Saga of the Soul Dungeon

“The Deccan Traps volcanoes spilled as much as a half million cubic miles of basalt over an area equal to half of present-day India. In places, the basalt lies more than a mile deep.”

―Greg Breining, Super Volcano: The Ticking Time Bomb Beneath Yellowstone National Park

==Caden==

One of the nicest things about being a dungeon was the ability to focus on multiple perspectives at the same time.

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.

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.