A Lich's Guide to Dungeon Mastery

My shoulders slumped a bit in relief. I had plenty of time left to go.

It had started to feel like I wasn’t making much progress, but I knew that was just in my head. The new floors should help keep anyone who wants to kill me from just charging their way through. Of course, I still had a huge number of Antigo troops at my disposal, but real floors were more helpful.

I made a quick checklist in my head.

My top priority should be making sure that Esheth can’t just fly his way up to my tower. Hopefully I could find a rune that could do that for me, but if not I’d have to settle for Infliction- or Ordinance-based ones.

I also needed to build up my tower. It was currently my best method of defending myself, as it had tons of energy poured into it. Increasing that amount would be in my best interest. As part of that, I also needed to make the walls of my tower as impenetrable as possible. Getting knocked over would just be… so stupid.

Before that, though, I needed to find more ways to boost the potency of each floor. If I could find a way to access other realms to use energy gathered from them, that would be ideal, and it was possible that they’d also have some creatures and materials that I could use for inspiration and resources.

The next task on the list was increasing my personal attack power. I could always tell Azrael to run away if I felt that I wouldn’t be able to defeat the opposing mage, but I wouldn’t be able to leave. For me, it was do or die. I could make myself incredibly hard to kill in terms of my physical body, but eventually he would have to notice that I was just not dying. Then, he’d go straight for my Repository.

That couldn’t be allowed to happen, so he would have to die before he noticed my clone-seam trick.

In the past few months, I had already put a lot of work into my dungeon, so spending some time on one of the other tasks would be for the best.

It shouldn’t take long to hunt down some sort of magic to lock people to the ground, so I’d be handling that first, but after that?

Well, it would be time to learn how to blow stuff up.

My footsteps sounded loud in the quiet halls of Kelemnion. Of course, there was that nagging sensation in the back of my head that would turn into a whisper if I allowed it to grow, but for now the books were quiet.

At the moment, I was just walking aimlessly, trying to clear my head so I could think.

I needed a rune to deny people access to the sky. What would that be, though? Would I need to search for something that would specifically target the sky, or would there already be something intended for area denial?

My head suddenly snapped sideways. The world had started to shift in accordance with my thoughts, and Kelemnion had presented a book to answer my unasked questions. This one burned to my Esoteric Sight– more than any I’d actually read before– and a series of unintelligible whispers started prodding at my mind.

I shoved the foreign thoughts out of my mind and refocused on the purple cover of this novel. I reached out, pulled it from its shelf, and opened it up. The whispers grew stronger, so I released my mental grip on them, allowing the information to wash over my mind.

This book did not contain information about a rune or a type of inscription. Instead, this novel spoke about all of inscription-craft.

I saw images flash across my vision, I felt whispered words tickle my ears, and I sat there, absorbing the knowledge. But I did not allow it to consume me. Eventually, the flood abated– my mind had withstood this trial.

In the past, I’d been a fool and thought that having all the information from these books crammed into my head all at once would mean that I understood everything it covered. Fenrir had shown me the error of my ways, though, so this time I sat down and silently thought over everything I’d learned.

The process was basically just like actually reading the book, only a little bit faster since I already had all the words stored in whatever part of my Repository held my memories. Reading, but without the reading.

The basic premise of this novel was simple: it talked about the why behind runes. Of course, most of it was theory, but as I read I realized that I actually had the capacity to test some of these things.

My original plan had been to find a rune that would work for my plans to keep Esheth out of the skies, but now I’d found something much more interesting than that.

I quickly summoned my portal back home, sinking into the inky abyss and suddenly reappearing beside my Repository.

I created a sheet of vellum and a quill out of energy, then got to work inscribing a basic Infliction rune into it. I channeled some natural Death Conceptium out of my Repository to give the Forbodum I was infusing the rune with some direction, and carefully observed the process through my Occult Sovereignty domain.

I was shocked to find the theory I read to be true.

I couldn’t create inscriptions out of pure energy because the magic did something to the paper as I worked with it. Until now, I’d just thought of it as magical crap, but now that I watched more closely… tiny, almost-imperceptible changes were taking place within the vellum. As I carved the Infliction rune’s pattern into the paper, my magic was editing it. To a casual observer, it looked random, like the parchment was somehow being damaged, but to me…

The magic was carving its own little patterns into the paper.

I quickly pulled myself back from the image and finished the inscription, then got started on another with the exact same energy, pressure, and intent.

Sure enough, I saw the exact same pattern take place within the vellum.

Finishing that work, I used a different intent, and found that a different pattern was being created. I changed to a different type of energy– pulling some Absiete out of a stored gem with a bit of effort– but used the same Death intent as my first tests, and found that the pattern was the same.

In other words, the intent that I provided the rune with altered the rune to make it more correct.

That proved the book author’s theory.

The runes we used were only a small fraction of what existed– theoretically, there were an infinite number of runes and inscriptions out there, but humans could never find them because they couldn’t look close enough.

Just to test my theory, I carefully created an exact replica of the talisman I’d just created, making sure to include the tiny swirls and cracks that had been created by the injection of intent.

I sent some Forbodum into the runescript and it immediately lit up, sending a streak of green light at my wall.

I cackled in glee as I realized what this meant.

Why would I go looking for runes when I could just make my own??

My Abstractive Influence surged with power as I commanded my surroundings to be filled with the concept of Gravity– or, rather, the idea of an unseen force pulling you downwards– and I began to capture the resulting Conceptium with my Mentum, crunching it down into a denser state, until it was more solid and could stand on its own temporarily. I then pulled it into my Repository, where it was preserved and kept separate from other influences.

Over the course of an indeterminate amount of time, I slowly grew a Gravity Rat within my crazy rubber room. It was pure, solidified Conceptium, so it grew more slowly than it would have if I’d kept it in its normal state, but that was fine. Eventually, it dwarfed the size of the others, and I was forced to cut of the flow of Mentum as my pool grew too small to sustain the work.

I manipulated the inside of my Mentum pool to suck in more energy, and soon I had a reasonable amount to work with. Then, I created a large plate of gold.

I’d chosen gold for this process because it was generally considered a pretty soft metal, but it was still overall pretty tough when compared to something like my faux-vellum sheets.

As soon as the plate was fully formed, I brought a huge stream of Energetic Gravity Intent and forced it down on top of the gold, putting a good amount of pressure on it.

I waited for a while. No noticeable changes took place on the surface of the gold. I spent a while considering the nature of intent and inscriptions, and suddenly realized that Conceptium on its own could do very little.

Energized Intent’s purpose was to create a type of magical energy that could alter other energy in its surroundings more forcefully and consistently than standard intent could. It was stronger, denser, and more resistant to change, so it could do a lot more than the intent that would normally be held within a spell. It could forcefully apply a different intent to magic that already had one.

In other words, it wasn’t doing anything because it didn’t have any energy to work with, so I added a drop of Forbodum and let it get to work.

I waited, frequently checking the surface of the gold to see if it was inscribing a rune on top of it. It wasn’t, so I waited some more. And then some more. I started to get a bit frustrated when no noticeable changes happened, but then I checked inside the plate and found the changes I’d been looking for.

Of course, I wouldn’t just be able to hold Conceptium up to a material and have it carve a rune for me. That would be silly. My Energetic Intent did, however, make minute changes to materials I infused with it.

Cracks had formed across the plate in the form of small tendrils that seemed to all be making the same patterns. Some were reaching deeper than others, and some were more complex.

I sat back for a while, giving the Conceptium time to finish its work. Hopefully, this would produce some results.

I think I must’ve waited a few days to check on the gold plate again. I spent most of the time just packing more energy into the walls of my tower to toughen them up, but also tinkered with some ideas for extra mobs to put on my floors. Right now, they were mostly homogenous in terms of creature types: Twinscales on the first set of floors, Nailwolves on the second set of floors, and a variety of rabbits on the third set.

I felt that the rabbits were fine the way they were, since they weren’t all exactly the same, but the Nailwolves could use some prey animals of different types to really sell the image– they’d all need to have the same sort of fur that the Nailwolves had, though, to fit in with the theme. Maybe I could also make a lion miniboss?

As for the first floor, it really looked like there should be an ecosystem there. I could maybe make hordes of squirrels that were linked together in the same way that the Twinscales were, but in much greater numbers? Could be fun to watch.

Anyways, I eventually checked back on the gold plate and was elated to see that the carvings had extended much deeper into the plate, grown in density in certain places, and gotten much thicker.

In fact, as I looked at it, I realized that the spots that had undergone more change than the others seemed to be following a pattern reminiscent of both what the small cracks had been trying to do and also the structure of my other runes.

Hurriedly, I formed a sheet of vellum and started carving the rune into it with the same Gravity intent as before, pouring my Forbodum into it through my quill.

I made sure that the lines I was tracing into the paper-substitute followed the exact pathway of the thickest carvings in the gold plate. Eventually, it was done.

I was a bit worried about whether or not it worked, since no cracks had formed as I was carving out the pathways, but I imbued some Forbodum into the inscription and felt a thin layer of the energy spread across the room, even as the talisman dissolved in my hand.

For a moment, nothing happened, but then a spike of downwards force came down on everything the energy from the talisman had touched.

Quickly, I formed another copy of the rune, this time infusing it with a Barrier intent– this one geared towards making a shield against physical attacks. This time, the cracks formed like normal, making it clear to me that the reason there had been none the first time was that I was using the exact intent that the rune had been formed with.

I activated the intent, and another line of powder-like energy was formed, but this one just hung in the air as a pane in front of me.

I carved a rock out of the ceiling and dropped it into my hand, then tossed it into the Gravity Barrier.

The moment the rock came in contact with the energy, all of the energy that was above it funneled in its direction, pushing it downward, where more energy would gather above it. By the time the small stone hit the ground, the downwards force was enough to cause it to shatter and shoot off splinters.

I marveled at the scene. I had actually created a rune.

Immediately, my brain got distracted by the potential of this new tool. I would never have to use imperfect runes again. Ordinance schmordinance! The efficiency of my work was about to skyrocket, and I’d be able to simplify some previously-complex runescript. Hopefully, at least.

The way that the rune had carved itself into the plate had given me concerns about a potential complexity limit for the process. If I tried to give something an intent that would replace a ritual, whatever came out the other side might be completely unusable. It was already pretty tough to create detailed intents, as it took way more Mentum to create complex intents. Really, Conceptium was only meant to carry a single idea or function– packing more into it could make things screwy.

For example, if I were to try to condense a bunch of Forbodum into my palm as a bolt and just told it that I wanted it to stay together, it would do that extremely well. If I said I wanted it to speed up in the direction I threw it, that was fine too. However, if I told it to explode on contact with something?

That was a bit more of a stretch, especially since Forbodum wasn’t really explodey in nature. It would take a little more energy and focus to get it to work right, but I could do it with barely any effort at all.

If I told the same projectile that I wanted it to not only explode, but also shoot other exploding bolts out in random directions? Again, still within my capabilities, but it was much more efficient to just create a few of the exploding bolts, rather than packing it all into one casting.

Eventually, if you stacked enough layers of complexity and functions into one intent, there was a point where it not only took more concentration than it was probably worth, but it also spread out the power of the spell too much. If you wanted any one function to actually do its job well, then you’d need to pour a ton of power into it.

The same thing was true with runes. Having more specific, efficient runes would allow me to bypass one layer of complexity. My new Gravity rune, for example, pressed things to the floor. It was pretty simple, but doing it this way meant that I wouldn’t need to use an Ordinance rune to do the same thing. Instead of telling a rune with a vague function to do something specific, I could tell a specific rune to do something vague and have it perform just as well and with a much higher efficiency.

I crafted another Gravity rune– this time onto a plate of steel that I’d pulled from the wall as stone and transmuted into metal– and carefully guided some Absiete into it. For the intent, I gave it a sort of Antigravity intent, wanting it to negate and then reverse the effect gravity had on the plate I’d carved it into.

Just as I’d expected, the piece of metal easily rose up into the air.

I pumped my fist, excited that I had so many cool things to test out.

Now, the most obvious thing to do will these cool new inscription possibilities was to make Azrael some more powerful gear, but…

There were still a few more things I needed to figure out to make it as powerful as I possibly could.