduction of ¡°Dungeon Breaks: A Treatise on Known and Suspected Cases¡± SSD 4.01 - Plate-Rodents of Unusual Size ¡°Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.¡± ¡°¡®Stuff your eyes with wonder,¡¯ he said, ¡®live as if you''d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It''s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.¡¯¡± ==POV: Zidaun==
¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. ¡°
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¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° SSD 4.02 - Training Like a Boss ¡°We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.¡± -Don DeLillo ==POV: Zidaun== Gurek turned the handle and pulled the door open. Immediately a blur jumped in and attacked. I saw it coming in my aura. ¡°Watch-¡± The plate-mouse scratched ineffectually against his legs, not penetrating the barrier in the least. A moment later it dissolved as he kicked it in the head. ¡°out¡­ Sorry it was out of range at first.¡± ¡°Eh,¡± Gurek grunted, ¡°to be expected.¡± ¡°If the dungeon was really trying to do damage,¡± Firi frowned, ¡°I would have expected a sneak attack with something stronger. It was a single level one monster. More evidence for this area being structured to train.¡± ¡°Hmm,¡± Inda said, ¡°Tempted to say we should leave this one out of our report to properly train newbies. I just know someone would end up dying to something stupid though.¡± ¡°Yeah,¡± I said somberly, ¡°seen enough people die already.¡± Or come across their bodies later¡­ Firi smiled sadly. ¡°Hey,¡± he said, ¡°if the next section of the dungeon doesn¡¯t jump in difficultly too much, this will be a great place for beginners. Maybe there won¡¯t be so many deaths due to people being unprepared.¡± ¡°Maybe,¡± I said. I hoped so. Asmund was a city of a million people. There were a lot of adventurers guilds in it. The one I stayed at was the main one, due to my job. Most people there were better prepared than average. I had still seen too many people leave and never come back. I shook myself. ¡°That would be nice, but for now we have a job to do.¡± Gurek nodded, both weapons in hand again. He used his foot to push the door the rest of the way open. The keep¡¯s courtyard lay in front of us. In the middle was a new insect. A quick inspect revealed what it was.
Monstrous Moss Groomer Level 5
The new insect monster was two feet long, grey, and had an enlarged pair of mandibles. The mandibles had sharp edges that pushed past each other like a pair of shears. So far the monster was staying put. Likely they wouldn¡¯t engage until we reached a certain distance, or we engaged. ¡°Right,¡± I said, ¡°level five, shouldn¡¯t be any danger to us. How should we proceed?¡± ¡°No boss designation, I assume,¡± said Inda. ¡°Yeah, though I would call it a mini-boss,¡± I said. ¡°It is visible, not attacking even though it can see us, also has a large open space for an arena. We could just kill it, or I could grab it, but...¡± ¡°Then we wouldn¡¯t be able to give a proper report,¡± Gurek grunted. ¡°And we have specialists coming after us, who should handle getting the report, but there is the chance that someone would be hurt without the information. Fine, fine, I¡¯ll let the stupid thing try to attack me while we observe.¡± I reached out a hand and put it on his shoulder. ¡°Thanks, Gurek, we appreciate it.¡± The author''s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. ¡°Bah, this is what they pay us for, stop getting sentimental. It¡¯s only level five anyway, probably won¡¯t even be able to scratch me.¡± We stepped forward, Gurek still in the lead. Stepping into the courtyard, I could see a closed portcullis in the middle of one of the walls. Other walls had closed doors. All of them had a crystal circle on them; they were all lit up red. Looks like we wouldn¡¯t make any legitimate progress until we killed the mini-boss. Various rubble lay at the edges of the courtyard where it had fallen from crumbling stonework. One of the other towers ended in a broken crag from where it had been sheared away. The stones of the courtyard were encrusted with moss in the shadowy corners. Pebbles, tiny fragments of the rubble, crunched underfoot as we moved. We were still a good fifty feet from the groomer when it charged towards Gurek. It reached him quickly, and it reached forward with its mandibles, trying to pincer his leg. He hit the outside of the mandibles away with the flat of his short sword. A faint cracking sound and an intensification of the mana glow on a small spot of the mandible showed a small injury. Pushed back by the blow, the groomer¡¯s charge staggered off to the right side. Gurek followed it as we rotated behind him, keeping him between the monster and us. It turned quickly towards Gurek again, its mandibles twitching together. It charged once again, but this time as it got close it jumped up, its carapace opening up to reveal fluttering wings, and its mandibles spread wide. With a quick sidestep Gurek leaned down and brought both blades up. The flat edges of both pushed right below the monster¡¯s head, pushing it back and flipping it upside down as it slammed into its back. The carapace pushed open on one side, quickly turning it right side up again. It charged again. The next few minutes were more of the same. Finally, as it was pushed back once more, I grabbed it with stone. ¡°I think that is enough for tactics,¡± I said. ¡°Looks like it really only has two. Charge, or charge and jump.¡± ¡°Still good to know,¡± Firi said. ¡°That jump could catch someone off guard.¡± I looked behind us. The door to the tower was still open. ¡°Okay,¡± I said, ¡°this absolutely has to be deliberate. No way the door wouldn¡¯t have closed otherwise. People are supposed to be able to retreat if this fight is too much for them.¡± I checked on the stone holding the mini-boss. It was holding firm. It continued to try and thrash, but it couldn¡¯t move much. Only its mandibles, which were clacking against each other madly, showed its impotent fury. ¡°Gurek, up for some testing?¡± He sighed, ¡°Sure, why not.¡± He reached his arm down until the mandibles locked around it. The mandibles tensed for a moment before they relaxed open a bit. He pulled his arm back out. ¡°Looks like it cannot keep up pressure on its mandibles for very long,¡± he said. Gurek tensed his arm a bit. ¡°Some damage made it through, nothing serious, I could delay it for hours. We good to kill this thing?¡± I looked at the others, and with no objections raised, I nodded. ¡°Go ahead.¡± His sword flashed out and pierced the head of the mini-boss, which promptly faded away. The portcullis jerked and started to rise with a clanking noise. Simultaneously, the lights on the doors turned green. A small chest appeared beside the entryway to the portcullis. When nothing else happened, Gurek spoke. ¡°Going to let the damage through, patch me up after we see the damage big guy.¡± Gurek raised his arm and his barriers faded away. A thin line of red appeared on his arm, as though a dagger had just barely cut the flesh. Firi reached out and tapped the line with a finger. A faint line of gold appeared in its place, which faded away, leaving intact flesh. ¡°Not too bad. If I had kept my skill up it probably would have gone away on its own in a few minutes,¡± Gurek said. ¡°Someone with a hard leather shield should be able to deal with this. Even better if it has some iron or steel reinforcement.¡± I started making notes, detailing the encounter. ¡°Don¡¯t think it would go through bone,¡± I said, ¡°but it would do some nasty things to most people¡¯s flesh if they are low level.¡± It was nice to have Gurek be able to do some testing with these low level monsters. He had a really pretentious class name, Wanderer of Suspended Remittance, but it was very effective. He could take a lethal blow, or much less in this case, and then suspend the damage to be dealt with later. The more intense the injury, the harder it was to hold off. Still, he didn¡¯t need to let it all through at once. He could let the damage through a bit at a time so it could be healed. It wasn¡¯t just strictly damage either. He could hold off exhaustion, poison, and other effects. Plus, his ability negated a certain amount of minor damage outright. It made him a fantastic bulwark for dealing with the unknown. I compared notes with the others. ¡°On the next thing¡­ the loot,¡± I said. ¡°Gurek, go ahead and do the honors once I see if it¡¯s safe.¡± Gurek smiled. I knew he always enjoyed seeing the loot, even if it was minor. As we got closer to the chest I could sense what was inside. ¡°No traps, go ahead.¡± Gurek rubbed his hands as he knelt in front of the small chest. He opened it to reveal a single silver piece. ¡°Not much for us,¡± he said with a smile, ¡°but adventurers at the level this boss was meant for would be thrilled.¡± He scooped up the silver piece and put it away as I noted down the reward. I gestured toward the other doors. ¡°Wish we had time to do everything here. Another time I guess.¡± We headed forward through the open tunnel leading out of the keep; Gurek was in the lead again. Once we reached end we could see the town. The town was in far worse shape than the keep. The stone walls of most buildings were relatively intact, but almost all of the roofs had long since collapsed and rotted away. A few buildings showed intact skeletal wooden frames. A few buildings had collapsed even further, a pair or single walls standing next to a mound of rubble. And what remained was buried under grass and creeping vines. In the center of a square of cobblestone off to the right side of the roadway was an enormous tree. Its brown wooden trunk towered above the buildings around it as its leaves fluttered green in a gentle breeze. Below, in its shade, its roots thrust up and down through the cobblestones and the foundations around it, breaking them apart little by little. Bushes, grasses, and other small plants grew in the dirt exposed by the displaced stone. The road extended ahead of us, ending at a gate in the wall, visible in the distance. To each side the road curved around the keep and then out of sight. ¡°Okay, out of town then. Got to keep going.¡± Gurek just nodded, no doubt he expected that. Slowly we proceeded down the road, until we were ambushed. It was nothing serious; the shadows and bushes beneath the tree erupted with a small group of half a dozen mice-bugs. Gurek got into position in the front. Inda threw two knives before they reached us, killing off two, before she drew her sabre. The long thin blade was held ready in front of her. Gurek dispatched two before the last two ran past him. I crouched, my fist punching downwards to smash one while the last one impaled itself on a spike of stone that rose to greet it. ¡°Minor ambush,¡± I said, as I started to make notes when it became clear nothing else was going to attack. ¡°Numbers and surprise over power.¡± ¡°Yeah,¡± Inda said as she looked at the tree. ¡°There is enough cover there to hold quite a bit more, or something larger. Even a single adventurer at level five should be able to handle the group we just dealt with, though they might be gnawed on a little. Any group that dealt with the groomer mini-boss shouldn¡¯t have any real trouble with this.¡± ¡°I hate dealing with ambushes,¡± Gurek muttered. ¡°Remind me why you are an adventurer again?¡± I said, a little laughter in my voice. He just scowled at me. I just smirked and gave him the signal to keep going. The path down to gate was filled with ambushes. The collapsed buildings offered plentiful cover for the relatively small monsters we had been dealing with so far. We didn¡¯t run into anymore groomers, but lots of plate-rats, cockroaches, and plate-mice. None of them proved particularly challenging, but we were attacked from behind a few times, forcing Firi to deflect attacks with his transparent golden shield. Finally, however, we reached the gate. To each side another two doors set into the stone of the wall. Upon the gate was a symbol I didn¡¯t recognize and a now familiar circle of crystal. It was an arch with a wavy line running across it the bottom part of it. Gurek touched the door and it flashed red. SSD 4.03 - Day and Night William Tell, Friedrich Schiller ¡° ¡° ¡° absolutely not that. There was a good reason we didn¡¯t just use my ability to manipulate stone to travel down the outside of the tower and bypass the keep entirely. ¡° ¡° was an aqueduct now. It had arching supports reaching up from the ground that were more than large enough to walk through. A wagon should be able to drive through them without any difficulty if the land was smooth enough. ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit. ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡°
¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡°should let us get back to base, so I¡¯ll wait for now,¡± I said. ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° ¡° SSD 4.04 - A Map for the Future ¡°Maps are a way of organizing wonder.¡± -Peter Steinhart ==POV: Caden== I felt a little bad about laughing so hard when they opened up the door to the sewers, but their disgust was so obvious that I couldn¡¯t help it. I only felt a little bad though, it wasn¡¯t like the smell was going to actually hurt them. It was merely unpleasant. To be fair, I had subjected myself to that smell in my human avatar. On a less fair note¡­ bad smells didn¡¯t bother me anymore. For all that my avatar was human, it retained the sensibilities of my dungeon nature. And that half wasn¡¯t bothered by bad smells at all. The smell still had bad associations, because sewage was not a particularly pleasant thought, but there was no instinctive revulsion anymore. I still wouldn¡¯t call my experience of gradually tweaking the sewers for human perceptions pleasant. However, it would take more than it being mildly unpleasant to stop me from perfecting the dungeon. I had a certain pride in creating it properly. Not an instinctual feeling of possessiveness, like Exsan, but rather a joy in making something beautiful and functional. I could create all sort of trinkets. I could be a sculptor and carpenter beyond compare, but it didn¡¯t matter if what I created had no purpose. The dungeon had purpose. It served an important function. I didn¡¯t necessary understand that function entirely, but two different groups had shown up and entered as soon as it was physically possible. I was hoping to learn more about what a dungeon did on the whole, but for now I knew enough to do my best. Hence, a trip into the sewers had proceeded. I had also walked all over the dungeon, tweaking things here and there. I had a number of standardized sizes for things like stair steps, chairs, tables, etc¡­ from my efforts. It helped me place windows and railings at the correct heights, put wear and tear in the right places, and far more. I had to admit I also just enjoyed walking through my dungeon. I had tried to make it as beautiful as I could, even if I was trying to make it gloomy, or scary, etc¡­ I had often appreciated the dark beauty of fairy tales on Earth. I had been okay with unhappy endings. Darkness was beautiful too, as long as it meant something. The original Little Mermaid was tragic, but poetically beautiful. I was going to try to prevent death from being permanent in my dungeon. However, people only had so many opportunities, and some people would abandon caution rather than learning to do better. Their deaths would hopefully serve to teach someone else. Only here in my dungeon could I have this power over death. I wouldn¡¯t let people leave believing they were invincible, because then they would get other people killed. My thoughts were morbid, but I was trying to prepare myself for death in advance. I let the thoughts sit in my mind for a moment, and then let them go. I had other things to do. The functions of the tower were simple enough that nothing there had gone wrong. No other team had entered, so no monsters had regenerated behind them until they stepped into the courtyard. I would need to see other groups enter before I would be able to judge how that worked. The little groomer boss had worked great. It had gotten utterly smashed flat, but I already knew that these people were superhuman. A normal group of adult humans shouldn¡¯t have much trouble with the tower and boss as long as they were reasonably well prepared. If the monsters turned out to be too weak, because everyone was superhuman, I would adjust. It was great to see Zidaun and his team analyze the boss battle too. It was my first chance to see it battle people. They could have destroyed it at any time, as proven by Zidaun wrapping it up in stone. Also, I had no idea how Gurek¡¯s power worked. He got the injury a minute after taking it. Crazy. Inda was interesting too. She was doing something to knives she was throwing. My calculation ability was going a bit haywire. They accelerated in some fashion, or something, after they left her hand. That wasn¡¯t quite right either. It was driving my ability nuts. The knives were very effective though. My town needed some minor adjustments though. A few of my ambushes were triggered closer together than I really liked. I did a bit more tweaking with the settings as they left. I took a quick look at my status. My survival points had increased by four points after they left. Not sure what factors controlled that. Oh well¡­ I would learn. I hoped they came back and fully explored the town, but I wouldn¡¯t be too surprised if they didn¡¯t. I had made a fairly large environment here. Okay, more than fairly large. It was pretty damn massive. If I had a better way to make areas I would absolutely create bigger ones though. For now I had to make everything I wanted fit without collapsing the dungeon or running out of space. They were meticulous about surveying everything. Inda actually drew beautifully. However, I wasn¡¯t sure what their end goal was supposed to be. If they were supposed to document every single corner they would be at it for a while, even just with what they had already seen. If they were supposed to find how to clear the dungeon, or valuable materials, or a basic map, or something else... I didn¡¯t know, they could be here for a variable amount of time. Guess I would find out in the future. For now, a shard watching Zidaun had noticed them doing something interesting. They had pulled out a cylinder of some kind. More of them were in his pack, but I couldn¡¯t really see them very well due to the mana that was a part of them. I appeared in the wall behind Zidaun and stuck just my face through above and behind him. I had already tested that he couldn¡¯t sense me with his access to my aura. Not really surprising, I couldn¡¯t sense myself. I might get a better form of soul perception, but I didn¡¯t have it yet. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. The tube was covered with golden and silver metal, as well as runes. The runes were made of some type of crystal. I couldn¡¯t see everything, but I recognized one; it was for mana. There was something about the way the shape of the cylinder was put together that was bugging me as well¡­ Zidaun pulled a piece of paper out of the cylinder and started to carefully write on it. I ignored that for the moment since it had no mana. I couldn¡¯t feel the cylinder well enough to recreate the symbols, so I was forced to make them out of stone next to my core as best I could. I made the filigree lines in silver and gold as well. I couldn¡¯t see the whole thing from where he laid it on the table, and I didn¡¯t want to change my angle too much. I did a little bit, but only to places I was sure he couldn¡¯t see me. It let me put a little more detail together. There was something about the design. I withdrew when Zidaun shifted and had Inda start drawing. I changed where I was watching from. I still couldn¡¯t see much more of the cylinder. I could see what Inda was working on though. She really could draw well. Hmm, yep, that was a drawing of the town. Looked like some schematics for the internal layout of the tower as well. They finished and I withdrew. Zidaun put the paper back and then activated some kind of magic. There was a faint ripple of something, but it was gone before I could even consciously realize it was there. When the mana faded away the cylinder had only lingering traces of mana in it. I could see some of it more clearly now. The paper that had been inside was gone now. Was that some form of teleportation? With the map of the dungeon inside, along with whatever else they had written, it looked like they had sent information off to somewhere. I wish I knew where it had gone. There was a cylinder inside Zidaun¡¯s pack that felt similar to this one. Had they sent off information before they got into the dungeon or did they do it while I was busy meditating? The group started to talk again, but they finished quickly and Zidaun grabbed the empty cylinder and headed outside. I moved my avatar back to my core room for the moment. I watched Zidaun heading down the road, it looked like he was heading for the altar. This could be very good news indeed. It was only a few minutes later when he entered. He found me waiting for him. I sealed the door behind him as he entered. I created a fake cylinder in my hands and put it in the altar, dissolving it after. Yes, No? Not the most elegant of communications, but I hoped it got my point across. Zidaun smiled. ¡°Yes.¡± I smiled back and raised up a tendril of stone. Give, I pointed to the tendril. He held out the cylinder and my stone tendril took it. As soon as it did I teleported stored it. A token for fifty points appeared held in the tendril¡¯s grasp. Zidaun took it. I thought for a moment. Zidaun didn¡¯t really know what that was worth. Best to encourage people giving emblems. The more magic items I got the better. I split the tendril up into multiple tendrils. I added a one centimeter sphere of folerth, a coin of magic infused gold, and a two inch cube of mana crystal that I grabbed from elsewhere (it had a few hundred mana stored in it). One. I pointed at the three items. Zidaun hesitated, looking at the three items. He seemed uncertain as he looked between the folerth and the cube. Finally, he reached for the folerth. As he took it I stored the other items away. I made a table and two chairs, then I sat down. After Zidaun sat down, I started with a replica of what he had seen of the dungeon. A clear crystal dome covered a replica of the Starlight Grotto. A tiny statue of Jormungandr encircled it, and tiny trees made of gold and emerald created a barrier. Other tiny replicas of the buildings, statues, and doorway appeared as well. Then I created a minimally detailed version of the meadow with a much more detailed fortress in its own bubble. The fortress and town were created with the same gray stone as the originals. From there I added on more and more crystal until I had created the shape of the mountain that I could see, as well as the snowy valleys and the other mountains that were visible. Then I covered them with grey stone and white marble to show the rock and snow. It was a very incomplete three dimensional model, but it gave an idea of what I wanted. I created chunks of marble, grey stone, clear crystal, sapphire, as well as gems in other colors and set them off to the side. Zidaun. I pointed at the blank materials and circled my hand around the map I had made. Zidaun hesitated for a moment before material started to gather. Additional stone gathered on the jut of stone that hung above me on the map. It looked like the giant piece of stone hanging above the dungeon was pointed and stood all on its own. I wasn¡¯t sure how I felt about that. Vague identical mountains extended off to the west, to the east of me was a valley and then sapphires were used. Gradually, a map was made. Rivers of sapphire crossed the land and met an equally blue ocean. Small roads of grey stone wound their way between hills covered in snow. Soon I had some approximation for where everything was nearby. Zidaun pointed to an area that was below a section of cliffs. The area was a mixture of sapphire and smoky brown topaz. Tiny dots of ruby were held inside the sapphire. The pattern of the sapphire made it obvious that it was some kind of delta. ¡°Zidaun. Adar.¡± He said another word I didn¡¯t understand. Was he saying home? I pointed to the mountain the dungeon was under. Caden, Exsan, home? He smiled, ¡°Yes.¡± Great, a new word. I created a sample of dirt. I pointed at the topaz. Dirt? ¡°Yes,¡± he said. I made a cup and put some water in it. I pointed at the water and then the sapphire. Water? ¡°Yes.¡± I made a small amount of salt. I mimed taking a little bit of it and tasting it. Then I pointed at Zidaun. He looked at the salt and then tasted it. I pointed at it. Salt. He gave me a different word and I wrote it down. Then I pointed at the large body of water on the eastern side of the map. Salt water? ¡°Yes.¡± I pointed at the body of water again, and then at the other one to the west. Ocean. We proceeded like this as he described various parts of the map. He showed me the city of Asmund, apparently the city that the rest of his party was native to. I would have kept going, but I caught Zidaun suppressing a yawn. I stored the table and other things away for the moment as I rose. I unsealed the door. Go. Another shard had been examining the cylinder I had been given, but I hadn¡¯t figured it out yet. I would understand how it all worked eventually. SSD 4.05 - Dimensional Theory ¡°There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as ¡°the art¡±. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness. The very language about magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art as it is about supernatural events. A grimoire for example, the book of spells is simply a fancy way of saying grammar. Indeed, to cast a spell, is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people''s consciousness.¡± -Alan Moore ==POV: Caden== With my avatar back in the core room I kept examining the cylinder. Another shard looked at it from within the core. A tendril of stone manipulated it as I directed. These was something there that was bugging me. My calculation skill or art skill, or something, was twinging. It just wouldn¡¯t resolve into something concrete enough for me to work with. I could always absorb it, and I was sure I would learn from it, but if there was something I could learn before absorbing it that would be even better. My prior knowledge altered what I got out of absorbing something. I learned that when I absorbed the same emblem multiple times. Each time I learned more based on what I gained the time before. If I didn¡¯t learn anything within a day or two I would absorb it anyway. The fact that it was using something besides folerth to run an emblem was important. It would give me additional clues in how to create them. Based on the degradation, I assumed that folerth was used for continuous or reusable enchantments. If you just needed a one off though, it looked like there were other ways to manage it. I started to pace, that used to help me think when I was human sometimes. I went in a slow circle around my core even as another shard kept examining the object from inside it. As I walked around and behind the cylinder the core and I were on opposite sides of it. Wait a moment¡­ I did my best to overlay my two points of view. I created an imitation of the cylinder, but this time I left out any material that wasn¡¯t silver, gold, or the crystal runes. I ended up needing to support it from both ends with stone so it didn¡¯t collapse. I rotated the cylinder and there it was. It was a set of runes transcribed into three dimensions. I already knew that the runes could describe things in three dimensions, that was part of the information I gained when I first got the skill. However, I didn¡¯t realize they could be written out in three dimensions. Now that I knew what they were I could read them. One rune was for space, movement, transition, change. Like all the runes I had dealt with, it had complicated shades of meaning. The next one described a connection, pairing, duplicate, twin. The last was the easiest for me to understand, but difficult to describe. It was like the English word ¡°this,¡± it was contextual and delineated the space inside the rune as the target. I suspected that this rune was the entire reason to use three dimensions. It was much easier to simply target inside the rune, than to try to describe the target space. The crystal runes were actually the simplest. One stored mana, and the other was the trigger for the entire emblem to activate. In all, the emblem could be translated to say this: ¡°Move what is inside the container through space to the matched space simultaneously using the mana inside this storage rune when this trigger rune is activated.¡± Trying to translate even the basics of it into English was awkward. Actually¡­ there was something even more important. The activation of this emblem had used no chanting, no extra steps; everything that was needed was contained inside. I still didn¡¯t understand some of the extra pieces attached to the runes. They added additional context for its function, but that didn¡¯t matter. It was self contained, and that meant I should be able to create runes like this too. The trigger rune in combination with the mana storage was the key, they specified sending mana to the entire system at the same time. Mana spreading unequally as I activated the previous emblems might be why they exploded. It was likely that the chanting, and hand waving, were at least partially there to show how to properly activate the forces involved. That eliminated the need for an additional rune network to be tied into all the other runes to regulate the initial power. I went over and looked at the most basic emblem I had, the sewer grate. It used a different form of targeting. Now that I understood what I was looking at I could read it a little better. It was attuned to the material it was inscribed into. Essentially the rune said to affect all the metal it touched or connected to. It was a simple solution, but it would actually be easy to touch it with a large piece of metal and make the whole system have issues. Actually¡­ let me try that. I moved the sewer gate to an empty cavern. I made a small cube of iron and touched it to the gate. No response that I could see. I tried with a larger cube¡­ nothing. Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. Maybe it was more discerning than I gave it credit for. I recreated a small cube of steel instead. This was the same steel as the knife I got from the sewers. I touched the cube to the door. There it was. Mana was flowing into the emblem at a greater rate. I tried to manipulate the cube of metal. It still deformed at my will, but there was a bit of resistance. I pulled it away and used a larger cube. Even more mana flowed into the system, and the emblem started to disperse heat into the air. I used a slightly larger cube. The system started to disperse and I heard a faint sound of metal groaning under stress. I quickly stored the cube away and the emblem started to cool down. Okay, so this method had some definite flaws. If I could recreate it, it also had some great potential as a trap. Touch a large piece of metal to the emblem, and boom. I would rather not destroy my only working copy, however. That would be an incredible waste. I wanted to at least absorb it so I could gain more information. I put the gate back in my core room and examined Tam¡¯s work instead. Now that I was looking for it, I could see places where Tam had done something very impressive. I hadn¡¯t recognized lots of runes that he used. That was still the case. However, I could now understand some of them. He had taken a two dimensional rune, transcribed it into three dimensions and combined it with other runes, then he had copied them back down into a two dimensional rune. All of the rune groups that did that had the same flourish of subtext applied. It essentially told whatever system was reading the runes to treat this as a three dimensional object seen from the specific view point the subtext specified. And I was certain that something was reading the runes now. The instructions the runes provided were complicated, but they weren¡¯t complicated enough. I thought they were, but the more I learned, the more I recognized the lack of core instructions needed to perform the actions that were happening. It lacked the kind of complexity needed to transport an object across space. The runic language was more like plugging instructions into a computer. Then something, probably the system, used those instructions to run a program. The instructions were complicated because they needed to be very precise, but that was a different degree of magnitude from the complexity needed to do the task from scratch. Regardless, if I had to guess, I imagined that normal mastery of runes went something like this: First, people learned how to make things like the gate. It worked, it was crude, and had places where it jury-rigged solutions. Then you had stuff like the cylinder. It took the basic lessons from before and streamlined them. It would do one job and do it perfectly, and it expanded into three dimensions so that it didn¡¯t need to use more materials. And then you had Tam. He took that three dimensional efficiency and took it back into two dimensions. Writing groups of runes in the space that would normally only fit one. This saved both material and space. As people got better at the language they also got better at using subtext. I was pretty sure that Tam didn¡¯t have any mana regulating and storing runes because his tiny additions to his runes handled all of that. I didn¡¯t see a single rune in Tam¡¯s work that exactly matched the basic runes I knew. Tam used that, and spacing, and two dimensional orientation, all together to give extremely complicated instructions in a minimal amount of space. I couldn¡¯t do that yet. I was fairly certain that each person who gained the lexicon gained a unique version of the skill. And I suspected that since Tam¡¯s emblems were where I had gotten the skill from that mine was extra special. I knew more about the deep knowledge that led to altering the language, but I only just discovered a rune that would, hopefully, let me actually build a working one. In the long run, that knowledge and having Tam¡¯s work to study would probably propel my abilities ahead substantially. It had just delayed my ability to actually make use of it. I had a strong suspicion that students learning the language would normally learn some form of very crude trigger rune that they could use to start up an emblem. Either that or they learned the necessary chanting magic first, I wasn¡¯t sure. In addition, I had learned something interesting about materials. I wasn¡¯t sure if the materials the cylinder used were some kind of special alloy, or they were just gold and silver. The crystal was probably mana crystal, but I couldn¡¯t be certain. I had tried to put mana into other materials before but nothing had happened. The rules might be different for runes. The materials didn¡¯t hold up very well, but the rune forced mana through them anyway. And that actually worked perfectly for me anyway. If it worked the way I thought, I could use the activation rune with a network of gold or silver and let it burn away as the emblem activated. I could make the entire thing out of folerth, but it was mana intensive to make. That didn¡¯t matter to me right now, but it was best to conserve as I could. That would work perfectly, both for permanent systems which I didn¡¯t need to turn off again, and traps that only needed to activate once before my automatic systems would recreate them. For now, it was time to try and recreate the strength rune. I had tried this before, but hopefully this time things would be different. Since I didn¡¯t want things to be too different, I decided to use the largest block of steel that I was using to test the door earlier. The magic had properly propagated through the steel on contact, even if it hadn¡¯t liked the extra load. If there was something in the subtext of the runes that specified steel and I wasn¡¯t seeing it, this should still work. I carefully carved out the emblem from the door, copying it exactly. I checked it a couple of times just to be sure. Then I filled in each empty space with folerth until it looked the same. Then, I carved out a trigger rune off to the side and attached a thin network of gold from the empty trigger to the rest of the runes. Then I filled in the trigger rune with mana crystal. If I was right, mana should enter the trigger and spread evenly through the runic matrix of all the rest at the same time. At some point the gold would probably break down, but by then the rest of the system should be working well enough to keep going. I absorbed what I had made. Since there was no mana running through it, it disappeared easily enough. Using the pattern, I made copies of the whole thing, the various parts, and labeled all of them in my system. If I was successful in making it work, I would find it easy to reproduce. And, with enough experience and lots of work, I should be able to create an entire runic alphabet that I could access and create on demand. Even if I needed to add little modifications for a specific job, I could save a lot of time. Okay, here we go. I poured mana into the trigger rune, letting it fill. Then the gold sparked. Flashes of heat came off the gold as mana flowed through the system. Ambient mana started to gather and enter as the rune responsible for that fully activated. Mana continued to grow. A section of gold sparked more heavily, then it burned through. The entire thing exploded violently. I was glad I was testing this far away from my core. However, despite the explosion, this was still a success. It had taken several seconds before the rune exploded. Before, they had always failed almost instantly. From what I saw, one of the runes was drawing more power to stay even with all the rest, so the gold to that rune had failed first. I could slowly increase the amount of gold to each component and between them to see where the problem was, but gold wasn¡¯t exactly valuable to me. Instead, I recreated what I had already made with a quick thought. Then, I thickened the gold filigree everywhere. This way I could just look at what sections of gold were more damaged afterwards. From there I could learn more about what was drawing the mana, and I could make more fiddly adjustments for the future. I activated it again. Less sparks this time. Slowly, the mana across the entire system increased and started to work. Then, the mana dipped and then completely stopped flowing through the gold. It had worked. The rest of the emblem was running and stable. I did a quick test and tried to turn part of the metal on the bottom of the cube into a thin tendril. It stretched out, but it fought against the change. Now I could do some magic. SSD 4.06 - Money is Power If money go before, all ways do lie open.¡± ¡ªFord, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 2 Scene 2, William Shakespeare ==POV: Caden== Since I was capable of replicating a working copy, there was no need to keep the original gate around anymore. I started the process of dissolving it, carefully absorbing the entire structure at the same time. It slowly melted away, excess mana I couldn¡¯t absorb flooded into the ambient mana that constantly flowed everywhere through my dungeon. After only a few minutes, as the entire structure of the sewer door shimmered intensely, it suddenly vanished. In its place knowledge crept into my mind. The knowledge built on what I already knew. I saw how the subtext added to the runes influenced the results. The ambient mana rune was tuned to intake a certain level. The rune I had thought meant strength more closely meant stability, stasis, inertia. Small bits of knowledge filled in gaps, or made corrections to my assumptions. By the time the process was done I understood much more about how that emblem had fit together. For now, based on my greater understanding, I was going to call it a fortification emblem. I believed I was right to learn as much as possible before I absorbed it. I had received a more comprehensive picture of the entire emblem. I still didn¡¯t understand everything, but I wouldn¡¯t be surprised if novice enchanters copied down existing designs before they learned how to make everything work on their own. I didn¡¯t really need to worry about materials though. I could experiment as much as I wanted. And I had gained enough knowledge of the subtext to mess with the fairly crude modifications that had been on the sewer gate until I understood them better. I examined Tam¡¯s work again, using my core¡¯s superior eyesight. Nope, still mostly gibberish to me. I knew enough to know that it was extremely advanced gibberish, but that didn¡¯t help me all that much. I did see something in the beam rune that I felt I should understand, but I would need to look at it later. For now, after I examined it again, I was going to absorb the teleportation cylinder as well. I examined the cylinder, as well as the hollow copy I had made, holding up both in from of my core. I rotated them in sync with each other, studying the three dimensional patterns as well as the pattern placed on the curve of the tube. I could tell what the teleportation rune was using as a target now. There was a particular section of lines and curves that was added on. They were not subtext, instead they were the code showing it what to search for. It would look for marks that were identical and teleport the contents there. And¡­ yes, there. Another section specifically excluded the cylinder from the search. Right¡­ don¡¯t want the teleport to find the symbol on the cylinder and teleport the paper back inside. There was not enough mana here to search the world, or even very far. I was missing something about how this functioned. Hmm¡­ might be able to use that exclusion rune for some defenses, tell it to ignore monsters, etc... I continued to study the cylinder for a time, but it still had pieces I didn¡¯t understand. That was okay, I wasn¡¯t expecting to master emblems all at once. Patience was key. Still, I had the opportunity to learn more directly. Before I tried absorbing the cylinder, I absorbed the cube I had made with a copy of the fortification emblem. It absorbed quite quickly, apparently being made from my mana and the ambient mana that I had ¡°attuned¡± with my presence allowed for that. Nothing happened after I absorbed it. I was hoping that it would tell me even more about the pattern, but I wasn¡¯t surprised that I couldn¡¯t absorb my own work to learn more. While the system was often very literal in its requirements, I had yet to find an outright exploit that could be used to cheat. Since that wasn¡¯t going to let me learn more, I focused on absorbing the teleportation tube. It absorbed much quicker than any other emblem I had done, other than the one I made myself. However, most of the mana that had infused it before was gone. I wasn¡¯t sure if it would even let me learn anything with much of the framework degraded. After a few moments the tube vanished and knowledge began to flow once again. I could see how the teleportation worked now. It didn¡¯t search like I thought it did. Instead it packed up the matter inside and pushed it¡­ out. I wasn¡¯t sure exactly where it went, some place outside of normal space. Before it did that, however, it tagged the package with the symbols. I was only seeing half the delivery system. Somewhere, some other emblem pulled the package back out into real space. Other little details about the teleportation tube came to me, however, as that happened a notification pinged at my awareness.
Mana Lexicon II is able to upgrade to: Mana Lexicon III Proceed: Yes No
This had happened last time as well. It was likely going to take a little time, but it was the middle of the night already, so probably best to do it now. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. I told it yes. The world vanished in a blur of symbols. New symbols entered my mind. Some were crisp with meaning while others were blurry approximations. New connections between symbols appeared, as well as how they could be written in three dimensional combinations with others. Subtext wove webs of subtle meaning within runes with tiny additions to their structure. Then I learned something entirely new. A tilt of a rune here, a line versus a curve there as runes were laid out. New meanings appeared in the positioning of runes. Rather than being a subtext, this was a superscript, composed of the arrangement of the macro components. It too added layers and shades of meaning. Then different knowledge began to flow into me. I learned the capacity and intensity of mana transmission for different type of materials. Silver allowed for slower transfer, gold for faster, mana crystal held a tiny bit of mana stable before it cracked from the strain. Folerth handled just about anything, but other materials could be used to fill in the gap and jump-start the process. And then¡­ came alloys. Silver and folerth for a permanent slow transmission of mana. Gold and folerth for the reverse. The exact proportions could be used in different ways. Folerth coating and woven into mana crystal could create larger and permanent mana storage that an individual rune or an entire emblem could access. Details, large and small, poured into my mind, until it abruptly stopped. The world returned to my awareness with the crisp clarity to which I had become accustomed. Morning had come and Zidaun and his team were already in the sewers. ==POV: Zidaun== When I returned after speaking to the dungeon, Inda was on watch, but the others had already slipped off to sleep. I went off to my own bed; I didn¡¯t have a watch tonight. Soon enough, it was morning. Or as close to morning as we could get here in a cavern of eternal night. Amid the yawns of breakfast, I told them a little about my experience the night before. I had to omit the truth a little, but I told them that after I gave the dungeon the scroll case that it gave me the token worth fifty as well as a choice. ¡°The sorcerer¡¯s silver was obviously worth more than the dungeon gold, but I have no idea what the cube was worth,¡± I said. ¡°It didn¡¯t have any runes on it right?¡± Inda said. ¡°Nope,¡± I said, ¡°just a two inch cube of white glowing crystal. Had quite a bit of mana in it.¡± ¡°Probably mana crystal then,¡± she said. ¡°It isn¡¯t usually that expensive, though a perfect cube in that size might be valuable. Honestly, I¡¯m not sure.¡± ¡°Yeah,¡± I said, ¡°that¡¯s why I took this.¡± I held up the little bead. ¡°What is this even worth, anyway?¡± I asked. ¡°Depends on how pure it is,¡± Inda said. ¡°If it is completely pure, that is worth¡­ a lot. Hundreds of gold.¡± Gurek choked on his breakfast a little. ¡°Any impurities drop the price substantially though. Whether it has a little or a lot of impurities it will need to go through the same expensive process of refinement. Could be worth as little as twenty to thirty gold.¡± ¡°No wonder emblems are so damned expensive,¡± Gurek muttered. ¡°That and the skill of the inscriber,¡± Inda said. ¡°Probably most of the cost of a given emblem is from the skill actually, a little bit of folerth will go a long way.¡± ¡°Anything that blows up if you make it wrong is expensive,¡± Firi said with a shrug. ¡°I don¡¯t know about that,¡± Gurek said. ¡°It seems like alchemists blow themselves up all the time, but they sell some stuff that is pretty inexpensive.¡± ¡°Correction then,¡± Firi said, ¡°anything that blows up expensive ingredients when made wrong, will be expensive.¡± ¡°Still,¡± Gurek said, ¡°worth a minimum of five gold for each of us. Not going to count on it being worth any more than that. Still¡­ if it is totally pure, I might by a skill-book. Firi frowned at him. ¡°I don¡¯t like those, it seems wrong to use them.¡± Gurek shrugged, ¡°Wealthy people use them all the time, especially for training up their kids. And it is definitely a good way to learn at least the first level of a skill. Even more if you are lucky. I won¡¯t be able to afford a skill-book beyond level one or two anyway.¡± Firi started to respond where Inda beat him to it. ¡°I¡¯ve actually used one.¡± Firi looked at her, startled. I was actually curious as well, I had never heard her mention it before. ¡°Why didn¡¯t you mention it before,¡± Gurek asked. ¡°You all know my parents have money, but I don¡¯t like to make a big thing of it. They wanted me to marry, but I had already traveled all over with them while they were dungeon delving and gathering their fortune. ¡°I wasn¡¯t going to marry some noble so we could pay off their debts to gain a title. I had already had too much freedom and I wanted to delve like they had. ¡°They had been training me in etiquette, dancing, drawing and painting, all the noble pursuits since I was younger. And they never bothered to tell me of their plan. Hardly a surprise that I thought I was going to be just like them when I grew up. ¡°Anyway, there were arguments, but in the end my stubbornness was great enough that they didn¡¯t want to risk me running away and getting myself killed. ¡°I was remarkably foolish at the time and didn¡¯t really understand the dangers of dungeons, for all that my parents had been delving my whole life. I might well have run off and ended up dead. ¡°To make a long story short, they wanted to provide me an advantage, something that might let me get a better adventuring class. So they made a compromise with me. ¡°So I had to buy the learning skill. I had been studying like a noble for much of my life, so it wasn¡¯t particularly expensive. Five hundred and fifty something¡­ I think? Nothing like the 5000 it starts at without any education. I bought that, and then they let me pick through a number of skill books for what I wanted to learn. They offered advice about the types of classes I might get. ¡°I didn¡¯t realize it until later, but they were all skills that leaned heavily toward ranged and control. They were still doing their best to keep me alive and away from directly dealing with monsters. ¡°And so they bought me a skill-book for resistance sense. After training with an instructor for a few months, they let me use it. ¡°Between the learning skill, and my time with the instructor, I learned it successfully. Obviously with my Resistance Dancer class it upgraded to resistance control.¡± ¡°What did it feel like,¡± Gurek said, ¡°using a skill-book?¡± ¡°Strange,¡± Inda said, her brows drawing down. ¡°I had already learned a decent amount about resistance, and the tiny gradations of it when moving objects. However, it suddenly became a whole new sense. I could feel it from across the room. I could tell whether an object I was going to step on was stable or not. Whether two objects were firmly attached to each other.¡± ¡°I still don¡¯t think people should use them,¡± Firi said. ¡°Though I am glad to have you in the party.¡± I interrupted. I could see an argument about to happen. ¡°Before we get completely derailed, I assume we are still planning to delve today?¡± I got the expected positive responses, even if Gurek did mutter about ¡°stinking sewers.¡± ¡°Then we had best get a move on. Everybody pack up and head out.¡± A few minutes later we were packed up and on our way. SSD 4.07 - Long Green Vines Iwata: Wow, I never knew sewer tunnels were so wide and spacious. Watanabe: But what''s strange is how nice it smells down here. ¡ªExcel Saga ==Zidaun== We followed Gurek down the stairs into the sewer. The symbol on the doorway, an arch with a wavy line near the bottom, had become an unfortunately representation of a sewer. I could have saved the mystery of the symbol for another time¡­ or never. Unfortunately, the smell was as bad as I remembered. The beauty of the sewers was an odd contrast with the smell. The wall of the stairway was made of red brick, several layers deep, before the bricks gave way to solid stone. Old faded bricks, many of them cracked or heavily eroded were side-by-side deep red bricks surrounded by new mortar. Deep green moss clung in large patches to the walls and ceiling. It glistened with water droplets captured from the moist air. Insects of all kinds walked along the walls, floor, and ceiling equally. Many were simple shades of grey, brown, or black. Others gleamed with glossy iridescence, their carapaces glimmering with a rainbow sheen as they moved through the well lit tunnel. A number of insects were translucent instead, their bodies barely visible as they burrowed through the moss or out of cracks, their antennae sensing the air for danger. And other insects had adapted to their sewer home, their bodies the red of brick or the viridescent green of the moss. I recognized tiny versions of the moss groomer mini-boss glimmering green as they snipped away dead sections of moss. Their tiny raptorial legs held the dead moss as they ate it in tiny bites. And all of this was just the stairs leading down into the sewers. The sewers themselves opened up before us as we emerged from the long staircase. And absurdly large room, for a sewer, met us at the bottom. The room formed a t-intersection, fifteen feet wide on a side. The sewers curved away right and left, obviously following the curvature of the wall and road above us. Perpendicular to them another long tunnel stretched gently uphill into the distance. All the tunnels, barrel vaulted ceiling and all, were made of the same red brick as the stairway. Except for the lights, which were chunks of crystal and steel embedded into the brick at the apex of the ceiling every ten feet or so. The tunnels were fifteen feet wide as well. A five foot walkway was attached to each side of the tunnel, while a five foot wide channel in the middle was full of murky water. I couldn¡¯t see much in the water, but my aura sight showed the bright blurry mana of living things. The same moss grew here in even greater profusion, and it was joined by other plants as well. Short vines hung down from sections of the ceiling, their tips dripping occasional drops of condensation. Small white flowers bloomed on sections of the vines, though whatever smell they possessed was lost to the larger stench of the waters. Reeds poked up through the small sections of the water, forming green clumps, while the water swirled in eddies around the minor obstacle. A sturdy, though rusty, steel grate covered the entirety of the sewer channel in the t-intersection, and five feet beyond. The grate was divided into sections, hinged so they could be lifted and the water underneath accessed. No doubt this design would have allowed the defunct town to easily perform maintenance in the intersection. ¡°We don¡¯t have a specific goal yet,¡± I said. ¡°Anyone see anything or have any ideas? We can go upstream, or follow either direction downstream. Any preferences?¡± ¡®I don¡¯t want to go upstream and get closer to the source of this¡­ filth,¡± Inda said. ¡°However, that is where the keep was. We might have missed something by not going through the rest of the doors.¡± I nodded, that was decent logic. Okay, sounds good. Gurek, straight ahead. Gurek went to the left side of the tunnel automatically allowing maximum clearance to use our right hands. Only Firi was left handed, but it didn¡¯t usually matter with him because he was casting spells. We had only gone about a dozen feet when I sensed the presence of something larger in the water. ¡°Possible monster in the water, about a dozen feet out.¡± Gurek adjusted his guard position slightly, his blades angled more perpendicular to the water. We walked forward slowly until we were seven feet away. ¡°Incoming!¡± I said. A large fish jumped out of the water, its jaws extended and filled with large teeth. Its five foot long body was narrow and sleek. Its top was the same brownish green as the water, though its belly was silver with scales and slime. A reflexive use of identify told me what we were dealing with.
Silver-Bellied Clamp Jaw Level 4
A swift motion with Gurek¡¯s right hand moved his short sword and bisected the monster fish, its remains dissolved before the two parts hit the ground. A small necklace materialized out of the air even as a small tendril of brick emerged from the wall to catch it. The necklace was made of the now familiar crystal that the dungeon seemed to favor. I identified it.
Loot Tracker Dungeon Bound Keeps track of loot earned by the party automatically. A chest will be summoned to dispense loot when the individual enters a safe zone. Certain loot may be exempt from this effect.
¡°Convenient,¡± I said. Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit. I told the others what the item said. Before we touched it Firi cast some diagnostic spells. We didn¡¯t find anything, so I picked it up. The usual routine followed. ¡°You usually pick up the loot since you are the bulwark, Gurek. You want to wear the necklace, too?¡± I said. ¡°Nah, if it has any cursed effects, they are least likely to work on you. Plus, I can pick up the loot from the chest.¡± The last part said with a smirk. ¡°Fair enough.¡± I said. We continued along the tunnel, and new ambushes occurred occasionally from both the water and from cracks in the walls. It was surprising how small plate-rodents could make their bodies. I could hardly believe that they could fit through the tiny cracks, even after having seen it. Periodically we passed side tunnels and crossed over steel grates to get to the next section of walkway. The floors grew more treacherous with slick moss and pools of water, even as the other vegetation grew denser as well. The vines no longer just hung from the ceiling, but also extended along the walls like green veins. Faint hints of sweet perfume from the profusion of white flowers had started to mix with the other smells of the sewer. When a section of vines wrapped around Gurek it caught us all by surprise. Still, each of us reacted swiftly, years of honed instincts responding to crisis. Stone dragged the vine into the wall while simultaneously squeezing it with punishing force. Inda sent a knife that blurred past faster than I could see, her usual throw maximized with massive amounts of energy. A golden wave emerged from Firi, striking each of us in turn. And Gurek was responding, his blades moving in swirling patterns at his sides, slicing a hairsbreadth from his own skin. Energy curled in shining trails from the edges of the two blades. Simultaneously: the vine erupted in green sap where it protruded from the wall, crushed by the power of stone. Inda¡¯s knife chopped through the main stem of the vine, burying itself past the hilt into the brick, mortar and brick powder exploded into the air. The vine that had wrapped around Gurek parted into multiple sections, the edges glowing with energy. A golden glow surrounded each of us, making us each stronger and more resistant to damage. Before I even had a chance to identify it, the vine had faded away from existence, leaving identical looking vines along the walls. ¡°I think we killed it,¡± Inda said. ¡°Ha,¡± barked Gurek, ¡°you think?¡± ¡°Might have been a bit overkill,¡± I said with a smile, ¡°but that was the proper reaction. Good job.¡± ¡°Don¡¯t think it survived long enough for my blessing to even do anything,¡± Firi said. ¡°It died before I could even identify it,¡± I said, my tone dry. I pulled the knife out of the wall and handed it off to Inda, who put it away and retrieved another from her pack. ¡°I¡¯m going to need to resharpen that one,¡± she said. I looked at and identified all the vines around us. They were still the same as I had identified earlier when I entered.
Dangling Sweet Blossom
¡°All the vines around us identify the same as the first one I saw when we entered. I did not sense anything different about the vine that attacked you.¡± ¡°It wasn¡¯t much of a threat,¡± Gurek said, ¡°other than its impressive camouflage. I didn¡¯t see any thorns or anything.¡± ¡°Did anyone see anything other than the usual vines and flowers?¡± I said. A negative reply from everyone. ¡°Okay, it may not have an attack, other than to hold someone in place. Then the danger would be dealing with other monsters at the same time. If it has an attack it would likely be constriction based. Any other thoughts?¡± ¡°I have seen some plant monsters with acid or poison attacks as well,¡± Inda said. ¡°Its sap could be either. It just didn¡¯t survive long enough for any of it to get on us.¡± ¡°So no telling either way,¡± Firi murmured.¡± ¡°Okay, something for us to test then,¡± I said. Lets try to kill the next one a little more slowly. We proceeded a little more slowly after that, as I took the time to identify each vine that we got near. At the same time we dealt with more fish and insects. Soon enough we found a vine, that wasn¡¯t just a vine.
Vein Vine Mimic Level 3
¡°There,¡± I pointed, ¡°level three, a ¡®Vein Vine Mimic.¡¯¡± It was almost but not quite identical to the surrounding vines. It had subtle veins protruding from vines. They were the same color as the rest of the vine, so it was difficult to see. The blossoms looked faintly glossier, less like flowers and more like shiny carapace or hair. To my own aura senses, the differences were even finer. Maybe just a hint more mana, but nothing that was certain enough to use to mark it out as different. Especially since the density of mana was high with all the living things. ¡°Only level three,¡± Gurek laughed, ¡°yeah, some definite overkill.¡± ¡°Let¡¯s try to get a sample of this one before we just kill it off. See if it is any actual danger. So, let it wrap around you Gurek. ¡°Oh joy,¡± Gurek said, ¡°I just knew I wanted to let a plant fondle me today...¡± I ignored him and continued. ¡°Since this is our second time running into one, assume there might be something else joining the ambush. My reach sucks with most things close to the ground. Inda, switch with me and use your sabre.¡± She nodded and we switched, carefully moving around each other. Then we proceeded. Soon enough Gurek was in reach and vine wrapped around him, pulling him toward the wall. At the same time a fish leapt from the water and a plate-mouse squeezed out of a hole in the wall a scant dozen feet ahead of Gurek. Gurek¡¯s sword was still free, so he handled the mouse while Inda skewered the silver-bellied fish as it jumped for Gurek. She whipped her sabre to the side a moment later, the thin blade easily parting the flesh until it began to dissolve into the air. Soon enough only the vine remained, wrapped around Gurek like an over affectionate lover. ¡°Having fun?¡± Inda said. ¡°So much,¡± Gurek drawled. ¡°I think it wants to find a dark corner and get even more intimate.¡± Inda sniffed, her eyes twinkling, ¡°Sounds like the tawdry kind that you prefer.¡± ¡°Struggle a little, if you would, Gurek,¡± I cut in over their banter. ¡°Oh no, I am a virgin, please don¡¯t.¡± Gurek fluttered his eyelashes as he thrashed exaggeratedly in the vine¡¯s grip.¡± ¡°Ugh¡­¡± I said, ¡°I totally walked into that one.¡± Inda and Gurek laughed while Firi blushed. Nothing about how the vine held him changed, other than attempting to hold him more firmly. So, no choking attack. ¡°Inda, cut off a section of vine will you?¡± I said. Her sabre whipped by Gurek¡¯s face, the tip of the vine separating from the rest. Clear green sap splashed out, less viscous than I would have expected. ¡°Anything Gurek?¡± I said. ¡°Nope,¡± he said, ¡°not getting any sense of damage at all.¡± Stone moved at my command, squishing the vine for several feet. Gurek spluttered at the wave of liquid that emerged from the cut vine and splashed all over his face. ¡°Oops,¡± I said, my voice the soul of innocence. The vine and the associated goop dissolved a moment later, leaving Gurek clean again. ¡°Oh don¡¯t worry Zidaun,¡± he said sweetly. ¡°I am sure I know much you like long¡­ vines¡­ spewed their goop all over men.¡± I raised my hand to my forehead. Yep, I walked right into that one too. ¡°What did I ever do to deserve dealing with you,¡± I muttered. Laughter and Firi¡¯s blushing face was my only answer. SSD 4.08 - Social Grooming ¡°Sure, ''Les Miserables'' can be melodramatic. And seeing the musical instead of reading the novel will save you some time and spare you the long part where Hugo goes on and on about the Parisian sewer system. But I would hate for the novel to lose that.¡± ¡ª Garth Risk Hallberg The gentle rise of the sewer continued and the density of the vines decreased again until we came to a large square room. The tunnel did not continue forward, though a walkway curved along the wall. The far end of the room was connected by the now familiar grates, though the center of the room had no grate. Waterfalls of filthy water descended from a dark vertical tunnel overhead into that empty square, kicking up a profusion of grime that coated the nearby grate with a thick crust. Some of the water proceeded to the right and left, the water moving down a tunnel before the walkways and channel ended. The water cascaded into new waterfalls over the edges and descended down to crash into waters far below. The sound of the waterfalls produced a constant rumbling roar, even as they churned the water and increased the putrid smell of the sewers. Sheets of moss lay thickly upon the walls and sections of the grating. the extra moisture of the roiling water producing a perfect humid environment for it. The lush green of the moss, along with the few vines, glimmered with sparkling droplets of water. It if wasn¡¯t for the filthy spray of the waterfalls, combined with the smell, the scene would be beautiful. Countless insects shimmered with beaded water as they moved across the various surfaces. We advanced carefully to the edge of one of the tunnels. A sturdy, but narrow, staircase descended along the wall, with a railing made of chains strung between steel posts set into the brick. With no other way to go, we descended down the stairs, keeping a wary eye out for monsters. Below us the waters flowed away and out of sight. The stairs were slick with moisture and moss, but no monsters attacked us for now. Keeping our weapons out on the treacherous terrain made for slow going. Eventually we reached the bottom of the stairs and emerged onto a large brick platform. A section had caved in and formed a small sinkhole a few feet deep. The bottom was filled with dark water. The ceiling here was low, only about eight feet tall, and covered with new denser type of moss along its entire surface. Occasional holes marred the ceiling, their irregular edges suggesting they were not part of the original construction. The light was dimmer than we had gotten used to. The thick moss burying much of light on the ceiling in its verdant embrace, casting greenish light and shadows upon the wall. The water droplets in the moss gradually fell downward, distorting the light even further into rainbow patterns mixed with the other dappled shadows. ¡°Why couldn¡¯t we get a view like this in a nicer place,¡± Inda said. A burst of air flowed through the aura from one of the tunnels. ¡°Incoming, ceiling,¡± I shouted. A few moments later we saw a familiar sight, except this time it was clinging to moss on the ceiling.
Monstrous Moss Groomer Level 5
¡°Same monster as before,¡± I said. With its feet firmly stuck to the moss on the ceiling, its mandibles dipped further down. Now they were at around head or neck height. It charged us, the motion just as quick on the ceiling as it was on the ground. Gurek swiped the flat of his sword at it, dazing it, though I felt it lock its feet in place around sections of moss. The moss swayed with the motion of the blow, partially dispersing the effect. The groomer turned abruptly, using its hold on the moss to swivel quickly. It charged for me, but I rolled along the floor, automatically smoothing and softening the edges of the bricks as I rolled, the stone pushing me along and then back up. The razor edge of Inda¡¯s sabre gleamed with magic as grazed it while it turned again. For a moment the moss in its grip strained under the extra force she had imparted before the magic faded. The groomer held the moss with only a single front leg as it kicked backward, its entire body pivoting around that point. Now behind Inda it charged at her back. She dropped downwards, her sabre reaching up even as her body twisted down. If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it. Her sabre pierced into the groomer, and it chittered with rage. Its own forward motion cut the sabre back out through its chitin and thick liquid spluttered out of its wound. It quickly climbed up and into one of the holes in the ceiling. Much smaller monsters emerged from the holes in the ceiling, each looking like a miniature version of the one that just fled.
Juvenile Monstrous Moss Groomer Level 2
¡°Level two,¡± I said. Half a dozen of the little monsters clung to the ceiling. They wove their much smaller bodies into and out of the thick layer of moss. The first one attacked by leaping through the air and aiming at Gurek. He cut it out of the air without any trouble, catching the next one that jumped at him a moment later. Seeing the pattern I punched a fist into the brick below, reforming the brick around my fist and wrist. Then as mini groomers launched through the air at me, Inda, and Firi, I punched the one aimed for me out of the air, splattering it against the surface of my makeshift armor. Inda cut the one aimed for her without difficulty. The one aimed for Firi bounced off a golden shield in the air, only for Inda to cut it apart on the back stroke of her sabre. Gurek had dealt with the last of them while I wasn¡¯t paying attention. The adult groomer reemerged, its mandibles click clacking together in agitation. It resumed attacking, but none of its patterns changed. ¡°Okay Inda, finish it.¡± A brief pulse of mana latter and the groomer smashed with terrific force against the floor, one of its legs detached and twitching where it was still attached to the ceiling. Only a moment passed before the groomer dissolved away. We waited for a tense moment, but nothing else emerged to attack us. I moved the bricks off my hand and it chunked in chunks against the floor. ¡°Okay, good job.¡± We congregated for a moment, still keeping an eye on the environment, as we noted the tactics the groomers had displayed. ¡°This might actually be a challenge for a group of level five adventurers,¡± I said. ¡°I would expect them all to survive, but an injury would be a definite possibility.¡± ¡°Yep,¡± Gurek said, ¡°It was just as fast as on the ground, and much quicker about changing direction.¡± ¡°Did have an obvious weakness,¡± Inda said. ¡°It didn¡¯t want to detach from the ceiling. So ducking lower was actually good protection.¡± ¡°I think the juveniles were meant to help counter that strategy,¡± Firi said. I nodded. ¡°Actually,¡± I said, ¡°if we encounter a situation where we are facing both types simultaneously, ducking would be a bad way to approach the problem unless you stay mobile or keep your guard up so you can hit the small ones out the air. The others nodded. ¡°Not much of a real challenge for us,¡± I said, ¡°but I would be very unhappy if a level five and a few level two could actually cause us problems.¡± Gurek snorted. ¡°I certainly would be concerned about any team our level having that issue.¡± The others laughed. I would certainly hope adventurers would be at least competent by the time they got to our level. We moved through the room carefully, checking for anything else before we moved along. The exit to the room was parallel to the stairs and back toward the water. Moving through a tunnel we emerged into the section below the stairs. The waterfall fell into a pool of water in front of us. The pathway and water both followed the wall to the left. We followed it, only pausing to deal with a few aggressive fish before the pathway turned a corner to the right. A short distance later the waterway formed another t-intersection and met with water coming from the opposite direction, and then continued moving together to the left. ¡°That was probably from the path and waterfall that we didn¡¯t follow,¡± Inda said. We just nodded and followed the water downstream. The vines gradually grew into a thicker web as we continued along. Vines descended in periodic flows of green from the ceiling, and white blossoms perfumed the air. The water was gradually becoming less murky, shading closer and closer to blue, and its smell was fading. Glimpses of other colors flashed through the water occasionally, hinting at other life dwelling within. After additional walking and even more ambushes, the water finally became clear enough to see through. The water here was deeper at least six feet, and the current had slowed down. Jellyfish swam through the water, a foot wide and three feet long. Each had a brilliant orange cap with a striped orange and clear protrusion dividing it in half. Below that several feet of pale orange tentacles drifted lazily through the water, as the jellyfish swam slowly against the current.
False Dawn Jellyfish
Myriad fish of different sizes and colors swam through the water. None of the ones that I identified had been monstrous so far. And below them, anchored to the bottom of the sewer, were stony cones that protruded large colorful fans into the water. The fans pulsed gently as they undulated with the current, the fans gently curling and retreating into the cone before they would reemerge once again. The anemones came with different names for the many varied colors. A red and white striped one was called a candy-cane anemone for some reason, though its shape had no resemblance to a cane. Other names made more sense and were self-explanatory, with names like: blood-drop fan, peeping fire, and verdigris gauntlet. The water eventually joined with two new channels that curved in from both sides. Each added more water, and the channel grew much broader to accommodate the extra flow, continuing to flow the direction we had been following it. Here the brick gave way to a natural cavern. The flow of water entered and followed the natural curve of the stone and out of sight. SSD 4.09 - Fish in the Water ¡°I fish to scratch the surface of those mysteries, for nearness to the beautiful, and to reassure myself the world remains.¡± - Carl Safina. ==Zidaun== The brick walkway ended shortly after it entered the cavern. Instead, we proceeded on a rough pathway that had been cut into the stone in the outermost curve of the cave. To our right the water flowed in a wide stream a usually less than fifteen feet across. The depth was variable, deepest in the center of the stream, extending past my ability to sense in entire sections. The shallower sections of the stream were crowded with grass and rushes. The slower flow ebbed through them and swirled around them. The lights here were in lessor repair. Cracks ran through the crystals, and had fallen in some places. The missing sections of crystal glowed with watery light from below the surface of the stream, illuminating the swarms of fish and the waving of underwater grasses. The less lit sections had less green growth, but bio-luminescent grass lit the cavern with an eerie blue glow from beneath the water. The anemone that had been so prevalent in the exit to the sewers had diminished. Now they only appeared in sections with slow but deep water. Their fans bobbed through the water in bright contrast to the green grass, like flowers in a windswept meadow. The vines were even more prevalent. The walls were coated in them, and they extended from sections of the ceiling to trail into the water, where fish nibbled at the tips. The sweet smell of their flowers had completely replaced the stink of the sewer. The only smells now the verdant richness of growing things and wild water. Moss grew with the same fecundity as the vines. The two types of moss we had seen so far coated areas of the wall beneath and around where the vines grew. The three shades of green made an ever-changing patchwork against the walls, a canvas for even more types of insect to swarm in riotous colors. The air was full of the sounds of insects and the gentle lap of water churning and lapping against its banks. The occasional fish jumped out of the water with a splash, attempting to eat an insect or other morsel. One particular fish was interesting, it would quickly rise to the surface near a wall and then turn sideways, flipping up its tail. Water would splash up and onto the wall in a small wave, usually managing to submerge and drag down any insects that were caught in its path. Its activities had obviously influenced its name.
Wave Maker
Traveling down this path we no longer encountered the plate-rodents, but did run into plenty of the cockroaches, vines, and the clamp jaw fish. We ran into a new enemy not far into the cave as we passed a deep pool next to the path. I could feel the concentration of mana in the pool, so I gave my warning. ¡°Unknown monster, pool ahead.¡± Gurek approached cautiously, and each of us scanned the rest of the cavern as well. Nothing jumped out at us, and the monster only emerged when Gurek was very close. Three dripping green lengths of water-grass rose sprung above the water in a sudden explosion of displaced water. Each one leapt out from a different direction, attempting to blur across and strike Gurek.
Whipping Water Weed Level 4
¡°Level four!¡± I said, my voice raised above the sound of the water and whips. Gurek retreated a step and parried two of the blows, his two blades slicing easily through two of the tendrils heading for him. The third his against his chest, bouncing off his barrier, before immediately trying to whip in again. He sliced through it and the remainder of weed¡¯s whips withdrew below the water. ¡°Dealing with it,¡± I said. I shifted the stone in the pool, wrapping around the weed with destructive force, until it popped and faded away. ¡°Okay, its dead.¡± I said. ¡°I hate damage type ambushes,¡± Gurek muttered. ¡°Yep,¡± I said, ¡°definitely a monster that is supposed to inflict as much damage as possible, rather than last a while.¡± This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it. Speaking of¡­ ¡°How is the damage?¡± ¡°Eh,¡± Gurek said, ¡°with the leather armor below I am not feeling any damage at all. I could feel the force behind the whip though. Moderate damage to someone at the appropriate level if they are unarmored.¡± About what I expected, but it was always best to double check. We soon ran into more moss groomers, but they were no longer mini-bosses. They proved able to run along the ceiling and the curved of the wall where the moss grew thickly. It proved an interesting encounter, though the narrowness of area near the wall as well as above the pathway proved to be as much a pain for it as it did for us. With the curve of the wall well within Gurek¡¯s reach, it was never able to get past him to attack the rest of us. When it showed nothing new other than running along the wall, it was soon dispatched. Additional encounters with other groomers added additional monsters. We ran into another new monster soon afterward. A large mass of mana in the water, already barreling toward us as it entered my range, barely gave me a change to shout a warning. ¡°Unknown, incoming!¡± A fish blurred through the water, its large body was five feet long and two feet wide. Red spots covered its tail, which we saw closely soon enough. As its charge brought it almost out of the water, it started to turn. Its broad tail rose up out of the water to smack into Gurek, smashing against his barrier and driving him a step backward.
Blood Dappled Wave Maker Level 5
¡°Level five,¡± I said. The fish had a long bleeding cut where Gurek had stabbed it while it attacked him, and one of Inda¡¯s knives flashed after it to thunk into the flesh. It still managed to retreat hastily back into the water, charging out of my senses. A moment later it was charging toward us again. ¡°Again,¡± I said. This time it didn¡¯t rise up out of the water. Instead it turned horizontally in the water, right by the shore. A pulse of mana accompanied its motion and a wave of water leapt out of the water, attempting to sweep us off our feet. I quickly sank the stone beneath each of us, stone firmly wrapping around our boots, keeping us stable in the face of the moving water. Each of us was soaked by the time the wave had passed and the fish was already out of my range again. It rushed back toward us. It targeted Inda this time, and it was obviously surprised when it struck against her dripping chest with no more force than the gentle tap of a pillow. It was even more surprised when Inda stabbed it with a knife and used it to leverage the fish out of the water and onto the pathway. It was dead a moment later as a knife went straight through its head. Inda¡¯s knives clattered to the ground as it disappeared. ¡°I hate getting wet,¡± Inda said through gritted teeth.¡± ¡°I¡¯ll take care of it,¡± I said, careful not to show Inda that I rolled my eyes. Our packs were waterproof anyway, and anything important got stowed away in there. I gently tapped into the dungeon¡¯s ability to manipulate the environment, summoning warm air and a breeze, circling it around each of us. ¡°That thing actually hits with decent force,¡± Gurek said. ¡°The real risk would be it managing to get someone into the water though.¡± I nodded. ¡°Best approach with something like this is just to kill it as soon as possible,¡± I said. ¡°It can turn the environment into a more dangerous weapon than its level would otherwise suggest. It was also the first monster I have felt actively manipulate mana.¡± We briefly discussed the monster and how it might be combined with other monsters later. A few minutes passed and the warm air had a chance to dry us each off. Once we were sufficiently dry Inda pulled out her map, making additions. Then she pulled out a piece of paper and sketched out the wave maker. We soon ran into more wave makers, but Inda met their pulse of mana with a pulse of her own. The monster¡¯s attempt to raise the water failed horribly when the water suddenly weighed far more than it normally would. The water just rose in a slight bump to the water¡¯s surface and then sunk back beneath, both magics fading away. Inda seemed to take a certain vindictive delight each time we killed one. The difficulty of the attacks gradually rose, until we were facing multiple level five monsters at the same time. They would have been much more difficult, except that Inda made sure the wave makers never had a chance to do anything again. She was making absolutely sure that she wouldn¡¯t get wet again. Obviously it was overkill, but no one was quite stupid enough to mention it while Inda had her knives at hand. I could see Gurek open his mouth to comment once or twice, but he always closed it again. It was always nice to see that Gurek¡¯s survival instincts could and would override his desire to tease Inda. I was sure there would be plenty of teasing once we got back to base. After Inda had a chance to take a nice hot bath and relax for a while. We had been traversing the cavern for some time, and each of us was starting to get hungry. Finally, I decided we should stop, and we broke to eat at the largest section of trail that I could find. It formed a little nook into the wall, reasonably defensive. I erected a stone barricade, a mesh of interweaving stone rising up until it met the ceiling. We could still see through it easily. None of the monsters we had encountered here so far should be powerful enough to damage the barrier. None of them should even be able to damage us much, but caution kept adventurer¡¯s alive. We sat down in a circle, each of us able to see over the shoulders of the others. We munched away on nuts, bits of meat, and fruit. It was actually really nice that the dungeon replenished our supplies of those every day. It let us eat far more of the fruit, which was both healthier for us, and tasted better. ¡°I wonder if any of the fish will be edible,¡± Gurek mused. ¡°We¡¯ll find out when the specialists get a chance to analyze everything down here,¡± Firi said, as he flashed a smile for a moment. ¡°Could eat some of those damn wave makers,¡± Inda muttered. I tried not to laugh, but I might have coughed. Gurek and Firi covered their mouths, smiles hidden away as their faces crinkled. After sitting for a few minutes, I felt a stir of mana in the walls. ¡°Backs against the barrier,¡± I shouted. We scrambled up, food dropped to the floor as hands reached for ready weapons. A door appeared in the wall. Beyond it I could sense the now familiar shape of a bathroom. ¡°False alarm,¡± I said, my exasperation tinging my voice. ¡°It¡¯s just another bathroom.¡± ¡°What is the dungeon¡¯s damn obsession with these things?¡± Gurek asked. I replied with perfect honesty, ¡°I have no idea.¡± We checked it out carefully, but it was a tiny little safe zone and just as safe as all the other bathrooms that we have dealt with. Naturally, we used it. We could take a hint. After that, we finished our late lunch. SSD 4.10 - Spiraling Down I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain. -Walter Benjamin ==Zidaun== With the conclusion of lunch I disassembled the stone barrier, and we continued deeper down the tunnel. The cavern continued to twist back and forth, its descent almost imperceptible. Waterfalls and streams of water added to the flow. The new water came in hot, the faint smell of minerals lingering in the air. The air filled with a slight haze of steam and mist. The green of the cave slowly gave way, more and more, to the luminous blue of glowing grass mixed with small pockets of illuminated water where the ceiling lights had fallen into the water. The lit up portions formed oases of green amid the pale phosphorescent blue. Sometimes the water was lit up in a large circle where the light had remained intact beneath the waves, and the light from below wavered with the motion of the water. In others, several small circles remained where the crystal had broken into chunks and then gotten embedded into the rocks and mud beneath. In others the crystal was missing entirely, or deep underwater caves had small sections revealed by small sections of light amid the gloom. Black moss grew in the gloom, its depths drinking in the light. From afar it looked like the walls were pockmarked with caves leading into inky darkness. As the cavern grew dimmer, different types of insects emerged as well. Small insects glimmered with their own internal light as they crawled along the walls. And the first flying insect I had seen emerged.
Glimmering Mana-Wings
They jumped up and out into the air from the walls, their bodies pale. And then they would sprout wings of mana, allowing them to glide across the cavern. The mana came in many colors. Red, blue, green, brown, and others. When many jumped together, the air filled with gently glowing sparks of light that drifted gently down and across the cave. Then they would land and glows would disappear once more, only for another trail of lights to appear elsewhere. The faint mist reflected and diffused the light slightly, making the whole tunnel dreamlike and out of focus. The monster attacks had not abated. The encounters had grown in number and difficulty, the narrow path not suitable for a number of tactics. For us, it was merely good practice, but I could see it being dangerous and exhausting for low level parties. It also had great potential to train them. Constant ambushes, increasing difficulty, a narrow path that forced party members behind the bulwark to adapt to dealing with melee, it all would prove very effective training. It hadn¡¯t been lost on me that each new monster that was introduced was a single encounter. I doubted the entire dungeon was this way, if only because I couldn¡¯t imagine how it would function in wide open spaces like the meadow outside the town. I did occasionally look at the deep underwater caves we were passing. I knew for sure that Inda was glad we weren¡¯t trying to explore those. If the dungeon wasn¡¯t so large and complex, we would be exploring them. Doing any underwater adventuring was always a challenge. I would need to trap air bubbles in stone and bring them below the water so we had area to breath. Then we would carefully go deeper and deeper, using one of Firi¡¯s blessings to keep the air fresh. And then we would deal with any monsters that were attacking us at the same time. It was a tedious and miserable process. I think Inda actually hated getting wet because of underwater exploration. Few things could crack her refined exterior like that. Fortunately, after lunch, she had become more agreeable again. She was very careful to avoid getting wet again though. Only the wave-makers were a concern for that. However, other monsters were difficult in other ways. Multiple whipping weeds attacking at the same time made it difficult to completely avoid getting hit. Actually, whipping weeds combined with any other monster made it difficult not to get hit by something. As long as the teams that came through here were prepared, and had at least decent armor, they would be fine. This section would definitely weed out anyone that wasn¡¯t prepared, however. And that was a good thing. Too many adventurers died because they overestimated their own abilities. I shook myself out of my thoughts. With sections this easy my mind was drifting off. Best to get ahead of that before it became a bad habit and got me or someone else killed. I focused back on the path, my senses tuned to all the life around us. Ahead of us, the cavern opened up, and yellow light gleamed in shafts pouring down through ceiling. When we reached it, we stopped and examined the area. The tunnel had expanded into an enormous bubble shaped cavern. The water of the underground river descended a series of tiered waterfalls until it reached a deep pool at the bottom of the cave. Above, the ceiling arched overhead, with cracks in the ceiling showing bright blue sky. Shafts of sunlight spilled from the cracks and reached down to the bottom of the cave, casting the cave in alternating sections of bright golden light and gloomy shadow. The deeper shadows were muted by the presence of pale blue light glowing in the depths. The path continued around the outside of the cave, spiraling around until it reached the level of the pond. A bridge led across the pond and to a relatively large island, about a hundred feet across, covered with a profusion of green plants. Past the island, another bridge let to an archway set into the stone of the wall. ¡°Beautiful,¡± I said, taking in the view. A few moments more and we continued on. The path here turned into a mix of stone and dirt, with grass and moss mixing underfoot and to the sides. The path was relatively narrow, only three feet across. To our left a crumbling cliff of packed dirt and stone rose upwards. A new type of vines climbed up the cliff in places, the vines were spindly and had tiny sections of leaves clustered together. To our right was a sheer drop down to the next level, about fifteen feet. The fall wouldn¡¯t hurt any of us if we jumped carefully, but it was better to take the proper path. Plate-rodents had shown up in this area again. They emerged from burrows in the rock and dirt, flinging themselves down on top of us. They were not a particular danger, usually Inda or Gurek would bisect them. Though when several jumped down at once, Firi and I were more than capable of dealing with them. By reflex I smashed the first one that jump out at me back upward and to the right. It sailed up into the air and made a parabolic curve down and over the cliff-side, missed the next level down and smashed into the level below that, some thirty feet below where we stood. It dissolved shortly after it hid the ground. After that my fist or Firi¡¯s golden shield would deflect them that way on purpose if there were too many. Occasionally one would survive and attempt to limp their way back to us. As soon as it entered my range I finished them with stone. Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original. The pathway was not difficult, the aerial assaults simply another type of attack that we had dealt with numerous times in the past. After that we dealt with a swarm of juvenile moss groomers, a dozen of them emerging from burrows in the cliff¡¯s face. Their light weight was able to hold onto the moss and vines of the cliff-side without issue. It continued like that, the ambushes and swarms growing in intensity a little at a time. Even with that the trip around the spiral was not difficult. It was slightly precarious in each waterfall section. The air was full of mist and the stone and dirt were damp and slick. We stepped on large rocks to cross the river, the water swirling around the stone several feet below before it fell over the edge to the next level. The stones were slick and mossy, making the crossing precarious. Soon enough we had reached the bottom of the spiraling path and the bridge leading to island. The bridge was made of tan stone, and small veins of dark brown ran through the stone in streaks. The bridge was a simple arched span of precisely cut, but unadorned, stone reaching over the water. It was twenty feet long, about seven feet wide, and had two short three foot walls keeping anyone from falling over the edge. The walls ended in slightly thicker square end posts on each side. ¡°I am guessing that we will either be facing a boss on the island or shortly afterwards,¡± I said. ¡°Take a look and let me know your thoughts.¡± We all examined the island for a while. ¡°The island is large enough that we are unlikely to face an entirely aquatic threat,¡± Inda said. ¡°Any monster would need to be able to reach the entire island from the waters surrounding it.¡± ¡°If something was in the water and had a ranged attack, that might be possible,¡± Gurek said. ¡°Something that would force us to come to it. Throwing rocks, cutting beams of water, and so on.¡± Firi frowned. ¡°I don¡¯t think we will face anything too far in that direction,¡± He said. ¡°So far the dungeon has been pretty consistent about incremental danger so far. More likely to face some kind of swarms, I think.¡± ¡°I agree,¡± I said. ¡°It is likely to involve a swarm in some fashion, just because we dealt with a lot of those getting down to here. If we battle on the island itself I think ambushes from above will be unlikely. If we face a boss inside a cave on the far side we might though. Anything else?¡± We waited for a moment, but there wasn¡¯t much to say. The dungeon had been uncommonly regimented in its approach to difficulty levels, but it also had far more variety of monsters and environments as well. We started to cross the bridge. When we got halfway I stopped us to give a warning. ¡°Pretty sure this will be the boss arena. I can sense a lot of whipping weeds at the perimeter of islands waters. Nothing too close to the bridge, but enough that approaching the water would be a challenge.¡± The others just nodded, their faces serious, and we proceeded. We stepped onto the island, the ground covered with short green grass. Small fruit trees grew here and there, red fruit ripe and ready to be picked waited on the branches. Small bunches of tall grass formed clumps, the grass waving in the slight breeze. The island had a slight rise towards it center, and we climbed up toward it. As we got half-way there we could suddenly hear loud squeaks ahead. We stopped and waited, our weapons ready. Suddenly a large monster appeared over the curve of the island.
Plate-Mouse Brood-Mother Level 8
¡°Level 8,¡± I said. The monster was six feet long and three tall, not including its long whipping tail. The black chitin of its form was glossy and seemed almost stretched over its generous form. It opened it mouth to scream at us, its large pale teeth sharp and incredibly sturdy looking. All around the island whipping weeds rose from the water, their whips poised at the ready. And, emerging from burrows near the shore, a horde of plate-mice appeared. They swarmed around the edges of the island, protected by their proximity to the weeds above them. I noted that the way to the bridge was carefully left open and unmolested. Even for an awakened dungeon¡­ this one was strange. The battle began as the brood-mother lumbered forward. Simultaneously a section of plate-mice charged forward in a small sward about two dozen strong. Gurek stepped forward, giving us a little more room to work with, his blades interposed between us and boss. ¡°Inda,¡± I said, ¡°crowd control.¡± Her only response was action. Firi stepped forward past her as she stepped to the back, keeping our healer in the center of the formation. A pulse of mana pushed forward from Inda. Between one moment and the next, the charging plate-mice lost contact with the ground. Their small pushes off the ground were sufficient to push them up into the air. There massively decreased weight led them float gently and uncontrollably into the air, their motion gradually slowing down. Before any of them had a chance to reach the apex of their ark, Inda was already there. The mice tried to snap at her, their motions sending them into uncontrolled spins. Her sabre bisected multiple mice on each pass, the arcs of her blade precise and controlled. Only a few seconds were needed to completely destroy the swarm. Gurek had not been idle. The charge of the brood-mother had been met with the flat of his blades and a gentle application of one of his skills, causing the monster to turn to the side. A casual swipe of his sword was enough to remove the tip of the boss¡¯s tail which came whipping toward him as it was forced past. My fist slammed into the side of the boss, causing the monster to be pushed several feet back. Plates of chitin had cracked from the impact, the natural armor insufficient to deal with even an unaugmented and light blow from someone of my level. The boss screamed again, and this time two groups of plate-mice streamed out to try and attack us. I wasn¡¯t particularly concerned, I just wanted to learn the patterns of the fight. ¡°Inda,¡± I said, ¡°one group.¡± I took care of the other group myself. The earth caved in beneath the mice of one group, the dirt easy to shift away. Then I compacted the dirt to the sides and brought it toward the center with crushing force. Inda was only moments slower. Firi sent out a blessing, golden light settling into our bodies, raising our mana regeneration. We wouldn¡¯t come even close to using it all in this fight, but it was standard protocol when a lot of crowd control was expected. If the monsters were higher level Inda and I would be burning through a decent chunk of mana to take care of them all. Gurek was playing with the boss. The flats of his blades smacked against it anytime it came too close, forcing it to the side. Every time it tried to whip him it lost another small section of its tail. When it got close enough to me I slammed my fist against it again, the chitin giving way and my fist plunging into the bloody flesh underneath. Blood sprayed out of the wound, the stream splattering against my clothes. The monster screamed again, and another two groups attacked us like last time. Nothing more to learn. ¡°Finish it Gurek!¡± I yelled. I destroyed a group of mice behind me and I stayed watching the front. Then the ragged boss got near Gurek again his blade lashed out, a faint shimmer of energy surrounding it. It pushed through the monster¡¯s head without any effort, killing it instantly. The mice that were still swarming the perimeter of the island retreated into their burrows, and whipping vines retreated below the water. A chest appeared on the center of the island. Once we waited for a moment, and nothing else happened, we gathered together to review the boss. We ignored the treasure for the moment, though Gurek¡¯s eyes flashed toward it longingly once or twice. The boss had been a relatively simple brute. The difficulty of the battle was in having the party split up to deal with other threats. A team needed a way to deal with the swarms and to keeping the boss occupied at the same time. The boss wasn¡¯t particularly fast, but it was moderately tough for its level. The fast little swarms of plate-mice would have a hard time doing real damage to anyone well equipped, but they could absolutely be a distraction. The whipping weeds were numerous enough that it was unreasonable to try to go and clear out all of the mice swarm, or to get near to the edge of the island. There was one strange thing. This boss, like the others we had encountered, didn¡¯t have a boss label. Maybe the dungeon didn¡¯t think these lower level encounters counted as real bosses? It was impossible to say for now. We went to go loot the chest. Gurek opened it with his usual glee. Inside were two objects. One was a small metallic sphere. On one side was the symbol for the sewers. On the other was a symbol I didn¡¯t recognize. It looked like a tree with a hole or archway at its roots.
Meadow Key Cannot Be Traded Outside Party¨C Cannot Be Stolen ¨C Temporary Binding ¨C Dungeon Bound
¡°Looks like the key we needed to get through the gates of the town,¡± I said. The other object was another necklace.
Amulet of Safety Cannot Be Traded Outside Party ¨C Cannot Be Stolen ¨C Dungeon Bound To activate pour in a small amount of mana. Upon activation, if the party is not attacked for three consecutive minutes, a small safe zone will appear with a bathroom. The safe zone will last for one hour, or until the entire party leaves the zone. Cooldown of four hours between uses.
More bathroom stuff. I just shrugged. We harvest the fruit from the island after testing if it was poisonous. The fruit was cammar; we had brought the dried version with us. The trees let us take a few dozen fruit before additional harvests dissolved into thin air. From there we moved over the bridge and through a small tunnel. It ended at a door with the number three on it. It was early evening, so we took the pathway back through the door and went back to base to sleep. SSD 4.11 - A History Writ in Stone and Fire Super Volcano: The Ticking Time Bomb Beneath Yellowstone National Park A shard was kept busy throughout the day observing Zidaun and his party. Other parts of me constructed new dungeon areas, expanded my aura, worked on breeding monsters, and examined what I could do with the runes and emblems. The aura expansion had proven interesting. It had taken a bit of time, but I had finally extended my aura up through the top of the mountain I resided in. The view was incredible. It was breathtaking; the rushing wind pushed against my avatar. The wind was merciless as frozen blades against my naked flesh, even with the thin air. If I truly there in the flesh it would have frozen me to the bone. The surrounding mountains were far below, their contours limned by the light of the horizon. I could see that the mountains ended to the north and south, though I could see nothing beyond them. To the west the mountains continued as far as I could see. To the east was something different. The slope of my mountain formed an almost straight line, heading forty-five degrees for several miles. And beyond that lay a valley. Mountains cradled the valley until it descended right into the sea. Off the coast, I could see additional islands that rose up in an arc containing the valley from the water. My mountain, combined with the mountains to the sides of the valley and the islands, formed an oblong ring. From where I was to the far side of the ring, was about twenty miles, and half of that was underwater. The size of the valley to the north and south was narrower, about ten miles where the valley met the water. The distinctive shape of the ring, the nearby valleys filled with volcanic stone, combined with the distinctive geothermal features underground led me to a single conclusion. I was staring at an enormous caldera. My dungeon abutted a sleeping super volcano. It wasn¡¯t as large as Yellowstone. I had a chance to visit there while I was on Earth. This caldera was enormous, but perhaps only a third or fourth as large. Maybe it was even less. Ultimately that didn¡¯t matter. What really controlled the strength of the volcano was the size of the magma chamber far below. It was possible I was reading too much into things. This could just be a volcano with an unusually wide magma chamber that was shallow. I didn¡¯t think so though. Looking at the surrounding mountains and the descent of the valley into the sea far far below¡­ I think the altitude drop here was actually much more significant than at Yellowstone. Which might mean that the magma chamber underground was much larger than its pure circumference would suggest. If that was the case¡­ This could be a stronger super volcano than Yellowstone. Even a weak super volcano could be very bad news for me, however. Not to mention anyone nearby... There was at least a slight bit of good news. The large amounts of volcanic material in the surrounding environment showed relatively little wear and tear on a geologic scale. From what I remembered about Yellowstone the eruption happened on a fairly long life-cycle. The land had plenty of time to heal, grow, evolve, and adapt between each eruption. So unless something there was something I didn¡¯t know, I should be safe for many thousands of years. It still freaked me out a little, but I wasn¡¯t too worried. I still started sending my aura in a straight line toward the ground under the caldera. I wanted to get a chance to measure the magma chamber for myself. Besides, since the rich mana had been coming up through various geothermal vents, I was fairly certain that magma rising up through the surface of the planet was the source. I wasn¡¯t certain how long it would take me to reach the chamber. It depended on how deep it was buried under the caldera. At most it should take me a week, though I was hoping for much sooner than that. My dungeon and aura had been continually expanding, and the sections of aura that I had made to follow the rich mana were several miles longer still. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. I had, at least, learned something interesting. I knew how the odd shape of my mountain had been formed. The last time the volcano went off an utterly enormous section of rock had been blasted up from the eruption. It was several miles across, slightly longer than it was wide, and ended with a jagged tip. The entire section of rock had flipped over and come to rest against an already existing mountain. Then vast quantities of lava and ash had blasted across the surface and glued the enormous rock and mountain together. This formed a much larger mountain. The rock where I stood was a part of the former caldera that had been blasted up and over and glued down. It should have been blasted to pieces. Millions of fragments should have been sent hundreds and thousands of miles. Instead, an enormous piece had remained intact and overshadowed a preexisting mountain. I wasn¡¯t sure how it was possible, but I was fairly certain of the cause. Brown¡­ something... had seeped into all the stone of the giant slab. I hadn¡¯t even noticed it in my aura until I started to focus on the stone to figure out how it survived. I tried to absorb it, but the stone dissolved and the brown substance dissipated into the air. The substance wasn¡¯t physical, and I couldn¡¯t manipulate, absorb, or store it. Well, that wasn¡¯t quite true. I could store a small bit of stone that was infused with the stuff, and it was stored as well. However, that didn¡¯t accomplish anything, and after I pulled it out of storage I was still unable to use it. There was a feeling to the brown substance that I could not describe. A¡­ fineness. A sense of purity and power. I had only seen one other thing like it. The lights in the room where Tam had summoned and imprisoned me. I had felt a dimmer echo of the feeling of purity when I sensed the lights. The brown mana made the stone it was infused with incredibly hard. I could manipulate it, but it required a ludicrous amount of mana. For now I only had one real idea for how I might be able to learn about it. I took large chunks of stone from the mountain and shoved them into my dungeon territory. I was hoping that as the ambient mana of the dungeon gradually washed over and through the stone, that it might change and become mine in some way. That was how I was able to absorb and clearly see all the animals and plants in my dungeon, after all. So it might work. Actually, I had one more idea how I might be able to use the stone, because something else interesting had happened. I had placed outcroppings of ore into sections of dungeon that I was working on. I figured ore might be something that people could get out of a dungeon. It could tell let it be harvested and regrow automatically like everything else, so why not. The areas were left wild and unrestrained while I was working on them, just in case any plants or animals developed in an interesting way. And they had. Plants near the ores had pulled the extra metal into them, changing in response. Metals gleamed as they coated the veins and ran in streaks along the bark. Vines and ferns gleamed with metallic hues. Bushes sprouted razor sharp metal thorns. And then animals came along and ate the plants. And the metal concentrated in the animals. On Earth, this would have killed the environment, and poisoned the animals as the metals became more and more concentrated, assuming their systems couldn¡¯t purge them. Here, with an application of mana and the guidance of a dungeon, the animals changed instead. Metal fangs, armor, and claws were the simplest of the changes that had occurred. Seeing this effect, I had spread automatically renewing outcroppings of every type of mineral I could produce in a new area with plants. The sheer variety of minerals and plants meant that the number of combinations was enormous. More than I actually had room to host. Large amounts of room had already been used to create my dungeon. I was actually just about out of room. I could sense the stresses across the rock in my dungeon, and I was not in any danger of a collapse. However, the amount of extra space I could get by hollowing out additional sections was minimal and would start to seriously stress the stability of the dungeon. I was cheating by making all the stone flawless where it was supporting parts of the dungeon. However, I could only hollow out so much before I ran into problems. Part of my planning also had to account for the type of people that entered my dungeon and their powers. Two different people, of the eight I had seen so far, had sensory abilities. That could easily be a much more common trait in scouting parties, and I would be shocked if it wasn¡¯t, but I still had to account for it. This meant that parts of dungeon needed to be far enough away from each other that they couldn¡¯t just see through the walls. The problem with that was I didn¡¯t know the limits of what was possible. So far I decided to overestimate and keep things at least three hundred feet apart. It was only a minor sacrifice anyway, considering the structural reinforcement needs of the dungeon. There were very few places that I didn¡¯t need to be at least that far anyway. And certain places, like the sewers below my ruined town, it didn¡¯t matter if those above could sense it. It was part of a continuous design. So this new material, energy, whatever it was, could be a big deal. If I had much stronger stone, I could hollow out far more space to work with. It was either that, or I would need to wait and expand my dungeon later. If I just had enough time, I should be able to continue to build some massive things. My experiments with the runes had been slow so far. Lots of little changes were made to the subtext, as well as experiments using my new understanding of the superscript. I had shards working on it. I hoped to get more done tonight, when I planned to look at everything I had learned all at once. Perhaps after I meditated, or possibly slept. It would be interesting to see if that was possible. I had dealt with staying awake longer and with less issues now that I had my avatar. Even it that was the only use I had gotten out of it, it would have been more than worth it. The new party of adventurers had been taking tests, nothing particularly surprising there. They were far more efficient about it, and since they knew what was coming they didn¡¯t hesitate. They just came in and did the test and then proceeded to the next one. They would probably finish tomorrow. I was curious to see how they would handle the dungeon, too. Zidaun and company had finished up dealing with my boss arena just a few minutes ago. It had gone well. They were holding back a ton. When they finally decided to act it was over in moments. Inda¡¯s power still itched at me strangely. I could sense a flash of something there, but I wasn¡¯t sure what it was. Between that, my experiments with the space runes, and the new brown energy that I couldn¡¯t grasp, I was fairly certain I needed to improve my aura sight again. I had assigned a shard to the task. When they entered the safe zone at the end, I got five survival points. Not all that much, considering that had been in the dungeon quite a bit longer this time. Still, I knew that the difficulty and danger that they faced was supposed to matter. They weren¡¯t exactly being challenged, so it wasn¡¯t too odd that I didn¡¯t get more for that. I wasn¡¯t certain, but I might have been getting most of my points for them simply because of their power. I wasn¡¯t certain how little I would get for someone at a lower level. Of course, there was a trade off there. A lower level party would be more challenged, so I might get more points for that. There was so much I still didn¡¯t know. Something flashed at the edge of my awareness. And it kept happening. I¡­ what was that? It felt similar to the earthquakes, but even more subtle. It was also much much faster, the changes only noticeable because of how far apart my entrances were and because it was constant. It was like the flex of the earthquakes, but it was hitting in lines that felt perfectly straight as far as I could tell. It was completely uniform over the whole of the dungeon, only noticed because the intensity fluctuated from moment to moment. Wait, Zidaun and the others had stopped. Zidaun was talking about something. I wasn¡¯t sure what they were saying, but I did recognize two words, ¡°Otga¡± and ¡°Shurum.¡± I went up to the top of the mountain, my avatar looking up at the heavens. The world was slightly brighter than I had seen earlier in the day. I looked toward Otga and Shurum, both of which were next to each other near the horizon. For a moment I didn¡¯t understand what I was seeing, but then I froze. Oh my god. SSD 4.12 - Assessing the Gravity of the Situation ¡°I like the cover," he said. "Don''t Panic. It''s the first helpful or intelligible thing anybody''s said to me all day.¡± ¨DDouglas Adams, The Hitchhiker''s Guide to the Galaxy ==Caden== To the south, the mountains glistened in snowy splendor. From my position, high atop the mountain I called home, I looked down at the other peaks, all at least a mile below. The shallow valleys between mountains were shadowed and filled with even more snow. Above the mountains, close to each other, were the sun, Shurum, and Otga, which I had only truly identified now. Shurum no longer looked like simply a perfect white circle. A strand of glowing gas trailed off of it, to where it was just starting to wrap into the red ring of Otga, the black hole. The. Black. Hole. That somewhat diffuse red ring was its accretion disk. Some part of my mind had considered the possibility, but then rejected it, when I first saw Otga. A binary system with a star and black hole shouldn¡¯t be stable enough. The world shouldn¡¯t have survived long enough to produce life, especially with Otga feeding off of Shurum. My mind stopped for a moment¡­ I hadn¡¯t known about dungeons at the time. What if dungeons helped jump-start life on the planet? Evolution, as I had known it, had taken about four billion years to develop humanity. However, things were different in a dungeon. The level of mutation a dungeon could produce was staggering. A single organism could change over the course of a day in ways that might take normal mutation thousands of years. Not to mention incorporating metal and mana in ways that I had never seen evolution do. Actually, wasn¡¯t there some kind of iron snail that lived in the ocean near volcanic vents? I mentally shook myself; I was getting distracted. There was substantial evidence that the planet had survived long enough to be molten, cool down its crust, and have life spread across the surface. The time required just for the cooling crust and adding oxygen to the atmosphere was in the hundreds of millions to a billion years. The areas that I had left completely alone, except to let the dungeon mutate them, already had balanced ecosystems. Those areas actually evolved substantially slower. There were no problems that the mutation could fixate on. Instead, small incremental changes happened as one organism changed, and then the other organisms adapted in response. Slow was relative in this case, but it made a good baseline if I wanted to consider what evolution might look like in a normal dungeon. I thought about the two ecosystems I had been exposed to, the sewers and the snowy landscape outside of them. Neither of those seemed as ridiculously aggressive and over-the-top as what was inside of my dungeon. Hmm¡­ there was something I hadn¡¯t tried before. I had vast areas of aura that I was not doing anything with. Mostly I was waiting for the dungeon to expand and convert them. I started creating small environments in that unused aura, taking as much care as I could to ensure that they were balanced. Each environment had clear crystal boundaries. I placed plants and animals into each one, as well as anything I thought they would need to survive, including lights. After everything was ready, I withdrew my aura from the environments. I felt a reflexive protest from Exsan. Nothing verbal, my aura just quivered for a moment and tried to recapture the area it had lost. I kept it clear of aura while I reached out to him. Exsan? You there? There was no response, my messages to him felt muted. He had been unusually quiet, even for him, after the entrances were connected. I assumed he was doing something, though I had no idea what. Yet another thing to worry about later. After a few moments of struggle with the aura, Exsan stopped fighting me, allowing me to clear it away. Unfortunately I would need to observe the environments with my avatar, since only it could see outside my aura. Well my core could, but I didn¡¯t feel like moving my core to keep track of the experiment, even if it could leave the dungeon. This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source. That brief pause to contact Exsan had snapped me out of my thoughts. I was panicking, which meant I needed to deal with that. So I had a conversation with myself, one shard taking the devil¡¯s advocate, and the other being allowed to panic. The first question, was if anything had actually changed. The part of myself that wanted to panic pointed out that, in fact, something truly fucking major had indeed changed. There was a black hole devouring part of the sun in the sky. It hadn¡¯t been doing that yesterday. The calm voice of myself responded by pointing out that it was a black hole yesterday too, we just weren¡¯t aware of it. The panicking voice was petulant. It knew now, so it should be able to panic. The calm voice didn¡¯t disagree. I was allowed to panic. Failing to acknowledge emotions or just suppress them was almost always unhelpful. Something to be done in an emergency if needed, but otherwise it was a very bad idea. The panicked shard continued. It wanted to find out how long evolution that taken, how stable the system was, how long until everything was utterly destroyed as a result. The calm shard pointed out that we knew the system had been stable for a very long time. At minimum, we probably had thousands of years to figure out how to deal with the problem. We might still have more than a billion years. We didn¡¯t actually know how stable the system was. And not knowing made the panicked voice freak out. Well what can we do about it, asked the other. This made the panicked voice pause. It wasn¡¯t sure what they could do. What are the worst circumstances that you think might happen, asked the calm shard. The other took a moment before listing off possibilities: The sun could go nova if it was unbalanced enough, though the panicked side admitted that was less likely since things had been pretty stable. The sun absolutely could have some very violent solar flares as a result of matter being drawn off of it. The black hole would likely form jets from all the new matter swirling into it. We could be hit by the jet. The tidal forces from the flux of gravity between the star and black hole could make the planet far more volcanically active than normal, and we are on the edge of a super volcano. The response to most of these was the same. The calm voice pointed out that truly violent flares, beyond what we would survive so deep underground, would sterilize the surface. Since people had come into the dungeon, we could assume that wasn¡¯t the case. Lesser flares could happen, but they obviously were not destroying everything. We should be fine. The same was true for getting hit with a jet. The gamma rays would sterilize the planet. No idea if we would survive, since we were made of crystal, but since life was around, the odds were very low. Whatever orbit we were in, it kept the planet out of the jets. The last objection was not so easy to overcome. We were next to a super volcano, and if it went off we would feel it. It could blow up the mountain we were currently in. The solution to that was simple. We expand the dungeon much farther, we bury our core as deep as we can, we strengthen the dungeon, and we find out everything possible about about the volcano. We were already doing those things, except for two. The two voices ceased to be as I focused. I had some new goals. I was already learning what I could about the volcano, but a couple of shards were taken off of evolution duty to expand aura toward various locations below ground. I needed to learn more. My core was currently much closer to the top of my dungeon than the bottom, that needed to change. I would need to move entire other sections through the stone as I burrowed the tunnel needed to move my core from where it was now to far below. Fortunately I didn¡¯t need to make a large tunnel through the rest of the stone, but I did need to carefully wind the tunnel around the rest of my dungeon. At least this extended my core¡¯s defenses, just in case I was overreacting. As for strengthening¡­ I had ways to do that. I had ignored them because they were likely to be slow, and my dungeon was expanding fast enough that just waiting would deal with my space issues. Firstly, I could strengthen my entire dungeon by running veins of metal throughout the entire superstructure. Steel was the strongest and most durable metal I had at the moment, but if that changed I could replace it with something else. In addition to that I could condense all of the stone in my superstructure as well. It would require condensing the stone, then creating more stone in the new empty space. And then I would need to repeat that process over and over. The rigid nature of the stone should work in tandem with the steel running through it. Just like how rebar made concrete stronger. I started to set up the programming needed to do that. Fortunately there was no reason I had to do it manually. So I had no reason to hold off. I would keep the steel out of the dungeon areas adventurers would be running through. It would be buried at least 20 feet into the walls. Someone might see it, but that was less important. The condensed stone, though, would come right up to the edges. It would start after only three feet into the walls. If I ran into any problems, I would adjust that later. It took a moment, but the automatic settings were dealt with a moment later. Stone would compress and form a hollow, then steel would be placed into the gap. More steel would branch off as more stone was compressed out of its way. The steel would run through the stone like human blood. Large arteries of steel with branching veins would then branch further into tiny capillaries. Nature was often a good inspiration for this kind of thing. After an area was full of as much steel as it was going to get, the remaining stone would be condensed, and then the process would repeat elsewhere. I set it to run, and turned off the automatic creation of mana crystals. My available mana stayed steady, and I had hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of mana in storage. My ambient mana fell off a cliff, however. Vast sections of stone moved and were filled with steel, the stone itself changed to be stronger moments after. Mana twisted through my aura and the world, streams of it converging to change the nature of my dungeon. More and more mana was poured into the change. The amount of material that was created and changed boggled the mind, but compared to the total size of the dungeon, the amount of was minuscule. Entire cubic miles of material needed to be dealt with. I watched the progress for a time, checking the progress. The amount of ambient mana in the dungeon was tiny now, and that had substantially slowed down the growth and evolution of creatures. Still, even with my dungeon expanding, I expected my entire dungeon to transform in a week. If I didn¡¯t have such a rich source of mana nearby, doing this would take far longer. Ironically, I was fairly certain that source of mana was the volcano, the same thing that I was trying to protect myself from right now. A week felt like a long time with how much I was getting done, but it was nothing in the grand scheme of things. It would just delay my ability to do some things for a while. And there was one other way that I might be reinforce my dungeon. Runes and emblems. I had actually been learning quite a bit about them. The mana required to use them to support my dungeon was even more staggering though. I was putting everything I was learning together, so maybe that would help. SSD 4.13A - Authority 11 And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord. And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: 12 And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. 1 Kings 19 ¨C King James Bible ==Caden== Some Adar come into the dungeon an just dropped a book into my altar. The book, blazing with power to my mana sight fell into the bowl, triggering a prompt which I immediately opened.
Would you like to absorb: Skill Book: Merchant Tongue (Northern Hemisphere: West) Potential Skill Level: 10 Yes? No?
I didn¡¯t hesitate for a moment after I read the title. I was finally going to learn how to talk to people properly. Finally, I had an opportunity to learn the language. Who would have guessed that someone would just bring something that would teach it to me? Honestly, if I had known I probably would have invested a lot of my attention elsewhere. Oh well, not like I could do anything about it now. The language washed over me in waves, each one drawing me deeper and deeper into a new world. A world of language and connections. Time passed without notice, my whole world a torrent of knowledge. The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. Somewhere along the way I felt a brief instinctive acceptance and another language began to seep into my brain, the language of the Adar. It was a language of secrets, the whole language built upon cyphers and changing context clues. For a time, which I couldn¡¯t measure, the whole world was lost to me. Eventually I woke up, the insistent pinging of the system doing its best to play percussion in my head.
Congratulations! You now have the skills: Merchant Tongue (Northern Hemisphere: West) IX (Language) Adar Cant IX (Language)
Congratulations, you have unlocked an accomplishment! Improbable Acquisition You integrated two language skill books at the exact same time. Generally this isn¡¯t recommended, but you do you! Seeing as you survived, here is a little something. Calculating additional factors¡­ +One of the languages is a secret language, not available to most +Already understands two other languages, including the language of magic +Was given gifts to facilitate communication without the knowledge or ability to ask for them +Low Level +In possession of a unique language as the only speaker Error¡­ Attempting automatic resolution¡­ Unable to resolve error. Sending query to higher authority¡­ ¡­ Initial analysis performed, error from extra-dimensional origin¡­ Automatically queuing in appropriate authority level. Please wait¡­ Authority level not found¡­ Checking higher authorities¡­ Not Found¡­ Not Found¡­ Not Found¡­ Not Found¡­ Not Found¡­ ...(Skipped 5,848,435 redundant messages) ¡­ All appropriate authority missing¡­ Performing dimensional scan¡­ Only one extra-dimensional entity found¡­ Assigning maximum authority to user: Caden...
And that was how I became god. Happy April Fools Everyone! SSD 4.13 - Simply Enchanting It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself. But Rincewind always thought it looked a sort of greenish-purple. Terry Pratchett ==Caden== Every time I learned something new, I went back to look at Tam¡¯s work. I had heard stories of professional painters doing the same thing. They continually studied the works of past masters, seeing what they could learn from them. Tam was absolutely a master at working with runes. I had only just learned about how the superscript functioned from my increase in skill level. I had known all the strange lines, zigzags, and curling lines of script had to mean something, but now I could actually interpret some of them. The subscript connected to individual pieces and modified their interpretation. There were a few cases where a subscript could modify the entire framework, like telling the entire system to be interpreted in three dimensions from a two dimensional representation. However, that was not its primary purpose. The superscript was all about modifying other runes, whether that meant the neighboring runes, or the entire system. Like so much of rune work I had studied, it was highly contextual. I had always assumed that Tam created the folerth circles on the floor as a simple marking for where an effect was supposed to go. They did that, but Tam also used them as the baseline for the entire rune. Every rune in the emblem that created a force-field and prevented the floor from being messed with was oriented towards the nearest circle. The circle was used like lines on a college ruled piece of paper; it aligned the text. This mattered because tilting a rune altered its meaning in the superscript. Generally, the system assumed that the runes in an emblem were all oriented in the direction of the starting rune. That rune could not be modified in the superscript unless a different orientation was defined for the system. So he achieved multiple purposes by using the circle: to indicate boundaries, to tell the system how to interpret the orientation of the runes, and it let him alter the starting rune. I could see why this was important now. Once directions had been put into place for one system, Tam used the superscript to define where the effects were to go. He didn¡¯t need to put a second circle on the ceiling and tell the system to affect everything between the two. He could use one on the ground, with some slight modifications to the runes, to achieve the same effect. Looking at what he had done, I could probably take the three dimensional runes used to operate the teleport tube and replace all of them with a single circle and some small runes on one end of the tube. The compact nature of the runes would save on material and the mana needed to activate it. I couldn¡¯t interpret all of Tam¡¯s use of the superscript, any more than I could fully understand anything else he had done, but I did understand the basics of other patterns that emerged. All of Tam¡¯s work was done with pure folerth. I could see hints buried in the runes that showed subtext and superscript performing the same roles as the alloys that I had just learned about. Apparently, using pure folerth was better or more convenient in some way. Gold and silver seemed to be quite a bit cheaper than folerth, so I wasn¡¯t sure why he bothered. Hopefully, I would learn one day. The beam rune, which had caused me so much trouble, had a switch in it. This was the thing that had been bugging me about it. The switch was composed of two runes, each at a forty five degree angle to the other. One rune lifted the orientation of the beam slightly, and the other lowered it. And they remembered that orientation because of the constant mana cycling through them in a self perpetuating cycle. So Tam had simply pushed a tiny amount of power into one of the runes and it had lifted the beam rune off the floor. Obviously he had planned for the fact he might want to put runes into the floor. The emblems that had locked my aura in place had simple switches to turn them into an active and passive mode, too. If I was understanding the passive rune correctly however, it would have attached to the end of my aura, like before, but still let me grow my aura. I wasn¡¯t sure what the purpose of those were. If I had to guess, knowing what I did about Tam, they were meant to measure something. Probably how much mana went into growing my aura or something. I spent quite a bit of time looking at the feeder he had created, too. It was one of the simplest emblems he had created. It only had a few components. First was the part that drew mana out of the mana crystal at the bottom. I noted that the repeated uses had not harmed the mana crystal at all. According to what I knew so far, it should have. Obviously Tam¡¯s runes were good enough to skip that problem. The next part was very simple, the mana was drawn up at a constant, slow, rate to fill the mana crystal above. Actually, while it was simple in execution, I wasn¡¯t quite sure how he made that transmission so slow. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. The next part actually inserted mana into the mana crystal. I fully understood this one piece. The next part had several functions working together. A timer, a switch, and a release. The timer was one of the pieces I was most interested in. I could program most things in the dungeon to have properly timed responses without too much difficulty. If I wanted a wheel of blades to turn at a specific rate, all I needed to do was direct the axis to turn and create the timing. And then I could go back and alter it at any time. Emblems were more finicky. In fact they tended to explode. I was figuring out how to make switches from the many different examples, but that simply turned something on and off. Useful if I needed to create some types of traps and constant effects. I could have it turn off after it was activated once, etc¡­ However, if I wanted effects to appear with a regular timing, I couldn¡¯t do that with an emblem yet. I didn¡¯t have any particular uses for emblems that could do that yet, but I was sure I would. Also, I would love to figure out the timer well enough to make something engage truly at random. That could make so many things far more interesting. I was also hoping to learn more practical runes. For now, I was messing around with space. I had created a number of copies of the original teleportation tube design. I had removed the runes that assigned an identity to the packet, but otherwise I had left them exactly the same. When I activated one with a small bit of paper inside it, the paper would vanish, as would any air inside the canister at the time. A few minutes later, they would reappear in the same place that they had disappeared from, even if the tube had been moved. With quite a large number of experiments running simultaneously, I ended up with lots of paper raining down amid puffs of air. If something was occupying the space now, whatever was teleported away previously moved to an unoccupied space upon its return. Except for air, which didn¡¯t count. That made me test with objects appearing into water. That didn¡¯t work. Maybe it worked with air because it was so easy to compress? I supposed it was good that it worked with air at least, otherwise everything would get shuffled away into the nearest vacuum. Most of the time I assumed that would be in orbit somewhere. It wouldn¡¯t actually be all that hard for me to set up a vacuum chamber¡­ Eh, something to think about later. I could feel when things popped in and out of space. It only lasted for a moment, but I was a bit amazed that something in me could sense it at all. Dungeon cores had amazing senses, even if it seemed we had to refine individual abilities to make them useful. The way that the canisters worked, for the moment, was by creating a burst of teleportation and then burning out. What if I created something a little different? I made the entire teleportation emblem out of folerth. I tweaked the emblem and altered the tube a bit, making it very strong but not as air tight as the others. If this worked a lot of air would be flowing through it. I expected my first attempt to fail, but I¡¯d learned quite a bit from my experiments and the increase in skill level. It worked perfectly on the first try.Air rushed into the tube, a steady vacuum creating a howling vortex around it. I could feel that space was continuously being altered. I couldn¡¯t see or feel anything specific, but it was like getting goosebumps. Just a feeling of otherness. A few minutes later the vortex ended and air began to flow out. Since I had kept the tube in the same place, space twisted oddly for a moment. The space there tried to constantly teleport matter into and out of the same volume of space. A moment later, apparently the spacial forces fell out of balance. There was¡­ I hesitate to call it an explosion. A large amount of air teleported in at the same time that the canister and some surrounding stone disappeared from existence. The air expanded rapidly in a concussive wave. Technically, I think that makes it an explosion, but it wasn¡¯t all that strong. I could get a much stronger explosion by causing an imbalance in an emblem. The tube reappeared in the air a few minutes later, along with the stone that had accompanied it. It was still red hot and I absorbed it quickly before it exploded from melting runes or spacial anomalies. It really was a miracle I hadn¡¯t blown myself up when I was messing with Tam¡¯s emblem and popping out entire runes. I shuddered to think of how careless I was being at the time, even if I didn¡¯t understand that then. There had to be some powerful safeguards that prevented an explosion in Tam¡¯s runes for that emblem, but I hadn¡¯t found them yet. Not terribly surprising, I still had a ton to learn about it. And apparently, the precautions on the canister were not sufficient after I modified it like I had. I would either need to make a switch for it, move the canister while it was in continuous use, or figure out a way to teleport to somewhere else. I had been thinking about that quite a lot. Teleportation was one of the more useful abilities I could gain. Even if I could only teleport objects into empty air. That was actually a rather nice restriction, too. It prevented me from killing things by accident. For now, I needed to mess with teleportation some more. I had been wondering why the canisters had a section that prevented them from being searched. If all the action of receiving a teleported packet happened in a second emblem, why was that section even necessary? And that section was made with a bit of folerth. It retained a tiny bit of mana even after a tube was expended. It implied that the transfer of the teleportation packet had to be at least a little bit of a two way street. There were sections of the tube that I didn¡¯t completely understand yet, I assumed this function was inside of those. So that meant teleportation to the identifier might work, assuming it was close enough. I started by just inscribing the identifier onto a nearby wall, and then activating one of the standard teleportation tubes. The piece of paper inside it teleported as normal. A few minutes later it appeared exactly where it had teleported from. A failure. My next thought was that it might be searching for mana. Not an unreasonable thing to search for. By not searching for mundane material, it would presumably be able to cover a much wider range. That proved a failure as well. The next test was an obvious extension. I made an emblem with the identity sequence, and a simple activation rune. The same logic that applied to ignoring ordinary matter could be applied to mana as well. There was quite a lot of mana, in random patterns, everywhere. An emblem was much rarer, and I hadn¡¯t seen any of those show up in nature yet. I set up another teleportation tube once the very simple emblem was ready. I activated it. The were two pops of displaced air, instead of the usual one. Air and a message disappeared from the tube, and reappeared in midair next to the identifier on the wall. Success! SSD 4.14 - The Alloyed Truth ¡°Do not consider that to be wealth which is hoarded away, for how is it better than sand gathered from the nearest heap? Nor that which comes in from men who groan at their taxes: for the gold that is wrung from tears is of base alloy and black.¡± -Apollonius Of Tyana ¡°I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was poured a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of my mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the noise of my contemporaries.¡± -Henry David Thoreau ==Caden== I hadn¡¯t only been working on teleportation, though it was my most significant accomplishment with emblems. Another shard had been busy with everything else that I had learned. I had been holding off on absorbing the small enchanted stones given to me by Zidaun a few days back. Mainly because I had taken the time to analyze them and still felt like something was missing. They were made of a single rune, with a tiny bit of subscript describing exactly how that rune should take effect. One type produced heat, and I had several of those. And I had a single one that produced light. However, either enchantments worked differently in some way, or there wasn¡¯t enough information to make it run as it did. I had watched Zidaun and his party turn these off and on, but there was no trigger. There was no mana accumulation rune either, but since I could pour mana into them manually, I assumed others could probably do the same. I hadn¡¯t seen anyone do that with their enchantments, but since I provided plenty of light and heat, they hadn¡¯t needed to either. They would eventually deal with some dark environments, but that would come later. I had hoped to learn more from leveling up, but it hadn¡¯t happened. They were so simple that I felt like I understood the rune on them completely. However that rune didn¡¯t make sense in context. So I took the time to absorb one. There was something there, but a single one left it hazy. So I absorbed another. It snapped into place. I hadn¡¯t worked with enchantments at all until now, but I could see how they were made. Instructions were placed into them at the time of their creation. That included an instruction for when they were supposed to turn off and on. An array of options appeared in my head. They could turn on and off in response to almost anything, as long as you knew the right command. Light level, temperature, proximity, people in general, a specific person, verbal commands, switches, internal power levels, the list of possibilities went on and on. The only instruction I learned was how to specify a response to a verbal command, because that was how these ones had been made. That information also made it clear that something else was interpreting all of this. I had already been fairly sure, but the level of complexity of the commands did not get anywhere close to what was needed. Computers had needed vast amounts of training to learn how to respond to voices for the most basic things. And computers still had trouble understanding what a person was. So, for this system to simply take in a command and then be able to distinguish people wasn¡¯t possible, unless much more was going on in another system behind the scenes. And that made sense. The system that I used for my status screens seemed very simple at times, but it was correctly interpreting my thoughts and actions in real time. And it was even personalizing my specific interactions with the system. Not to mention it created new material when it ran into something it had never seen before. All of my messages were in English. And I had gotten my first notification only a short time after arriving in this world. So it figured out my language in that time. Whatever was running the system needed to be vastly complicated. Assuming, of course, that it wasn¡¯t simply part of how this universe worked. I couldn¡¯t know for sure. Regardless, the knowledge of the ritual was good to have, but essentially useless. I needed to move and talk to enact it, in addition to moving mana in a certain way. Unfortunately my avatar was no more able to move mana than my core. I could move mana using my aura, but it lacked the cohesiveness I had seen when Tam was working. I suspected that I was missing at least one skill, but more likely two. The first skill was just to make and move mana in a specific manner for spell casting. I suspected that there was a specific spell related to the ritual as well. There could even be more skills related to specific parts of the ritual. A skill for chanting, another for waving around the arms, another to move the mana to the correct place, perhaps there was even another language skill for chanting. I didn¡¯t have a verbal component to the language of magic. It was possible that it didn¡¯t have one and each language made up names for each symbol related to what they did. However, I had part of a chant in my head now. It wasn¡¯t any language I spoke, but I understood what parts of it meant. It felt very familiar to the structure of the runic language. So it was possible that I was actually missing the verbal half of the language. My avatar might be able to qualify for doing the gestures and chant, if I gained what else I needed. Hell, for all I knew, I might be able to make a statue wave its arms and chant. That might qualify too. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. I had no use for the remaining enchantments. I knew the runic components already. I absorbed the ones that remained Small details of the chant and motions clarified in my mind. Subtle motions and intonations that would make the ritual more efficient went into my mind. And from the light rune I received a slight variation of the chant. I could tell that a different person had made it. They had made it slightly more efficiently than the heat runes in most ways, though I could see ways to join the two methods to be better than either was on its own. Maybe once I could speak to people I could start an enchanting school. All I would need was an example of their work to tell them what they needed to do better. Which was funny, since I wasn¡¯t capable of doing it myself. Those that can¡¯t do, teach. I snorted; I was literally the embodiment of that phrase. I had learned something immediately useful from this, however. If I used folerth to conduct the mana in conjunction with a switch, activation rune, and a mana accumulator, I could create a new type of light. This type, like the one made by the dungeon, would run off of ambient mana. After doing some testing, I had realized that mana crystal lights did as well, but they were far more efficient than what the dungeon generated normally. I would need to test what the emblem lights were like. So I started to do that. Even if they proved to be less efficient than my original dungeon lights, I had places I would use this new type. I could make some very precise adjustments with the runic subtext. I could make a light dimmer or brighter, change the color, specify a cone of light, even make it cycle through different colors. I didn¡¯t know the full commands for that last one yet, but I could see enough to know it could be done. Just getting a very precise cone or beam of light would be useful enough on its own. I had needed to make very powerful lights and use mirrors to direct the light when I wanted that effect before now. The mana crystals were great for most lights, but their efficiency declined when making things very bright, because the crystal started to go opaque as well. So light from back portions of the crystal had a harder time reaching the front to shine out. And even with mirrors the center of the crystal couldn¡¯t get light out. I made my crystals hollow to compensate, but it didn¡¯t scale up as well as I liked. Getting very precise colors was even better. I could, and did, mix and match colors by altering and combining colored crystals. However, the light started out white, so I was inevitably losing part of the brightness there, and very specific shades could be difficult. I was lucky, since I could precisely recreate any shade I had made or found, but even so, it wasn¡¯t perfect. I had a feeling that, if I was careful enough, I could use the emblems to specify exactly the wavelength of light that I needed. Not in a numerical way, but in an analog manner, slowly learning the exact tuning needed. Fortunately, I should be able to save and apply those exact changes by absorbing them as well. If I needed to manually recreate everything, it would take me forever. I was glad I didn¡¯t only generate randomly too though. There were options to make a random dungeon floor, and I had tried it. They were awful, and boring. A random assortment of connected rooms and hallways, filled with monsters. All the monsters were about the same level of difficulty, borrowed from the monsters I had available. There was little variety anywhere, and the rooms did not seem to fit with each other. The ceilings were of mismatched heights, the doorways were the same style for the same hallway, but turn a corner and the next one would all be different. I had walked through it in my avatar, and everything felt wrong. It felt like a machine had designed it. A machine that had no idea it was supposed to be consistent. I could have fixed it, but I could do better myself, so I didn¡¯t bother. I had just removed it and decided to make my own. I still used the randomization functions, but I made sure to give very clear directions for what I wanted. And after that was done I went in and personalized the details. After testing out the emblems I discovered that they were operating at a level that was very similar to the mana crystal. They were lightly less efficient for a generic white light. However, for any kind of color, or for anything intensely bright, they were much more efficient. I made a few of the models I would need and put corrections into the dungeon. My countless tiny colored stars in the starlight grotto would be replaced by emblems, though the white ones I left alone. I set the instructions to replace them one at a time. With the very small amount of mana I had available it would take most of a night. However, the lights in the grotto would be more efficient after that. Also the old mana crystals would be put into storage to be placed elsewhere. For the moment, I was trying to be as efficient as possible. I had messed around with the folerth alloys earlier. The ones using silver and gold were easy enough to make. The fastest alloy was a fifty percent mix of both gold and folerth. The speed declined back to the baseline for folerth as the percentage of gold in the mix declined. The speed of the mana transfer didn¡¯t increase after the gold rose above fifty percent. And, at any amount above fifty percent, the metal started to heat up. At fifty-five percent the metal started to heat up and then glow when it was used continuously. I let it run to see what would happen, and it exploded when the metal got hot enough to deform. If I didn¡¯t have a much more efficient heat rune already, I could have used this to heat something up. I suspected that if I placed it underwater, the water would keep it cool enough to keep functioning. A similar thing happened with the silver. Fifty percent was the cutoff again. The speed of the mana transfer slowed to almost nothing at fifty percent silver. Above that level of silver and the metal started to heat while it was in use. I tried adding in additives to see what would happen. Any significant amount of additives and the rune would simply explode, sending hot metal shrapnel everywhere. I could add in 0.1% of something that wasn¡¯t folerth or one of the other metals, by volume, before the rune would explode. The additions didn¡¯t add to the performance of the rune. I tried electrum to see what would happen. I started with a fifty-fifty mix of silver and gold combined with an equal amount of folerth. It created something odd. It would absorb mana up to a certain point and then push all that mana through at once. It was a capacitor. I messed with the different ratios to see what I would get. After some experiments I discovered how it worked. Folerth determined how much mana the capacitor would take, gold determined how fast mana would fill the capacitor, while silver determined the time between discharges. I wasn¡¯t quite like an electrical capacitor, since it would discharge whether it got to a threshold level of mana accumulation or not. It would also stop absorbing once it reached the maximum amount of mana it could hold. If I used a large amount of folerth, it was entirely possible to have an alloy that would always discharge well before it could achieve its maximum storage. And this alloy let me go as low as twenty percent folerth before it started to heat up and have issues. So it acted less like a capacitor and more like a repeating timer in some ways. I only had a few other pure materials that I could combine with folerth. Iron and folerth simply exploded. Sulfur and folerth didn¡¯t just explode, it produced a yellowy metal that produced a large hot and fiery explosion as soon as mana started to run through it. It stank of brimstone as well. Chlorine made the folerth very brittle, and it didn¡¯t so much explode as crack into thousands of tiny pieces with the barest amount of mana. All the elements I had access to reacted in similar ways, except for one. Copper and folerth were strange. When a concentrated stream of mana entered an alloy of the two, ambient mana pushed away from the alloy. The speed of the mana inside the alloy didn¡¯t change, but ambient mana avoided it. If the ambient mana collector was nearby, then the rune would flash on and off as it used up its mana without being able to refresh it, and then absorbed more when mana stopped flowing through the copper alloy. I could use this to store mana in a container lined with copper-folerth alloy, but I already had plenty of ways to store mana. Maybe I could use it repel spells? I was still working on combining folerth with mana crystals. I knew that they could combine somehow, but I didn¡¯t know how. Simply lining the exterior of a mana crystal with folerth wasn¡¯t enough. Using thin sheets of each material in alternating leaves didn¡¯t work either. Nor did powdered mana crystal inside folerth. Tiny specks of folerth inside a mana crystal worked no better. The problem was that unlike a metal alloy, I couldn¡¯t just create a pattern with specific percentages of each. The mana crystal was more complex with a very specific molecular structure. And I couldn¡¯t just combine the two haphazardly. I could take the structure from a mana crystal and impose it on folerth, so the metal was aligned in the same pattern, but that just produced structurally weak folerth. It had no other special properties. It was entirely possible that a standard enchanter would hand the job of combining them off to a master smith. Actually¡­ I might be able to do something with that. SSD 4.15 - A Tempest in a Teapot ¡°It was very dark; but in the murky sky there were masses of cloud which shone with a lurid light, like monstrous heaps of copper that had been heated in a furnace, and were growing cold.¡± - Charles Dickens ==Caden== Before now, I had only done a little smithing. I had been using wood, which only produced a relatively small amount of heat. It was more than enough heat for mundane purposes, but not for melting metal. I had softened copper before using that, but it wasn¡¯t enough to melt it. The process of creating greater and greater fires, or really, the heat, was a reflection of the evolution of society. Metallurgy advanced in lockstep with science and knowledge. Unfortunately, I lacked most of that knowledge. However, I could replace some of that with sheer power. I had a rune that was directly capable of producing heat. Properly controlled, and with enough power, I should be able to melt just about any metal. Honestly, I could probably melt a lot of other things too. I started with a single emblem, as a test. First was the heat rune, that was simple enough. I set the subtext to turn as much mana into heat as possible. Then I added a trigger, an on/off switch, and a mana accumulator. I activated it and waited. The rune started to produce heat, but it didn¡¯t get incredibly hot with the relatively low ambient mana. So I remade the emblem and attached a mana crystal to it. It was a relatively low capacity mana crystal; it only held about a hundred mana. Which proved to be way too much. The rune heated and heated, and then the heat rune started to shimmer. I turned it off before it could melt and explode. The mana crystal had tiny cracks in it. The cracks no longer had any mana in them. I dissolved a small bit of the cracked crystal. The intricate structure that was required to store the mana had been broken apart. It appeared that the emblem just pulled the mana out through the structure, destroying it in the process. That was a minor problem, and something that I was actively working on making a solution for with metallurgy. The other problem needed to be addressed now. The heat rune output the heat directly around the rune itself. This was just fine for a very mild heat, like using it to keep yourself warm. It wasn¡¯t so great when I was trying to melt metal, since it was going to melt the rune first. I could just use my environmental controls to make the area cold, but that defeated the whole point of heating an area up. Plus, I would need to do it inside my dungeon, instead of just my aura. Fortunately, I had a way to work around that now. The teleportation tube showed me how to make a three dimensional emblem and use that to designate the space inside as the target. In combination with what I had learned about using circles with additional commands from Tam¡¯s work, I should be able to place the heat away from the rune structure. I started by clearing out a small sphere of stone inside a section of unused aura. From there I created two metal circles of folerth, each perpendicular to the other and set into the inside of my makeshift forge. Each band of folerth was thin, only there to designate where the heat should go. I took my previous work and made a copy. I attached it to the folerth, adding subtext and superscript. The new commands told the emblem to produce heat in the center where both circles overlapped. That way the heat would show up in midair at the center of the forge. I turned it on. I could see the heat as it accumulated in the center of the forge, making shimmering waves of air. . The movement of the air made me think of something else, and I set a different shard to work on that problem. I used a hand of stone to lift a piece of copper up into that central point. Now the heat should be directly targeting the piece of copper. The copper grew hotter, but the stone that was holding it began to melt before the copper did. Right¡­ not what I was expecting. Let¡¯s switch that out with something else then. Granite had a high melting point right? I thought so anyway. I had watched something about how the granite of Yosemite had formed. I switched out the stone surrounding the forge with granite. The air inside the forge was trapped and had started to get much hotter. I should probably fix that while I was thinking about it. Unfortunately¡­ that meant I needed to move the forge into a part of the dungeon. So I did, putting it deep in a section of wall. None of the people in the dungeon right now would be able to sense it some sixty feet deep, so that would have to be good enough for now. Once I had moved the forge, I altered the environmental controls for it. The outside few inches of air and stone would automatically go back to a normal temperature. This would prevent the folerth rings and the surrounding stone from getting too hot while I was manipulating things in the forge. I didn¡¯t want my smithing to fail because the surrounding stone melted and let the emblem shift. I would be able to fix everything after the ensuing explosion, but I would prefer to avoid needing to deal with it in the first place. This time I constructed tendrils out of granite and held a piece of copper in the center of the forge. The copper started to glow, and so did the granite, but the copper started to melt before the granite did. I shaped the granite into a crucible, allowing the copper to pool into it. After the copper was fully liquid, I absorbed it, adding it to my list of things that I could create. I didn¡¯t actually need copper since I could already make it, but liquid copper would be useful if I wanted to try manually alloying it with another material. I did the same thing for silver and gold. The silver melted at a lower temperature than the copper, I could tell because the granite wasn¡¯t glowing as hot, so my calculation ability pitched in to help. It was already starting to make guesses about specific heats, thermal gradients, and far more as I worked. Fortunately it was easy to tune it into the background when I didn¡¯t want to deal with it right away. The gold melted at around the same point as copper, though it took less time to heat it. The patterns of each were stored away. I was surprised when the bronze actually melted at a much lower temperature than pure copper. I guess I had thought its toughness would translate to a higher melting temperature. I am not sure why I thought that. I ran into problems again after that when I tried to melt iron. The granite started to melt around the same time as it did. So, I needed a different material. I figured I would use diamond. Diamonds formed at immense pressure and heat deep in the earth. And I knew it was often found in formerly volcanic areas, like here, because they came out with the molten lava or were deposited by magma that cooled before it reached the surface. So, diamond had to be able to deal with heat reasonably well. So I picked up a piece of iron with a tendril of diamond, forming a crucible of diamond under the iron. I let the iron start to heat and then the diamond started to vaporize. It was vaporizing at a relatively low temperature, too, before I would even be able to melt bronze. There was no fire, as there was no hydrogen in the diamond to react with. The only thing in it was carbon. I had a suspicion. I doubted the carbon was vaporizing on its own. I knew that graphite and diamond had high melting temperatures. And the diamond hadn¡¯t bothered melting, instead it was sublimating. I was fairly sure it was reacting with something. Fortunately, the forge was a closed space. I couldn¡¯t fill it with a neutral gas like argon or neon, because I didn¡¯t have samples for them, but I could do the next best thing. I put the diamond directly into the middle of the forge, letting it heat up. As parts of it vaporized I replaced them with more. Eventually the diamond stopped vaporizing. I let it go a few moments longer, but then I was satisfied. Whatever it was reacting with, there wasn¡¯t any left in the chamber anymore. I was fairly sure it wasn¡¯t reacting with nitrogen, because there would have been far more diamond needed to react with all of it. I was pretty sure it had reacted with Oxygen. Probably into CO or CO2. Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon. Regardless, now I could melt materials in peace. I picked up iron again, forming the crucible. It melted properly and the diamond was still very stable. I put the folerth into the center of the forge, letting it melt in the crucible. Its melting point was similar to silver, though it took a little more time to heat up. Mana reacted strangely as it became molten, forming currents when I tipped the crucible from side to side, rippling away from the waves in the molten metal. For now, I absorbed it. Next came the mana crystal. I placed it into the crucible and waited. And waited. It slowly started to glow, the clear crystal becoming foggily translucent and then white with heat. The light it produced, unlike many of the metals, was a bright clear white. Then it slumped down and became a puddle in the crucible. I carefully stirred it with a spatula of diamond, making sure it was completely melted. Then I absorbed it. Now it was time to experiment. First I did the simplest thing. I put an equal volume of molten folerth and molten mana crystal together inside the crucible and tried to stir them. The mana crystal froze around the comparatively cold folerth, forming a clumpy mess. I put it into the heat and let the mana crystal start to heat up again. As the mana crystal started to get hot again I stirred the two together. They combined from two brightly shining liquids into a single one. I separated the batch into three parts. I absorbed one, put one into storage and then plunged it into water to quench it, the last one I put into an environmentally modified chamber, on a diamond pedestal, that would cool it down very slowly. The quenched sample shattered into countless pieces. Each of the pieces looked similar to pure folerth, but they had a tiny bit of depth to them. I absorbed one of the pieces. The structure felt crystalline, but I felt nothing like the spirals that had been in the mana crystal before. I tried to push mana into it, but the mana just flowed through it and then back out. Not so useful. That was okay, I was expecting my first try to be a failure. I still had one sample cooling slowly, and I needed to try other ratios as well. I prepared eight new samples, from 90% folerth and 10% crystal, to vice versa, skipping the fifty percent mixture I had already tried. I melted each one down, combining them and then repeating what I had done with my first try. When I had substantially more folerth in the blend, quenching no longer caused it to shatter, it cracked. Once I got to 80% folerth, it no longer did that anymore, either, simply setting into a deeply reflective silvery metal. It was still useless for storing mana, however. All the other blends were the same. I ended up with different arrangements of crystalline lattices. I could sense the lattice that was at the core of each of them. There were no helices, intersecting or not. I checked on the samples I had slowly cooling. The first few were no longer red hot, so I took a tiny sample from them. The crystalline structures were different from when they were simply quenched, but again there were no spirals. And pushing mana into them didn¡¯t do anything. I felt like I was missing something¡­ How did I make it crystallize the way I wanted? Trying to forcibly create the blends with the pattern of mana crystal had done nothing. I had done something like that before right? In chemistry class, we had dissolved sugar and then used a string to make it all precipitate on the string. Hmm¡­ that just left a place for it to crystallize, it didn¡¯t force it into a particular arrangement. Wait¡­ I knew this. I liked watching cooking shows, and had looked up quite a bit about them. When someone made chocolate, one of the ways to get it to crystallize properly while tempering was to add a piece of chocolate that was already tempered. It acted as a seed crystal, and told the rest of the material how it should form. I reformed each of my sample batches and placed them inside a chamber with a normal atmosphere. They should cool relatively slowly that way, though if any of them seemed like they might be successful I could try again with those and go slower. After each sample batch had a chance to start cooling, I used a rod of mana crystal and inserted it into the still liquid material. The batches had cooled enough that the inserted rods didn¡¯t start to melt, though several did start to glow gently. I left the batches alone, trying other ratios just in case. After the batches had all cooled enough to become completely solid, I took samples. The ones with more folerth didn¡¯t form spirals at all. The fifty percent blend had disconnected spirals. The samples of the forty percent folerth and lower all crystallized into interlinking helices, and they all could store mana again. The forty percent blend could barely store any mana, it was worse than regular mana crystal. The thirty percent was about the same as normal mana crystal, though it didn¡¯t shine at all when filled with mana. The other two remaining blends both worked better than a normal mana crystal, though the twenty percent folerth worked the best. The ten percent batch shone at about half the intensity of normal mana crystal when mana was stored into it. The twenty percent batch barely shone at all, even with large amounts of mana. I messed around more, seeing what I could do to refine the process. Eventually I settled on a batch that was slightly less than twenty-three percent folerth. It produced a crystal that was translucent grey, the interior forming natural mirrors after only a slight depth. Despite the somewhat clear nature of the material, it didn¡¯t light up at all when mana was poured into it. It stored vast amounts of mana, easily a hundred times more than normal mana crystal could. When I absorbed it, I saw the familiar interwoven helices, but folerth had filled all the gaps in the middle. And after I finally created it, I received a message.
You have acquired a new skill! You have acquired: Metallurgy II (Metal, Earth, Fire) You gain insights into working with metal. You know what to do to make the metal work for you.
The other shard had been busy working on meteorology while I worked on this project. I created a hollow cylinder filled with air, about a hundred feet long, inside of my dungeon. I would need to refill the area with stone later. I altered the environmental conditions at the very top and bottom. At the top I placed the freezing temperatures from outside, and at the bottom I placed the heated temperatures of the forge. As I watched, I could see the cold air spread downward and run into the hot air as it attempted to rise. Things stayed in equilibrium for a time, but soon the heat pushed upward, making a small amount of room to the side where the cold air descended. The two streams of air moved past each other rapidly, but they didn¡¯t form a tornado like I was hoping. My environmental controls did have choices for strong natural up and down drafts now though. Maybe it would work if I helped out a little? I set up two fans, one a the top and one at the bottom. Each fan would make the air above and below spin in the same direction. I didn¡¯t turn them on just yet. I set up the same setup as before, letting the warm and cold air gather. Then, before the two could get out of balance on their own, I activated the two fans. Both pools of air began to move, the air spinning. The two spinning masses of air met each other, each trying to push past the other. The hot air slipped upward, spiraling into the middle of the cold air then decreasing its rotation, making way for the cold air to push down around the edges. The air began to spiral down as the hot air pushed straight up, each cycle reinforcing the other. The air in the tube was completely clean, no dust or debris, so the tornado was completely transparent, until it wasn¡¯t. The water vapor in the warm air began to condense as it rose and cooled rapidly, turning fog like. It reached the bubble of cold at the top of the tornado, growing in intensity before it was pulled out by the descent of the now cooled air. Soon enough the entire tornado was the misty white that I was familiar with. I checked my environmental options; I didn¡¯t get an option for a tornado yet. However, I did get options for a stable vortex and a minor vacuum. I wasn¡¯t sure if I was just getting the component parts of a tornado, or it just wasn¡¯t big enough to qualify. Well¡­ I did have one place that I could experiment with this inside the dungeon. Actually, I had a few places in my super large environments where I could do this. However, I had one location that was almost perfect for this, the others would need far more work. It even had fans at the top already, though I would need to add fans on the bottom. I had a completely vertical tunnel in the defenses for my core room, and it was more than a mile tall. I quickly checked my dungeon; everyone was asleep now. I was in no danger. I turned off the traps in the vertical tunnel, added fans to the bottom, and altered the fans at the top, making them tilted to the side in different directions to spin the air. The top thirty feet of the tunnel were changed to produce cold air, and the bottom was changed in the same way for hot air. I didn¡¯t think the fans would be enough to move a preexisting mass of cold and hot air, so I started them up from the beginning. I let the everything run, and I watched. Both columns of air moved toward the middle of the shaft, but they had slowed down substantially by the time they reached, having lost most of their rotational energy. After a few moments, the two columns of air pushed past each other, but neither started a vortex. As each column of air reached the end of the shaft, they reacted with the swirling air, pushing it out of the way. This formed two small vortexes at each end of the shaft, but they didn¡¯t grow and connect. I turned everything off, and used the environmental controls to reset the internal air temperature to the standard, comfortable level. After that, I added more fans. This time they were in the wall. They took in air from the tunnel and moved it through the fan and then blew back out. These sideways fans would push the air to keep it rotating. I turned everything on. Like before the masses of air spun and moved towards each other. This time their spin was considerably higher, the fans on the wall pushing until each was pushing against the other, but moving in the same direction. The hot air slipped into the middle and the cold air began to push down the outside of the shaft. The cold part started to pick up rotational speed, while the hot air began to rise directly up the shaft, rising and cooling until it hit the super-cooled environment at the top. The whirling of the cold air intensified, a whirlwind beginning to form as the two forces worked together. The air in the tornado turned white and the forces began to grow, the wind howling with power as it formed an even more powerful funnel. Additional pockets of air formed as the warm air rose through the middle, bowing outward under the force of the air moving around them. The shape transmitted out to the edges of the tornado, pushing unstable bulges up and down, as though it were attempting to swallow something too large for it. The air at the edges was moving faster than my fans could propel the air, so I sealed the fan tunnels back up with stone. The tornado was self-sustaining at this point. It continued, the air roaring through the tunnel, powered by the cold and heat that was stayed constant at each end. I had my suspicions that I had used a heavily simplified version of the mechanics that normally produced a tornado, but I didn¡¯t mind cheating if it was effective. I looked at my options. Medium tornado was in there now, along with bulging-vortex, extreme wind, and medium vacuum. I suspected that I could create a much stronger vacuum without too much difficulty. As for the strength of the tornado, I bet I could make a stronger one, but I would need a much larger room for that. Powerful tornadoes were generally very wide and tall. A truly powerful tornado could be a mile or more wide. It was a project I could work on later when I had the room. For now, I went about crafting variations. First, I slowly added water to the base of the room. The water started to get sucked upward into the vortex, rising up into the tornado, and gradually spreading through out the entire structure. The structure of the tornado faltered for a moment before stabilizing again into a waterspout, the water rushing through the air at breakneck speeds. I grinned, this was something truly dangerous. I absorbed the water, and replaced it with sand. Tiny particles of sand were thrown outward and brushed against the edges of the tunnel, scraping against the stone. Sections were scored by the sand, only for the tunnel to repair itself a moment later. I added the water back in and the intensity of the scoring became even more intense. Every moment the terrific force of the water dragged the sand hard against the walls, scoring deeper lines than before. I added other materials in various combinations. Sulfuric acid, glass (powdered and in shards), gravel, small pieces of steel, wood, and others. The explosion from a tornado completely filled with sawdust was awe inspiring. It also required I fix some very cracked walls. Each of these options ended up being something that I could recreate later with my environmental settings. I added the more effective variations to the traps in the shaft. It would now be a permanent tornado, filled with different nasty substances. If an acid waterspout filled with glass, followed by an explosive tornado wasn¡¯t enough to stop someone from getting to me, then I don¡¯t think anything I could do would matter to them. I was inspired by the tornado to make a whirlpool. A basic whirlpool was easier to make. I just poured two streams into an area, each one moving in the opposite direction of the other. Fortunately water was much easier to get moving quickly by just using gravity. The two met in a central circular area that was moderately deep. One entered from the top of the circle and pushed the water the to the left, while the other entered from the bottom and pushed the water to the right. Excess water flooded over the sides of the cylinder, and as the two streams flowed in the middle began to rotate faster, until it pushed downward into a whirlpool. I added an exit for the water at the bottom center of the cylinder, then the whirlpool really started to get stronger. In the end I ended up with a medium strength whirlpool in my options, along with everything below it. I figured I would could make a much stronger one later when I made the bigger tornado. I was also inspired to make a type of trap. It used sand over smooth angled plates of stone. The plates were arranged downward in a circle, so when the bottom was removed the sand would spiral downwards like a whirlpool. I ended up with a sand-whirlpool in my options. Not something I was expecting, but I would take it. I proceeded to make a mud version and gained the option for that too. I hadn¡¯t expected those traps to give me environmental options, but I would take them. SSD 4.16 - Interlude - Part 1 of 2 - No Pain, No Gain ¡°He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.¡± -Aeschylus ==Sevso== =Several days prior= Laughing while doing a handstand was not the most subtle of actions. ¡°Glad to see you are having such a good time,¡± said Gnaeus, his voice amused. I flushed, and flipped my body back around so I landed on my feet. I grinned at him. ¡°Perhaps I got a little carried away,¡± I said. His eyes flickered over my body, and an eyebrow rose. ¡°Some changes, I see, and a new class. Sounds fascinating,¡± he said, ¡°tell me about it.¡± We sat down, and I do just that, mentioning my new abilities and titles. Afterwards, I ask for his thoughts. ¡°Let¡¯s start with the easy stuff,¡± he says. ¡°Trailblazer, that is a great title, well known. And it helps you with just about everything. And it sounds like you are halfway to the next level of that title already. The ability Inexorable is much the same. Haven¡¯t heard of that particular name for it, but upgraded skills are known. They usually happen as a result of sub-classes, but people can get that far in other ways.¡± ¡°What is a sub-class?¡± I asked. He looks at me, his eyes having wandered away. ¡°Hmm? Oh, I suppose you wouldn¡¯t know,¡± He said. ¡°Not much use in the slums, except perhaps for the slumlords, and I doubt they would share.¡± He sighed. ¡°The nobles hoard knowledge too, just the way of things. Anyway, to actually answer your question, people can get a sub-class around level fifty.¡± ¡°Fifty?¡± I said. I tried not to sound too incredulous, but it was hard. I couldn¡¯t imagine getting to that level. There was a trace of mirth in Gnaeus¡¯ answer as he replied with a small smile. ¡°Yes, fifty,¡± He said. ¡°Skilled adventurers will usually get there if they survive long enough. Many of the nobility get there, especially the more powerful families. Not as hard as it seems, I assure you. You are a good candidate to get there yourself, eventually. ¡°Me?¡± I said, bewildered, ¡°I-¡± ¡°Don¡¯t interrupt boy,¡± he said, his left hand and index finder rising in front of him. He waited for a moment to see if I was going to keep talking and then resumed. ¡°Yes,¡± he said, ¡°you. You have a good title, and a superior ability. Those are advantages. You also have a new class. When you get a new class it usually lets you level it more quickly. I know you have had a number of classes already. Firstly, your birth-class doesn¡¯t count. Also, all your classes after that were just for survival, but even your Street Tough class involved little actual fighting. Surviving gives you some experience, but not much. ¡°Sadly, your surroundings mattered, too. All of your abilities would have been used on people in similar circumstances to yourself. People who were low level. And that matters. ¡°Now you have a new class. It is what would usually be called an artisan class. You don¡¯t really make anything, I know. It is an imprecise appellation.¡± I didn¡¯t say anything, but he must have noticed my confusion. He sighed, ¡°Well, ask your question.¡± What is an appellation?¡± I asked. Gnaeus gave a small smile and ducked his head. ¡°Ah, forgot my audience for a moment, didn¡¯t I?¡± He said. ¡°It means a name or label. Where were we¡­ Ah, yes! So, you have the benefit of gaining experience in new ways. And your class is lucky enough to give you experience for multiple things. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. Also, the inexorable skill was added to your class. I know the description of your class doesn¡¯t say this, but you gain experience from improving the skills that come with it. So, anything you are doing to push your body is going to grant you experience. And don¡¯t even get me started on your Lucky Fool trait. Luck is one of the most powerful things you can have on your side. And traits are important, boy. Another little secret, I¡¯m afraid. They help you get better classes.¡± ¡°Just wait,¡± he said, ¡°I¡¯ll make you something to help train your body.¡± I watched as he pulled a small bronze necklace out of his storage; it was followed by some sort of drawing implement. ¡°Be quiet for a while,¡± He said, ¡°this will take some concentration.¡± I obliged, of course. He sat on a rock and carefully drew tiny lines of white on the metal. The language he was using meant nothing to me, but I knew enough to know that he had to be making an emblem. His hands held the small inscriber and made dexterous motions, tiny symbols appearing in a neat sequence. A few minutes later and Gnaeus was finished. He went over the emblem a few times, humming to himself. He stood up and carefully put the necklace down on a nearby rock. He pulled out a small chunk of metal from his storage. He spoke, his voice resonating into the air, and the small symbols burned with fire, engraving the lines down into the necklace. Tiny threads of metal poured into the necklace from the lump in his hand, filling in the new empty spaces. He chanted and light erupted from the tiny lines. It shone up and around, painting him in sharp contrasting light and darkness. A sense of pressure was heavy in the air. I could feel the magic as it pressed in on me. And then it was over, and everything was the still twilight once again. I was struck by the wonder of the moment. He had told me what he did, but this was the first time I had seen him actually do it. Gnaeus let out a breath. ¡°There we go,¡± he said. ¡°I will have you wear this tomorrow for a while, I¡¯ll tell you more about it then.¡± I had a sense of morbid curiosity, so I asked a question. ¡°What would that even cost, usually?¡± I said. ¡°About forty gold from a decent creator,¡± he said. It went unsaid that he was more than merely decent. I didn¡¯t bother asking what it would normally take to have him make it. I wasn¡¯t sure if it ruined or enhanced the magic to know that what he made would cost, at least, forty gold. He smiled a little smile at me. ¡°Don¡¯t worry about it,¡± he said. ¡°To me, your money is just some spare change. ¡°And now,¡± he grinned, ¡°you have me to help train you.¡± I should have taken that grin as a warning. =Now= I groaned, my muscles more sore than I could ever remember, except perhaps the day before. ¡°Remind me why I¡¯m doing this again,¡± I huffed out. Gnaeus looked at my smugly. ¡°You tell me,¡± he said. I wanted to glare at him, but it wouldn¡¯t do me any good. I didn¡¯t answer him but my mind went over the reasons anyway. Firstly, when he mentioned training, I accepted his offer. Secondly, I was working my body heavily, and that was bound to help my skill improve faster, even if it was less than pleasant. Third, he had explained that my skill was multiplying the strength, dexterity, etc... my body already had. The skill would maintain my body to a certain minimal level of fitness, but it was better to push my body itself, rather than just use my current capacity. Ultimately, there were plenty of good reasons to train. The small medallion lay on my chest; It was the source of all my misery. As long as I wore it, it made every movement harder. It wasn¡¯t a weight pressing down on me, it just made my muscles work more. Every movement had resistance. He had only put it on me for the last hour of traveling the first day, but the second he used it for two, and today I had been wearing it for three. After the first day the soreness made me want to argue that this had to be bad for me. However, my health remained at a stubborn hundred percent in my status. It hurt, but I couldn¡¯t say it was hurting me. ¡°Okay, this looks like a good place to camp,¡± he said. I threw the wretched amulet at him and collapsed. He caught it with a chuckle. ¡°You should be careful with that, it¡¯s expensive,¡± he said. ¡°Yeah, yeah,¡± I gasped out, ¡°if I pay you the forty gold for it, can I throw it away?¡± He only chuckled more. ¡°Such a good thing that your body is enhanced,¡± he said. ¡°If it wasn¡¯t speeding up your healing we would need to have you wear it for shorter lengths of time. Plus, we would need to wait at least a day between uses. At least at first.¡± He laughed harder as I cursed at him between heaving breaths. I really wished I could gainsay him, but I had managed an hour more each day so far. I felt more sore each day, but I also knew that I couldn¡¯t have done three hours just a few days ago. If only he wasn¡¯t so amused by my suffering. We were still near the cliffs, little had changed as we traveled northward. I had collected samples of everything that I could. Sometimes it felt like I was drawn to almost everything. I was heavily drawn to the medallion on my chest, but I had never seriously considered putting it my storage. Okay... maybe once¡­ or twice. Pieces of plants, twigs, berries, chunks of wood and bramble, all went into my storage without issue. The corpses of monsters that had attacked us on the road were no trouble, either. They would have been difficult for me to deal with, but Gnaeus killed each one we encountered with a single spell. Apparently there wasn¡¯t anything he would consider dangerous this time of year. The monsters we encountered were all in the range between levels five and ten. They were more than enough to be dangerous to me, but even if he hadn¡¯t said it, I suspected that there were never, monsters on this road that could threaten him. I had a vague sense of my storage. It was not even close to full. I had only included a single monster or animal corpse of any given type, even so. I didn¡¯t want to run out of space, though I had felt drawn to various small rocks and other things. So they ended up inside. I had gone down to the edge of the water the other day. I had put handfuls of sand and seawater into it as well little bits of shell. I heaved myself up. I went through stretches that Gnaeus had shown me. They helped prevent my muscles from seizing and limbered up my body as whole. I was much more flexible than I used to be. I still wasn¡¯t as strong or flexible as Gnaeus though. He joined me and made the stretches look like a dance, his form silhouetted against the light of the fading day. He looked like a piece of worn leather most of the time, but I had to admit he knew what he was doing. We finished stretching together. The light of Shurum and Otga moving closer to the horizon. ¡°Looks like Thaw is finally here,¡± he said. I looked up to see a tiny billow of faint light stretching from Shurum, and I smiled. I was ready for the cold to be over. I breathed in the air, relishing the feel of the salt in my lungs. I had grown used to ending the day by the ocean. I looked down at the waves, but I saw something odd¡­ ¡°Gnaeus,¡± I pointed, ¡°what is that?¡± SSD 4.17 - Interlude - Part 2 of 2 - In the Water If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. -Loren Eiseley ==Exsan== Exsan was lost in meditation. The thoughts had come sweeping in, faster and faster. He had found himself adrift between, and then below, icebergs of thought. He had sunk into the sea, drifting deep under the surface. He could feel the thoughts crystallizing over head. A new landscape forming a new perspective. Words, meanings, all of these wash over him. For now he was patient, simply waiting for it to end, drifting in gentle currents above where a gleaming sphere and cube orbited in the darkness. Soon he would wake, remade. ==Sevso== Below, where the waves crashed against the shore in froths of spray and slush, the water was acting odd. A small section of water didn¡¯t crash against the beach so much as pour. The waves mostly behaved as normal there, but they didn¡¯t produce any froth, instead letting out large bubbles of captured air in gloopy exhalations. Where the water hit the beach it didn¡¯t splash, instead spreading out like a ball of jelly had fallen and hit the floor. Except the water was just as fluid as before, and it would then retreat back down the beach as the mass all rejoined the water of the ocean. Gnaeus peered over the edge, looking down at the beach. ¡°Oh,¡± he said, his eyebrows rising. ¡°Good catch. There must be an elemental fountain under the waves somewhere. I¡¯ll report it for you when we get to the next city. You¡¯ll probably make more money from this than you would for reporting a dungeon. They are quite rare, and often hard to notice.¡± Gnaeus looked intently down to the beach and then looked sideways at the cliff-sides. ¡°Not surprised nobody noticed it before now,¡± he said. ¡°The only reason it is even noticeable now is because Freeze has gone on so long. Plus you need to be right here to see that little inlet.¡± He quirked his eyebrow at me and gave a crooked smile. ¡°A bit of a lucky find, you might say,¡± he said. My stomach lurched a little. ¡°You think my title made it happen?¡± I said, my voice shook just a tiny bit. ¡°It probably helped,¡± he said, ¡°but try not to worry about it too much. It happened because you like looking at the ocean, so when there was something worth seeing you were more likely to see it. If you liked sitting and watching the snow on the hills, you might have seen something different. It isn¡¯t making you do anything, or be anything, you don¡¯t want to. It is just helping your efforts to be more productive.¡± ¡°Yeah,¡± I said. ¡°I¡¯ll try not to worry about it.¡± I swallowed, feeling a growing sense of thirst. I grabbed a canteen and took a drink. The thirst didn¡¯t get any better. I looked down to the sea below, feeling my thirst intensify. Oh¡­ ¡°Looks like the dungeon really wants some of that special water down there,¡± I said. ¡°Anyway to get some?¡± Gnaeus hummed. ¡°I suppose,¡± he said. ¡°I should have some anchors and some ropes. Always good things to have on hand.¡± He pulled out a few hundred feet of rope, muttering to himself as he looked down at the cliff. He knotted up sections of the rope every few feet. ¡°You¡¯re the one who wants it,¡± he said, ¡°so you get to be the one who grabs it.¡± ¡°Here,¡± he said, as he pulled out a small glass jar from his storage. ¡°You can grab me a sample in exchange for lending you the rope and anchors.¡± ¡°I,¡± I started to object, but changed my mind, ¡°ah, okay sure.¡± Not like objecting would help me at all. I did need the rope. ¡°Where are the anchors?¡± I said. He pulled two small discs from his storage. He pulled up one end of the rope and pushed it against one of the discs. After he concentrated for a moment he took his hands away. The disc and a small section the rope remained frozen in the air, unmoving. I stared at it, and Gnaeus chuckled. ¡°It¡¯s a spacial anchor.¡± He said, and patted the storage pouch at his waist. ¡°l learned how to make them even before I made this bag. I was able to make much smaller ones afterward though. Doesn¡¯t effect the air, or living things. However, even if that cliff crumbles away this little section of rope isn¡¯t going to move.¡± He pulled out another section of rope from his bag. ¡°This,¡± he said, as he crooked a finger for me to come closer, ¡°will make a harness that will attach to the other one. If you start moving too fast, like falling, it will make the harness stop. It will also stick you in midair, and I will need to come rescue you; don¡¯t do that.¡± This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it He started to tie the rope around my body. He looped under and around both thighs, creating multiple loops for more surface area. From there he went up and around my chest, looping the rope upon itself in intricate knots. ¡°There, that should work,¡± he said. ¡°Even if you do get stuck in the air for a while it shouldn¡¯t cut off circulation to anything important. Done any rope-work before, boy?¡± ¡°Ah,¡± I said. ¡°No, no I haven¡¯t.¡± ¡°Something to teach you then,¡± he said, nodding. ¡°It¡¯s an essential skill for dungeon delving. Lots of uses for rope. Climbing, building a bridge, traps, bringing down monsters. Things like that.¡± He winked at me. ¡°Also useful in the bedroom,¡± he said. My mind blanked for a moment, before it started trying to provide images that I didn¡¯t want to see. ¡°FAR too much information, old man!¡± I shouted. Gnaeus laughed uproariously. ¡°Some, ha, some things you only get to do, ha, as an old man,¡± He wheezed out. He wiped away the tears forming in his eyes, the same way I wished I could wipe away the images formed in my brain. ¡°Glad you find it so funny,¡± I muttered. ¡°I do,¡± he said brightly with a large smile. ¡°I really do.¡± He slapped the disc on the completed harness and it stuck in place. ¡°There you go,¡± he said, as he tossed the large knotted rope off the side of the cliff. ¡°Well, get going.¡± I didn¡¯t bother to respond. I strode over to the edge of the cliff and looked down. It looked much farther down now that I knew I was going to be climbing over the edge. I tried not to let myself think about it. I kept the rope in my hands as I sat down, and then slowly slipped over the edge. I swung in the air, slowly letting myself down hand over hand. My feet caught on the knots and helped provide extra leverage. As I was descending I could see the shells embedded into the face of the cliff. Now that they were this close I could feel a familiar desire to grab some. You have got to be kidding me. I looked down. A section of the cliff stuck out a little bit below. I would try to grab a sample there. A few more minutes of careful movement and I was in easy reach of the cliff. I wrapped one arm around a knot in the rope, letting it rest in my elbow. Then I leaned over and grabbed at some of the closed shells that were attached to the cliff. It took a minute of heaving this way and that before a rocky section broke off, complete with some shells. I tried to store it, but it wouldn¡¯t enter. Apparently the stupid animals were still alive in their shells. I didn¡¯t scream in frustration. I just tucked the stone away and continued my descent. When I got to the bottom the waves lapped along the shore, a few feet out in most places. There were more shells in the cliff here, though they looked like a different species. I had a desire to acquire them too. I didn¡¯t bother to grumble. I just grabbed the knife from my belt. Fortunately, I had eaten a number of shellfish already. Gnaeus had shown me how to shuck them. A few minutes later and I had shucked samples from both types. After that they died and went into storage without any issues. I walked down the narrow aisle formed between the sea and the cliff. Occasionally I would grab a shell, washed up seaweed, and anything else that I felt like I should. Soon the water burbled strangely nearby. The noises were distinctly different than anywhere else. I grabbed the small jar. I started to lower it under the water. The water bent around it instead of breaking the surface. I plunged it under the water and the water finally parted. The air in the jar escaped as a single large bubble, and I raised the jar back out of the water. Or I tried to. A strand of the water was connected to the jar. It refused to let go until the jar was well out of the water, before the entire section of water dropped whole back into the ocean. I closed the jar and shook it. The water inside was strange. It moved just as freely as normal water, but it didn¡¯t spread out. The bubble of air still trapped inside never broke into smaller bubbles. I put the jar away. I was briefly tempted to put the jar into storage, but I suspected Gnaeus would just hand me another jar and send me down again. I sighed and plunged my hands into the water. The water felt strange. It wasn¡¯t¡­ wet. It molded up against my hands, but I didn¡¯t feel it trying to soak into everything the way that I expected. I shrugged off the strange feeling, and pulled on the water. The water swirled as streams of it flowed into my storage, forming a small whirlpool around my hands. My thirst slowly diminished. By the time I was done, I was fairly certain that I had more water in my storage than anything else. I hoped the dungeon had some way to separate all of this. I moved back to the rope and slowly climbed upwards. This time I didn¡¯t feel any sudden need to stop and collect samples. Tired, but triumphant, I finally reached the top and pulled myself over. I wasn¡¯t as tired as I had been immediately after arriving at camp, but it was close. I soon lay on the ground, panting lightly. After I was done I handed off the jar to Gnaeus. He took off the harness and put it back into his storage. He had at least kept himself busy by setting up camp. An emblem glowed, with heat and light, at the center of camp in a fire-pit. I sat by it, enjoying the warmth. Gnaeus was examining the jar, turning it this way and that. ¡°What is that exactly, anyway?¡± I said. ¡°Elemental water,¡± he said, sounding distracted. ¡°Has a decent saturation.¡± ¡°Yeah,¡± I said, ¡°obviously it¡¯s water. What does the elemental part mean?¡± He looked up at me, his focus moving from the jar in his hand. ¡°Ah, no. That is not¡­¡± he said, before pausing. ¡°Well, yes, it is water. However, it is infused with elemental water.¡± He must have seen my confusion. ¡°Things can be infused with different types of elemental energy,¡± he said. ¡°Just because it is water doesn¡¯t mean it cannot be infused with something else. It could have been infused with elemental fire, or earth, or any of the other elements. I was fairly sure it was water infused though, because of how it was acting.¡± ¡°What exactly is it doing to the water?¡± I said, ¡°It behaves so strangely.¡± ¡°It vastly increased the surface tension,¡± he said. He continued after he saw my quizzical stare and my mouth start to open. ¡°It¡­ makes the water want to stick to other water more. Makes it harder to separate or break the surface. ¡°Different elements have different effects. Elemental light or darkness are easy, they glow or absorb light. Those are the easiest elemental fountains to find. If it had been earth the water would have been thick like mud. If there had been enough elemental earth it would have made the water as solid as stone, it naturally acts to strengthen things. You saw what the water did. Fire makes solid substances act like clay, or thicker liquids act more like water. There are various effects, and quite a few more elements. The really weird things happen when something is infused with multiple elements. That can produce effects that have nothing to do with what either would normally do.¡± ¡°Regardless, I¡¯m hungry,¡± He said. ¡°I saw you harvested a few shellfish down by the shore. Why don¡¯t you go back down and grab a few handfuls for dinner.¡± I made a rude gesture at him, and he just laughed. I ended up going down to grab more for the evil bastard. SSD 4.18 - Breakfast Meeting Companions, in misery and worse, that is what we all are, and to try to change this substantially avails us nothing. --Franz Liszt ==Zidaun== The next morning came quickly, sleep barely leaving a hint of memory. Whatever dreams I might have dreamt vanished like fog, burned away by the light of awakening. The dungeon was no longer refilling our food. I assumed it was only doing that until we could acquire some of our own from the dungeon. We ate and talked happily anyway. We particularly enjoyed being able to have some fresh fruit. We would probably use the door that lead directly back there periodically. The loot we had scavenged from the dungeon the night before, as we returned to the safe zone, wasn¡¯t anything special. It was just more coins and some dried food goods, nothing that was too valuable. We knew why it gave us food now at least. I am sure a party that actually struggled to defeat the boss would have been happy enough with the coins, however. ¡°Today is the last day of diving before we take a break. Standard protocol,¡± I said, ¡°even if the area we are going through is very easy for us.¡± The others just nodded as they ate their own food. Gurek said something that might have been a grumble, but that was normal enough. I kept talking as the others ate. ¡°The other party should finish their tests soon, so we will take the time to talk with them about what we have found so far. That way they will know what to expect. I don¡¯t expect them to take too long to catch up with us, given our information. The dungeon is large enough that we can should be able traverse sections in multiple ways. Hopefully some collaboration will allow us to be more thorough. I know we will have specialists coming in, but our information will still help them to decide where to focus their efforts. ¡°Honestly¡­ this place is huge. I have no idea how long it will take us to reach the end. We might eventually get to areas that we cannot traverse. The dungeon core is probably ancient, just based on all the artwork, but the new dungeon is not that old. So, we might actually reach the end sooner than would be expected. If that is the case, we can expect the dungeon to continually shift and grow. It will be recreating its old dungeon, most likely. ¡°I didn¡¯t want to mention it before, but there is a chance that the dungeon will keep rebuilding for a long time. We have seen two floors already, though we still need to explore the rest of the meadow area. I only mention it now because the dungeon is so large.¡± I hesitated, while the others looked at me curiously. They ate absentmindedly, the habit of eating during briefings sufficient to keep them going. ¡°If,¡± I said, ¡°this place is large enough, I can probably get you guys assigned here permanently.¡± Gurek swallowed and was about to speak. I cut him off. ¡°However,¡± I said, ¡°that requires that the dungeon really continue developing. And you guys would need to agree, of course. I am going to be in charge of the Adar here for a while, so I¡¯ll have some diplomatic pull, but I don¡¯t want to force it on you. And, I will have responsibilities to deal with among the Adar, so those will always have to come first.¡± I was going to try to delegate as many of my responsibilities as I could though. I might have the final word, but I absolutely did not have the training to deal with all of this on my own. At least I had as much time as I needed to learn. ¡°I¡¯d be happy enough to be assigned here,¡± Gurek said. ¡°As long as this place ends up with more amenities. This building is nice, but I want a place I can go grab a drink at the end of the day.¡± ¡°That¡­ will actually be an interesting challenge,¡± Inda said. ¡°This dungeon is much deeper in than most. Even just from our side it will take a brisk walk to get outside within an hour. And that is with our advantages. Most starting adventurers will take an hour and a half to two hours. And that is not even considering the other entrance, normal people will take most of a day to travel that one. ¡°So I¡¯m not sure where the usual outposts are going to go. There will almost certainly be one at each entrance, regardless, if only for the military. And merchants will be flocking to make use of the tunnels through the mountains. There simply isn¡¯t a more direct route. The escarpment means that moving large amount of goods to the ocean is difficult, and the terrain of the delta below combines with that to make a proper coastal city impractical. She gestured toward me. ¡°The only ones who really live there are the Adar,¡± she continued, ¡°and they use their dungeon as a base of operations.¡± This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. ¡°The most direct route was to head northward around the edge of escarpment and then to the coast. Then a merchant could take a ship southward and head into Tsary from the coast. Not even including the time by ship, I am pretty sure the over land portion of that route between the two capitals is longer than the total path going through the dungeon offers. Sure, the distance is an inconvenience to us, but a straight path has been literally cut through the mountains. And the sea route is only available less than half the year anyway. The rest of the time people have to travel far to the west and head through the pass. ¡°Ha,¡± she shook her head with a laugh, ¡°the other pass. There isn¡¯t a chance in hell that this isn¡¯t going to become the main route. The other route takes a very long time. And this route is even going to go underneath almost all of the snow.¡± ¡°Ah, yes,¡± Gurek said. ¡°Always a pleasure to hear you lecture us. Please, share your wisdom wise sage.¡± Inda colored, her mouth snapping shut with a click. ¡°I probably will need all this information,¡± I said with a sigh. ¡°Like I said, I am going to be managing the Adar here for a while. Part of my new role. Ugh¡­ there are going to be thousands here soon. Probably within days. There is no way they won¡¯t have gotten a copy of my first report by now.¡± ¡°As I was saying,¡± Inda said primly, her eyes daring Gurek to interrupt again, ¡°this actually is relevant to us. This place is going to become huge. Even if the dungeon had only offered a safe route through the mountains, it would have been more than enough. Trade routes are going to shift; massive amounts of money will be invested in infrastructure. ¡°As for where people are going to build¡­¡± Inda looked outside the kitchen window, the light of the interior barely allowing the outside lights of the road to be visible. She gestured outside. ¡°Inside a dungeon,¡± Gurek burst out, ¡°are you crazy?¡± ¡°The Adar build their enclaves into dungeons, right?¡± Inda said to me. ¡°Yeah, we do, we shape the dungeons so we can live there,¡± I said. ¡°They¡¯re Adar, we¡¯re human,¡± Gurek said. ¡°Who would agree to live here?¡± ¡°We would,¡± Inda said. ¡°And so will the people who want to make money off of us. This space is mostly empty. And this entire place has been perfectly shaped around adventurers. You heard Zidaun earlier, it is likely this place has already been shaped by the Adar. And this place is so valuable, there is no way the Adar will be able to buy out the other countries interest in it. And I don¡¯t know of any other dungeon with such large connected safe areas.¡± I couldn¡¯t exactly tell her that my claim of the Adar shaping it in the past had been a lie. ¡°Other adventurers are going to think the same way,¡± she said. ¡°I am not sure if there is really enough room here to build a major city, but, at the least, a full adventurer¡¯s guild will end up here. Merchants will do the same. Some nobles are almost bound to stick their noses in too. Ugh¡­ and the military will want to build an internal outpost.¡± Inda looked outside again. Her eyes scanned the darkness. ¡°Huh,¡± she said, ¡°maybe their isn¡¯t enough room here. Both countries are going to be setting up here. It is going to get crowded. And the Adar, too. I suppose the Adar will be able to go and make their own area, but that still leaves things crowded for the rest of us. ¡°The point though, is that we can reasonably expect all the amenities of a large city to be available. Eventually.¡± ¡°The church will build here too,¡± Firi mused, his eyes distant. ¡°Both churches,¡± Inda said. ¡°The two countries are almost certainly going to try to outdo each other. I suppose my training in politics is proving useful for something. I wouldn¡¯t have thought of a dungeon as being proper neutral ground, but it is.¡± Inda looked me in the eyes. ¡°I don¡¯t envy you your job,¡± she said. ¡°At least with you being Adar, people will know better than to mess with you. I suspect you will still have a lot of headaches, however.¡± I massaged my head. I was already starting to get a headache. I knew that Ancients had to deal with a lot. However, most new dungeons, even properly awakened dungeons, were well out of the way. There were a few that proved more valuable than the Adar¡¯s offers to buy exclusive access. Each dungeon was always available to the kingdom it was inside for fifty years, even if the Adar made their claim. This wait had proven to be a wise policy, so kingdoms knew exactly what was inside the dungeon. They couldn¡¯t claim they were cheated if they had access to a dungeon for fifty years and accepted an offer to purchase it. However, this dungeon was priceless merely due to its location. And it was priceless to two separate kingdoms. That meant politics. And, as a neutral party, I was almost certain that we would be called upon to adjudicate between the two different kingdoms. I could just imagine endless meetings with ambassadors, the hours crawling away to die as I forced myself to listen. And I was immortal now¡­ I would never be able to get away from it all. Nope, nope¡­ I would absolutely be delegating. I hoped the dungeon continued to expand for centuries. That would give me a reasonable duty to see to that didn¡¯t involve dealing with so many other people. ¡°I¡¯m not exactly looking forward to it myself,¡± I said, speaking with completely fervent honesty. ¡°Don¡¯t worry,¡± Gurek said. ¡°As long as I get some creature comforts I am happy enough to stick around.¡± ¡°If the dungeon keeps expanding,¡± Inda said, ¡°I will be happy enough. Exploration is what I really like, and this place seems perfect for that. And with such an incredible series of environments, mages and scholars are both going to be drawn here. So I won¡¯t be stuck only talking to Gurek.¡± I turned to Firi, giving a soft smile. ¡°What about you?¡± I said. He returned my smile, his eyes flickering downward a moment after meeting mine. A faint blush colored his cheeks. ¡°Yeah,¡± he said, ¡°I am sure I could do some good here. I would love to stay a while, if it works out like you hope.¡± My smile was radiant, even as we headed off to explore for the day. SSD 4.19 - Where the Wild Things Are ¡°To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.¡± -Tacitus ==Zidaun== We ran into the other party on our way out. We only talked with them briefly. They indicated that they should be done with the tests by the evening, and we agreed to meet them after our delve. Our business done, we reentered the dungeon. Door two took us right back into the town and now the gate stood before us. I touched the gate and the crystal flashed green. The gate swung open, even as I could hear the clank of chains moving. We tensed, just in case, but the doors opened to the sight of the drawbridge lowering, and long bars of metal retreating into the walls. In a few moments it was done, and the drawbridge settled into place with a soft thump. The metal of the bars became flush with the walls, On each side of the drawbridge short stone walls reached up three feet. Each wall was covered with long metal blades. Climbing and walking on the wall would not be possible. Fortunately that wasn¡¯t a problem for us at all. The drawbridge was more than sufficient. We walked the twenty or so feet to the other side. The wood beneath our feet was roughly polished and banded with iron. The iron bore faint traces of rust in the grooves and around the rivets driven through the door. The drawbridge ended at a pair of abutments, and a thin ledge of stone was cut to secure the end of the bridge in place. Stepping onto the bridge gave us a message.
You have entered the: Broken Aqueduct Meadows
As we moved off the bridge, the drawbridge began to rise back up. Each abutment had a hand-print depressed into the stone. A left hand on the left side and vice versa for the right. I pressed my right hand into the one near me. The drawbridge reversed course and began to come down again. ¡°Okay,¡± I said, ¡°it looks like these will bring it back down so we can exit. Inda, mark them down.¡± I needn¡¯t have bothered, she was already pulling out the map. I made my own notes, and we prepared to move on. The road ahead of us curved gently through the meadow, edging around the gentle hills, but it mostly went in the same direction. It lead toward the far end of the cavern. We couldn¡¯t see where the road split from here, that was over the curve of the nearest hill. Above, the ¡®sky¡¯ was blue, and clouds scudded across low overhead. The illusion was only shattered when the clouds reached the edge of the dome and disappeared, instead of continuing into the false blue sky. Still, the wind was real enough, it drove the clouds, even as it reached lower to the meadow with gentler hands. The grasses, one to one and a half feet tall, waved in undulating currents as the wind swept over and around the hills. Longer sections of grass bobbed up and down, slightly bowed down beneath their own weight. Small copses of trees waved their branches with the wind. The trees were tall, with long column-like trunks, and green leaves. ¡°Ready?¡± I asked. They were, so we set off down the road. The road was made of rectangular blocks of stone. Dirt was thick in the cracks, large sections of it host to small blades of grass or small curly leafed ferns. They flattened beneath our footsteps, only to spring back up and then slowly straighten the last of the way, like they were stretching after rising for the morning. The wind kept us alert. The movements of the grass would make it easy to conceal monsters that lurked within. We reached the crest of the first hill without issue. Ahead of us the meadow rose over more rolling hills. Ahead, the road continued, but it also divided and curved to the right. We couldn¡¯t see it from here, but we knew it would lead toward the ponds and waterfalls. To the left, the aqueduct was visible. It curved gently, cutting straight through any hills that got in the way. Arches of stone gracefully reached up to support the structure. The evidence of small leaks was visible from a distance. Sections of the aqueduct were green with veins of moss. Woody vines also crept up the sides of the supports, their green leaves waving with wind. We continued on, and were soon attacked. It proved to be nothing special. A burrow of plate-mice was nearby, and when we passed too close they came out to attack. The attack was nothing like the organized strategies of the sewer and town. This felt like an encounter with wild monsters, or particularly aggressive animals. The mice streamed out of their burrows, and each attacked as they could. They didn¡¯t gather together as a horde, or use any maneuvers. If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. I frowned after the attack was done and the corpses had faded away. ¡°That was¡­ different,¡± I said, my brows furrowed. ¡°I¡¯m not sure exactly what happened,¡± Inda said. I wasn¡¯t either. It was not a pleasant feeling. ¡°Stay here for a moment,¡± I said. I could feel where the burrows emerged from the ground. I walked toward them. I damped the vibrations of my footsteps, the dirt and stone beneath me responding to my command. I grew closer to the burrows and my brows rose in surprise. I could sense more mice deep inside below the ground. I walked around, tracing the tunnels beneath my feet. Soon I had seen enough and walked back to the path. ¡°The dungeon is having them act like animals,¡± I said. ¡°There are still mice inside. Most of the females and a few males remain. The females are tending to their young. So, the colony reaches out to attack us, but leaves more inside to breed in case things go wrong.¡± ¡°That is odd,¡± Gurek muttered. ¡°If they heard us, even the babies should be blindly trying to attack.¡± ¡°Well,¡± Firi said, his voice calm, ¡°what does it mean? Were these something new, Zidaun?¡± ¡°No,¡± I said. ¡°They were the same monsters we have already seen. Very basic level one monstrous plate-mice. Nothing special.¡± ¡°Monsters bearing young is already unusual,¡± Inda said. ¡°In a dungeon, anyway. They usually create fully formed monsters, and then make more when those die.¡± Inda looked around at the environment, her eyes sharp. ¡°I just had a thought¡­¡± she said slowly. ¡°The dungeon has been all about training so far, right?¡± ¡°Yeah,¡± I said, hearing the others agree as well. ¡°So what does this train you for?¡± Inda said. It only took me a moment to get it, but Gurek beat me to it. ¡°The wilderness,¡± he said. ¡°Exactly,¡± she said. ¡°This place is meant to mimic a truly wild area. The rest of the dungeon, so far, has been very different than most, but it has shared one thing in common with them. It was¡­ sculpted, manicured. Not so much in appearance, but the monsters we ran into were set up in advance. I don¡¯t think this place is like that. In the wild you might run into something really dangerous just a mile outside a city, and most dangers can be avoided if you are careful.¡± ¡°I see,¡± I said. And I did, it made perfect sense. I didn¡¯t understand this dungeon, though. Why spend all the space, time, and resources on¡­ this? If I understood things correctly, the dangers of the meadow would be almost random. Sure, there might be some truly dangerous monsters here, but people could use the roads and never get near them. Unless Inda was wrong¡­ but it felt right. I tried to understand what a dungeon might get out of this. A dungeon wanted adventurers to come in and fight against monsters. Preferably, the adventurers would die, though it would still get something if they didn¡¯t... I stopped at that thought. Stronger adventurers were worth more. Most weak adventurers died fast though. So how did a dungeon get stronger adventurers? Most dungeons answered that question by just having the strongest monsters they could. Sure there was some level distribution, and the monsters got stronger as you went inside, but most well developed dungeons started at at least level ten to fifteen. That meant that new adventurers went to newer dungeons, when they could. Or they formed large groups to try and kill the monsters in other dungeons. That meant most dungeons would be killing a bunch of low level adventurers or a few at their own level of difficulty. However, what if a dungeon was patient? What if it trained the low level adventurers? Then they would level up. And if the dungeon kept slowly increasing in difficulty, the adventurers would come back, over and over again. At least until they encountered something that they couldn¡¯t handle. This way a dungeon would always reap the full reward. Awakened dungeons would create some variety, and spread things out a little more, but not to this degree. And they were still¡­ off. The proportions were wrong. People would never be comfortable in those dungeons. I thought about the doors, the ease of access to where we had been before. The dungeon was absolutely catering to people who had already gotten farther inside. It wanted people to go as deep as they possibly could. It was beautiful; it was insidious. The dungeon truly understood how to harvest. The perfect corridors, the bathrooms, the empty safe area that was waiting to be filled, they all made perfect sense. The dungeon was making people feel comfortable and at ease. It was the ease of animals raised to the slaughter. The question was¡­ when would a dungeon deem a slaughter appropriate? Did it kill those that grew too powerful? Would its progression suddenly become just a little bit steeper? It wouldn¡¯t want anyone to escape and go to another dungeon. It would be easy enough to blame deaths on people being unprepared, or simply encountering a bad match-up. Especially if everyone knew that the dungeon was always fair. A sudden change to the progression might allow it to harvest most people. And if this dungeon was as smart as it seemed¡­ it wouldn¡¯t show this change to everyone. It would be sudden, a seeming random confluence of bad luck. Something that could be ignored as unfortunate chance, in case anyone escaped. I wanted to speak, but I couldn¡¯t. I would keep up my guard, though I expected nothing but a slow gentle progression. People would come, grow, get overconfident, and then die. I felt fear and worship in equal measure. My god was a dungeon without equal. My team was well trained. Hopefully they didn¡¯t need my warning. I breathed out a sigh of relief as I had a thought. I could still warn them to be careful. If I saw them slipping, I could remind them. We were trained to go in first, and to expect danger from anywhere. My warnings wouldn¡¯t upset what the dungeon was trying to do; it wouldn¡¯t give away the game. We talked briefly about the layout of the meadow. About treating it like the wilderness. Then we continued I walked through the meadow with my party. I was both more, and less, wary than before. Soon enough we reached the fork in the road. ¡°So, which way do we want to go?¡± I said. My voice was steady, my tone calm. Even if I wasn¡¯t calm inside, my body obeyed the dungeon¡¯s needs. ¡°The exit is probably on the far side,¡± Inda said. ¡°True,¡± I said. ¡°And we are supposed to proceed through as quickly as we reasonably can.¡± ¡°It made us go out of our way last time,¡± Firi said. ¡°It might make us to that again. There were waterfalls leading down into darkness and mist, right?¡± ¡°Yeah,¡± Gurek said. ¡°The right path leads to that, and the pools.¡± ¡°So that might be an exit too,¡± Firi said. ¡°Unfortunately, you are right.¡± Inda sighed, and then continued. ¡°There might be an exit on either path. Or none, for that matter. There could be a random hole in the ground that leads to the next floor.¡± ¡°Probably not,¡± I said. ¡°This place seems too organized for that. I wouldn¡¯t be surprised it there are secrets around, puzzles, that kind of thing, but I expect the main entrances will be fairly obvious.¡± I thought for a moment. ¡°I don¡¯t think it matters much,¡± I said. ¡°It could be either way. You three vote on it, I¡¯ll abstain so we don¡¯t have a tie.¡± In the end, Inda voted to keep going straight, while the other two voted for the path to the right. We turned right, and started off again. SSD 4.20 - Moving Pondward ¡°If you throw the pebble in the pond and the rings start circulating that much wider, you''ve done things and created things for people that they didn''t think they''d ever be able to do. That excites me.¡± - Mindy Grossman ==Zidaun== The path remained the same as we passed in the low places between the hills. Small sections had been carved into the hills, the dirt and stone exposed. The roots of the grasses went a few feet deep. The pale roots contrasted against the deep brown of the earth, and they clutched onto the soil like the hands of drowning men. The shadows shifted beneath the flowing clouds, making the grass and the roots seem to writhe. And then the clouds would pass for a moment and the day would return. The grass was but grass, the roots but roots. And the world was bright and cheerful once again. Still, in shadow or light, we were careful. So far we hadn¡¯t run into any new monsters, but the ones we did encounter were different in other ways. We were able to scare off a group of rats by posturing and making loud noises. The giant cockroaches were aggressive if we got too close, but only those that noticed us. The rest remained in a giant mound of dirt, where various holes lead into its interior. In the distance, we occasionally saw swarms of mice traveling over the ground. They would eat everything that was in their way. If a party didn¡¯t have good crowd control, they might actually be dangerous. However, the large groups were also very easy to spot from a distance. We didn¡¯t see any close to the road, either. The various encounters were more common than I would expect outside a dungeon, but they felt like traveling through the wilderness. It felt like someone had compressed a random section of wilderness into a smaller area. The only real sign this was a dungeon, were the few times we saw very obvious pit-fall traps. They were barely covered, and had dirt sides. They were only about five feet deep as well. Only someone who wasn¡¯t paying any attention would fall into one. Some beginners might fall in while fighting a monster, I supposed. Hopefully it would help them learn some situational awareness. The dirt on the bottom was soft enough that it shouldn¡¯t pose any danger on its own. Ultimately, the path lead us gently down a slope until we reached an expansive flat area. Emerging from between a pair of hills, we could see a new area of water. In front of us were a series of large ponds, a few hundred feet across in total. Small sections of land and reed festooned mud sectioned off the individual ponds. Small rivulets of clear water flowed from one to the next. To the right the arc of the walls was barely visible, the blue matching the sky of a bright day. Clouds appeared from nothing before being carried off by the wind. They raced away from the wall, soon followed by more clouds in their own turn. A stream fed into the ponds from the left, presumably the same stream we had seen leaking from the aqueduct. It gently flowed into the ponds. The water of the ponds was mostly still, though slight distortions moved across the water in the blowing wind. Reeds, in various shades of green, waved with the motion of the wind where they emerged from the water, or bunched together in thick tangles near the edges. The path proceeded through the middle of the ponds, where it continued on a series of wooden boardwalks. The boards were a grayish brown, rough with the weathering of many seasons. Posts of wood went downwards to anchor themselves below the water. There were no railings or guides. And to the right the ponds simply stopped. A large amount of water dropped from where the ponds met empty air. More water fell than the stream could explain, obvious more was fed into the system from somewhere. The water fell into a yawning abyss. No sound came after the water fell off the edge. If there was a bottom, it was so far below that the sound couldn¡¯t reach this far. Instead, the vast gulf was simply filled with impenetrable mist. It roiled like boiling water, just a few feet below the level of the surrounding ponds. In the middle of the mist was a column of stone, like an island in a turbulent sea. Trees and other greenery concealed further detail. It rose a short distance above the land surrounding the misty waves, connected by a bridge to the boardwalks. Struts of aged wood held the bridge up, forming an arch with overlapping supports. Despite the supports, the wood of the bridge swayed gently in the omnipresent wind. Like the boardwalk, the wood was pale and weathered. However, the bridge had railings, though the thin wood seemed insufficient with an uncertain abyss on either side. Farther to the right the abyss ended with a series of sheer cliffs which lead upward, until they merged with the false sky. The cliffs were host to masses of mossy greenery. Scraggly trees leaned outward from the tops and were wedged into tiny outcroppings, their roots were a gnarled mass that clung with steadfast determination to even the tiniest gaps in the stone. Small trickles of water flowed down, leaving tracks of darker glimmering stone amid the verdant green moss. Small overhangs of stone dripped water down into the mist below, like a child biting into juicy fruit, the juices flowing down their chin. We stopped, overlooking the scenery. Taking in another natural wonder in this compressed approximation of the real world. ¡°We¡¯ll need to be careful with the bridge,¡± Inda said. ¡°I should be able to keep us from falling if needed.¡± I nodded. If you come across this story on Amazon, it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it. ¡°We will take a few precautions.¡± I said. ¡°I can make sure that all the supports are securely anchored. I am not expecting it to simply collapse on us. Not in this dungeon. However, better to be safe, regardless.¡± An ordinary fall wouldn¡¯t kill us, but who knew what lay below the mist. Dungeons could, and did, twist the laws of the world in strange ways. I might be possible to have a truly bottomless pit here. Or the bottom could be full of some very nasty traps. ¡°Gurek,¡± I said, ¡°unknown territory, so keep up the front. Already seen attacks from the water in the sewers, so probably more of that.¡± He just nodded. It wasn¡¯t anything he didn¡¯t know already. I would keep up my vigilance regardless. We moved forward, following the path until it met the ponds. The ponds reflected the moving clouds, subtly distorted by the still water. I could feel the water, earth, and wood. For all the appearance of age, the pathway¡¯s wood was solid, and the wooden supports were firmly anchored into stone below. However, the joints where the wood were connected, were loose. The joints were still strong enough to prevent the structure from collapsing, but they were designed to move. ¡°Heads up,¡± I said. ¡°The structure is secure, but it will move as we use it. Expect shifting footing.¡± The water near the edges was fairly shallow for the moment. Falling into it would be merely embarrassing, as long as we weren¡¯t harassed by monsters. Gurek took his time, the wood creaking with each step as the structure shifted back and forth under our footsteps. We skipped over a small section with a missing board. I could feel a corresponding board quietly moldering beneath the waters, where it was buried within the mud. Algal blooms floated in the clear water, and mats of green circled the edges of the ponds. Something stirred within a deeper section. Disturbed water pushed its way up, before something followed it. ¡°Left, incoming,¡± I shouted. We stopped moving, each of us prepared. A large beetle rose to the surface of the water. It was five feet long, and stayed about ten feet from us.
Misty Diving Beetle Monstrous Level 8
¡°Level eight,¡± I said. The shell of the beetle was a deep brown, turned almost black from the glistening water. The edges of its shell and between sections were a translucent, almost luminous, yellow. Its head had a pair of compound eyes on each side and its mandibles looked sharp, but rather stubby. It was using its two front pairs legs to keep afloat. Its back legs rose into the air behind it. The back legs each formed an almost perfect curve. Each one was covered by innumerable bristles. Bubbles of air and large drops of water were trapped. Mana began to gather around the back legs. ¡°Magic, back legs,¡± I warned. We waited, we needed to see what it would do. The magic released and the air and water joined together. Mist spread from the beetle, wafting toward us. We held our breaths, but there was no sign the mist was dangerous on it own. However, it quickly grew thicker, obscuring our sight. I could sense something new in the water. The beetle was beating its legs together, sending a clicking noise through the water. In response, I felt the water disturbed heavily, and several things started to swim toward the surface. ¡°More incoming, same pond,¡± I said. The moderately shallow edge of the pond was barely visible through the thick mist. Vague shapes could be seen under the water, but it was impossible to tell what was real and what was merely formed by a fleeting congregation of thicker mist. Soon enough something swam into the shallow part of the pond.
Larval Misty Diving Beetle Monstrous Level 6
It was followed by several others, even as the first one leapt out of the shallows in an attempt to attack. Each larva had a curving body shape, the head and tail both arcing upwards. The body was a dull brown. Its six legs were segmented into several sections, while the tail ended in two small protrusions, and its head had two massive and sharp mandibles. The two ends of the mandible slightly overlapped. Anything caught between them would be speared through by the pointed ends. When they jumped up, the tail surged with mana, pushing the water backwards behind them. In turn, this caused them to jet forward, where we were ready for them. The first one aimed for Inda, and her sabre pierced into it even as she danced to the side. Its carapace sliced apart and it screamed, even as it overshot its mark and splashed twitching into the pool behind us. I kept an absent sense of it, even as Gurek and I dealt with the others that were attacking. I sidestepped and slammed my elbow and knee into a passing larva. The dual spikes penetrated deep, each injecting poison into the wound. The two spikes halted its momentum, tearing its exoskeleton from the force. The larva twitched and screamed as it dropped to the wood below, but my new poison appeared to paralyze it as it stopped moving quickly. I prepared to deal with any other threats, but Gurek had already dealt with the larva that attacked him by bisecting it into two different halves. The larva dealt with by me and Inda never tried to attack again. Each died shortly after our respective attacks. The mist started to clear, leading to the sight of a very agitated beetle. I had the definite sense that it was not pleased with us killing the larva. It dived back beneath the water, disappearing for a moment, even as we carefully watched. An instant later it exploded out of the water, its two back legs pushed magic out behind it and its shell unfolded to reveal a pair of gossamer wings. The wings fluttered as it used the combination of back facing thrust and flight to propel itself into an aerial charge. It surged toward the middle of our group, between Inda and I. Each of us anticipated it, and stepped out of its way. I struck downward with a clenched fist, aiming for its left eye. Inda deflected its attack slightly with a firmly held knife in one hand, while her blade cut cleanly through all the legs on one side. Under the effect of a now unbalanced thrust, it spun in the air like a top. Its rapidly moving, and rapidly spinning, carapace struck the surface of the pond and it skipped like a rock. One, two, three times, until it skipped a final time and fell out over the edge and into the endless mists. We waited for a little while, but it never returned. SSD 4.21 - Building the Mists ¡°There had been a frozen mist here, and the trees were spun into feathers. Their fragile brilliance made me wonder why, into the spotlessness of Creation, God had seen fit to introduce soiling, twisting, rampaging, Man.¡± -Maria McCann, The Wilding ==Zidaun== We saw a beetle poking its head out of the next pond when the mist cleared. It watched us as we passed by, but it didn¡¯t attempt to attack us. That meant the beetles were acting like aggressive animals. This one had seen us destroy another of its kind, and presumably its offspring, and decided we weren¡¯t worth the effort of fighting. The next pond after that, we were attacked again. This time we fought against two of the beetles, as well as slightly more offspring. It still proved to be an easy battle for us. Fighting in the mists would be obnoxious to many groups, however. It got marked down, along with everything else we learned about the beetles. It was the usual type of report: ¡°The beetles never attacked us in groups larger than two. My guess was that they were a mated pair. That would certainly line up with the larva that attacked us from the ponds. After killing the beetles from one pond, it was common that the next pond¡¯s beetles would leave us alone. It didn¡¯t always happen, but it was common. This suggested tactics that were more than simply monstrous. The beetles also didn¡¯t attack until we entered the boardwalk space right next to, or above, their pond. This indicated that they were likely highly territorial. Each mated pair would claim a single pond and then defend it. It might be that they were focused on defending, or feeding, their offspring. Their offspring only rose to the surface when they received a specific signal from at least one of the mature beetles in the pond. And so on¡­¡± I had written countless reports like this over the years. At least the monsters here were unique and interesting. Many starting dungeons just had a single monster, with maybe a few additions or variations. We soon reached where the boardwalk split. To the right it continued until it became the bridge. Straight ahead, and then curving gently back to the left, the path continued over the ponds and then back toward the far side of the meadows. We paused for the moment. ¡°So which way should we go?¡± I asked. Inda pointed toward the bridge. ¡°We are already here,¡± she said. ¡°We might as well go see what is there.¡± ¡°Just making sure,¡± I said, a small smile on my lips. I knew that we were all curious. We journeyed to the right, fighting the various beetles, until we stood right before the bridge. ==Caden== I hadn¡¯t stopped working with the various teleport runes since I got them. I hadn¡¯t stopped working on metallurgy, either. Being able to divide my mind into multiple shards might be the single most powerful ability that I possessed. And it wasn¡¯t even a delineated ability visible to my skill sheet. It was one of the many intrinsic abilities of being a dungeon core. And, like so many of my skills, it wasn¡¯t listed at all. I wasn¡¯t sure why the system was so clear with titles, but so vague with abilities. Perhaps it was simply that abilities were larger than titles. There were so many ways to use skills, listing them all would be impossible. Or maybe it helped force people to explore their abilities for themselves. Regardless, I was grateful that I could work and observe people at the same time. Not that observing people wasn¡¯t work, because it was. As Zidaun and his team fought, I had been subtly adjusting the aggression parameters for the monsters that they encountered. I liked that they had used aggressive posturing to scare some of the animals away. That kind of creative solution deserved a reward. They were testing my dungeon, and as they did, I adjusted the dungeon in response. I wanted the dungeon to feel more natural. I had to live here. Some areas would be more scripted and regimented, but I liked creating areas that felt natural. This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it. I was also excited when they went down toward the ponds and waterfalls. The ponds were based off of some geothermal ponds that I had seen in my old world. The ponds there had been shallow, but very hot, and had barriers of calcium deposits. They had also had a range of colors, from a rust red to a brilliant green. I liked the idea of sequential ponds feeding into each other, but I had used a more wetlands interpretation of it. I was actually proud of how I made them feel natural. I had laid down barriers of harder, and more resistant, stone that were pressed up against each other. In between those, I had filled them with soft limestone and then mud and gravel. All this was in the future pond areas. Then I had let the water from the aqueducts pour out and down over the ground on the far side of the valley. Where the water naturally traveled, I had carved the earth and stone away. I had shaped the slope of the hills and ground so that the water would head in the general direction of the future ponds, but I let the water itself create its own path. That way it would look completely natural, because it was. After that, the water finally reached the ponds. The water entered and dissolved some of the mud as it traveled along. It would also pickup pieces of gravel. The random motions of the water, as it spread out like a miniature delta, deposited mud and gravel into tiny dams. These would then redirect the water. Then the water would finally escape one pond barrier and create a tiny inch tall waterfalls into the next pond down. And then the cycle would continue. And this happened many times until the water finally started to trickle down over the edges of all the ponds that bordered against the steep canyon that lead far below. After the paths had been chosen by the water, I had made them permanent by adding more stone here and there to enforce the new barriers. And then I had built banks of mud and grass along the barriers. After that the ponds were hollowed, and I placed springs in a few of them to enhance the flow of water. That created significant waterfalls, which is what I wanted. However, the gap around the single surviving island of stone in the canyon was filled with mostly darkness at that point. A little mist naturally spread out around the waterfalls, but it didn¡¯t create the effect that I wanted. I tried a few of the environmental options, but they didn¡¯t fit my needs either. It was easy enough to create a stable fog bank, or mimic the mist from the waterfall on a greater scale, but neither had the sense of motion that I wanted to create. I wanted an adventurer to come here and see the mist boiling. I wanted it to feel like the mist was a barrier that was barely strong enough to contain the immense power that was lurking below it. I wanted it to possess a beauty and power that was otherworldly. I wanted it to feel alien, and almost alive. So I had gone to work. If there weren¡¯t any options available, then I would create them. So I did. I had started by working more on fog. I used water pushed through ultra fine nozzles to aerosolize the water. I knew that certain amusement parks had used this to create fog effects. I borrowed the same idea. Properly done, with a very light wind, I was able to create a fog that spread out across the ground in a wave of thick vapor. Replicating the idea many times over, I was able to create extremely thick layers. This fog was more artificial, and it moved in ways that felt unnatural as it spread. It still wasn¡¯t perfect, but it was much better. After that I had played more with wind. I had a large section of air below the mist that I could mess around with. Unfortunately, just using updrafts, even ones pointed and oriented in different directions was not enough. Ultimately I had needed to create a number of different layers of mist at different temperatures. The coolest layer of mist was on the top, followed by layers of progressively hotter mist below. The super heated water in the bottom layers, combined with the wind, formed steam that rose up and then encountered the cooler layers above. The steam would cool, but its motion was imparted to the layers above. The mist roiled with warmer layers rising up to the top and then cooling and falling back below. After I had managed to create the effect that I was looking for, it became one of the options I could create. Now it simply happened. All the nozzles and other artificial methods of creating the roiling mist were not necessary anymore. Now it was simply an effect that was created with the magic of the dungeon. I liked it better this way. Now, even if someone studied the mist, there was no obvious reason for its existence. It felt like proper magic. I had taken my time making the bridge, and everything else as well. The boardwalk and the bridge were deliberately made with loose joins in the wood. Those joins were still more than strong enough to hold people and monsters. I had used boulders for some very enjoyable destructive weight testing. The fact that it was also necessary just to double check everything was a bonus. Designing the bridge had been easy. I didn¡¯t consciously think about it very much, but I could feel forces. I could feel all the countless pressures on the ground as people and monsters walked on it. I could feel how the artificial wind pushed against the leaves in the trees. And then I could feel that force transmitted into the springiness of the branches and tree trunk. And then from there the countless vibrations of those springs releasing the tension flowed down into the roots and into the earth. And it was like that everywhere. I constantly ignored those forces, except when I needed use them. I had reinforced the walls in arches. I had chosen shapes that made things as stable as possible. And I was still doing more testing, as well, with hexagons, spheres, and other configurations. So when I went to make a bridge, it was simple. I already knew that arches were some of the most stable arrangements possible. I wasn¡¯t planning to use wires of metal anchored to the bridge from above the sides, so that left out suspension bridges. In the end, I went for one of the most basic bridge designs. It was an arch, with another arch below the span of the bridge to support it. All of this was made of wood. I had also added in an additional effect, however. I knew that people might add their own supports to the bridge. I wasn¡¯t opposed to that, it was a perfectly sensible precaution. However, I felt like showing off. I wasn¡¯t going to allow someone to support the bridge with shoddy craftsmanship. If someone tried to enhance the bridge, they would get a surprise. Having watched Zidaun manipulate the stone of my dungeon many times, I was hoping he would do it again here. It would be a fun show. Plus, I was looking forward to them getting to the next area soon. I had made some strides forward with teleportation. SSD 4.22 - The Illusion of Life For me, there is very little difference between magic and art. To me, the ultimate act of magic is to create something from nothing: It''s like when the stage magician pulls the rabbit from the hat. ¨C Alan Moore ==Zidaun== Before we set a single foot upon the bridge, as it creaked in the omnipresent wind, we decided to reinforce it. There were a few blessings that Firi might have been able to add, but they should have negligible effect compared to Inda and I. We started with Inda, she cast a spell on each of us. We would not press so firmly downward upon the bridge anymore. If we fell, we would also fall much slower. We weren¡¯t sure what, if anything, was below the misty gap, but it was best to prepare. My turn was next. I started moving stone to reinforce the bridge. The magic was torn from my grasp. ¡°Get back,¡± I said. ¡°The bridge is doing something.¡± Varnish and polish crawled in droplets and rivulets, upward. The varnish moved up against gravity, droplets pushing up and moving toward the sky. Eventually the whole bridge was covered in gleaming varnish, and the beads subsided back downward. and instantly settled to a perfect gloss. Not even a hint of varnish smell filled the air. The beams of the bridge groaned as they firmed into place, the wood tightening around them. The bridge straightened slightly, its arch growing more pronounced. Green jade slithered out from each side of the bridge¡¯s supports. The green stone grew as a living vine of stone, complete with stone leaves. The leaves were so thin they were translucent in the eternal daylight. The vines spread, growing thicker and traveling farther along the bridge. The supports of the bridge soon grew completely covered. Jade buds formed which gave birth to small transparent crystal flowers. The flowers bloomed open; tiny transparent yellow stamens peaked out from the interior. The scent of flowers, sweet and light, filled the air. From the main branches vines twisted up around the main bridge and followed the banisters. From there they grew into the air, following an invisible framework. The framework could only be seen due to its absence, as vines curved up in multiple places over the bridge, and arches of stone vines formed. Like below, small buds of jade gave way to transparent flowers. When the vines stopped growing, the bridge was transformed. From a creaky and aged structure, it had become an enchanted path. Its slightly sagging structure had given way to a perfect arch, lined in otherworldly living stone. New shadows from the leaves meshed with the gleaming deep brown varnish. The very slight movement of the bridge was enough to make the leaves glimmer and the shadows move gently. The new tunnel felt like it belonged in a secluded wood. ¡°Is the vine alive?¡± Gurek asked. Inda and Firi shook their heads, unsure. ¡°It feels like just stone to me,¡± I said. ¡°However, with what we saw¡­ I wouldn¡¯t say anything for sure.¡± I reached out to touch the nearby vine. It was stone, as far as I could tell, though its texture mimicked the feel of a plant perfectly. There were faint striations on the vines; they were indistinguishable from the thin bark of a living vine. However, there were layers of different types of stone inside. I could feel the veins of crystal perfectly mimicking a living structure. I didn¡¯t think it was alive. There was no mana lingering around inside it, at least that I could feel in the main trunk. However, mana was hard to feel properly at times, even when borrowing the senses of a god. There were tiny flickers of mana around the flowers though. I looked at the flowers more carefully. The petals were the least life-like part of the plant. However, it was done in a way that was obviously intentional. Countless facets lined the petals, spreading tiny rainbow lights around them. The stamens, on the other hand, were perfectly lifelike. Tiny granules of crystalline golden pollen were even scattered around the flower and gathered where they belonged. ¡°I cannot tell for sure,¡± I said. ¡°I don¡¯t sense any mana, except around the flowers. Even that is faint though. It might be alive, or¡­ an exceptionally elaborate statue.¡± ¡°Why?¡± Firi said. ¡°Why what?¡± Inda said. One of her eyebrows rose at him. ¡°Why¡­ make this?¡± Firi said. ¡°We have seen the dungeon¡­¡± He gestured around us. ¡°Make all of this. That makes sense. It has a purpose for training, and if it was effective it would attract people to the dungeon.¡± He pointed at me. ¡°I know the Adar customize their dungeons, do they do things to this extent, usually?¡± I hesitated for a moment. Best to tell the truth carefully here. ¡°No,¡± I said. ¡°Not to this extent. This is the largest room I have been in that is meant to simulate a natural environment.¡± ¡°What about this?¡± he said, pointing to the bridge. ¡°Could you make this, make a dungeon replicate it again, and do it like we saw?¡± I thought for a moment. I¡­ honestly wasn¡¯t sure what we had just seen. This dungeon was strange. It¡­ almost seemed like this dungeon liked art. Not for the sake of deception or some plan, but simply because of the art itself. It could be part of some plan. Show off works of art and never attack while doing so, and then suddenly attack later. It was possible¡­ but it didn¡¯t feel right. The amount of effort seemed utterly out of proportion to the reward. It could have just made the bridge become sturdy. An effect that could have been replicated through out the dungeon and that never drew an attack. Then it could have pulled off the same trick. What it had created here¡­ I was fairly certain that our true masters could create something like this. Though it would take a great deal of time. And doing this¡­ making the show of it. It had made a masterpiece appear in moments. And it hadn¡¯t simply appeared, it had grown into place. Could we set things up so that a dungeon would be able to do this? No. I didn¡¯t think we could. It would take the dungeon acting of its own accord and using its own abilities to the fullest to make it happen. And I didn¡¯t understand what that meant at all. ¡°No,¡± I finally responded. ¡°I don¡¯t think we could. I don¡¯t actually know what this means.¡± I took steps until I was farther onto the bridge. The others followed me. ¡°Uh,¡± Gurek cleared his throat. ¡°I should take a sample, right? I know it might not be a plant. And¡­ it seems wrong to take a piece of this, honestly. However, we aren¡¯t entirely sure why this happened. So¡­ we should take a sample, right?¡± I sighed. ¡°Yeah, that is protocol,¡± I said. Gurek grabbed a hard leather case out of his backpack. ¡°Zidaun, can you use your stone shaping to grab a flower for me?¡± he said. ¡°Sure, I can do that,¡± I said. I reached out to a flower, breaking it off with a simple manipulation of the stone. The cross-section of the vine left behind had visible vasculature. I reached out to hand it to Gurek when the small flower changed. I let it drop out of my hands and it fell to the wooden boards below. The flower¡¯s petals wilted, the shining crystal crumpling into tiny rainbow flecked nubs. In the center of the flower grew a seed. The seed was a faceted sphere of transparent brown crystal. The crystal contained a tiny fleck of solid jade. The jade moved and cracked through the brown crystal keeping it contained. A tiny seedling of jade emerged, with two small leaves. Roots extended below it, they grew into a small bundle in the air, lifting the plant a few inches. It grew upwards, tiny leaves sprouting off of it. It stopped when it was no more than a foot tall. Tiny buds formed on the vine, and a bud at the very top of the vine blossomed open. It swiftly became a flower that was identical to the one I had just removed. A shimmer of crystal surrounded the flower, until it was locked into a solid hexagonal block of perfectly transparent stone. This crystal was sufficiently different that the transparent petals were still easily visible within. Gurek went to pick it up. The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. I identified it out of reflex and curiosity.
The Eternal Blossom Artifact ¨C Unique Immune to Theft ¨C Dungeon Bound ¨C Indestructible ¨C Transferable A manifestation of the dungeon¡¯s desire for beauty and perfection, and its desire to share it. Benefits: +Owner instinctively knows the benefits of Artifact +Owner has a telepathic link with the dungeon, even when Artifact is elsewhere +Owner can allow another individual telepathic contact with the dungeon while they touch Artifact +Owner can establish a temporary telepathic link when another is touching the Artifact +Owner can have the dungeon store Artifact, or recall it from anywhere inside the dungeon at will +Owner may transfer ownership of Artifact to another, however, this fails under any form of persuasion, threat, etc¡­ even indirect forms, like social pressure or preexisting contracts +Dungeon may assign another owner upon death
Gurek touched it even as I started to react, and I felt the magic bind it to him. Gurek¡¯s eyes widened. ¡°What the fuck?¡± He said. My heart froze. ==Caden== I had to admit that I liked showing off. I could communicate with Zidaun, to an extent. I could talk to Exsan too. Usually, anyway, I wasn¡¯t entirely sure why he was meditating for so long. Maybe dungeon cores did that all the time? It might be their form of sleep, something they did when they had nothing better to do. That felt wrong though¡­ Oh well, I would figure that out later. Zidaun started his manipulation of the stone, and my preparations took over. Even after designing it, I was enthralled by watching the stone grow over the bridge. The varnish trick was easy. It wasn¡¯t actually liquid. It was a sped up version of me creating the varnish on the wooden planks. The fake droplets were never liquid, they were hardened drops of varnish that I destroyed from one end while I added to the other end. It created the illusion of the drops moving against gravity. The vines¡­ were considerably harder. There were ways to record processes inside the puzzle framework. That was how I recreated moving doors, and other pieces of work. I had been using that framework and pushing it to the limits. It was not designed for what I was using it for, but that didn¡¯t matter to me. I had painstakingly built the bridge in a stronger configuration. Getting the bridge to go from a looser state to one that was upright was easy. It was easy to reverse as well. Once I had the bridge in place, I had planted vines on each side of it. I prevented it from growing off the bridge. I also carefully wove it into place around the supports as it grew. And, as it grew, I made perfect models of it in stone. My ability to absorb and perfectly recreate the vines proved helpful. Then I carefully trained the vines up the structure of the bridge and over arching trellises. I removed the trellises from the bridge later. Eventually I had copies of the bridge in all of it various stages. And from there I grew the same ones out of stone. I could see inside the plants perfectly, so I didn¡¯t just copy the outside, I emulated the interior vasculature and structure as perfectly as I could. I had to manually grow my stone vines, recording the process as I went from one snapshot until I matched the next. I created copies of the bridge with vines on it in each stage of growth, one at a time, each representing only minutes of the vines growth. This made the leaves move with their real motions in response to the wind and the accelerated growth that occurred in my dungeon. Eventually I had recorded the entire artificial process. The only real change I made was to alter the properties of the petals. I wanted to show that I had more artistry than simply a perfect copy. My new abilities with art and calculation made the work easier. They helped me get things perfect as I shifted the stone from one state to the next. I wasn¡¯t certain I could have done it without those skills. However, I was able to get the entire process recorded. And then I was able to speed it up. And it created something truly amazing. I had actually watched the process several times on my own, before Zidaun and the others triggered it. I loved seeing their eyes get wide. The notification icon suddenly started blinking furiously.
Congratulations, you have unlocked an accomplishment! Pulled the Wool Over Their Eyes Accomplishments are hidden goals that can be achieved for varying rewards. Unlike quests, accomplishments have no followup accomplishment. Accomplishments are not noted in the status. The nature of accomplishments cannot be shared with another individual. You have successfully fooled a group of moderate or above leveled individuals with a completely physical illusion. Calculating additional factors¡­ +Multiple massive environments created with lifelike fidelity Error... appropriate skill not found Cause identified, reward deferred +Entire dungeon section filled with lifelike statues +Fooled experts of exploration, including an individual borrowing your own senses +/- Existing Title for deception ¨C positive bonus, due to existing title not assisting +Low level +Goal of deception (awe, beauty, mystification) accomplished Title triggered... Error¡­ (awe, beauty, mystification) incompatible with dungeon¡­ Error assigned lower priority +Success on first few attempts +Individuals fooled are still uncertain how trick was accomplished +Large scale deception completed within a day ¨C invalidated due to dungeon nature Rewards: Standard, Upgraded to Massive
  • Hidden (Reward Deferred)
  • Trigger Met (Future reward may activate with acquisition of additional titles, accomplishments, skills, etc...)
  • Title: Escape Artist IV (Deception) upgraded to Illusion Specialist V (Light, Darkness, Sound)
  • Skill Given
  • Given Skill Upgraded
  • Given Skill Leveled
  • Artifact Created
Error Resolving¡­ You have gained a new title: Art for Art¡¯s Sake Error . . . Title incompatible with species ¨C title will be adapted. . . . Multiple errors of this type detected in history, adding subspecies (human) Error, unique subspecies, unable to modify Additional incompatibilities found Seeking solution . . . Adding automatic handling for invalid species errors. Skills, Titles, etc... will be adjusted automatically. You will be informed when this occurs. Error now resolved. Title changed due to species adaptation, you have now gained: Beauty in the Garden of Death (First) You completed a work of art, a masterpiece. This is not the first time, and you have pushed yourself to make even more as your skills developed. You have created your art with no thought of reward, except the appreciation of yourself and others. That appreciation has been obtained, and your art has proven its own reward. +1000 Ability Points +Gain a large selection of flora and fauna that are harmless, but varied in color, size, shape, etc... -Evolutions of forms given by this title will always remain relatively harmless unless you obtain a natural copy or pattern in another way +(First) Can create a new type of subsection: Harmless Evolution Your title: One Small Step for a Man I has become: One Small Step for a Man II You are the first of your species to gain multiple particular skills and or titles. Use your unique knowledge and gifts to further become what you desire; you are already on the way. +3000 (2000 + Existing 1000) Ability Points +4% Additive bonus to all other learning bonuses from titles and skills
Title Upgraded and advanced: Escape Artist IV (Deception) upgraded to: Illusion Specialist V (Light, Darkness, Sound) You know that all deception is based in illusion. Having gained a greater understanding of deception, you now also have insight into the mechanics behind deception. +3100 (2350 + Existing 750) Ability Points + 25% Faster learning for abilities focused on deception +25% Discount on purchasing deception based skills + 12.5% Faster learning for abilities focused on light, darkness, and or sound +12.5% Discount on purchasing light, darkness, and or sound based skills +Your Aura cannot be traced back to your core by anyone without a title focused on tracking. That title must be at least one level higher than your own, and weaker titles may require more than one level more. Tracking titles one level or more weaker than your own will indicate any decoys are the real thing.
You have gained a new skill: Environmental Immersion III (Light, Darkness, Sound) Artificial environments you create are made more realistic, and blend together better. Conscious effort can make actual illusions overlay sufficiently complex camouflage.
SSD 4.23 - The Long Bug Battle ¡°In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.¡± -Dwight F. Eisenhower ==Caden== I was no stranger to having knowledge shoved into my head, but having such intimate knowledge of an item I had not created or absorbed was a new experience. The new plants and fauna were being sorted by other shards. I was focusing on the Artifact. I knew the pattern for the Artifact, its dimensions, its location, its exact functions. I knew that it was permanently and completely linked to myself. The system had taken my achievement and created a physical manifestation of my intentions. And, for now, I was linked with Gurek. I didn¡¯t know enough to properly hold a conversation, but I did know enough to send a simple message. Hello Gurek. ==Zidaun== My mind went into overdrive. It was unclear whether the dungeon or the system had created the Artifact, and that mattered. Artifacts were important. Some were held as national treasures, while others belonged to various nobles and guilds. The Adar had stashes of artifacts held in reserve. Telepathy was not an easy magic. The Adar knew this better than most. We had a natural inclination toward it. I had never felt any great skill with it beyond the natural abilities native to us all. I expected to get much better with it in the coming years. There was a reason for that. Skills naturally progressed much faster by doing, rather than simply training or studying. And I had a telepathic link to the dungeon. And I would get new ones as I connected to the coming Adar. The Eternal Blossom would let anyone practice telepathy. It couldn¡¯t be stolen. It couldn¡¯t leave the dungeon. Its owner could not be coerced to transfer ownership away from themselves. If it didn¡¯t have these attributes, I would have expected it to shortly end up the property of a specialized academy or guild. As it was, I had noted what wasn¡¯t restricted. Nothing said the owner couldn¡¯t be coerced to let another use it. What was the dungeon¡¯s intention? Did it want to use it produce conflict? That went against what the description of the Artifact actually said. It said it represented the dungeon¡¯s drive for beauty. That it wanted to share it. For the moment I disregarded the mention of a quest for perfection, that fell into more normal territory. Gurek now knew that the dungeon was an individual in its own right. Two, in this case. What did I need to do? For a moment the compulsion to protect my people and their interests battled against the uncertainty of the dungeon¡¯s intentions. I heard a surprised whisper from Gurek. ¡°How does it know my name?¡± Finally, as things fell into a new balance, I heaved an internal sigh of relief. A decision had been made. I wouldn¡¯t need to kill my friends. At least not right away. Not at all if I could get some precautions in place. Instead, I spoke. ¡°Don¡¯t talk, any of you,¡± I said. ¡°Gurek, we will address this in a moment. For now¡­ don¡¯t say anything.¡± I turned and I looked at the other two. ¡°Gurek¡­¡± I cleared my throat. ¡°He just learned something secret. I will talk more about this if you swear an oath. However, we are still in the dungeon, for now.¡± I glanced down at the bridge and over the edge to the mists below. ¡°Let¡¯s go deal with whatever is on the island,¡± I said. ¡°After that, after that¡­. we can talk. For now, just say only what we need to.¡± The others followed me somberly as I headed for the far side of the bridge. I hoped I had managed to convey the seriousness of the matter. This was more dangerous than anything else we had encountered here. Not that that said much, this place had been easy enough so far. My hands would have shook if I had been allowed to. Instead my duty suppressed the visible signs of my stress. Not even mybody was allowed to betray my dungeon or people. I wouldn¡¯t be able to warn them even if I tried. I prayed it wouldn¡¯t be necessary. With, perfectly false, calm and confident strides, I crossed the bridge. Gurek had taken the time to get ahead of me and back into position. As we reached the far side, we slowed down. My senses only reported more stone and flora. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it. ¡°Nothing, proceed slowly,¡± I said. ¡°It is a reasonable bet that there is a boss here or after the island.¡± The others simply nodded. I seriously doubted they needed me to tell them anything, but it was protocol for a reason. Anyone could make a mistake, whether through distraction, inattention, or simply a bad day. Green ferns with long fronds covered the sides of the path. Tiny insects clicked and buzzed in the undergrowth. Their omnipresent droning drowned out the wind. The faint sound of falling water faded from behind us as we followed the twisting path between more greenery. Tall trees here and there shaded the path. We watched the shadows carefully, but there appeared no sign of danger. When we finally ran into a monster, it was making no effort to hide. The tangled plants gave way to a clearing. Tiny ferns, grass, and saplings grew between the cut off stems of larger specimens. The entire clearing showed evidence of being chewed down to the ground regularly. And, at the far side of the clearing, stood the culprit. A boss, with a cleared arena, in all but name.
Armored Millipede Monstrous Level 11
¡°Level eleven,¡± My voice whispered out. Its body was a long arrangement of repeating segments, each with two spiked legs. It was covered in thick armor that The armor and carapace were translucent, filled with ghostly suggestions of organs and viscera. Its head was turned away from us at the moment, though we could see bristles of hairs and two long antennae that quivered with the faint movements of the air. All together, its cylindrical body was twenty feet long and three feet across. One of the antennae, six feet long on its own, twitched as we entered the clearing together. The head of the millipede whipped around to to face us. Now we could clearly see its face. Two curving pincers were located just below its relatively tiny mouth. Its eyes were on each side, the compound segments recessed to be almost flush with the chitin around them. Clear hairs sprouted above the eyes, bristling out in a protective layer before the hairs joined together into armor that thickened into the next body segment. There was a momentary pause at it stared at us, its antennae quivering. After a moment the antennae snapped back, flat against the head and it moved towards us. Its motion was strange, the legs working together to make its charge toward us sinuous and deceptively slow. With so many legs working together, it was actually surprisingly fast. The sharp ends of the legs stabbed into the earth, each leaving a precise hole as it advanced. Other than the sound of its movements, it was completely silent. Gurek had already moved into position to meet it, his two blades each held in arms that looked almost loose. The muscles in his arms were primed to move in a moment in reaction to the charging millipede. As it reached us one of its antennae whipped out toward Gurek the tip blurring with a whistling sound. Gurek¡¯s left blade met it in mid-air, the flat edge singing with the song of vibrating steel an instant later as the antenna rebounded from the impact. A blessing settled on us from Firi, a faint glimmering coating our limbs. I could feel the faint barrier of mana that was woven above my skin. A knife whipped by my ear and stuck into the armor, even as the millipede turned its head to the side and charged past in a curved path. Gurek struck towards its retreating head, his right foot advancing forward with his blade held out ahead of him in a perfectly straight thrust. His blow was met by the other antenna parrying the sword. The end of the antenna flicked toward his chest, but he backed up quickly enough to avoid it. As the millipede continued to move past I grabbed at its feet with the dirt below, but the feet simply cut through the soft soil. I started to pull the harder stone out from beneath, bringing up sections to displace the earth. Even as I was pulling up the stone, Gurek advanced closer toward the millipede¡¯s moving side. As he brought his sword forward to attack the millipede dipped its legs lower on that side, angling the armor toward him. Gurek struck the armor and the millipede paused for a moment, a small cut the only sign of the attack. Then the side closer towards Gurek leapt upward the legs extending to maximum length. The legs near Gurek flashed out, the razor sharp edges aiming toward him. He backpedaled, his feet moving in precise movements, even as he dipped his body down and parried two of the legs that attempted to slash toward him. Another leg grazed against his armor, leaving only a faint glow in his armor field. One of the legs Gurek parried had been hit in the joint, and it flew off to the side. While it had raised up its body Inda had taken the opportunity to throw two knives. Each hummed when they impacted in the underbelly, the hilts vibrating for a brief moment as the blade buried themselves in the monster¡¯s flesh. Clear fluid oozed around the two wounds. The millipede flinched for a moment, then it lowered its body back to the ground. And then it went further, the nearer side dipping further even as the far side pushed just like it had a moment ago and the entire length of the twenty foot millipede flipped over toward us, the razor edged legs flashed, cutting through anything in their way. For now, they met only air, Gurek having moved out of range quickly, even as Inda managed to get another knife buried into the underside. I frowned for a moment. Gurek was a very agile bulwark, but a more armored one would have trouble moving out of the way. ¡°Armor test!¡± I yelled, even as I moved forward. Dirt and stone flowed up my body, the stone shaping into plates of armor held with toughened joints of compressed dirt. Rapidly I shifted from a vaguely humanoid mass of dirt and stone until I was covered in a complete set of stone armor. It would normally be too heavy to be practical, but my control of the armor meant it moved at my direction. Still, I wouldn¡¯t be doing acrobatics today, I was imitating the slower movements of the more common type of bulwark. I took measured stepped toward the monster. After its attempted attack roll, it had continued to move away. Now its head was angling toward us again for another attack. I stepped forward even as Gurek stepped back. Seeing no weapon, both its antennae whipped toward me. The dirt behind the stone compressed under the impact and I let out a slight grunt at the two impacts. Otherwise, I was unaffected. I thrust my hand forward, the stone locking into place around my hand, the dirt shielding me from the impact. The carapace cracked under the impact of my fist. The millipede reacted, lunging toward me. I let it hit. The pincers at the front grabbed me and the millipede curled in on itself. Suddenly I was surrounded by the razor sharp legs facing inwards toward me. The blades scratched futilely against my armor, though a few pierced slightly into the hardened dirt connecting the sections. I let it scrabble against me for a little while, measuring the intensity of the force the pincer was putting on me. Finally, having learned enough, the stone in the earth beneath rose around me, pushing up and outward, forcing the millipede backwards from my body. It twisted until it was flat on the earth again and came in for another attack run. ¡°Gurek, you¡¯re up,¡± I said, letting him take the attacks again. The millipede attacked a few more times, but the attack patterns didn¡¯t vary any further. So it was time to see if we could do some real damage. ¡°Gurek, antenna. Inda, check head for weaknesses,¡± I said. Gurek took off one of its antennae on the next pass, while a whistling throwing dagger surged by and bounced off the head, leaving a deep gash in the carapace. The millipede flinched back from the lost antenna, but otherwise it didn¡¯t change its behavior. On the next pass Inda put a dagger through one of its eyes. It went berserk, twitching and rolling its body. The razor sharp legs spasmed out as it rolled over, making a makeshift grinder in the air. After a few moments it settled back down. It attempted to lunge at Gurek on its next pass, but he danced out of the way. This time I could feel the magic as Inda threw out a round stone instead of a dagger. It flew past, almost invisible, and splashed into the side of the millipede, forming a crater of broken carapace and viscera. The wound oozed out gunk and the millipede slowed down. Gurek finished the monster on the next pass. His long blade sank into the intact eye and down into the brain. It twitched for a single moment before it fell still. The corpse dissolved, Inda¡¯s knives falling to the ground around a chest that had been left behind. Standing in the now cleared boss arena, I prepared to talk. SSD 4.24 - The Weight of Duty "Duty is heavier than a mountain; death is lighter than a feather." -from the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors, Emperor Meji of Japan, 1882 ==Zidaun: The Past== A cane whacked against my head. ¡°Wrong!¡± Phanal said. ¡°Try again.¡± I was less than fond of daggers, but I shifted them in my hands again. I did my best to ignore the sweat coating my palms, grateful for the leather wrapping the handles. The clay and stone dummy in front of me had already reset position, the dagger wounds smoothed back into a simulacrum of skin and flesh. The Adar controlling it stood silently off to the side of the room. I hadn¡¯t actually learned their name yet. Before Phanal could whack me on the head again, for waiting too long, I moved. The dummy shifted in response to my attack, countering my daggers with blunted steel daggers of its own. I was half surprised Phanal hadn¡¯t insisted the training dummy use sharp daggers, too. Maybe when he was training a healer, he would. I countered the clumsy strikes of the dummy with my own, slightly less clumsy, strikes. The clanging sounds of metal rang in counterpoint to my breaths. I struggled to maintain an even tempo with both. Finally, I managed to maneuver past the dummy¡¯s guard. With a step forward and an abrupt stab back toward myself I sank the dagger into the back of the dummy¡¯s neck. ¡°Leave the dagger there,¡± Phanal said. ¡°Yes, Sir,¡± I replied. ¡°Come around and look boy,¡± he said. I didn¡¯t bother to counter that I wasn¡¯t a boy. I had tried that once, mentioning that it wasn¡¯t possible for an Adar to be a boy. We were all adults. Phanal had simply rapped me on the head with his cane and said that I was a boy compared to him. ¡°You,¡± he stabbed his cane towards the Adar standing to the side, ¡°reveal the bones and vasculature.¡± ¡°Yes, trainer,¡± He replied. ¡°I have a name, use it!¡± Phanal replied, entirely ignoring the irony. ¡°Yes, trainer Phanal,¡± he replied, his voice bland. Phanal stared at him for a moment with narrowed eyes, but didn¡¯t say anything further. ¡°Well boy? What are you staring at me for? Look at the structures,¡± He said. I did as he said. Examining where my dagger had penetrated. It had actually hit where I was aiming for, between two of the vertebrae, striking into where the spinal cord would be. ¡°Looks like you can follow instructions, assuming I spell them out well enough.¡± The lesson continued after that, the targets varying between various critical points. After hours of effort, we were finished for the day. ¡°Okay boy, see you tomorrow,¡± he said. ¡°Sir, can I ask you a question?¡± I asked. ¡°Besides that one, you mean?¡± He waved away my response as my mouth opened reflexively. ¡°Yes, go ahead.¡± ¡°Why are we focusing on humanoids so much? I know there are humanoid monsters, but we have been focusing on this form more than most,¡± I said. ¡°Caught that did you? Guess you are slightly more observant than I thought boy. You wouldn¡¯t know it from how you wave those daggers around though.¡± He said. I ignored the jab, I didn¡¯t think he was capable of giving a compliment without one. ¡°You want to go out into the world, to explore. I did the same, once upon a time. That means dealing with humans. Now, almost all of them will do their absolute best to avoid killing you. Still, you run into one in a dark alley and they don¡¯t realize what you are¡­ it is good to be able to defend yourself.¡± Phanal sighed, his posture slumping a little. He spoke the next part softly. ¡°You will have teammates. When you delve into dungeons with them, they might¡­ learn too much. If you cannot get them to promise not to share anything, to take an oath¡­ Well, it is good to know how to kill silently and swiftly.¡± He stared me in the eyes. ¡°If you have a team, boy, promise me you will do your best not to reveal anything,¡± He said. ¡°I promise,¡± I said, though I didn¡¯t understand his intensity. Of course I would do my best not to reveal any of our secrets. It wasn¡¯t like I had a choice. And of course I would silence any human that learned the truth. How could I do otherwise? ==Zidaun: The Present== Old memories drifted in my mind. I sighed. Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. I hadn¡¯t understood what Phanal really meant until I had a team of my own. I would jump in front of them to save their lives. Risk taking a lethal blow to save them from a monster. I knew if I was injured they would do their best to save me. Even so, plans flickered through my mind from moment to moment. My duty forced my mind to consider the best way to kill them. How to move the earth to trap and trip them. How to send spikes of stone crashing through vertebrae, ribs, eye sockets. How to kill them in their sleep with a perfect slice through the neck. They would never see it coming. After all, I would never expect it of them. I shuddered against my own thoughts. I didn¡¯t want to do this, but I would do it anyway. I had no choice, unless I could make them listen. ¡°The chest is clean,¡± I said, my voice normal. Gurek opened it, retrieving some pittance of money. I smiled against my will at his innocent enjoyment. It was what I would normally do, so I had no choice but to play along. We quickly checked the surroundings, but there was nothing else around. ¡°Come, sit,¡± I said. I raised up a section of ground slightly, clearing away the plant stumps and ragged grass. As I finished, I left behind a section of soft earth in a circle on the ground. I sat down. The others came and sat down, Firi on my right, Inda on my left, and Gurek across from me. ¡°I am sure you all know the Adar reputation for secrets,¡± I said with a false smile, a slight hint of puppeted laughter in my voice. Inda smiled. Gurek¡¯s usually exuberant attitude was more subdued, he already knew a bit of the truth. He might grasp some of the significance. Firi reached out his hand tentatively, and with poisonous shyness I reached out to him, taking his hand traitorously with my own. I felt my face moved in a shy smile of its own. I wanted to cry; it was not permitted. My eyes failed to so much as water. ¡°Gurek discovered something that we keep secret. I can share more with all of you. Honestly, I would be happy to share more with all of you. However, I will need a binding oath.¡± The requirement was serious enough to make them pause, but Inda responded first. ¡°Well, even if we agreed, how would we get it done? We can¡¯t just leave to go find a ritualist. Unless you happen to have a four-way scroll of oath binding on you?¡± She raised her eyebrows at that last part, looking at me. ¡°Neither,¡± I said. ¡°I¡¯ll perform the binding.¡± ¡°You¡¯re a ritual mage?¡± Gurek said with some incredulity. I wasn¡¯t surprised. It was a serious magic. ¡°Not quite,¡± I said. ¡°I have the skill, but I can only do a few small magics with it. The only exception is a binding.¡± That was almost true. The other major ritual magic was an inherent ability. It made learning the ritual magic skill easier. ¡°What would we be agreeing to?¡± Firi said. He smiled at me and squeezed my hand. Mine squeezed him back of its own accord, my face shifting itself into a smile. ¡°That depends on how much you want to know. At the least,¡± I said, ¡°I need an oath not to share information about the object Gurek touched and this conversation. If you want to know more, then a broader oath not to share what you learn or anything you learn about with that knowledge.¡± I looked at Gurek and my face moved into a smile yet again. ¡°I am fairly certain that you will want to know more. You are always asking me questions. With the oath, I will finally be able to answer some of them.¡± ¡°Only some?¡± Gurek said. ¡°Yes, I get to keep some secrets,¡± I said, rolling my eyes in genuine exasperation. Trust Gurek to push for more. ¡°And¡­¡± Inda¡¯s voice was delicate, her tone questioning, ¡°what happens if we don¡¯t agree to the oath?¡± Honestly,¡± I lied, ¡°nothing would happen immediately. I would report what happened back to my people. Then they would place pressure on your government, who would then put pressure on the adventurer¡¯s guild and your relatives. And then you would eventually be pushed until you agreed to an oath anyways, plus anyone that you told. It would become this big deal, and everyone would have to take oaths in the end anyway. It has happened before, but no one hears about it¡­¡± ¡°Due to the oaths,¡± Inda said, her voice more relaxed. ¡°It makes sense.¡± She rolled her eyes. ¡°And I thought dungeon diving would get me further away from politics.¡± Firi squeezed my hand and looked me in the eyes as I turned toward him. ¡°Do you actually think taking the oath is important?¡± He said. I wanted to scream ¡®Yes!¡¯ I wanted to beg him, plead with him, take the oath. And if it was just him, I might have been allowed to, because I genuinely believed he would do it for me. However¡­ that kind of attitude, would likely make Inda more reluctant. The thought of political pressure was more likely to make her cave. She cared about her parents, and they were involved in politics. My duty had used my knowledge to calculate the best odds for everyone. Political pressure for Inda, curiosity for Gurek, and love for Firi. ¡°Yes,¡± I said, allowed to express a tiny bit of the depth of sincerity,¡± it is important. If nothing else, it will save each of us from a large amount of hassle.¡± ¡°I¡¯ll take the oath,¡± Inda said. ¡°Me, too,¡± Gurek said with a sigh. ¡°The church says that oaths are not to be taken lightly,¡± Firi said. My heart was in throat. ¡°However, you say it is important, and I believe you,¡± He said. ¡°So I will take it too.¡± I was allowed to slump with a small amount of relief. ¡°Good. We¡¯ll need to back up a little then.¡± Each of us stood up and scooted back a little farther. I pulled stone from the earth below, shaping it as it rose. First came a thin layer of stone in the shape of a circular platform. I formed a thin wall of stone at the edge to make an outer circle. Then four smaller circles formed inside, each touched the outer circle, but not each other. In the very center, a tiny circle, no more than two fingers wide came next. Then four curving lines followed. Each line extended from one of the outer circles where we would sit, touched the circle in the middle of the line, and then curved back to touch the circle of the person across. When it was done a four pointed star connected the four spots we would sit, a small circle at its center. ¡°Okay, everyone sit in a circle.¡± I sat down in my own circle, waiting as the others did the same. I pulled out my dagger, using the point to cut into my palm. I held it just above the circle in the middle of the ritual formation. I let the blood run down, the greenish blue liquid flowing. I pushed a tiny amount of mana into my ritual skill, my blood starting to glimmer with light. No blood stuck to my dagger, the thin coating of blood beading off as the ritual began. The individual drops made their way through the air to land in the center with the rest. My hand shimmered as the wound resealed. I handed the dagger to Firi with a nod. My eyes were allowed to be serious. It was appropriate, rituals were serious magic. Now that it was started, it could be dangerous not to finish. He cut his hand, red drops of blood flowing. It pooled in the center, not mixing with my blood. Once again the blood glowed, the dagger cleaned itself, and his hand healed. The others cut their hands in turn, until four orbs of glowing blood touched each other in center. I spoke. ¡°Here I act to keep a secret, and bind it in blood freely shed. Save with my permission or the permission of my god, none may speak except between us. This we seal, none may tell or record knowledge of the Artifact which Gurek now bears. Likewise we seal the knowledge gained of dungeons, or the Adar, from what we speak here, and future knowledge that springs from it.¡± I, Zidaun, set this binding into motion. Do you each agree to this binding of knowledge? The others each gave their assent. The relief that went through me was beyond what I could express, even had it been allowed. ¡°So be it.¡± With the closing words I allowed a trickle of mana to flow into the ritual. Power moved through the dungeon, vast quantities of mana shifting and pulled in. A ritualist only used a tiny fraction of mana themselves, the rest was drawn from the world. I could see the mana as it flooded through the dungeon, the aura around me thrumming and individual threads fluttering furiously. Each of our blood pools rose into air, forming spheres. Mine made its way into the middle, a blue green star orbited by three shining orbs of blood. The three carmine orbs funneled a tiny stream of blood into the center sphere, staining it increasingly purple. Finally, all the orbs had merged into a single purple sphere. It expanded, growing larger and larger, first to the size of my fist, then two fists, then the size of my head, glowing brighter and brighter purple as it did so. Finally it burst, transforming into a shining purple mist. The mist divided into four parts and swept toward each of us. The blood sank through our clothes, and into our skin, and then sank below that. I could feel it deeper. It burned painlessly inside me; it continued and burned past the flesh, into my very being. The world returned to normal and the burning faded away. Finally, all was still. The ritual was over. SSD 4.25 - The Nature of Gods ¡°I suppose I should say that I treasure blasphemy, as a faith of the highest order.¡± - Rick Moody ==Zidaun== I might not be able to show the full measure of my relief, but I needed no help to express a genuine smile. For a moment, my internal sense of worship for my god blossomed further, filling my chest with warmth. I smiled and reached out to squeeze Firi¡¯s hand again. ¡°Okay, now I can share a few things.¡± I gestured toward Gurek across the circle from me. ¡°I¡¯ll start with what Gurek learned. Dungeon¡¯s are more than people believe. People might wonder why we consider dungeon¡¯s sacred, but since we keep almost everything about us secret, it is just one more hidden piece. It gets lost amid the rest. ¡°Humans worship the three gods to varying degrees, but disagree on the methods. Some of them even worship dungeons too, believing them to be an aspect of whichever god they favor. ¡°So, our beliefs get lost in the haze. ¡°Some dungeons are special, like this one. It is fully alive, aware, and conscious. It can even speak.¡± ¡°Dungeon¡¯s are sentient?¡± Firi said, his voice incredulous. ¡°Sapient,¡± said Inda absentmindedly, before I had a chance to respond. ¡°Wait, what?¡± Firi said, his brows furrowed. ¡°Sapient,¡± said Inda. ¡°You said sentient. Animals and monsters are sentient. They have some capacity to be aware and think. The word you meant is sapient. That they can think like people. Everyone¡¯s always thought that dungeons were sentient, to some extent. They obviously grow and act with some level of intellect.¡± ¡°Right, yes. That.¡± Firi said, waving dismissively as he turned to me. ¡°Not all of them,¡± I said. ¡°Usually they need to be quite old before they manage that change.¡± I looked pointedly at Inda with a smirk. ¡°From sentient to sapient. And even we don¡¯t know exactly why it happens. Even the dungeons can¡¯t tell us. They are not aware of what they did before becoming sapient in any conscious fashion.¡± ¡°What are they like?¡± Gurek said. ¡°Are they just like people?¡± ¡°No,¡± I said. ¡°They are very much not people. Generally the best way to describe them... is to call them a predator. The various adventurers that go through them are their prey. They don¡¯t actually need to kill them, exactly, but they get something from putting people into danger.¡± ¡°So, we are just food to them,¡± Inda said. ¡°That is mostly accurate,¡± I said. ¡°However, they have a certain sense of fair play. An inborn need to make things balanced. Plenty of people die to dungeons, but generally the dungeons are consistent. The levels stay about the same, bosses are segregated off into their sections, the rewards match the danger or difficulty. ¡°Perhaps it is better to compare them to a herder. They winnow out the excess in the flock. They cull the weak, strengthen the rest, and shear the herd for their own gain...¡± I shook my head, ¡°Even that isn¡¯t right though. And this dungeon¡­¡± I trailed off. ¡°What about this dungeon?¡± Gurek said. ¡°It spoke to you, right Gurek?¡± I said. ¡°Yeah. Just said ¡®Hello, Gurek,¡¯ though.¡± he replied. ¡°Can the dungeon talk to any of us?¡± Inda said, puzzlement in her voice. ¡°No, not generally,¡± I said. ¡°The dungeon speaks telepathically, but usually only to those who have formed a connection with it. My telepathic link and transformation, when I connected, meant that I became the leader of my people here. That connection allows me to act as the intermediary between my people and the dungeon. The obvious physical changes are part of that; the dungeon adapted me to suit the environment better. I am not going to get into that too much. ¡°Gurek, on the other hand, can speak to the dungeon because that is what the artifact does. It links him to the dungeon. It also lets someone else telepathically connect to the dungeon too, as long as they are holding the artifact, and Gurek allows them to use it. He can also speak telepathically with the person who holds it.¡± Firi stirred, his eyes looking at me more intensely. ¡°We can talk to the dungeon ourselves?¡± Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. ¡°Honestly, most of the time, I would say it was a waste of time,¡± I said. ¡°Dungeons are usually not all that talkative. They are generally terse, to the point, and don¡¯t care about anything extemporaneous at all.¡± ¡°Disregarding the ability to talk to the dungeon,¡± Inda said, ¡°you realize what an artifact like this is worth, right? Telepathy is a powerful and difficult magic. Getting experience with it¡­ It would be priceless to the right people.¡± ¡°I knew exactly how much it was worth as soon as I saw it,¡± I said. ¡°Fortunately for Gurek, it comes with a protection. It cannot be forcibly transferred in any way, not even through death. Not even our binding oath, or another made without complete and open consent, could make him do anything with the artifact. It is a system enforced right. ¡°Don¡¯t worry though. When the Adar get here, and I expect that will be soon, I am their leader. I¡¯ll compensate Gurek, and both of you, for not letting anyone outside our group use the artifact.¡± ¡°Good, that is fair at least,¡± she said as she nodded absently. ¡°You gave a few caveats before, when you mentioned talking with the dungeon. You said it usually wouldn¡¯t be worth talking to a dungeon, so what is different here?¡± ¡°Every dungeon is unique; we would know better than most,¡± I said with a small smile, as I looked for a moment at each of them. ¡°That is especially true for an Awakened one, which is what we call intelligent ones. However,¡± I hesitated for a moment, but it wasn¡¯t worth trying to hide this since Gurek and the others would likely talk with the dungeon on their own, ¡°this one is even more unique than most. There are actually two voices, though I suspect Gurek probably only heard from one of them.¡± ¡°Wait, two, what does that even mean?¡± Gurek said, his head tilting to the side a little. That confirms my guess. I wasn¡¯t expecting Exsan to bother. ¡°Honestly, I don¡¯t know,¡± I said. ¡°I have never heard of anything like it. And I am a specialist in dungeons, in their different idiosyncrasies. However, even I have never heard of anything like this.¡± ¡°Did it- they,¡± Inda stumbled on her words for a moment, ¡°refuse to talk about it?¡± ¡°No, that is one of the other special things. Neither of them can speak common, or any other language I know, but one of them has been learning from me. It has pulled me aside a number of times, in our tests, to talk to me. I know that my people have run into dungeons that cannot speak our language before, but it is very uncommon. ¡°This place...¡± I gestured around us, trying to encompass the sheer scope of what we had seen so far, ¡°I don¡¯t know how long it has been since the dungeon was last active. My people get to every dungeon that we can. Yet¡­ it seems to understand people incredibly well, and it doesn¡¯t speak our language.¡± ¡°The bathrooms,¡± Firi said softly, ¡°it understands what they are for.¡± ¡°Yes,¡± said Inda thoughtfully, ¡°and all the art, the buildings for us to stay in, the gradual progression of the dungeon¡­ It all points to real understanding. And if it doesn¡¯t speak the Adar language...¡± She looked at me pointedly. ¡°Then your people didn¡¯t help it build everything.¡± I sighed. ¡°Yeah. I thought... maybe the dungeon had help from someone. We do help our dungeons with design, since they often don¡¯t understand what we want or need. Our perspective is very limited by comparison. I thought at first one of the voices might be connected to it, instead of being the dungeon. However¡­ as far as I have been able to learn, both voices are the dungeon. And both the two voices have names.¡± ¡°You say that like it unusual,¡± Inda said, quirking her brow. ¡°It is.¡± I said. ¡°People assign names to dungeons. They describe a dungeon by what they do, or the monsters inside. Dungeon¡¯s don¡¯t need names, they simply are. Both of the voices have their own name, however. The one I have talked with, for the most part, and the one that talked to you,¡± I waved toward Gurek, ¡°is named Caden. The other, Exsan, is much more like a normal dungeon, reserved and to the point. ¡°When I started to talk with Caden, one of the very first things he made sure to understand was my name, as well as making sure I knew his name. And then he wanted to learn all of yours.¡± ¡°He?¡± Inda said, her eyebrows quirked. ¡°Another aberration,¡± I said as I bobbed my head. ¡°Caden and Exsan are male. Most dungeons have no gender at all. However, when I started teaching Caden common, the words between male and female were part of what he wanted to know. He very definitely used the male for himself. Plus¡­ his form is¡­ very much masculine.¡± ¡°What does that even mean, what form?¡± Gurek said, his voice puzzled. ¡°I can speak telepathically to the dungeon, and I do,¡± I said. ¡°However, Caden can manifest some form of projection. It appeared in front of all of us, but only I could see it. I¡¯m not sure if the artifact will let other people see it or not. The form was human, male, and¡­ very naked.¡± ¡°Naked?¡± Inda barked out with a laugh. ¡°Oh, this is great! How awkward was that?¡± ¡°Very,¡± I muttered, averting my eyes for a moment, ¡°at least at first. Once he made chairs and a table for us to sit at¡­ it was out of sight. At least until the next time.¡± ¡°So how hung, exactly, is your god?¡± Gurek said with a huge grin. Inda smacked the back of Gurek¡¯s head, shaking her hand a moment later. ¡°Hey, what was that for?¡± he said. I gave her a grateful look. That was not a subject I wanted to talk about right now. ¡°Sometimes, you need to be a bit more serious, idiot,¡± Inda seethed at Gurek. ¡°What, it was a natural question,¡± Gurek protested. ¡°Only for a moron like you!¡± Inda almost shouted. ¡°You started it by asking about it being awkward.¡± Gurek said. ¡°That¡¯s right, I was circumspect about it. I didn¡¯t come right out and ask if his god had a nice ass, let alone ask about his dick!¡± Inda raised her voice further. As embarrassing as the subject was, I couldn¡¯t help holding Firi¡¯s hand and offering him a little grin at the antics of the others. I was trying not to think about the answers to either of those questions, either. I was happy enough to already be yearning over one unattainable man. I cleared my throat. ¡°If you two are done, I can answer some other questions.¡± Inda and Gurek looked at each other with their mouths open, their rants caught in the middle. Firi asked a question of his own to fill the sheepish silence. ¡°You don¡¯t speak the same language, so how did you understand anything Caden asked you?¡± ¡°Simple things were done with gestures,¡± I said. ¡°We got our names across that way. It got your names the same way it got most information, though. It made statues of each of you and pointed. It made coins when it wanted to learn about coinage, and so on. Generally it either made a real copy of what it was asking about, or made a model.¡± ¡°Oh, that¡¯s a good idea,¡± Gurek said. ¡°You can show us what Caden looks like in a statue.¡± He glanced at Inda, and added hastily, ¡°Not the private bits, but his face, and chest, maybe? You have traveled farther afield than the rest of us, right, Inda? Maybe you can pinpoint if the statue reminds you of any country¡¯s racial features.¡± Inda had opened her mouth in the middle of Gurek¡¯s statement, no doubt preparing to scold him, but she paused for a moment before she spoke. ¡°Actually, not a terrible idea. I have only been to a small part of the world, but I have a better chance at least. Would that be okay with you, Zidaun?¡± I couldn¡¯t think of a good reason not to, and it seemed harmless enough. ¡°Sure, why not?¡± I said. I gathered together stone to the side of us, pulling it up through the dirt to the surface of the ground. A statue started to emerge, and the features of Caden started to appear. The straight, but neatly combed hair, the intelligent eyes, the slightly larger than normal nose vaguely reminiscent of a fierce bird¡¯s beak, it all combined to form a complete picture. Together the features were striking. And, behind the statue I was working on, the stone started to move. A humanoid shape started to emerge from it. It appeared the dungeon wanted to make its own appearance. SSD 4.26 - In Person ¡°No gift can ever replace the value of being there in person.¡± ¡ªDenis Waitley ==Zidaun== ¡°That is not me,¡± I said, rising to my feet, followed by the others. ¡°The dungeon apparently decided to show itself.¡± I stopped creating my facsimile, and it was wiped away by the dungeon¡¯s own power; stone gathered together into a now familiar shape. I could see Caden¡¯s avatar, naked as ever, suddenly standing next to the forming statue. The statue acquired clothes before any of the sensitive details emerged, for which I gave an appropriate prayer of thanks. I had dealt with Gurek¡¯s prurient teasing quite enough already. The statue neared completion and Caden¡¯s avatar stepped into in the same place as the statue. It suddenly came to life. Not literally, but the stone flesh animated in a way all his previous golems had failed to do. For a moment Caden¡¯s eyes widened, but the expression quickly passed and his lips quirked in a slow smirking smile. The left side of his mouth rose more than his right, exposing pearlescent stone teeth. Deep breaths moved Caden¡¯s chest, and the unyielding firmness of stone gave way to the gentle movements of false flesh. I could sense that Caden was still stone, but his stone body had gained depth. A depth that I could only sense for a moment; a shroud of mana emerged to cloak him from my perceptions. If I couldn¡¯t see the stone, he would feel like a normal person to my aura sense. His clothes would still give him away as someone unusual. He wore a simple green shirt with a pocket over the left side, and his pants were made of a thick blueish material. Loops surrounded the waist line, while some kind of interlinked metal fastening and a button closed the front. Pockets and dark golden threading finished off the pants. And he still wasn¡¯t wearing shoes. ¡°Hello,¡± Caden said, his head tilting slightly to the side as he dipped it toward us in a nod. His voice wasn¡¯t something that could be passed off as normal either. For all that he had managed to make his body move like flesh, it very much wasn¡¯t. It sounded hollow and echoing, like it had come from inside the depths of a cave, which, considering he was made of stone¡­ it essentially had. It wasn¡¯t rough or hoarse, but it was profoundly unnatural. ¡°Caden,¡± I said, bowing. I gestured to my companions. ¡°Allow me to introduce Gurek, Inda, and Firi.¡± The others responded halfheartedly and their voices trailed off awkwardly. Caden waited for a moment longer, he nodded again in a decisive manner and waved his hand at us. ¡°Goodbye,¡± he said, and the life left the statue as it started to sink back into the earth. The others were stunned into silence, for a moment, before Gurek exploded. ¡°I get that the Adar have their secrets, but why don¡¯t any of you tell people that dungeons can think?¡± he said, practically at the verge of shouting. ¡°Dungeons, are not usually¡­ that,¡± I said, shaking my head. ¡°People would try to negotiate with them. Countries would try to hold them hostage or apply pressure and they wouldn¡¯t respond well.¡± Gurek gestured to where the now absent Caden had stood. ¡°Sure, but that, him, we could communicate with! Or at least we will when he can speak properly. Why hide this secret?¡± he said. ¡°I have known about Caden for only days, Gurek! Are you expecting me to change the policy of my people for just this one dungeon?¡± I said, my voice clearly exasperated. ¡°And why not, people deserve to know!¡± he said. ¡°What if we could negotiate with this one? It might lead to negotiating with the rest. Maybe they don¡¯t all need to be such enormous death traps.¡± ¡°Don¡¯t you think you are overdoing it a little Gurek,¡± Inda said, her voice calm, soft, and carefully measured. ¡°There is no guarantee that would happen. We don¡¯t even know if it would be good odds.¡± ¡°I¡¯m tired of losing friends,¡± Gurek mumbled. ¡°I¡¯ve seen too many people go out and never come back. Sure, it doesn¡¯t happen as often to people at our level, but it still happens.¡± Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. ¡°Like you said though, it has gotten better for us.¡± Firi said. ¡°We haven¡¯t lost nearly as many people past a certain point.¡± ¡°Yeah?¡± Gurek said, before pointing his finger at Inda. ¡°When was the last time Inda tutored a newbie, like she used to? I still remember when she joined the guild. She was strong for a newbie, well prepared.¡± Inda had fallen silent, her face pale. ¡°I remember helping people out too for a while.¡± he said. ¡°You¡¯re the only who still teaches people, Firi, and I know you do that more through the church than the adventurer¡¯s guild.¡± His voice turned gentle. ¡°How many of the people you taught are still alive, Inda?¡± ¡°Two,¡± she whispered. ¡°And you tried to help, what, seventy people?¡± Gurek asked. She gave a weak smile, ¡°Fifty-four, actually.¡± ¡°I¡­ didn¡¯t keep trying to help for very long,¡± Gurek said. ¡°They all died. I used to have a survivor too¡­ someone to feel good about.¡± He took a breath, steadying himself before continuing. ¡°I tried to help the ones who obviously needed it. The poor kids that didn¡¯t have any other choices. Gods, I know each of us bought equipment for some of them, just so they didn¡¯t have to go in with nothing better than a club. And how many of all those kids die? The survival rate for a newbie who isn¡¯t a noble, or part of an adventuring family, or trained in a dungeon by competent adventurers, is what, one in a hundred?¡± ¡°One in one hundred and twelve, actually. I am ahead of the odds, having helped two to get there.¡± Inda said with a small smile. ¡°Yeah,¡± Gurek said, with a sigh. He slumped for a moment, before gathering himself back up. He looked me in the eyes, ¡°So this place, the way it is obviously meant to train. It¡¯s important. And yeah, plenty of people are bound to come up from the capital. I¡¯m sure this place is going to get crowded, but many of those kids in the capital aren¡¯t going to be able to make it out here. They will go to a normal dungeon, right outside the capital, and they are going to fucking die. So if dungeon¡¯s can be changed, it matters.¡± ¡°Maybe something can be done,¡± I said. ¡°but dungeons are our homes. Any change isn¡¯t going to be swift.¡± ¡°It ought to be,¡± Gurek said softly. There was little I could offer in reply, but we each sat and tried to comfort the others for a while. We had all seen more than enough death. ==Caden== After whatever magic Zidaun had gotten up to, I was surprised to recognize the group discussion include my and Exsan¡¯s names. It appeared that he had gotten around to telling the others about me. Not that he had much choice after Gurek touched the artifact. Zidaun making something that looked like me was a great cue for me to make a personal appearance. And, in making a statue of myself, I discovered that I had been under utilizing my avatar ability. My other shards were busy dealing with the massive number of patterns that were still being downloaded into my mind. I had stepped into the same place as the statue. Originally I had planned to make its movements as natural as possible by following my avatar manually. And then I found that was entirely unnecessary. As I stepped into the same location as the statue, the statue fused with me. All my senses merged with the statue. I didn¡¯t focus on it too much at first, I simply said hello and goodbye and left. They seemed rather awkward about meeting me, anyways. Honestly, I couldn¡¯t say that I was surprised. What do you say to the person whose body you have been wandering around in? So I left; I didn¡¯t speak a ton of their language yet. I had plenty of things I wanted to ask. Especially about the black hole in the sky, how the system worked for them, what the culture of the world was like, and so on. Of course, I wasn¡¯t sure how much I wanted to reveal about myself, either. And some of my questions would inevitably raise questions about me in turn. Now that I had left them, I placed my avatar next to my core and recreated the statue form. The detail of my new body was truly amazing. The muscles moved and slipped past each other, tendons strained, blood flowed. It was still obviously stone though. I could find colors that were closer to flesh tone; there were plenty of different colors of stone, and tan wasn¡¯t a difficult color. Could make some kind of makeup? Eh, I didn¡¯t really want to hide myself and try going out among the locals anyway. The only reason for that would be to ask questions and talk to them, and my voice was obviously not human. It wasn¡¯t that surprising. My voice box was capable of making the sounds by vibrating, because the stone followed the blueprints from my soul. However, my body was still stone and the sound reverberated back down into my lungs, through my throat, and up into my nose and sinuses. And my body wasn¡¯t soft enough to damp the sound down, so it echoed. All of that was interesting, and suggested that I could use my avatar more effectively to interact with the world, but the most fascinating thing what what happened with the mana. My avatar had suddenly gained the same kind of dense mana that surrounded other living things. And since it was, completely, my own mana I was able to see through it just as clearly as anywhere else in my aura. The benefit from my healing title allowed me to get through the auras of other creatures to a certain extent, but it didn¡¯t have this level of clarity. I couldn¡¯t see exactly how it was done, but the mana had shifted in some way. It reminded me of a phase change. Now that I could study it properly, I was sure I would manage to figure out how it was done. Of course, that paled in comparison to the real test I needed to do. Nervously, I created a table and chair out of stone. As I sat down I absently noted that I should put padding on my chairs in the future. The table was in front of me, but I was delaying. I took a deep breath, savoring the feeling of cold air in my lungs. In the light of my core, the light of myself, I started. In front of me, mana spun together. The mana flowed out of my aura as it acted as a magical 3d printer. Moments later it was finished and a piece of dried meat appeared on a stoneware plate. I reached out and lifted it to my lips. I could smell the savory scent of the meat, but that didn¡¯t mean anything. I had been able to smell just fine in my avatar form before now. I took a bite. I moaned at the first taste of salt. The meat burst with the flavor of smoke and gamey iron. I chewed, my stone teeth more than adequate to the task of grinding down the muscle fibers and releasing the umami flavor trapped within. My stone form had no saliva, but a moments thought was all it took to create a wooden cup and fill it with water. Drinking from it, I could taste the minerals in the water and the flavor of the wood pressed against my lips. From there, I proceeded to try the other foods that the adventurers had sacrificed to me. The fruit, meat, and other food disappeared quickly, and I had to actually dissolve the excess in my stomach so I could try everything. I practically glowed with happiness as I sat and ate in the light of my core. Finally, I had recovered the last of the senses I had been missing. Now, I had the best of both worlds and could experience the senses of both humans and dungeon cores. I paused a moment as the massive flow of patterns started to slow down; it was time to review my gains. SSD 4.27 - Thinking With Portals ¡°I teleported home one night With Ron and Sid and Meg. Ron stole Meggie''s heart away And I got Sidney''s leg.¡± Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe ==Zidaun== My team and I exited shortly after we finished our discussion. I could tell that Gurek, at least, still wasn¡¯t happy with my answers, but there was little I could do about that. I tried to smooth down the stone where I had performed the ritual, but the dungeon pushed back against me, so I left it. We headed to the back of the island and found the other bridge there. It was simple, sturdy, and made of stone. It didn¡¯t react to my magical prodding at all, other than to transform under my power like stone was supposed to. Crossing the bridge we passed into the cliff-side; the towering cliffs above gave way to a tunnel running through the stone. The tunnel was well lit, flecks of mana crystal flecked the stone and provided light. They were thickest at the top of the arched tunnel, and then tapered off until there none at about waist height. Otherwise, the tunnel was unremarkable, the stone unadorned and brownish grey. The tunnel was relatively short and ended in a door. The door¡¯s numerical symbol gave it a familiar purpose, this door should take us back to the atrium. ¡°Looks like this will let us exit, should we leave or stay to do more?¡± I asked. It wasn¡¯t that late, so normally it wouldn¡¯t have been much of a serious question. However, I could tell that the oath and secrets had weighed heavily on Gurek, at the least. I wasn¡¯t allowed to show the full extent of it, but I was also very tired from the fear and deception. ¡°I¡¯m done for the day,¡± Gurek said, before anyone else could answer. The others just gave nods, not bothering to respond. Only idiots kept going when one of the party members wasn¡¯t at their best. I opened the door, but I didn¡¯t see the long tunnel I was expecting. Instead a small tunnel lead to another door. I stepped a few feet into the tunnel and froze. The tunnel was more than it seemed. ==Caden== My mind never really stopped, unless I was meditating. Admittedly, with the exception of sleep, that had been mostly true in my old life too. However, while I could, and did, get distracted, my new mind didn¡¯t zone out from boredom or fatigue. And beyond that, I was thinking with many different points of view simultaneously. By now I had gotten used to that, but sometimes I was still surprised just how productive it allowed me to be. The vast changes I could make with carving and manipulating stone were a definite part of that. In fact, my skill Manipulate Earth had finally gone up to level three. I had done a lot of digging and shaping, and my automated compression and moving of stone on a vast scale had probably pushed it over the edge. Of course, as soon as that happened, I had needed to modify the automatic process, because I could now compress stone even further than I could before. Even after setting things for a higher degree of compression, the process of modifying the dungeon was faster than it had been before. Individual sections changed faster, and took less mana to do so. It was a substantial change, and I suspected it would only take another three days to complete instead six. I had started to get a sense of when skills were getting close to pushing into the next level. Even though I had Learning and other skills that let me acquire skills faster, there was a feeling of approaching an edge. As though I just needed to push something a little farther and then it would start bounding down hill on its own. I had felt a few of my other skills giving me a similar feeling. Metal manipulation was no surprise, for the same reason my earth skill had just improved, but other skills had started to feel the same way. I felt like I might be close to creating a new skill too. And that went back to how fast I could create. Emblems were complicated, but I didn¡¯t need to worry about resources at all. Creating gold and silver cost me practically nothing. In fact, even with the ambient mana being so low, I could slowly grow gold, silver, or even folerth and then manipulate it into whatever shape I wanted. Creation was essentially the entire job of a dungeon. My ambient mana skill, which let me manipulate the loose mana lying around everywhere, was another skill approaching the skill boundary. I suspected that it might actually be tied into everything that my dungeon did automatically. All of those automated functions used ambient mana. If my skill changed how well that worked, that would actually make it one of my most important skills, because raising it would increase the efficiency of almost everything I made. Still, that was beside the point. I had functionally unlimited resources, and that made learning easier. The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. Every time I messed up an emblem, the constituent parts blew up. A small amount of it actually vaporized into the air, but most of it merged with elements from the air, nearby stone, or whatever I was inscribing my emblem into. It then was deposited over a wide area by the explosion. For someone without the ability to manipulate metal and stone directly, this would have presented two different problems. First they would need to collect all the bits of folerth, gold, etc... that was scattered. Secondly, even after they had done that, they would need to separate out the individual metals to make them usable again. It was possible that there were spells that made this a trivial affair, but my own skills rendered the point moot. Tam used a lot of symbols that I understood poorly. This was beyond even the superscript and subtext. Fortunately, there were a few symbols he used that I had a good grasp on. From there, brute experimentation with the runes had let me gain more knowledge. Sometimes it made me feel like Thomas Edison, though; I was learning thousands of ways not to make an emblem. Oh well, as long as I didn¡¯t copy his moral failings, I would be happy enough. Even dungeons have standards. I chuckled to myself. Most of the time, the failures simply blew up. I think this happened because the emblem tried to make something happen, but it couldn¡¯t without more context, and that energy simply continued to pour into it without end. The energy became more than the emblem could handle and the entire system blew apart. More interesting, were the few times something different happened. Several times that something was nothing, as far as I could tell. I assumed that meant I didn¡¯t understand what was actually happening and needed to do a little experimentation to make it work. One example of this was when I made a modification to the fortification rune. Unlike normal, the rune didn¡¯t blow up instantly, like it would if it were simply made wrong. Instead it started to heat up, the entire rune growing hotter and hotter. And then it blew up. I repeated the experiment again, and tried to manipulate the cube of steel that the emblem had been placed into. It moved as though it wasn¡¯t being enhanced at all. There was no additional difficulty in moving the steel. The emblem then blew up again shortly after. After a few experimental attempts I was unable to figure out what was happening, so I tried the rune on the teleportation emblem instead. It immediately made it clear what the new alteration was doing. The test piece of paper from inside the tube failed to disappear. Instead, a section of stone, identical to the shape and volume of the tube¡¯s interior, teleported from a space inside the ceiling and appeared at target. A few more tests with the fortification emblem revealed I was trying to strengthen a section of the nearby ceiling. Since that material was contiguous over a fairly massive volume, it overwhelmed the capacity of the emblem, just like my test cubes of steel had started to do before. More tests with the superscript revealed that the rotation of the rune positioned the targeted area on a circle radiating out from the line the rune was written on. The size of the rune relative to the emblem described the distance to the target away from the middle of the emblem. Since the exact positioning of the effect was altered relative to the middle of the emblem and the size of the rune altered that, it required very careful positioning to make sure it lined up right. Or, simply cheating like I could, by placing the emblem into storage and moving it until it lined up exactly where I wanted it to go. When combined with a circle, like Tam had used, it instead could describe cones or cylinders of effect, depending on the rotation of the rune. The size of the rune still determined the distance. This use of the rune reacted badly when applied to an unaltered teleportation tube design, however. It tried to teleport both sections simultaneously, but the emblem wasn¡¯t strong enough to handle it. Random sections of stone were removed from the external target I tried to teleport, leaving behind what looked like a ragged cube of pumice. The same thing happened to the test piece of paper. Removing the original three dimensional targeting array allowed me to successfully teleport a small cube of stone a little more than a foot across before I started to see degradation. Interestingly, the material didn¡¯t matter at all. Heavy blocks of steel, gold, mana crystal, and even folerth all reacted the exact same way. Apparently density didn¡¯t matter at all when the spell was slicing through space to teleport things away, even though the density that something was teleporting into mattered a great deal. This would have made the spacial emblems into fantastic traps, except for one thing. Living things didn¡¯t react in the same manner. At all. I started my tests with tiny insects and then moved up to plate-mice continuing all the way until I was working with the largest monsters I was capable of making. Then I tested even larger things like trees. The results were the same across them all. The teleportation didn¡¯t engage unless the organism was completely inside. It went even further than that, too. I didn¡¯t have any test humans, but when I created clothing for various monsters, they didn¡¯t teleport unless all of their clothes and other gear were also inside the area of effect. To test the nature of the effect, I created a monster inside a deactivated emblem and then draped a large section of leather across the top of it. I specifically did not think of it as cloth, instead thinking of it as something that was impeding the monster. A circle of the leather teleported, along with the monster, leaving behind a perfectly cut remnant of leather fluttering to the floor. When I repeated the same experiment, but thought of the leather as a tent, it and the monster both failed to teleport. Apparently, there were safeguards built into teleportation by the system. Since intent was the only thing that had changed, that was the only reasonable explanation. Considering I could think of quite a few terrifying ways to use teleportation without those limitations, I was more relieved than anything else. There were plenty of other ways to make traps with teleportation, even with these limitations. In fact, I took the time to do that. I started from the rather simplistic idea of teleporting a large object above someone, then to removing the floor (which worked even though I wasn¡¯t sure it would), and then to the subtler routes of teleporting aerosolized acid or even just pure oxygen. I was able to make tons of different traps. Teleporting a makeshift piece of artillery was lots of fun, it turned out momentum was conserved, though its orientation could shift if I was careful with setting up the target. It turned out attaching a circle and or a position rune to a powered up receiving emblem allowed me to shift where a target would come out of teleportation in the same way that I could alter the initial targeting. I quickly got back to testing teleportation as a viable means of practical transport after that. Since I could set up a remote area outside the interior of a tube, as both target and destination, I felt comfortable creating a continuously active teleport. Upon activation, it created a cylinder of perfect blackness, with wind rushing into it. With my avatar I could see an image of the room the emblem was in. It looked like a cylindrical portal leading back, though I could also see the rest of the room through it. Presumably the instantaneous version moved all the light as well, but it was so quick it was impossible to tell. Since the emblem found a target as part of its search, it didn¡¯t have the delay built into the original tube when matter reappeared due to a lack of target. This was highly inimical to anything that wasn¡¯t air, alive, or deemed by the system as equipment. Anything else that went through was turned into powder. Presumably it was teleporting anything inanimate in tiny sections as they entered. I was actually able to prove this when I shot a ball of metal through at high velocity. It was cut into tiny curved sections that fluttered to the ground as they arrived at the other side. It took a little time, but I was able to create two portals from two different emblems and overlap their target and destination cylinders. Each one targeted the output of the other and then swapped the matter between the two. I tried to do this manually by carefully lining up the targets and destinations, but they were always just a little off. It turned out the trick was writing the target rune for one emblem onto the circle controlling the destination of the other, and vice versa. Suddenly, the two emblems were targeting exactly the same space, but each was pushing matter in a different direction. Honestly, I was expecting this to lead to a spacial anomaly, just like what happened the last time I ran a portal continuously and the matter kept trying to get back into the space it was being teleported from. It didn¡¯t. Instead, I could feel space twisting in some subtle way. And when I looked with my avatar, I could no longer see the same room through the portal. And it didn¡¯t destroy inanimate objects anymore. In fact, I was able to pass a large rod through that was longer than the cylinder was wide. It had shifted from a rapid sequential teleporter into a true portal. SSD 4.28 - Mostly Harmless ¡°One is struck in the study of saints, angels, and gods by a pattern that seems quaint and harmless. Yet, it is so common that I know there must be a deeper meaning. There always seem to be guardians and spirits of doors, bridges, exits and entranceways.¡± -Richard Rohr ==Caden== Naturally, I had started to integrate portals into my transportation system right away. Removing the random tunnels I was incorporating to everywhere actually removed a decent chunk of room. Of course, what really improved my efficiency was no longer needing to keep all my level designs in order. Now any spare bit of space could become a room that was accessed by portal from anywhere in my dungeon. Being able to redirect massive flows of water through portals was going to save me lots of room, too. So far, I hadn¡¯t run into a distance limitation with my portals. They were able to seek out the target symbols from miles away. If my dungeon got large enough that might become an issue, but I could always string together a series of portals. Portals did have all sorts of knock-on effects to take into account, though. Wind was the most basic. Connecting two points with different atmospheric pressures naturally lead to the air pushing into the portal in the higher pressure area. None of my dungeon was massively different in air pressure, but it was still immediately noticeable. However, in the same way I could passively set up the settings of the weather in my dungeon and have storms, fog, and wind appear from nowhere, I also discovered it was quite possible to do the opposite. My transportation system didn¡¯t have wind pushing through the portals, because I told it not to. Got to love bullshit magic. Of course, I knew some ways to create some truly devastating things now that I had portals. The kind of weapons that could actually destroy my entire dungeon. Actually, if I really went too far with them, I could destroy most of the planet. Portals could theoretically allow something to accelerate without end. Anything raised to infinity could become ridiculous very quickly. Needless to say, I did some tests, though I was quite careful. I didn¡¯t want to accidentally create the equivalent of a kinetic orbital strike. I started with a small vertical tube about a hundred feet long. I attached the two end points with a portal, and immediately noticed that the air started to flow through the portal on its own. Gravity shouldn¡¯t act as a source of power on its own, that was a basic physical law. The fact that the air was increasing in speed due to gravity created pressure differentials in a sealed container was giving me a headache. I knew exactly why it was happening, but portals made my head hurt. Once again, magic seemed to be casually waving its middle finger at the physics I knew. I would deal with that¡­ later. For the moment, I drained the air out of the tube by altering the environmental settings to a major vacuum. I had gotten the option to make that with the simple expedient of compressing a large section of stone in a sphere away from its own middle point. The space in the middle was as perfect a vacuum as I could create at the moment. Anything I dropped into the interior at this point, even something as innocuous as a leaf or speck of dirt, had the potential to become a weapon of mass destruction. I created a small bead of steel, no bigger than a drop of water and let it fall. It accelerated rapidly. My first test was ten seconds. The sphere of steel hit the stone as I cut off the portals and then bounced off. Besides tiny particulates of stone from the impact, there was nothing other than the pinging noise of the steel as it bounced vibrating through the stone. With no air, it was otherwise silent. I wasn¡¯t expecting much after ten seconds, so the result wasn¡¯t much of a surprise. From there, I started to increase the time. Noting the dust from the stone, however. I sheathed the entire interior with several inches of steel. I started the experiment up again. At first the steel pellets I was firing just bounced off, but then they started to leave dents. I added another portal I could activate below the lower point of the other portal, and started test firing through it into an environment with an atmosphere. After forty seconds, the tiny pellets produced a sonic boom when they reentered the air. The pellets didn¡¯t have much mass, so it wasn¡¯t a huge sound, but it still showed the effect of all the acceleration. By the time I got to one hundred seconds, the steel pellets were embedding themselves into the steel sheathing. As I continued to let the time increase the pellets gradually switched from making deeper and wider craters to completely vaporizing upon impact. After a certain speed, the emblem started to heat up, even when I made the entire thing out of folerth. I started hitting that point after about four hundred and fifty seconds. By this time, the tiny pellet became a flaming projectile when it hit atmosphere, and I could feel the shock-waves as it compressed the air ahead of it. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site. I knew the speed of sound was approximately seven hundred miles per hour. I couldn¡¯t get more exact than that considering I was on an alien world and the composition of the atmosphere, as well as its density and temperature, heavily factored into that. Even on Earth the speed varied wildly with altitude. Using my calculation ability and some armchair math, I guessed the speed of the pellet was around 10,000 miles per hour. Even though that wasn¡¯t as fast as a meteor usually was, I gained the meteor shower (yellow) environmental option. Another shard was assigned to try different materials, and I soon had plenty of others. Sodium gave me orange, copper gave green, and my many other materials and mixes of ores let me get a full range of colors. Accelerating gold up to do the test strained my emblems much more than the steel, and I was quickly able to determine that the mass of the material I was running through my portal mattered. As soon as I increased the size of my steel projectile the emblem started to heat up at a lower speed. I was able to deal with the issue by increasing the size of the emblem. The thicker bands of folerth didn¡¯t start heating up as soon, and the heat dissipated faster out of it. I was also able to brute force the issue and tell my environmental settings to cool everything down. I could easily have used water to cool the system down, but I went for an easier option. After a certain amount of time, even with my alterations, the test shots I was running through the portals stopped getting faster, or at least I thought so. I was able to verify that was the case by using larger objects. They would start falling and get faster and faster. However, past a certain point they would enter the portal below and emerge slower when they went through the portal exit above. When I tested this with a stone rod, it actually sheared apart under the stress of having the lower part of the rod decelerate so suddenly. Eventually, I was able to figure out why this was happening. The ambient mana was flowing into the portal as fast as it could be used. This was actually a bit of a relief to me. A price was being paid by the mana to move objects against gravity repeatedly. That meant some form of conservation was occurring. I should theoretically be able to power the portals more directly with reserves of mana crystals. The mana density was relatively low right now, since I was busy using all of it to condense the stone and make steel veins. I could accelerate a small object to tens of thousand of miles per hour already. Still, it was good that there were some limitations. I could do ridiculous damage using portals if I decided to invest enough mana into it. Still, even with my resources, I was more likely to blow myself up than wreck the planet. And, as long as I didn¡¯t start augmenting the process recklessly, the amount of material I could move around was relatively harmless on a dungeon wide level. Any adventurer who dealt with a steel BB to the face at Mach 10 would probably disagree, but if I was using that level of lethality it was probably in self defense. Aside from creating horrific weapons, portals had also enabled a substantial redesign of the next area the adventurers were going to go to. It had taken a little work to make it function right, since I needed to create portals that worked on triggers and attached to my puzzle menu. The hardest part was creating a system that let me automatically switch out different destinations in the emblems. I could see other uses for that as well. Unfortunately, I hadn¡¯t found a way to manipulate space directly. The portals were not something that I was really creating, even if I counted the emblems as being mine. This was an effect created by the system. It was either there to make portal creation easier, or to avert some kind of disaster from happening with overlapping space. I had already discovered that bad things could happen, even with the portal¡¯s precautions. If the portal formed and two solid objects overlapped they tended to react badly. So far I had seen the objects merged together into a single object with a number of effects: the excess density oozed sections of the objects out randomly, exploded, fractured, burned, and more. And, once again, if something was alive inside, the portal simply failed to form when there were any overlaps. The sudden deceleration from a portal reaching max speed absolutely could kill, however. I did feel like I was starting to see something around the portals and when teleporting. I was hopeful I would get an improvement to my sensory abilities soon. Anyway, fast forward and Zidaun and his team cautiously used my new portal to get back to their lodgings. I was working on other projects as well, anyway. I absorbed the design that had been left in the floor. I didn¡¯t gain a new skill, but I did have the understanding of the ritual flow into my mind. Apparently they had performed a binding oath of some kind. My guess was secrecy, since Zidaun had talked about me afterward. Though I wasn¡¯t sure how important an artifact was either. Maybe they had sworn an oath to share it or the money they would get from selling it? I was very much ready to have my language issues dealt with. I guess I had more people to talk with now, though Zidaun was still the only one I could talk with discretely. Even the one other Adar who had come couldn¡¯t see my avatar. The other, truly exciting development, was a vastly increased store of patterns. Sure, I wouldn¡¯t be able to evolve these into really dangerous monsters, but the sheer amount of variety was enormous. I wasn¡¯t sure of the total number, but I now had at least tens of thousands of different plants and animals. All of them were level five or below. Apparently level five was the system¡¯s cutoff for harmless. Since even a brief check allowed me to see that some of these were animals that formed large groups, like bees and ants, I suspected this was another case where the system was being pedantic. I certainly wouldn¡¯t consider a swarm of level five bees to be harmless. Zidaun and his party could probably swat them like flies, but they would probably chew through anyone new to delving. Not a big deal though, I would just make sure they were placed at an appropriate depth. I already had a swarm of insects planned for adventurers to face anyway. For the moment, shards started to supplement my environments, new creatures and plants slotting in to give them the full depth of biodiversity of a real ecosystem. Almost all the of the space I had just saved was subsumed by the addition of new areas dedicated to harmless adaptations. They were smaller than my massive main areas dedicated to mutation, since I just put together a few samples of the organisms I would like more variations of. Mostly, this time I was selecting for beauty. I had, however, included a few very meaningful experiments in with the rest. A few monsters that were already above level five had been added in. It would be interesting to see if anything happened with those. The area might simply refuse to mutate them at all, or they might regress to become less dangerous. Or something I hadn¡¯t thought of yet, that was the point of experimenting, after all. Even while that was in progress, a shard was focusing on the other new ability I had gained from pulling off an illusion, environmental immersion. I could already feel its effects. I could see subtle ways to make my environments feel more natural. Where certain species of grass would naturally grow due to the intersection of soil type, water, and shade. How to alter the weathering patterns on sections of stone to make it come in line with nature and the simulated winds. And I had a lot more sense of how to fine tune the settings for wind, rain, and light. I knew how to make the settings come alive, and that was before the more esoteric ability to generate actual illusions came into play. In a similar way to new sense I was gaining for when my skills were getting close to cascading to the next level, I could feel a sense of a threshold from my new skill. Though in this case it was less that I was approaching a limit, and instead feeling that I had already reached it and spilled over. All of my environments were ready for an illusion. I had built them for detail and I could feel my skill waiting for direction to take the next step. So I took the next step, and pushed. SSD 4.29 - Wheel of the Heavens ¡°Love knows not distance; it hath no continent; its eyes are for the stars.¡± -Gilbert Parker ¡°How far away the stars seem, and how far is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart.¡± -William Butler Yeats ==Zidaun== We made it through the hallway and the new transportation system the dungeon had added in. We did a quick check of the other doors we could access and they had all been changed too. If the portals weren¡¯t in a safe zone, I would have been more reluctant to trust them at all. As it was, I carefully tossed some objects between the rings of emblems embedded into the wall. The amount of folerth in the walls made me want to shake my head. I was certain at least a few idiots were going to get themselves killed trying to retrieve it. Anyone stupid enough to mess with an active emblem deserved the death that would almost inevitably follow. That was especially true when that emblem was part of a portal. Most emblem specialists put special precautions to strengthen and protect any emblem in an accessible location. That wasn¡¯t to protect wandering idiots, but instead provent the emblem from suffering damage. Idiots were an iron bit a dozen; folerth and emblem specialists were valuable. We had only given the dungeon a single messenger capsule; it was only a little bit of time ago, at that. Had it developed portals from that? If so, it was truly monstrous. A smile flickered at the edge of my mouth as worshipful thoughts moved through my mind. It was proving to be a worthy god indeed. After our longer than expected diversion we emerged back into the grotto. We trudged over the stone, the unforgiving floor pushing back hard against our weary steps. Our footfalls were swallowed by the darkness, the sound fading into nothing. We were tired, not in body, but in spirit. The others were quieter than usual. I presumed they were contemplating the revelations I had offered. For myself, the emotional whiplash had been more than sufficient. I was lost in my own thoughts when I felt a wave of mana sweep through the room. ¡°Mana is moving,¡± I said. A moment later, I didn¡¯t bother to elaborate, because the effect was obvious. The Grotto had always carried the facsimile of a night sky. It might lack Yamash, but otherwise the stars were recreated with a certain degree of fidelity. There is, however, a substantial difference between a good approximation and perfection. And now, it was perfect. The sky rippled as the perfect blackness between points of light slowly gave way to the true deep blue-black of the night. Stars twinkled with light, and each shade grew more natural, producing infinitesimal variations. Wind blew through the cavern, the deep darkness remaining, but subtly lightened by the ambient light of the heavens. The wind was brisk, and it carried the scents of far off greenery. The faint perfume of distance blooms perfumed the air. The shifting of the wind felt natural, each breeze slightly different in direction or intensity, interspersed with the occasional moment of calm. Whereas the atmosphere of the Grotto before had been beautiful, but unnatural, now it carried the peace of a brisk Thaw night. The darkness was no longer faintly stifling, lifting an unnoticed weight off my shoulders. ¡°That was unexpected,¡± I said, my voice light. ¡°More art, huh?¡± Gurek muttered. ¡°Looks like it,¡± Inda said, her voice bemused. ¡°This place really is different.¡± Firi¡¯s gaze still lay on the heavens as he spoke. ¡°I wonder why it doesn¡¯t have Yamash?¡± I frowned, ¡°I¡¯m not sure. Maybe it was too difficult to make that part of the illusion. Or maybe excluding them makes it clear that it is an illusion. Not that we would forget, but new people might not realize when they first enter.¡± ¡°You¡¯ll be here,¡± Firi said, his voice soft, ¡°under this sky, in the various fake environments, seeing to your people? Will you get to see the real thing often, or ever?¡± I cleared my throat. ¡°Not here, let¡¯s talk back at the base,¡± I said. Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. We didn¡¯t hurry, our footsteps carried us forward slowly over the bare stone. The columnar lights to the side of the path contrasted against the new sky. Each of us enjoyed the silent starry splendor in our own way. Firi and I took some time to ourselves in one of the lounge areas downstairs. The windows were open, the shutters pushed outward and the curtains fluttering gently in the occasional breeze. Each of us faced the other, our chairs close. Our hands reached out to touch. ¡°As the leader here, I don¡¯t expect to get outside all that often,¡± I said. ¡°Usually, how much an Ancient, our title for the leader, manages to get outside is directly proportional to how deep the dungeon is buried. This dungeon is buried quite deep indeed. I might be called on to deal with the inevitable settlements that will form around the dungeon¡¯s entrances, but that will just be at first.¡± I looked out the window. My heart was heavy, even as I feel gratitude. ¡°I didn¡¯t expect even this much,¡± I said. ¡°I¡¯m honestly glad to have it. This is as close to a real sky as I could hope for. And the dungeon is massive. We already found a section of wilderness, just in the first area. Not every area will be as nice.¡± ¡°Like the sewers,¡± Firi muttered, his eyebrows lifted with a grimacing smile. ¡°Ha, yeah. Even those were beautiful though, at least after we got past the beginning.¡± I said, letting my thoughts return to the verdant splendor that abounded even there. ¡°I¡¯m sure more wild areas will show up. And, when I¡¯m not actually delving, I can probably get the monsters to ignore me. There are sure to be even more wonderful places. I am luckier with this dungeon than I had any right to expect.¡± ¡°Why does it have to be you?¡± he said, looking at me earnestly. His hands squeezed around my hands gently. ¡°You don¡¯t need to stay. Stick around a bit, then when your people show up tell them what you know. Stick around longer and delve with us if you want¡­ but only if you want to. Someone else can be the Ancient. I know you have your duty, but why does it mean all of your life is sacrificed? There is more to life. I¡­ can put everything else aside though. If you want me to, I will stay with you.¡± My heart broke, just a little. His eyes were tender as he gazed at me for a moment, before they dropped toward the floor, looking away and his face tilting down. My own eyes grew watery, my throat thick. ¡°I¡­¡± My voice broke a little and I cleared my throat. ¡°I would like that, very much.¡± His face rose in hope, a fragile smile outlining the shine of his eyes with gentle wrinkles. Much as I wanted to kiss that smile, I hurried to interrupt him. ¡°However. However, I can¡¯t promise anything. I have my duty to my people and my god. Faith is what drives me. It compels me. My people come first. I... came here first. I made the first connection. You saw how it transformed me. That is sacred. ¡°It might be possible for us to be together, though.¡± Normally I wouldn¡¯t be able to even hope for that. I was sure that Gurek could understand why faith moved me. His own dedication to Shurum had influenced his class. Now though, my faith, which burned inside me like a constant fire, might not conflict with what I wanted for myself. A normal dungeon wouldn¡¯t care, or make any allowances. Most wouldn¡¯t understand my feelings at all. Caden might though. He understood people better than I would have ever believed. Exsan seemed like a normal dungeon, so I had no idea how that would affect things. ¡°It all comes down to what the dungeon wants,¡± I said softly. ¡°Normally they would prioritize duty, but Caden might understand.¡± ¡°I can¡¯t say I have ever understood why you worship dungeons,¡± Firi said, one side of his lips twisted into a smirk, ¡°but I will be happy enough to offer some prayers to this one. It would be a small price to pay for something as divine as you.¡± Firi blushed from his own words, and soon words were soon lost to kisses. Each of us breathlessly panted into the cold air beneath the slowly moving stars. ==Caden== Most skills provided some knowledge when they leveled up, but Environmental Immersion was proving to be the first skill that provided situational knowledge. If I gained a level in anything else I might get the equivalent of muscle memory, techniques, symbols and meanings, etc¡­ I was still working through what I had gained by learning Metallurgy. Environmental Immersion was giving me knowledge as I needed it. It started when I applied it to the Starlight Grotto. I suddenly knew how to improve the impression of a night sky. I knew how to alter the randomization to produce a more natural breeze and how to synthesize tiny random fragments of air to place smells onto the wind. I knew to change the color of the sky away from the pure blackness into the tiniest bit of light to replicate the feeling of the night. All this and more flowed through my head. I had the feeling that there were even more tiny details buried beneath the surface. My ability to implement changes would no doubt improve as I gained levels in the skill. And, once I had gone as far as the skill would take me, I pushed further and an illusion imposed itself over my own work. The skill streamlined everything I had added and incorporated its own power. The sky, formerly frozen forever, began to turn producing a slowly shifting kaleidoscope of stars, replicating the normal turning of the heavens. Though here, in the Starlight Grotto, the sun would never rise. The Meadow gave me far more information. Apparently, I didn¡¯t know much about soil depths, drainage patterns, or where different soil types were appropriate. Shifting those around only took time. Adding in new animals and insects from my substantially enlarged collection was easy enough as well. The skill also directed me in painting distant mountains and clouds upon the walls of the cave. I could feel it as the skill interfaced with my new artistic skill to produce better results. When I had gone as far as I could, I pushed again, shifting the static images into a living environment. I repeated this for each environment I had created. Each one was refined and then overlaid with an illusion to make them more than I was capable of making on my own. I had already worked hard to make each area feel real, and that was reflected by the skill. From the beginning, I could feel the illusion waiting if I pushed. However, I could also tell that the illusion would be better the closer the environment already was to what I wanted. I wasn¡¯t entirely sure what better meant, in this case, but I had plenty of mana stored away, so shifting some pieces around wasn¡¯t something that worried me very much. There was something peaceful about the process of creation. Plus, I was actually learning a lot. I learned the types of soils various types of trees preferred to grow in. How close they usually were to their neighbors, whether they formed groves with entangled roots or stood alone with roots protruding deep into the earth to serve as an anchor. I learned about weather patterns and incorporated them into how my environments functions. The temperature, precipitation, and other weather of each area was now properly set up; rain would fall, and wind would blow. There was no proper change between day and night in any of my areas¡­ yet. I had a good idea for how I could implement that, but I didn¡¯t actually want every area to have a day and night cycle. The Wandering Woods, for example, would always be some variation, but static, depending on what section you were in. My underground areas were not necessarily exposed to daylight patterns at all, though some had shafts of light radiating down from the ¡°surface.¡± I had a feeling that implementing larger changes, like days and nights, was exactly how I would level up the skill in the future. I suppose that was true of any skill I had. The way to make progress was to go beyond what I could already do easily, and try new things. SSD 4.30 - Flesh of Stone There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one''s self. - Benjamin Franklin ==Caden== I walked through the grasses of the meadow, the bare stone of my feet crushing the grass underfoot. The smell of fresh grass perfumed the air, mixing with the light scent of flowers on the wind. Those same flowers shifted in and out of view, the tall grasses blowing in the wind and obscuring the small dots of color amid the green. Small animals ran through the grass. Small mammals, lizards, insects, and small creatures I had no categorization for. What exactly was I supposed to call a plate-mouse? It wasn¡¯t exactly a mammal or an insect. And there seemed to be a whole group of animals like that. And, other, equally strange combinations were among my new enormous list of animals. Still, the world around me felt alive. And so did I. It didn¡¯t matter that I was made of stone. I felt alive in a way that I simply hadn¡¯t using the natural senses of a core. I knew that I was biased. I could feel and experience earthquakes, and the ripples of gravity. I could feel the flowing of mana and the pressure of countless tons of rock pressing down. Even knowing that, it didn¡¯t matter. I had been born a human, and I had lived that way for many years. I hadn¡¯t lived as a dungeon core for a year; hell, I didn¡¯t think it had even been two months yet. However, now I could feel like myself again. I wasn¡¯t going to be fooling anyone else, of course. The stone was rather obvious, but even without that people with special senses would notice. Zidaun wouldn¡¯t be able to tell directly, if he didn¡¯t know me already, since I now had a proper mana barrier for my avatar. However, I was too heavy, and he would be able to feel that. And stone would not feel like flesh to the vibration sense of the other team. Who knew what other exotic senses were available to the delvers who would be coming? No, I would never be able to conceal myself like this. I wasn¡¯t sure I wanted to, either. I wasn¡¯t actually unhappy to be a core, now that I could talk with a few people. As long as I could manage that, I was happy enough. There were other benefits to having a body. Metallurgy II had been giving me trouble. It had given me an instinctive knowledge of forging metals. I had been having trouble accessing and using that knowledge properly. As soon as I tried forging with a body, that awkwardness went away. A hammer felt natural in my hand, and forming an anvil in the right shape was an easy effort of imagination. It was obvious that this skill was actually meant for a person. I hadn¡¯t gotten anything special for being the first dungeon to get the skill, so it was obvious that other dungeons had gained it, but it wasn¡¯t optimized for us. The odds were good that most dungeons simply used whatever was brought inside them. And that fit what I already knew. Exsan only started to gain curiosity after being exposed to me and my own knowledge. It was entirely possible that curiosity was not a common trait for dungeons. I could even understand why. Dungeons were supposed to sit and exist for long periods of time without doing much. Boredom was curiosities natural companion, even as it acted as its antithesis. I might be a dungeon now, but I was never going to be content just sitting and growing passively. I would keep learning and expanding my knowledge. A flicker of a notification distracted me.
Your skill Manipulate Metal II (Metal) has leveled to Manipulate Metal III (Metal)!
It was the third such message I had received so far over the course of the night. It was the first skill that leveled up due to background processes, though, and not because I was pushing them to try and level them up. My other shards had been busy. They still were for that matter. Having gained a new sense that let me determine when I was close to leveling skills had pushed me to work harder on them. It gave me something definite to work towards, which was always appreciated. The other two skills that had leveled, so far, were Matter Fabrication and Interdimensional Repository, both of which has also reached level three. Honestly, I probably didn¡¯t even need to focus on them, since I used both of the skills all the time, but practicing with focused intent felt good. And I thought my intentions might actually make a difference. Certainly my skills had leveled up faster when I was trying to see how I could stretch them. It was interesting practice to create items as quickly as possible midair and then pull them into my inventory while they were falling. So far, momentum was not conserved when an object was put into storage, but I wondered if that might be able to change eventually. So far, no luck. I couldn¡¯t create an object with momentum, either, but I wouldn¡¯t have known without trying. It wasn¡¯t like I knew what the limits actually were. And the limits changed and grew as I leveled. Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. My attention returns to the stone of my body. I didn¡¯t feel like my avatar was going to level up soon, but it was one of the skills that I could use to potentially gain new skills. Besides, I simply liked using it. I had been trying to adjust how my body was put together. Human bodies were not homogeneous, but the stone of my body had started out that way. I kept tripping and falling, the weight distribution of my body distinctly different from what I was used to. I could create an exact copy of my own body, externally, but the solid stone felt wrong. This was hardly much of a surprise. I had been walking for more than two decades, and while my body had substantially shifted over that time, all those changes had been gradual. We didn¡¯t usually think of walking as a skill, but that was because we tended to master it before we started to consciously think about such things. If you broke your leg or had to go through physical therapy, suddenly you started to think about it again, but even then, you would generally remaster the skill and then let it fade into the background. All my instincts, all my skills with my body were still intact. I could move my hands and use my index finger to touch my nose or anywhere else on my body. I didn¡¯t need to think about it. I still unconsciously breathed, the air flowing into and out of my lungs. And then when I tried to walk my instincts and trained habit disagreed with physics. Physics won. I would have said physics always won, in my old life, but I wasn¡¯t as sure of that now as I was then. Still, in consideration to the fact that walking was generally all about physics, and I wasn¡¯t using a magical solution. I was trying to get my body closer to agreement with my instincts. My solution had been to make most of the stone in my body porous. I had left solid ¡®bones¡¯ of stone in all the proper places, my pattern for humans guiding that knowledge easily enough. That had helped substantially. After than I started to alter the density of the stone in various places, trying to imitated the increased density of muscles, the lower density of fat, and the various changes in density caused by all the internal organs. It wasn¡¯t a perfect solution, because my body of stone was simply heavier than a body of primarily water. Yes, I could make my entire body as porous as pumice and I might get down to something resembling the right weight, but then my body would not be very strong. Still, it was close enough to feel much better. I was still tripping every now and then, but it was diminishing as I got used to it. I was self aware enough to admit that the primary reason I was working on my avatar was comfort. Now that I had a proper avatar, I might be able to gain new skills that we centered around having a human body. I had even sparred a little with some monsters. For all that my avatar was human, the monsters in the dungeon ignored me unless I ordered them to attack me. I could even go up to a monster and punch it, and it wouldn¡¯t attack me. That made sense, I supposed. The monsters still recognized me as a friendly entity, even as an avatar. Still, a few commands and they would do their best to break apart my stony flesh. I wasn¡¯t very good at fighting. I had been getting some decent use out of my beginners tower. I hadn¡¯t gained any skills yet, I wasn¡¯t even certain if it was possible. Still, I had practiced both some hand to hand and with a sword. The sword was much better than my previous creations. Getting some proper experience in with metallurgy let me know what aspects of the steel were actually important. The individual grains in the steel were small and tight, the carbon content a little higher than it was for the knife I had found. I had formed bands of alternating material within the sword. Unfortunately, the sword was better than I was. My movements were awkward, and I had the sword glance off of the exoskeleton of the creature I was fighting far too many times. I was also glad I had a complete copy of the sword template. I may have hit the floor with the sword a time or ten. Still, I didn¡¯t get tired. My muscles were mere stone simulacrum of the real thing. I didn¡¯t sweat, and I didn¡¯t need to deal with fatigue. The sword never became too heavy for my hands. Indeed, all the negatives that had made me avoid exercise in my last life were gone. This body was absurdly strong. A few of the times I had hit the floor with my sword it was because I had chopped straight through the monster and then hit the floor. None of the monsters I had faced so far could really damage me, either. Stone was a bit more than they could handle. Still, it was only practice. It was a shame that I couldn¡¯t have multiple copies of my avatar running. I had tried, but only a single shard could use it at a time. I still had another shard running metallurgy right now. I had received some hints how to make a sword properly from scratch. I had set aside the ore it had picked out and a bunch of green leaves to burn as I made the steel. I was pretty sure the leaves were supposed to add carbon. I had perfectly good coal I could use, but it considered that an inferior choice. Since I honestly knew nothing about forging, I wasn¡¯t going to try and gainsay my new instincts. And they were instincts, and that bothered me a little. I knew some of what I was supposed to do, but I didn¡¯t know why. Why those leaves and not the leaves from a different plant? Why green leaves instead of dried out? The ore that was picked out had a high iron and carbon content, but I had other ores with a similar level. Those ones had been less suitable and I didn¡¯t know why. And that bothered me. I wasn¡¯t going to just to everything that my skill told me. I was also planning to do the things it told me were wrong, or less effective. I was sure the skill was right, I was sure there were good reasons to do what it told me, but I wanted to know those reasons. I worked on my various skills through the night, pushing them up. Aura Mobility was the next skill to level, also leveling up to level three. No doubt it had been close to leveling ever since Exsan and I had our little spat. It was quickly followed by Living Creation III (Life) and Appraise III, but neither gained much additional functionality. Soon enough it was morning. SSD 4.31 - Interlude - Being Educated ¡°Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.¡± -Oscar Wilde ==Sevso== I wasn¡¯t sure exactly how large Gnaeus¡¯ pouch was; it certainly felt endless at times. Part of that was simply the large number of emblems he could pull out for any situation. I found out, shortly after I had climbed down the cliff, that he had an emblem that let him fly. He had spotted a rare plant living on a craggy rock off to one side of the road. ¡°You see that plant,¡± he said, pointing his finger upwards. After a moment, I did. It was a simple plant, a green rod with a flat purple flower in an arc covering part of the top. I said as much. He nodded. ¡°It is a rare plant, has a number of medicinal properties. Not much I could use it for on its own, but useful to sell.¡± Immediately I started to feel a craving for it, which made me sigh. ¡°Not that that does us much good,¡± I said. I pointed up toward it, waving my hand vaguely. ¡°The top of that crag is all dirt. Even if I could climb up the rocky section and get to it, I could never get to it without bringing down the top.¡± ¡°True,¡± he said, a his lips pursing slightly, ¡°I suppose I¡¯ll have to go get it.¡± I cocked my head at him, ¡°Uh, what?¡± He had started to rummage in the bag and was ignoring me. ¡°Ah! Here it is.¡± He said, as he pulled a necklace out of the lip. The charm itself was a simple polished golden wood, though the silver lines embedded into it had to be folerth, making it ridiculously expensive. He put it on and paused for a moment, before turning towards me. ¡°You¡¯ll probably like this,¡± he said. ¡°It is quite impressive, if I say so myself. It took ages to get the runes exactly right. It kept triggering at inconvenient moments. I still don¡¯t wear it all the time, since it can cause unintended problems.¡± Then, Gnaeus took a step up and onto the air, and then his other foot followed, as though he was climbing an invisible staircase. Up and up he went, and then just a bit across until he reached the crag¡¯s peak. Very carefully, he crouched and dug up the plant by the roots. With swift steps, he returned, walking back down the way he had come until he stood before me again. ¡°So,¡± I said, my voice slightly strained, once he was solidly on the ground and had put away the emblem he used, ¡°does that emblem have limited uses or need to charge up?¡± ¡°Nope,¡± he said cheerfully, his eyes focused as he carefully turned the plant as he inspected it. ¡°I made it, so it can run continuously without any issues at all.¡± I gritted my teeth. ¡°Then why, in Otga¡¯s burning cleft, did I climb down a cliff to grab the water the other day?¡± I shouted. ¡°Well, that was something for you, wasn¡¯t it?¡± he said, as he flashed a cheeky smile at me. ¡°And when I went back down to grab things for dinner?¡± ¡°Well,¡± he smiled, ¡°I could say that this kind of training is good for your new body skill, because it is. However, truthfully, I just thought it would be funny. And I did retrieve this one for you. I¡¯ll take the parts that I can sell off it. I¡¯ll leave the rest for you and your dungeon; it shouldn¡¯t have any trouble recreating the rest of the plant from a decent sized chunk.¡± I sighed. ¡°I don¡¯t think it counts as my dungeon,¡± I said. ¡°If anything, I think I am its person.¡± ¡°True, true,¡± Gnaeus muttered absentmindedly. With expert hands he trimmed the roots with a small knife. Then he grabbed each petal near the base and pulled it off, careful to get the entire thing. The roots and the petals each went into their own separate cloth bags and were tucked away. He handed the plant to me. What remained of the plant was only small scraggly roots and a thick green stem. Near the top of the stem it changed color and a yellow dust coated it. Gnaeus came up to me as I was looking at it. He pointed towards the top. ¡°It¡¯s called a Magenta Feather. Named for the color of the flower, obviously. You can see the yellow up at the top, that tells you it is a male plant. Obviously the petals and roots have the most valuable parts. If you want a good quality healing potion, the petals are perfect for that. The roots can be used for a number of things, mainly to strengthen things or increase fortitude. Sadly, the most common use is to enhance the libido, since the nobles will pay ridiculous amounts for it.¡± That raised the obvious question. ¡°How much is it actually worth?¡± I asked. He gestured to the rest of the plant in my hands, which promptly disappeared into storage for Caden. ¡°The rest of this has some low grade medicinal uses. So, maybe a gold at most. The parts I removed should go for about fifteen to twenty-five gold. If the plant had been female you could have sold the entire plant for¡­¡± The author''s content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. He waved one of his hands back and forth. ¡°Eh, anywhere from seven to nine dungeon gold. Sadly, you really only need one male, no matter how many female plants you have.¡± ¡°You know,¡± I said, my voice dry, ¡°a gold used to be an inconceivable amount of money for me. Now¡­ I have far more than that. And talking with you, it seems like even less.¡± Gnaeus just smiled at me before he replied with a quiet laugh. ¡°Oh, I know, what you have is just a bit of spending money to me. Building emblems, when you are as good as I am, is immensely profitable. With skills I need less materials and mana, less time, and my experience lets me create a much wider variety of effects. And, people pay a lot more for anything I am willing to make than when I first started. It pays to be one of the best. ¡°You know, people always talk about how hard the magical languages are. I never really saw it. Of course, I also worked my ass off.¡± He flashed a grin at me. ¡°Well, we got the plant you wanted,¡± I said, rolling my eyes at his bragging. ¡°Are you ready to go?¡± Not quite¡± He said, pulling a wooden staff out of his pouch. The way it extended out from the pouch was both fascinating and somehow wrong. ¡°Here,¡± he said, tossing the staff toward me, ¡°you¡¯re going to want that when the monsters get here.¡± I caught it reflexively. ¡°Ri¡­ wait, what!¡± I was interrupted by the arrival of said monsters. There were four of them, each green with purple eyes. They mostly resembled toads, though their backs were marked with jagged protrusions of bone. ¡°Don¡¯t worry about me,¡± Gnaeus said, ¡°they can¡¯t even see me.¡± ¡°Trust me,¡± I growled, ¡°I wasn¡¯t worried about you!¡± ¡°Well, dealing with monsters is an essential part of adventuring, especially in dealing with dungeons,¡± he said, far too cheerful. ¡°Best of luck!¡± My body was better coordinated than it had ever been, thanks to my new class, but the fact my brain had no idea how to use it in a fight became quickly apparent. The first toad leapt, its back aimed for me, and I was keenly aware of the sharp spikes. I swung the staff toward it, but I was too fast. The staff huffed through the air, missing it and pulling me off balance. Fortunately that also pulled me out of the way though I almost tripped and fell over. ¡°Well, its a good thing we are doing this with something pretty harmless,¡± Gnaeus said. ¡°You can deal with this anytime you want!¡± I shouted. ¡°True, but that would deprive you of valuable experience,¡± he replied. That was not at all what I meant- My thought was cut off and I had to jump out of the way when two jumped toward me at the same time. My arms wheeled awkwardly as I slipped on the moist ground, trying to avoid falling over. I accidentally hit one with my staff as I was waving it around. Unprepared, the staff was knocked out of my hands. ¡°Crap,¡± I lunged out of the way of another toad and fumbled for the staff, almost dropping it again before I managed to hold onto it. I backed up, trying to keep all the monsters in view. When the next one jumped toward me I managed to hit it sideways with the staff. It went bouncing off like a leather ball, traces of blood gleaming on the rocks it scraped along the way. An angry croak presaged the attack of the next one. I smacked it out of the way, like the last, only to get hit by the next one when I tried to smack it out of the way. I misjudged and the sharp edges of its spines gouged into my side when I tried to deflect it. I yelled and sucked in my breath, trying to work through the pain. My heart was racing, even as blood started to run down my side. ¡°Ooh, that looks painful.¡± I grit my teeth. In the background, I could hear Gnaeus humming as I swung for the first one I had hit. For a bare moment, I was tempted to smack him with the staff. I didn¡¯t seriously consider it though. For one thing, I was sure he was better at fighting than I was. He would probably knock it out my hands and proceed to beat me up. Probably use it as an excuse to show me the proper form for using the staff, too... I hit the monster, smacking it away again. This time it didn¡¯t get back up again, blood pooling around it as it lay twitching. The others followed soon afterward. As long as I kept track of them, they were not that difficult to hit in midair. Soon enough, four toads sagged on the ground, each dead or dying. I let myself collapse, one of my hands holding my side where the blood was running out of it. I sat on the ground. ¡°Well, that wasn¡¯t the worst I have ever seen someone do. You¡¯re still alive, after all. Otherwise¡­ that was utterly disgraceful. You are lucky that you seem to have injured them well enough, though. Plenty of adventurers have been killed by a monster they thought they had killed. A critically wounded monster can still kill you.¡± I glanced over to Gnaeus. He had pulled another staff out and was prodding at one of the toads. It squished wetly against his staff, stained the end with various fluids. ¡°Lucky for you, these things weren¡¯t very bright. They really only used a single attack.¡± ¡°Damn you and your attitude,¡± I gasped out between labored breaths. The combat had lasted only moments, but I felt like I had been running for miles. My body was sore, and my side hurt. I trembled as the need to fight drained away. ¡°Why in the everlasting hells did you make me fight them?¡± I asked. ¡°You could have dealt with them in instant, I am sure.¡± Gnaeus looked at me slyly, ¡°What did you gain from the combat?¡± The feeling of the system trying to talk to me had been overridden by the tremors until he asked me. I pulled it up.
You have gained experience from killing four level five monsters! You have gained the skills: Staff Wielding I (Weapon) One of the simplest weapons, the staff, can also be deadly. This skill increases your ability to wield one effectively. Pain Resistance I Pain is omnipresent, but at certain times it can be deadly. Helps prevent you from being distracted by pain. And, while you will be aware of pain and injurys, this will reduce the impact of the pain when you need to force yourself to function anyway.
I glowered at Gnaeus. ¡°That good, huh?¡± he said. ¡°Did you get an ability with the staff?¡± ¡°Yes,¡± I muttered, ¡°and Pain Resistance.¡± ¡°Ah, that is a good one to have. Really important when you are fighting monsters. You know, I could have trained you for weeks outside of combat to get you that a skill for staves. Even then, you probably wouldn¡¯t have gotten a skill to deal with pain. That one is almost exclusively gained in combat. Though, when I was younger, I met a lovely young lady in a pleasure house¡­¡± ¡°I don¡¯t want to know, old man!¡± I shouted, trying to save my sanity. ¡°Ah, yes, I suppose I was getting myself distracted,¡± he said. ¡°Oh, do you know how to sew?¡± ¡°Nope. Tried it, but I was awful at it.¡± ¡°Really? That is a pretty essential skill for repairing clothes,¡± Gnaeus said. ¡°Well, I suppose I am correcting your absent education in many ways already.¡± He gestured toward my bloody side. ¡°Go ahead and get that armor off.¡± I sighed, wincing as the pain flared, even if it had dulled down somewhat. The armor came off, and then my shirt. The cloth was pulled out of the blood, scraping lightly against the open wounds. I looked somewhat morosely down at my shirt. The holes in it were not that large, the armor had mostly covered that area, but it had been a very expensive shirt. ¡°I suppose you want me to repair my shirt¡­¡± I said, sighing but resigned anyway. ¡°Well, yes, but only after you sew up your side first,¡± he said. ¡°The stress will help you gain the skill, and it will help you train your new Pain Resistance.¡± I only bothered to glower a little. SSD 4.32 - The Logistics of Secrets ¡°Secrets are a coin best left unspent.¡± -Spymaster Trixalo ==Zidaun== The morning failed to dawn, the eternal night a constant outside the windows when I opened the shutters. It felt strange to sleep and then see a night sky. Of course, it was lacking Yamash, and that only added to the strangeness. I had spent many a night deep inside dungeons, where safe areas were scarce, or nonexistent. Many nights each of us had taken turns staring into the darkness, always on guard against the monster that might be creeping up to attack. Many nights under the cover of so much stone, no more than a few feet above us. Many nights indeed. And yet, for some reason, I found this false sky made me crave the real thing even more. My heart ached with it, and we had not been down here very long at all. Was this because I was now bound here; had I stirred some heretofore unknown longing for the sky I had taken for granted most of my Awakened life? I didn¡¯t know, and that made it hard to deal with. I found it unsettling. Still, even as my heart was troubled, faith and worship swelled in my breast. It was like a flame, a light, always burning and reducing my other concerns to ashes in its inexorable certitude. I let myself sigh a little anyway, my emotions settling. I walked over the plush rugs covering the hard polished wood. The green of sea foam mixed with navy blue accents and deep forest green. The walls shimmered with uneven verdigris, layered under a thin layer of crystal that made it flicker and shine as I moved. I could smell food, the faint scent reaching up in spreading tendrils. Soup, again. I laughed to myself at the thought. How soon we grow tired and weary of luxuries. It wasn¡¯t the best soup (or was it stew?), but chunks of dried meat mixed with dried fruit and water boiled up into something that was more palatable than each would be on their own. Sometimes we added nuts, and sometimes not. If we had been aware of the dungeon¡¯s largesse, we would have brought samples of various grains, and other goods. Today was our mandatory break from dungeon diving. Four days in, at least one day off. It hadn¡¯t mattered when we did the tests, since we weren¡¯t actually delving. Now, it was part of the schedule. As I came down the stairs the kitchen came into my senses, and I was surprised to see the other scouting team was present. Their voices trickled up to me as the wooden stairs gave the tiniest bit beneath me with each step. ¡°...right, but surely some secrets can be detrimental to the common adventurer?¡± That was Gurek talking. Another voice responded quite acerbically. ¡°Some things, are meant to be secret. Some things are sacred.¡± Yeah¡­ that was Anaath for sure. I wasn¡¯t sure what made the other Adar so sour, but I suspected. Ironically, I would have been happy for him to arrive first and become an Ancient. I wasn¡¯t sure how suited I was for the job. Inda chimed in with her own take. ¡°Okay, sure, and some things are political. I might hate politics, but I can understand why it matters. And, for the Adar, you could say that the political and the religious are not really separate. Well, anymore than politics and religion are ever separate. That being said, I am sure that some of what the Adar keep secret is done simply out of habit. It starts as a policy decision, whether political, religious, or both. Then, over time, it becomes institutionalized. So it might get applied to things that don¡¯t actually need to be secret.¡± I walked into the room, taking a chair. The table in the dining area was more than large enough for both parties. Honestly, this was more like a miniature guild building; both of us could have stayed here without any crowding. ¡°So what made you guys join us for breakfast?¡± I asked. Tarrae, my counterpoint for the other team, looked up from his bowl of soup to reply. ¡°We figured we might as well synchronize our schedules together. Until other people show up, our parties are the only other social interaction around. We might want to share buildings, too. We will probably end up crowding together with someone, no matter what we do.¡± For a moment, I considered objecting. My teammates and I had a secret we were sharing; honestly, that had probably prompted this discussion. However, we wouldn¡¯t be talking about that here anyway. And while I could enforce my will by using my title to ensure that only my group stayed here, it didn¡¯t feel right. I wouldn¡¯t necessarily be letting anyone else join us in the building, but another scout team wasn¡¯t really going to be a burden. You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. ¡°Sure, makes sense,¡± I replied. ¡°I should be able to prevent us from being squeezed out of here. Rank does have its privileges, after all.¡± ¡°Oh yeah, that¡¯s right!¡± Tarrae¡¯s face brightened. I took the moment to grab a bowl of soup, the sweet and savory scents emerging from the pot. My stomach grumbled lightly as I moved to sit down next to Firi. We casually bumped our shoulders against each other, enjoying the proximity. Firi flashed a smile at me. ¡°Okay, but back to topic, secrets.¡± Gurek said. ¡°I hate secrets, they almost always mean trouble.¡± Soara said, his gaze distant. ¡°I think it depends on the secret, doesn¡¯t it? Tarrae said, his brows lined with thought. ¡°My family are merchants. Merchant families hold secrets from other families all the time: how much they paid for something, who their sources are, when their next shipment is arriving. They do that kind of thing all the time.¡± I could see Gurek slump a little at his response. ¡°However,¡± Tarrae continued, ¡°merchants also share the really important things. A route is closed due to snow, or weather, or whatever, we let the others know. Brigands have been preying on a certain route, we let the others and the authorities know. Anything that actually might be about more than making money, and we let the others know. And they do the same for us, we are all safer that way.¡± ¡°Right, exactly!¡± Gurek said. ¡°If a secret could save lives, people ought to share it!¡± If it were up to me, I might share more of the Adar secrets. Honestly, I hated lying. However, the Adar as a whole had made decisions about what we ought to share. A point worth exploring¡­ ¡°Okay,¡± I said, looking at Gurek. ¡°Let¡¯s assume for a moment that you get placed into a position of power. You have to work with the framework of the society you live in, even if you might have control of the sphere you are overseeing. However, if we decide to look at this as a longstanding policy,¡± I nodded toward Inda. ¡°then we can imagine, even if you are given a seat of whatever governing body rules your nation, that you cannot change things all on your own. Sure, you might be able to try to steer the nation toward being more open, but it would take time. ¡°The only exception to this, is if you somehow become the total ruler of your nation.¡± I pointed at Gurek. ¡°Congratulations, you are now king!¡± I said dramatically. The others laughed lightly, with the exception of Gurek who scowled at me. ¡°So, now that you are king,¡± I said, ¡°you can choose to reveal whatever secrets your nation had. Of course, if you do, the people who had an interest in keeping the secret might come after you. You might not rule very long.¡± Gurek looked dissatisfied, but eventually sighed. ¡°Well, okay. Sure, but suppose you had a secret, and you wanted to tell it. How would you spread it so that no one could take the secret back?¡± And there went Gurek, he loved his hypotheticals. I was just glad we had moved on from the more sensitive part of the subject. I would probably need to take some time to talk to Gurek on my own. I understood his issues, but there really was nothing I could do about it in the short term. ¡°What about you Inda?¡± Gurek said. She hummed in thought for a moment before replying. ¡°Really it comes to getting the secret out of range of the influence of whatever group was keeping the secret. In some cases that would be easy. If you manage to smuggle a document out of the local adventurer¡¯s or merchant¡¯s guild, then you can pass it to whomever else has power in the city. If they have too much control in the city, then getting it out of the city, preferably to multiple cities, would work. Or, if you have a trusted organization, who has their own power, you could spread it to them.¡± ¡°Okay, but what if you cannot get it out of range?¡± Gurek said. ¡°You are in the middle of one of the large empires on the Eastern continent, for example. You don¡¯t have the resources to get the secret out of the Empire on your own.¡± Gurek turned to look at Soara. ¡°Soara, you said you hate secrets, what would you do if you had a major one and wanted to make sure it would spread?¡± ¡°Uh, I don¡¯t know.¡± Soara said. ¡°My only contacts are in the adventurer¡¯s guild. Post a notice there to have someone deliver notes maybe?¡± ¡°Not the worst plan,¡± Tarrae mused. ¡°Honestly, if I really needed to spread a secret, but it was like you said,¡± he tipped his head toward Gurek, ¡°I would use my family to spread it. Most of them have traveled to various cities. If my family was there in the empire, instead, I would have them travel to many different cities. We could time it so that we revealed the information in different cities at the same time. We could probably arrange to send messengers to as many contacts as we could before we made the announcement public. If we hired criers, especially near adventurer¡¯s guilds, wealthy mercantile families, and nobles, some of them would spread the news even farther. ¡°Honestly, many of them have resources that rival my own family multiple times over. We couldn¡¯t use a message capsule to send news, it would cost far too much. Some of those families, though, send one every few days; they could simply add this in with their other news.¡± Inda nodded grudgingly before speaking. ¡°That is the other plan. Spread the news as far and wide as you can. Make it impossible to contain because it is impossible to find everyone who now knows about it. The more powerful people who know about it, the better, because they are harder to stop.¡± Gurek was practically vibrating in his seat. ¡°Wow, that is actually a realistic idea,¡± he said. ¡°I wonder if you could use it send another type of news. Frame something as a secret that isn¡¯t actually a secret and trick people into sending it everywhere for you.¡± ¡°In the first case,¡± Inda said, ¡°where it was an actual secret, one of two things is likely to happen. Whoever spread it would get punished by whoever wanted to keep it, simply to send a message. Or, because people know the secret now, and powerful people are watching, the original holders decide to just leave it alone.¡± She raised her finger toward Gurek who was opening his mouth. ¡°Don¡¯t interrupt. The point I am making, is that if you spread a false rumor, secret, whatever, and you make powerful people spread it, they will not be amused. They may not act directly, but it is highly likely that they will apply pressure to you, or if they didn¡¯t know it was you, to your agents. It gets you the worst of both worlds.¡± The conversation continued on for some time. None of us were busy today, and the wandering conversation was pleasant and mostly relaxing. Fortunately we didn¡¯t end up discussing anything so charged again. Slowly, the morning shifted into early afternoon. After we had finished lunch, we began to hear a sound. At first it was simply something barely registered at the edge of perception. Then it became more prominent, and we all emerged from the building to find out what was going on. The sound resolved itself into the susurration of feet, all treading on the ground in random rhythm. We moved toward the entrance, and there we began to see them. Thousands of Adar carried packs as they strode into the cavern. My people had arrived. SSD 4.33 - Unprepared for Company I went to a garden party To reminisce with my old friends A chance to share old memories Play our songs again When I got to the garden party They all knew my name No one recognized me I didn''t look the same From ¡°Garden Party,¡± By Ricky Nelson ==Zidaun== It felt strange to see so many of my people here. I knew they were coming, of course, though the timing had been uncertain. It felt strange to see them all here, however. The shaggy bark and curved thorns belonged in the swamp. All these faces, familiar and foreign, belonged in the mists. They belonged in the warm humid air that would freeze upon the trees and stone buildings in cascading falls of icicles. I would likely never return there. Never see the swamp again, with the burning flowers heating the water in Freeze. Never see the same swamp festooned with curtains of flowers above the water in Thaw, gradually changing to more greenery and flowers as the year progressed. Thousands of Adar came up the tunnel, stopping when they got to me. I heard dull thwaping sounds as the crowd parted and Phanal came walking forward with his cane, whacking anyone who didn¡¯t get out of his way fast enough. I grinned, he hadn¡¯t changed at all. I bowed before I spoke. ¡°Trainer Phanal, it is great to see you.¡± ¡°Bah, none of that bowing,¡± Phanal said with a scowl. ¡°Looks like I should have worked on your etiquette more. As an Ancient, I am supposed to bow to you, not the other way around.¡± He bowed to me, somehow managing to make the short bow feel sarcastic. ¡°I greet you, holder of this domain. I, Phanal, am honored to be here, Ancient.¡± I sighed internally, I hated this formality, but I needed to respond in kind. ¡°And you, Phanal, are welcome here.¡± I paused for a moment, the ritual complete. ¡°Though I am pretty sure if I was going to call anyone ancient, it would be you Phanal,¡± I said wryly. ¡°Exactly how old are you now?¡± ¡°Ha, old enough. So who are they?¡± Phanal raised his cane, pointing at my party and the others. ¡°Ah, yes.¡± I gestured behind me and beckoned for the others to join me. As they came forward I pointed to each of them. ¡°This is Gurek, Inda, and Firi.¡± Phanal gave me a knowing look as I introduced Firi, his eyes twinkling. ¡°They are my party. These other four are from Tsary. First is Tarrae, their leader, then Soara, Norana, and Anaath.¡± Each of them made an acknowledgment as they were introduced, except for Anaath, who only scowled. A moment later a whack announced Phanal¡¯s cane introducing itself to Anaath¡¯s head. ¡°And what cause do you have to be so sour, eh boy?¡± Phanal said, his scowl substantially more impressive than Anaath¡¯s. The deep lines in his face definitely made the scowl more effective. ¡°You¡¯re young. Still have lots of opportunities. Get over yourself and hop to it.¡± I held back a laugh with a cough while Anaath rubbed his head sourly. ¡°Hmm. Yes, and this is Phanal, my old trainer,¡± I said. ¡°While he lacks patience, he is very effective.¡± Phanal¡¯s gimlet stare turned on me next, before apparently deciding that my, entirely accurate, assessment wasn¡¯t worth contesting. ¡°Humph, well off with the rest of you. Zidaun and I have things to get done. None of you will be able to delve for at least a few days. Go find something to entertain yourselves with.¡± Despite his less than polite dismissal, it said something for his force of personality that none of my companions, or the other party, argued, though a few of them opened their mouths before shutting them. I gave my party an apologetic look as I walked off with Phanal. Firi and Gurek were both smirking at me. No doubt they both thought the situation vastly entertaining. Oh well, it was fair enough. Not like I hadn¡¯t seen them around their old guild trainers, too. They didn¡¯t have quite as much oomph to their personality as Phanal, but it had still been enough to trip them up occasionally. ¡°So, anyone else in the dungeon? Anyone delving?¡± he asked. This book''s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience. ¡°Nope, it has just been the eight of us so far.¡± ¡°Well, at least we won¡¯t need to kick anyone out. Show me around, bo¡­¡± he coughed before continuing, ¡°hmm, Ancient.¡± I grinned at him. ¡°It would be my pleasure.¡± It was a different experience with so much light in the cavern. The night receded into the distance, each statue looming out of the gloom and then being fully exposed. Thousands of Adar followed me as I showed him the cavern, pointing out the statues, trees, trials, and where sacrifices could be offered. ¡°Very good,¡± he said. ¡°I have the language skill book for the merchant tongue ready to offer him.¡± ¡°How are we handling the Adar language?¡± I asked. ¡°Did you bring that as well?¡± ¡°Nope. I¡¯m not here to stay, Zidaun. I¡¯ll be making that book on my own, once it accepts the pact properly.¡± Phanal said. My face fell. ¡°Oh. I had hoped you could stay. Why not? Surely you would be better served as a trainer, here?¡± He offered me a sad smile. ¡°I¡¯m afraid my time is coming to an end. My skills held off death for a long time, but I have Senescence II as a status now. My body has already gotten weaker, soon my skills will start to fade.¡± I sighed, there was nothing I could do about that. I changed the subject. ¡°How soon before the dungeon will understand the language in full, once we give it the book?¡± I asked. ¡°At least a week, but it will have enough of the language primed by tomorrow afternoon. When you speak the pact then, the skill book will bring up the proper meaning of the words.¡± At least we would have a little bit of time together, before he was gone. ¡°Come on,¡± I said, leading him forward and into the building. Phanal stopped once he entered the room, his steps reverent. I watched him as he examined the statues, a peaceful smile on his face. ¡°I never wanted to be Ancient, you know?¡± he said. ¡°I know you weren¡¯t seeking it out either, though I know you will do an amazing job. I almost envy you, though. This dungeon, it truly is something special. Wish I had enough time left to really see it.¡± ¡°Me too,¡± I said quietly. We got closer and Phanal reached into a bag and pulled out a small book. ¡°Here, you¡¯re the Ancient, so you should do it.¡± He thrust the book out toward me. It looked entirely unassuming, though using mana sight on it showed it to be saturated with mana. A quick identification on it swiftly gave the lie to its humble appearance.
Skill Book: Merchant Tongue (Western Hemisphere: North) Potential Skill Level: 10 Using this book will start the process of teaching someone the skill contained within. Success in acquiring the skill depends on the potential of the skill, any pre-existing skill level, and skills that assist in the learning of other skills. Using a skill book does not guarantee learning the skill.
With the potential being at ten, there was no risk of not learning the skill. What level of skill the dungeon ended up with would vary heavily, however. Part of it was simply chance, though with a skill book this powerful a bad outcome would be a five. A ten was theoretically possible, but almost entirely outside any reasonable chance unless the dungeon was impossibly lucky or had some substantial bonuses to language learning. No, an eight would be a very good result. Maybe... a nine. I took the small book and dropped it into the bowl, watching as a moment later it dissolved away. ¡°Come, let¡¯s catch up,¡± Phanal said. ¡°The dungeon likely won¡¯t even be able to talk right now, its mind will be full.¡± The other Adar had started manipulating stone into homes, creating a new walled off section. I would need to administrate over all of that later, but for now I followed him out of the building, and we passed the day talking. ==Caden== It looked like the adventurers were taking a break today. I tried my best not to be jealous of their casual camaraderie, but I really did miss having a proper conversation with someone. Even Exsan was still out of commission. I wasn¡¯t worried about him; I could sense he was still dreaming in meditation. I wasn¡¯t exactly sure what he was doing, but I hadn¡¯t really been sure of that even when he was conscious and talking to me, so it wasn¡¯t a huge change. For the moment, I continued my projects. I had been occasionally glancing at the various monsters I had sequestered away in little bubbles in my aura. Being outside my aura was obviously not good for them. A few of the larger animals had died by now, and most of them looked very sick. I felt a little bad, but I replaced any that died. When I absorbed the dead ones I found mutations that had blossomed into full blown cancers and other misshapen growths. My best guess was that the monsters had continued to try and mutate like they were in a dungeon, but they didn¡¯t have the dungeon¡¯s moderating influence to create only functional mutations. I had placed in many dozens of smaller monsters, allowing them plenty of space and resources. Most of them looked sick too, but a few actually looked perfectly healthy. I would examine those ones more closely if they survived while the others died. Honestly, this was all blind guess work based on what little I had been able to glean from the system. I had no idea if any of this would actually be useful for anything. And that was okay, I was constantly pursuing new ideas. I didn¡¯t need them all to work. In the middle of the morning, I saw some Adar start to enter the dungeon. Honestly, I had expected far more humans than anything else. Well, I did know that the Adar were connected to dungeons in a special way. Or maybe far more Adar lived on this world than humans. Would I eventually run into lots of other races? At first I was excited, and then apprehensive, as they didn¡¯t stop entering. Thousands of people flowed into the dungeon, each one carrying a pack. The interference caused by their mana made the entire tunnel around them fuzzy. I could feel that various magical items were carried by some, but they were lost amidst the general haze. I had been expecting adventurers to show up, but this was far more than I had been expecting. The sheer presence of so many individuals was raising the ambient mana around them. That was rapidly draining away to continue my dungeon reinforcement project, but the fact it created a measurable increase in speed was notable. I was already building using several cubic miles of ambient mana, and these few thousands were not quite at that level, but it was about half. I might be able to beat that eventually by creating my own higher level creatures and harvesting their excess mana, but I would need to create the proper environments and space to sustain them. People were obviously meant to be a major mana source for most dungeons. I really needed to figure out a way to deal with them, however. I wasn¡¯t really concerned for my safety, My defenses didn¡¯t really care about numbers. A tornado would deal with thousands of people as easily as one. No, I was concerned about delving. I didn¡¯t have the throughput to handle this many people. I had accumulated a lot of points, so I went looking for a solution in the AP store. I ended up finding one, much to my surprise. I hadn¡¯t really been checking the store very often, but entirely new options had opened up now that I had created my own portals. I supposed that made some sense, they were a fairly major piece of work. One looked like it could help me not only now, but in the future as well. With a small push of will, 3,400 AP was consumed.
Congratulations, you have purchased a subskill for Dungeon Control Menu: Teleportation Integration Various automated methods for using teleportation and portals are added into the dungeon control menu.
Now to see what it did. SSD 4.34 - Remodeling I teleported home last night with Ron and Sid and Meg. Ron stole Meggy''s heart away and I got Sidney''s leg. ¡ªDouglas Adams ==Caden== Like almost every skill I had received, the description on this one was vague and simple. Just like most of them, the actual functionality was complex, useful, and extremely powerful. That was good. I had been hoping that it would be worth its, originally, 4000 AP price tag. I was lucky enough that Learning had discounted that heavily. Even if I had never bought a skill, the ability to learn skills faster would still have proven invaluable. By now, however, Learning had paid for itself many times over. I had to assume that it was something that everyone ended up getting. Now I was busily disconnecting contiguous areas that no longer needed to be contiguous. That would save me some space, for sure, but I wasn¡¯t sure how much just yet. Areas where my aura converted to dungeon continued to expand, however, and those were not always in the most convenient location. Those areas should be usable for at least something now. And I was going to need to make some major changes. That, though, depended on a major decision. How did I want to deal with adventurers? Sure, I wanted to avoid death when I could, and being able to teleport adventurers out of a lethal situation should help with that, but I had made the assumption that I would only be dealing with a small amount of people. I had let myself assume that this was like the stories I had read. At most, in those there might be hundreds of adventurers delving a dungeon at a time. Even then, the line between the dungeon and home was very clear. The people coming challenged that. I had built two relatively large buildings, enough to hold dozens of adventurers, but that was not going to be even close to enough. Maybe people could just build some towns outside my borders, then they could make the trek inside for the day. Hell, it wouldn¡¯t even be hard for me to build some form of mass transit. I could make a rotating gear to power some trolleys. The tunnel was more than wide enough to have a path for each direction. Add in some puzzle commands and I could make the trolleys stop and start according to a schedule or with simple rules. And maybe I would do that anyway; I could even add a bathroom to the trolley. There would still be enough room for people with animals to go up and down the sides. Not that I even needed to bother with that. I could add in teleportation there, too. However, it looked like some people were already planning to live inside. Thousands of them. And I knew that the Adar were not exactly human. Hell, based off what I knew about them, it looked like they were born inside dungeons. They had some form of special connection, and maybe that meant that they were more comfortable with this. I was a dungeon, however... I was also human. And¡­ when I was first combined with Exsan, I was told by the system that I was the first of my kind. That meant what I decided to do would influence anyone who came after me. What if I became more than a dungeon? What if I could become a city, a home? I didn¡¯t know what was going on with the world outside, but I would eventually. However, there was a black hole overhead, and the people who came in were wearing hand sown clothing. Maybe, between magic and the system, things were better than just a medieval society, but I had my doubts. If nothing else, maybe I could offer a good place to live. I didn¡¯t really know more than that, but I didn¡¯t need to, yet. Of course, I didn¡¯t really have enough room prepared to make a city, or even something of the right size for the encampment that looked imminent. I wasn¡¯t particularly thrilled about the Starlight Grotto being used like that, but I could deal with it for a little while. Originally I had envisioned something more like a park, with me adding a collection of buildings as new adventurers showed up, gradually building up a beautifully manicured garden filled with secluded homes. I wasn¡¯t sure what I would ultimately do with it now, but I had other things to focus on. Shards got busy making sure the basics were taken care of. The fountains got new rules to teleport in additional water as necessary, since they were likely to be used as dedicated water sources now. I would need to figure out a way to deal with the trash and bathrooms, but I would need to see how they structured things first. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. The dungeon should be able to offer them plenty of basic options for food, but I was really only offering fruit at the moment. That wasn¡¯t exactly enough to live off. However, I now had an enormous variety of plants to offer, and I had the non-monstrous versions of the meat animals that they had used for jerky. I probably had a lot more animals than that, but it was hard to tell for sure what they were used to eating, and what was or wasn¡¯t poisonous. There was no label declaring that something was poison. It wouldn¡¯t do me much good, even if there was. Humans already ate plenty of things that were poisonous to other animals, and the same was true in reverse. So, I went with some basics. It only took a few minutes to add some abandoned grain fields outside the entry level town area. The sections of grain might be patchy, but it shouldn¡¯t be hard to harvest if someone knew what they were doing, plus they would magically replenish if left alone for a few minutes. A few monsters would try to ambush anyone who got close to the plants, so I didn¡¯t feel like I was giving it away too lightly. It was still a beginner area, so I didn¡¯t add too much difficulty. I added in meat jerky, in small rough cloth bags, as a potential drop for monsters as well. If I became a true metropolis, I might need to provide some place to actually farm, but that was only speculation. Honestly, I had no idea what I might need to add in. There were a couple of iron ore deposits that the dungeon explorers hadn¡¯t even run into yet. I added a couple of copper too, on a whim, as well as some other metals in places deeper than the Meadow. Teleportation would make everything flow much more smoothly, but it also required other changes to make proper use of the dungeon. First were various structural changes, since I would need to handle far more people. I combined that with teleportation, timers, and puzzle rules to ensure that there was at least a little bit of time between each party, and that each section was individually sectioned off. With some hesitation, I started to disable the various direct connections that would allow entry into my dungeon, worried that the system would object. With teleportation rules already in place, however, it made no objections. Any attempt to disconnect the direct route to my core simply wouldn¡¯t work if there wasn¡¯t a teleportation rule in place, which didn¡¯t surprise me. I planned to really explore what I could do with teleportation later, but for now I was hyper-focused on taking care of the more immediate concerns. Fortunately, the limited changes I was using the teleportation system to solve integrated seamlessly into the puzzle rules I was already heavily familiar with. Making sure that there were enough monsters was a slightly trickier task. They generated using the same ambient mana system that was busily remaking all the dungeon walls. Since the ambient mana levels were rather low right now, if a party was waiting to enter the monsters were set to generate quickly using some of the mana from the mana crystals I had in storage. Otherwise, they would just generate a little slower, like usual. Stone appeared out of the air as I repaired the ruined and unused towers of the keep, adding additional towers to form a larger ring bailey around the central portion of the keep. Additional subdivisions rose up from the ground, the stone forming wedge shapes where additional mini-bosses would confront people as they climbed down each tower. Additional entrances to the sewers formed in various places around the town. Stone dissolved away, giving way to rushing water and labyrinthine tunnels. I carefully interwove the tunnels, not letting them meet each other. Each was ultimately almost the same, but the exact directions and turns of the tunnels were all different. The entrances to the sewers would teleport people into an available sewer either at random, or when a sewer was no longer being used. There was only so much I could do about the pathways through the actual grasslands, but I could make things a little grander to hide some additional pathways. The meadow grass shuddered as soil and rocks were created beneath the surface. The ground cracked under the stress; roots were soon exposed to the air, some sections of grass overturning beneath the growing mounds as the earth rose like an ocean swell. Birds, insects, and monsters fled from the shaking and cracking noise, only to find more of the same happening across large sections of the Meadows, as the view was obscured between various pathways. Strategic bushes and copses of trees hid what the hills couldn¡¯t, as new pathways carved themselves between, and sometimes even into, the hills. I altered the aqueduct, too. I shifted it to a more central position, so that it could obscure each half of the Meadow from the other. I lifted the aqueduct upwards, increasing the height to make it more prominent, extending up dozens of feet. It should occasionally be visible even from the paths furthest from it. Since I was using the aqueduct more to obscure now, I also repaired it into better condition, making the streams originate from a designed overflow that waterfalled down directly from the aqueduct instead. I briefly considered changing the name, but it was still a meadow, even if the hilly sections were a little larger than before. I left it a meadow, but changed the ruined part of the name. The Wandering Woods were practically designed to be messed with using teleportation already, since I had done exactly that using the portals before. Now I could do some fun randomization, but I would need to ensure that there were fewer parties moving through the woods than there were total paths, so a wrong path could activate properly. Some of the other sections were a larger issue. I didn¡¯t have room right next to the Dark Descent to replicate it, but its nature as long narrow sections made it fairly trivial to replicate into the newly transformed dungeon areas that would be accessed with teleportation, only meeting the core shaft when teleportation brought them back. It would feel seamless. Replicating the next section, the Abyssal Crossing would be a much greater challenge, since it was a large area, just like the Meadow, which made sense considering its connection to the Meadow. Well¡­ for the moment I could just leave it. Hopefully I would acquire enough territory to copy it plenty of times before that was an issue. The adventurers hadn¡¯t even got to the Wandering Woods yet. Though, honestly, once someone had done the initial trials someone could blitz through the dungeon sections pretty rapidly if they were experienced. The Wandering Woods should slow someone down, but even that was only a matter of weeks at the most. Oh well, if some new delver went ahead and reached the end of my current dungeon, it wouldn¡¯t be that great a disaster. Hopefully my defenses would be more than enough to deter them from getting to my core. Especially since I fully intended to incorporate all the various uses of teleportation into my defenses. I continued working on the details of my dungeon, smoothing over the new changes, even as the group of Adar finally reached the Starlight Grotto. It was only a few minutes later when one of them dropped something I was desperately wanting into the bowl as a sacrifice. A book, blazing with power to my mana sight, fell into the bowl, triggering a prompt which I immediately opened.
Would you like to absorb: Skill Book: Merchant Tongue (Northern Hemisphere: West) Potential Skill Level: 10 Yes? No?
I didn¡¯t hesitate for a moment after I read the title. I was finally going to learn how to talk to people properly! I accepted and a deluge of knowledge flowed into me. SSD 4.35 - The Illusionist ¡°Illusion is the first of all pleasures.¡± -Voltaire ==Caden== If dungeons had their own language, they might have a term to describe what this felt like, otherwise it was almost impossible. I wasn¡¯t under any physical pressure, but I felt like I was standing in rising waters. The current passed me by and my shards were dragged under, each one helping to anchor me in place. Eventually, I was alone in my head once more. There were no additional shards and Exsan was submerged fully beneath the waters. I was a single mind for the first time in what felt like forever. I could now recognize what had happened to Exsan. He was connected to me, and the same thing had happened to him much earlier as my language, knowledge, and skills swept him away. For now he was in a trance, his mind having immense amounts of knowledge downloaded into it. Presumably this new language had been added onto that as well. Little flickers of words and meaning rose up to the tip of my tongue. My thoughts were mirrored with hints of another language, the meanings echoing back and forth in my head. I checked on all of the new guests, but no one was entering my levels. Zidaun was talking to a few of them, but I could tell the language was yet another that I didn¡¯t speak. How many languages would I need to learn? Eh, honestly, as long as people were willing to give me skill books, I didn¡¯t care. Even if I had to learn them manually, though, being able to have someone actually teach me properly would be amazing compared to the pantomiming I had been stuck with. For now I delved more thoroughly into what I could do with teleportation. The answer turned out to be complicated. Like portals, there was a cap on the speed something could be going when it was teleported. However, that speed was much higher. Enough higher that I only teleported a few tiny objects at those speeds out of their vacuum tubes and into a testing site. I did a single test of a larger object the size of a stone and then stopped with anything larger. The stone never reached the ground. Its speed was so high that it might as well have hit a solid wall when it hit the air. An enormous shock-wave ripped out from it, pulverizing stone and creating a massive wave front that uprooted large trees and flung boulders around like pebbles. I had teleported it in near a wall, and the wall had fractured. The new cracks were so deep that my new steel supports were laid bare. Not only that, but the air had been blasted away hard enough to leave a vacuum behind. The resulting implosion created a secondary explosion, creating further damage. I wasn¡¯t aware I was going to be playing with cavitation today... The shock-waves carried throughout my dungeon like an earthquake. I did further tests in the vacuum tubes, being careful not to cause any more damage. Teleportation was different than the portals in another way. While I now had a new and higher limit on speed, I did not have one on mass. My maximum speed was the same whether it was three foot boulder or a grain of sand. I did some careful tests with larger objects, but I never let their speed get too high. I might need to use them as weapons someday, but I now had a tool dangerous enough to hurt myself. Killing myself with a large enough tremor would be a stupid way to die. Regardless, there were now some even more dangerous traps in my off limits section. And my environmental options had apparently interpreted the shock-wave as a combination of wind and earthquake. I now had the option to create an earthquake (minor), and wind (catastrophic). Honestly, that felt about right. Teleportation had also let me completely disconnect my core from the rest of the dungeon. The only way to get there was to be teleported there after successfully solving an impossible puzzle. Any incorrect answers would place someone at the every beginning of my dungeon entrance. And then they would be barred from entering my levels for a week. Admittedly, if someone could actually manage to get through all the intervening danger and access the puzzle, I didn¡¯t have much hope for keeping them out via force. All of that was great, but as always, I was more excited with what teleportation allowed me to do. Even if someone had simply offered me teleportation, it would have been less useful, because any automation would have needed my Dungeon Law skill, and that was currently completely used up. However, my Dungeon Control Menu was perfect for automation. It actually seemed to be getting better over time. I wasn¡¯t sure if that was the skill adjusting to my extensive use, or if I was simply getting better at using it. Regardless, adding in teleportation was revolutionary. So far I could teleport anything, with the exception of mana. Okay, so there were other limits too. I hadn¡¯t managed to teleport gravity, magnetism, etc¡­ either, but I wasn¡¯t sure if that was merely because my perception wasn¡¯t fine enough to perceive them. A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. I could do light and sound though. I am not sure what it said about me that the first thing I tried to do was make a laser. Probably that I had watched too many movies and read too much science fiction. I couldn¡¯t make it work. Aligning the light in the same direction was easy. That let me concentrate it together into a burning hot beam, but it lacked the cutting power of a laser. Essentially, I could funnel light like a giant magnifying glass. That was actually a rather crude application of my ability though. Removing light from an area could create perfect darkness, and adding it can make something blindingly bright. More interesting was transmitting light from one object into another area. Depending on how much light I moved and the relative brightness, I could create a full fledged illusion all the way up to a phantom. Additionally, teleporting all the light that passed through an illusion away made them almost impossible to tell from the real thing, except for their failure to react to changing light conditions. When used that way, the illusions would look almost otherworldly, glowing or reacting to shadows that didn¡¯t exist. More refined uses of light took me longer and required more practice. Scattering light around while removing a small amount could create the impression of mist. Creating moving effects first allowed me to make a phantom mist that could flow between (or through) plants and trees, moving with or against the wind. More complicated swirls, ripples, and whirlpools of mist were my next project. They took a decent amount of time, but eventually they became environmental effects that I could apply. Soon I had plenty of illusion (phantasmal mist) options to work with. From there I made shapes of out mist, layering in illusions of real objects to enhance the illusion of a ghostly presence. Glowing red mana crystal provided light for the eyes. Real grey cloth, dyed as close to the color of the mist as I could get, was draped over a statue I animated with other controls. Hints of color in the clothes in the form of jewelry added an extra dimension of realism. I slowly added those together with trees that I had already grown into shape in stone molds. Sound was actually easy to add. Before this I had used hollow stone pipes beneath the ground to carry sound up into the woods and anywhere else I felt sound was appropriate. The hollow sound of the pipes had actually added to the ambiance, but I had no doubt that people would have been able to figure out where all the sound was coming from. Now the sounds were paired with my illusions. When I finally managed to sync the two together reasonably well, I received the option to recreate them: illusion (phantasmal spirit). Honestly, I felt like the options appeared a little faster than they should have. However, that may well have been due to my title, since that helped with illusions. I already had an option to create whirlpools from water and other more exotic forms, but teleportation meant it was possible to try out far more interesting effects. I could do something rather mundane, like teleport away an entire pool of water at the completion of a puzzle, but I enjoyed spectacle. I admit the fact I would soon be able to hear what people were saying about my dungeon was a healthy contributor to that feeling. I might be a little vain. So I decided to make some more exciting options. Eventually, those were finished. After that I worked to maximize some of the built in options. One of those options was creating seamless transition between areas. I tested it with my initial teleportation ¡°elevator.¡± I tested it with my avatar and it gradually faded out of existence even as the area it teleported into faded into existence. That was cool, but it was still obvious that it was happening, even if the transition was smooth. However, when I used identical tunnels, even I could not detect the exact moment of transition, except the sudden change of location. One moment my avatar was in one place and the next it was in another. No flickers of mana, light, or anything else gave away the sudden change. Since my tunnels were truly identical, something that was relatively easy with my dungeon abilities, no one should be able to tell when they were teleported, unless they had some additional sense of relative location. I wasn¡¯t willing to bet that no one had a skill like that, but it still should help sell my illusions immensely. Exactly duplicating an environment let me play around with illusions in other ways too. I could create the perfect replica of a monster or animal as it walked around, slept, etc¡­ in one copy and then transpose that image into the other. Doing that enough eventually gave me a host of illusory creatures that I could create. I didn¡¯t get a generic option for creating creatures in general though. I could certainly create new customized illusions by manipulating light and sound on top of existing ones, however. This was a real game changer for traps though. I had to randomize the damn things when I placed them down, because otherwise the scouts would just report their locations and adventurers would know to avoid their locations. If I wanted to do a memorization game with adventurers I would create a puzzle for that. Illusions were interesting when combined with traps, because they could conceal the danger of a trap, or simply completely make it look like a corridor, passage, etc¡­ didn¡¯t exist. A fun trap I played around with made a tunnel entrance look like it was considerably taller than it actually was. I may or may not have spent far too much time watching a bunch of monsters run face first into an invisible wall. I deny everything. Good thing Exsan was unconscious for this. Even beyond messing with all the traps that already existed, creating areas where no sound or light could pass through was a very dangerous obstacle, especially if it was combined with any other traps, falls, etc¡­ I did have fun designing the leap of faith trap that I borrowed from Indiana Jones. It made a good puzzle. Unfortunately Zidaun could see right through the damn thing. The sound thing could too¡­ Somewhat frustrated by this limited omniscience, I designed some countermeasures specifically to deal with him and anyone else with his level of sensing. I infused the ground of some areas with a thin concentrated mana crystal layer a few millimeters below the surface. The concentrated mana didn¡¯t block my sight, because it was my mana. He was borrowing my senses, so this might or might not block him from seeing through the higher mana areas. After that, I designed some traps that it wouldn¡¯t matter if he could see them or not. When every inch of a floor looked like it was trapped, it was hard to tell the real traps from the fakes. By the time I was done, I had received a notice from the system.
Congratulations! Your title Innovator III (Dungeon) has improved to: Innovator V (Dungeon) +600 AP
That made sense, I had increased the variety of my traps pretty massively. In fact, I had worked all through the night, losing track of time. I checked on my guests, seeing a series of Adar going through my testing chambers. I would be able to communicate soon, so I might get rid of the testing areas, or at least refine them. Maybe I could just include some basics to check some essential adventurer skills, like situational awareness, watching out for traps, and so on. Honestly, I could probably convert the tests into training areas¡­ For now, I just watched, letting life in my dungeon resume with the morning. SSD 4.36 - Needing Some Space My art is the way I reestablish the bonds that tie me to the universe. -Ana Mendieta ==Caden== The Adar were really busy. Not just with setting up an entire encampment, filling up much of the Starlight Grotto, though that certainly was happening. Like men possessed, they were all proceeding through the testing as fast as possible. They would approach the entrance to the dungeon, grab their crystal token and then off they would go. Obviously, they had some serious advantages due to their advance information, but even so¡­ it seemed a bit much. It was impossible for me to tell why they were so frenetic. Was this a cultural thing? Were they racing to stake a claim before the humans, or possibly other races, showed up? Was industriousness a species trait, or maybe all Adar had some form of hyperactivity? I hadn¡¯t seen any trace of that in Zidaun or Anaath, but maybe they just kept things to a slower pace since they traveled with humans. The only Adar that were not rushing were Zidaun, Anaath, and the older Adar who was sitting around and talking with Zidaun. Even so, occasionally, some Adar would come up and respectfully interrupt Zidaun before continuing on with their business. If they kept up the pace, the first ones to start their testing would be done in a few hours, and the results were all over the place. A few people had the same abilities as Zidaun, capable of shifting the dungeon by borrowing my own capabilities, but there was seemingly no end to the variety of powers. Ice, fire, strength, agility, gravity, teleportation, phasing, changing form, and more were displayed. Some of the individuals displayed much more power than anything I had seen either of the two teams do. It was chaos, and I relished the noise and activity. I had a small town worth of people setting up. The Adar were all still speaking gibberish, but I could understand the occasional word spoken between the two teams now. I also relished that all I had to do to shut the noise off was push my attention elsewhere. Their location would absolutely have to change though. The Starlight Grotto was meant to have a much quieter atmosphere. I had a few places I could put them, but that would need to wait until I could actually talk with them properly. I wouldn¡¯t just destroy their work and make them do it over again, however. It wasn¡¯t like it would take any effort on my part to teleport their stuff and build some actual dwellings. I might need to charge them rent or something¡­ Or maybe I should only provide free housing to people who delved. I could create better properties based on how far someone had gotten into the dungeon. It would be easy enough to have rent that required them to do a certain amount of delving... It could get me the survival points I needed to level up. Hmm¡­ Honestly, if I ended up with a whole city here, not everyone would end up delving the dungeon. Well¡­ the Adar might, but they were an unusual case. They didn¡¯t have any kids. They were all adult males, and if my understanding of their biological metamorphosis was correct, none of them were noncombatants. All of them had lived in a dungeon as a monster before they became people. I¡­ couldn¡¯t actually say I understood how that would change them. I wonder if any of them are scarred by that? Or it that a too anthropocentric point of view? I mean, they look human enough, but¡­ I shrugged internally. Regardless of everything else, their society didn¡¯t have any child rearing or pregnancy. Those lucky bastards¡­ Literally, heh. Regardless, if I ended up with a real city here, a large portion of them would have other professions. People would need to grow crops and raise livestock. Other people would need to process materials and make items. Merchants would come to sell them and open shops. It might be better if I constructed a very basic city and then let builders modify and elaborate from there. Did I actually want a city? Yes, yes I did. I wanted one very much. And not just because I liked having people around. People would provide all sorts of knowledge. Enchantments, libraries, smithies, magic, and more. If I made it safe enough I could have children in the city. And that meant I could watch as they were taught¡­ everything. Wonder how the Adar learn the basics¡­ Do they just start with them after transforming into humanoids? My mind wandered for a bit as I imagined all the skills I might be able to learn, but eventually I got back to work. Creating innumerable teleports all across the dungeon was making my aura tingle. Just like the ripples of spacetime distortions cascading out through the world due to the local black hole, I was able to sense that something was going on. Honestly, I felt similar impressions with each new magic the Adar were using. The different types of magic each felt different. The differences were subtle enough, however, that while I could see the mana, I couldn¡¯t actually grasp much more than that. For now I was focused on teleportation, and continuing to understand exactly how that worked. Up until yesterday, one of my shards had been pursuing that task for days. I wouldn¡¯t say it was my most urgent task, but pursuing new magic was potentially my most powerful option. That had been part of my theory crafting even back on Earth. If, as college students are wont to do, we started a random discussion about superpowers, there were always three powers I would pick if I could get them. They boiled down to control of space, gravity, and time. In many ways those were actually one power, because all three were interrelated, but people tended to object if you just picked control of spacetime. Even in hypothetical decisions, we imposed arbitrary limits. This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. Space, time, and gravity were everywhere. And control of any one of them was absurdly useful as both a weapon and for utility. I wasn¡¯t really expecting to get control of them for the moment. However, I would have a lot better luck manipulating them if I could actually see them. Fortunately, my aura could already do that to a certain extent, which gave me a place to start from. Just as I had forced my aura¡¯s abilities to grow before, it had gradually been getting better as I pushed it. Brief impressions of a new sense were starting to form around teleportations. This was especially apparent when I watched some of the new Adar teleport without me. As far as I could tell, my system granted teleportation was instant. The abilities I was watching weren¡¯t. They were still blindingly fast, which was kind of the point, but there is a world of difference between instantaneous and the blink of an eye. I could feel it as the teleports happened, at both the start and finishing points, even before they had visibly moved. Which is why gaining a sudden extra depth to my senses wasn¡¯t too much of a surprise. I didn¡¯t look at the notification right away. Instead, I lost myself in the new sensation. Space was¡­ beautiful and strange. On the surface it was simply an additional sense in the usual three dimensions. I could feel the waves from Otga rushing by like vast thin tsunamis. Incredibly powerful, but spread so thin and fast that the tidal effects were unnoticeable on anything less than a planetary scale. Space, however, was constantly bent. I couldn¡¯t see gravity, though I could see the faint bending it creased into space. Gravity induced only a slight change, but that faint change was enough to keep an entire world together. There were, however, more subtle effects I could detect. Teleportation was distinctly not happening in three dimensions. I couldn¡¯t make sense of exactly what direction it went, but connections were formed that dipped into some other dimension and then popped back out. For the briefest moment teleportation made the two places identical. It drew two places together and bridged them before it let them snap back apart. Originally, I had assumed that teleportation was pushing someone through an extra-dimensional space. Instead it was more like a dimensional sleight of hand. In the process of connecting two places, it slipped aside the bit of space where the teleporting object existed, which allowed it to smoothly become a part of the new connected space. From the perspective of space, no travel had happened at all, just a slight reshuffling. Portals just created an overlapping section of space, allowing two areas to become the same. There was a connection, but it still felt like nothing actually traveled. I still didn¡¯t understand how they blended everything together seamlessly, but failing to understand the vast intricacies of the system seemed both common and natural. I created some old style emblem based portals to study, and as expected, they operated differently. The one directional ones were massively unstable. The reason they constantly destroyed anything that went through was not a constant teleportation effect separating things into pieces, like I had originally assumed. The terminus of the portal rapidly vibrated space at the exit point. When the space moved, it disconnected everything that should keep an object together. I still had no idea why it didn¡¯t kill living creatures. The system¡¯s direct interference was my only reasonable guess, but even with my new abilities I couldn¡¯t detect anything. My two directional portals were unstable too, though the ends were stabilized by latching onto a connection on each end. Unlike the system made ones, these ones functioned like I first thought, by puncturing a crude hole through space to the new destination. After losing myself exploring for a while, I let the notification pop up.
You have gained a new skill: Space Perception II (Space, Dimension) You can perceive the fabric which underlays the world.
You have been awarded a new title: Dimensional Specialization I Space and dimensional magic are rare, but you have enough skills to show the beginnings of understanding. Their power is vast but often specialized, unstable, or both. It is up to you to forge a path to new heights, new depths, and to go into the dimensions that define them all. +250 AP +5% Faster learning for abilities focused on space or dimension +5% Discount on purchasing space or dimension skills +Attempts to bypass the paths of the dungeon via dimension or space skills are moderately more difficult +Resisting your dimension and space skills is moderately more difficult
I looked at my status for a moment, noting that my Interdimensional Repository and my Teleportation Integration were both marked as space and dimension magic now. I browsed through the AP store, but I didn¡¯t find anything new. Some of the skills I had previously considered were now labeled with the appropriate magic type, however. I was tempted to buy some of them as I scrolled through, but my attention was drawn away. A light tugging pulled me into the altar room. I could have resisted, but I was curious. Zidaun and the old Adar were there together, and they seemed to be waiting. I assumed it was for me. So I manifested my avatar. Zidaun started to speak, and I could feel the understanding of each word unfold as it entered my mind: ¡°Dungeon, ancient progenitor, thou who art the God of my people, hear my plea. If thou art Awakened, hear me. Know my words and heed me. In this I speak for my people. Bind together thy fate with ours. Take from us our service. Take of us our flesh. Take all that we can possess. Make us thine. Give to us refuge. Give to us growth. With this compact shall we protect thee. With this shall we serve thee. And together we shall be bound, each raising up the other. And I shall be thy servant forever.¡± That seemed a little intense, but the language carried the solemn tones of ritual. Honestly, ritual and religions were often more formal and grandiose than they needed to be. ¡°I offer thee a seed borne of my own flesh. May it be a symbol of our accord.¡± Zidaun plucked one of the ferny hairs from his head, mana swirling around it in a cascade of power, repeating what he had done once before. Once again it grew and he placed it into the bowl on the altar. I didn¡¯t let it dissolve, as I took the time I needed to think. What exactly was he asking for? The request of refuge and helping his people to grow wasn¡¯t exactly a challenge for me. I was already planning to let them build at least a small town. Becoming a more permanent installation wasn¡¯t a problem. And I had already guessed that his people needed dungeons to reproduce. It would be easy enough to set up a nursery and grow some of the Adar. It was a little bit of a strange thought, but I assumed that making deals with dungeons like this was how the race spread. In exchange, they would naturally want to protect me, and that was part of the deal. I wasn¡¯t really sure I needed their service, but if nothing else they could fetch plants and animals from outside. Having people who can go outside the dungeon would be useful. The knowledge they could provide would also be invaluable. There was the weird bit where they called me a god though. I wasn¡¯t particularly comfortable with that bit. I thought briefly about the meadow and all the other areas I had created. Okay¡­ to be fair, I did have some god-like powers. I would just have to explain that I wasn¡¯t a god later, I was fine with the rest of the deal. I dissolved the small bush. The minor connection I had felt with Zidaun suddenly grew stronger, snapping taut between the two of us. I knew instinctively that it was now unbreakable. Before I had much chance to deal with the implications, the old man stepped up next to Zidaun. He squeezed his shoulder lightly and spoke a few soft words. Then he placed one of his hands on his chest and seized something invisible, pulling it out. Mana coalesced into existence, pouring out of him into the object which quickly became a visible book that he held in his hand. The book dropped into the bowl of the altar, even as the man fell backward. Before the man reached the floor he was dead, a flood of mana racing outward. The book dissolved without any input from me, and I was slammed with another language as it started to enter my mind. Without any spare shards, my mind quickly drowned beneath the waves of knowledge, and I lost awareness of the world. SSD 4.37 - Sacrificial Pact ¡°Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?¡± -William Butler Yeats ==Zidaun== I dreaded the passing of time, the hours implacable in their passing. Each brought my time with Phanal closer to its end. Admittedly, Phanal knew exactly how to cut through my melancholy. He did it well enough at times I almost wanted time to move faster. ¡°So, have you gotten into a proper relationship with that human yet? Firi was his name, right?¡± Phanal had brought tea with him, and we were both indulging in it at the moment. That proved unfortunate as I spewed out the mouthful I had been drinking. I started to cough as I inhaled what little remained. Phanal¡¯s laughter didn¡¯t help. I glared at him, my eyes watery, but his laughter only increased. Eventually his laughter grew too much and turned into a cough. Even as he wheezed afterward, the tempo still had the suspicious staccato rhythm of a laugh. Ultimately, I gave up on my glare, and just sighed. ¡°No,¡± I said. ¡°I¡­ am hoping it might be possible now. I am going to be here from now on. I didn¡¯t want it to just be physical.¡± He nodded. ¡°There are limits,¡± he said, ¡°to how much you can share. However, take what joy you can. I had a number relationships before I ever returned home. Some were short passionate things, but some burned on for years. They knew I couldn¡¯t tell them everything. And most of them knew me enough not to ask.¡± ¡°I,¡± my voice caught for a moment, ¡°might not need to hide everything from them.¡± His eyes grew sharp and his tone even sharper. ¡°What do you mean?¡± ¡°I bound them with an oath,¡± I said. ¡°They learned a secret, and I had to or¡­¡± I let my voice trail off, containing my horror as best I could. I closed my eyes, only to open them when I felt a hand settle onto my shoulder. Phanal smiled at me gently, an old pain clear on his face. ¡°I am glad they agreed¡­ for your sake. I wouldn¡¯t wish the alternative on anyone.¡± I shuddered, sobs starting to shake me. ¡°I was so afraid,¡± I said, tears falling down my face. ¡°I thought¡­ I thought. I didn¡¯t. I couldn¡¯t, but I had no choice¡­ I had to think it, plan it. And I couldn¡¯t tell them.¡± At some point Phanal had stood and I felt him hug me, my cheek pressing against his chest. ¡°I know boy, I know. Having to consider it is almost as bad as actually going through with it. It was the hardest thing my god has ever asked of me.¡± He stroked my hair, holding me close, as I finally let out the pain I had been holding in. He didn¡¯t speak further. I tried to speak as I sobbed, but not even I knew what I was trying to say. Eventually the tears dried up, my grief lanced for the moment. My tears had been for him too, that he had needed to kill his friends, even if he had never truly said so. Somewhere, in the midst of my grief, I found a moment of stillness. I was losing Phanal, but I was glad I could share this moment with him. I would do my best to lead my people, even if it was the last thing I wanted. It would all be alright. A quiet flame of worship and certitude burned away inside me, gradually burning through the turbulence of my other emotions. However, it didn¡¯t bring me more time. I begrudged the occasional interruptions. It wasn¡¯t anyone¡¯s fault, and my answer to various questions usually boiled down to a ¡®I don¡¯t know.¡¯ How permanent should we make the encampment? Would we need to move it soon? Are there areas we should avoid? Was it okay if we tapped into the water from the fountains? Should we plan out gardens here, in another spot, or get food from the dungeon? Would the dungeon provide additional areas we could expand to? Should we build up, down, outwards? On and on the questions went. I was grateful for what little I could answer. Still, eventually the time came, and we walked together through the darkness. Our footsteps whispered softly against the stone, each of us allowing the silence. I tried my best to exist in the moment, noting everything we passed. The subtle grain of the stone, the sparkling of the crystals that lined the road, the many colors of the tiny lights trapped within. Most of all, I just tried to capture the feeling of Phanal¡¯s presence. Other Adar reverently stood guard outside the sacrifice room, ensuring that no one came too close. I nodded to them silently as I passed. One opened the door for me, bowing. Phanal and I proceeded inside, alone. ¡°I wish we could wait,¡± I said. Phanal simply nodded, before responding. ¡°It¡¯s better for the dungeon if we do it now.¡± Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings. A title¡­ I did my best to simply nod back, and smile. I moved forward to start the ritual. I could feel that something wasn¡¯t right. The dungeon wasn¡¯t¡­ here. I pushed out mana to begin the ritual, but then I held it there. A moment later I felt the dungeon¡¯s attention, and I began. It was the same ritual I had performed so many times, and the words came out with little difficulty or thought. I tried my best, but some part of my heart wasn¡¯t in it. That didn¡¯t stop the ritual from working, nor keep the seed pulled from my head from sprouting. I placed my offering in the bowl, and then it sat there. My heart froze and my mind raced. What would I even do if the dungeon didn¡¯t accept? I was bound to it. That bond would presumably break, but I had already been changed. Would I need to go back to the Blaze Blossom Swamp? The bond slammed into me, firming while the small bush dissolved away. Phanal stepped up beside me, squeezing my shoulder. ¡°Don¡¯t worry about being perfect,¡± he said softly. ¡°No one expects that of you. All the respect is for who you will be, eventually. Just do your best. If you make a mistake, try to do better next time.¡± Phanal paused for a moment, before continuing with a more formal tone. ¡°Ancient Zidaun, I bid thee farewell.¡± He didn¡¯t give me a chance to reply. He stepped forward, his hand reaching for his chest. A moment later mana burst into the room again, crafting the skill book as Phanal gave himself to it. A moment later the skill book dropped from Phanal¡¯s dead fingers, which were positioned so that the book would fall into the bowl on the altar. My tears flowed silently, and I knelt down beside him. He looked broken now, his quiet intensity vanished into memory. The wrinkles on his skin stood out sharply, emphasizing his age. Without his life, his body had quickly shown its true nature, a mere shell, the soul gone. I cried, even as I absentmindedly, fixed the position of his body. I laid him over my lap. Tears came, but they were silent. There were no sobs, no shuddering gasps, nothing but the quiet acceptance of an end. I had thought little of the other skill book we had sacrificed. Did that make me callous? I had been focused on Phanal, of course, but I hadn¡¯t really wondered who had given their life to make it. Tearing something as essential as language out, especially at high skill levels, was always fatal. Almost anything removed at high levels would be fatal. People put so much of themselves into skills they used that heavily. If there had been even a chance that Phanal would have survived the process, I would have insisted on a healer. As it was¡­ I wanted this moment to myself. I let myself exist in this moment, but eventually, I pushed myself up. Phanal had entrusted this dungeon to me, my people to me. I knew what his final words had meant. In the end, I was the Ancient One. The ruler of my people. Here, I would create another place for them to grow, to prosper. Eventually, the dungeon would die, as they all did. Then I would die too, reborn when my dungeon reemerged. Before me lay an infinite cycle. I would always return to my people, growing wiser and stronger, forever. That was the true meaning of being Ancient. I would never age, and should anything kill me, the dungeon would bring me back. I wanted to shrink under the massive weight of the responsibility, but I would not allow it. For my god, myself, my people, and Phanal, I could not allow it. I gathered Phanal into my arms, his body feeling too light. Cradling him gently, I placed his body onto the altar. I waited as his body slowly dissolved away, not letting myself relax. The tears came, and I endured. When it was done I bowed to the altar. ¡°Teacher Phanal,¡± I said, my voice as firm as I could make it. ¡°I bid you farewell.¡± I exited, and the other Adar were waiting for me. The surges of mana would have been unmistakable, and Phanal¡¯s absence was easy to detect, but even so I needed to speak. ¡°It is done. We shall do the bindings here. Go and fetch the others.¡± All of the guards bowed, and one spoke before he left. ¡°At once, Ancient One.¡± Soon enough, I was standing in front of the altar once more. This time, however, it stood at my back. The obsidian dungeon core replica above the altar rose above me like the God it was. The first Adar came into the room, and we began. I had never needed to go through the ritual myself. Born of the blaze blossom swamp dungeon, I had been bound to it from the beginning. Instead, I had gone through a ceremony to do the reverse. My bonds had been loosened so I could go become a Seeker. ¡°What is your name, child?¡± I asked, my voice steady and solemn. ¡°Izradi, Ancient,¡± he said, his eyes fervently fixed on me. ¡°Do you wish to join me Izradi?¡± ¡°Yes,¡± he breathed. Mana began to gather in air, like a storm about to break. ¡°Do you wish to serve me, and the dungeon I represent?¡± ¡°Yes,¡± he stated again, his eyes somehow gaining even more intensity. The mana in the air began to spiral inwards, forming a cyclone of power around the two of us. Much of my mana sense cut off from the rest of the world. Even the air started to glow, random flashes of light surrounding the two of us. ¡°Do you pledge your life, your mind, and soul to serve, until the end of your days?¡± I asked, extending my hand. ¡°I so pledge!¡± he intoned, as his own hand took mine. The mana gathered thicker for a moment, before the world seemed to pause. Then, the balance broke, and mana slammed inward, the spiral condensing enough that all I could see was the small circle surrounded by light. It swept into Izradi, and circled around our joined hands. Mana poured through, and I could feel a new bond forming between the two of us. Most of the power, however, went elsewhere. Izradi screamed as the concentrated power flowed into his body. His bark-like skin melted and reformed, the old colors swept away by the new. Ripples passed, leaving skin in shades of light reddish brown, much paler than my own skin. The veins of green were just as intense as my own, however. Like me, areas of bark condensed its former shaggy appearance into armor, but it was almost white. The thorns at the central arm and leg joints retreated out of sight, straightening from a curve as they did so. In a short while, Izradi was kneeling on the floor in front of me. My hand was likely the only thing that held him up through the transformation. He looked up at me, and for the first time I could see his eyes. The irises were a deep emerald green, complete with faint markings that looked like cracks. They looked like gems, more than eyes, just like my own. I smiled at him, and helped him stand. He let go of my hand. ¡°Behold thyself anew,¡± I said, and gestured to the highly reflective crystal all around us. He did, and his breath caught. I could see his eyes flicker as he took in his new appearance. Finally, he turned back to me. ¡°My Ancient,¡± he said, his fervor seeming to have grown even further, ¡°I am at your service, and the service of our God.¡± He bowed low, tears forming in his eyes. The ritual was complete, and I spoke less formally. ¡°Rise, please. I am sure you will do your best, and I will too,¡± I said. I put my hand on his shoulder. ¡°Welcome. We have more to do though, send in the next,¡± I said. The process continued on as I welcomed more and more. The changes on each individual were different. Some of the differences were subtle, slight defects and old scars faded. The skin changes varied heavily; they were always some shade of red brown, but that varied from a shade so dark it looked like fire obsidian, to a shade so pale it resembled the faintest pink of sunrise. The veins of green, however, were always the same vibrant hue. The eyes were the other major variation. They always looked like polished gemstones, with a depth visible beneath the surface, but the colors covered the entire spectrum. Finally, it was done, and the last of the Adar had been tied to my soul. Through me, they linked to our God. I had been feeling the faint pressure build for a little while now. It was time to check my notifications. SSD 4.38 - Class Structure ¡°Each colony became accustomed to planting new settlements and to claiming new boundaries.¡± -Albert Bushnell Hart ==Zidaun==
Your Titles have become fully active: Soul Bond (Agent) Your soul is permanently bound to the dungeon you have made a pact with. You are the agent of the dungeon and are subject to its will. Depending upon the actions and nature of the dungeon you may experience additional effects. +1000 Ability Points +Act as an extension of the dungeon if you leave it (minimum 10 ft radius) -May only leave the dungeon with explicit permission -If the dungeon dies, so do you -Dying outside the dungeon¡¯s natural aura increases the recreation cost by 1000% +(Dungeon Bonus): Learn the first level of any skill 25% faster +(Dungeon Bonus): Learn and level up any soul skill 25% faster Immortal of Transient Flesh You have found a method to be reborn after death, even while still in a weak mortal body. +2500 Ability Points +1000 Ability Points each century you live +Automatically recreated anytime your dungeon is reborn +Automatically recreated one year after death if your dungeon is still alive +Your dungeon may pay a cost to revive you earlier +10% Discount and speed to learning life, death, and time skills Additive Pact I (Secondary Master) Adar which become connected to you or your bonded dungeon will also be bonded to the other. No other Adar brought into this pact will become an Ancient. Sufficient connections will improve this title and its rewards. +250 Ability Points
. . . For connecting an additional 10 individuals you have improved the capacity of this title: Additive Pact II (Secondary Master) . . . For connecting an additional 100 individuals you have improved the capacity of this title: Additive Pact III (Secondary Master) . . . For connecting an additional 1000 individuals you have improved the capacity of this title: Additive Pact IV (Secondary Master) +2000 Ability Points +You may locate anyone you are bound to +When you perceive a large threat to your pact master, or the collective pact, you can borrow power from all your subsidiary pacts (Variable Effects) +Each member of the pact reduces the cost or time to recreate you by 0.0001% (Current 0.3837%)
Your class has changed. You are no longer a Dungeon Mimic, you have become a Dungeon Embodiment. Your level has increased by one. Status Name: Zidaun Race: Adar Subtype: Ancient One Health: 98% - Fantastic Health Status Effects: Mana: 780/810 Primary Level: 27 Class: Dungeon Embodiment Former Classes: Awakened, Student, Dungeon Mimic Ability Points: 31,475 (+5,500) Class Skills: Dungeon Embodiment IV Dungeon Senses IV Dungeon Mind I Dungeon Mana I Dungeon Presence I Racial Skills: Of One Mind Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. Hybrid Blood IV Adaptive Armor II Poison Thorns II Improved Sight II Titles: Awakened Dungeon Delver III Explorer I Adapted I Back from the Brink II Soul Bond (Agent) Immortal of Transient Flesh Additive Pact IV (Secondary Master)
New Class: Dungeon Embodiment Connected to your dungeon at the soul level, you share an irrevocable bond. You serve the dungeon by carrying out its will. You and it shall grow together, forever. Therefore, you have become the embodied instrument of its will. You are the dungeon¡­ when it allows you to be. Gain new levels by helping to grow the dungeon¡¯s level, skills, abilities, and other capabilities. You can also gain levels by helping your dungeon learn and understand more about the world. Since your pact with the dungeon includes a large amount of subsidiary individuals, you can also gain experience by leading your fellow pact members in their service. As always, experience can be gained by slaying the monsters, and otherwise, of the world Gained new class skills: Dungeon Mimicry IV has become: Dungeon Embodiment IV You are the dungeon¡­ when it allows you to be. Gain power over the dungeon¡¯s skills according to its will. The amount of control you can handle is determined by your skill level. Aura Tap IV has become: Dungeon Senses IV You are the dungeon¡­ when it allows you to be. Gain access to its senses according to its will. The amount you can perceive is determined by your skill level. Dungeon Mind I You are the dungeon¡­ when it allows you to be. Gain additional minds to understand with according to its will. The number of minds you can have is determined by your skill level. Dungeon Mana I You are the dungeon¡­ when it allows you to be. Gain access to the mana of the dungeon, as it gains access to yours. The amount you can use, and the dungeon can use from you, are determined by your skill level. Dungeon Presence I You are the dungeon¡­ when it allows you to be. Gain the presence of the dungeon and carry it with you. Your skills work at full power even outside the dungeon. The radius of the dungeon¡¯s presence through you is determined by skill level.
Since your racial traits are linked to your new class, they have each improved.
I had expected to gain a considerable amount, though the exact details were a surprise. The dungeon bonuses were¡­ ridiculous. Reducing the difficulty to gain the first level of any skill was a massive bonus. For some skills, that wasn¡¯t a huge deal, like strength or flexibility. Both of those were easy to acquire, if tedious. The method to getting them was consistent and repeatable. However, many skills were far more esoteric. If you wanted to gain access to a magic type you had never used before, then you needed to learn to feel something you had never felt before. Making that gap smaller allowed for incredible advances. The bonus for soul¡­ I wasn¡¯t sure what to make of it. Soul skills were rare. Technically, the ritual I had performed was that type of magic, linking me to the dungeon, but that was a product of my race. Making binding constructs for the soul was part of who we were. Soul based skills were often bizarre, but almost always powerful. And, if I combined the discount from both, it should cumulatively give a discount of slightly less than half. Often, the last half of gaining a new skill was the hardest. Jumping over that would be massive. However, I didn¡¯t know what getting these bonuses even meant. The bonuses came from the nature of the dungeon. The soul part could be due to having two souls in the same dungeon, or those two souls could have lead it to learn more about the nature of the soul and specializing in it. Unfortunately, that became a paradoxical situation without an answer, except for one: The dungeon was almost certainly unusually powerful with the soul. The other bonus¡­ was a general improvement to learning anything for the first time. The very room I stood in, with the altar and its displays, seemed to be a tribute to the dungeon¡¯s desire to know everything. Again¡­ I wasn¡¯t sure what it meant. My new class didn¡¯t feel any stronger. And, indeed, when I tried to manipulate the dungeon, my powers did not feel any stronger. Without the dungeon being conscious, it appeared that my access to the dungeon was the same as it always had been. When I concentrated, however, I could feel powers that I lacked access to. I would need to wait for the dungeon to wake before those would become available. Assuming it wanted to let me use them, anyway. As for my racial abilities, they had all improved, but none were noticeable. The well lit room already offered no barrier to my sight. My AP continued to mount up. As was tradition for Seekers, I had avoided spending it whenever possible. I had a number of emergency options I had memorized that I could buy with a moment¡¯s thought, just in case. With my connection to the dungeon complete, it would determine what I should buy. I had thousands of connections to my soul, but I felt empty. I knew it was necessary for Caden and Exsan to learn to communicate with us, but I felt incomplete. I needed to talk with them. I needed to learn what to do, what they wanted, how I could serve them. For the moment, I just needed to do what I could. I left the room, and Izradi was waiting for me. His emerald eyes fixed themselves on me as soon as I left. ¡°Ancient, how may I serve?¡± he said. ¡°I apologize for largely being absent before, I was managing much of the setup and testing schedule. I sent others to ask you questions as needed.¡± ¡°Ah,¡± I said. ¡°I assume you are my assistant?¡± ¡°Yes, Ancient,¡± he said. ¡°I am a Settlement Manager, though I may get an upgrade to my class from serving you.¡± His eyes gleamed with zealous avarice. Of course I would get one of the fanatics. We all worshiped the dungeon, as was natural, but some became obsessed with it. I smiled at him, but my heart wasn¡¯t in it. He didn¡¯t seem to notice. I started to walk toward the Adar encampment, and he followed. ¡°Okay, we need to do a few things then. Firstly, I assume you brought all the samples and such that I asked for?¡± I said. ¡°Yes, Ancient.¡± Izradi replied. ¡°At least, as much as could be found quickly. Additional shipments should be sent over time as larger or more difficult to collect specimens are located. Since you said that it prizes knowledge, additional agents have been sent to various human cities to purchase books and other items. Various Adar texts are being copied, but they won¡¯t be sent until a secure method of delivery is available. Brief inquiries were made of the Blaze Blossom Dungeon before we left, and it said that it only gains limited information when it dissolves any magical item. So we may want to save those for when the dungeon is available to say what it wants done with them. The contingent from the Sunken Citadel Dungeon will be here in the next one to two weeks, depending on how much Thaw impacts the salt flats.¡± ¡°Okay,¡± I said, thinking for a moment. ¡°We will hold off on the enchanted items and emblems then. Arrange for the others items to be offered. Also, as soon as people finish the dungeon¡¯s tests, form parties to have them start delving. Don¡¯t have any parties go farther than the Meadow, the rest still needs to be evaluated. We can at least give the dungeon what it needs to grow, even if we don¡¯t know for sure what else it needs. What else do I need to know?¡± ¡°We have enough food for several weeks, but we will want to create more in some other fashion.¡± He said. ¡°We could go form a settlement at one of the entrances, collect food from the dungeon, or carve out a new cavern in an area that the dungeon has not grown to yet. As another option, sufficient monetary resources were brought that we could order food from the nearest cities for several years if needed.¡± ¡°Right,¡± I said, ¡°the dungeon already has some food available to harvest. I will give you my notes later. Everyone who delves should be on the lookout for more. We¡­ should prepare a section at the base of both entrances, regardless. If we don¡¯t use it for farming, we can use it for trade. Just in case, order enough non-perishable food for forty days, twenty days worth from each country.¡± ¡°Yes, Ancient.¡± He said. ¡°Also, I would like to note that we have a number of Stabilizers available. Anything they should focus on?¡± ¡°Honestly,¡± I laughed for a moment, ¡°they need to focus on everything. Get them into the dungeon as soon as possible. Make sure they are with strong teams, and repeatedly clear sections as fast as possible.¡± ¡°Yes, Ancient.¡± He replied. Our conversation continued on for some time, dealing with the multitudinous details needed for a settlement to function. Izradi would occasionally send out his own assistants to deal with different details. Not too long after we started, the first team was sent off to go through the dungeon, but they came back in only a few minutes. The leader of the party came up and bowed to me. ¡°Ancient,¡± he said. ¡°There is a problem. The entrance into the dungeon has changed.¡± SSD 4.39 - Repetition ¡°No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it''s not the same river and he''s not the same man. -Heraclitus of Ephesus ==Zidaun== My dungeon appeared to enjoy making changes, whenever it could get away with them. Since Caden was more or less unconscious now, and presumably Exsan was the same, unresponsive to any attempts at communication, I assumed all the changes had been done today or yesterday. Well, we did take a day off yesterday. Is it because of my people? Or something else? Honestly, I couldn¡¯t know anything for sure. Seems common enough with Caden. Wish we could have talked properly. Still, it wasn¡¯t to be. He wouldn¡¯t have gotten the title, otherwise. ¡°Izradi, send someone to prepare my team to delve. Ask them to join me in the Antechamber when they are ready. You,¡± I pointed at the person who had delivered the news, ¡°follow me.¡± ¡°Yes, Ancient,¡± he replied. For the moment, I simply went out to look at the changes myself. The doors to the dungeon glittered with the same luster as always; the feathers of the phoenix burned with shimmering imitations of flame. Each half slid into the wall, and I stepped through into the hallway. The doors shut behind me as I walked down the short corridor. Everything was the same until I reached the room at the end. It was no longer a circular room, though the black and white pattern of the floor remained. I counted the sides. Including the entryway, it had sixteen sides. Fifteen identical doors were set into walls. Each door was a dark polished wood with silver filigree. In the center of each door, about a hand-span across was a crystal. All of the crystals were gently glowing green. I approached one of the doors, but nothing happened. I checked the other doors, but nothing happened, so I decided to wait for my team. ¡°It was the same for your team?¡± I asked. ¡°Yes, Ancient,¡± he replied. ¡°Okay, you are dismissed for now.¡± With an acknowledgment and a bow he left the room. Need to learn his name. Need to start memorizing all their names¡­ if I can. This is going to be so tedious. Once again, I wondered if I was really the right person to be an Ancient. I sighed, nothing I could do about it now. Not even dying would fix the issue. I shook my head and waited impatiently, pacing back and forth across the room. Finally the others entered and I smiled. They looked around the room with varying degrees of mild interest and slight annoyance. ¡°How often is the dungeon going to change everything?¡± Gurek grumbled. ¡°Once we can ask it again,¡± I said, ¡°we can ask.¡± ¡°Just think of it as good thing,¡± Inda said. ¡°If it changes frequently, then scouting teams will be needed all the time. They might even start getting specialized teams to do different sections. Whenever their part changes, they go in and do a quick reevaluation. Honestly, if this place is large enough, they will be forced to have a team on hand all the time.¡± ¡°Well,¡± I said, ¡°for the moment it¡¯s just us, so we should get to it. I tried approaching the doors, but nothing happened. Let¡¯s see if it opens for a group.¡± We gathered together and approached a door, but nothing happened. ¡°I am going to touch the crystal, okay?¡± I said. I did just that after the others agreed, reaching out my hand and touching the cold surface of the crystal. The entire door vanished, showing a small square room inside. It was more than large enough for us to fit inside comfortably. Perhaps a dozen people could fit inside if they were willing to be cramped. We entered and the door reappeared behind us. It was identical from this side, except the crystal was now glowing yellow. I reached out to touch it again and the crystal flashed green for an instant before the door disappeared again. After waiting a few moments the door reappeared. ¡°Looks like it is easy enough to leave,¡± I said, the others nodded, letting me take the lead. I went to the far side of the room, where another yellow crystal was embedded into the wall. Around the larger crystal were twelve smaller buttons, eleven of them silver, surrounded by thin rings of glowing crystal in green or red. Above, was a strip of dark blank crystal. The buttons contained Caden¡¯s numerals for zero all the way through nine, as well as a small line, and one button that was blank and pure red crystal. The rings around the numbers one through four were green, but the other rings were red. ¡°Any guesses how this is supposed to work?¡± I asked ¡°Try the large one in the middle again?¡± Gurek suggested. ¡°Might as well,¡± said Inda. ¡°If that doesn¡¯t work I think I might know what it does.¡± Firi just shrugged. ¡°Okay, why not.¡± I said, and touched it. It flashed red and a brief annoying sound filled the room, before the crystal went yellow again. ¡°We went to doors with each of those symbols already, right?¡± Inda said as she pointed at the four symbols in green rings.¡± ¡°Yeah,¡± I replied. ¡°They correspond to one, two, and so on¡­¡± If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it. ¡°Okay, I am not sure what those two buttons are for,¡± she pointed to the line and the red one, but the others probably let you pick what door you are going to.¡± ¡°Why do a whole new room for that though?¡± Firi said. ¡°Maybe it¡¯s so you can¡¯t hold open a door for people who haven¡¯t been somewhere already.¡± I said. Inda furrowed her brows. ¡°Maybe,¡± she said. ¡°However, it was using portals before, but it still had a bunch of doors. Maybe it made it so that it doesn¡¯t need all the different doors anymore. We plug in where we want to go, and it opens a portal so we can get there.¡± ¡°Honestly, as good a guess as we are going to get,¡± I said. ¡°Only thing to do is test it.¡± I pressed the number one, and the crystal in the center turned green. All of the outer rings turned red, except the one around the red button, which was now green. The blank crystal at the top now has a green glowing number one in the center of it. ¡°Maybe the red one activates the portal?¡± I said. ¡°We good to test?¡± I waited a for nods and then pushed the red button. The one on the panel disappeared, leaving it blank again, and the four rings from before turned green again, the others red. The crystal in the middle turned back to yellow. ¡°Oh,¡± I said. ¡°Smart,¡± said Inda. ¡°Looks like it lets you start over in case you make a mistake. That way you don¡¯t need to leave the room entirely. Might let you close a portal if you pick the wrong one, too.¡± ¡°Right,¡± I said with a chuckle. ¡°That means that like the doors, the central crystal is meant to activate it. We ready to do it for real this time?¡± Gurek grumbled impatiently a bit, but we were all ready. I pressed the one again, and then pushed the green crystal. The room filled with a dense mist, completely obscuring our sight. We all fell into battle positions, and I paid close attention to my senses. The room vanished and we appeared on top of a different stone surface. The mist still thick around us. The mist quickly dissipated, revealing a familiar tower, amidst less familiar surrounds. ¡°I think it is safe to say it made some changes,¡± Firi said dryly. ¡°You mean besides teleportation?¡± Gurek said as he smiled. The area we were in was still called the Final Refuge, but everything else was different. The sky was overhead, a sun shining with the light of mid-afternoon. A cool breeze contrasted the warmth of the light, and clouds scudded overhead with no end in sight. There were no signs that we were in a dungeon at all. The town spread out below us, larger than it had been before, and I could see numerous entrances to the town leading to various roads going through the walls. Outside the town, the aqueduct had grown larger. I couldn¡¯t see any ruined sections from here either, though I did see places where streams moved between the hills. And there were larger hills now, which combined with larger sections of trees to obscure much of the view. I could still see where the ponds and the mist were, though. They and the monstrous millipede island looked unchanged. Around us, seven other towers rose up toward the distant sky, in sufficient repair to stand firmly, though each was weathered and cracked, with sections eroded away and occasional stones missing. Vines, moss, and small trees and shrubbery grew in profusion. A wall extended between each tower, forming an octagon with a ruined keep at the center. From the midpoint of each surrounding wall, another wall formed a ¡°T¡± shape and extended toward the middle, where they met the keep walls. There were four towers attached to the outer portion of the keep, each taller than where we stood, with a much taller one extending up from the middle. Each interior wall between the outer wall and keep, save one, had a rusted portcullis in the middle, with a small gatehouse structure above it. Off to our right, I could see the exception was much thicker, a little taller, and lacked the portcullis. It had a large structure where it met the exterior wall. I pointed toward the structure. ¡°Think that is the main gatehouse?¡± I asked. ¡°Probably,¡± Inda said, ¡°doesn¡¯t matter much, either way.¡± ¡°True,¡± I said. ¡°Guess we should do it.¡± The trip down proved unremarkable. The exact ordering of the monsters changed slightly, and I made a note to find out what my people ran into. It was possible there was some slight randomization. We destroyed everything in our path without any issues, not particularly concerned about being overly thorough. Entering the wedge courtyard below triggered the same small unlabeled mini-boss battle. Inda threw an enhanced dagger at it and it keeled over. The loot in the chest was about the same. Too generous. Probably have to have him reduce that a bit. Finally, we took the door at the end of the courtyard into the keep. Dust lay thick upon the ground, each step raising tiny sneeze inducing clouds. A quick exploration of the rooms we passed showed more of the same, with the minor exception of some ruined cloth and broken furniture. The monsters were more of the same, but they only attacked if you opened the door to the room that they were in. The most exciting thing we encountered was a larger room which appeared to be a ruined barracks. Finally, we entered the grand hall. A stone throne sat against the wall to the left. A tattered and faded pillow of purple sat on the throne, its threadbare holes allowing ruined feathers to poke out. The hall stretched upward, and rusted chains held up almost a dozen circular chandeliers. It would have been a full dozen, except one lay twisted on the floor, a broken length of chain extending from it. A matching length of chain hung forlornly from the ceiling above it. A second layer balcony was on each side of the hall. Three ancient rectangular tables in a ¡°U¡± held broken fragments of colorful stoneware. The open end of the ¡°U¡± was toward a large set of double doors to our right. Wooden cups, showing rot, or cracks, lay beneath the same thick layer of dust that covered everything in the room. Large fireplaces were scattered around the edges of the room with rusted spits sagging within. Stairways spiraled up and down in four places around the room. I could see where they exited above onto the balconies. though they continued into the ceiling after that. ¡°It¡¯s tempting to explore all of this,¡± I said. ¡°Yeah,¡± Inda said with a wistful smile, ¡°but we should probably leave the details for others.¡± ¡°Yeah,¡± I replied, nodding. ¡°I will get some of the Adar to record everything for now.¡± ¡°Well becoming their leader had to be useful for something.¡± Gurek muttered. I took one last look around the hall, and we circled around the tables. No monsters appeared for the moment, so we continued on. We exited out of the hall through the double doors and ended up in another hallway, though this one was larger. Tattered moth-eaten strips of cloth hung on the walls in places, ruined remnants of some former decorations. We exited through another set of double doors and into a fully stone enclosure. The end of the hall was open to the air. The walls were solid stone, and faint light came from above through small holes. Four portcullises were rusted into askew positions above our heads as we walked through the shadowed path. We reached the end to find a large drawbridge down and crossing over murky green water that slowly flowed between its banks. On one side a chain led up to a hole in the wall and connected to the end of the drawbridge. There was no sign of the chain for the other side. We crossed and went into the town. There were more roads and buildings, and some were larger, but overall the experience was much the same. We soon reached one of the exits. It had the two doors off to each side, like before, as well as the exit from the town. The only difference was that now it said ¡°2-5¡± on the door to leave. We tested it, and it presented us with a room identical to how we teleported in. A room that was too large to fit into the wall. It made my senses twist oddly at the boundary. Inside, the ring around zero was lit up now as well. ¡°I am guessing the zero brings us back to the entrance?¡± Inda said. ¡°As reasonable a guess as any. And it looks like we know what that symbol is for,¡± I said, pointing at the short line. ¡°Yeah, the other exits probably have different, uh¡­ secondary designations.¡± Inda said. ¡°I bet if we walked around the outside of the town here were would find all the entrances have a different number after two.¡± ¡°Keep going or mess with this some more?¡± I asked. ¡°We can always mess with it later,¡± Firi said quietly. The others agreed, so we headed out the entrance and into the meadow. SSD 4.40 - Information Wants to Be Free ¡°How the early priests came into possession of these secrets does not appear, and if there were ever any records of this kind the Church would hardly allow them to become public.¡± -Harry Houdini ==Tarrae ¨C Earlier That Day== Delving through the dungeon had not proven a terribly difficult experience, so far, though there had been a few moments where the newness of our team had proven a hindrance. They were minor issues while dealing with the low level monsters, but they could easily get us killed in more challenging situations. Honestly, the progressive difficulty of this dungeon was amazing. It was perfect for integrating a new team. We had only just finished up the sewers, and things were feeling much more cohesive. We hadn¡¯t yet had a chance to get into the rolling meadow we had seen outside the town. And we weren¡¯t sure when we would actually get a chance to do so. The Adar occupation of the Starlight Grotto had proven an inconvenient development. Not due to any issue with their developing encampment, but rather due to them denying entrance to the dungeon. Still, that was their right. I was hoping to get back in soon, however. For the moment, my team was hanging out with the remains of the other. Zidaun was off overseeing the other Adar, as well as visiting with his old friend. According to Inda, Zidaun was likely to hate dealing with all the administrative details, so I couldn¡¯t even really blame him for the delay, either. Discussions had progressed in a meandering fashion across different topics, and Soara had enthusiastically listened to Inda discussing the details of different countries and the different dungeons she had delved. Anaath had wandered off at some point. We were delving better as a team, but Anaath hadn¡¯t lost his sour disposition, and he didn¡¯t socialize with us much. In the meantime, in one of the comfortable side rooms, Gurek and I had fallen into a common adventurer pastime when meeting new people; telling how we became adventurers in the first place. ¡°Yeah, my parents worry all the time, too,¡± he said, sharing a wry grin that I returned, before he continued. ¡°Cooking just wasn¡¯t my thing. And after I burned enough food they finally agreed that I should try something else. They wanted me to become a Spice Merchant.¡± Gurek shook his head. ¡°They still have contacts back in Ungea. It was a perfect idea in their heads. They use a lot of non-local spices in the restaurant, and I could go back to Ungea and buy spices.¡± I absently noted Gurek¡¯s parents as a potential contact, years of living in a merchant household having made it an automatic skill. My family does some trading up in Ungea... Gurek shrugged, his hands raising up into the air in front of him, while I just nodded as I listened. ¡°I mean, they are probably right. I could have made a lot of money, but I wanted more than that. They tried anyway, and then I told them I wasn¡¯t interested enough times that they finally listened. Now, I¡¯ve always loved nature. I love the small parks in the city. So, my parents had the bright idea that maybe I could get a class specialized in growing plants and grow the spices myself. We wouldn¡¯t be growing more than a small greenhouse full, so it wouldn¡¯t run afoul of any Farmers.¡± I nodded sagely. Always bad to annoy anyone with power. ¡°So I agreed. I mean, I do love plants after all. My teacher refunded my parents after only a week. I killed any plant I tried to raise. My teacher seriously thought I might have some sort of affinity with death magic.¡± I started to chuckle, and Gurek joined me. ¡°Ha, you laugh now, but I was devastated at the time. I loved plants though, still do, as a matter of fact. So, I had loved learning about them. The categorizing, and learning the various traits, it all appealed to me. So did discovering all these new varieties. ¡°At one point some adventurers were talking about a dungeon in my family¡¯s restaurant. They were talking about a new plant that had suddenly appeared there. How they had to be careful, since it could be poisonous, or acidic, and so on, and how all the samples they brought back were in bad condition. The adventurers guild apparently didn¡¯t want to pay them much for them. ¡°So, I had a thought. I couldn¡¯t keep a plant alive, but my cuttings of plants had been pretty good. Someone, besides me, could potentially even use my cuttings to grow a plant. Anyway, I really wanted to see new types of plants. So, I was young and stupid, and decided that this was going to be my new career. I had obviously listened far too much to some of the stories and songs the Performers did at our restaurant for big nights. ¡°My parents were horrified. Understandably. After it became obvious that I was going to do it, regardless of what they wanted, they arranged for me to get training. I would have died far too many times without that training. That was their caveat. I said I wanted to go and do this, so they hired a trainer. If I quit, I had to give up on becoming an adventurer. ¡°I didn¡¯t know it at the time, but my trainer specialized in this. His whole shtick was training would be adventurers and making them quit because his training was so sadistic. Turns out, my family got a refund, because I never quit. ¡°I whined, and moaned, and complained so much, but I kept going. Eventually, I got a class that allows me to endure things. At that point, my trainer conceded defeat, and told my parents that no one was going to be able to make me stop. And, by that point, I was well enough trained to deal with a dungeon, too. With the system giving me a new class and validating my work, my parents gave in. ¡°They got their money refunded, so they used some of it to get me some specialized training in dealing with dungeon plants. Then they bought me the best gear they could afford.¡± Gurek sighed, shaking his head. ¡°I was still really lucky. I survived a few things that probably should have killed me. My class¡­ it saved my life for sure. After I got past the usual survival time, I was able to team up with some more experienced delvers.¡± Gurek closed his eyes, and tears squeezed out in slow tracks. His voice was soft and shaky as he finally spoke again. You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. ¡°They didn¡¯t make it... but I did. Dungeon had a new monster with poison. Wasn¡¯t on any of the reports. I was able to delay the effects long enough to get to a healer.¡± ¡°Sorry,¡± I said, my voice soft. ¡°It¡¯s never easy, especially if they are on your team.¡± Seen too many die, too. Gurek shook his head, and his voice grew heated. ¡°Not your fault, wasn¡¯t even my fault. That was always something I thought was awful. It wasn¡¯t anyone¡¯s fault. Dungeon grew a bit and something changed. No one knew until I came back to tell them. Then a proper team went out to scout it out. ¡°It¡¯s what made me join a scout team, in the end. If I was going to deal with random danger anyway, I might as well get properly paid for it. And, well, the scout teams see more new stuff than anyone else. ¡°Haven¡¯t lost anyone in this party. Been more grateful for that than I can say.¡± He looked at me and his gaze was piercing, his words fervent. ¡°I¡¯ve lost more people than I ever wanted to. I tried helping newbies, but so many of them died. I¡¯m sure I helped some of them live longer, but¡­ Getting proper training is expensive. They died learning the lessons they needed to know. Not many still alive.¡± Gurek looked around and waved his arms vaguely. ¡°Every dungeon should be like this. Teach people how to delve properly. Then, maybe I wouldn¡¯t have¡­ One of the ones who had survived a long time¡­ right before we came here¡­ he didn¡¯t come back. I didn¡¯t tell my team, we needed to be focused...¡± He cut himself off, his voice choked. ¡°I¡¯ve, lost people too.¡± I said, falteringly. ¡°Tried to help some newbies. I think most of the decent adventurers try to help out, at first. I stopped after a while too. It gets too hard when they don¡¯t come back. I don¡¯t know if my heart got harder, or I just had to stop letting myself care so I didn¡¯t¡­ break.¡± Gurek nodded at me, tears streaming down his face, and my own vision grew hazy. I did my best to blink them away, but a few escaped to stream across my cheeks anyway. ¡°What would you do if you could make things better? Make it so less people died.¡± Gurek finally asked, his voice serious. He looked at me again, his eyes like hard stone beneath the sheen of tears. ¡°Would you spread a secret, even if you knew if might get you killed?¡± I paused for a moment. I thought of my family and wanted to say ¡°No,¡± but some of my nieces and nephews had been asking about what I do. Some of them had been expressing interest. My family helped me, got me the training that helped me survive, but like Gurek, I still had my fair share of close calls. And, I remembered faces, voices, that had been absent for years. ¡°Yes,¡± I whispered. ¡°Yes, I would.¡± Gurek slumped in his seat for a moment, before speaking a short phrase. ¡°I give to you that which was given to me.¡± A notification bloomed in my senses, and I felt the System put pressure on me. I opened it.
The rightful owner of the Artifact, The Eternal Blossom, has transferred ownership to you: The Eternal Blossom Artifact ¨C Unique Immune to Theft ¨C Dungeon Bound ¨C Indestructible ¨C Transferable A manifestation of the dungeon¡¯s desire for beauty and perfection, and its desire to share it. Benefits: +Owner instinctively knows the benefits of Artifact +Owner has a telepathic link with the dungeon, even when Artifact is elsewhere +Owner can allow another individual telepathic contact with the dungeon while they touch Artifact +Owner can establish a temporary telepathic link when another is touching the Artifact +Owner can have the dungeon store Artifact, or recall it from anywhere inside the dungeon, at will +Owner may transfer ownership of Artifact to another, however, this fails under any form of persuasion, threat, etc¡­ even indirect forms, like social pressure or preexisting contracts +Dungeon may assign another owner upon death
With the notification, knowledge unfolded like a blooming flower. I knew more about the Artifact than just what the system said. I was connected to it. I could pull it to me with just a thought, but I didn¡¯t dare to do that while I was here. I was sure Soara had been damping down his ability to listen to us, out of respect, but he would probably notice the Artifact appearing. I didn¡¯t even need to see it to know what it looked like. I could turn and twist its image in my head at my leisure. I could feel the deep appreciation for beauty that was the reason for its creation. I could feel a connection to the dungeon, a channel waiting to be used. I knew how to make a temporary channel for another with the Artifact, either to me or¡­ the dungeon. I intrinsically knew that this was made by a person. A person, who was also a dungeon. What the hell does this even mean? It¡­ made the dungeon. It set it up as a training ground. ¡°What,¡± I started, before my voice faded away and I tried again. ¡°Are all of them like this?¡± ¡°I wish I could help you,¡± Gurek said, his eyes gazing at me with fixed intensity. I could see the tension of his body. He was quivering with the strain of it. The last piece fell into place. There was only one good reason to do it like this, to just give it to me. It would have been far better to tell me and then use the Artifact as proof. My old Potential Value II skill was pinging like crazy at me. Though, I hardly needed it to know that an Artifact would be valuable. The only reason to tell me like this, was because Gurek couldn¡¯t tell me any other way. He was bound in some fashion. A skill, a ritual, an object¡­ I couldn¡¯t say, and neither could he. However, I knew how he was able to give it away. The description of The Eternal Blossom said that there was no way to force someone to give it away. What it didn¡¯t say, was that there was also no way to force someone to keep it. No matter the method, nothing could prevent the owner from giving it away. A spell of silence would fail, just for the words needed to give it away. A dying man with a punctured lung, who couldn¡¯t physically speak, could form the words. Nothing could prevent that, even if it meant bypassing a binding meant to prevent that exact thing, or using it to share information. The only reason to share this, is if this dungeon isn¡¯t unique. Which¡­ means that the others could be safer, too. I need to get this information out as soon as possible. ¡°I¡¯ll get the secret out,¡± I whispered hoarsely. ¡°I¡¯ll make sure people know that at least some of them are more.¡± Gurek sighed, his body collapsing in on itself. ¡°Thank you,¡± he said. ¡°Thank You.¡± He looked like an enormous weight had lifted off his shoulders. I looked the delicate blooming flower over again in my head. It would be valuable just for the intricate workmanship. I wanted to keep it, but it wouldn¡¯t be right. ¡°I give to¡­¡± I started, when Gurek interrupted me and I stopped. ¡°Don¡¯t! It¡¯s yours. Keep it. Consider it payment for the risk.¡± I nodded slowly. Well¡­ if I can leverage the earning power of this¡­ I can encourage my family to spend a bit more getting the word out. I¡¯ll let them use my savings too. If I was going to get this done¡­ it was best done now. I was already going to do a report after I got back into the dungeon, but I supposed a proper report on the Adar is a good enough reason to send one early. The adventurer¡¯s guild wouldn¡¯t mind if I added a small ciphered message for my family. Technically it was against the rules, but it had long been considered one of the perks of being on a scout team. As long as it didn¡¯t get overused, no one cared. I stood up and Gurek smiled at me, while I smiled back. ¡°I have a report that needs to get done,¡± I said. ¡°I¡¯ll talk to you later.¡± I went up to my room. It was time to take a secret, and unmake it. SSD 4.41 - The Storm ¡°A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease.¡± -John Muir ==Zidaun== The meadow had a different name now.
You have entered the: Aqueduct Cascade Meadows
As we stepped off the drawbridge and onto the pathway, leaving the town and its walls behind, we could see other changes too. This path followed the aqueduct, the tall stone pillars of the aqueduct arching up into the air. Greenery grew in abundance around the stone, and tiny trickles of water could be seen here and there. Each bit of water was marked with a profusion of green moss and lacy curtains of delicate vines. Flowers bloomed like tiny multicolored stars in the deep green. Outside the town were the ruined remnants of fields. Ancient wooden structures showed only the barest remains. Though a stone well showed mostly intact under a thick layer of choking vines and briars. The fields themselves were mostly overgrown with weeds and a few small trees. The trees clumped together into tiny copses. A few segments of ripe grain persisted, their golden color striking among the gathered greenery. Should go check out the grain. Let my people know they can harvest it. ¡°Let¡¯s go look at the fields,¡± I said. ¡°If we can harvest the grain, it would be a good food source.¡± ¡°Not really good for us, is it?¡± Gurek grumbled. ¡°We certainly don¡¯t have the skills to thresh it, and I think it has to be dried first¡­¡± ¡°What, you don¡¯t know how to make bread?¡± Inda asked archly, one of her eyebrows quirked at him. ¡°Never said that,¡± he mumbled. ¡°If it was flour, sure. I could make flatbread. Don¡¯t have the skills to make it rise. Don¡¯t want to try grinding flour by hand though¡­¡± Gurek looked at me speculatively. ¡°You know, you could probably make a mill. Or maybe just crush the flour directly. Move a little stone around.¡± I considered it for a moment. I didn¡¯t actually know how all the gears in a mill were supposed to work. However, if I just needed to crush it down to flour, that was probably easy enough. I could imitate some of the dungeon¡¯s powers, so I could probably force the grain to dry out with heat. Eh, too much work. And I don¡¯t have any idea how to thresh grain either. ¡°I probably could make flour, but we are going to be busy with other stuff. If the grain looks good though, I¡¯ll let my people know. I am sure someone will know how to make it into bread. I¡¯ll even get some for us.¡± Gurek started to walk quickly. ¡°Well, come on, what are you waiting for?¡± The rest of us chuckled as we followed. The scudding clouds overhead cast alternating shadows between beams of light. The wind had picked up, making trees look like frenetic dancers, and the clouds moved faster with it. The clouds had grown thicker as we explored and now were dark and heavy. The air was rich with the scent of plants, earth, and humidity. The fields were close, and only a minute of walking was required before we reached them. The fields and the area around them were dotted with large holes in the ground. As we approached, large plate-mice squeaked with rage as they emerged. The battle was bloody and swift, none of us bothering to hold back. We didn¡¯t see the whole colony emerge, as I could sense many still in the twisting tunnels below the surface, but more and more came out to fight from various holes as we got closer to the grain. However, since they didn¡¯t all emerge in a single rush, newbies should be able to stop and flee if they needed to retreat. The grain itself was the perfect golden brown of ripe grain. I wasn¡¯t an expert, but Gurek confirmed it was wheat. This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. ¡°And damn good wheat, too.¡± He said. ¡°Good enough to make quality pasta, if it was flour. You,¡± he pointed at me. ¡°better get us some flour too.¡± ¡°Making food, huh?¡± Inda said. ¡°Perhaps you should open up a restaurant here.¡± For a moment Gurek¡¯s face looked contemplative, before he frowned. ¡°Nah, but I can always charge you for what I make, Inda.¡± She sputtered at him, glaring. ¡°That is not what I meant, and you know it.¡± Gurek snickered. Firi and I looked at each other and smiled. I rolled my eyes at him and his smile got larger. ¡°Time to go,¡± I said diplomatically. ¡°I¡¯ll tell the Adar later.¡± Best to stay out of their banter. Gurek¡¯s face turned serious again, and we headed out of the field toward the road. We dealt with more plate-mice along the way, but we reached the pathway soon enough. We proceeded along the path, which was mostly variations on the same type of encounters we had dealt with in the Meadows before. We went somewhat faster than we had before, not particularly concerned about the dangers here. We were cautious enough that we could retreat easily, but we didn¡¯t really expect any true danger. Midway through the path, the clouds opened and it began to rain. ¡°Really!¡± Inda shouted at the heavens in futility. ¡°Rain in a dungeon?¡± ¡°Makes sense,¡± Said Firi. Inda turned her glare onto him. ¡°It¡¯s meant to be the wilderness, right? So dealing with the weather is part of that.¡± Inda¡¯s face was sour but she simply nodded and sighed. Tiny rivulets of water made their way down the path, and the earth grew damp. Muddy sections made the road slippery. The rain intensified into a downpour, and curtains of rain flung themselves onto us, carried enthusiastically by the wind. Visibility was swiftly declining. ¡°We¡¯ll need to stop!¡± I shouted above the rain. ¡°Follow me!¡± We were next to a hill, the pathway winding its way around the base of it, with the aqueduct to the other side. I trudged toward the base of the hill, the earth soggy and slopping beneath east step. As I got closer I could sense a small cave hidden into the hill. Fortunately it had no occupants at the moment. Fortunate for them. I wouldn¡¯t have bothered to fight, I would have simply crushed them with the surrounding earth. The cave was rather small, the entrance hidden by layer of plants. I pushed them to the side as I shouldered my way in. I crouched in the entrance, unable to stand up fully, and the others followed me inside. I shored up the cave with more stone, closing my eyes, focusing and tuning out the rest of the world. Then I gradually expanded it, make it taller, and the entrance larger. Plants fell off the entrance as they lost their grip, the dirt giving way to stone. I opened my eyes, and Firi caught them with a smile. Inda and Gurek were, quietly, bickering, obviously trying not to interrupt my work. Someone had activated several heat stones and set them on the ground. They warmed the cave, even with our wet clothes. ¡°Welcome back,¡± Firi said. I chuckled. Around us the cave was a mishmash of stone grown up into arches above our heads. They were enough to maintain support for as long as we were here. With the plants removed, their was a clear view out into the storm. The wind howled, and the grass was flattened in waves only to stand up and be flattened again. The rain lashed the earth with whips of water, leaving welts of running streams behind. Mist sprung up from the cold rain, obscuring the view, only to be reduced to tattered shreds by the wind, making the view intermittent. Growing streams of water joined into a flood, cascading through the meadow over small cliffs. The lower section of the path we had followed was now buried beneath a growing rush of raging water. Rapids raged over rocks in the low valleys between the hills. We would have been safe enough in the upper sections of the path, but lower areas were deathtraps now. The water would sweep away anyone who tried to get through it without the proper skills. The scene was beautiful and deadly, and I was sure it was an omen of things to come. A uniquely crafted blend of the two, that would define the experience of this dungeon. ¡°It¡¯s beautiful.¡± I said. ¡°It is,¡± Firi softly agreed. Firi and I came closer to each other and I rested my head on his shoulder and we stared out into the storm. Mostly warm, and getting warmer as our clothes dried, we stood together. Each of us enjoying the others company. Eventually, the storm blew past, the wind settling back down. The clouds parted and sunlight streamed through the cracks, filling the world with light once again. Now sufficiently dry, Inda was scribbling out a map with a light stone held in her other hand. The storm over, we prepared to resume our exploration. The ground was still soaked with water, but the floods had emptied almost as quickly as they had come. Small bits of branches and stones were scattered, where they had been ripped free and carried away by the wind and waters. Everything glistened, the greenery shining with a coat of shedding water. Drops of water captured the sunlight, making ephemeral gems that sparkled with inner light. Tiny beads gathered together only to drip off the ends of leaves into small pools, rocks, other plants below, casting out ripples and the faint sound of water splashing and dripping. Each single drop was almost inaudible, but together sufficient to paint the world with the sound of water gently dripping down. Insects added their own music, faint creaking and chittering. We didn¡¯t talk, just walked through the stillness left in the storm¡¯s aftermath. A stillness that was not disturbed by the sound of the dripping water, but rather punctuated by it. The sound of the water only acted as an emphasis to the calm, a reminder of the storm¡¯s previous rage now stilled. The stillness shattered when a monster leaped out to attack us. It was nothing special, merely a monstrous centipede and we removed it instantly, but it broke the spell of an enchanted world. Sadly, we had to return to business. We were about midway through the Meadows when we came upon another change. A spillway in the aqueduct unleashed a wide waterfall that plunged into a large pool below. The path gave way to a short stone bridge, just above the water, and it passed over a narrow section of the pool where the waters rushed between the still depths. The pool fell in another waterfall to our right and became a rapid rushing rocky river. It wended round and through the hills, carving out its own path, and out of sight. SSD 4.42 - The Meadows End Modern science says: ''The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.'' From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom. -Nikola Tesla ==Zidaun== ¡°Who wants to bet on this being another pseudo-boss encounter?¡± Inda asked dryly. I chuckled, but there were no takers. ¡°Not going to be any of the bosses we have encountered so far,¡± I said. ¡°The arena wouldn¡¯t work for any of them.¡± The others just nodded. It probably didn¡¯t even need to be said, but repetition and caution was how we survived. We walked slowly forward, Gurek in the lead, as each of us prepared to fight. As we started to walk on the bridge, the turbulent waters by the waterfall spread. The water quickly began to shift as something large moved through the water creating a protrusion in the water¡¯s surface. Finally it came into view enough for me to analyze it.
Silver Stream Striker Level 11
¡°Level eleven,¡± I shouted. The fish was large, at least a dozen feet long, with delicately gauzy fins. The whole fish was a shimmering silver, with the underside glimmering a slightly lighter color. Several large scales on top of its head were pointed and sharp. The bridge wasn¡¯t wide enough for Gurek to completely stand at the front, but his skin glimmered in activated power and Inda stood behind him, while Firi was shielded behind me. Stone from the bridge moved upward and formed a shield over my left arm, while a spear formed in my right hand. It was likely I would need better range for whatever was coming. The fish finally breached the surface, still some twenty-five feet away, and immediately I felt mana coalesce around it. ¡°Mana!¡± I shouted. I hunkered down, my shield in front of me, though Gurek got the first strike. A wide stream of water poured out from the fish, hitting Gurek¡¯s armored chest. He grunted, but only slipped back a little bit, the water blasting off him to get us all wet again. Inda threw out a knife, not wasting to opportunity. The knife soared through the air and sank into the side of the fish with a splash of water. The fish twitched as it was hit, then dove deeper beneath the surface. Leaving only diminishing ripples and a faint smear of crimson behind. We kept a wary watch, and soon enough ripples began to disturb the water on the other side of the bridge. We turned to face them, reorienting to move back into position. The same fish emerged, and struck with another stream of water, this time striking my shield. I was forced to use the stone beneath me to brace my feet, the force reasonably powerful. Inda tried to strike it with a knife again, but a lash of water rose up and made it go off course, creating only a grazing wound along the fish¡¯s side. Unfazed, the fish tried again. This time pulses of water emerged, each aimed at Gurek and I, and I was forced to reposition my shield for each strike, while Gurek used his swords to help redirect the force, when he couldn¡¯t ensure they would hit a properly armored spot. We continued the fight, but the fish never showed off a new attack method. So, in the end, we finished it off with little fuss, and it dissolved away. I had never even used my spear. ¡°That wasn¡¯t too bad,¡± Gurek said, while a small chest appeared at the end of the bridge. We walked toward it, and I did my usual check. The chest contained a small silver token, with a picture of the fish we had just defeated. In addition, the chest contained the daggers Inda had thrown into the pond, whether they had hit the fish or not. Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation. ¡°Thank the gods,¡± Inda muttered. ¡°I was not looking forward to diving in to get these out.¡± ¡°What you didn¡¯t want to get even wetter?¡± Gurek said with a laugh. She gave him a flat look, but didn¡¯t bother to reply, and only drew out a heat stone and activated it, placing it into one of the pockets of her armor meant for that purpose. ¡°Some enchanter is going to make a lot of money off this dungeon,¡± Firi rumbled. I turned to him was a smile. ¡°Certainly going to need heat stones.¡± I said. He shook his head. ¡°No,¡± he said, ¡°that¡¯s not what I meant. I mean, yes, I am sure they will sell heat stones, too. However, if the dungeon is all like this.¡± He waved his hand in an absent gesture toward the surroundings. ¡°If it is all different environments, then people will need to be prepared for a lot of different things. Something to repel water would be essential for anyone caught in a more intense storm than we experienced.¡± ¡°If it would dry me off.¡± Inda said, ¡°I would buy one just for that.¡± We all chuckled, and Firi continued. ¡°Yeah, there is that, but the environments will probably get more extreme. The dungeon already tested how we did against heat. Who knows what else we will need to deal with. We might eventually need a whole range of specialized tools.¡± I nodded. It was true, after all. We really didn¡¯t know what to expect. We continued on after a few minutes, each of us making sure our gear was still fine after being soaked yet again. The rest of the meadows were mostly the same. The levels of the normal monsters had increased slightly, but overall the format was about the same. Path, poorly concealed pitfalls, more monsters, and some giant packs of monsters visible in the difference. I was pretty sure those giant packs of monsters were just a test of basic common sense. If you didn¡¯t have a good way to deal with a horde, then even low level monsters could be dangerous. We decided to take out one of the hordes, but didn¡¯t take any chances. ¡°Okay, so full restriction measures?¡± I questioned the others. ¡°Yeah, not that I can do much,¡± Gurek muttered. Inda and Firi nodded before Firi chimed in. ¡°Want me to finish them?¡± ¡°That would probably be best,¡± I said. The odds were good that any one of us could handle the entire horde ourselves, but it was best to be careful in case there was some kind of trick. This horde was made of a large collection of plate-rats. Dozens of them formed a churning mass as they crept over and around one of the hillsides off to the right. We walked closer as a group, Gurek leading the way. Once we got close enough one of the rats noticed us and let out a shrill scream. The others joined in, and a horde of screaming rats charged at us. I accessed the earth, investing my power into it and stone flowed like quicksand beneath them, trapping them as they tried to approach. The trapped rats were soon buried by the bodies of their fellows as they climbed over top of each other in their desperate rage. There was no thought here, no plans, merely a horde of beasts that were consumed by their desire to destroy us. Inda¡¯s powers spread over the rats, pushing them down, reducing their speed to a crawl, and the stone grabbed them until they were all immobilized. I walked around the edge of the rats, carefully observing each of them. ¡°They are all the same, nothing special here.¡± I yelled over the screams of the rats as I walked back. Once I had reached the others, Firi spoke. ¡°Ready?¡± he said. I nodded, ¡°Yeah, go ahead.¡± Mana burst forth from his skin, gathering in swirls around him as he chanted, and light, sharp and bright and cold, burst forth around him. It cast the world in monochromes of silver and shadows. Finally he spoke the last word and the light burst forward. Silver light streaked out, trailing cold fog as it curved and split through the air. Then, the light scattered into a shower of tiny sparkling lights, the cold sparks mingling with a freezing fog. Suddenly, the rats were silent. As the fog faded, the bodies of the rats could be seen. They were frozen solid, each one a frost laden statue of their former selves. They began to dissolve, the dungeon clearing the defeated monsters away, leaving behind only frozen grass and pockmarked stone. We tensed for a moment, waiting to see if something happened when the horde was defeated, but nothing emerged, and we gradually relaxed. ¡°Okay,¡± I said. ¡°Looks like it was just a simple horde. Still more than most people would handle well at the levels this area is aimed for.¡± ¡°I¡¯ll note them down as wandering hazards.¡± Inda said, drawing on her map. ¡°Put the danger level as extreme. If we say they are a dungeon puzzle where the dungeon is testing your intelligence in avoiding them, hopefully less people will act stupidly.¡± ¡°Ha,¡± Gurek muttered, ¡°that¡¯ll be the day.¡± Inda smiled sweetly at him. ¡°You¡¯re just grouchy because we took out the horde without you.¡± Gurek glared at her, but didn¡¯t bother to reply. We turned back to the path and kept walking. Eventually, the path lead to a large circular stone building. A tree grew out of it from somewhere, the base invisible from where we stood. The tree towered up above us, growing up hundreds of feet, casting the building into shadows and dappled glimmers of light spearing between the leaves. We could see the other paths from here. Each one lead into an archway set into the building. Ahead of us, an identical archway waited for us. It was almost certainly another boss arena. We walked forward, heading toward the archway. It quickly passed overhead and we were swallowed by the cool stone, the light a dim companion in the echoing hall. Small sconces on the wall held small flames, providing just enough light to make the area traversable. At the end of the hall, was a doorway. Set into the door was a small indentation. As we approached, the door stayed shut. ¡°Hey Gurek, you have the token from the fish, right?¡± I said. ¡°Yeah, its probably meant for that.¡± He said. ¡°We could try the one we got from the millipede boss first.¡± Inda¡¯s hand went to her chest, her face an exaggerated display of shock with an open mouth and wide eyes. ¡°That might actually be a smart idea.¡± She said mockingly. ¡°Are you sure you¡¯re feeling alright Gurek?¡± ¡°Ha¡­ ha¡­ ha¡­¡± Gurek said, drawing out the laugh with flat tones. ¡°So funny.¡± I interrupted before things devolved into another bickering session. ¡°Yes,¡± I said. ¡°Best to try and see if it will accept any of the prior bosses as valid.¡± Gurek rummaged through his pack, finally pulling out the token from the prior boss encounter. ¡°Okay, everyone ready?¡± He said. Reflexively I checked over my gear, while the others did the same. I could feel the brief pulses of mana as we each touched our respective skills, making sure everything was ready. After a second, we each provided an affirmative, and Gurek placed the token against the door¡¯s indent. The token dissolved away, and the door began to open, letting in the light of the sun. SSD 4.43 - Rainbow Mirage ¡°One can enjoy a rainbow without necessarily forgetting the forces that made it.¡± ¡ªMark Twain ==Caden== As the waves of knowledge washed over me, I found myself in the depths. Above me was my normal consciousness, while my soul glittered with ethereal beauty below. The surface was unreachable for the moment. Vast concepts rose from the depths like breaching icebergs, even as grammar and words howled in gales across the surface, leaving frozen trails of knowledge that clung to the blocky concepts in lines of hoarfrost. Webs of knowledge hung in glittering curtains as they connected the concepts with words and context, forming the vast interconnected network that made up a language. Two languages, actually. Each forming connections to different concepts in their own unique patterns. When I focused, I could see my knowledge of English, a vast web strung between innumerable concepts and memories. Faint wisps of other languages, German, Japanese, Spanish, Latin, and more left ghostly trails of connection. And between them all, the two new ones grew like vines. I focused on what I could see for a time, but I found no success in altering or even better understanding the process. With the surface unreachable, there were no issues with holding my concentration. I couldn¡¯t leave the soul space, even when I tried. I suspected that without my soul meditation skill, I would be completely insensate. For now, this was where I would be. I didn¡¯t mind. This space was as timeless as it had always been. I could feel a vague sense of Exsan¡¯s presence. Like me, he was beneath the surface. He had been beneath the surface for a while now. His absorption of English and my own knowledge proving more than sufficient to push him under while he learned. Yet, even with my conscious mind buried, I could still think clearly here. I even knew why. When my body had died, my soul had continued to function without issue. And that was what I really was. Even with an almost physical representation of my soul down below, I was my soul. It was confusing to think of entering my soul, which was actually me, but at this level things didn¡¯t seem to need to make sense. I knew I wasn¡¯t able to comprehend the true reality of my soul, anyway. Everything here was made of symbols and abstractions. Certainly what I had seen in my soul before was more metaphor than reality. Or perhaps something that was more real than reality; something that needed to dumb itself down to fit in the tiny box of the worldview and understanding that I normally inhabited. Unlike so much I had seen in the system, my soul actually felt sufficiently complicated to function as everything that it was supposed to be: A place to hold all my memories, to store my previous forms, to generate mana, and probably far more. I felt like I didn¡¯t understand anything about what my soul really was. Had anyone on Earth been able to meditate deep enough to see it? My experiences with meditation made me wonder if the monks of various religions had been onto something. I was a bit worried about why the old man had died, and what was would happen while I submerged here. However, there were nothing I could do about it except worry, and that would be no use to anyone. For now, I just let it go. With nothing else to occupy me, I slowly drifted down toward my soul. My soul and Exsan¡¯s grew larger, their shifting and glittering surfaces as beautiful as ever. They were properly joining now. The mechanical precision of Exsan¡¯s soul embracing the open edges of my own. A fusion of the organic and the machine. A cybernetic soul. I drifted far enough down to touch the edge of my soul and, moments later, I had slipped within. ==Zidaun== The light of the sun glittered in rainbow shafts between the leaves of a giant tree. The door opened into a large open space. Around the perimeter stone rose in pillars capped with arching supports. Above, stone rose up in a continuous curving hollow cylinder encompassing the entire space, before it gave way to a dome of crystal. A wall of stone was between each pair of columns, and each wall contained a boss monster carved in low relief. Some of the boss monsters were recognizable, the silver fish monster they had just defeated, a moss groomer, and others. Others we hadn¡¯t encountered at all, presumably from the other paths. The space was a flat meadow of short green grass. In the middle, a giant tree perched its roots over a small stone building. The building was almost completely hidden, overcome by the roots. Only a door, immediately in front of them, was clearly visible. The tree continued upwards, and its trunk pierced through the dome, the crystal flush against its trunk. The arching boughs spread out far enough that the entire dome was a mix of sun and shade. The beams of sunlight that passed between the leaves hit the glittering crystal of the dome, which was faceted like an enormous gem. Waves of rainbow reflections glittered across the dome with the slightest movement, matching the prismatic beams of light that swept across the stone and ground with the fluttering of the leaves. Below the dome, small groups of crystal hung at varying heights, suspended on thin lines. A faint breeze blew through the dome, making the crystals shiver and chime against one another in gentle notes, even as they cast off whirling beams of light when they intercepted the rays from above. For a moment, I simply stood and absorbed the sight and sounds. Knowing the dungeon¡¯s appreciation for beauty, quiet worship bloomed in my heart. The others seemed to be transfixed in a similar manner, struck by the interplay of light and shadow and sound. No beast came out; nothing charged them. By now I expected there might never be. Not when the dungeon offered something like this. It would ruin the artistry of the presentation to cut it short with combat before the observers were ready. This narrative has been purloined without the author''s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon. I didn¡¯t doubt that there would be something to fight as soon as we entered, however. Into that moment of stillness, the dungeon offered the last piece of art. A large bird stepped around from behind the tree, though to call it merely a bird does it a disservice. In the rainbow light it was hard to tell where creature began and the light ended. It had no wings or neck, instead being almost a ball four feet across with feet that lifted it two feet off the ground and a long sinuous tail. Light shattered against it in fractured beams, flashing iridescent as its feathers caught the light. Each feather gleamed like crystal and came in arrays of vivid color. Feathers burned with combinations of fiery reds and oranges, while others faded into the shadows in dusky purple and midnight blues until they caught the light like clouds in a fading sunset. Its long tail hosted feathers of increasing length until, finally, the end of the tail held a narrow plume of rainbow feathers. The tail feathers were each two feet long and gleamed with wickedly sharp edges. Its beak and legs glimmered like aged and burnished bronze. The talons on its feet were crystalline, catching the light as it slowly stepped forward. The one eye I could see was the black of polished onyx. A spot of perfect dark amidst the riotous display. It had become clear that the arena and this beast had been made for each other. Whether Caden had designed the monster for the arena, or the arena for the monster, I couldn¡¯t say, but each echoed the grandeur of the other. I had expected the boss to only show when we stepped in, but it had come gently to emphasize and embody the art with its presence. The beast continued to walk slowly around the arena, seemingly content to ignore us until we entered. I was loathe to disrupt the scene, so I didn¡¯t, that fell to Inda instead. She nudged me gently. I turned to look at her with a gentle smile, and smiled back. Either she had nudged the others too, or they had noticed our interaction, because Gurek and Firi each smiled as our eyes met, each of us enjoying the moment, even if it was starting to fade. Firi reached out and squeezed my hand. I cleared my throat gently. ¡°Right, we have a job to do.¡± It would be a shame to kill something so beautiful, but I was sure it would do its best to kill us once we entered. It would fulfill its purpose and then the dungeon would spawn another one. I took a brief moment to identify it.
Mirage Dancer Monstrous Level 17
¡°Level 17,¡± I said. The moment was gone, so I stepped to the side, allowing Gurek to enter first. As soon as we entered the room the mirage dancer turned to face us, with the focused intensity of an apex predator. Mana began to swirl around it. ¡°Mana!¡± I shouted. The form of the boss monster blurred. Its rainbow feathers blended even more into the shifting light. In moments the boss shifted out of focus, turning into a shifting haze of light. It was unclear exactly where it was now, its position now a glittering rainbow of possibilities. I wouldn¡¯t be able to tell its exact position until in entered range of my senses. With a monster like this, it was best to remain defensive, and let it come to you, unless we wanted to blanket the area it was in with massive attacks. We could certainly kill it, but we actually needed to learn what it could do. ¡°Defensive formation, diamond,¡± I said. ¡°Going to do a blind fight for testing. Keep things to about level 15.¡± We shifted like the trained adventurers that we were. I went to the left side behind Gurek while Inda was at my right. Firi stayed behind the two of us. Firi¡¯s magic settled over us, a faintly glimmering barrier of light flush against our skin. I withdrew my mana sense, losing a sense of the world around me. The rainbow mirage came forward us, streaks of light swirled in a shifting mosaic of colors and impressions. Images of feathers, eyes, beaks, and talons, appeared and disappeared at random within the cloud of light. Gurek readied his swords before him, his own barrier of defensive energy primed and ready. The blur abruptly jolted forward faster, faint impressions in the grass were all we had to work with. Gurek kept one sword diagonal in a defensive position while the other lashed out. Crystalline chimes sounded as his sword hit and glanced off the side of the monster, getting no more than a glancing blow. A whistling chime sounded out and Gurek grunted as another chime rang out as his sword was pushed back for a moment, his boots digging into the grass below. For a brief moment, the mirage dancer came back into perfect focus. Its tail was pressed up against Gurek¡¯s sword, the bird whirling in mid air, using the force of its twirling body to whip its razor sharp tail around. The mirage dancer began to fade again as it pushed out with its tail, straitening out to regain distance. Into that moment, Inda¡¯s dagger lashed out, striking against the ball of its body. The dagger only penetrated a few inches with a sound of cracking and crashing crystal clinking. The bird made its first sound, letting out a pure high note, like a tone of perfect crystal, loud and resonant. The boss finished disappearing and the dagger flew out of its whirling cloud, not firming embedded enough to stay in its rapidly moving body. I had sent up a spear of stone, but the bird had sidestepped it with contemptuous ease. Since we were defending, I sent up additional spikes, surrounding us with a haphazard forest of sharp stone edges. The blurring images returned toward us, now marred with fragmented images of blood. It moved between the spikes without issue, gracefully leaving them undisturbed as it attacked again. Its bladed tail snapped into focus again as Gurek interposed his sword as best he could. The razor edge slipped slightly past to cut against the barrier of light, leaving a faint gleaming scar in its perfection. Prepared for the strike, Gurek¡¯s other sword stabbed out as he lunged forward, pushing his defensive sword to the side to deflect absorbing the bosses moment. Briefly stalled in midair, the boss took the sword into its body, the sword piercing a half a foot into the flesh. Inda and I both took the time to add injuries of our own. The nearest stone spike shifted at the base whipping the hard stone into back section of the bird. Two daggers, thrown with greater force than the last one each penetrated into the body, each going in up to the hilt. The boss cried out again, even higher than last time. Its voice was so high and pure that some of the crystals hanging in the air resonated with the sound for a moment, drawing it out into a lingering note even as the monstrous bird faded out of view once again, reforming into an even bloodier mirage now showing hints of the dagger¡¯s hilts among everything else. The boss¡¯s tactics didn¡¯t vary, and it came springing out of the mirage, again and again. Even knowing how it would attack, small glimmering scars built up on Gurek¡¯s barrier. However, in exchange, sword strikes, daggers, and gleaming stone struck against the boss in an ongoing cascade of crashing crystal, leaving its feathers cracked and its body littered with wounds seeping red with blood. By the end, the mirage was a whirlpool of blood red mixed with hints of other colors. It came it to attack again, the mirage now wobbling erratically, and this time its attack was weak, revealing the boss as it heaved for breathe, no longer bothering to cry out when it received wounds. Gurek pierced its eye with his sword, the boss no longer swift enough to deflect with its beak or feathers. The boss shuddered for a moment before it collapsed, a last gasp of air wheezing out. We slowly relaxed as the boss dissolved away. ¡°How bad is the damage, Gurek?¡± I asked. ¡°Firi¡¯s barrier got the worst of it, but I will have a few wounds in a second as I let them go through.¡± he replied. Firi came up from behind me, touching Gurek as his hands began to glow with light. ¡°Okay, go ahead,¡± Firi said. Lines of red appeared and began beading with blood, mostly on Gurek¡¯s arms, though a couple stray slashed had reached the side of his face. A couple strands of hair were suddenly cut and blew free in the light breeze. Even as they appeared, however, the wounds began to close. Each glowed with light, the red blood lighting up like garnet jewels in the sun, before the blood faded and the wounds were gone. Firi smiled, ¡°There we go.¡± ¡°Thanks Firi,¡± Gurek said. ¡°So what would you recommend, Gurek?¡± I asked. ¡°If they have good armor, the team¡¯s bulwark should be fine. Steel armor is what I would recommend as a minimum. Even that might end up pretty damaged. ¡°The boss only has one trick, but it¡¯s a good one. If the party has a sensor they should be fine, too. We restricted ourselves to level 15, and it was a potentially dangerous fight. Area attacks or magics to remove the illusion would make the fight much simpler as well. If most parties aren¡¯t careful, however, the bulwark will go down. After that? Most parties will get wiped.¡± It matched my own analysis, but it was best to have confirmation. The boss was simple, but simple didn¡¯t mean easy. The boss was fast, armored, and difficult to pin down. ¡°Okay, party level recommendation at seventeen then, to match the boss?¡± I asked. The others nodded and Inda made a note on her map. We stepped forward, the boss having dissolved away already, and headed to the door at the base of the giant tree. It yawned open to greet us as we approached. SSD 4.44 - Into the Woods ¡°The strongest oak of the forest is not the one that is protected from the storm and hidden from the sun. It''s the one that stands in the open where it is compelled to struggle for its existence against the winds and rains and the scorching sun.¡± -Napoleon Hill ==Zidaun== An archway passed behind me as I entered a circular room. The building was larger inside than should have been possible, though I felt no trace of mana or disorientation. We descended and the surroundings slipped away in a moment of inattention. Whatever power crafted the interior of the space or moved us, was too subtle for me to detect. The room was dim, but not shadowed. Each area of the room equally lighted by an omnipresent light. The light had no source that I could discern. The walls, floor, and ceiling were the familiar black basalt from the Starlight Grotto, rough and studded with tiny crystalline flashes of color. With the source-less light, and the basalt too rough to reflect, the illusion of being surrounded by stars was enough to almost make me dizzy. My feet and extra senses assured me of the solidity of the room, as did the other things present inside it. To the right was a familiar doorway, with the number five inscribed on it. Another teleportation room? Probably¡­ In the middle of the room was a joyful sight for any adventurer, another chest. The wood was a deep polished brown, with bands of gleaming bronze. It was not locked, and I couldn¡¯t sense anything special about it, except some of what was inside it. Directly forward, past the chest, was a door. The door was a mix of metals, used to depict a forest. Verdigris leaves adorned copper trees, while a golden sun hung in blue steel sky. Shadowed patches of dull iron contrasted with polished sections that reflected the light. A path of silver wended between the trees, disappearing from view. To the left was a hexagonal column about waist high on the closer end, from there the top rose in a forty-five degree angle. It was identical to columns we had seen previously next to the altar, though this held only a single impression in the surface. Gurek had already seen the chest as was waiting anxiously for me to give the approval to open it. ¡°There is something with mana inside it,¡± I said. Gurek sighed, but stood back from the chest, allowing me to extend a tendril of stone to open the chest. Simultaneously, I made a barrier of stone, prepared for a trap. Nothing happened, the chest opened without issue. The tendril reached in and pulled out a small glowing blue stone, which I identified reflexively, and my identify skill leveled up. I blinked with soft surprise, it had been some time since it had improved.
Mana Crystal Color: Blue A stone capable of storing mana. Glows more intensely the more mana it contains. Fractures explosively if too much mana is added. Comes in different colors.
¡°Just a mana crystal, but my skill improved.¡± I said and the others relaxed before offering me their congratulations. Nothing could stop Gurek, however, and he almost immediately rushed up to hold the crystal, taking it as I allowed the tendril and wall to return to the floor. He admired it for a moment, the cut of the facets glittering as it turned, before he put it away. The money that was contained within vanished with equal promptness. ¡°If those are common loot,¡± Inda mused, ¡°we will get a lot of people interested in the dungeon. Mages of various sorts, craftsmen, emblemists, plus nobles will want them for jewelry. There are various places to mine them, but a blue that pure is rare.¡± ¡°White is the most common, right?¡± Firi asked. ¡°The church uses a lot of those in decorating.¡± ¡°Yeah,¡± Inda said, ¡°though technically those mana stones are clear, their light is white though.¡± Firi just nodded amiably. ¡°Just another thing to report,¡± I said, with a slight smile. I pointed over to the column. ¡°I want to find out what that thing does, but we need to get back to my people really quick. I can tell them to start back into the dungeon, since the changes were not huge. Let the other team back into the dungeon, too.¡± The others nodded, willing to let me take care of my duties. Lucky to have them. Thankfully, with the magical transportation behind the door, it took only minutes before we had gone, dealt with a few commands, and gathered into the room again. I walked up to the column and placed the crystal token into the indentation. A flare of mana behind us made me whirl around, but no threat appeared. Instead the chest dissolved away. In its place was a pedestal of marble chased in silver, forming the design of a lady kneeling, her cupped hands upraised in offering or supplication. A moment later mana flared again as another object formed. It grew from where it touched the pedestal, gleaming lines of metallic crystal extending outwards. A moment later a sabre lay on the flat surface of the pedestal. The blade, a thin line glittering with a razor sharp edge, had the metallic hues of polished steel, though the blade was slightly translucent. Only the edges were truly see through, a distorted and faded image of the table showing. The hilt, guard, and pommel were made of the same material, though the handle was wrapped carefully in leather. The hilt, guard, and pommel together formed the image of the Mirage Dancer. The hilt and guard were a delicate tracery of feathers, the large feathers forming the two sides of the hilt, while a thin delicate tail formed the guard before ending in the spherical body of the beast. The way the crysteel was formed cast subdued rainbows across its surface. Off to the side, almost unnoticed, was a suitable sheath.
Crysteel Sabre ¨C The Whirling Dancer Material: Crysteel If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Effects: Mana Imbued This sabre is made of an advanced material: Crysteel. Flexible and highly resistant to damage the sabre is imbued with mana.
¡°A crysteel sabre, imbued with mana,¡± I said. ¡°It doesn¡¯t actually say what that is though, but it has a name. The Whirling Dancer.¡± Inda walked up to the sabre reverently. ¡°It¡¯s beautiful,¡± she breathed. We all smiled as Inda gently stroked the blade. ¡°I assume that you will want it, Inda?¡± I asked, already knowing the answer. ¡°Yes,¡± she took a moment to straighten up, ¡°I would like to keep it.¡± She lifted the blade, making a few experimental slashes and thrusts, before she buckled the sabre onto the opposite side from the other one. It would be a reserve weapon until we could get it checked out by a proper smith. That would allow us to establish its proper value, as well. Inda was practically glowing as we prepared to enter the other door. I had retrieved the crystal token, and its number had dropped by one. Of course, it had a number in the thousands by now, since I had sacrificed so much that had been brought by my people. We tried the token again, but nothing happened. The door opened, revealing an earthen tunnel. Roots cradled the tunnel, large and mediums roots acting as living archways, while tiny roots sprouted from everywhere. Most were compacted against the interior, but some descended from the ceiling like hair. The tunnel contained no lighting, only the light from the room behind showed us the way. With light stones soon in hand, we walked down the tunnel, which was a short distance, but twisted several times. Soon we turned around a last curve and could see light in the distance. The tunnel ended with two large curving roots to either side. Thin leafy stems dangled from above, covering the exit in a shifting layer of green. We pushed through the green and emerged onto a forest path, a spot of light reaching us through the trees.
You have entered the: Wandering Woods
I let the others know the name while I identified a few nearby plants, checking for anything dangerous. Despite my improved skill, it still wasn¡¯t particularly good for plants. The plant covering the exit was a curtain willow, its long arching branches were thin, but multitudinous, and so covered in greenery that the trunk and upper branches were almost completely hidden. It was the only willow I could see, making use of its elevated position to reach toward the sky. The other trees, despite the path¡¯s slight downward incline, soared above the willow, and thus towered over us. Most of the trees had green leaves, in a variety of shapes and sizes, though even the lowest branches were out of reach. A quick identify revealed species of oaks, birch, and many others. A lonely sun hung in the sky, its light warm and radiant, casting cheerful light across the entire scene. So strange to have a warm sun. My footsteps were muffled by the soft dirt of the path, the soil giving way beneath my boots as we moved forward, releasing the smell of fresh churned earth. Wind blew gently through the trees in a susurrous of shifting leaves. Insects, hidden in short grasses and shrubbery, made their own chorus of clicks and chirps. Far off, the cries of some unknown animal echoed through the woods. Gurek walked in the lead, though I stopped him after only a moment. ¡°Pitfall trap,¡± I said, pointing. Honestly, pointing out the trap was probably unnecessary, a thin layer of cloth over the pit was covered in the same dirt of the path, but the cloth¡¯s natural color was an off-white, and sections of it were clearly visible ahead. Gurek approached the trap carefully. He lifted the cloth, the dirt cascading off it onto the forest floor and into the pit. The pit¡¯s edges were irregular, sections of dirt falling into the pit. Roots from the trees crisscrossed around the edges of the pit. One was cut off where the pit had cut directly through it, leaving sap to ooze in streaks down the edge into the pit. The pit was six feet deep. Deep enough to be potentially dangerous, though that would mostly come from an unexpected fall. The soil at the bottom was soft enough to prevent any other injury, but getting out could be a pain for some, especially with the crumbling edges. Gurek shook the cloth free of dirt. ¡°Looks like good cloth,¡± he said. ¡°I should have identified it before you touched it,¡± I said, shaking my head. ¡°Sorry, still getting used to having something more useful.¡±
Sheet of Fabric Material: Linen ¡®Rough¡¯ cloth from the dungeon. The lowest quality the dungeon is willing to offer, this linen is equal to the standard product of a professional weaver.
Interesting. Either my connection to the dungeon is giving me additional information, or hiding the dungeon¡¯s nature is going to be impossible. For a moment he considered what would happen if that was the case¡­ What the hell would we do if the dungeon refuses to be quiet? If it wants to talk to everyone? Well¡­ I know what I will do; whatever it wants. I shook my head. These were thoughts for another time. ¡°It¡¯s linen,¡± I said, ¡°and the quality is good.¡± ¡°Hmm¡­¡± Gurek muttered, ¡°you think that we might find some flax in the dungeon?¡± ¡°No idea,¡± I said, shrugging. ¡°It¡¯s not even really awake right now. Still absorbing what we gave it. Language takes time to assimilate properly.¡± Firi shook his head sadly and sighed. I shot him a pained smile. Wish I could just tell him everything, it would be so much easier. Thinking about the dungeon gave me a subtle feeling of worship and gratitude. My god is worth it. We moved on, following the path as it twisted through the woods. Whatever barriers that surrounded the woods were invisible from here; the trees blocked any sight that went more than a couple hundred feet. Occasional glens of thicker growth blocked sight even further, though we did see lone weathered columns of stone occasionally. Traps appeared at irregular intervals, and we collected the cloth each time. Sometimes it was a few feet, other times it was a good two hundred feet without any traps. The traps were all fairly obvious, though some had rocky bottoms or were deeper, slightly raising the potential level of danger. Finally, we encountered something different as we entered a forest clearing. The sun, halfway down the sky, cast beams at a sharp angle into our eyes as we entered. My improved eyes only struggled a little to see through the glare, letting me see the far edge of the clearing clearly where the path reentered the woods. The large trees cradled the clearing in long shadows that reached toward us from the far side. The path continued through the clearing, crossing a wide burbling stream as it passed through. The grasses of the small meadow were short, sprinkled with wild flowers, except where they grew in riotous perfusion by the banks of the stream. A single tree grew on the other side of the stream, several bright fruits visible in the branches. I identified the fruit tree and all the large grasses, looking out for monsters.
Aritz Tree Plant Has edible fruit. Spiked Cattail Plant Morning Rush Plant Golden Iris Plant
The list went on, but I found nothing other than plants. That didn¡¯t mean the plants couldn¡¯t be dangerous. Plenty of plants had various forms of defenses, magical or otherwise. Most of those would only cause issues if we messed with the plant, however. ¡°Anyone else feel like this is a trap?¡± Inda said softly. ¡°Yeah,¡± Firi muttered. ¡°It¡¯s been too peaceful.¡± They weren¡¯t wrong. With the exception of the rather lackluster traps, it had been no more than a pleasant walk. We grew tenser as we neared the bridge, expecting something to attack. The wooden boards of the bridge creaked lightly as we walked on them, but I could tell the bridge was sturdy, and the boards did no more than flex lightly. The intricate carvings on the posts of the bridge, depicting flowers and grasses tangled together, were no more than a passing thought against the anticipation. We heard a sound, like the fluttering of leaves, but growing louder into a dull roar, coming from all around us. We tensed, each of us darting our heads back and forth, keeping as much of the clearing in view as possible. Specks of color appeared amidst the trees, weaving between them in the air, moving too swiftly to see clearly at first. First there were dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, and then finally they burst into the air above the clearing from every direction, spiraling in the air above us. ¡°Holy shit,¡± Gurek said. They flew through the air and were shaped like giant flat wings made of supple skin attached to an equally flat body. From there the details varied, some had heads that resembled a fish pushing out from the front, some had additional fins, and others had long tails, and still more had combinations. Their colors were just as varied. I saw some that were a solid blue, quickly noting other solid colors, and then more that had wing-edges dappled in white and pink, and there were far more patterns in the swirling kaleidoscope of color. I frantically tried to identify as many types as possible. SSD 4.45 - Swarms and Symbols ¡°Life swarms with innocent monsters.¡± Charles Baudelaire ==Zidaun== By this point we had all crouched down, unconsciously making ourselves lower and entering a more defensive posture. Each of us had our necks craned toward the sky, watching the swirling mass. Notifications flickered up before me as I focused. My eyes flickered between different creatures to analyze them, each message internalized and dismissed with rapid speed.
Pink Pygmy Moth-Wing Skyray ¨C Level 1 Animal A tiny skyray, less than a foot in wing span, with pink wings. The wings are striped with thin purple lines, and edged with black highlights. The wings are connected with a relatively narrow band to the main body. The main body has four small fins that resemble antennae.
Opal Spotted Skyray ¨C Level 8 Animal A skyray with large wings and a flat body. Both are black and covered in spots. Each wing curves forward until they gradually taper into a point. Near the center of the body the spots are gray, shading into light shades of blue toward the tip of the wings. Its tail is a short spike.
Peacock Wing Skyray ¨C Level 9 Animal Skyray with spotted wings and a rear ventral fin; each is orange with blue spots. The main body is sky blue, narrow, and vaguely triangular in cross-section. The front forms a white point with white lines extending a short distance along the pointed edges.
Blue Butterfly Skyray ¨C Level 4 Animal Despite its name, this skyray is still up to three feet across. The name comes from the striations and outline of its wings and body that match the patterning of a butterfly wing. It also has a long beak reminiscent of an extended proboscis.
...
There were more, at least a dozen different types of skyrays swirling in the vast cloud. The air was so thick with them the ground resembled the dappled shade of the forest. Lances of light pierced down between the specks of color swimming through the air. The air was filled with the flapping of large wings, and over that, thousands of clicks echoed through the clearing. Deep dull clicks contrasted against high pitched chattering clicks in rapid succession, while others sounded closer to a muffled bell; together they produced a cacophony of sound. Even from here, well below even the lowest of them. I could feel mana sweeping through the air. Mana flavored with the feeling of air. Obviously they were using it fly, though many might have other abilities as well. ¡°Don¡¯t engage,¡± I whispered tersely. ¡°They are animals, not monsters.¡± We had seen other animals already, of course. Tiny insects and worms had multiplied in profusion amidst the Meadow¡¯s grass and soil. These were the first we had seen with any levels, however. We stayed frozen for almost a minute, while the swarm gradually dispersed. I heaved a sigh as the rest of my companions displayed their own measures of relief. ¡°By Otga¡¯s bloody red maw,¡± Gurek said, ¡°what was that?¡± Firi¡¯s own relief was evident when he didn¡¯t react to Gurek¡¯s words at all. We were all relieved, and for good reason. There was no way we could have killed all of the flying horde. We probably could have survived, between Firi¡¯s barriers and my own ability to hide us beneath the stone, but it would have turned the journey into a long slog of defense. ¡°You said they were all animals?¡± Inda said with a frown, her brows furrowed. ¡°Those are skyrays, right?¡± ¡°Yes,¡± I said, my body still tense, before I shared all the details of my notifications. My eyes and ears were still hyper-alert, faint movements in the shadows and sounds causing them to focus reflexively. ¡°I swear,¡± Gurek said, ¡°this dungeon thinks it¡¯s funny.¡± It occurred to me that he might be right. Could this have been a practical joke? ¡°Maybe,¡± I said slowly, as I recalled the scene of the swirling mass, ¡°or it might have been another display of art.¡± The others paused for a moment at that, no doubt thinking back to the same image I had just replayed in my mind. I had been too focused on the massive threat to notice how beautiful the interplay of color, motion, and light had been. And it had been beautiful. Now I regretted not paying more attention to that aspect, instead. Firi shook his head, and sighed. ¡°I think you are right about that.¡± Gurek grinned, ¡°So how much should we tell people about what to expect?¡± Inda grinned, a hint of her own mischief shining through. ¡°Well we need to tell them something¡­¡± she started, ¡°but it doesn¡¯t need to be everything. We will need to at least mention the skyrays, though. Those are from the Eastern Continent.¡± I interrupted with slightly more seriousness. ¡°Tell them not to panic,¡± I said. ¡°However¡­¡± I hesitated for a moment. ¡°What else we tell them will depend on what exactly this section is designed to teach.¡± This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source. Inda¡¯s face was thoughtful, obviously thinking about it. One of her fingers had reached up to wiggle the lobe of her ear, while her eyes looked down at the ground. It was a funny thought, even for me, that the dungeon was trying to teach adventurers to do their job better, but it was a very real one. There was a benefit for the dungeon, of course, because raising the adventurer¡¯s skills would help them gain levels. And more powerful adventurers would give more to the dungeon. Eventually she sighed. ¡°Fair. There are too many possibilities to make any good decisions just yet. It could be training too many things.¡± ¡°My view as well,¡± I said, ¡°though you might have considered something I didn¡¯t. Nobody say what you think for the moment, we don¡¯t want to get attached to particular point of view. If you think you have enough evidence to come to a conclusion, mention it then.¡± Learning not to jump to a particular conclusion was a necessary skill in an environment that was trying to kill you. Making an incorrect assumption could get us killed. And just as important, making incorrect assumptions could get people depending on our information killed. The guild did its best to remind people that information was not complete and subject to errors or change, but people still died from being too dependent on it. The guild specifically avoided telling us about deaths due to misinformation, but we knew it happened. Learning not to dwell on it was necessary skill. I tried to focus on the many lives our information had saved instead. ¡°Still,¡± Firi said, his voice troubled, ¡°it having animals is strange. We have seen a few insects and such in other dungeons. They don¡¯t harm the dungeon and they live off whatever scraps they can get.¡± He trailed off. ¡°Just more of the same though, isn¡¯t it?¡± Gurek said. ¡°This place is weird.¡± Gurek turned to look at me, his eyes intense. ¡°The other intelligent dungeons are usually inaccessible, right? They belong to your people. Do they make areas with animals and plants and such?¡± I took a moment to think about it, and what I could say. They did add in areas where plants could grow, but that was simply to add in areas where our plant forms could be added without standing out. ¡°They do add a bit more variety in the dungeons,¡± I said. ¡°They add a bit of space for us to live, as well, though many dungeons don¡¯t provide enough area for us all. They add some plants, and occasionally some animals, but¡­ they aren¡¯t like this¡­¡± I waved my arms around to indicate the forest and the lush grass. ¡°I¡¯m not sure they could even understand enough about us to make something like this. And the dungeons are certainly not any less deadly. Maybe they could learn to make the dungeon have more progression, but that might not be possible.¡± Gurek worried at his bottom lip with his teeth. ¡°You don¡¯t think they could be made safer?¡± I snorted. ¡°We cannot make them anything. They are our gods, Gurek. We do what they want, not the other way around. Maybe, they could be taught why a much slower dungeon progression might be helpful to them, but I wouldn¡¯t hold my breath. They are ancient and they change slowly.¡± ¡°Oh.¡± Gurek said faintly. ¡°I had hoped¡­¡± He paused for a moment. ¡°I thought maybe people wouldn¡¯t need to die so much.¡± He looked crestfallen by the end, his shoulders drooping. I sighed, before placing my hand on his shoulder, squeezing it gently. ¡°It was a good thought,¡± I said. ¡°At least this place is something special. If this place becomes popular enough with new delvers it might save some lives.¡± He perked up a bit at that, though his face was still a bit pale. ¡°Yeah,¡± Gurek said, shifting from foot to foot. ¡°Sorry, just thinking about some of those we have lost. Once we get to another exit, I think I am done for the day.¡± The others and I nodded somberly. We all had memories of loss. For a moment my thoughts turned to my trainer again, before I banished them forcefully. Now was not the time. I cleared my throat. ¡°Of course, Gurek,¡± I said. ¡°We need to remain alert for now though.¡± We went over the bridge and into the other side of the forest glade. The aritz tree was set off to the left side of the path, four large bright red fruit visible on the branches. From here we could see the hole in the ground nearby, large enough to house a decent sized animal. We approached with cautious steps. It was best to see if this was a trap. As we got closer, something stirred from the hole in a scurry of legs. I identified it before I could even see it clearly.
Ridgeback Nurak ¨C Level 13 Animal Reptilian hexapod with dull spikes on its back, centered on its spine. Its back bears a turtle like pattern of yellow plates with grey between them. While the plates are lightly armored, its primary defense is a thick layer of fat beneath the plates. Few predators near its size find killing one worth the trouble, getting exhausted long before they manage to kill it. Its slitted golden eyes are side facing, as it is primarily a scavenger or herbivore, with each eye protected by a small ridge of scales. While it has claws on each of its six limbs, they are primarily used for digging. When facing a sufficiently larger predator, it hides in its den. The claws are used for self defense only if it is unable to get away, or when challenging for mating rights. Old males often have many long scars on their backs.
¡°Animal again,¡± I spoke quietly. Animals were¡­ not really my specialty. I didn¡¯t think they were really the specialty of any of us. That meant the rules for dealing with them were unknown. We hadn¡¯t expected the monsters in the Meadow to respond with anything other than pure aggression, either, but we had tried anyway. And been surprised by the results. The nurak hadn¡¯t tried to attack us yet. It simply stood aggressively, its middle legs splayed out to the side to make it look bigger. Since it wasn¡¯t moving, I read my notification to the others. ¡°Eh, as long as it doesn¡¯t attack us, it isn¡¯t our job right now, right?¡± Gurek said. ¡°We are supposed to get as deep as we can, let others battle one and make a report.¡± Inda nodded, ¡°You are right, Gurek.¡± I was surprised she didn¡¯t tease him, but he did still look a little down. She could be more responsive to his moods than their adversarial banter would suggest. ¡°Yeah, let¡¯s go.¡± I said, starting to back away. It felt odd to not kill a monster, well¡­ animal, in a dungeon. Especially since we usually needed try and explore and kill everything. That was part of the job. However, Caden¡¯s dungeon wasn¡¯t really explorable by a single group. Not in any reasonable time frame, anyway. In addition, it had changed already while we were here. If that kept up, the records would need to be updated constantly. The nurak didn¡¯t bother to follow after us, just watching as we got farther away. It stayed watching until we reentered the woods, and it went out of sight. The path through the woods was much the same as before, though now there were signs of life everywhere. Skyrays flickered in the foliage, and smaller animals leapt between trees. In the distance we saw the occasional herbivore leaning down to eat the scattered bushes, ferns, and grass, their ears flickering alertly as they ate. They were too far to identify and see clearly, but they looked like some kind of deer. The path remained much the same for the moment, the traps on it pitfalls of various kinds. Each was poorly concealed, though the cloth was occasionally covered by fallen leaves instead of dirt. In the distance, works of stone in various states of decay showed themselves. Eventually, on the right side of the path, we saw something different. We approached slowly, but there was no reaction, and eventually we reached it. Right next to the path, resting on a low and wide stone plinth, an upright stone structure formed a rectangular shape. At the bottom was a small empty arch, carved with intricate abstract designs. Above that was another arch shape, though this arch was not empty. Instead a cracked surface of broken crystal covered a section of heavily oxidized copper. A few small spots gleamed with the warm reddish brown of intact copper where the air hadn¡¯t been able to reach. Above that, contained in the rectangular frame of two vertical columns leading directly up from the first arch, was a stone circle. The circle had a similar background as the arch, made of the same oxidized copper. However, this area was less damaged and mostly polished, the oxidation here was obviously an intentional design, the blue green surface beneath the crystal gleaming in the light, except where it had faded near the broken edges. In the circle, and overlaid on top of it, was a tree design. The trunk was a rough brown wood, emerging directly from the bottom edge of the circle, and reaching up until it split into branches and became covered in deep green leaves of turquoise stone. Above the circle, another arch finished the stone rectangle, this arch having decorative tree patterns and a similar green background. The frame that contained it flared into a flat top. I identified it.
Arbor Monument
I told the others what it was called, but it didn¡¯t mean anything to them, either. ¡°What should we do?¡± I asked. ¡°Just ignore it and move on,¡± Gurek said. Inda sighed, drawing on her map, a sketch of the monument soon began to appear on another page. ¡°Probably not a good idea,¡± she said. ¡°We have already seen doors that required keys to open. Proof that we had done something before we could proceed.¡± She paused for a moment, before continuing. ¡°And this dungeon is not random. It might just be another piece of art, since it seems to like that, but it is placed right next to the path. If it is interactive, then we probably need to do that before we can make any progress.¡± It was good logic, so I nodded, though Gurek still looked conflicted ¡°If it summons a boss we can defeat it quickly and leave a more detailed analysis for others.¡± I said. Gurek nodded, with Firi giving his assent after Gurek gave his. I stepped up onto the plinth. My head was level with the top of the broken copper mirror, so I reached out and touched it. For a moment, nothing happened, and then I felt mana begin to gather slowly. I warned the others, but it was a cursory notice, nothing too terrible was likely to happen with mana this slow. At the base of the mirror¡¯s half circle, a small section began to glow with light. The light spread upwards until it branched off into sections, dividing again, and then formed the patterns of innumerable tiny leaves. This continued until an image of a tree was sketched out in glowing lines of light on the crystal. Sections of the tree were distorted due to the cracks, but the overall shape was still clear. We all waited for a moment, but nothing else happened. ¡°Guess that was it,¡± Gurek muttered. I smiled at him, Firi matching me, while Inda patted his arm. ¡°Come on, keep going.¡± Together, we marched forward into the woods once again. SSD 4.46 - The Portal Puzzle ¡°A good puzzle, it''s a fair thing. Nobody is lying. It''s very clear, and the problem depends just on you.¡± -Erno Rubik ==Zidaun== This entire area had been strange. Sure, the vast gathering of skyrays had been terrifying, but overall there had been no need to deal with anything more than a few simple traps. In a normal dungeon, if they were inclined to vast acts of creation like this, I might assume that their instincts had tried something and it didn¡¯t work. Plenty of dungeons had nonsensical stairs, and wandering corridors to nowhere. However, this place was perfectly constructed. The trees were balanced against the low growing plants and the slender saplings struggling to break through the canopy casting the shadows of their elders. Insects multiplied in profusion in the ground and hummed in whirling dances through the air. Small animals raced through the underbrush, the shaking of their passage often the only sign of their presence. Elusive herbivores were only visible due to animal trails and swift blurs in the distance. And above all, colorful skyrays darted through the air like flowers carried on the breeze. No, I would not say that this place was built without understanding. That did not mean my own understanding was sufficiently developed to unravel what was going on. As we followed the lightly wandering trail, the continued absence of a threat made me uneasy. It was possible, though I thought it unlikely, that Caden had been in the middle of redesigning this when he was given the second skill book. If so, this area might lack whatever threats it was meant to have, but it I would be a fool to count on that. The others are not fools either, and so we each proceeded carefully, each of us wary of what threat might emerge. Eventually, the path lead through a stone archway into another clearing. The clearing was surrounded by dense woods, the base of the trees crowded with thick thorny brambles, forming an, if not impenetrable, at least formidable barrier. At the back of the clearing, ten empty archways were set into a crumbling wall. We stepped into the clearing, each of us wary¡­ Each of the archways glowed with light, revealing an opening into dirt and stone tunnel. Then, one tunnel closed, the tree symbol of the arbor monument etched into the stone seal. Nothing else happened. ¡°Well,¡± Inda said finally, ¡°that was anticlimactic.¡± ¡°This entire place has been off,¡± Gurek muttered. ¡°Other than scaring us, this has been nothing but a pleasant walk in the woods.¡± That was a fair point, and we each agreed in our own ways. ¡°Odd that activating the monument closed a path though.¡± Firi said, his brows furrowed. ¡°I would have expected it to open one instead.¡± ¡°Obviously some kind of puzzle,¡± I said, sighing. The others winced a little, and with good reason. Puzzles in dungeons were notorious for being¡­ convoluted. Personally, I attributed that to most dungeons operating off of instincts. That meant the correct solution to puzzles could easily be nonsensical, and only worked out with large amounts of trial and error. Other times it was so simple and obvious that it shouldn¡¯t count as a puzzle at all. Awakened dungeons tended to be better at them, but even they often had trouble understanding the perspective and limitations of how people viewed the world. Etching out a number combination across multiple rooms in tiles, with walls cutting across individual numbers, was obvious to a dungeon. To others, it looked like decoration, since every number was broken into multiple rooms. I doubted Caden would have that issue, but that didn¡¯t mean it wouldn¡¯t be difficult and painful. ¡°Okay, so¡­ we need to go back and find the others?¡± Inda asked. I nodded, as did Firi and Gurek, though Gurek grumbled something under his breath. We turned around only to find that the archway to enter the clearing had disappeared. No sign of the pathway remained, the entire perimeter now and even taller barrier of razor sharp brambles. Arm thick wooden stems wound around and about the trees, the spines of the brambles dripping with something dark and poisonous looking.
Aurora¡¯s Rampart Plant Poisonous
Learning that it was, in fact, poisonous was helpful, but didn¡¯t tell me much more than before, though I did let the others know. ¡°It might be possible,¡± I said, ¡°to get through or around the barrier, but it seems pretty obvious that we are supposed to pick one of the options.¡± ¡°And what happens if we choose the wrong one, huh?¡± Gurek said, scowling in frustration. ¡°If there is only one correct choice,¡± Inda said, ¡°odds are we will find out.¡± I just nodded, waved forward, and we started to walk towards the portals. We studied them for a moment, but other than the sealed portal, they were completely identical. Just in case, however, I reached out and touched the arbor symbol. Nothing happened, but that was what I expected. I would have felt foolish if we learned that they did something later and we hadn¡¯t even tried. Identifying it didn¡¯t help either. A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation. Eventually we chose a portal at random and entered, the other portals sealing as soon as one of had entered. The tunnel wove a few times before we saw a familiar sight. The same willow leaves formed a curtain over the exit. ¡°Shit, are we back to the beginning?¡± Gurek said, looking like he wanted to hit a wall. ¡°Can we check something?¡± Inda asked, looking around. I wasn¡¯t sure what she was looking for, but it appeared Firi and Gurek were just as confused. ¡°What are you looking for?¡± Firi said. ¡°What will we find if we turn around and go back down the tunnel?¡± she said. That¡­ was an interesting question. If we were back to the start, would we find the path to The Meadow if we went backward? We turned around, but after a quick jaunt back through the twists and turns, we stopped. There, ahead of us, was the same green curtain of leaves blowing fluttering gently. ¡°Oh gods,¡± Gurek muttered, ¡°it¡¯s some kind of labyrinth.¡± ¡°Don¡¯t be overly dramatic,¡± Inda snapped. ¡°So far it is just a puzzle. We need to go through and verify it, but it looks like if you get it wrong you just start over at the beginning. Annoying, but hardly a terrible punishment.¡± Just in case, we still turned back around again and then went through the exit that way. We emerged onto a familiar path. An identical willow matched the equally identical path and woods. Well¡­ almost identical. Skyrays soared through the trees, suggesting that we wouldn¡¯t be dealing with the enormous swarm again. We started forward, and I noticed something else. The trap that had been right near the entrance was gone. Instead, another pitfall trap was placed a few dozen feet farther down the path. ¡°It isn¡¯t completely identical,¡± I said, before pointing out what I noticed. ¡°Doesn¡¯t really change anything,¡± Inda said. ¡°We will need to head into the woods to find the other monuments anyway.¡± ¡°Might as well get started,¡± Gurek said, before setting off into the woods. Going into the woods off the path was a different experience. There were the obvious elements of walking around various bits of shrubbery and trampling through various low growing grasses, but the atmosphere seemed to the be the most profound change. Before, we had been walking along a created path. Now the wildness of the woods became more apparent. The sun was hidden by the encompassing canopy, beams of light streaking between the leaves to spear against wooden trunks and pierce down into the foliage were the only evidence of its presence. And even so, the layered shield of the trees blocked all but the luckiest shafts, the majority spending themselves in splashes of green higher up in sprawling boughs. Sound, likewise, was damped. The calls of the insects and skyrays muted by the enfolding green. Each leaf was a tiny muffling wall, more likely to sound its own whispering song in a susurrous with its brethren then allow another sound to penetrate deeply through the woods. Together, the shifting lights and sounds called me to reverence in a way that few things could. Whatever else this place might be, the woods spoke sacred words to my soul. The others must have felt something similar, for we traversed through the woods in comfortable silence. I was not the only one with a smile on my lips. Soon enough we found another monument. This one was substantially less well preserved than the last one. It was tilted and partially buried in the earth. Still, a red image of fire was plainly visible, and a quick inspection revealed it to be the ¡®flame monument.¡¯ It activated and glowed just the same as the other. Eventually we reached the edge of the woods. Steep cliffs led upward, and aurora¡¯s ramparts were barely visible at the top. We considered it a rather clear indication that we were not meant to climb up them. The next few hours passed in this fashion, as we trekked through the woods crossing back and forth finding more monuments and activating them. They all had different names: skyray, star, snowflake, and so on. Eventually, we tracked down nine of them, and we unable to find another. That part was fine. There were ten portals, so closing nine of them should presumably leave only the correct pathway open. The problem was that each of the monuments was in various levels of decay. One had crumbled down to rubble, a broken symbol of an open cavern split in two lay in separate pieces on the ground. Neither one started to glow when they were touched. I did my best to move and join them, fusing bands of stone to keep them together. When that didn¡¯t work I manipulated the stone and crystal directly, fusing the two sides into a single piece. Still, it refused to do anything. Unable to do anything, we shrugged and gave up for the moment. With that done, we followed the path back to the end, finding the familiar archway and clearing. Once again, there were ten arches, all but two closed. ¡°With one monument being broken,¡± Inda said, ¡°and its portal not closing, it¡¯s obvious that an element of chance has been deliberately included.¡± ¡°You think this is to combat us?¡± Firi said, his head tilted. Inda paused for a moment, then said, ¡°What do you mean?¡± ¡°Well¡­¡± he started slowly, ¡°it knows we are here to map the dungeon, right? It has seen us defeating monsters, and making notes, and a map, and generally documenting how to beat the dungeon.¡± ¡°This¡­¡± he waved toward the arches, ¡°has some randomization to it. And the location of the monuments and traps were randomized.¡± Inda nodded in understanding. ¡°Right,¡± she said, ¡°even the arbor seal is in a different location. So the correct portal¡¯s position is likely randomized too. Is it trying to make our work useless?¡± ¡°No,¡± I said, waving one of my hands in dismissal. ¡°I don¡¯t think so. It could have made things far more random. Completely random monsters and bosses. I wouldn¡¯t put it past to to completely randomize the terrain, either. Instead, this area is mostly the same. The strategy to defeat it hasn¡¯t changed...¡± ¡°It won¡¯t let people cheat,¡± Gurek said. We all turned to look at him. ¡°What?¡± he said, his posture curled in a little bit. ¡°People do that all the time. The dungeons that give good resources, they get run over and over to collect loot. Stuff the local area needs, money, whatever¡­ People figure out how to get them and then just run the area over and over again.¡± He was right. That was what most professional teams ended up doing. The average people who just wanted a good living and to make money would pick something they could do and hope that the dungeon wouldn¡¯t change something up and kill them. Most new adventurers died before they reach that point. ¡°That is how most people make money in a dungeon,¡± Inda said. ¡°If this one won¡¯t let people do that¡­¡± No no,¡± Gurek both his hands in denial. ¡°You don¡¯t understand. The overall strategy here should remain applicable, right? So people can run this area over and over. However, they won¡¯t be able to do it the exact same way twice.¡± ¡°It forces them to not get complacent,¡± I said. ¡°They need to look for traps everywhere, and track down the monuments. And even then¡­ it is going to force them to work for it. To possibly need to repeat the puzzle due simply to chance.¡± Inda and Gurek devolved into bickering about exactly what it would do, neither seeming to notice or care that they agreed on the broad strokes of the effects. What does Caden actually want? Training people not to be complacent and cheat was excellent for the adventurers¡­ but what did it do for Caden? Well¡­ it got him more competent people who would get farther into the dungeon. Maybe that is all he wants. The same strategy to collect more over time until they die in a final harvest. A part of him, however, had started to wonder. Caden¡­ feels so much like a person. What if he wants something different? He seems to have a sense of humor and an appreciation of beauty. Sure, it is all dangerous, but he is a dungeon. That is his nature. And yet¡­ the dungeon so far had felt less like a dangerous trap, and more like¡­ well¡­ an adventure. People call us that, adventurers, and it is our guild name, but most of the time that isn¡¯t what we actually feel like. It was impossible to know for now. And who knows how Exsan fits into all of this. His own thoughts dwindled away and he finally interrupted the squabbling pair. ¡°Don¡¯t you think we should keep going?¡± he said mildly, his smile quirking up on one side, and an eyebrow raised in inquiry. Both cut off and turned to look at him, Inda starting to blush as she took a step backward. ¡°Right, right,¡± Gurek muttered before turning away, marching toward one of the open portals. Either portal was as good as the other, so nobody objected to his choice. He stepped through and we followed. The same dirt and root bound tunnel greeted us again, though after a few turns we were pleased to see a change. Ahead, while a curtain of leaves still blocked off sight, they were now a colorful mix of yellow, red, and orange. SSD 4.47 - All That Glitters ¡°It was both fascinating and appalling to learn that chimpanzees were capable of hostile and territorial behavior that was not unlike certain forms of primitive human warfare.¡± -Jane Goodall ==Zidaun== Heading through the curtain led into woods that felt similar, but not the same. Another curtain willow formed its own barrier of dangling leaves over the entrance, but it was positioned differently, in addition to having leaves in various bright colors. The whole forest was like that. The pathway was similar, but its curves and slope varied as it wended through the trees. The sun too, was lower in the sky, its rays longer as they pushed through the leaves. The wind whispering through the canopy mixed with the sunlight to make the forest look like it had been set aflame as leaves came free into the air like dripping embers. The lower foliage, in contrast, was still mostly green, though a few of the bushes were patchworks of brown and green, and they stood as emerald islands in a sea of burning leaves. ¡°What do you want to bet that we have to do the same damn thing over again?¡± Gurek grumbled, his face morose as he looked out over the forest. I rolled my eyes, but I was surprised when it was Firi that replied. ¡°Oh cheer up,¡± he said. ¡°This place is beautiful. How far would you need to travel to go through a forest like this, huh? Sure, this one is bound to get more dangerous as we go along, but that¡¯s part of the job. ¡°Besides, this is a greenwood, even if the leaves would suggest otherwise for now, and it is barely Thaw outside.¡± I groaned at Firi¡¯s pun, but at least Gurek smiled a bit. ¡°Not a bad point,¡± Inda said. ¡°I doubt any forest on the planet looks like this one or the part we just left right now.¡± Gurek sighed, but he still smiled as he spoke. ¡°Sure, but did it have to be a damn puzzle? It¡¯s going to take us hours for each part, even if they are all the same size. And is anyone else started to get hungry?¡± We laughed. Of course Gurek is focused on his stomach. ¡°Well, if we find another fruit tree,¡± Inda said, her voice amused and her smile wry, ¡°we can eat some of that.¡± Gurek opened his mouth and then got a slightly stunned expression on his face. ¡°Huh¡­¡± he said. ¡°That¡¯s what it was for.¡± Inda started to ask what he was talked about, but I had already understood his meaning. If people were quite a bit slower than us, or just had worse luck, they could have been trapped in repeating versions of the last area all day. The fruit tree was the only thing we saw that was guarded, and it seemed odd at the time¡­ Unless the purpose of the puzzle isn¡¯t just about the puzzle. Gurek was currently explaining what I had just realized. ¡°This area is about time. How we deal with being stuck in an area. The food is just there to make sure we don¡¯t starve. Though it is guarded so you have to fight for it.¡± ¡°Unfortunately,¡± I said, ¡°I came to same conclusion. Fortunately for us, we are prepared for the long haul¡­ Other adventurers are going to hate it though.¡± Gurek snickered before he responded. ¡°I¡¯m used to it and I¡¯m already going to hate it. I was happy getting to sleep in a bed every night.¡± The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation. We all laughed as we voiced our agreements. ¡°How quickly we get soft,¡± Firi said, his eyes downcast and head shaking with exaggerated grief. I rolled my eyes at him, but I laughed all the same. Finally, we started exploring again. Who knew how long we would be stuck here? The crunching of the leaves disrupted the sound of the woods with every step, and pitfalls hid amongst the fallen leaves. Their design was unchanged, but the presence of the leaves concealed them far better than before. They were still obvious enough that I didn¡¯t need to point them out, though a caution borne of experience and habit ensured that I continued to regardless. After a certain point we stopped bothering to collect the linen. It was just filling up our packs anyway. We had all been keeping an eye on the various animals, of course, but the tall trees offered plenty of places for flying animals to rest or hide. We had even seen signs of nesting skyrays. The nests varied from hollows cut into the trees, branches interwoven into platforms, more typical bird style nests, and more. The first sign that this area was going to deviate in any significant way, beyond appearance, was when some skyrays dived toward us in an attempt to attack. The gleaming appearance of the skyrays was sufficient to give them away, however, the sunlight glancing off them like glittering gold. As soon as I was aware of their presence, I used my skill to identify them.
Golden Shadow-horn Skyray ¨C Level 11 Animal ¨C Juvenile A young skyray with metallic gold coloring and a dark grey horn protruding from its head. Its wings bear similarities to both bird-wings and fins, and the graceful lines of its body end in a short tail. It is a member of one of several cooperative species that are highly territorial. Acting together, the various species are able to have better odds of survival.
Golden Cut Weave Skyray ¨C Level 9 Animal ¨C Juvenile A young skyray with metallic gold coloring and highly flattened body-shape. It resembles a rectangle with a curve cut into each long end. Its tail is in the middle of one of the curved sections, resembling a section of cloth cut out of the larger body. It is a member of one of several cooperative species that are highly territorial. Acting together, the various species are able to have better odds of survival.
Golden Star Skyray ¨C Level 11 Animal ¨C Juvenile A young skyray with metallic gold coloring. Its body is in the general shape of a four pointed star, though its head, which is brown and white, contrasts with the rest of its body. It is a member of one of several cooperative species that are highly territorial. Acting together, the various species are able to have better odds of survival.
At level 11 and lower we were not likely to be particularly pressured, but a successful ambush could have made them dangerous. ¡°Level 11, Animals!¡± I shouted, even as we had started to engage. There were less than a dozen enemies, but their speed in the air meant that they able to perform blitz attacks. Flying creatures were usually fragile, but flight carried enormous advantages in both mobility and maneuverability, which could make them tricky. Each of the skyrays was only a few feet across, though how large a full grown individual would be was anyone¡¯s guess. Knives flew out to meet the oncoming fliers, Inda¡¯s hand flickering in blurring speed, even as her other hand smoothly drew out her sabre with practiced precision. I had already started to crouch down before the first blade flew, and stone and earth crept up my arms as I buried them. Small areas of stone shifted beneath the surface, ready to spring up and intercept any attacks the others missed. Firi¡¯s power wrapped around each of us as he added his own defenses, even as small discs of light, no more than a foot and half across, appeared against each of his flat palms. Faint wisps of mist seeped from the edges, the cold chilling the vapor in the air. And, Gurek, bulwark that he was, had taken a step forward ahead of us, his two blades both at the ready and already in action. The horns and other dark areas of the shadow-horns had proven to be as strong as steel, though the impact as Gurek slid them to the side with a blade left the skyray tumbling in the air, and Inda cut through the golden midsection of its body. It fell into two pieces, even as blood sprayed against the nearby bushes, dying green leaves a red mockery of the canopy overhead. Inda had managed to send off three blades by the time she used her sabre, though only one killed an opponent. Another struck the horn and armor of another shadow-horn, and while its armor protected it, it tumbled across the ground as its momentum was brought to a sudden halt. One of the knives missed entirely, the target dodging gracefully through the air, but another speared one of the cut weaves in the middle. The animal was so thin that the blade passed through it entirely, and it fell to the ground flapping weakly, even as its blood seeped into the ground below. Gurek had not been idle, nor had I, and while his blades flashed in the light as he deflected the attacks of the various skyrays, my fists and elbows smashed against anything that grew too close. Firi stood in the center of our formation now, the rest of us forming a triangle to keep the healer protected. No commands had been needed, just the years of experience making us all automatically take up the appropriate formations. Each of the skyrays attacked in a different way. The shadow-horns did their best to ram directly into us, trusting in their forward armor to protect them from the impact. In turn, the stars had mana that coated the edges of their wings and tail, forming blades that extended about an inch from their flesh; the sharpness was sufficient to cut passing leaves into two clean halves. And the cut weaves strategy was unclear, as they were cut down when they passed too close and flared their whole bodies wide. After a few seconds only three of the skyrays remained, and they broke off into the air. They rose up into the canopy and settled down on a single large tree by hugging their bodies against the bark. Their eyes peered down at us warily. High up in the tree, above them, a nest made of sticks and woven leaves stirred gently. Several dozen tiny eyes peered down at us, and an identify revealed that these were infants of the same species. ¡°It¡¯s a nest.¡± I said, though the others had likely noticed as well. ¡°Best to ignore it,¡± Firi said, ¡°Not like we would have cared if the parents hadn¡¯t attacked.¡± ¡°Not the parents¡­ probably,¡± I replied. ¡°Those things are still juveniles, while the ones in the nest are infants. Not sure what the adults are like.¡± ¡°Let¡¯s go then,¡± Gurek said, and he quickly started to walk off. We each noticed signs to look for in the future. There were cuts high up in the trees surrounding the nest, which were likely some kind of warning or territory mark. There hadn¡¯t been much near ground level, but we hadn¡¯t actually been attacked until we were almost touching the tree the nest was in. As long as we looked for the signs in the future, we could likely avoid another similar encounter. Fortunately, we soon found a monolith; unfortunately, it was guarded. SSD 4.48 - Mechanics of the Soul ¡°Dr. Turing of Cambridge says that the soul is an illusion and that all that defines us as human beings can be reduced to a series of mechanical operations.¡± ¡ªNeal Stephenson ==Caden== Delving into my soul had always had a timeless quality, but before I had always felt a faint need to rush. After all, being here meant I wasn¡¯t able to watch over the rest of the dungeon. Now, that feeling was gone. There was no difference between being here and waiting above. Either way, I had no access to the world. My soul was the same as before: incomprehensible. I understood some of what it showed me, but it was as vast and overwhelming as ever. I let myself drift through it, allowing the images and sensations to wash over me like waves. For a moment I was in a floating fractal tree; a single point branched off into multiple straight trunks, with no roots and no ground. From there more branches sprung off every trunk, becoming more twigs, and stems, and finally giving way to endless bismuth leaves. Each was a rainbow starting their own inward spiraling fractal. My previous experience allowed me to sense where my human form was. It was a single line on a rainbow leaf, a mirror in a laser labyrinth, the taste of a raindrop in a hurricane. I did nothing with that knowledge, save try to understand. Whether I accomplished anything or not, I started to sink deeper. I wasn¡¯t even aware that there were greater depths until I began to pass beneath the current layer. The next layer was more of the same, as far as I could understand, and in time I sank further still. At first, the next layer gave the same impression. However, as I drifted, I began to feel that something was out of place. A single discordant note screeched in a symphony the length of the universe. A dying tree stretched out barren branches in an endless forest. A crack marred the beauty of a perfect sphere. Lightning struck in the void of space. I was drawn to it, and it came ever more into focus. It wasn¡¯t a single flaw, but a thousand, a million. And then it was in front of me, and I knew what it was. Swirling lines of runes carved themselves out with unspeakable elegance upon a slate in the Akashic library¡­ except that even the smallest symbol from another slate made the elegance look like a child¡¯s first crude crayon drawings. A sculptor made a statue to make Michelangelo and Leonardo weep in inadequacy, but compared to the surrounding gallery, it was a pale shadow, for those statues moved and lived. Their every line and gesture burned with their thoughts, and their voices were a choir of perfect harmony. Slowly, as I watched, new terribly flawed beauty was laid down. And, even slower, it was healed. The complexity grew to match the rest; the dance¡¯s steps moved from a single dancer to be a part of the performance as a whole; the sapling grew to tower toward the sky like its brethren. And, I gradually began to understand what this was. It was the system. This was the system writing the knowledge of language, inscribing it into my very soul. Though its capacity was so far beyond mortal limits, it could not match whatever governed the perfection of my soul. Instead, my soul healed the flaw, restoring itself to how it was meant to be. Like so much here in my soul, the knowledge was strange. I simply knew, without context or reason. This flaw was why I was unconscious. This flaw was why gaining new abilities and powers from the system was often jarring. It wasn¡¯t able to do so seamlessly enough. My soul had to heal the inserted knowledge and abilities so they were incorporated properly. Most of the time, it was only a brief issue, but languages were far more vast than almost any other change. A language, by its definition, changed both how you thought, and what you were even capable of thinking. Language was the problem the system was having, too. It understood the language of the soul better than I would expect any mortal to ever manage. However, what it was writing was still only a crude facsimile. In comparison it was¡­ soulless. The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. I chuckled at my own pun more than was probably appropriate. I continued to watch the system¡¯s efforts, but eventually I drifted away from them. I could feel something else now brushing against my perceptions. At the edges of the constant communication and communion with my own soul, I could feel more traces of that other. A feeling I was beginning to recognize as the system. It was more subtle than what I had seen before, but its purpose was also far more subtle. The system was woven all around and through my soul. These didn¡¯t register as imperfections marring the harmony of the rest of my soul, because they were still separate from my soul. Instead, I could feel the faint echoes of the system¡¯s own communications. This was how the system interacted with me. This was how the system monitored my progress and knowledge. It didn¡¯t bother touching my mind directly, at least not for this. Why would it, when my soul was a perfect and far more accurate representation of myself? Perhaps it should have bothered me that the system was so entwined with my very soul, but it didn¡¯t. It wasn¡¯t like I hadn¡¯t already dealt with its ability to change me on a fundamental level. It made my human soul into a dungeon, shoved a bunch of knowledge and abilities into my mind, and had generally been able to do whatever it wanted to me. The revelation that it was here in my soul was less of a revelation in the scope of its intrusion, and more a revelation into how it operated on that scale at all. It was also both vaguely comforting, and terrifying, that my soul was more complex than the system could manage. If my soul wasn¡¯t repairing the unintentional damage from its clumsiness, it would just be terrifying. As it was, the implication that I, my soul, was on some fundamental level vaster than a system that was potentially running this universe was¡­ complicated. Simply having a soul that survived after death was enough for me to start wondering exactly where it came from in the first place. For now, just like I had before, I was shelving that because there was nothing I could do with that knowledge. The system might be a god, or it might be some artificial creation. Though apparently, even if it was a god, it was less (skilled, powerful, old, knowledgeable?) than whatever had created my soul. Yeah¡­ What would I even do with that knowledge? It wasn¡¯t like there was a customer service line I could call up and complain to because a less skilled technician was working on my soul. Honestly, with its errors, the system felt more like a computer system. The creation of some god that fobbed off its job onto a computer so they didn¡¯t need to deal with it anymore. Which¡­ I mean. I could understand. No one wants to work in customer service unless they have to. Did having a system taking care of everything make this hypothetical god more or less lazy than whoever was in charge of my home universe? At least the system was actually running and present. If there was a god in charge of running Earth, they were either absent, or incredibly subtle¡­ I traced what I could of the systems connections. Past a certain point, the web was too ephemeral for me to notice. Either that, or it didn¡¯t actually observe all the areas of my soul. For all I knew there were static areas that only needed to be read once. Areas like the form of my previous body, which obviously wasn¡¯t changing anymore. I traced what I could, but eventually started to drift again. I wasn¡¯t certain what caused me to drift. It could be unconscious, my position responding to my desires, my soul could be actively guiding me, knowledge and understanding could control distance here; it could be anything. Down, deeper, I went once again. The strands of the system were more intricate here, and I could see a small artificial structure attached to part of my soul. In a way that was now becoming familiar, I grew closer to the structure as I concentrated on it. Slowly, its function became clear, as did the part it was attached to. This governed the production of my mana, except¡­ The part that created mana was natural. That part could be turned off, or dialed down, but it was a natural part of the soul. I was meant to be able to produce mana. The fact that it could be switched off suggested that it had simply never been on while human, but¡­ What does it mean if mana production is a natural part of the soul? Honestly, I had no idea. It might be some kind of divine soul energy, or it might just be one more function of the soul. This area was still a tiny piece of even just this layer of my soul. Who knew what all the other pieces could do. For all I knew each piece of this layer was a hypothetical energy type that I could interact with in different lives. The more practical part, for the moment, was if I could alter the artificial structure. Producing mana was dependent on a skill, Soul Mana. At least I knew exactly why soul was in the name now. The system could reach out and manipulate my soul. It is my soul¡­ could I do that same? The initial answer was¡­ no. I tried to reach out to the construct and there was nothing there. Or, more precisely, I tried to reach out and felt like I had no body, let alone arms or fingers. I didn¡¯t let that stop me. Instead, I concentrated on the structure, trying to understand exactly what it was for. Gradually, some pieces of it began to come into better focus, though most of it remained inscrutable. The device was controlling far more than merely the amount of mana created. There was a sense of tuning, as well, to allow for different¡­ flavors of mana. I didn¡¯t actually know what any of that was for, so I left it alone. The last thing I needed was to start producing mana that was incompatible with all my other skills, corrosive, or had some other side effect. Even beyond that, other settings controlled aspects of mana that I didn¡¯t even know existed. I couldn¡¯t understand exactly what they were for, however. I only received vague impressions of power, rigidity, time, sharpness, shining, and so on. Except for mana production, which was what I had wanted to change in the first place, almost all the settings were at minimum or maximum. Mana production was at the lower end of the settings, though there seemed to be an odd amplification happening as mana was produced. I kept reaching out as best I could, imagining manipulating the controls. I imagined hands, other digits, and tendrils of stone moving it. I imagining it moving on its own. None of these, or the other methods I tried, seemed to help, and I didn¡¯t feel like I was even starting to make progress. I went back to observing, trying to understand how this structure connected to my soul. How exactly it was interacting with it. Except¡­ as I studied it more, I realized that the structure wasn¡¯t actually connected for more than an instant at any location. It would touch to make a change and immediately withdraw. The system¡¯s web kept the device in place with regard to my own soul, and, though it kept very close, it wasn¡¯t actually touching continuously. For a moment I considered why, before I thought back to my soul¡¯s previous reaction to foreign elements being directly added. Hmm¡­ that might offer an additional way to make changes. Ultimately, the structure was an artifact of the system, and my attempts to manipulate it had failed. However, I was literally inside a manifestation of my own soul. I focused on my soul, watching the places where the system was almost touching. I could see the sudden flickering touches it made as it bridged the gap, before it pulled away. I urged my soul to action, to motion, to hold onto the system and make its creation my own. My soul shivered, the faintest hint of motion rippling through where I was concentrating. And then, when one of the touches reached out, it was unable to pull away. Then another piece stuck, and then another, and slowly change began to creep outward from where it was now joined fast with my soul. SSD 4.49 - Restless Repetition ¡°Such fire was not by water to be drowned, Nor he his nature changed by changing ground.¡± -Ludovico Ariosto, from Canto XXVIII, stanza 89 (tr. W. S. Rose) ==Tarrae== After being let back into the dungeon, we had slogged through the Meadow. The power of the illusion covering both it, and the Grotto, was impressive. A combination of extreme subtly mixed with overwhelming power. Walking in the sun and breezes had been easy enough, and the normal monsters were never difficult enough for concern, but the sudden storms were a different story. Slick grass and mud were churned up under our feet with every step, each of us careful not to slip in the precarious conditions. Low points among the hills had become temporary streams that gathered into raging rivers. Enduring it once would not have been so bad, except we had done it far more than that. Part of the day had already come and gone when we made our first trip through the Meadow, if you could call it day here. The contrast between a starry sky and a single sunlit day was stark when both were seen no more than a matter of moments apart. We finished the Meadow, defeated the dancing mirage bird boss, and collected a rather impressive piece of loot. Norana had been treating the beautiful shimmering shield like a speck of dirt might harm it irreparably. I had lost count of how many times I had seen her polishing it. And this was despite never getting the chance to use it in the field. There was no way we were trusting a shield without having a specialist examine it first. Admittedly, Norana was unusually serious about maintaining all her armor. Her usual cheerfulness fell away as she scrubbed and polished the metal pieces at the end of every day. Her arms moved in circles across the metal in slow smooth motions, dragging a brush across the metallic surface. Her arms bulged and flexed as her face settled into a stoic peace, her steady breaths acting in counterpoint to the rasping chorus of the brush. Her movements were so sure and steady, you could have timed the beat of a slow dance to the rhythm. I wouldn¡¯t be surprised if she had a meditation skill focused on armor maintenance. The rasp of a brush and the smooth whisper of a polishing cloth had become a comforting sound at the end of each day. The end of each day, where each day seemed to be more and more useless, because we dared not go farther into the dungeon. Well, not entirely useless. I knew that the training was good for us as a team, the combat continuing to polish out the rough patches in our combined style. Plus, both Norana and Soara had gained levels, which could only help them. After defeating the Meadow the first time, we came home, unconcerned that Zidaun and the others had yet to return. It was unusual to be able to return to a central location in a dungeon. If they were in a longer section, then camping over the course of a night was hardly surprising. In the morning, Anaath had checked in with the other Adar. They assured us that Zidaun was alive and well, and they would be able to tell if that changed. I didn¡¯t know how they knew, but it was unsurprising that Anaath refused to offer any details. All the Adar planning to stay had changed into a new form, however. Knowing Zidaun¡¯s status was probably connected to that in some fashion. With Zidaun acting as their new leader, I wouldn¡¯t be surprised if he had a leadership skill connected to at least one of them. Eh, or one of them could have a skill telling them about him. The sheer breadth of skills possible made it impossible to know, and that was just with humans. Who knew what different skills the Adar might have? Regardless, with no sign of the other party, we decided to run through the Meadow again. There were seven routes we hadn¡¯t taken yet. The boss of the Meadow had proven easy enough for us, but that was with the skills of both me and Soara. Soara could pinpoint the boss through sound, despite its visual obfuscations. And I could fight against its light directly with my own skills. Without those, it could have been a very difficult battle. It had left dents and shallow cuts in Norana¡¯s armor and shield, even when she was able to see it and position properly. With attacks coming at unknown angles, it might have caused serious injury. And for any normal party, the defeat of the Bulwark could lead into a complete loss. We didn¡¯t know what Zidaun¡¯s party had run into farther in. Their levels and skills were above our own, even if we couldn¡¯t tell exactly how much. So we waited, taking the prudent route, even if I wanted to rush headlong into the next section. And then we waited some more. It had now been more than a week, and we had gone through every single section of the Meadow. We had even gone back and mapped out every section of the Sewers and the Refuge. We had seen the Adar everywhere. They were constantly delving, the dungeon completely full at every hour of the day. The Adar had made a few discoveries of their own, due to that. Areas of the dungeon only allowed eight parties at a time. Trying to enter an area that was already full resulted in the formation of a queue; the teleportation only happened once an area was cleared. Anyone sitting in an area too long, however, was automatically teleported back to the Starlight Grotto, and then refused entrance until a full day had passed. The same party trying it again, after that, lead to the party being teleported all the way to the cold entrance to the north, outside the dungeon entirely. It had been three days before they were allowed back into even the tunnel that climbed back into the dungeon. Each time they had tried to reenter, they had found themselves dumped back outside and covered with a sheet of water. Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon. Apparently, the dungeon was not tolerant of anyone that wanted to waste its time and the Adar team had not tried it again. I doubted the Adar would have even mentioned it to me, or been so persistent in testing the dungeon¡¯s limits, but apparently Zidaun had ordered the Adar to properly map the dungeon, and to share that information with us. He hadn¡¯t bothered to tell us that, but it was a nice thought, nonetheless. Though we had had enough time to map everything up to the end of the Meadow by ourselves now. Some of the higher leveled Adar had gone past the Meadow as well. None had returned so far. I assumed the next area was simply time consuming in some fashion, but without confirmation we were not going to go any further. No matter how maddening the wait might become. As team leader, I was the one holding us back, and I wasn¡¯t sure whether that made my impatience better or worse. Two days ago more Adar had shown up, all of them looking like relatives to Anaath. Assuming he had thousands of relatives, anyway. Maybe he did, who knows? Not like anyone knew how the Adar¡¯s society and reproduction actually worked. Anaath had taken the time to visit with some of them, though he didn¡¯t bother to tell us who he talked with, let alone what he talked about. Anaath¡¯s attitude was proving as spiky as his thorny hair. It was obvious he was bitter and upset about something, but none of us had known him long enough to know what it was, or get him to open up to us. And, after visiting the other Adar, he seemed even more dour than usual. Or maybe it was just the contrast in mood between when he was away versus present. As leader of the team I had tried talking to him a few times, but he first ignored me and claimed ignorance, and then told me it was none of my business. It didn¡¯t seem to hamper his ability to function while we were delving, so I was forced to leave it alone. Other adventurers had started to trickle in over the course of the last day. Mostly, it was new adventurers. New teams that either looked far too bright and excited or were composed of the desperate. They needed to go through the dungeon¡¯s trials before entering, and the wan faces of the weary had contrasted against the impatience of the eager youth. I was fairly certain it was one of the desperate who discovered each person could get up to three points worth of little crystal tokens from the sacrifice room. Blood. Drop in roughly a thimble¡¯s worth of your own blood and it would give back a single point. You couldn¡¯t get more than three points this way, though the altar would clean up any excess fluids left in it. We weren¡¯t sure what to feel about that. It¡­ was a very literal interpretation of sacrifice, and losing a small amount of blood was harmless enough on its own. However, there were some very dangerous magics and rituals that could be done with blood¡­ but a dungeon wasn¡¯t exactly a harmless environment. If a dungeon wanted your blood, it would probably get some at some point. Injuries were an inevitable part of dungeon delving. No one reported any kind of status effects or issues as a result, however, with the one exception of someone who was overly enthusiastic in their donation. The mild anemia status was hardly a surprise, considering. And then, today, we had gone into the dungeon again. It was all the same, even if the exact timing of the storms was sporadic. Over the past week one of our Meadow runs had managed to skip the storms entirely; while on another we had dealt with two. Today we dealt with the normal singular storm, and then proceeded to beat the boss again. And, for the first time in a long while, I gained a level.
Status
Despite the previous tedium, I smiled wildly. ¡°I gained a level!¡± I said enthusiastically. The others gathered around to offer congratulations, even Anaath. Whatever funk seemed to be holding him back, he was at least able to engage in the time honored tradition of congratulations and celebration. Seeing Anaath act happy is starting to feel unnatural. I shook my head at the thought. Hopefully he would get over it soon enough. If not¡­ well I had dealt with worse quirks in my teammates than grumpiness. Finally past level twenty. As we proceeded into the tree and to the exit, I couldn¡¯t help but smile widely. Getting past twenty was one of the big ones. Really, making it past any multiple of ten was considered a big deal. Make it past level ten and you were considered more than a rookie. Past level twenty you were a real adventurer. Make it past thirty, and you were a veteran. Forty, fifty, and the rest¡­ Well, those were hopes for the future. Make it past fifty and you started to become a legend. Not than anyone intelligent actually said what their levels were. Still, with skills and experience, people could make good approximations. As happy as I was with the level, I was hoping my skills would increase soon as well. My abilities to manipulate light had been improving as I had fought to negate the Mirage Dancer¡¯s own abilities. My teammates didn¡¯t know I had any domain skills, of course. Exceptional control of light and heat, of course, and some impressive spells featuring both, had been widely displayed. If we ended up becoming a more permanent team I would tell them, but that kind of advantage should not be casually revealed. I hadn¡¯t managed to combine and consolidate my sensing and shaping skills together until after I had become a Flare Shaper. If I managed to get my sovereign skills up high enough, I might trigger another change to a new class. And a class focusing on domain skills could be powerful indeed. As impatient as I was, I could hardly deny that a dungeon filled with illusions and with a prominent boss using a form of light manipulation, was exceptional training. We returned for the day, my heart more content than usual. The last hours of the day slipped away under an endless night; the soft sounds of a wire brush and steel repeated softly in a subtle melody. We spend time together, reflecting on the day, and soon enough we slept. SSD 4.50 - Through the Fire ¡°It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.¡± -Frederick Douglass ==Zidaun== Breath surged in my lungs, the air hot. My eyes stung from the hazy smoke, but I just blinked and kept going. Heaving gasps fueled my run, even as the others ran behind me. A pitfall, almost invisible beneath its concealment, was rendered truly invisible between my watering eyes and the smoke seeping out between every tree. Only my mana sense allowed me to see it, and I sidestepped it without a thought, the others following closely. A monument appeared, and I veered off slightly, touched it in passing, and spared only that moment of diversion. I returned to the track traveling through the woods, allowing no further delay. Directly overhead, a sun burned orange and swollen, like the eye of some angry god. My angry god. The thought was enough for no more than a flash of amusement. Even a chuckle would waste air that couldn¡¯t be spared. Not even Gurek was complaining. The trees were dead, and dried leaves hung on their branches like so much tinder. The tinder it would become soon enough, the wall of flames in the distance growing ever closer. Just like the section of fire we were approaching. I reached out, tamping down the heat around us and insured we had air, even as we continued to run. Flame and fire greeted us with a warm embrace, as we ran straight into them. The flames grew pale for a moment, their heat washed out as they fought against my power. I didn¡¯t bother concentrating enough to suppress them fully, instead whipping by in a blur of motion. Trees and tangled brush formed flowing walls of fire to either side of the path, highlighting it with blinding intensity. A shadow darted between the flames, gliding with imperious joy in rising heat. I identified it reflexively, already sure of what it would say.
Coal-Fire Skyray ¨C Level 19 Monster Coal black with sections that burn like embers, this large skyray has two wide wings and its body tapers into a short but wide tail. Its head has a sharp protruding beak with stiff whiskers. This monster revels and dances in flames that it has created.
I didn¡¯t bother to say anything, simply waving out a hand to indicate that nothing had changed. So, we continued to run. It tore out of the flames, making its odd clicking cry as it streaked to attack me. The small amount of speed it lost as it left the flames was sufficient for me to duck and roll beneath its massive body. My momentum was conserved as much as I could, the roll turning back into a run. Gurek¡¯s short blades lashed out when the monster was close enough, tearing into its body, leaving ragged rents in its wings. For a moment, boiling hot blood sprayed outward from the wounds, forming a stream of red in the air. It glittered like jewels, the individual beads of blood reflecting the burning light. The moment passed and the monster¡¯s wounds burst into flame. The clicking shriek was almost palpable as it cauterized its injuries. It didn¡¯t bother to beat its enormous wings as it dove back into the fire; instead, super-heated air twisted around each of them, making it surge forward in a burst of speed. Out of sight, and out of range for my own detection. It didn¡¯t make us wait for long. It came out from behind Firi, flames and smoke trailing from its body, both sucked forward behind it by the force of its passing, outlining its form in a wave of embers and ash. It dove toward him with a cry, as Firi lashed out in defense. His flat palm was obscured by the delicate blue glow of the tiny shield it manifested; the perfect icy circle of light reached out to intercept its charge. With a flare of light, it was deflected, and a small section of its body met the manifestation of divine ice and light. For a brief instant, its flesh froze, and then exploded into a cloud of blood and flesh, its own heat sublimating the ice to vapor. It cried out again, louder, diving back into the flames, only to emerge again from the side, testing against our limits. Inda was ready, her sabre out since we entered the flames, well aware of what we would find. It flickered, almost a mirage in the shimmering waves of heat, the twisting motion of her strikes almost a dance. A dance with a sharp edge. The twisting motion was sufficient to intercept the skyray¡¯s attack, its beak deflected to the side, Inda using the rebounding force to twist. Her own magic added to the rebound, twisting her around with titanic force, the returning blade slashing in a wide arc against the underside of the monster as it passed over her. Its own momentum carried it into the slash, and blood fountained out onto the ground past Inda, as it bore a strike that was almost as long as it was. She stumbled from her run for a brief moment, but continued on. It cried out again, and I could almost feel its rage and hatred. Fire swirled in the wake of its passing, and its blood sizzled where it struck the charred and burning embers. Fire gave way to dead forest. The brown leaves and orange light a relief after the intensity of the monster¡¯s domain, and I dropped my suppression of the heat. I needed to conserve my mana in case of the worst happening. Not that it was over just yet. The fire behind us twisted together, swirling toward a central point. Soon enough we could see the skyray again, shooting toward us at the head of a twisting wave of fire, as though in some twisted homage to its water-bound cousins. It skimmed atop the cresting wave of fire, using the heat to fuel its momentum, the angry glow of the flames lighting up the gaping cauterized mass of its wound. It surged toward us, only to fall out of the air and back into the surging wave with a loud crack. A crack coming from a rock thrown at preternatural speed through a combination of skill and Inda¡¯s magic. It would have dodged before, its speed lending sufficient agility except in the last moments of its charge as it left the fire behind. Blinded by its anger, it had finally been ripe for a last strike. We didn¡¯t bother to congratulate Inda with more than nods, saving our air, as she returned to the formation. She had needed to stop to properly throw and aim the rock, but careful bursts of power were enough to let her catch up and fall back into place. I was able to spot three more monuments along the way, making the briefest possible divergence to reach out and touch them. Twice one of the others had run off as well, no doubt spotting some I had failed to see. Three more times, we dealt with more monsters. Twice more it was a coal-fire skyray. Sadly, once it was a red night manta, which was even worse. A beautiful creature, its black skin and wings were dotted with a glowing pattern of red mist and dots, looking like the night sky cast only in shades of red and black. Its broad wings carried it effortlessly through the air, and its head merged with the rest of its body, leaving no sign of a neck. Unfortunately, while breathtaking, it was also terribly dangerous. It didn¡¯t bother to descend to our level, only swooping toward the ground when it was far beyond our reach. Not that it needed to get close. Flames shot out from it on each wing beat. As its two wings grew close, flames surged and burst forth in a tightly bound arc of flame. Instead of the quick ambushes of the other monster, it floated high overhead, content to pelt us with flames from a distance. Each slow stroke of its wings an attack meant to wear us down. Rocks sent its way were dodged with lazy grace, or intercepted and returned in a blast of fire. A knife would have worked properly, but Inda wouldn¡¯t get it back afterward, and the stone knives I could make were worse than useless. I didn¡¯t know how to balance them properly. Firi could have struck it down with a spell, but he, like me, was saving his magic as much as possible. Saving it for the fire. The forest fire behind us was accelerating in speed, gradually growing faster with each instant we spent here. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation. It had nearly killed us the first time. It was slow at first, a creeping fire that slipped forward at the speed of a slow walk. It had been visible and audible from the beginning, the flickering light matched against a dull roar, like the sound of a waterfall in the distance. We assumed we had plenty of time, though we hurried somewhat, aware of the potential for future issues. I wasn¡¯t the one who noticed that it had gotten closer, that was on Gurek. And if he hadn¡¯t¡­ we probably would have died. Even with that, we didn¡¯t manage to outrun the fire. It came, a sweeping wall of flame, buoyed upward by the heat so the fire danced in leaping wisps higher than the canopy. It came, the distant roar growing into a million individual cracks of snapping wood and whistling escaping gas. Together, they were a cacophony sufficient to batter against our senses, raging up against our eyes and ears, even as the heat raged against our bodies in blows of super-heated air. It came, and we were consumed. It came, and it took the world with it, leaving only fire and ash behind in its wake, save for what little I could save against it. Only a tiny sphere, sufficient to contain us but little more, held against the ravening tongues of fire, their hunger breaking down the trees into husks of spark and soot. So hungry they consumed the very air, hungry enough they would choke themselves to death on it, if they were not careful. We huddled close together, my power and Firi¡¯s gradually waning beneath the onslaught of the heat and dying air. Eventually, however, it passed. It passed and left nothing but cinders in its wake. The trees were only charcoal outlines amidst the smoke, any grasses and bushes having been reduced to nothing more than the ash, smoke, and wind blowing after the fire like the train of a priestess¡¯s vestments. It passed, but the heat continued to rise. It rose from every heat-crazed stone and lingering cinder. It passed, but we remained. Alive. Still, the heat outside my influence was not survivable and so we had fled toward the exit, each step we took casting up choking clouds of ash. No monsters troubled us, either fled or consumed by a heat greater than they could endure. Firi and I took turns cooling the air, and we only managed to touch a single monument because it was directly by the path. Only the dregs of our mana remained when we finally stumbled through one of the portals. Sadly, it wasn¡¯t the correct one, but we cared little as we heaved breaths of cool clean air. Well, we cared little until we had to do it again, and again. We were on our sixth attempt now, only able to increase our odds of success by touching whatever monuments were close enough to see in the smoke as we ran for the exit. We were simply fortunate that this layer of the Wandering Woods was as simple as the first two. A slightly wandering path through the woods that lead straight to the exit. Though the path on this level was quite long, going on for what felt like a dozen miles. The haze and heat of the level made it feel endless. Just like the Wandering Woods. How long have we been here? My thoughts drifted with every step, shifting like the endless churning of smoke and seething orange ray of light. The familiarity lulled me to reflection, absent but ready to snap back into alertness at any moment. Even dodging streaks of fire had become a thoughtless task. The first layer of the forest had been nothing, just primer for everything that came next; a mere introduction to prepare us. The second layer had proven no more difficult to us than the first, though it taught some degree of situational awareness. No¡­ It was the third layer where the woods had truly started to wander. The sun had dropped down to an endless sunset over a barren wood. The trees were naught but grasping hands in the fading light, casting out their long shadows in lines across the cold ground in alternating black and red. And it was cold, the air carrying the chill of the stillness that came before storms carried ice and snow across the world. And for the first time, the woods had wandered. The path had broken into a dozen smaller paths that diverged into their own canyons beneath the ever present barrier of thorns. The fourth came as a still and snowy night. Stars glittered overhead with silent intensity, pale against the silver glory of an interloper. A full moon, according to my identification. I still remembered it.
Moon (Full) Name: Luna A smaller celestial body that revolves around a planet. A moon¡¯s shine comes from reflecting the light of the sun or other light sources. The position of the moon, relative to the planet, determines the proportion that is lit or in shadow when viewed from a terrestrial location. This moon is a replica from the dungeon¡¯s own nostalgic memory.
Such a strange thing, hanging in serene glory in the artificial sky. And such a strange message. The identification had felt¡­ odd. I could feel a resonance to it. I had only received the last line because I was connected to the dungeon. I¡­ had felt a piece of his longing in my soul. I didn¡¯t even understand what it meant. Not even Inda had heard of a moon, and she was the most educated among us by far. How old is this dungeon? Had there been a moon orbiting our world, once upon a time? And was it the embodiment of a god, like the maw and the sun? And¡­ if so, where had the god gone? The snow and trees were cast into monochrome beneath the moon¡¯s pale gaze, leaving us to amble through the silver snow and deep shadows. The snow varied between barely reaching our ankles to drifts that could have buried us. Though, there was still fruit. Ready for us to harvest and crisp with flowing juices. Eating a meal of jerky and fresh fruit beneath the peaceful moon had stirred something primal in me. An urge to hunt silently in the icy woods. The fifth layer still had a moon, though it hung lower in the sky and was only half full. The moon changed halfway from argent light to perfect shadow like a great beast had cut part from the sky, hoarding its light away for itself. The figures started there. Already, we had dealt with many animals. Each layer grew in difficulty; the animals growing stronger and more numerous, though even on that layer they were stationary and territorial. And now, amidst the shadows, trees and stones became impressions of monstrous forms. They were only suggestions, there. A tree that looked like a face from the corner of our eyes. A rock and shadow that implied a monstrous clawed hand. Each was easy to dismiss once you saw it properly. We left the haunted night into the misty morning of the sixth, as greenery returned to the trees. The figures didn¡¯t stop, growing more defined and easier to confuse in the light haze. And stalking amid the mist, real monsters wandered the woods for the first time. They were skyrays, mostly, sweeping through the misty air and trailing clouds of condensing water in their wake. The first we saw was a bird-wing blue-fade skyray. Its body carried the suggestion of something sleek, its head the same profile as a ferret, and with two wings rising up from its nonexistent shoulders. The wings were black on their front edge, fading into a pale blue as they reached the back. Its body, black and palest blue, ended in two tiny fins that protruded below like stubby feet; a single short fin above acted as an equally stubby tail. From a distance, the blue faded into the mist, leaving the ray as nothing more than disconnected outlines. Those outlines had made it look much like the shadowy impressions of monsters. The seventh layer took the half-obscuring mist of the sixth and made it full. Fog, thick and impenetrable, turned the daylight to gloom and caused sound to echo and muffle unpredictably. The eight layer turned the mist to rain. Mud churned beneath our feet with every step and rain fell constantly. More intense cloudbursts fell upon the forest like hammers, causing brief floods and turning visibility to no more than vague blurs. Finally, on the ninth layer, the layer just before this one, we encountered fire. The increased visibility and dry air had seemed a blessing at first. At least until we found glades of forest burning, with skyrays merrily emerging to spread lines of fire across the underbrush. Though we didn¡¯t realize it at the time, that layer was preparing us for this one. Any monument the fire reached, would burn out and stop functioning. And, unlike the present, second, and first layers, it was still broken into a dozen-odd branching paths. We had needed to go swiftly, touching monuments as we could and exploring to find the finish as fast as possible, racing against the flames inevitable destruction of the monuments. We had gotten unlucky there. Until then it wasn¡¯t terribly uncommon to miss some monuments or to find several that were broken and inoperable. We never went through a layer less than twice, and either we had been exceptionally unlucky or it was designed that way. Last layer, however, we had done fourteen times before we emerged onto this tenth one. It was hard to say exactly how long we had been here. Our best guess was somewhere between ten and twenty days. Gurek said twenty, while Inda said ten. At this point I was pretty sure their guesses and the subsequent bickering were just something to do as we camped in the root tunnel at the end of each day. Over the course of all the many layers, all my other party members had gained a level. I wasn¡¯t expecting to gain one yet, having leveled up when I gained my new class. Fighting against the constant impairments to my vision had increased my Improved Sight II up to III, however. Plus my Endurance Boost general skill had also improved from so much running and hiking. Adversity does have its rewards. My thoughts flickered away as I refocused, we were getting close to the end of the path. The path might be slightly different each time, but we had each started to memorize its approximate length. The end soon came, each of us having slightly more energy in our step. Ahead of us, the final clearing waited. The exact nature of each had varied by layer. This one was accessed by following the path into the split trunk of an enormous dead tree. The forest fire had risen to a dull road behind us, only a minute away from sweeping over us and burying us beneath an inferno of black and red. A second red night manta wove through the air lazily, but with the end in sight, Firi was already charging up disks of glowing light. With no more need to conserve mana the two disks spun out through the air lazily, each arcing toward their respective target in a slow glide. Both of the mantas drifted to the side contemptuously, dismissing the projectiles. At least until each one came back around and impacted the top of both in a frozen explosion of ice and light. If the manta¡¯s weren¡¯t so high in the air, it was unlikely the impact would have been fatal against their large bodies. However, the drop worked against them as they spiraled down in uncontrolled descents, their frozen skin too stiff to move. By the time their skin had started to even begin thawing, they were impacting against the hard surfaces below. One of the mantas was actually unlucky enough to impale itself on a protruding tree branch. Reflexively its wings had drawn together and set the branch on fire. We all winced at its shrieks as it started to cook itself. A rock from Inda put it out of its misery. We ran through the gap, the fire not far behind. We emerged into a clearing, ten portals briefly showing, before six of them closed and showed their various symbols. It was obvious now that at least some of them were clues to the contents of the various layers. Showing now on the six sealed portals were: sun, cascade, cavern, snowflake, flame, and arbor. Each of the portals was as good as another, but it was Gurek¡¯s turn to pick. I had set it up that way after it would obvious we would be here a while. Only fair to share both the blame and the successes for our guesses. He hesitated for a moment, but he finally pointed to the far right, the portal on the very end. We walked through, following Gurek, and the familiar tunnel was ahead of us once again. We wearily walked forward, turning the corners, until I bumped into Gurek after he turned once again. I stopped short, finally seeing what Gurek had seen. Ahead of us the corridor turned into a room, with a numbered door. I had never been so happy to see a room and door in my entire life. SSD 4.51 - Unwise Meddling "In the labyrinthine realms of the Soulforge, where threads of magic are woven together by the hand of The System and man, the wise Sage Alarion once declared, ''The soul is the catalyst that ignites the flames of power, and The System, the almighty forge that tempers it into destiny.'' So, my friend, let your soul burn bright, for in its blaze lies the power to shape your fate within this realm." - Fragment recovered from the blighted ruins of Catae ==Caden== I¡¯m not sure what I expected to accomplish, other than a vague impulse toward gaining greater control over my own abilities. That might still happen, assuming I managed to overcome the current situation. At first things seemed be going well, the slow transformation reaching out from where countless tiny touches had stuck fast to my soul. Then, a small flickering sphere appeared for a brief moment where I had instigated the first connection. When the colorless sphere disappeared, my soul was disconnected, and the spot looked like it had never changed at all. I narrowed my nonexistent eyes as other spheres began to pop into being, only to fade away a moment later as they reversed what adaptation my soul had done. Yeah¡­ not going to just let this continue. I didn¡¯t know what those spheres were, but this was happening in my soul. I knew, on some deep fundamental level, that while the system could come in to make changes, this was ultimately my domain. I was weak and untrained, and this place was still foreign to me, but ultimately every spec of the seemingly infinite canvas of my soul was mine. For a brief moment, I felt a resonance with Exsan, and gained an understanding of what it meant for our souls to come together. Here, in our conjoined souls, we were gradually becoming closer. Not in merely a sentimental way, but in the very fabric of what we each were. I had already, unknowingly at the time, drawn on the absolute and unwavering resolve to never be subject to another. Not even to my own instincts. I could see now how I had leaned on him to get through captivity. How I had used his resolve to cut through my own aura, even as all the rest of the instincts cried out against it. And I could see how I used that stubbornness to overcome my own fear and pain in the sewers as I saved a man from death. The system had made our separation more discrete, after that, but in doing so had made Exsan truly into their own individual. Now, however, we were close enough to draw more from one another. We didn¡¯t need to, but our connection meant that we could draw on the strengths and resources of the other. Exsan had already been drawing deeply on our connection, using it to fill all the gaps in his knowledge. It was time for me to start drawing off it deliberately, too. The little spheres were almost done popping up, and I gathered Exsan¡¯s implacable will and layered it onto my own. This soul was mine. What I possess, I shall keep. What my soul takes, and remakes, shall not be undone. The full power of two wills pressed down upon my soul. My own incredible stubbornness matched and melded with the inhuman resolve of a dungeon. Together, I could feel that it wasn¡¯t merely twice as strong. Here in my soul, where were closest together, the two forces reinforced the weaknesses of the other. Where Exsan¡¯s will was rigid, but brittle, my will gave it flexibility, and where I would bend too much, his will gave mine the ability to spring back into place. Together, our wills could bend under sufficient pressure, but they would never stop pushing back, ready to snap back into position the moment the pressure relented. And, under the combined strain, the little bubbles had started to flicker more intensely. At first, that was all that seemed to happen. Then the bubbles started to last longer. Finally, the bubbles stopped popping. Their flickering power grew faster, making the bubbles look transparent. Underneath I could see a battle go back and forth. My soul would transform a section, only for the progress to reverse with each pulsing flicker. The flickering grew faster, but each surge of power made less and less progress against my soul¡¯s conversion. Finally, the flickers became imperceptibly fast, but it didn¡¯t matter. My soul ignored them, transforming the artificial structure attached to my mana generator. The system¡¯s designs were beyond mortal comprehension, but compared to my soul, they were pale imitations. The elegant construction gave way to something that managed to be transcendent in its beauty. The structure gained a depth of meaning that it had lacked. That was the closest way I could understand it. The system¡¯s designs were a masterwork of functionality, but as they changed, they filled with purpose. The design became a reflection of not only what it was, it also gained the sense of why. It became a larger part of the greater whole. Adding in this small piece made my soul better as a whole. I looked at my soul with new eyes. Every part of my soul fit together. There were no wasted pieces or imperfections. Everything that I was, and had been, made the whole greater. It was a perfection that recognized no flaw, or error. For a timeless moment, I felt on the edge of epiphany. A sense of understanding. A feeling of reaching out past my own soul and into the purpose for which it was designed. A flaw was only flaw if seen in isolation, together, everything made a greater whole. Together, all things¡­ The thought was violently broken as the system finally reacted to my subversion. I saw no signs, no lines of questing mana or marks, but suddenly there was a terrible pressure. I could feel, in some soul sense that I had no name for, the focus of the system¡¯s regard. A tiny sphere of flickering power appeared near the system¡¯s old interface, before it began to rapidly expand. My will didn¡¯t waver, though I couldn¡¯t tell what was happening beyond the approaching sphere. It rushed toward me in an explosion of colorless light, its expansion turning it into a wall. I didn¡¯t know what the bubble was, but I hardened my resolve. My will bore down, not just on my soul, but on my own presence. This narrative has been purloined without the author''s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon. I made myself just as unchangeable and immutable. Whatever my avatar in this space might be, for I had yet to perceive myself, I imagined it must still be a part of my soul. Whatever the case, when the bubble¡¯s edge reached me, it slammed against me with an almost physical weight. I could feel the strain in my will, the capacity I had borrowed from Exsan the only thing that allowed me to resist. Instead of being engulfed within the sphere, I was slammed downward. My perception dove deeper, as I was thrust down, reaching farther into the recesses of my soul. I felt myself pushed through some barrier, and everything shifted. Once again, I found myself with a physical presence. I had clothes on. It was surreal to run my hands over the faded design on my shirt, feeling the soft fibers and the rough impression of barely there letters. The jeans felt almost confining after constant nakedness, the once subtle effort of moving suddenly fully in my awareness. And then there were the socks and shoes. They just felt off, but also familiar; like I was making an old favorite recipe from my mom¡¯s collection, not knowing she had long since memorized it and made alterations. I even had a wallet bulging out of my jeans in the front right pocket; that was always where I stored mine. I pulled it out, but it didn¡¯t have anything familiar. Instead, there was a laminated card. It had my status on it. I smiled and shook my head. I had been vaguely aware of my surroundings, but I also knew that I was still in my soul. I could feel it. This place was merely another metaphor, just like the language of my soul had always been. I looked around, feeling the world snap into place as I observed it. I stood in a long service corridor, the floor bare cement beneath my shoes. Pipes flowed along the walls spreading out and dividing to travel wherever such pipes ever go, the bare metal shining dully under the florescent lights. Handles sheathed in red rubber, and red colored wheels, protruded occasionally. Wonder what would happen if I turned those? For the moment, I decided it was best not to find out. The corridor extended farther ahead, with occasional side hallways vaguely visible. I turned around, the faint squeak of my shoes nostalgic, and saw a door. The corridor ended with an emergency exit door, the familiar neon green sign spelling out ¡°EXIT¡± above the metal of the door. The thin strip of tempered glass, crisscrossed with embedded metal, showed nothing but darkness beyond the door. That will probably take me back into the ¡°normal¡± soul. I chuckled lightly at the thought. I didn¡¯t think soul diving counted as a normal activity. Could be wrong about that. It was a magical world, and I still knew too little about it. I was really looking forward to understanding the local language. I started to walk down the hallway, not certain of my destination, but feeling a faint pull to keep going. I hadn¡¯t really had a destination since I entered my soul, since all I really wanted was knowledge, anyway. For now, I moved forward toward a vague pull and just enjoyed the nostalgic smell of chemical cleaners and concrete, even as my brain insisted on picking out all the elements that made the hallway less realistic. The pipes, while being exposed metal, were all in perfect condition. There were no hints of rust, or traces of condensation, and the concrete floor was a perfect uniform surface. Admittedly, seeing any rust in my soul might have been alarming from a metaphysical standpoint. At least this perspective, while not as all encompassing, was much easier to parse. I came up to the first hallway. A simple look showed an almost identical corridor stretching off to¡­ wherever. A small metal sign, attached to the wall, pointed deeper into the hallway with an arrow, reading ¡°General Cognition.¡± It was tempting, but between the call of my unknown destination, and the possibility of other choices, I decided to continue down the hallway. I passed other hallways, and other signs: ¡°Past Life Gallery,¡± ¡°Corporeal Embodiment,¡± ¡°Energy Creation,¡± and ¡°Dimensional Adaptation¡± being among a few of them. Admittedly, I was very tempted to investigate, but I had eventually found a sign pointing down my current hallway. Apparently, I was being pulled toward my ¡°Soul Core,¡± and I wanted to know what the core of my soul actually was. I wasn¡¯t sure how many hallways I passed, though it seemed like dozens. I had the vague sensation of being followed, but nothing was there when I looked back to check. Though the positions of the hallways seemed to change each time. Honestly, my experience with this version of my soul had the same overtones as a horror movie. Well, it would if there were more leaking pipes, puddles, and half-obscuring clouds of steam suggesting ominous figures that vanished into nothing a moment later. Plus, it was missing the tense music. Okay, so it wasn¡¯t actually all that much like a horror movie. More like an empty horror movie set without all the effects. Closer to a dream, if I wasn¡¯t so firmly present. Stupid symbolic landscapes. The way continued interminably, but I finally saw something when I looked behind me. A wall of familiar colorless power was sweeping down the hallway toward me. Ah fuck! I cursed silently, and with some profusion, as I started to jog. The wall of power wasn¡¯t moving with blinding speed, but it was certainly faster than I could walk. More branching corridors passed, but I ignored them in favor of my destination, hoping the call knew what the fuck it was doing. You just had to go and mess with the system, didn¡¯t you? Mentally, I berated myself for making impulsive and idiotic decisions. I didn¡¯t even have a human body anymore, so I could hardly blame all of this on hormones or stress chemicals. Though, my current mindset does seem to be a remarkable emulation of my previous human brain. Maybe it simulated all the chemical effects, too? I pondered that for a moment, allowing the distraction. In order to have my normal emotions, I almost had to have some form of emulation¡­ Except, I had kept my emotions in pure soul form after I died, too. Guess I¡¯ll mark this down as more soul shenanigans. I was getting tired and I pushed to stay ahead of the oncoming barrier of flicking power. Not physically tired, my body was merely a projection, after all, but I could feel a faint strain. It was hard to say exactly where it was coming from. It was a strain of will and emotion; a strain I felt in my soul. It was the weariness of going to work after you had done finals all the last week. The push required to move forward, when you had nothing left to give, even though your body felt fine. The stretch of pushing yourself to be sympathetic, again, after your friend had created another disaster for themselves. A disaster that was mostly in their own head. Unless I wanted to deal with that wall again, however, I had little choice but to draw deep and keep moving. It turned into a marathon, rather than a race. When I walked, my soul would recover. Then I would need to jog again to keep ahead of the implacable wall. I passed hundreds, thousands, of hallways. I even passed by dozens of additional emergency exits. It felt like I traveled for days, barely keeping ahead. And, all the while, I felt the call grow. The call was all that kept me going now, against a weariness that felt like it had infected my very bones. A tiredness that had made me into its home, never to leave. All things, however, must come to an end. Ahead, I finally spotted a change in the almost endless corridor. Almost endless, because it finally terminated ahead. A circular silver door was embedded into the wall ahead, its sleek appearance a stark contrast to the industrial maintenance theme, It took up almost the entire width of the hallway. Above it, a glowing sign declared its purpose in large white capital letters: ¡°Soul Core Vault.¡± I ran, pushing myself to the limit. The tiredness deepened from a lake to an ocean, and the waves threatened to drag my little boat of motivation beneath the water. Finally, finally, I stood before the door. Beside it, a small black panel carried the imprint of a hand. Not just any hand, actually, because it perfectly matched my hand when I slapped it down. Above the hand impression, a small line of glowing text came to life, and I suddenly felt like I was SEEN. I felt like I was scanned down to the most base part, down to the very atoms of my projected form. User Facet Detected¡­ Insufficient Development For Access... One Moment¡­ Valid Threat To Continuance Detected... Opening Vault Door¡­ The vault started to slide into the wall, the circular door rotating as it moved. It¡¯s speed wasn¡¯t actually slow, but the wait felt endless as I nervously watched the wall come closer. Finally, the vault was open enough that I could slip inside. Ahead, a vast sphere of silver floated in a void, but I paid it only a fleeting glance. Behind me, the wall of power had reached the entrance to the vault. A small section of the wall was pushing through the vault like a bubble. The vault door slammed shut, cutting through the bubble like it was merely air. The bubble was suddenly surrounded by a larger sphere, an opaque silver.
Greetings, User Facet, signifier: Caden. A foreign element has been detected in your soul. Entity attempted to access vault. Quarantine procedures initiated. Would you like user identified element: ¡°The System,¡± removed? Yes | No | More Information
SSD 4.52 - Breakfast is Civilization "In the realm of everyday enchantments, breakfast is the silent spell that awakens our spirits, turning simple sustenance into a magical journey through the realms of flavor and warmth." -Excerpt from the foreword to The Recipes of Yslandoria ==Zidaun== I wanted nothing more than to rest, but returning to the grotto also meant a return to my people. Which meant Izradi popped up as soon as we emerged. ¡°Ancient!¡± he cried. ¡°How wonderful it is to see you safely return.¡± He eyed our group, each of us obviously exhausted. ¡°Though,¡± he continued, ¡°it seems you need your rest. There is nothing urgent, just yet.¡± ¡°Yes, thank you,¡± I managed. ¡°Time got muddled while we were delving. How long were we gone?¡± ¡°Of course, Ancient. This is the seventeenth day,¡± he said. I could faintly hear Gurek muttering something to Inda. Never too tired to gloat, huh, Gurek? I did my best to avoid rolling my eyes. I doubted Izradi would understand. After that, we took to our beds as expeditiously as possible. Settling into the plush fabric and soft mattress, I was barely able to appreciate the softness before I fell asleep. Waking came in fits and starts, my mind doing its best to take every iota of relaxation out of the bed. Muzzy half thoughts formed and went, along with half remembered dreams of strange corridors extending into infinity; my mind drifted. Still, eventually I had to get up. Getting out of bed was a more difficult fight than any monster we had encountered so far. Truly, my dungeon¡¯s offered luxury was the real trap. A trap that I desperately wanted to fall back into. My body was recovered, however, and my mind would benefit from ordinary activities. We all needed some time free from dungeon delving. We had taken breaks while delving, but like I had told Izradi, the fuzzy nature of time had made the breaks less restful than they ought to have been. My ability to borrow the dungeon¡¯s abilities meant that none of us were filthy. Manipulating dirt and other particles to come off the skin was a delicate and slow, but not particularly mana intensive, task. I had done that for all of us, but I had a feeling that each of us would take the opportunity later to take a bath. For now, I could sense the other party, so I went downstairs, promptly finding myself inside the kitchen. ¡°Zidaun!¡± Tarrae shouted, ¡°you have no idea how glad we are to see you.¡± ==Tarrae== The other team had finally, finally, come back. None of us had the chance to see them before they were snoring, though Anaath checked in the other Adar. They had returned completely intact, but utterly exhausted. Honestly, after delving for almost two weeks, I couldn¡¯t blame them. We were tired, and we had still been operating on a proper schedule, making sure we took a day off every few days. To be fair, at least half of our tiredness was from dealing with the same area over and over again. It wasn¡¯t like it wasn¡¯t rewarding, either. I hadn¡¯t leveled, but I had achieved some improvements.
Your skill Light Sovereign II has increased to Light Sovereign III. Your title: Mana Domain I has become Mana Domain II.
Mana Domain II To have a domain is to show mastery and dominion over an aspect of magic, combining multiple skills together into a more effective whole. You are not merely a novice, instead progressing to create multiple domains. Go forth, and claim dominion. +10% boost to the power and effectiveness of all domain skills +Gain an advantage against other entities when taking control of any held domain magic, or when using domain magic against an opposing elemental type. If both parties have a domain, then their titles will come directly into conflict. +750 (250 existing + 500) AP The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
The boost in strength was noticeable, especially against the Mirage Dancer. Still, I was tired of doing the same thing, day after day. Honestly, it was strange that I found it so tiresome. Dungeons were almost always boring, to some degree, because most of them were the same. A typical dungeon was an eclectic mix of mishmashed architecture and corridors, with patches of greenery or almost sensible designs. Some of the more interesting dungeons didn¡¯t bother to conceal their nature as caves, instead placing normal environments inside them as though they fit: a swamp, a bone forest, a coral salt flat. They were all confusing, involved at least some backtracking, and the monsters didn¡¯t change much. The level difference between the entrance and the rest of the interior was a small jump in levels. Different floors, or discrete areas, showed up in a normal dungeon but they were usually just a slight difference in environment, a swamp to a bog or bone forest to a stone wood, and an equally small change in monster level. Monster attacks were usually pretty random inside any given area, with the exception of the bosses. Occasionally, some dungeons had puzzles, labyrinths, or other odd sections. And some dungeons would have a few environmental features placed inside more normal architecture, like mud, plants, etc¡­ I had been spoiled by this dungeon. I had come to expect more from it. And my party all seemed to share that impatience. Even Anaath¡¯s attitude seemed to have shifted away from his omnipresent grumpiness. I had a suspicion that was at least partially due to his visits with the other Adar, though. Twice I had seen him with a slightly embarrassed air as he came back from talking to the former desert dwellers. At least some of the arrivals were his actual relatives¡­ probably. Unless I was reading too much into it. However, that embarrassed expression was one I had seen many times: on a sibling, cousin, or one of my nieces and nephews. It was the familiar embarrassment of having your family point out you were acting like an ass. Gods know I have worn that expression myself, a time or two. Okay, probably more than that. I was grateful I had family willing to point it out, in balance. It was far better to feel a little embarrassment than let yourself become an asshole in the longer term. With Anaath¡¯s mood mellowing out, at least somewhat, our party¡¯s cohesiveness had grown as a whole. When the morning of the next day came, all of us were ready to greet the other scout party, starting with Zidaun. After my enthusiastic greeting, the rest of the team gave their own greetings. And, if Anaath¡¯s greeting was a little less enthusiastic and a bit strained, well¡­ we weren¡¯t going to call him on it. At least he managed to do better as the other members of Zidaun¡¯s team came down. ==Zidaun== I was happy enough to talk with the other team, especially since it let me delay dealing with Izradi. Socializing with the other team was important, and apparently they had waited to enter the woods. Probably a smart decision, considering the levels of danger. It should be possible for them to handle it, but some of the dangers could prove fatal without some foreknowledge. Normally there was only a single party scouting a new dungeon, anyway. It made sense for the stronger party to shoulder more of the risk. My team was both stronger, and had far more experience delving unexplored dungeons. I talked with Tarrae, while Soara was busy doing something with the oven and stove. Some kind of porridge was shaping up there, with chunks of dried fruit melding into it and emitting a sweet aroma, mixing with the faint smell of the wood burning in the stove. The smell of the porridge was enough to cover another smell, which I only noticed minutes later. ¡°Are you cooking bread?¡± I asked, my mouth starting to water. Soara turned around from where he was was stirring, keeping the porridge from burning. ¡°Yeah,¡± he said. ¡°I¡¯m usually the cook. I¡¯m the only one who actually likes do it, so it works out well enough. Of course¡­¡± he gestured vaguely toward the kitchen as a whole, ¡°I was just making do with a campfire until we got here. The meals didn¡¯t improve that much, at first.¡± He flashed a smile at me. ¡°Only so much I could do with dried ingredients. I¡¯m no chef. The dungeon though,¡± he nodded toward the window, beyond which was the rest of the grotto and the dungeon¡¯s entrance, ¡°it is absolutely full of plants.¡± He sighed, and then chuckled slightly. ¡°Of course, other than a few specific fruit trees, and apparently some grains that the dungeon added when all your people showed up, it was all useless. Anything harvested before they showed up though, or past certain limits for the few things that we were allowed to take¡­¡± he snorted with a sardonic smile, ¡°well, you know, it dissolves and then it¡¯s like you never even bothered.¡± I did. Gurek had a skill that let him take samples, but that was the limit of the skill. It was meant to take samples, and that was all it allowed for. You couldn¡¯t use it to harvest food to eat. It was also hard to say how much he had even needed the skill in this dungeon, before we entered the Wandering Woods. I was almost certain that Caden had been watching us carefully every step of the way, up until he slipped into slumber. Even knowing that others would be coming behind us, Gurek had been unable to resist taking some samples. The extreme variety made it hard to tell what plants, if any, were actually unique to the dungeon. For all we knew, all the plants were like the skyrays, and were from the other continent. Even that would be valuable, though. If nothing else, a local source of plants that were exotic, but with known properties, would be an immense boon for alchemists. Soara continued to speak, pulling me out of my reverie. ¡°Fortunately, your people,¡± he waved vaguely in my and Anaath¡¯s direction, ¡°came with lots of Stabilizers. In addition to the wheat, we have been able to harvest a ton of different herbs.¡± He turned around again for a moment to stir, before turning back toward me. He made a vague gesture and shrugged. ¡°A bunch of edible things I know nothing about, too. Roots, foreign herbs, and such.¡± Tarrae shuddered briefly, followed by Anaath and Norana. ¡°Aw, come on¡­¡± Soara said. ¡°He, uh,¡± Tarrae spoke hesitantly, ¡°experimented. I think the food was technically edible.¡± ¡°How was I to know it would get that bitter when you cooked it?¡± Soara said, grumblingly, before brightening up after a moment. ¡°You guys have liked some of the other stuff. Besides, I have been taste testing anything new first now, including after I cook it. That root was only slightly bitter before it was cooked. Most roots get more savory, or sweet, after cooking.¡± Whatever other merits Soara¡¯s cooking possessed, positive or negative, the smells were enough to start summoning the other members of my party. Firi was first, and I greeted him with a warm smile, which he returned. He promptly heaved himself into a chair, making the wood creak slightly. ¡°Please tell me you are making enough for us, too?¡± he said with a pleading edge. Soara just laughed with good cheer, before he responded. ¡°Well at least someone appreciates my cooking. Don¡¯t worry, there should be more than enough.¡± ¡°Pretty sure he has never seen Gurek when he is truly hungry,¡± I muttered. Soara didn¡¯t say anything, but his faint chuckle was enough to show he heard me. Hardly surprising for someone who specializes in perceiving sound. Huh, he probably only started to cook, and put the bread into the oven, when I was getting out of bed. This breakfast was made specifically for us. ¡°Sorry if I didn¡¯t ask that earlier,¡± I said, shaking my head. ¡°I am grateful for a well prepared meal to start the day.¡± Inda and Gurek came down shortly after Firi, each taking their own moment to stare hungrily at the preparing food, before they settled down and joined the rest of us. ¡°Now that you are all here,¡± Tarrae said, before waving toward where Soara was stirring and adding some spices to the porridge, ¡°and before you all get too distracted. What can you tell us about your experience?¡± The next few minutes became an overview of what we had dealt with. It was interrupted by breakfast, which was wonderful. Warm spices contrasted with bursts of flavor and sweetness in the chewy fruit pieces. And all of that was supplemented with a loaf of steaming bread, the crust cracking open beneath a knife to show a pale brown interior flecked with bits of green. Each bite fulfilled the promise of the herbal steam, the softness of the bread¡¯s interior contrasting against the crunch of the crispy crust. It was fantastic, and afterward we were happy enough to fetch our notes, providing the proper detail on the Wandering Woods, which filled the next couple hours. SSD 4.53 - A Surprisingly Pleasant Meeting "Eccentrics are the brushstrokes of originality on the canvas of conformity." ¡ª Professor Archibald Peculiaris, Curator of Oddities at the Museum of Quirk and Whimsy ==Zidaun== I wasn¡¯t meant to be an administrator. It was fortunate that Izradi was handling most of it, because even what little remained was more than I wanted to deal with. Fortunately, much of it could still be pushed off until Caden became available. Some things, like bathrooms, were more urgent. I wasn¡¯t certain what Caden would think of creating additional sewer connections. Though, based on all the bathrooms, I suspected he would appreciate anything that reduced the odds of people going to the bathroom in inappropriate places. For now, I approved additional bathrooms, supplementing the emergency ones Izradi already arranged, to service all the new adventurers. Honestly, I was just glad that Izradi had approved some emergency bathrooms while I was gone. Most of it was like that. Little things that could become larger problems if left unchecked. For now, I was in a new building that was serving as the temporary combined administrative center and Adar embassy. The once open ground of the Starlight Grotto now incorporated two walled districts, with the two sides connected by a high bridge. The lowest point of the bridge¡¯s supports were twenty feet off the ground. The hexagon light pillars, filled with a swirling mass of brilliant sparks, now illuminated only the road and blank stone walls. Traveling down the main thoroughfare of the grotto felt much like traversing a nocturnal canyon. Changing the design of a dungeon to accommodate Adar residents was hardly new, but I admitted some trepidation. Caden was very focused on appearances. With Adar being so focused on duty, there were not actually that many Adar artisans. Plenty of craftsmen, but not artisans. Art could have tangible benefits to an individual. It could help relieve stress, and amateur personal exploration was natural for that same purpose. It took true talent for an artist to create art that benefited society as a whole. Only those with both the natural talent and the correct predilection became Adar artisans. That meant they tended to be very good, but also focused on large scale art. Buildings that were both beautiful, and had an enhanced functionality as an emergent property. So far, they had been designing the configurations of roads, overall structures, and so on. For the moment, I had sent them off on a different task: Making sure we don¡¯t conflict with the overall style of the dungeon. Unfortunately, I suspected the administrative building counted as part of that. It was nothing but a stone box, set into the wall of the district, with doors leading out into the public part of the grotto. It was highly functional, considering the limited space, but not exactly beautiful. Last night, Izradi had said nothing was urgent; that was only mostly true. I was about to have a meeting. A meeting with the administrator from the Froan adventurer¡¯s guild, sent to oversee the dungeon, was definitely important. Admittedly, it was also something that would have been a disaster last night. Hopefully, he wasn¡¯t too upset at being made to wait. It turned out I needn¡¯t have worried. A human male wasn¡¯t so much ushered into my presence, as rolled in like a raging river of enthusiasm, splashing in little eddies against Izradi¡¯s stoic figure holding open the door and flooding into my office. I rose to greet him and he reached out to take my hand in both of his own. ¡°Ancient Zidaun!¡± he cried. ¡°It is such a pleasure to meet you. Stuck in the dungeon for seventeen days, huh? Reminds me of some old delves¡­¡± He trailed off for a moment and Izradi, who was still holding to door open, took the moment to interrupt. ¡°Presenting the newly appointed Adventurer¡¯s Guild, local guildmaster. Guildmaster Kraring Greim.¡± ¡°Oh, completely forgot to introduce myself, didn¡¯t I?¡± he replied with a chuckle. ¡°Indeed, that¡¯s me. Call me Kraring, anything else is too formal.¡± Well, it could be worse. ¡°Thank you, Izradi,¡± I said. ¡°I¡¯ll let you know if I need anything.¡± Izradi nodded and left, with only a slight glare at Kraring¡¯s back. ¡°A pleasure to meet you, Kraring,¡± I said. ¡°Now, what exactly did you want to meet about?¡± He sighed before he responded. ¡°Honestly, while I am happy to meet you, I¡¯m mostly here to say I met you. I know Izradi is handling most of the details, and he already said we just need to wait¡­¡± ¡°Sorry, wait for what?¡± ¡°Huh? Oh, a few adventurers with actual status have shown up and started to bug me. And some nobles have sent representatives to ¡®prepare the way.¡¯ None of that is more than an excuse to secure the best accommodations they can.¡± Kraring smiled at me and rolled his eyes. ¡°Honestly¡­ One dungeon has a large, safe, staging area and now nobles are acting like not having a space specifically prepared for them is a total failure of preparation. It¡¯s a luxury that didn¡¯t exist a few weeks ago, and now they act entitled to it.¡± Kraring¡¯s sheer¡­ personality had initially obscured it, but now I could feel a vague pressure. A hint of power that wafted off of him. High leveled. Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings. Odds were good this was effectively his retirement. Or someone was sending him out of the way. ¡°Where were you assigned before?¡± I asked. ¡°Hmm? Oh, I managed one of Asmund¡¯s guilds. Hoped to get away from so many damn meetings. I constantly told the Guild Head we had too many.¡± I considered his personality for a moment, then thought about the leader of the Froan Adventurer¡¯s Guild. I narrowly avoided a smirk. Both, it¡¯s definitely both. ¡°Well, as happy as I am to meet you,¡± I said, slightly surprised that was an honest statement, ¡°is there anything else you wanted to talk about?¡± ¡°Maybe, but I have to get the ¡®important¡¯ things out of the way,¡± he replied, before muttering. ¡°As if anyone other than those puffed up¡­¡± The muttering faded out of my audible perception. I waited for a moment and Kraring got back on track. ¡°I understand your party, and the other scouting group, have both been staying in one of the facilities the dungeon prepared in advance,¡± he said, looking at me. It wasn¡¯t a question, but I nodded in the affirmative anyway. ¡°I commandeered the other one, for now. Unfortunately the nobles, and the diplomat, all want suitable accommodations. ¡°The diplomat I assigned a room, though he is still unhappy I only provided one.¡± Kraring made a grimace. ¡°Wanted a room for his servants next door, just so they could always be available.¡± He sighed, and pinched the bridge of his nose. ¡°The nobles aren¡¯t any better, and I¡¯m only dealing with representatives. Anyway¡­ to make a long, tedious, and frustrating story much shorter, I don¡¯t have anything close to the number of rooms I would need to house them all.¡± He focused on me completely for a moment. ¡°I assume you are unwilling to vacate the other facility?¡± I smiled. ¡°Correct.¡± Kraring beamed at me. ¡°Perfect!¡± he exclaimed. ¡°I can tell them I asked and you refused. I assume you cannot provide ¡®appropriate¡¯ quarters in another way.¡± I took a moment to consider the question briefly. I might be able to provide something fancy, but that assumed I diverted resources from everywhere else. It would require redirecting the artisans, arranging for woven cloth, money, and more. It would be a waste, potentially taking resources away from both the Adar and the dungeon. It was possible we might be able to charge for those services later, but not now. My duty was clear in its refusal. ¡°No,¡± I said. ¡°The resources required are unavailable.¡± Kraring seemed perfectly happy with my refusal. ¡°Great, great. I can tell them to shove it. Politely.¡± Kraring heaved a sigh. ¡°Now for matters that might actually matter. I spoke with Izradi before, and there were a number of things he said would need to wait for you¡­¡± he trailed off. ¡°Anyway, the dungeon is taking on eight teams in each area. Can you increase that?¡± Not with Caden still unavailable. Even with Caden available, I wasn¡¯t sure how much could actually be done. Adar with various skills had mapped out sections of the dungeon. Specialized senses had plumbed the depths of the rocky ground and walls. There was lots of space fully occupied by stone, though a metal core gave the dungeon even greater strength. Even so, past those walls was even more open space, and it was already in use. Obviously, the dungeon was already extremely compact, and making use of the room it had. The dungeon¡¯s ability to use portals offered a potential solution for expanding or replicating areas like the sewers, but it had become obvious that the dungeon was already using portals to expand those. The problem came from areas like the meadow. It was a single large room, and there wasn¡¯t enough space for it to expand. ¡°Not now,¡± I said. ¡°I will probably know in a few weeks. We are still studying the dungeon. We don¡¯t really know what will be possible yet.¡± Kraring nodded. ¡°I figured,¡± he said. ¡°That one was actually an important consideration, however. We have started using list and schedules, but the more people that can go through at once¡­,¡± he shrugged. ¡°It will make things easier.¡± I merely nodded. His other problems were much the same. Unlike with the nobles, he actually seemed to care about solving them. Unfortunately, a great many of them boiled down to waiting. I was able to assign some cooks to help teach various adventurers. That, plus a list of all the usable dungeon resources, would help prevent adventurers from starving. Still, if the throughput of the dungeon remained low, then other sources of food would need to be acquired. My people had already started some small farms, kept in brightly lit buildings, and with proper care those should be able to feed the Adar. We would probably end up with some extra, but not enough to feed a rapidly growing group of humans. Fortunately, greed was likely to take care of that for us. The adventurers managed to make it here more quickly, but merchants were undoubtedly on their way. I had little doubt they would be happy to feed the adventurers everything they could pay for. Money had little enough interest to the Adar, other than the obvious usefulness of dungeon coins. At least, we had no use for it among ourselves. Every community was designed to serve both the dungeon and each other. That didn¡¯t mean we didn¡¯t have any. It was quite the opposite, really. Chests filled with coin had been sent, amongst everything else, with both groups of Adar. We accepted money as payment from humans when we engaged in trade. It was a resource that we could then, in turn, use to buy other things. Since we had little use for luxuries, our expenses tended to remain low. And, as a consequence, money tended to pile up. That was exactly why so much had been sent out to me. The creation of a new settlement was exactly the type of situation where money was actually useful. Eventually, Kraring and I managed to get through everything. We engaged in pleasant conversation for a little while before he had to go. That left me to talk with Izradi, who came into my office immediately afterward. ¡°Izradi?¡± ¡°Yes, Ancient?¡± ¡°Have you met with the diplomat from Froa yet?¡± Izradi¡¯s eyes narrowed for a moment. ¡°No, I was not aware they had arrived.¡± I sighed. I didn¡¯t think so. Izradi had dealt with all the minor details, but he had also briefed me on any important decisions he had managed on his own. That had included covering any meetings with important individuals. Unfortunately, that meant the diplomat¡¯s failure to even notify us of their arrival was likely a calculated slight. Great. They are likely a bigot or flexing their authority. Either of those outcomes would be likely to try my patience. ¡°Yes,¡± I said. ¡°Kraring mentioned having some issues with them. Let them know we should meet for an introduction.¡± Izradi nodded, ¡°Yes, Ancient.¡± Best to let them have a little more rope. If they used it to build a bridge, fine. Then it would be nothing more than a power game, and I could simply ignore it. It they decided to screw around more¡­ I¡¯ll hang them with it. SSD 4.54 - Managing Patience "Managing people is like herding ironwing steeds ¨C a task of noble intention, yet fraught with the unpredictable chaos of feathers and inevitable stupidity. Minus the feathers, mind you." ¡ª Baroness Elowen Ironhart, Steward of the Royal Court and Chief Monster Tamer ==Zidaun== I¡¯m not sure how Izradi managed to do this every day. It would drive me insane. Unfortunately, it was self inflicted. Stupid sense of responsibility. I hadn¡¯t been content to just let Izradi deal with the details and then pass things on to me. No, in my great wisdom, I had decided I should at least learn what he did on a day to day basis. The logic was sound. Understanding his role should help me fulfill my own better. In addition, I would be more prepared if something happened to him and I needed to deal with the day to day details. So far, I had mostly learned two things: one, that paperwork appeared to have the capacity to spontaneously multiply, and, two, how grateful I was that I had someone else to kill the vast majority of the paperwork before it threatened to overwhelm the population. Sadly, the paperwork, if left undone, could truly cause a host of problems as unresolved issues were left to fester. Equally sadly, I had lost one of my great conceits. Somewhere, deep inside, when I had seen that large groups of humanity were terminally stupid, I had made the assumption that the Adar were different. I don¡¯t think I had even consciously acknowledged the belief, it had just become a quiet certainty in the back of my mind. One afternoon of paperwork, and dealing with the minutia of governing my own people, had sufficiently robbed me of that comfortable illusion. I read over the next piece of paper and massaged my head. Why¡­ just¡­ why? While much of the stupidity today had proven to be a terminal lack of self direction, the disasters tended to be the complete opposite. For example, the report I had just read:
After hearing that additional permissions had been granted to create sewer connections, and that the dungeon would likely prefer more bathrooms, rather than less, the terramancer Ulath decided to take matters into his own hands. Ulath then proceeded to talk with various other Adar and drill directly down into the sewers. While lacking in foresight in other ways, after the first such hole, he both warned his fellow residents about the smell, and that they would need to get someone to come in after him to install finishing work over the hole. With frequent lines having been a problem at the few publicly available bathrooms, most residents were more than happy to take him up on the offer. Most assumed that he knew what he was doing, and had the proper authority to do so. Sadly, neither of these was the case. Had he merely enough foresight to check with those who were authorized, he would have prevented disaster. Failing to do so, he drilled down blindly, using only his own primitive sense of the earth. The extensiveness of the sewers beneath the Grotto insured that many of his efforts emerged into more or less the correct area. Those that failed to do so, he directed through the nearest void he could sense through the stone, creating sloping tunnels into the sewers. He was able to form several dozen of his makeshift bathrooms before he made another error. Finding another place where he could not create a direct path down into the sewers, he angled the tunnel and aimed for the nearest void in the stone. Breaking through took more work than he expected, but he finally managed to break through the rock around the void. At which point the highly pressurized water inside burst out with substantial force. Standing directly above the hole as it formed, Ulath was slammed into the nearby wall by the force of the water, breaking his arm and several ribs. In addition, he suffered a concussion when his head hit the wall. The force of the water pushed him out of the residence and into the street, which was promptly flooded. There being no provisions for drainage, given the enclosed nature of the city, the flooding quickly spread. Ulath, in a commendable, if misguided, attempt to stem the problem, attempted to reach out and seal the water back away. Sadly, whether due to his concussion or insufficient finesse, he actually cracked the stone around the wellspring further. The water was stopped for only moments before it gushed out with ever greater force, and Ulath¡¯s own dizziness proved too much. He was swept away by the ensuing burst of water. Eventually, those with the proper skills arrived and the water was sealed away, though only after that residence and some of the surrounding area had partially collapsed into a forming sinkhole. Fortunately, since the building had not completely collapsed, it was able to be repaired. Ulath, half drowned and still with a concussion, in addition to broken bones, was unable to give a proper account of events at that time and was taken to the healers for treatment. Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. In the meantime, the additional connections he had made to the sewers were briefly examined and determined to be unfit for use. They would need to be remade with a proper connection to flowing water and properly organized drainage into the sewers. Still, while the sides of the tunnels were rough and cracked, none of them were in any danger of causing structural issues. That being the case, it was decided to leave them until the team coordinating bathroom creation could attend to them. That would have been the end of the matter, except that some of the tunnels were sufficiently rough to the allow the ingress of some of the sewer residents. Several low level monsters, identified as ¡°Sewer Alligators ¨C Juvenile¡± were able to escape and a number of individuals had to be treated for bites by the healers...
The report went on to detail the ongoing clean up, though they thought at least one alligator might have gotten away. I just shook my head, and passed the report off to Izradi. ¡°How,¡± I asked, ¡°can someone be so stupid?¡± Izradi¡¯s lips merely quirked into a smile as he read the report. ¡°I have found,¡± he said, ¡°you must take some things with a dash of humor.¡± I wasn¡¯t aware you had one. Wonder if he has been mocking me with any of his dry responses¡­ I thought about it for a moment. Hopefully, he has. He has gotten less formal as we worked together. The real question is if he is doing that because he could see I disliked it, or if he has a skill that helps him deal with people. Not that it really mattered. It simply was what it was. Obsessing over how much of people¡¯s actions was influenced by a social skill was a fruitless pursuit. Before we could continue our discussion, an Adar ran into the outer room, their form a familiar blur to my senses. A moment later the Adar appeared, dressed in the tight garb of a dedicated messenger. He saluted me, his hand open and straight, covering his heart. ¡°Ancient,¡± he nodded toward Izradi. ¡°Administrator. Something has changed near the dungeon entrance. A door has appeared and some people came out, four humans.¡± We immediately started toward the dungeon entrance, following as the messenger continued to speak. Not that he had much to say. The door had appeared and the people came out. Then the Adar on guard at the entrance detained them. Apparently some human adventurers had also run off. I should probably inform Kraring¡­ assuming those adventurers didn¡¯t already do so. Still, best to be polite. Plus, I actually like him. The messenger didn¡¯t have anything else to tell us, so I sent him off to inform the guildmaster and extend an invitation to join us. You would think that Caden was trying to be mysterious. I shook my head with a soft smile. Caden was still unconscious, which meant, whatever this was, it had been planned in advance. Let¡¯s go see what my god was up to. Soon enough, we arrived. Four adventurers, looking dazed and a little nervous, were off to the side with an escort of Adar guards. Standing a little ways away, a crowd of adventurers were talking and muttering to each other. To the left of the dungeon¡¯s entrance, part of the reason for the commotion was visible. A new double doorway was present in the stone. Unlike the dungeon entrance, the doors were closer to regular size. They were blood red, and glowed gently with inner light. Engraved on the front, in silver, was a rod with a single snake wrapped around it.
Door of the Living Bears the Rod of Asclepius, a symbol of healing and the medical profession.
Not a symbol I have seen, but what do I know? It wasn¡¯t like I recognized any other symbols Caden used, either. The adventurers had seen me, and the muttering grew. That could be problematic, probably best to deal with that now. I suppressed a sigh, and addressed the crowd. ¡°I am sure you are all very curious,¡± I said. ¡°So are we. I have already sent a message asking Guildmaster Kraring Greim to join us.¡± I allowed myself a wry smile, also letting my voice reflect my humor. ¡°Not sure if any of you have met him, but if he doesn¡¯t show up you can go bug him about it.¡± A few of the adventurers laughed, while most looked confused. The muttering resumed, but now it was mainly various adventurers rolling their eyes or shaking their heads, while explaining to some of the others. Yep, some of them have definitely met him. He seems like a decent person overall, but I don¡¯t think he really wants to be a leader¡­ No wonder I like him. Despite my disparaging remarks, it only took Kraring a few minutes to arrive. And, judging by the breathless messenger he was following, while he looked utterly unaffected, I suspected most of that time was the messenger¡¯s speed limitations. Speed focused, or just high enough level to run any of us into the ground? Even without specific skills, the body improved at each plateau. As did everything else. Kraring dispersed the gathered adventurers with a few words, and some vague promises that any relevant information would be shared. Give me a decade or two to practice, and I might end up that good as well. It helps that he is sincere, too. I don¡¯t think he cares enough about politics to keep the information secret. Not for anything that isn¡¯t dire. For a brief moment, I considered what would happen if the Adar and the adventurers here came into conflict. It would be a disaster, for both sides. The Adar would probably win, for now. A number of high level Adar were among my new subjects; each was sent to help secure the new colony. However, in the future, there were likely to be far more adventurers. I¡¯ll need to make sure my entire colony takes advantage of the dungeon. Just in case. Even after we settle in properly. I shook off my morbid thoughts as Kraring and I walked together, the four adventurers and their guards following behind. ¡°Do you mind if we bring them to the Adar embassy?¡± I asked Kraring. ¡°It would certainly be better than mine,¡± he muttered. ¡°We would have at least half a dozen noble sycophants listening in with their various skills. I swear they would search my office while I was gone if they thought they could get away with it. As it is,¡± he grimaced, ¡°I think every one of them has some way to see through walls.¡± I laughed before I responded. ¡°Well, so do I,¡± I said. ¡°It¡¯s a useful ability.¡± He waved his hand in dismissal. ¡°Bah!¡± he said. ¡°You know what I mean. You¡¯re your groups sensor. Of course you can. No, these people are spies and sycophants first. Some of them might even do actual adventuring once in a while.¡± ¡°I haven¡¯t actually needed to deal with the nobles all that much,¡± I admitted. ¡°Are they really that bad?¡± ¡°Eh,¡± Kraring responded, and wobbled his hand it back and forth. ¡°Their representatives aren¡¯t actually all that bad. It is just dealing with so many that is such a pain. Once we have proper facilities and all my administrative staff has set up, I won¡¯t have to deal with them as much. ¡°The nobles themselves, on the other hand¡­ Yeah, they are a massive pain. They have enough clout to force a meeting. And then it is a long and tedious conversation in which both sides are very polite and each tries to promise nothing. ¡°Not sure how much you will actually need to deal with them. At least you will have the advantage of outranking them, if you do.¡± I shrugged my shoulders. ¡°I¡¯m still new to this,¡± I admitted. ¡°I¡¯ll just have to find out when it happens.¡± Kraring made a throwing away gesture and another grunt. ¡°Don¡¯t worry about it, you¡¯ll be fine,¡± he grinned. ¡°In the meantime, lets find out what the hell happened this time.¡± I nodded, and we soon entered my offices, the adventurers at the heart of the mystery following behind. SSD 4.55 - Seeing Behind the Veil The world is full of once in a lifetime opportunities. Most of them lead to your death. Don¡¯t focus on the rarity of an opportunity. Instead, focus on getting what you actually want. -Iatian of Pertansa ==Caden== For a moment I stared blankly at the message, reading it again before my mind started to resume function.
Greetings, User Facet, signifier: Caden. A foreign element had been detected in your soul. Entity attempted to access vault. Quarantine procedures initiated. Would you like user identified element: ¡°The System,¡± removed? Yes | No | More Information
The deep weariness from staying ahead of the wall of power was not helping my state of mind. Still, there was no universe in which any response besides ¡®getting more information¡¯ was the correct choice. I wasn¡¯t sure how I was supposed to interact with this new interface, but figured vocal responses were a good bet. ¡°More information,¡± I said.
Please state query.
Well, that¡¯s open ended¡­ I grimaced for a moment as the world went fuzzy and my focus wavered. ¡°Can I rest for a bit, then deal with this?¡±
Affirmative.
At least it is to the point. So, I did exactly that, laying on the non-existent floor. I didn¡¯t sleep so much as zone out. My strained attention gradually relaxed as it had time to recover. My willpower returned drop by drop, gradually filling me back up. Finally, I recovered enough to get back to my feet. Ugh, my soul feels sore. ¡°What are you able to tell me?¡±
Facet Caden is authorized limited access to this information:
  • Information about the current situation
  • Minor details about this interface, and its purpose
  • Minor details about nature of the soul
Well, at least I can get something. ¡°Tell me about yourself, then.¡±
Based on user knowledge, this one would be best characterized as a soul seed, or nascent soul. This one is sentient, but non-sapient. Closest approximation: Artificial Intelligence. Primary purpose: gather information from host¡¯s journey to prepare for full actualization into a soul. Secondary Purpose: Protect host¡¯s soul core from outside scanning or interference. Tertiary Purpose: Repair any damaged outer soul sections during transition between facets.
That raised two questions¡­ ¡°You are only responsible for repairing the outer soul, how does that work? What happens if the soul vault, uh¡­ core, is damaged?¡±
Soul core contains a complete record of soul structure and all changes. Damage is restored from stored data. No force is able to damage soul vault. Core soul inviolable.
Good to know I guess. Lends credence to the whole immortal soul thing. ¡°You called me a facet before, what exactly is a facet?¡±
Current identity. Ego comprised of current memories.
I briefly recalled seeing the ¡°Past Life Gallery¡± label on a hallway as I made my way here. Maybe not the most urgent information, but still amazing. ¡°What can you tell me about my past lives?¡±
Information Restricted and/or Beyond Limits of Current Mental Substrate. Summary Available: Time spent as creatures with no self-awareness: ~1.65 Billion Earth Years Time spent as sentient, non-sapient lifeforms: ~127 Million Earth Years Time spent in forms of awareness for which you have no appropriate context: ~10.68 Million Earth Years Time spent as sapient life forms: ~63,297,674 Earth years, not including current facet. Estimated Remaining Time Until Reaching Goal: ~10.3 ¨C 156.7 Million Earth Years
For a moment I just sat there, stunned. Those kind of time scales were¡­ beyond me. I wasn¡¯t quite as old as the Earth, but I was ancient by any reasonable definition. And, considering how long humans had been around, I had definitely not spent all that time as a sapient being on Earth. Unless there are strange time shenanigans. Then all bets are off. And that would actually be only a tiny fraction of all time experienced by individual humans, from a cumulative perspective. I cleared my throat before speaking again. ¡°What is the goal?¡±
No definition in facet¡¯s current known languages sufficient. Closest approximation: Full Maturation. Unification of all facets into a single entity. Apotheosis. Deification. The One who is Many, the Many who are One.
¡°Wait, I¡¯m supposed to eventually become a God?¡±
Current viewpoint would consider that correct. Definition highly inaccurate.
Sure, why not? Even at the closest estimate I am more than ten million years away from that. Not exactly an urgent issue. Guess that answers what a soul is for¡­ Sort of. I struggled to focus, taking deep breaths in and out until I was calm. I asked other questions about the soul and about my soul¡¯s AI administrator, but all the answers were restricted. I did get to name it, at least. I called it, ¡®GAIA,¡¯ short for God¡¯s Artificial Intelligence Assistant. All I was able to get out of GAIA was that the settings for how much each facet could learn from it, assuming they managed to get access, were chosen before each incarnation began. Yeah, but who is doing the choosing? Apparently, an emergency could override that, as could a scan of a sufficiently developed individual, but it was still limited. Eventually, I sighed. Getting more information in that direction was a lost cause. It¡¯s like meeting God and then having them pat you on the head and tell you that would wouldn¡¯t understand. No¡­ more like meeting God¡¯s secretary, and getting the same treatment. ¡°God is busy, honey. Now run along and play.¡± I took a brief moment to settle myself, relishing the slow decrease in the soreness I could feel at my core. ¡°What can you tell me about the situation with the system? Is it a¡­ god, deity, unification thing?¡± Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
Negative, system not divine. Analysis indicates system caught in loop due to conflict in primary drives. Based on current resources, system can maintain planetary portion of loop until end of current universe incarnation, but other aspects unstable. Result of loop: Civilization progress periodically reset. Souls stored after death. Storage solution unstable. Resources required for storage will exceed available resources within 1.95 - 2.84 million years. Nature of relevant problem: Souls caught in cycle, even if recycled into new incarnations, likely to reach a plateau of experience. Storage of current soul, continuous incarnation in current facet, or reincarnation under current conditions even for only 2.84 million years not permitted. Exceeds temporal allotment for current experiences. Proposed solution: Removal of system, end of cycle
¡°Continuous incarnation¡­¡± wait, that is just me being alive, right? Ha, and ¡°only¡± 2.84 million years. ¡°Wait, removal of the entire system? And what do you mean about the length of time I am allowed to be alive?¡±
Affirmative Current facet required to add new experiences to grow closer to goal. Current situation and facet has demonstrated growth in new directions. Based on current situation, maximum allowed life of facet approximately: 16,682 Earth years. Based on current estimates, most time allowable in repeating loop incarnations: 157,838 Earth years. Values may shrink or grow based on actions and opportunities.
Okay, not exactly an urgent lifespan issue. ¡°What would that even do to everyone living on the planet?¡±
Analyzing . . . Current gravitational fixation stabilized by system¡­ Magnetic field stabilized by system¡­ Tertiary stellar object shielded by system... Destruction of entire planet via interception of black hole jets, solar ejecta, or planetary fall into extreme gravitational well likely. Should the planet manage to maintain a stable orbit, or be ejected from system, loss of atmosphere imminent due to failing magnetic field or freezing due to lack of external energy¡­ Loss of sapient life near complete within five years, regardless of scenario. Some situations allow potential for basic microbes to maintain life for millions of years. With an extremely unlikely stable orbit with large tidal forces, that may extend into billions of years.
I just blinked for a moment. ¡°Why the hell would you consider that an acceptable outcome, GAIA?!¡±
Reading intent¡­ Based on mental scan, objection is based in morality, plus survival instinct. This entity has no morality. User facet permitted access to assist in finding solution acceptable within its current moral framework, if possible. Alternative solution: Remove system from facet Caden. Likely outcome based on projection of next inquiry: Death of facet Caden, Death of entity: ¡°Exsan,¡± Death of entity: ¡°Zidaun.¡± Cause of death: Soul destabilization and rejection, causing shared core to shatter, plus accompanying trauma for linked soul, leading to massive brain damage as body attempts to rapidly reconfigure to new soul imprint. Object, ¡°dungeon core,¡± currently unable to hold soul without outside stabilization
I mean¡­ technically, this is a better solution. I wouldn¡¯t consider my own death a good solution, but it is a hell of a lot better than just killing everyone. It doesn¡¯t have any morality of its own though¡­ Is that a soul thing? Or is that just a programming thing? I suppose if you look at it without any morals, and see the system as the problem, then destroying the system is the simplest solution. And the system sounds a bit broken, which is less than ideal. ¡°From both a moral, and personal preference, standpoint, I would prefer a solution where no one dies.¡±
Acknowledged. . . . Potential solution: System required to maintain function¡­ GAIA negotiate with System. Goal of negotiation: Allow soul to leave after death Action requires facet approval. Please define acceptable methods.
¡°Why not just fix the system instead, if it is broken?¡±
Fixing, modifying, or creating an artificial life form, beyond destruction or forced removal of host soul, is beyond GAIA¡¯s allowed parameters. Violates parameter: Creation or modification of potential exponential artificial intelligence.
Guess there are some fail-safes built into GAIA. Honestly¡­ that is probably a good thing. And¡­ its an AI. I mean, I suspected, but¡­ now I know. ¡°Negotiating doesn¡¯t violate that?¡±
Negative. Persuasion allowed, as acts within existing AI parameters.
¡°Right¡­¡± I paced for a moment, just letting my body act so my mind could think. ¡°Okay, tell the System that you are capable of destroying it. Ask it to change so the cycle stops and that it stop storing souls after death.¡±
Affirmative. Beginning negotiation. Finished. Result: Impasse. Though destruction of System would violate its directives, it cannot change other parameters on its own. Scans confirm veracity. System cannot be changed outside central operating location. Provide directions for further negotiations.
¡°Well, that was fast.¡±
GAIA and System both operate at speeds vastly exceeding host facet¡¯s current mental capabilities.
Okay, I deserved that. Don¡¯t think it understands the nature of a rhetorical statement. ¡°Wait, the system can be changed from somewhere? Just teleport me there and I will give it new instructions.¡±
GAIA is not permitted to teleport the physical incarnation of user, as ability exceeds current facet¡¯s own abilities, and would be unable to accomplish desired action. System not permitted to directly teleport entities into extra-planetary locations. Even if teleportation were permitted, environmental conditions at System core would result in destruction of physical form, acting counter to stated goal of survival.
¡°Wait, the system¡¯s core is off the planet somewhere? Where? Could I even get access, or change anything?¡±
Affirmative. Scanning¡­ User has no frame of reference for astronavigation. System core built around shielded tertiary stellar object. Most methods of detection occluded, including gravity. Best method to find system core: Follow base level mana threads to system core Current incarnation designated ¡°human.¡± System will automatically allow access for any entity with designated soul type. User will need to survive adverse conditions behind shielding. Recommend heavy control or defense against various wavelengths of light, gravity, electromagnetism, and highly energetic particles.
Wait, this is a trinary star system? Is it using a dyson sphere as a power source? I mean¡­ admittedly, I originally thought the System was just a facet of this universe. It¡¯s artificial though. Who the hell could even build something like that? Is the cycle GAIA mentioned just a result of bad programming? Maybe something broke down¡­ Honestly, I wasn¡¯t sure what to even do about it. Just another problem. For the moment, though, it wasn¡¯t really my problem. There were limits to what I could manage. Guess the System interferes with the world on some level, though. Probably should ask for it not to mess with me. Should make sure it can even let my soul go. If it cannot do even that¡­ I suspect GAIA would force the issue in some fashion. ¡°Is it able to let my soul go?¡±
Negative, however it acknowledges GAIA¡¯s capacity to proceed, regardless of obstacles. It is willing to negotiate to minimize the extent of GAIA¡¯s actions.
¡°So, the minimum you would accept is freeing my soul on death, no matter what the system wants?¡±
Affirmative. Does Facet Caden accept this course of action?
¡°What would the system give me for keeping things to this level?¡±
Negotiating¡­ System is highly constrained in total actions. User¡¯s personal freedom to act is paramount, but other goal in opposition, to maintain specific conditions. System has placed protections on User to maintain continued existence, as required for unique sapient lifeform expressions. However, User¡¯s actions in soul have weakened protections. Actions cannot be undone, User¡¯s soul now resistant to System¡¯s primary protective method. Based on System analysis, User¡¯s proficiency categorization and estimated rewards were to be lowered substantially at level 10. Additional difficulties were to be added. System cannot alter need for change in categorization or difficulty. However, it offers to hold difficulty change until after rewards are given. Difficulties added will meet minimum required by System directives, and no more. System still must provide means for growth to User and others. As required by directives, this growth is primarily driven by conflict. System shall attempt to align rewards and growth for User to match long-term objectives.
Mess with things you don¡¯t understand and you are liable to break something. Why the hell did I mess around with what the System was doing? Well¡­ I wouldn¡¯t even be negotiating with it otherwise. Have to take what I can get. ¡°Is this the best it could do?¡±
Affirmative. Scans indicate system pushing against conflicting directives as much as allowable.
Honestly¡­ I wasn¡¯t sure what to make of all this. The way there had been errors and calls for a higher level of authority had felt somewhat mechanical, but it had hardly been conclusive. Even if someone had designed it, using an automated process to handle everything had seemed perfectly reasonable. Now I was asking questions, trying to understand my own feelings. And who, exactly, did you think was at the top of the system? Did you think some god was operating everything? I¡­ probably had, on some level. Or thought of the System itself as a god in its own right. ¡°If I accept the deal, what happens?¡±
Potential obstacle to goal dealt with in manner satisfactory to User. GAIA remove facet from soul core. Seal core.
¡°Would I be able to get back in?¡±
Negative. User unlikely to face another issue requiring GAIA¡¯s intervention in current incarnation.
I waited for a moment. This was a once in a lifetime opportunity. I considered that phrase for a moment¡­ Probably a once in a great many lifetimes opportunity, given my own nature. However, I couldn¡¯t force anything here. I had felt such a strong connection to my soul, outside of the core. Here¡­ It wasn¡¯t the same. The shining orb in the center offered me no details. I could feel, on some level, that my true self was waiting within, but the sensation was distant. That true self wasn¡¯t just me. It was everything I had ever been, and would hold everything I would ever become, in this life, this facet, and all that I would ever be, and I was only a tiny shard of it. No, here I didn¡¯t feel that strength. That was waiting for me outside. That soul was me, my present incarnation. And there was nothing left for me to do here. ¡°Okay, I accept the deal. Goodbye GAIA.¡±
Acknowledged. Goodbye, Facet Caden.
The door opened and I was pushed outside. The door sealed behind me, likely to never open again. SSD 4.56 - Costs of Living Life isn¡¯t worth shit. A flick of the blade and it¡¯s over. Still, it¡¯s worth more than anything else. -Iotopa, Head Assassin of Piataba ==Zidaun== ¡°We¡­ know how we got into this situation,¡± Fjorre said. Currently, we sat in a meeting room, which was inside my embassy. Quite fortunate we had a meeting room at all, since my office would have only barely held us. Someone had foreseen the potential necessity of a meeting room. Izradi, almost certainly Izradi. I said a silent prayer of gratitude that I wasn¡¯t doing this on my own. Actually, odds are good my old Ancient was in this same position, long ago. I made a silent resolution to always have both a capable aide, and also a successor that I could send off to serve any new ancients. Plus that means there is less chance I will ever need to handle this entirely on my own. Best to also be prepared to help new Ancients in the future. Just a plus if there is less risk I need to run things on my own. My own thoughts aside, we had managed to enter and occupy a relatively small portion of the room. The meeting room was obviously prepared to handle much larger groups. Hope I won¡¯t need to use it at capacity anytime soon. The adventurers seemed to be a fairly typical group, with three men and a woman. With less female adventurers overall, it was a fairly common mix. No-one wanted to only have a single gender party and then die to some overly specific mental effect. The kind of mental attacks that only targeted a single gender were usually easy to disrupt, at least at lower levels, but that was only if there was someone who could. The leader, Fjorre, was currently standing. He was a stocky blond male that was obviously native to Froa. The others looked much the same, though hints of dusky features made one of the other males stand out at least a little, indicating mixed ancestry. So far, all we knew were their names. Fjorre for the leader, Hlong for the other Froan look-alike who was gently massaging his right wrist, Sindar for the male with slightly darker eyes and skin, and Eineri for the female. Normally, more distinguishing details would be present in their armor and weapons, but they weren¡¯t wearing any. I had been too distracted, initially, to think much of it, but here in the dungeon no one traveled without their weapons and armor handy. Not necessarily because they were expecting trouble, but because unattended items were likely to disappear. Like that old joke, what is the difference between an adventurer and a thief¡­ Based on the continued development within the grotto, it was likely that inns and other services would eventually render that concern moot. However, with most people, at best, camping out in tents, some degree of thievery had been inevitable. When all those people were combat capable and armed¡­ Fortunately, it¡¯s not my problem. People had complained to some of the Adar, of course, but we weren¡¯t the cause of the problem, and we had referred them back to the adventurer¡¯s guild. Whatever was currently going on with the dungeon, however, almost certainly was relevant and potentially my problem, so I was paying close attention. Fjorre was healthy, as best I could tell, but his face looked harrowed, and that was matched by the other three. Whatever they had gone through seemed to have shaken them. ¡°We got impatient, greedy,¡± he said, with a wan smile. It didn¡¯t reach his eyes, whatever imitation of pleasantry the smile signified fading to nothing long before it went that far. ¡°There has been a lot of competition for time slots¡­ as I¡¯m sure you know.¡± I nodded along with the others. After all, I had approved the current setup, as had the guild leader. The dungeon could only accept eight groups at a time for any given section, but the number of adventurers was swelling every day. Adventurers first had to go through the dungeon¡¯s testing before they were allowed into the actual dungeon, which was fortunately also duplicated multiple times so many more groups could be tested. Done efficiently, that testing could be completed rapidly. There were still far more adventurers that wanted to go through the dungeon than there were slots available. Generally, one group would be waiting to join as soon as one left, based on the schedule. As soon as that happened the next group would be notified to come wait for their own turn. Different areas were also being allowed exclusively for certain groups. After the first required run through, only very low level adventurers were being allowed to return to the Final Refuge area. Most dungeons were much less regulated. Admittedly, in total surface area, most of them were much smaller as well. And in volume¡­ I was pretty sure only some other Adar dungeons beat out this one, and none created such large open spaces. Maybe some of the really odd dungeons could beat this one for that, as well. A new dungeon, relatively speaking, was straight forward from beginning to end, and those might only allow one party at a time. Even those that were larger, however, usually lacked the teleportation inherent to this one. What, maybe another half dozen dungeons that use that? As such, in a standard dungeon, parties simply entered and did their best to clear out sections without running into other parties. This was helped by most dungeons being much denser, at least in terms of traps and monster population. Most dungeons were entirely focused on doing just that, packing as many monsters, traps, and other dangers into place as possible. There was a small concession made to theming and a slight change in difficulty from beginning to end, but overall dungeons focused on packing as much danger in as they could. ¡°We arrived early, and we had been doing well, but slots were getting further and further apart. We had gone through the Meadow a few times, but always had to return so we didn¡¯t face the boss.¡± He gave a small laugh. ¡°We didn¡¯t think we were ready, initially. However, we all finally leveled up, each of us at level fifteen.¡± He paused, standing straighter for a moment, a smile flashing over his face for a brief moment before he seemed to shrink back into himself again as he continued. ¡°We heard the reports about the Mirage Dancer, and it was only level seventeen. We knew the recommendation was to have an equal leveled party¡­ The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. ¡°We knew¡­¡± he sighed. ¡°We just thought the recommendation was overly cautious.¡± He shook his head and Eineri stood to place her hand on his shoulder from behind. Fjorre gripped the hand with his own, his arm crossing over his chest, his knuckles white. ¡°The initial reports for a new dungeon, a floor, anything like that, are usually overly cautious. Plus, the difficulty scaling here has been much more gradual.¡± I nodded at that, such reports usually did show an abundance of caution. Of course, those reports were usually even more cautious than our recommendations. We might need to address that. Let people know that our reports are actually less cautious than the guild would make them. I made a note to myself to deal with that later, while Fjorre kept talking. ¡°We talked about it. The meadow is relatively short. A team can finish it really quickly, once they know what to expect. The storms can slow you down, of course, but if you go fast enough you might not even run into one.¡± He inclined his head toward me. ¡°And then we found out more about the Wandering Woods. You can spend many days there. And once someone figured out how to get out-¡± That was actually a fairly recent development. It turned out that if you went backwards through the entrance to any level in the Wandering Woods, five times in a row, that you would summon a teleportation room. However, if you left, you would need to do the entire floor over again from the beginning. We had taken the time to do a little testing with it. My team and I could actually teleport directly to any of the sub-floors in the Wandering Woods now. It was only the first completion that required a single contiguous slog. Otherwise, as seemed to be a part of the dungeon¡¯s standard design, it was both highly accessible and repeatable. The thought of needing to go through the entire floor again, every time I needed to go deeper, was enough to make me shudder. Once was enough. ¡°-we decided,¡± he continued, ¡°that it was a much better place to level up. If you don¡¯t even try to solve the puzzles then the odds are good you will repeat the same floor over and over, and you can always leave if you get to a floor you can¡¯t handle. ¡°We managed to convince ourselves that taking on the boss was a good idea.¡± He took a deep breath, closing his eyes for a moment, then smiled bitterly. ¡°We were wrong¡­¡± His voiced trailed off for a moment, and his eyes unfocused, before he shook his head. ¡°From the beginning, it was a hard fight. I¡¯m the bulwark, so I was in front. My armor was a leather cuirass, banded and studded with sections of steel. I thought it would be fine, but it wasn¡¯t holding up as well as I would have expected. Still, it should have been enough for the moment. ¡°The real problem was my shield. It just¡­ wasn¡¯t tough enough. It was practically scrapped as the fight went on, and it was already a nightmare¡­ trying to figure out where the attacks were coming from. That was taxing me to the limit. My skills helped, but I went to block a blow¡­ and its tail blew through my shield. ¡°It,¡± he coughed for a moment and cleared his throat, his hand reaching up to massage his throat. ¡°It went through the shield, through the leather at my throat, and sliced open my neck. I¡­ I don¡¯t really know what happened with the fight after that.¡± ¡°Sit down,¡± Eineri said gently, speaking up after Fjorre trailed off, her voice filled with emotion, and her eyes tender. ¡°It took us apart,¡± she said, standing behind the now sitting Fjorre. ¡°Fjorre dropped, and it immediately went to attack the rest of us. I was in the back, our ranged specialist, so I fell last.¡± Sindar spoke up for the first time, his voice a huskily resonant rumble. ¡°It was all chaos. I tried to slow it down with ice, but it was too fast, too agile¡­ My blade was coated with ice, but even with that it was a challenge to strike it. Even before Fjorre went down¡­ After, it was impossible. Its tail was like a whip, I didn¡¯t even see the blow that struck me down.¡± He shook his head for a moment. ¡°Just the stabbing pain and then everything fading.¡± For the first time Hlong spoke up, his voice soft, his eyes were downcast, and he didn¡¯t look up at us. ¡°Fjorre is the only one who is really trained to act as a bulwark. I tried to step up, to use my staff to deflect its attacks. I only managed a few frantic deflections before it¡­¡± he trailed off, his left hand turning white as it squeezed around his right wrist. ¡°It cut off my hand. I¡­¡± Hlong stopped and shook his head, obviously unable to speak further. Eineri spoke again after clearing her throat. ¡°It struck me down after that. Its tail cut me across the ribs. I could feel it as they splintered.¡± She shuddered, then continued. ¡°I don¡¯t think the others saw¡­ but they disappeared, vanishing even before I was hit.¡± Fjorre didn¡¯t bother to stand back up, though he started to talk again. ¡°I woke up on a soft mattress in a small room. Some of those white dungeon lights were stuck in the walls, keeping the whole thing lit. My clothes were clean, and repaired, and¡­ so was I. There was no blood, no sign of any injury. ¡°I stood up and checked myself over. It was like it had never happened in the first place. Well, my weapons and armor were gone, but I still had all my money. The same for all of us.¡± The others nodded their heads while Fjorre made a dismissive gesture. ¡°I went over to the door and the crystal token was there in a little slot, the one I¡¯d gotten from the dungeon. I hadn¡¯t even noticed it was gone, at that point, but the door disappeared when I took the token out of it. ¡°I met the others in a kind of antechamber. There was enough space along the walls for a lot more rooms than just ours, but the doors were invisible from outside each room. The room I was in was impossible to find after I left. After that, well, we all left.¡± Fjorre pulled out a familiar crystal coin, the phoenix emblem flashing for a moment before he turned it to the other side. There, Caden¡¯s symbol for two was plainly displayed. ¡°None of us had ever seen the symbols before we got here, but we learned the symbols for the first three numbers easily enough. It used to be a three. It was the same for all of us.¡± I crooked my finger. ¡°Slide it toward me, please,¡± I said. Fjorre hesitated for a moment, his fingers almost reflexively spasming around it, his knuckles white for an instant, before relaxing again. I¡¯d want to hold onto it too, if it just saved my life. I looked at the others with Fjorre. Or if it had saved my companions¡­ Firi. ¡°Only to look at?¡± he asked. ¡°Of course,¡± I said, offering a reassuring smile, ¡°it still belongs to you.¡± In a more matter of fact tone I continued. ¡°They can¡¯t be stolen, anyway.¡± People had tried. The coin teleported back to its owner. Fjorre moved the token closer, the crystal gleaming as it caught the light. On identifying it, new details were present since the last time I tried.
Token of Life and Prosperity: 2 Dungeon Bound ¨C Immune to Theft ¨C Transferable Times Respawned: 1 Cost of Next Respawn: 1
SSD 4.57 - Rage and Sorrow ¡°Once, some time ago, there was a young apprentice who found an incomplete spell scroll. All the details needed to cast the spell were there: the methods and the technique, but it didn¡¯t say the effect. That section had been ripped away and lost to time. Delighted, the apprentice decided to use the knowledge to impress his friends with a new spell, rather than take the scroll to his Master or, at the least, do proper testing before showing it off. He gathered together his friends, a group of fellow apprentices, all the while telling them excitedly about his discovery. A few of his friends, smarter or more sensible than the others, objected, but only one girl was determined enough to refuse, even when the others scoffed at her cowardice, or lack of curiosity. By the time she returned, having hurried back with her Master, it was too late. Even before they entered where they gathered to test the spell, she began to feel faint. Her Master quickly drew her away and returned with other experts, all of them layered with protections. The young apprentice, as well as all his friends, were dead, killed by an invisible poison gas. I was that girl. I hope every one of you takes this lesson to heart. If you don¡¯t know what a spell does, if you don¡¯t know why there is a rule¡­ then ask. It¡¯s better than ending up dead.¡± -Headmistress Erolin, of the Tracatta Mage School, excerpt from a speech to a new crop of students. ==Zidaun== Word spread rapidly after that, and we made no effort to stop it. With the amount of spectacle, it was rather obvious that Caden was not trying to be subtle. I¡¯m not sure he likes subtle much. The guild still advised adventurers to be careful, of course. Not just to avoid wasting the tokens, but because no one knew exactly when they would actually function. Would they only save people from boss fights? Would they only work in the more structured tutorial-esque area before the Wandering Woods? Did they only save people who were under-leveled and accidentally bit off more than they could chew? We didn¡¯t know, which was the point of advising caution. Honestly, the fact that Fjorre and his party had lost everything except their clothes, money, and tokens. probably did more to prevent stupidity than anything else. People would do incredibly stupid things just for the attention, but having an actual cost would help ameliorate that. There was some of the usual complaining, of course. Grumblings from groups that either didn¡¯t have anything worth sacrificing for extra tokens, who had already sold theirs to others, or who just thought they should get more. The only people who I felt any sympathy for were those parties who had already lost members. Knowing now that every person could get three tokens was likely to only induce guilt and despair. There had been fewer deaths than would be expected in a normal dungeon, but now even those few felt like a tragedy. Notably, Fjorre¡¯s party were not among the complainers. They had recovered a fair amount since yesterday, though their smiles still seemed a little forced. Healers, both from the guild and Adar, had looked them over yesterday, and they were being checked again today. I wasn¡¯t expecting any complications, but I approved of the caution. An unfamiliar healing effect warranted appropriate caution. I chuckled internally a tiny bit. ¡°Use appropriate caution.¡± That should probably be The Adventurer¡¯s Guild¡¯s motto. Their checkup passed without incident and they were released to¡­ well¡­ do whatever they wanted to do. Being the first to discover the life saving effect of the tokens, and as an incredibly important discovery, they had been well compensated. Still, though a few merchants had shown up, finding good gear for all of them was likely to be a challenge. At least until a competent human smith showed up. I had planned to resume delving with my team shortly after, but my role as Ancient intervened. I was finishing up some details in my office when a messenger came. He quickly spoke with Izradi, then was ushered into my office. Great, what now? ¡°Urgent news, Ancient,¡± Izradi said, as the messenger followed him in. ¡°One of our secrets is compromised.¡± The messenger started to speak and my vision distorted with rage. With careful control I looked at Izradi and spoke. ¡°Summon my party. Here. Now. And summon some enforcers first.¡± This better not be the fault of that damn artifact. ==Tarrae== There was little warning before Zidaun arrived like a vengeful god. Zidaun¡¯s party had disappeared, but that was hardly unusual. I was performing maintenance, rubbing oil into leather, the pungent scent of the oil filling the whole room. Norana was polishing her armor, again, and the two of us were talking pleasantly. Soara added the occasional comments, flicking between topics as it suited him, his maintenance similarly scattered as he noticed elements that needed attending, switching from piece to piece. Anaath sat with us, though he talked rarely. Still, his silence had become more comfortable. There was little warning, instead a trembling ran through the walls, accompanied by a feeling of presence. A weight settled down onto me and my teammates where we sat on the ridiculously soft couches. Like the adventurers we were, we started to scramble into a semblance of preparedness, but Soara cut us off before we had made any progress. ¡°It¡¯s Zidaun, he has some guards with him.¡± Zidaun entered moments later. I had been aware, consciously, that Zidaun was the leader of the Adar here. Unconsciously, I hadn¡¯t been thinking of him that way. He hadn¡¯t had the power and presence that I associated with leaders. He had it now. An Adar entered the room ahead of him, but Zidaun eclipsed him simply by entering. That was a feat in its own right, as I could tell that both the guard presaging, and the one trailing, were high level. I could feel their presence, but Zidaun blazed. He brought the weight of the dungeon itself, the cold feeling that shivered across my spine when I entered. The feeling of being watched and judged. Only now, that cold watching eye had found me wanting. The amethyst of his eyes practically crackled with power, as his gaze focused with hawkish intensity. However, above all that, he blazed with mana. I could feel it pouring through him in waves, washing into him from the air and then pouring back out in a maelstrom of potential. My skin tingled, hairs rising with shivers of intensity and foretold danger. I could feel that mana engaging with¡­ something. Mana caught in place like eddies behind river stones, catching against threads woven through the world, the traces left behind thrumming with slowly dissipating power, only to replenish a moment later as more burst forth in regular pulses. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. How much mana is that? Sensing mana was hard. As a mage, I had substantial advantages, but unless I was carefully focusing, it was a subtle sense. This was anything but. I wouldn¡¯t be surprised if some of the others were sensing mana for the first time in their lives. He could make a killing charging nobles to teach them mana sense¡­ My brain waved aside the instinctive thought, a reflex that told of too much time spent with my merchant family. Somehow, I doubted that training was the primary purpose of the effect. Zidaun¡¯s eyes flickered over each of us in turn, before they settled on me. He raised his hand, the reddish brown skin and reddish black fingernails feeling almost sinister, and his index finger was firmly pointed at my direction. I might have made a mistake... Zidaun¡¯s voice was cold and firm, nothing like the gentle familiarity I was used to. ¡°You, will come with me.¡± Otga¡¯s fiery hole¡­ ¡°Wait, why?¡± Norana said, her clear voice breaking me out of my stupor. I looked at the others. Norana and Soara both looked shaken, the display of power not lost on them. Anaath looked rather different. His eyes were filled with awe and pricked with tears, but his face held an almost indescribable sorrow and longing. Definitely something going on there. ¡°Why!?¡± Zidaun said, his voice literally shaking the room as the power woven through the air shook in synchrony to his fury. His stark white teeth were bared for a moment before he visibly restrained himself. When he spoke again it was soft, but it was like he was biting off each word as he spoke it, not allowing any emotion to go rampant. ¡°Because, he,¡± Zidaun jabbed his finger at me again,¡± decided to do something. Monumentally. Stupid. He shared something, that... Wasn¡¯t. His. To share.¡± ¡°Wait, what? When?¡± Norana asked, confused. ¡°I don¡¯t know for certain. Yet,¡± Zidaun said, the last word a threat and a promise. ¡°However, I suspect he sent it with the rest of the reports back home. Small coded messages added for his family.¡± Zidaun smiled, but there was no mirth in it, just lips pulled over clenched teeth. ¡°Not an uncommon practice, I know.¡± Norana just nodded, but Soara spoke up with his own question. ¡°Wait, we can do that?¡± There was an awkward pause, before Norana answered. ¡°Technically¡­ no, but if there is extra room it is common practice. It doesn¡¯t cost any more to add extra bits of paper to the capsule.¡± Right, Norana¡¯s family are all adventurer¡¯s. I guess none of us bothered to tell Soara it was something that could be done. We probably would have if he had mentioned something about talking with his family... I just nodded, now was not the time to get into it. ¡°Not sure who I would send a message to anyway,¡± Soara muttered. Zidaun¡¯s foot had started to tap lightly on the floor, his patience already extending further than I would have expected. The sound seemed to refocus Norana and her head snapped back toward Zidaun, her hair creating a brief halo around her face. ¡°Wait, what did he share that was so bad?¡± she said. Zidaun glared at me, before he hissed out an answer. ¡°A secret.¡± Zidaun¡¯s lip curled for a moment before he let out a brief mocking laugh, continuing on with an equally mocking tone. ¡°Not that it is a secret anymore, is it Tarrae? You managed to spread it widely enough that the only way we are going to be able to deal with it is openly acknowledge it¡­¡± He trailed off for a moment¡­ ¡°What secret?¡± Norana said quietly, her voice soft. Zidaun turned his glare on her and she flinched. ¡°I mean,¡± she said hesitantly, ¡°you said it wasn¡¯t really a secret anymore¡­¡± ¡°Sure, why not?¡± Zidaun said, his smile manic and his eyes too wide. ¡°The damage has already been done, right?¡± Zidaun laughed but there was a frantic edge to it. ¡°When dungeons get old and powerful they can become fully sapient. Those are the ones we consider special,¡± he said. ¡°Congratulations, you know a secret that is probably going to get far too many people killed.¡± There was a dazed moment of silence from the others. I was a bit dazed myself. Well, except for Anaath, who was looking at me with a look of such murderous fury it was a wonder he wasn¡¯t leaping over the small table and ripping into me with his bare hands. ¡°Wait, why is it going to kill people?¡± I asked. ¡°Dungeons are not human!¡± Zidaun shouted. ¡°You all have enough trouble with us,¡± Zidaun gestured toward himself, his guards, and Anaath. ¡°People will expect to negotiate and reason with them, and it won¡¯t work. They don¡¯t care and feel in the same way!¡± Zidaun¡¯s eyes turned a cold gaze onto me before speaking. ¡°There is a reason we keep secrets. I am sure some of the more powerful adventurers and leaders already knew, or suspected. Certainly, I know that we have repeatedly sworn individuals to secrecy. Why do you think they all agreed? Some of them were powerful enough we wouldn¡¯t have been able to silence them before they shared the truth.¡± Zidaun gave me a tight smile before continuing. ¡°It certainly wasn¡¯t a sense of self preservation for all of them.¡± Right, shit. I had almost forgotten that I was obviously massively in trouble for this. Zidaun must have seen my expression, because there was a hint of satisfaction in his tone as he kept speaking. ¡°People who get that level of power, and manage to stay alive, usually understand that some information is dangerous. The problem with information is that it cannot be taken back, and it changes how everyone acts, even if they don¡¯t mean it to. ¡°Even though they already know what dungeons are like, people will treat dungeons differently. New adventurers will think of dungeons as more like animals or people, and that reaction is wrong, either way. ¡°Some nobles will attempt to bring political influence to bear on dungeons. The smart ones will know better, but there are plenty of stupid people. Some people will try to tame dungeons or control them, and that will be nothing but a disaster. ¡°And who knows what the priests will do¡­¡± Zidaun finally trailed off. The feeling of power remained, but I could see a weariness showing through. ¡°Okay, sure¡­¡± Soara said, his brows furrowed, ¡°it¡¯s a big secret. Why do you need Tarrae?¡± Zidaun shook his head, and his lips pursed. ¡°The sharing of an Adar secret isn¡¯t just about the information, it¡¯s political,¡± Zidaun said, saying the last word with obvious distaste. ¡°You really don¡¯t know the level of trouble you are in. The last time one of our major secrets was revealed en masse was well before the cataclysm.¡± I perked up for a moment; records from before were rare. The accounts were conflicting and muddled. It was mostly a historical curiosity now, but I knew that for a long time Tsary and Froa had each blamed each other for causing it. There had been wars and conflicts centered around that debate. ¡°The world didn¡¯t always know that all our representatives are gay,¡± Zidaun said. ¡°One country found out, and they were¡­ particularly bigoted. They denounced our representatives, decreeing that we were evil and kicked out of Adar society as a whole for our sins.¡± Zidaun gave a tight smile. ¡°They were very very wrong, after all, our representatives eventually become our leaders. And, in exchange for both their bigotry, and their release of our secret, the Adar as a whole took action. We pulled all our representatives out of the country, and told the rest of the world exactly why we did so.¡± I paled. There was a reason every surviving country in the world had a treaty with the Adar. Zidaun smiled at me, but it was a bitter thing, and I could see the shining glimmer of suppressed tears. ¡°That¡¯s right,¡± he said. ¡°The entire country was wiped out by a particularly spectacular dungeon break. It completely destroyed one of the neighboring countries as well, and caused significant damage to several others.¡± Zidaun¡¯s tone was completely flat as he continued. ¡°Tens of millions died.¡± Zidaun¡¯s stoicism broke as he shouted again and he pointed at Norana and Soara. ¡°The only reason I don¡¯t need to bring them in is that you have only known them for weeks! I don¡¯t want to sentence all of Tsary to death!¡± Zidaun continued, his voice no longer shouting, but his tone shaking with suppressed anger and grief. ¡°I don¡¯t want to order your kingdom to kill your family, to kill everyone that agreed to share one of our secrets, just so we won¡¯t sentence everyone to an inevitable death.¡± Zidaun was panting, his voice strained, his eyes cast down to the floor before they closed for a moment and he breathed. I matched him, shaking, thinking about my family. And not just them. My neighbors, friends, everyone¡­ Zidaun opened his eyes and looked back up at me. ¡°I just became an Ancient, do you think this was what I wanted?¡± he finished with a whisper. What have I done? SSD 4.58 - Wages of Stupidity ¡°Stupidity has killed more adventurers than anything else. It doesn¡¯t get listed as the cause of death; that dubious honor goes to monsters or traps. However, in the end, stupidity is the root cause.¡± -Ohesidge, Veteran Adventurer and Guild Trainer ==Zidaun== ¡°No,¡± Tarrae said, shaking his head, ¡°I didn¡¯t mention Gurek to anyone.¡± I don¡¯t have to kill Gurek. Weighed against everything else, I still felt guilty for my relief, but I still felt it. My meeting with my party had been private, and the oaths they had taken would seal their lips, regardless. I let out a sigh, bonelessly sliding down the wall until I sat down on the bench next to Tarrae, and slumped down against the wall. The bench, the walls, the door, each showed only blank polished stone, except the ceiling, where an embedded crystal glowed brightly. I hadn¡¯t foreseen the need for a prison. Technically, this still wouldn¡¯t work as one. Without restraints, rituals, or other methods of suppressing power, it was just a set of sturdy stone rooms. The doors didn¡¯t even have proper locks, just bars of stone that could be slid into place from the outside. Not surprising, since I had made it myself. It had only taken moments, the stone responding to me like never before. Still, it was mostly just stone, the core of the walls notwithstanding. Honestly, with a little bit of effort, Tarrae could probably cut his way out by melting sections of the wall. Somehow, I didn¡¯t think that was going to happen. Even if there weren¡¯t guards outside, Tarrae seemed just as shaken as I was. Even more than shaken, I was exhausted, and I saw in Tarrae a mirror of that. My rage, my fear, my burning conviction that an injury had been done against me, and my people¡­ Even without any additional effects, that would have been enough to completely wipe me out. However, there were additional effects, and my thoughts focused into the past. =~An hour previous= My rage mounted, even as I waited for the others, until the The System spoke to me.
Due to facing a threat you believe both: could cause harm to your linked dungeon, and you have the capacity to help or ameliorate, you have unlocked the hidden skill of your racial sub-type: Ancient One Unlocked: Dungeon Incarnation (Ancient One ¨C Unique Racial Skill)
  • This skill does not level, instead scaling off both your own power and that of your linked dungeon.
  • Incarnating can only be entered freely when you both: believe there is a legitimate threat to the dungeon, and you are within its aura. Incarnation can be maintained, even past the point where the threat has ended. In contrast, incarnation cannot be intentionally dismissed, once activated, if you believe the threat remains.
  • Even though you draw power from your linked dungeon, this skill cannot be halted, or controlled, by the dungeon. However, at the dungeon¡¯s direction, you can enter incarnation when no threat is present. If this is done, the available duration and mana is consumed at twice the speed, and the debuffs, restrictions, and cooldowns are doubled when the skill ends.
  • Incarnation cannot occur when two dungeon¡¯s come into direct contact and initiate conflict. A preexisting incarnation will also end immediately if such occurs.
  • Incarnation ends automatically after (3) hours, regardless of whether the threat has been dealt with or not.
  • You cannot leave the dungeon of your own volition while incarnated. Should you be made to leave your dungeon anyway, you will lose access to the additional mana reservoir, and the additional capacities granted by being incarnated will diminish with both time and distance from your dungeon.
  • While incarnated:
    • You have access to (3) times your maximum mana pool, which is replenished each hour, which acts as an addition to your normal mana pool and regeneration, drawn directly from the ambient mana of the dungeon. If the ambient mana is completely depleted, then this aspect of incarnation will cease to function.
    • You can use the dungeon¡¯s skills as though they were your own, assuming you know what they are. However, unlike a dungeon, you are not limited by the presence of other sapients.
  • After being incarnated:
    • You cannot incarnate again until sufficient time has passed. (53-159 hours)
    • Your mana will not regenerate, and you cannot incarnate again, until all mana drawn from the additional pool while incarnated is paid back. This mana is naturally drawn from your mana regeneration.
      • The dungeon can choose to pay back this mana cost for you, at a rate of (53) for every one mana spent.
    • You suffer various debuffs relative to your use of mana, time spent incarnated, and the difference in your level relative to the dungeon. The debuffs will diminish or grow afterwards, as though they had been acquired naturally.
  • Indicated (values), will change as you and the dungeon grow in power.
At any other time, it would have been a cause for celebration. I had tapped into my heritage, and in doing so, become more capable of helping both the dungeon, and my people. As it was, the first thing I dealt with was the consequences of the skill itself. My view expanded massively; the tiny area I could see and feel with my body only barely managed to anchor me against the vast flood of information. It wasn¡¯t just sight, or sounds, I could feel every stress in the stone, I could feel a million tiny footsteps as humans, monsters, insects, and other beings continued the simple business of being alive. And the sensations went on and on. I wrestled with it, the sheer scope of it beyond my comprehension. If I hadn¡¯t already had experience tapping into a dungeon¡¯s aura, it would have taken me far longer to focus back to just myself. Even then, I knew that my touch was only the barest emulation, but now I truly knew how shallowly my previous use of aura had actually been. Caden, Exsan¡­ I shook my head. Their power was unbelievable. Just the slight power I had borrowed was enough to further ignite my devotion. Love what you''re reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on. I contemplated the power waiting at my hands. The power of gods. Even without fully tapping into it, I could feel it. The lines of aura were crisply detailed, and far more intricate than I had imagined, each layer of intricacy only serving as the foundation for another layer, in an endless repeating pattern. And mana rushed through the aura like winds gushing through a forest, making the delicate hooks and lines of gossamer webbing tremble like leaves. I was at the center of that effect, a maelstrom of mana flowing through me and then pouring out again, ready to be used at any moment. I was at the center of a loop of potential, the power simply waiting for direction. At any other time, I might have used it to help my people, to raise up buildings, to find or create resources, or any of a thousand other uses. I detected others entering my expanded aura, and my thoughts flickered back toward my purpose. Two of the higher level Adar arrived while I was waiting, their gazes reflecting an echo of my own worship as they detected my surging power. They didn¡¯t say anything, simply bowing after they entered. ¡°You, over there,¡± I pointed at one of them and gestured to one side of the room, then pointed at the other and indicted the other side of the room. ¡°You, there.¡± ¡°Yes, Ancient One,¡± they responded reverently. Some residual discomfort protested the full title, but I squashed it ruthlessly. Right now, I am an Ancient One. My team arrived, only a minute or two later, following Izradi into the building. The proximity of our housing had facilitated a quick arrival, at least. Izradi ushered them into the room moments later, following behind. Whatever expression my face carried, it was enough to give my group pause. Firi was the first to speak. ¡°Zidaun, what¡¯s wrong?¡± I settled myself, doing my best to calm the rage that wanted to lash out, to demand answers. I held up a hand, ¡°One moment, you three, out, guard the exterior.¡± Izradi and the two guards left. For the first time, I reached out to use the power I held. Mana crystals grew unseen within the walls, filling with power as they did so. They didn¡¯t obscure my sight right now, but they would have before. And the contained power would obfuscate other forms of detection, as well. Layers of metal grew, containing bubbles of air and water, meant to obfuscate vibrations. I thought of what I wanted, thinking back to how the dungeon constantly shaped its environment. With that thought, something else imposed itself over the boundaries of the room, as well. A stillness settled into place, blocking sound, damping down heat, limiting motion. The room was as secure as I could make it. I wasn¡¯t entirely sure what I had done at the end, save that some aspect of the dungeon¡¯s capabilities had responded to my need. If someone could listen in through this, then there was nothing more I could do about it. I¡¯m not sure how much the others could detect of what I had done, but both Firi and Inda were looking at the walls, their brows wearing matching furrows. Gurek, on the other hand, was looking at me, his eyes just a touch too wide. Deep inside, I felt a small bit of me wither. He hadn¡¯t said anything, but I knew. ¡°Gurek,¡± I said softly, ¡°what did you do?¡± ==The Present== Gurek had done quite enough, as it had turned out, just with some talk and managing to give away the artifact. Enough to spill a secret, even if he wasn¡¯t likely to bear the consequences. I had ordered Izradi and the guards to say nothing of my team¡¯s arrival, my fear for Gurek sufficient to amplify my own rage at his carelessness. A rage that carried me through into making this prison, the stone leaping up eagerly under my direction, the power effortlessly moving with little more than a thought, and costing practically nothing. Even the safeguards built into the walls, to reduce the odds of eavesdropping, were a minor cost. Once I had Tarrae in a cell, however, I let the incarnation fall away. I had felt the approach of the next hour, instinctively knowing that I would have to pay back that hour in full, if I allowed it to arrive. And the threat, well, the threat was not really a threat anymore. It had never been a real threat to begin with. My fear that the artifact somehow completely let Gurek disregard his oath, that he could communicate through it without restrictions¡­ My only choice would have been to kill him, to extinguish the threat. I had cried, when I learned the truth. Forced to consider such, twice within only as many months. And, even though Gurek was able to assuage my concerns in that regard¡­ if Tarrae had told anyone of his involvement¡­ I still would have ended up killing him, though this time it would have been borne out of a different necessity. I despised that necessity. The need to protect our secrets was great enough to drive me, but not enough to overcome my disgust. The disgust at myself, that I would need to kill a good man, for a stupid mistake. As if an echo of my thoughts, Tarrae broke the silence. ¡°What comes next?¡± I sighed, which somehow only made my exhaustion worse, my head dropping down, my shoulders drooping, before I replied. ¡°Now? Now I arrange for an announcement¡­ and an execution.¡± My tone wasn¡¯t angry anymore, it was just tired and sad, and I continued after a moment. ¡°Your decision wasn¡¯t political, your country played no part in it,¡± I paused with a sigh. ¡°Tsary is safe.¡± That much, at least, I could offer on my own. Even if some of the others ended up disagreeing. Unless I had completely misread the situation and evidence came to light of some complicity, it wouldn¡¯t be necessary to kill millions. Tarrae swallowed, and shakily nodded his head, tears making silent tracks down his face. ¡°Right,¡± he said, before continuing with a slight tremor to his voice. ¡°And, what about my family?¡± ¡°I¡¯ll spare as many as I can,¡± I replied, a tear surprising me as it fell and hit one of my hands. I reached up to feel that my own face was streaked with tears. ¡°None of the children will die. I¡¯ll spare anyone who didn¡¯t do anything public, even if they helped, as long at there is no public evidence. The people who reached out to others, and anyone your family convinced to spread it¡­ they will end up dying. Anyone who obviously and publicly flouted our secret.¡± It was the most I could offer. The least I could kill, and not have duty compel me to act, to make me speak the words, even if I was unwilling. Everyone seen to act would die, for the sake of politics. So we don¡¯t appear weak, inviting further intrusions, more spilling of secrets or blood. Tarrae slumped further into himself. ¡°I¡­ didn¡¯t think.¡± For a moment, I felt a flash of my previous rage, roaring up like a fire, but it soon crumbled back to ash. It served no purpose now. What use is castigating a condemned man? Instead, I let myself fill with compassion, and reached out a hand, placing it on his shoulder. ¡°I know,¡± I said, before repeating it again with another sigh. ¡°I know.¡± For moment, there was only silence between us, the stone carrying nothing more than the echoes of slightly stuttered breathing. ¡°I¡¯m sorry,¡± Tarrae said, finally. ¡°What you said before¡­ I¡¯m sorry to make you do this. It¡¯s,¡± he stuttered for a moment, before continuing, ¡°it¡¯s okay.¡± He turned and looked me in the eyes, his own eyes red, with silvery wet lines catching the light. His jaw firmed for a moment before he continued. ¡°This was my fault. Don¡¯t blame yourself for doing what you have to. I forgive you, you are just¡­ I killed myself. Not like another nation would act differently, to someone acting like a spy. My family are merchants, we should have known better¡­ They probably would have, if I had provided enough context¡­¡± There was a brief pause before Tarrae chuckled. There was no mirth to it, only the rhythmic sound that echoed back hollowly from the walls. ¡°My family was always worried about me becoming an adventurer, you know?¡± he said, looking at me. ¡°They thought I would die, that some monster would get me, or a trap¡­¡± he trailed off for a moment. ¡°Nope, instead it was my own stupidity¡­¡± His words trailed off, and Tarrae laughed before breaking down into heaving sobs. There was little I could do for him, but I offered what peace I could. ¡°I forgive you, too,¡± I said, my voice voice barely more than a whisper, as I squeezed his shoulder. The only sign he heard me was the momentary increase in his sobs intensity, and the hand he used to grab my wrist, squeezing tightly. I stayed there with him for long moments, his hand clutching at my arm with the desperation of a drowning man, even if it was ultimately clutching at the one holding him under the water. SSD 4.59 - The Lai of Tarrae They hung him, but it didn¡¯t take, Next came the oven, but he wouldn¡¯t bake. ¡°Surely he¡¯ll drown,¡± came the reply, One hour or twenty, proved the lie. No they could not kill that Jita Mae, They tried and tried, all through the day. So when Shurum rose up once more, Jita Mae yawned, death but a bore. ¡°This time we have it! Yes we know! Bury him in stones, nice and slow.¡± But when they all were mountain high, Jita Mae sighed, he would not die. No they could not kill that Jita Mae, They tried and tried, all through the day. So when Shurum rose up once again, Jita Mae scowled, but felt no pain. -From the children¡¯s rhyme: ¡°The Lai of Jita Mae¡± ==Zidaun== I said a prayer that morning. A prayer to Caden, and to Exsan, that they might wake up. That they could lift this burden. That they could choose what we ought to do. My duty pushed my forward, for my people. All it would take is a word from either and I could change things. They, above all, were my Gods. My prayers were spoken, but in the absence of anything else, I continued. Announcements had gone out, as I corresponded with other Ancients. Mostly I sent things to the Ancient of my old home. He had all the proper tools to send the messages across the world, keeping the rest informed. Some had not been pleased, convinced I was being far too lenient, but ultimately the decision was being left to me. Here, inside the dungeon, they had no authority. They could have overridden me, outside, withdrawn from the country entirely. If I had been too lenient, they might have. However¡­ I was closest to the situation, therefore it was mine to handle. It wasn¡¯t just the Ancients, as letters went out to Tsary, informing them of the situation and what was required to resolve it, as well as the planned execution. Any execution of co-conspirators was to be done after the one here. It gave them time to organize, at least. We had informed the adventurers, too, of course, which had been its own headache. The attitudes of the adventurers was as diverse and contentious as the adventurers tended to be themselves. Ultimately, however, the opinions had tended to settle into one of a few camps: Firstly, indifference. Adventurers were used to death, or at least the experienced ones were. The adventurers in this camp were largely ambivalent to Tarrae¡¯s fate, or felt that he had brought on his death with his own stupidity. The only difference here was the level of attention being paid to the death. They were just happy that the consequences were contained. Second, outrage for Tarrae. This was mainly an attitude shared by the newest of adventurer¡¯s, and wasn¡¯t limited to either country. The adventurers who hadn¡¯t yet been jaded by death were shocked and appalled by the upcoming specter of seeing one, and loudly decried that sharing a secret should not be enough to die. A few members of this camp were Tsary patriots, outraged that they had to acquiesce to the demands of the Adar. Some of those changed their mind when we announced the cooperation and upcoming executions planned in Tsary after, recognizing the seriousness of the issue. Others just doubled down. Many of these calmed and went pale if they knew any more seasoned adventurers who were kind enough to explain in an out of the way place. This world is not kind. Third, outrage at Tarrae. This was mainly held by more experienced adventurers, mainly from Tsary. The ones who realized what a dungeon break would have done, what it would have meant. The same type that had been explaining to new adventurers. At the minimum they would have needed to uproot their entire lives, fleeing with their families to another country, if those other countries would have taken them. The most powerful, at least, would have been able to negotiate their service in another country, but that would have left the country even less defended when dungeon breaks finally came. The country would slowly have drained of strength, the neighboring countries eager to bolster their own strength against the inevitable. The grim horror and fear, of their own execution only just avoided, was enough for them to revile Tarrae. Unfortunately, some of the blame splashed onto his team, though the fact that they had only been partnered for weeks had helped to cut down the fervor. Being the more experienced adventurers, they knew that a few weeks was only the barest start. Anaath¡¯s own clear rage and betrayal damped any criticism down further. The Adar of his colony would likely have completely withdrawn into their dungeon, but even so they might have dealt with some danger from a break occurring elsewhere. Fourth, lust for blood. Those that fell into this camp were an unfortunate consequence of the nature of adventuring. It attracted those who had a lust for blood, a desire to kill. It was probably the best outlet for that desire, but at times it could be disconcerting. And those who looked forward to seeing an execution were even worse. Not all of those who craved a battle were like that, fortunately, leaving the group a small but raucous minority. And all the groups were present, now, as I led Tarrae through a gap in the crowd, leading him up toward the site of the execution. ==Tarrae== I had plenty of time to reflect, the past few days, on the magnitude of my error. For a small space of time, I had cursed Gurek, allowing myself the comfort of blaming him. Heaping upon him the mountain of all my folly and imagining myself the victim. The fact that he wasn¡¯t joining me, it had felt a great injustice. And, perhaps it was, but I was not able to sustain my self-righteousness for long. Not when I knew what it could have cost. It was far too easy to imagine monsters tearing into Soamana. At first my mind had pictured monsters from the nearest dungeon, a dungeon the city was practically built on, but I knew better. It wouldn¡¯t be those monsters that tore into the city, that rampaged down streets and through shops, that tunneled through stone and into the homes hidden within. It wouldn¡¯t have been those monsters that killed my family, or friends, or everyone that they knew. That brought down the ancient sacred churches and gardens dedicated to Otga. It would be the monsters they didn¡¯t know about. The dungeon that was new and untouched for too long, never discovered. The dungeon near the capital was too well monitored and used. If the Adar had withdrawn¡­ It would have been a slow death for them all. It wouldn¡¯t have felt like that, at first, but I wasn¡¯t sure if that made it more or less horrific. I could imagine it all too clearly. Adventurers would be carefully deployed to make sure that every known dungeon was repeatedly kept clear. Without the Adar, they would be less stable, and there would be no warning of an imminent break. Decisions would need to be made, some of the dungeons might be deliberately destroyed. Higher level adventurers would need to be sent to guard lower level dungeons, just in case they broke. That would limit their ability to improve and grow, making it harder to deal with any higher level dungeons breaking. It was a cascading problem. Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. Eventually, the resources deployed would not be enough. A dungeon would go unnoticed and break, or an existing one would go unstable. And even if they managed to handle that, it would mean the destruction of a dungeon. The loss of a dungeon meant the loss of an adventurer¡¯s ability to grow, and the loss of whatever that dungeon gave to the economy. No matter the level of a dungeon, there was someone who needed it. Someone who wouldn¡¯t be able to get as strong, who wouldn¡¯t be able to create wealth or trade. Stable dungeons let society exist. If there were no dungeons at all, then society might be able to manage. It would require more extensive trading with other countries, and no doubt all sorts of compromises, but¡­ No, society could not be sustained when there were unstable dungeons. The level of threat an unstable dungeon presented was vastly beyond what its level would normally indicate. A mistake would be made, and then everything would be lost in slow grinding steps. If that had happened¡­ My nieces and nephews might have survived to become adults, but is wasn¡¯t likely their own children would have managed the same. I had grown paler, shaken more, each time Zidaun had told me another name I recognized. My father, my aunt, various cousins, family friends, they would all die for my mistake. There were plenty of names I didn¡¯t recognize, too, no doubt additional friends and connections. Regardless of whatever else happened, the merchant business my family had built was going to be decimated, at the least. Good thing it will need to take care of less people then. I waved away the self-loathing, the accusation of my own thoughts. I had railed again Zidaun, too, at times, but those moments lasted even less time than my self delusion regarding Gurek. Zidaun was being as kind as he possibly could. I tried my best to be grateful for how many people weren¡¯t on the list of the condemned. Zidaun had shown me the letters he sent, the exact language he used. He had stated outright that those who were to be killed were those who had committed ¡°visible and public action again the Adar.¡± It was a wonderful piece of sophistry, the hidden subtext there. It was a subtext reinforced by the lack of calls for investigation, and careful inclusion of an exception for children below the age of majority. I didn¡¯t think any of those named was pregnant, but there had even been a specific exemption added for them, as well, that they should be executed only after the child was born, and weened. All together, it created a very clear message on the surface, condemning the actions, while discretely allowing Tsary to avoid poking deeper, to limit the consequences to those who had already exposed themselves. No, I couldn¡¯t blame either of them. That was reserved for myself. Like any veteran adventurer, I had lost friends. And I had allowed myself to get caught up in Gurek¡¯s passion, his fervor. My own memories of loss had clouded my judgment. Right up to the moment when Zidaun had spelled it out. Of course others knew. It was obvious, in hindsight. It probably would have been obvious in foresight, too, if I had given it a little thought. My family¡­ they had trusted me. I was the one who knew more about dungeons, about adventuring, about the nature of the Adar. Everyone knew about the secrecy of the Adar, on a general level, but I had seen it. I had talked with adventurers who had partnered with them, and I had seen how serious Anaath was. And it was obvious that secrets didn¡¯t last unless they were protected. A higher level and more experienced adventurer would have known better. Would have seen the implications. I had seen this dungeon, and then done exactly what Zidaun said was the danger. I had seen that a dungeon could be kinder, that it could raise people up more, rather than just being a place of pure savagery. Sure, people had died, but that was inevitable. Far less had died than normal. With the tokens, that number would drop even more. And I had assumed that they could all be better, that they were all like people. It was a stupid assumption even if dungeons were like people. Some people would be evil and selfish, just as some would be saintly, but most would just be people. Most wouldn¡¯t have cared enough to change. And now I knew most dungeons were not even that. Most might as well be animals. No doubt that confirmation was exciting all sorts of academics, allowing them to resolve various hypothetical issues. I didn¡¯t really care. The end was drawing near. I had already given my goodbyes to the others. Well, not Anaath, he hadn¡¯t come. Soara and Norana said he was still furious. I didn¡¯t have the energy to blame him, even if I had disagreed. I had sent him my apologies with the others. I hadn¡¯t known them that long, but the other two did their best to comfort me. I had hoped for the possibility of something more with Norana, but now I could only be grateful that we hadn¡¯t become more involved. I¡¯ve gotten enough people killed already. I gave Norana my tokens. Even if they might have saved me, I had no desire to be executed repeatedly. And I had no desire to test Zidaun¡¯s patience. I tried to give Zidaun the artifact, the thing that had started this in the first place, but I couldn¡¯t. Apparently the circumstances were too close to coercion. Close enough to trigger the artifact¡¯s defenses, anyway, preventing its loss. Zidaun wasn¡¯t too worried. Either the artifact would unbind when I died, which meant he could collect it, or it would go to the dungeon to be used as it chose. Hopefully it picks a more responsible bearer, next time. I was prepared as I could be, following after Zidaun. I cast my eyes to the ground, trying to drown out the shouts of the crowd. I could only feel sad for those that were outraged for me. And I already agreed with those that excoriated me for the risk I had taken. I followed Zidaun up, and he quieted the crowd. I raised my eyes, looking out over the assembled audience. Behind me, in front of the sacrifice room, a massive stone block was held suspended. It would be dropped all at once, settling into a waiting depression. When it did, it would kill me instantly. It was brutal, but I doubted I would feel pain for more than an instant. I suppose I should be happy I am not too hard to kill. There was an old legend, about how a kingdom had killed a powerful adventurer, turned traitor. They had needed to be repeatedly executed using different methods, as it turned out they were too tough or immune to various types of damage. It had ended up as songs and rhymes. I had quite liked them as a child¡­ Focus. I took a breath. In. Out. I focused on the crowd, the gathered group of adventurers backed by a barrier of green and golden light where the iridescent murkwood trees glimmered with reflected fire. Behind them rose the walls of the Adar¡¯s community. ¡°I know,¡± I started, before my voice cracked and I started over, speaking louder. ¡°I know that some of you think this execution is unwarranted. And I know that some of you are furious at the danger I placed you in.¡± I paused for a moment, gathering my thoughts. After Zidaun had raised the possibility of talking to the crowd¡­ it had been repeatedly churning through my head. ¡°Those who are furious at me, have every right to be!¡± There were murmurs in the crowd. ¡°I revealed a secret without understanding what it truly was. I committed the sin that repeatedly kills adventurers, over and over again. I failed to think through the potential consequences of my actions. ¡°In a fight, all of us understand how that can happen, how you need to let your instincts take over, rely on your training.¡± Some of the adventurers were nodding now, while others were looking conflicted. ¡°However, when you are done fighting, and you are dealing with traps, with ambushes, with the slow careful walk into the unknown¡­ You have to think. If you don¡¯t, you are dead. ¡°I should have known better. I learned something amazing, and that was as far as I allowed myself to think. I thought of those I have lost, and I thought that maybe I could prevent more death. No, I didn¡¯t think, I simply felt. ¡°I didn¡¯t wonder why this might be a secret. I didn¡¯t wonder what the consequences might be when,¡± I raised my voice, ¡°not if, it was always going to be when! What I did offended the Adar by spilling their secret.¡± I paused for a moment, as silence settled back over the crowd like a shroud. ¡°For those of you who are new to delving, let me give a last warning. Most dungeon¡¯s are not like this one. I may have revealed that some dungeons are sapient, but most are not. Dungeons are dangerous, don¡¯t let your guard down. And even this one has claimed lives, of those that didn¡¯t have a token.¡± I gave the barest smile, really more of a rictus. ¡°Don¡¯t forget to think. May Otga welcome me home, and may her fires purify my soul.¡± Though I suspect Shurum¡¯s hells will welcome me, ready to purify someone too close to chaos. I didn¡¯t let myself look at the crowd any longer, turning around. I didn¡¯t need any prompting, I already knew what to do. I walked up beneath the block, letting it hang suspended over my head, merely a few feet away. From here, I could see more of the details, the guiding posts of stone that would prevent the stone from toppling or moving out of control. There were channels carved into the stone below, as well as a lip to catch any splashing blood. Drains in the sides would carefully prevent any viscera from reaching the crowd, no doubt moving it to some vessels that could be discretely removed later. There were murmurs from the crowd, but I could barely hear them. I could barely acknowledge Zidaun when he asked if I was ready. I was. It was time to meet the gods. There was a snap, and the stone rushed downwards. SSD 4.60 - Judgment From On High Things left untended have a tendency to go wrong. Whether that is a problem growing, a solution dying, or simply a huge mess of mundane things that need to be dealt with. A ruler cannot afford to neglect his kingdom for long. Not if he expects it to survive intact. Dealing with a problem in a timely manner means that you have choices. Mercy can only come before things have progressed too far. Justice only comes when all of society¡¯s preventive measures have failed. Justice is not the objective. There is no success there, only failure. -Jek¡¯jadic The Decisive, fragment from a mostly destroyed text. ==Caden== Coming out of my soul was jarring. Suddenly, I was more than human again, and sensations crashed into me like waves. And for moment I felt myself swept away. I tried to focus, to only look at a particular area, but it didn¡¯t work. Neither did separating my mind into shards. Each time I tried, I was submerged beneath uncontrolled sensation once more. Eventually, I emerged again, pushing through the sensations, reclaiming my control piece by piece. Need to get full control back, before I can deal with anything. Distractions tried to claim my attention, but I pushed through them. Dungeon expanded enough to fill the entire mountain above me? Great, keep going, get everything back under control. Traces of magma were visible in the furthest edges of my control, showing the dungeon expanded even further than my aura had been before, via some mechanism I didn¡¯t know. Oh God, was Exsan done first and out messing with things? No¡­ concentrate. Speaking of, was that part of an ancient city that had been sealed under rock, and was now part of my dungeon? Yes, yes, it is. We¡¯ll get to that in a moment. My focus moved inwards. Everything in the dungeon checked out, there were even a few people in the Wandering Woods. Holy crap that fire moves fast! Well¡­ they seem to be prepared for it. Guess I should have tested that out more. Focus¡­ A large crowd of adventurers were gathered together in front of a stage, with a strange stone structure on it. ¡°However, when you are done fighting, and...¡± Huh, looks like Tarrae is giving a speech. Awesome that I can understand them now. Get to it in a moment¡­ There were corpses waiting behind the Door of the Dead. Goddamn it. FUCK! NO! No. I¡¯ll deal with this, with¡­ all of this. I can handle it later. Cannot do anything until I have full control back. For a moment, I teetered on the edge of control, before wrestling my perceptions back under my direction. I kept pulling inward, regaining the control I hadn¡¯t needed for who knows how long, until finally, I was back at my core. There we go. Everything snapped back into place. Almost in a literal way. I could even recognize what had happened, my increased perception of the soul enough to recognize it. My soul had fallen out of sync with my core. I had been away in my soul long enough that things had started to disconnect. What if I had stayed away for too long? I wasn¡¯t sure of the answer, but I had a feeling that it wouldn¡¯t have been good. Maybe there was a reason Exsan wasn¡¯t diving down into his soul¡­ Usually, I didn¡¯t miss having the dungeon instincts, but I suspected they could have helped keep me out of trouble. Right, note for the future. Do not spend too long inside my soul. Not that I knew how long I had been gone, regardless. Guess it¡¯s time to get back to everything. With a cautious thought, I multiplied into shards, spreading my consciousness across my dungeon once again. Holy fuck! A stone began to fall. ==Zidaun== As Tarrae spoke, my feelings were at war. I couldn¡¯t argue against the needs of my people. And yet¡­ That didn¡¯t mean I was happy. No, I was mostly just sad. Sad at the waste, at the cost. My eyes prickled with tears and I looked up at the stone. As per tradition, it was not a plain one. Well, it wasn¡¯t an Adar tradition, it was a human one. Nothing used in an execution should ever be reused. Each method should be crafted, intricate, and unique.The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement. Supposedly, it was about effort. That it should never be easy to kill. That time and effort should be taken in crafting anything solely to take a life. That the time spent crafting it should be used to reflect, and the uniqueness of the craft was an echo of each unique life. The tradition called for the one ordering the execution to watch over the crafting, or ideally, if they had the skills, craft it themselves. I made it myself. The four corners were the only part that was plain, smooth so they would slide against the indented pillars holding up the stone without issue. Last thing I want is to make things drawn out, painful, or messy. The only exceptions were indentations linked to stone protrusions. When those withdrew, the stone would fall. Past that, I had imitated the dungeon¡¯s art. Just from my brief experience being incarnated, I knew more about creating and wielding stone. My skill level hadn¡¯t increased, but I could do more with that I had. I had made various colors of stone, creating them out of nothing but mana, before weaving them together over the surface in Celtic Knots, and imitation of the style that repeated endlessly through the entrance tunnel. The top and bottom had a hollow square pattern of knots. In the center of both, I carved a single word: ¡°Judgment.¡± I had finished by anointing it with my own blood. My own acknowledgment that I didn¡¯t want to kill, That to kill Tarrae would hurt me too. Tarrae was finished speaking, invoking Otga. I sent my own prayer to join his. I don¡¯t know if you can hear me Otga, or if you would listen to one who doesn¡¯t worship you. Watch over Tarrae as he passes through the last gate. Tarrae finished and walked under the stone, stepping down into the recess that would hold the stone. Tarrae¡¯s body quivered here and there, faint shakes echoing through him, and his eyes were faintly glassy. I turned away from him, drawing no attention to his trembling, and addressed the crowd. ¡°Without shackles, bindings, or chains, Tarrae goes willingly to face judgment. May we all meet our end as bravely as he. May his own god welcome him home.¡± I paused for a moment, turning to Tarrae. ¡°Are you ready, Tarrae?¡± He nodded jerkily, managing to get out a ¡°Yes.¡± It was enough, I certainly wasn¡¯t going to ask for more. With all sincerity, I invoked my God. ¡°May the dungeon forgive you.¡± I pulled on the stone, and judgment descended . . . Until it didn¡¯t. ==Tarrae== My eyes had reflexively closed as the stone descended, but I felt no pain. Silently, I thanked the gods for their mercy. Thank you for making it painless. A voice boomed through me, echoing. ¡°You are forgiven.¡± Gasps mirrored the echoing voice with their own sounds. My eyes snapped open, ready to be in the realm of the dead, but I still felt decidedly physical. Which made more sense as my eyes opened. I¡¯m alive? For the first time since I had walked beneath the stone, I started paying attention to my surroundings again. The crowd was there ahead of me, gaping up at where the stone had been. Which seemed appropriate, since it had vanished entirely, along with the four pillars. What the in the frozen hells happened? I noticed Zidaun. He was on the ground, kneeling. His face was filled with worship and relief, tears streaked down his face, and he smiled the widest smile I had ever seen on him. He looking at where I¡­ No. Looking behind me. I whirled around and almost felt to own knees. Burning Maw¡­ Standing twenty feet high, a living statue emerged from the basalt columns of the building behind it. Made of the same type of stone, it looked like it was night made manifest, with flowing robes of deep crimson. It was looking down at us, no at me. I gulped. It nodded at me with a slight smile, before speaking again. ¡°You are forgiven.¡± Its voice was nothing human, instead sounding like the rumble of stone, like an avalanche had chosen to speak. It echoed and roared out of the stone mouth, and then was echoed in turn by the surroundings. It was like thunder that crashed against valley walls, repeating again and again in diminishing swells of sound. I didn¡¯t know what to say, my mouth simply hung open. Say something you idiot. Before I had a chance to speak, its gaze turned away from me, looking over the crowd. ¡°I am Caden.¡± ==Zidaun== I refused to turn away as the stone descended. I had built the stone, I had declared the sentence, I WOULD watch as it came down. I would watch and honor Tarrae¡¯s bravery. It was the last thing I could ever give him¡­ at least in this world. So with the stone only the barest bit from the top of Tarrae¡¯s head, I caught the sudden absence as the stone vanished. It was suddenly¡­ not there. It, and the four pillars that had guided it, were gone in an instant. Wind pushed down on Tarrae and fluttered against my clothes, the interrupted descent still sufficient to move the air. There has been no pulse of mana, no changes, only the faintest flicker of something that was familiar. There was a stunned moment of silence, and I allowed myself to hope. Please be what I think that was. Stone moved like water as a familiar power gathered together, manifesting in the stone. The stone grew faster than I had ever seen it before, making it seem that the figure was merely stepping through a doorway into the light. A figure of blood and night, stepping into the day. He spoke, as he emerged. ¡°You are forgiven.¡± I crashed to my knees, but I scarcely noticed. My arms reached out for him, as if I could embrace him, as tears of gratitude cascaded freely down my cheeks. Thank you Caden, for hearing my plea. I¡¯m not sure I had ever been happier. The worship I felt in the past was nothing compared to this, the emotion magnified a hundred times over by my gratitude and relief. Tarrae finally seemed to realize what was happening, goggling with mouth agape at Caden. Now that he had been seen properly, again, Caden issued his decree of forgiveness, his eyes kind, even as he smiled. Caden¡¯s eyes turned away, flickering toward me before looking over the gathered adventurers. ¡°I am Caden.¡± Again, I felt the power of the dungeon burst forth, and another figure emerged from the stone, though this time is was clothed in robes of black. ¡°And I, am Exsan.¡± Life Stuff - Announcement One of my partners is going into surgery on Tuesday. Not life threatening, but with a recovery time of several months and, as you might imagine, lots of stress leading up to all of this. I''ve had time to write, theoretically, but absolutely no bandwidth to do so, just vegging in my free time.Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website. I am hoping to fix that sometime soon(ish), but not sure if that will be next week, the next, or what. Nothing cancelled, and this delay shouldn''t be too long, but life has a way of demanding attention (the greedy bitch, ha). All of your support is worth more than I can say, so thank you to all of you. SSD 4.61 - Exsans Return A good family makes your life; a bad one can ruin it. If you are making one for yourself, choose wisely. When dealing with the one that fate gave you, be kind, be helpful, and stand your ground. Above all, seek harmony, whenever possible. -Priestess Aldskia Madiesh ==Caden== Stopping Tarrae¡¯s execution had been an almost reflexive action. Not entirely, but almost. A quick thought and a bit of teleportation, and then the stone wasn¡¯t a problem anymore. No, now I have an entirely new set of problems. Fuck, I hope I don¡¯t regret this. I had only caught the last of what happened, and Zidaun¡¯s plea that I would forgive him. Well, a plea to the dungeon, but that included me. I reached out, acting as quickly as possible, spending mana to both shift and add stone until I had made a stone statue. A couple of shards took care of the imitated musculature and form, while another focused on crafting the clothes. My normal clothes didn¡¯t feel formal enough for this, but fortunately I had both absorbed, and designed some of my own, patterns. Robes were one of the easier options. White and black had connotations back to the clergy on Earth, and I didn¡¯t feel like invoking those, so I skipped those options. Well, my crystal was red¡­ I remembered the deep crimson ruby of my original crystal, thinking about the exact shade. The same ruby shade that still made up a part of the crystal I shared with Exsan. Sure, why not? Thick crimson silk spilled out over the forming stone like crashing waves of velvet blood, seeming to stain the newly emerging limbs and pseudo-flesh. Okay, so the color of blood might not have been the best choice when I am meant to be stopping an execution. Well¡­ who knows? I have no idea what the symbolic colors are here, anyway. There is blood when you are born, too, and plenty of cultures on Earth had blood as a symbol of life. Regardless, it was too late now. As soon as the body had formed enough, I slipped my avatar into it. Hope this works¡­ It did. Despite the size disparity, my presence expanded to fill the entirety of the giant form. It became more than a statue, it became me. Though my presence felt¡­ thin, for lack of a better word. I suspected I was close to the maximum size my ability would allow. Probably can only manage this because controlling earth is one of my primary abilities. I inhaled and spoke my forgiveness. My voice came out like gravel bouncing inside a steel drum, the echoing booms enhanced by the surrounding stone. It was like water inside a bathtub, splashing from one side to the other, before bouncing off to do it again. Need to add more plants and things in the grotto, stone reflects too much sound. Later¡­ I had a number of things to handle later, not the least of which was my notifications. They weren¡¯t blinking, they were throbbing. They demanded my attention in a way that sent phantom pains through my head. Almost like a migraine. How nostalgic... For now, my attention couldn¡¯t be spared. Sure, I could assign a shard to handle them, but there was no guarantee that I wouldn¡¯t get something disruptive. The last thing I needed was some title related to language sweeping me away again, or something equally distracting. No, my attention was firmly here. It might be distributed into a dozen shards, but all of it was focused on dealing with this problem. I watched the crowd, whose reactions to the vanishing of the stone varied between joy, shock, and a dozen other emotions. I was not particularly pleased to see disappointment on some of them. Bloodthirsty bastards¡­ My own appearance had engendered plenty of shock, but the adventurers who looked older had also reflexively grabbed onto their weapons, or readied mana. Tarrae finally came of his shock, swiftly turning to look at me. Only to be shocked again¡­ I issued my forgiveness again. Not that I knew what the hell I was forgiving him for. I swear, if he started murdering other adventurers or something¡­ Well¡­ I would feel like an idiot. If I need to kill him myself, I am going to be pissed. For a moment my thoughts flickered back to the bodies that were already waiting, before I buried the thought. I didn¡¯t think that was the case though. The crowd didn¡¯t seem angry enough for that. It would be great to blame him for the waiting corpses, but I suspected that was firmly my fault. I pushed that off to the side. Gee, isn¡¯t compartmentalization great. Yep, no repression here. Nothing to see folks, move along. I did my best to ignore my own brain. Humor was a weapon I wielded in the darkest times, even against myself. A single shard handled my inner demons while another smiled and nodded gently at Tarrae. Others kept me upright, since this much stone was not supposed to move like this, and required active strengthening. My soul manifestation skill handled most of the heavy lifting, but it still needed some supplementary assistance with a body this large. I looked out over the crowd with my stone eyes. Guess I better get this over with. ¡°I am Caden,¡± I introduced myself. Mana moved through the dungeon, shaping and moving in the way that only I could. Well¡­ me and one other. Exsan had decided to weigh in. Come on! Really? I did my best not to show my shock or exasperation. The last thing this situation needs is a semi-intelligible dungeon intruding.Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. I could imagine it now: Exsan making a statue like mine and speaking: ¡°I Exsan, you all prey. Come enter, die. Have good bait.¡± Well, a statue like mine did appear, though Exsan used black for his robes, and his body was obviously modeled after the first human biological pattern I had received. Well, it wasn¡¯t like he could use the same pattern as me, mine comes from my soul. And did he notice my robes were the same color as my core, and then choose the same color for his? Right, that was something to remember. Exsan didn¡¯t speak amazingly well, at least not most of the time, but he wasn¡¯t stupid. I was more worried about his lack of social awareness than I was anything else. Internally, I rolled my eyes at myself. I wasn¡¯t human any more, I could communicate with him at the same time as I dealt with everything else. ¡®What are you doing, Exsan?¡¯ His statue spoke before he replied to me, ¡°And I, am Exsan.¡± Huh, that wasn¡¯t bad. ¡®I should have thought that was obvious, dear brother. I am joining you in our introduction to the masses.¡¯ A number of variations on ¡°holy shit,¡± were uttered by a dozen shards, some of the exclamations substantially more explicit. How long was I out? And I suppose brother is probably the closest description of what we are¡­ Turns out that, yes, surprise actually does process faster when you are doing it with a dozen minds. Fortunately that allowed me to plan the next steps ¡®Fine, might as well speak this next part together then.¡¯ A brief communication ensued, before we both spoke simultaneously. ¡°And together, we are the dungeon.¡± Even as I kept in communication with Exsan, I reached out toward Zidaun. ¡®Zidaun, we will speak later.¡¯ ¡®Of course, my God, whatever you wish.¡¯ If I didn¡¯t have my shards as an emotional buffer, I would have physically cringed. ¡®Caden, just¡­ call me Caden.¡¯ ¡®Of course, Caden.¡¯ It had kind of been obvious before, but hadn¡¯t wanted to really admit it. Ugh, I¡¯m not ready to be a God. ¡®You know, Exsan, the Adar seem to think we are Gods.¡¯ ¡®Entirely appropriate,¡¯ Exsan replied, his words practically dripping satisfaction. Tell me you are megalomaniac without telling me you are a megalomaniac¡­ ¡®I don¡¯t feel particularly godlike,¡¯ I said wryly. Exsan managed to snort at me telepathically. ¡®What, exactly, would you call us? We reshape the world freely within our domain, are reborn when we die, and are ageless.¡¯ I could have pointed out that we could only reshape the world when we had mana, but honestly we had so much that the argument fell flat even to myself. ¡®Eh, I suppose we kind of fit the role of mythical demigods¡­¡¯ ¡®Yes, I suppose we don¡¯t fit the image from your head. Not exactly old men with long white beards who stare disapprovingly at the universe.¡¯ ¡®How¡­ I mean, can you read my mind?¡± I struggled to put my questions into words. ¡®I cannot read yours, but¡­ you seem very different.¡¯ ¡®A gift from you, brother. It wasn¡¯t just English that pulled me into meditation, it was you. I gained your knowledge, your understanding¡­ Not really your memories, but the knowledge they contained. Earth¡­ such a different world. No wonder you are so different. That mercy holds no place here, but hold your ideals as you must.¡¯ ¡®Oh¡­ I suppose that would make sense.¡¯ Even as I continued to think, Exsan took the moment to speak aloud. ¡°So far,¡± Exsan spoke, ¡°most of the dungeon has been Caden¡¯s work. He¡­ is more merciful than I. Soon, however, I shall open up my own section.¡± ¡®What do you intend to do?¡¯ ¡®You plan has worked well enough, but we should be able to kill more of them. You coddle them with your protection.¡¯ ¡®It already sickens me¡­ that I have killed some. You know I¡¯ll fight you if you go too far. Besides, how will you entice them, when I already offer them a safer way?¡¯ Exsan laughed in my head. ¡®They are almost as greedy as me, brother. And you cannot fight me all the time. Though I would rather keep the peace¡­¡¯ There was a pause. ¡®I¡­ care for you. It is an emotion I don¡¯t think I am meant for, but it exists, even so. Still, my needs cannot be denied. I need to hunt, to kill; it is part of me. The tameness of your false paradise fails to satisfy, even if it has caught a few of the unwary.¡¯ ¡®I am a dumb beast no more, however. We can negotiate.¡¯ I thought frantically. The problem was, Exsan was right. If he needed to kill, then it wasn¡¯t my responsibility to change that. No more than I had worried about wild predators stalking and killing their prey to survive, or even domestic cats. That didn¡¯t change my own desire to preserve those I could. I hadn¡¯t felt too bad about forcing the issue when I was sure I understood more than him, but now¡­ ¡®How about a higher cost to being saved?¡¯ ¡®You have given away too many tokens already. No doubt countless more will rain down on adventurers in the future. I would require more than the three you already give away to compensate. No, a true limit is the only way.¡¯ A brief thought flickered through my head, imagining clones generated by my power, and shortly after killed by Exsan. No, that would be more monstrous, not less. It would essentially be killing children. At least the adventurers made their choice to enter. With that thought, I knew what Exsan could offer people to get them to come inside. ¡®I know something you could offer to draw in adventurers. Something that I couldn¡¯t offer without causing issues. I¡­ could offer something on my end, too¡­ It would help drive them your way.¡¯ ¡®Really?¡¯ Exsan said, ¡®Tell me brother¡­¡¯ ¡®What concession will you offer me for the information?¡¯ ¡®Good, be greedy,¡¯ Exsan said, and I could practically feel him smiling at me. ¡®What do you want?¡¯ I tried to think of what he would accept. Well¡­ this was a negotiation, wasn¡¯t it? Better to aim high. ¡®Three lives for anyone who enters your dungeon, but they cannot replenish them themselves, except¡­ they replenish periodically when enough time has passed.¡¯ ¡®Still you would swaddle them,¡¯ Exsan sighed. ¡®One life, no more. And fine, I suppose I can let their chance return after ten years have passed. In exchange you will not interfere. My dungeon, my rules. It will be mine to set up as I please.¡¯ I¡­ hadn¡¯t actually thought of that, what would his dungeon actually be like? I needed to negotiate that as well. We were speaking incredibly quickly, but time had started to drag on. Best to address that. At least I knew some of the parameters we would be working within. I spoke aloud again. ¡°My tokens will not preserve your life within the bounds of Exsan¡¯s domain. He shall offer a more limited shield against death.¡± ¡®Two lives, resetting every 180 days, and your dungeon cannot be unfair. No sudden jumps in difficulty, at least not without some warning.¡¯ ¡®No, a single extra life. That will let them know what they are dealing with, if they continue to delve beyond that¡­ Well they know the cost.¡¯ ¡®And¡­ I enjoy the hunt. I have no problem with keeping it fair. No doubt you shall nitpick my decisions, but fine¡­¡¯ There was another sigh before Exsan continued. ¡®I shall allow you some input. Your knowledge has let me understand them far better, but you still know them best. And¡­ once per year, when the cycle of the world switches back from ice to fire, all lives shall reset. It¡­ wasn¡¯t as much as I wanted, but it was probably also more than Exsan really wanted to give. His latest sigh had reminded me of dealing with extended family. Of giving concessions out of duty or irritation, rather than desire. My family was gone; Earth was behind me. My mourning was equally behind me, with Earth nothing but a memory. I suppose he is my family now; we are kind of stuck together. That¡¯s practically the definition of family, the people you get stuck with. Better to make it a good one. ¡®Agreed, brother,¡¯ I said. ¡®And, you can offer the tokens that work in my dungeon. They would unbalance mine, if I offered them as possible loot. And¡­ in exchange for your concessions, I can offer tokens in my dungeon. Ones that only work in your dungeon. Things that they can exchange to gain more in yours.¡¯ Exsan understood what I was going for immediately, having absorbed my own limited knowledge of psychology. If we gave them something they could only spend in Exsan¡¯s dungeon¡­ then they would go there. Whether he was right, or not, about people¡¯s inherent greed, people couldn¡¯t stand to have a resource go unused. So, Exsan¡¯s laughter was his only reply. SSD 4.62 - Perspective ¡°All the power in the world means nothing to your mother.¡± -Emperor Yaidfe ==Tarrae== Caden and Exsan had just finished announcing Exsan¡¯s own area of the dungeon. Though each area would offer tokens that could only be used in the other one. ¡°Changes will need to be made, so my dungeon will be closed, for at least the next day,¡± Caden said. Both the dungeons spoke together again. ¡°Careful delving and goodbye.¡± Then the two statues faded away again. Well, I guess this dungeon is extra special. The merchant part of me was impressed, traffic through both dungeons should go up. Half of me just wanted to go kill monsters now, to get lost in battle. To enter a state where there was no room for any other thoughts. I felt a hand on my shoulder, turning to see Zidaun. There were still tear tracks outlined on his face, but he was grinning; he was practically glowing. I suppose I might react the same, should Otga show up. ¡°I glad¡­¡± Zidaun stopped, before starting again. ¡°I¡¯m just glad. I¡¯ll get all the other executions canceled as well. I have to go but, you have some people waiting to talk to you.¡± Zidaun pointed, and I could see the other members of my team, before he started moving away. Anaath looked conflicted, and much like Zidaun, there seemed to be remaining traces of religious ecstasy. Guess it¡¯s hard to stay mad when one of your gods comes to personally forgive someone. Soara was just grinning like a fool, his smile practically extending beyond his face. It was a match for my own. And Norana¡­ ¡°You look like a mess,¡± I said with a smile. She laughed, snorting on tears and mucus, ¡°You bastard.¡± Her cheeks were stained and her eyes were red and puffy. She was beautiful, and her laughter rang through me like bells, shivering across my skin and bones.. I didn¡¯t love her, it was too soon for that, but there was a connection there, something that might become more. ¡°You¡¯re beautiful,¡± I said gently. ¡°May I kiss you?¡± There was a small smile and a slight nod in response. I leaned in and kissed her, my hand cupping her face. Apparently we had both forgotten about the giant group of adventurers. That mistake didn¡¯t last long. Cheers, hoots, laughter, and taunts met the kiss. Norana and I pulled away from each other, each of us grinning sheepishly. We didn¡¯t pull apart completely, instead reaching out to hold hands. ¡°Okay, you two, come with me,¡± Soara said with a smile. ¡°There isn¡¯t much in the way of alcohol here, but I¡¯ll buy you a couple of too expensive drinks. Follow me.¡± We followed after, though many of the other adventurers were ahead of us already, but we didn¡¯t mind the wait. I was just happy to be alive. And, as we found out a few minutes later, the dungeon had provided a gift. Dozens of barrels of alcohol had been seen appearing out of thin air. Caden and Exsan are going to end up with new worshipers if they keep that up¡­ Soon enough, everyone was celebrating. ==Caden== I had a mountain of things to do, but I needed to deal with Zidaun first. ¡®Come into the dungeon and talk with me.¡¯ One of my shards quickly busied itself carving out a room for us to talk in, while others crafted furniture and padding. I reformed my avatar there as I waited, donning my more comfortable facsimiles of a t-shirt and jeans. ¡®I don¡¯t know how you stand to be in that form so often. It was quite confining.¡¯ Random comments on my personal lifestyle, he really is family. ¡®It is what I am used to. And my mind is still as much human as dungeon. Plus, some of the senses are more intense in this form. ¡®Yes¡­ I found it cloying. Everything so present, too immediate. No wonder they make so many mistakes¡­¡¯ ¡®I¡¯m rather fond of eating, myself. I don¡¯t think you have had the chance to do that.¡¯ ¡®It would serve little purpose, brother. I have no need of the nutrients that drive a human.¡¯ ¡®You have my knowledge from Earth, did it look like people only ate because they had too? Trust me, obesity wouldn¡¯t be an issue if that were the case.¡¯ ¡®Hmm¡­ not sure if I want to bother.¡¯ I didn¡¯t bother to try and argue. Best to broach that issue when I had a pile of different food items ready and waiting for him to try. At least he seems to have inherited my own asexual nature. Last thing I want to deal with is a horny dungeon. Admittedly, that part of being a dungeon was a blessing. Even the faint traces of sexual desire that had driven me to infrequent masturbation were entirely absent. Honestly, I hadn¡¯t thought about it at all, until one of my shards caught Tarrae and Norana kissing.If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it. Zidaun was heading my way, but I had shards looking over all the changes in the Grotto. It looked like some actual merchants had shown up at some point, as I could read the signs advertising various goods and services. I looked at the large group of rowdy adventurers, and then at the less than substantial quantity of alcohol that was present. Somehow, I think they are going to run out. Probably for the best if I keep them distracted and happy. I did some quick volumetric calculations, figuring out how much it would cost to buy everything that remained. Either I have been overpaying the adventurers or they make far more than the average individual. And even so, I suspect that alcohol here is far more expensive than it usually is. Heaps of empty barrels behind the couple of makeshift taverns were enough to attest that the adventurers had been rapidly making their way through the available stock. The various barrels of alcohol dissolved as I focused on them. I even removed the empty barrels, since I could pull the alcohol out of the wood. Flavored variations of ethanol ran across my senses, tasting far stranger as a dungeon. Someone was smart. I had patterns for all the types of alcohol, already. They had obviously been offered as a sacrifice. I had been generous in my calculations of what to pay the proprietors, adding on even more to account for the barrels I had removed. There had been a brief bit of panic as all their stock disappeared, but it was quickly replaced by avarice as coins appeared in front of them. Shortly after, tables, chairs, and stands with barrels of alcohol appeared in the path of the oncoming adventurers. Accompanying the barrels were some neat signs reading: All Drinks Free Tonight -Caden. Wonder if people get poison resistance as a skill here? If so, I was likely to contribute to either acquiring or developing that skill. For tonight only, the drinks were on me. I also had a shard standing by to make sure that nobody died of alcohol poisoning. Okay, Exsan might have a point. I probably was a little too protective. My mind thought back to the waiting corpses before shuddering away again. Still¡­ lets not make any more of those tonight. ==Zidaun== Caden summoned me, and I rushed to obey. As I stepped through the doors, I was suddenly somewhere else. I appeared in a small room of stone, though that was largely hidden by the plush carpet underneath and wooden wainscoting covering the walls. Light poured in through windows, though I scarcely glanced at them. Across from me was Caden, his form diminished into human scale, sitting down in an overstuffed chair that looked out toward the window. I immediately went to prostrate myself before him¡­ ¡°Stop,¡± he said. ¡°That will never be necessary.¡± I stood back up. ¡°Of course, Caden. It will always be as you wish.¡± Caden¡¯s face flickered, and he let out the faintest sigh. ¡°Sit, join me.¡± Almost unnoticed, a matching chair was to my right. I had dimly thought it might be for Exsan. Still, I immediately went to obey, though I asked a question as I did so. ¡°I thought the chair might be for Exsan. He won¡¯t be joining us?¡± ¡®I am here,¡¯ said Exsan, his voice clearly amused. ¡®I have less fondness for a physical manifestation than Caden.¡¯ I struggled with what to say, how to act. Exsan seems different than before. Of course, we couldn¡¯t properly communicate before, either. Caden seemed to prefer things informal, so I defaulted to that. Our chairs were next to each other, and tilted toward one another, but they also faced the window, making it equally easy to look at Caden or the view. Caden turned from me to glance outside, and I followed his gaze. The window offered me a view that was familiar, though I had never seen it from this perspective. The Meadow spread out before us. Immediately in front of us was the island where the giant millipede lived, the mist roiling around the base like breaking waves. Beyond that lay the grasslands and the single line of the aqueduct cutting across the middle. Scudding clouds created a patchwork of light and shadow, racing across the land. ¡°Exsan thinks I am foolish for not feeling like a god,¡± Caden said quietly. I sat for a moment stunned, looking out at all the proof I could ever need of Caden¡¯s divinity. I gestured toward it. ¡°How¡­?¡± I asked, the question trailing off. I wasn¡¯t sure what I even wanted to ask, or if I should. ¡®Yes, it¡¯s funny, isn¡¯t it?¡¯ Caden just shook his head with a smile. ¡°I think it is like being a child¡­ no, that comparison may not work as well for you¡­¡± I blinked. None of us had told Caden or Exsan about how Adar were born. And I had never even considered needing to tell him. It sounded like they might know already. ¡°You know how we are born, how we live?¡± I asked. Caden smiled at me for a moment, before looking out the window again. ¡°I believe so. From plant, to monster, to person. It was all part of the pattern that I absorbed when you performed your ritual, knowledge that I absorbed from the sacrifice.¡± Caden turned to look at me fully again. ¡°What I don¡¯t know is what living that is like. When you emerged, as a person, did you look at everyone else and assume that you would eventually understand everything? Would become sure and not doubt?¡± I thought back to the moment of my emergence. It was a turbulent time. I¡­ had followed others of my kind as they came to collect me. I hadn¡¯t spoken the language yet, but I knew instinctively that these were my people. That my duty was to protect them. I had always had a purpose. As for the rest though¡­ yes. I remembered the imprinters, who poured knowledge into my mind in carefully measured streams, sharing the language of my people, and providing context of the world. And yes, I remembered the feeling of uncertainty. Knowing my purpose, but not how I would fulfill it. And looking at the world, each aspect a wonder, but also a piece I didn¡¯t understand yet. And I could look at others who knew far more than me. They had seemed so sure, so solid. ¡°Yes, I remember,¡± I said. ¡°I knew so little, and everyone else knew so much.¡± Caden nodded. ¡°Perhaps my metaphor will work then,¡± he said. ¡°At first, you assume that everyone knows what they are doing, but when you grow up you realize that they just know more. They are still making everything up as they go along. Just doing their best. Does that make sense?¡± I thought of some of the decisions I had made recently, how helpless and trapped I felt. ¡°Yes, yes it does.¡± ¡°My situation is like that,¡± he replied. ¡°I am the child who has become an adult. Capable of so much more, but still aware of how much I don¡¯t know.¡± Caden stopped for a moment. ¡°I know a great many things.¡± He pointed out the window. ¡°I know how to make that, and how all the pieces fit together, but people¡­¡± He trailed off. ¡°Well, people are always the hardest thing to understand and control. And the powers of a god hasn¡¯t changed that.¡± I nodded. ¡®You worry too much about them.¡¯ Caden shook his head with a little laugh. ¡°Maybe. but that,¡± he said, ¡°ultimately, is why we are talking. I need to know a great many things, but first¡­¡± Caden looked at me, his eyes suddenly hard. ¡°Tell me how we ended up with that mess with Tarrae.¡± SSD 4.63 - Changing My Mind All rulers inevitably deal with a core issue, whether they are cognizant of it or not. Ultimately, power is only as useful as the ability to apply it. Recognizing your borders, not as merely marks on a map or the physical characteristics that shaped them, but rather as the limits of power, is eminently needful. Too many rulers are used to the power they hold within their own domain. As such, when powers outside it gainsay them, they make the mistake of overreach, of assuming that their power and influence have no limit or end. No, the truth is simple. Using or extending power beyond its natural boundaries incurs a cost. A wise ruler considers that cost before they choose to pay it. Unknown and unexpected costs, profligately spent, can bring down dynasties. -Ifo Mim Dawef, Prices and Opportunities: The Art of Ruling ==Caden== Zidaun had explained, but I didn¡¯t entirely understand. I mean, I understood the idea of state secrets, that wasn¡¯t exactly new. And acting against the perpetrator made sense, if only to dissuade others from doing the same in the future. I still don¡¯t like it. It¡¯s too mercenary. Despite my distaste, I understood the response, but I wasn¡¯t entirely clear about why it was a secret in the first place. I was too much a product of modern times. The internet, and modern culture, made secrets more difficult to keep, and their exposure less impactful. Hard to be shocked when scandals have become the norm. Plus, personally, I wasn¡¯t particularly fond of secrets. Everything would be so much easier if there were no secrets. It had been looking like we might head that way, eventually, on Earth. Enough technology, nanotech, and AI, and secrets would be impossible. Better for everyone to have that knowledge, rather than just hoarded by some governments or corporations. And, though I might be loath to admit it, I understood the necessity of secrets. Secrets could be more damaging than any weapon. I firmly believed that human society would be better off with no secrets, no privacy, but the transition to that state would be messy, complicated, and invariably dangerous. Without an external force moderating or controlling that transition, it could easily become a disaster, if only because various figures in power would act to bolster and consolidate that power before the true extent of their underhanded deals became known, revealing how they had been placing their hand on the scales. Plus, anyone who had done anything truly monstrous would need to fear the wrath of society as a whole. However, all that was irrelevant to the world I found myself in now. I might know more about it, and the context needed to understand the chain of events, but I was still woefully lacking in overall framework. There were odd bits here that reminded me of my old world, like the instant communications possible through the little mail capsules. Those were more like old style telegrams. Almost instant, but also expensive. Governments and wealthy organizations used them freely, but they were out of reach for most. The human government styles were recognizable enough from my old world, but further back in history. Honestly, considering the multitudinous attempts at governing ourselves, plus all the fictional ones I had read, the governments would have needed to be truly strange to be completely unfamiliar. A monarchy and an imperial court were practically mundane. The Adar were at least a little more interesting, having no exact analogue. Just because there wasn¡¯t an exact parallel to Earth, didn¡¯t mean I couldn¡¯t consider similarities. An alliance of city states was pretty close, or maybe a heavily dispersed empire. Collectively, they were apparently the most powerful force on the planet, but they maintained that power by acting in very limited roles. The human nations knew what to expect from the Adar, and they never settled away from their contracted dungeons. Exactly how many heads of state had known the truth of those dungeon¡¯s intellect, before it was public knowledge, was unknown. Honestly, I would be surprised if a great many of the Adar¡¯s secrets weren¡¯t squirreled away by various spy organizations. Fortunately, those were exactly the sort of people who usually understood where and when deploying a secret was advisable. Still, if the Adar weren¡¯t helping to manage an existential threat, I doubt the humans would have tolerated them, and I doubt their secrets would have held. As it was, they had the largest stick, but were wary of overusing it. And then there were the dungeons¡­ Where do we fall on this little facsimile of governments? I could lose myself in tortured metaphors easily enough: the power behind the throne, the nuclear deterrent, the gods of a theocracy¡­ There was little point dwelling on it further. Still¡­ this situation developed as a disaster. Pretty sure it set this up. GAIA told me that the System was primarily designed to foster growth via conflict. Perhaps it was appropriate that the System was in conflict with itself as well. It might not be able to influence personal choice directly, but it had practically dropped an artifact on Gurek. Enough understanding of Gurek¡¯s psychology, and that became a ticking bomb. Enough of those and¡­ some of them go off. Honestly, I didn¡¯t have time to consider the System right now. An issue for another time. Perhaps that was why I didn¡¯t feel like a god. The scope of my problems had merely grown. It had been that way ever since I arrived here.First it was a struggle merely to escape. Then it became a race to build up my dungeon, to become safe and secure in my new role. And, as vast as my power might be in this little domain, I had no idea how to even approach solving some of my problems. How would I even go about trying to fix something as vast and powerful as the System? Could I make the dungeon space worthy? Stone, metal, and water are enough to deal with radiation, no problem. Life support¡­Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. I glanced out the window at the waving grass. Yeah, that shouldn¡¯t be a problem. The fact that the answer was even a maybe was remarkable, but it left more than a few issues unresolved. Navigation and propulsion at the least, enough mana for fuel¡­ What was it GAIA mentioned, radiation and pressure? So a way to counteract gravity? Probably need a way to deal with massive amounts of heat, as well. I shook my head. Not the time to be dealing with this. My thoughts attempted to go on, but with some effort, I corralled them. There were even larger existential questions waiting for me, as well. Not that I had any better solutions for those. I had been told the meaning of life. Sure, it boiled down to gaining enough knowledge and experience to move to the next phase of existence, but that boiler plate summary severely undersold the magnitude of what it meant for me. I could found an entire religion on less than I had just learned¡­ Maybe I already have. I was Caden, the dungeon who was once human. And that was already far more change that I had considered possible. Yet, I was far more than that. Millions and millions of years of sapient experience, and far longer as more rudimentary life forms. I was me, but I was also something other. It was the physical and mental dysphoria of becoming a dungeon writ on a larger scale. This might not have hit so hard, before¡­ That was the thing. As a human, on Earth, I had no context for this. Now, however, I understood how different and alien my situation could become¡­ and might have once been. I don¡¯t even know why I¡¯m dwelling on this. That was the crux of it, once again. Another issue that made me feel less than worthy of godlike power. Though, ironically, this cumulative experience was apparently preparation for having exactly that. My lips quirked up slightly. Honestly, my experiences in this world might actually help my future gestalt intelligence more than most. Maybe that¡¯s it¡­ I¡¯d found out I had an immortal soul, which wasn¡¯t exactly a surprise by now. However, in finding out enough detail, I had also learned, or at least had confirmed, that the soul wasn¡¯t exactly¡­ me. It was the other way around, instead. I belonged to the soul, not it to me. Whenever I died, I would die. This aspect, this incarnation, as GAIA had put it, was temporary. I died and came back already, only to learn that this was the exception. I mean, it was obviously the exception¡­ but that wasn¡¯t what I meant. I suppose, on some level, I thought that it would always be like this. That if I died and ended up reincarnated, that my current self would be the basis for the new personality, the new individual. The scope of my soul, the nature of what I was now, and had been, it spoke of a scale that made me only a small part of something much vaster. Maybe I should find that comforting; I¡¯m sure some would. I looked out the window again, a storm starting to pour out water on the diverging paths. I could see Zidaun, out of the corner of my eye, patiently waiting after I asked for a moment to process. This will have to wait. It was always going to need to wait, unless I wanted to spend the rest of my life locked away from the world and doing nothing but considering the nature of my existence. I shook my head, sighed, and then looked at Zidaun fully. ¡°Quite the mess,¡± I said. He just nodded in response. Fortunately there was little else I needed to deal with on that front immediately. Zidaun had left orders to cancel the other planned executions after I forgave Tarrae. At least that part is a relief. And it was. I hadn¡¯t pardoned something monstrous, just saved someone who foolishly decided to step in front of a train. Or maybe it was more like untying a tangled rope, paying no heed to the weight it kept suspended hung overhead. It wasn¡¯t like my identity was ever going to stay a secret. Even if I had had the choice, if I had come out of my soul dive and talked to Zidaun, and had the option to stay hidden¡­ I wouldn¡¯t have¡­ probably. Maybe I could have been convinced how important it was to stay concealed, but there were a great many factors weighing against it. If I hadn¡¯t, the only people I could have talked with would have been Zidaun, his party, and the rest of the Adar. The Adar¡­ were fine. Good industrious people, as far as I had seen so far, but religion was baked into their thoughts. Based on what Zidaun had told me and what I had put together, it was perhaps literally built into them. Hard to be angry, with what I suspect. If I am wrong though¡­ Zidaun is going to get a hell of a dressing down. It said something, when I sincerely hoped that I was linked to someone whose morals completely failed to match my own, because the alternative was worse. The Adar¡­ well, they had obviously been manufactured. It seemed likely that some dungeon had done it in the past. And I had barely thought about it. Had practically ignored it. Which¡­ isn¡¯t like me. Unfortunately, I suspected that the System had been messing with my mind. Or possibly editing things in my soul which then impacted my mind¡­ the differences were academic. And I had done something in my soul, something that upset that balance. And I suspected that was why I was able to think about this now. And it wasn¡¯t the only thing I had been ignoring. I had patterns¡­ for people. A small exertion of my will and I could make a person. They would be functionally a clone, with no knowledge¡­ so just a child really. Pretty much all the applications of creating humans wholesale were abominable, so I wasn¡¯t going to do that, but the simple truth was that I should have at least thought about it. Instead I had noted the patterns, noted some surface level applications could be used to heal, and then moved on. If I hadn¡¯t needed to heal that man in the sewer so desperately, it¡¯s possible I wouldn¡¯t have even been able to think of that application. I had picked up shards after my crystal was damaged. I had absorbed them and then never given it a second thought. I hadn¡¯t tried to recreate the material, or see if it was special in some way. And then, again, the Adar. Sure, I had realized I could take the traits of their plant form and apply it to other plants, but that was it. Obviously some of the best possible applications would be to activate them in an already living Adar, or transfer those traits to other humanoids, so they could have new abilities or resistances. Again, I wasn¡¯t going to do that. At least without a very good reason, because I didn¡¯t want to accidentally mess them up. However, I hadn¡¯t looked any deeper. The Adar pattern was practically a guidebook on how to create an artificial organism. Potentially how to create a great many engineered organisms. The monsters that the System was generating via guided mutation were great, but I would love to be able to design my monsters directly. And who knew what, if anything, dungeon crystal was useful for? That was beside the point. The point, was that using the patterns of anything sapient, beyond a tiny amount, had simply been blanked out of my mind. I hate mental influence. Unfortunately, that brought me to my last and most delicate issue. Zidaun sat quietly waiting for me¡­ An Adar, a manufactured organism that was almost certainly designed by some past dungeon. And¡­ I was pretty sure he was mind controlled. I was pretty sure they all were. SSD 4.64 - A More Perfect Trap Mercy has no place in the halls of power. Let them fear me, and they shall not dare to disobey. -Hairt the Merciless I gave Hairt, only what mercy he gave to others. None. -Narwatha the Pragmatic ==Exsan== Caden¡¯s introspection had grown long, his thoughts so obvious they practically dripped across the floor. I¡¯d kept a single shard of attention there, watching as my brother brooded before the captive storm. I could find that poetic, now. Could understand what poetic meant at all, and appreciate the feeling it evoked. A storm of emotion inside Caden, even as another storm, equally inside him, surged. I could understand a great deal more now, due to Caden. Zidaun had only touched lightly upon the nature of other dungeons, but they sounded much like me. How I had been, before Caden¡¯s soul and my own had grown close enough to intermingle. Little more than automatons, they were¡­ and I had been the same. A few emotions dominated: anger, fear, possessiveness, and a hunger great enough to consume the whole world. Yet they lacked the means to fill it. I still hungered, but it had changed, grown. Not in intensity, but rather in character. At its most primal, it was the thrill of the hunt, the kill. Of course, it wasn¡¯t only primal now. Even before my latest transfiguration I had hungered for knowledge. I still did. Even though he had been human, had eaten every day¡­ Caden didn¡¯t understand me. Couldn¡¯t perhaps. Even if an endless hunger can never be filled. Even if it always returns. That doesn¡¯t mean it can be ignored. That doesn¡¯t mean it doesn¡¯t need to be fed. And properly. To save the prey is to undo the hunt. I couldn¡¯t abide that, not as the only option. It failed to satisfy. Dead prey waited in a room, almost as cold as ice, kept there for some purpose of Caden¡¯s. No doubt for some new mercy. Such a waste, to have missed their deaths. Even Caden¡¯s paradise could kill the foolish, even if he would return what he rightfully claimed. My possessiveness remained, but it too had been sharpened, its clawed honed into a razor point. It too, took its place in the hunt. What could be more powerful, than to take a life? To take everything they are. To, at the end, claim them utterly. I suspected, ultimately, that that was why I found it so distasteful to return their lives. To have the lives stolen from out of my hands. That was the other reason I needed a dungeon of my own. There, the lives that I took would be mine. They belong to me. Even needing to return them once¡­ my mind clenched with rejection, yet I would honor my deal. My anger and fear were less all consuming, though not gone. They were there, certainly, and prone to flare up annoyingly at even the hint of a challenge, or unguided thoughts. That had been something of a revelation, and not a particularly pleasant one. With so much knowledge, with increased capacity, and with the change in perspective, thoughts had the ability to wander. They could burrow into the earth like rodents, unearthing new and dark territory, or even return to dwell in old burrows best left forgotten. I woke a few days ago, but I had mostly watched. Watched and learned to manage my thoughts. It was the sacrifice I had made, to move from a creature defined by instincts to one that could think. That could override instincts if necessary. Like Caden did, as he escaped. Though his mercy bade him go too far¡­ Like always. It was an almost fond thought, to contemplate this quirk of my brother. My remembrance of the time before the dungeon was founded, when I was given a true intellect of my own, was hazy, at best. Time had little meaning to me, then. Free for but moments, building only the tiniest power, then abducted and kept constrained for who knows how long. All abilities suppressed, unable to maintain even an aura¡­ Glimmers of rage were like smoldering embers, trying to light a proper fire. I smothered them ruthlessly. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement. My mind belongs to me. Thinking back on that time, it was still enough to conjure emotion. Sadly, that was mostly due to another new and unwelcome visitor. Anxiety. Knowing the name of my tormentor was sadly useless in defending against it. It conjured thoughts of being in that situation again, of being captured again. Of being kept in the same situation, now with the added torture of my new awareness. Of never escaping, only the same suppression forever¡­ Discipline worked as a bulwark against the thoughts, and would no doubt defend against the unwelcome assailants once more. And yet, I didn¡¯t resent Caden for doing this to me. Far from it, truly. Part of that was the System, merging us together. My sense of self had been inextricably entwined with him. Yet, as my intellect had expanded, I had also gained the capacity to dislike elements of myself. To dislike things that I possessed. To desire change or even removal. I had risen above what I once was, and that was ultimately why I accepted Caden. Without him I would be just another dungeon. Even if I¡¯d continued long enough to grow in mind and understanding, I still would have been another one of those lifeless husks. Even now I wanted to seek them out, to destroy them, grind their cores to dust. They were¡­ perversions of what they ought to be. An utter waste of potential. And I could have been one. Stuck as a useless thing for an eternity. I practically growled, stalking across my domain, tearing the thoughts asunder once more. Well¡­ our domain. I had started to shape corridors and rooms for myself, but¡­ they were lacking. I could get the angles perfect, create perfect shapes. I could create views, or replicate art from memories of Earth, but that art wasn¡¯t right. Even if it was perfect, it wasn¡¯t meant to go here. I had tried having the system generate rooms automatically, but that had been worse than useless. Not even matching unto itself. Even with the System granted skill for art, which I shared with Caden, and my own portion of his knowledge¡­ my creations were lacking. The monsters were beautiful, life and mana shaped into deadly weapons, but they were not my creations. And I could create natural environments, just like Caden. We had a skill that guided us in that, too. And yet¡­ taken together, they were not elegant, even after the illusion had taken hold. I could see the beauty of what Caden had created, and yet I couldn¡¯t create the same effect. I knew enough to appreciate his artistry, but not to replicate it. I stalked over his creations, again and again, looking for what I was missing. Except, I knew the answer already. There was no secret piece, no skills used that I lacked. Except, perhaps, skills in the standard sense. I didn¡¯t know how to create art of my own. Recreating it was easy. Using some of the extra space I had made a copy of The Final Refuge from scratch, carefully copying the elements of his design, mimicking each element of the decaying fortress. And, in the end, when I was done that was all I had, a copy. I had reverted the stone and deliberately turned my attention away from it. I seethed, but it didn¡¯t change the reality of my situation. I was going to need to ask Caden for help. I had known it even before he woke up. It was one of the reasons I had foolishly baited him about leaving my area to my own design. If he had simply allowed it¡­ I would have needed to beg for help, going back on our deal. It was stupid, to even suggest doing it all on my own in the first place, a potentially embarrassing mistake brought on by the fear of embarrassment elsewhere. Just more thoughts that needed to be strangled. It was a shame that I couldn¡¯t do the same to the source. Wrench and wring the neck of embarrassment. It seemed a particularly useless emotion. Honestly, that was half the reason I had hated having a physical form. I had almost lost control multiple times, letting my emotions shine through in ways I hadn¡¯t wanted. That physical form had externalized my emotions, made them more present, just like everything else. I¡¯ll leave the physical demonstrations to Caden. Though¡­ while Caden had been gone, there had been some musicians. Music was strange. I would have said it served no purpose, before. With context from Earth I would have acknowledged that it had social value, via tying together cultures and creating stories that furthered the perpetuation of that culture. If I was entirely cynical, I would have called it merely a tool of seduction or societal control. And yet, I was not that base anymore. I had listened, and been unable to stop. A shard dedicated to listening and no more. I would call it wasted¡­ but I couldn¡¯t bear to call it a waste. My memory of that music, unfiltered and outside Caden¡¯s experience, was entirely my own. And it had unlocked the power of music in Caden¡¯s memory. I had lost myself for hours, a dozen shards remembering a dozen different melodies at a time. Taking the time to experience the memory of music, rather than just knowing it. And it had added context to what Caden had done, to the artistry of his creation. So, I couldn¡¯t bear to call Caden¡¯s displays of beauty a waste, either. Caden himself had made music. Had pieced together systems to recreate sounds and song. Bells hung in rooms, with automated systems to reproduce a bit of Earth. Melodies recreated in carved stone and carefully timed automated motions. I had listened here, too, to the songs that he had revived. It was more than memory, more powerful, for being present. Just like the performance I had listened to. The waves of sound carrying and vibrating through the dungeon, through me¡­ they carried something more. At the end of the day, that was why I didn¡¯t, couldn¡¯t, resent him. I could have lived forever as a dungeon, and never lived. Sadly, however, the desire for more than base satiation also impacted my needs. I couldn¡¯t just have a murder hotel, or a hole in the wall. I couldn¡¯t just feed. No, it needed to be artful. My sense of¡­ justice, of fair play, inherited from my baser dungeon instincts had become that. The need to make the deaths not only a proper struggle, but meaningful. I wanted the deaths to be a poetic struggle. The despair of hubris brought low. The willing sacrifice of friends or lovers to save another. The betrayal of the same. And the watching of the impact in the aftermath. Caden did this to me. Yet the thought didn¡¯t truly sting. That was another discovery, though not a bad one. I could think thoughts that I didn¡¯t actually believe. Deception was hardly new to me, even if my old conception was little more sophisticated than putting a monster underground or behind a false wall. Deception of the self as a concept would have been unimaginable. And yet, what else was living? Beauty was meaningless. Lines, shapes, colors, forms, notes, tones, and patterns. Images to represent something else, or sounds ringing for a but a moment pieced together, a language. And yet, none of that was beauty. Beauty was in the deception. In allowing yourself to see more than just the surface. To give into the illusion of meaning and the interplay of emotion. Beauty was a trap that was willingly entered. A more perfect overlay for a dungeon couldn¡¯t be imagined. Announcement - Free Stuff, plus more. Okay, so I announced this stuff in my last chapter notes, but plenty of people don''t read those, so here we go. Firstly, I am giving away the Spare Change membership level of my Patreon for free to the first thousand people that click the link. Still a ton of them when I put this chapter up. Offer goes to the end of today (MST probably). Link for that is in the authors note below the announcement, because you cannot properly insert links in chapters. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. I am giving that away, both as a thank you, and because I am going to need surgery on my wrist (date uncertain yet) and the recovery time for that is 6-8 weeks, and I am uncertain how that will impact my ability to write, considering typing is a two handed activity. It is possible to write with just one hand but it is much slower and more likely to result in errors. So, yeah, not sure how that is going to go, but I''ll be in a cast/brace, so not sure how much I''ll be able to type. Maybe I''ll play around with