Saga of the Soul Dungeon

“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.

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.