Limitless Path

She didn't find anything else of value before Blood came to get her, leading her to a shelf with the last item in the room sitting atop it. It was a little box made of a dark blue material with a little silver symbol on the top. Picking it up and inspecting it carefully, Beth decided to open it as well after finding nothing amiss. When she popped the lid of the foot wide by six-inch-deep box open a wave of overbearing heat slammed into her, immediately drying out her eyes and causing her to cough. She could feel her skin starting to redden and singe a little, so she took a quick look in the box before snapping it closed. Inside were a bunch of rocks, but not just any rocks, as they glowed with a deep, seething orange light. The rocks were clearly some kind of heat aspected or producing material, and Beth was glad the box blocked all temperature transfer as she quickly stuffed it in the backpack.

The two had looted the place clean, other than the shelves and racks themselves, which Beth was in no position to take. Nor did she have a desire, quite frankly, to be grabbing random furniture and carting it around for the hope of a few silvers. They passed back through the gates as she pondered, heading out into the extra-large tunnel before making their way back and back again, winding up in the "main" tunnel after a little time walking.

The tunnel continued before a little while before sloping down more sharply than it had previously. After nearly ten minutes of descending with no new side passages, the tunnel leveled off. Just under a minute later they walked out of the tunnel into a large, open room. At least, it seemed so from what Beth and Blood could see of it from just the light attached to Beth's belt. She did catch sight of what looked like a light fixture set in a large support column further in the room, and she cautiously made her way toward it. She still had the new greatsword held by the scabbard with her left hand, and now gripped the hilt just below the center with her right.

Nothing leapt out to accost them before they got to the column of stone, which Beth noted had some details carved in a circle around the base, and Beth tsked in annoyance that she wouldn't be getting another good fight. She examined the fixture on the column and, with only a second's hesitation, reached up and sent a tiny thread of mana into it. The fixture was like a little glass sphere attached to the column by a round metal bracket, containing within it a little stone for storing mana and radiating it off as light.

As the fixture started to glow with a warm, golden light, Beth took a moment to look around the area. She still couldn't see the whole room but estimated it to be about a hundred feet across and thirty high at the center. She also still couldn't see any obvious dangers such as beasts, and they decided to simply go around and light more of the fixtures on the other five columns in the room.

When the room was fully lit, it was revealed to be a large hexagon with all sides of the room being of roughly equal length. The design was very uniform, which also meant that each of the other five walls had a doorway with a tunnel or room on the other side. The columns in the room were carved at the base with a circle of runes that she couldn't recognize and otherwise unadorned, if one discounted utilitarian light fixtures as 'adornment.' The walls were of a smoother stone than what the tunnel that had led them here was made of, while the ceiling was slightly dome shaped and so even as to be almost reflected. The only part of the room still rough in any way was the floor, as it was not broken as before but did still have a little loose scree scattered about.

Beth supposed the only thing to do now was to check each doorway and see if there was anything interesting through any of them. She once again went counterclockwise around the room, looking into each doorway one-by-one. The first doorway to the right of where they had entered led almost directly into a large room, only a short tunnel separating it from the main room. Beth noted the room and moved on to the second opening, finding a longer tunnel here which she couldn't see the end of at a glance. She moved on to the third unexplored opening, the one directly across from where they had entered, and saw another tunnel. She thought she could just faintly see it opening up further down, but whether it was a wider tunnel or a room, she couldn't tell. The fourth opening revealed another tunnel that stretched away into pooled darkness, no end to it that she could see. The fifth and final opening, apart from the sixth where they had entered, led into a room like the first opening she had inspected.

"What do you think girl; rooms first?" she asked Blood. The wolf barked an affirmative in reply and they entered the first opening she had scouted.

The room looked like some kind of office space, with a number of desks arranged throughout the center of the room while the walls were lined with shelves. The room must have been at least twenty feet wide and thirty deep, and Beth was hopeful they could find something of use in a drawer, as the shelves were already looking pretty bleak. They started nosing around, in Blood's case literally, trying to see if they could ferret out anything of interest.

It was a rather disappointing browsing session, Beth finding a couple small pieces of mana copper ore on a shelf and a single silver coin. Blood wasn't able to turn anything up either, the wolf merely shaking her head before leaving the room. She led the way to the next doorway, and the two journeyed down the pathway to find a grouping of rooms together.

These rooms seemed to be more living quarters, but they were designed to be fancier than the ones they had previously explored. Instead of individual rooms, these were entire suites, with foyers, living rooms, bathrooms, and bedrooms all together in one unit. Beth was a little more hopeful that these rooms might yield something more than the office, and that hope turned out to not be ill-founded.

While the first suite was basically entirely a bust, the second of the ten or so dwellings certainly wasn't. Beth found a little pouch in a drawer in a stone cabinet in the bedroom, made of a dark leather and slightly bigger than her palm, which was full of gold. This wasn't gold coins, but instead was a pile of glimmering small ingots. Beth pulled one out and inspected the three-inch-long bar in the light, trying to determine what exactly it was. She wasn't one hundred percent sure, but she guessed it was actually mana gold. If that was really the case, the bag would likely be worth more than its considerable weight in gold.

The next few suites were more of the same, empty rooms with empty containers, but that changed again in the sixth suite. There were odd little knickknacks on the shelf in the living room, things that Beth didn't think would hold any real monetary value, but that did breathe a certain life into the room. What's more, there were a number of items in both the bedroom and, surprisingly enough, the bathroom.

The bedroom contained an ornate wardrobe that had several rather nice shirts inside. They looked like they were made of some kind of silk or silk-like material, and Beth carefully took them down and folded them on the bed before stashing the half dozen tops in her backpack. The wardrobe was not quite empty, however, as she moved over to it to check for more. In the back, leaning against the back left corner of the impressive piece of furniture, was an old staff. It was made from some kind of polished wood with a medium brown hue, sleek and smooth all the way from a base capped with a mana steel endcap up to a flaring top. The wood spread into six different branch-like pieces that stretched for almost a foot. The ends curled inward slightly but did not touch, and hovering within the center of the six branches was a dark blue gem nearly half the size of one of Beth's fists.

She carefully picked the item up before inspecting it, surprised at just how heavy the staff was. It was nothing compared to her considerable strength, but a staff she expected to be a few pounds likely weighed close to fifty. With a bit of a sigh and much maneuvering, she was able to slide the staff into the pack on one side, though it stretched the pack out slightly. She was rather thankful for the space-expanding enchantment at this point, already having to deal with hefting her new sword around in one of her two free hands. She'd like to keep the other hand available to actually draw the blade instead of lugging around yet more weapons of dubious use.

The bathroom was a bit of a surprise, as it contained something that looked very much like a standard vanity setup, including a medicine cabinet. It was within this medicine cabinet that Beth found several small vials of medicine, two of them looking like some kind of potion while the third seemed to be a bottle of painkillers, if she was reading the Universal Standard on the label correctly. The painkillers were made by an alchemist and could not just numb standard pain but block out the effects of magically induced suffering. With that pleasant new information swirling around in her head, Beth stuffed the three bottles in her belt pouch and exited the suite.

The next few suites were generally empty, with Blood sniffing out and snatching up a handful of silver coins, but otherwise they exited with no more than they entered. It was in the final suite that they found their last prize of the area; a hammer. At first, Beth was a little disappointed to find the final living area contained nothing but a hammer, but upon further inspection of the piece, that disappointment started to morph into excitement. The piece was very similar to what she had been using at the Hall in her work, but compared to the forging hammers she used there, this was clearly a cut above. It was made of a dark steel, a very deep gunmetal that was almost black, with a solid handle wrapped in a dark red leather. There were inscriptions on the sides of the head of the hammer, though Beth was unsure what they were for, and the weight and heft of the tool just felt so right as she held it in her right hand and twisted it around with just her wrist.

Stashing the hammer, the two returned to what she was thinking of as the central room of this area, the large open room with six pillars and six sides. They entered the fourth doorway and headed down a long and straight tunnel, Beth noting that the rather cool air was dropping in temperature rapidly, quickly progressing through cold towards truly frigid. The tunnel had turned out to be slightly longer than she had thought, but it was still only a little over a minute of walking to reach the end. The tunnel let out into a moderate size hexagonal room, much smaller than the main room, and Beth stopped dead upon entering, Blood almost bumping into her.

In the center of the room was a shining portal of silver light. There was no sort of structure around the portal, no arch or doorway or frame of any kind. Instead, there was simply a large silver hexagon standing alone amidst the room. Beth only hesitated for a moment, taking that time to do a short but thorough scan of the room for any hostiles before she approached the portal. She had played enough games and experienced enough in this new, changed reality to intuit right away that this was a dungeon entrance. Where they had been treading to this point was clearly some type of old ruin, or something meant to be a facsimile of one, at any rate. Reaching out her hand as she stood before the portal, she gently touched it with the tip of her gauntleted right index finger. A notification sprang up in front of her immediately, causing her to twitch slightly before she lowered her eyebrows and frowned, examining the message closely.

Kobold Labyrinth discovered.

{Properties: Closed, Large, Anchored.}

Closed - This dungeon is split into instanced pockets. The minimum number of pockets is ten, and the maximum number is based on a scale influenced by available mana and dungeon age.

Large - The category above Simple, this dungeon extends at least a mile in one or more directions. The maximum size is an area of ten miles in any one direction, and the layout is only restricted in not requiring any sort of spatial movement or special skills to access the main section of the instance.

Anchored - A step beyond Discrete, this dungeon exists at a nexus of mana; from a conjunction of leylines to a natural Mana Well, something at this location provides a continuous source of power much greater than the simple gathering point that forms a Discrete dungeon. This dungeon, unless altered or destroyed through some special or extremely powerful means, will function continuously without needing any time to recharge or repair.

The message was not entirely new to Beth, as she had seen this twice before at the dungeons near her development. It was, however, chocked full of new and interesting information, including the parts about leylines and Mana Wells. She would be sure to do some research back at the CRA Hall to figure out just what those things were. It also appeared from the descriptions that this was a bit of a more powerful or difficult location, as both the second and third tags' descriptions basically said they were a stage above the tags for the ant dungeon. While the description for the first tag didn't state as such, she also assumed that a closed dungeon with multiple internal instances would be something more powerful than an open dungeon.