Saga of the Soul Dungeon

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.

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.