Saga of the Soul Dungeon

My art is the way I reestablish the bonds that tie me to the universe.

-Ana Mendieta

==Caden==

The Adar were really busy.

Not just with setting up an entire encampment, filling up much of the Starlight Grotto, though that certainly was happening. Like men possessed, they were all proceeding through the testing as fast as possible. They would approach the entrance to the dungeon, grab their crystal token and then off they would go. Obviously, they had some serious advantages due to their advance information, but even so… it seemed a bit much.

It was impossible for me to tell why they were so frenetic. Was this a cultural thing? Were they racing to stake a claim before the humans, or possibly other races, showed up? Was industriousness a species trait, or maybe all Adar had some form of hyperactivity? I hadn’t seen any trace of that in Zidaun or Anaath, but maybe they just kept things to a slower pace since they traveled with humans.

The only Adar that were not rushing were Zidaun, Anaath, and the older Adar who was sitting around and talking with Zidaun. Even so, occasionally, some Adar would come up and respectfully interrupt Zidaun before continuing on with their business.

If they kept up the pace, the first ones to start their testing would be done in a few hours, and the results were all over the place. A few people had the same abilities as Zidaun, capable of shifting the dungeon by borrowing my own capabilities, but there was seemingly no end to the variety of powers. Ice, fire, strength, agility, gravity, teleportation, phasing, changing form, and more were displayed. Some of the individuals displayed much more power than anything I had seen either of the two teams do.

It was chaos, and I relished the noise and activity. I had a small town worth of people setting up. The Adar were all still speaking gibberish, but I could understand the occasional word spoken between the two teams now. I also relished that all I had to do to shut the noise off was push my attention elsewhere.

Their location would absolutely have to change though. The Starlight Grotto was meant to have a much quieter atmosphere. I had a few places I could put them, but that would need to wait until I could actually talk with them properly. I wouldn’t just destroy their work and make them do it over again, however. It wasn’t like it would take any effort on my part to teleport their stuff and build some actual dwellings.

I might need to charge them rent or something… Or maybe I should only provide free housing to people who delved. I could create better properties based on how far someone had gotten into the dungeon. It would be easy enough to have rent that required them to do a certain amount of delving... It could get me the survival points I needed to level up.

Hmm…

Honestly, if I ended up with a whole city here, not everyone would end up delving the dungeon. Well… the Adar might, but they were an unusual case. They didn’t have any kids. They were all adult males, and if my understanding of their biological metamorphosis was correct, none of them were noncombatants. All of them had lived in a dungeon as a monster before they became people.

I… couldn’t actually say I understood how that would change them.

I wonder if any of them are scarred by that? Or it that a too anthropocentric point of view? I mean, they look human enough, but…

I shrugged internally.

Regardless of everything else, their society didn’t have any child rearing or pregnancy.

Those lucky bastards… Literally, heh.

Regardless, if I ended up with a real city here, a large portion of them would have other professions. People would need to grow crops and raise livestock. Other people would need to process materials and make items. Merchants would come to sell them and open shops. It might be better if I constructed a very basic city and then let builders modify and elaborate from there.

Did I actually want a city?

Yes, yes I did. I wanted one very much. And not just because I liked having people around. People would provide all sorts of knowledge. Enchantments, libraries, smithies, magic, and more. If I made it safe enough I could have children in the city. And that meant I could watch as they were taught… everything.

Wonder how the Adar learn the basics… Do they just start with them after transforming into humanoids?

My mind wandered for a bit as I imagined all the skills I might be able to learn, but eventually I got back to work.

Creating innumerable teleports all across the dungeon was making my aura tingle. Just like the ripples of spacetime distortions cascading out through the world due to the local black hole, I was able to sense that something was going on.

Honestly, I felt similar impressions with each new magic the Adar were using. The different types of magic each felt different. The differences were subtle enough, however, that while I could see the mana, I couldn’t actually grasp much more than that.

For now I was focused on teleportation, and continuing to understand exactly how that worked. Up until yesterday, one of my shards had been pursuing that task for days.

I wouldn’t say it was my most urgent task, but pursuing new magic was potentially my most powerful option. That had been part of my theory crafting even back on Earth. If, as college students are wont to do, we started a random discussion about superpowers, there were always three powers I would pick if I could get them. They boiled down to control of space, gravity, and time. In many ways those were actually one power, because all three were interrelated, but people tended to object if you just picked control of spacetime. Even in hypothetical decisions, we imposed arbitrary limits.

Space, time, and gravity were everywhere. And control of any one of them was absurdly useful as both a weapon and for utility.

I wasn’t really expecting to get control of them for the moment. However, I would have a lot better luck manipulating them if I could actually see them. Fortunately, my aura could already do that to a certain extent, which gave me a place to start from. Just as I had forced my aura’s abilities to grow before, it had gradually been getting better as I pushed it.

Brief impressions of a new sense were starting to form around teleportations. This was especially apparent when I watched some of the new Adar teleport without me. As far as I could tell, my system granted teleportation was instant. The abilities I was watching weren’t. They were still blindingly fast, which was kind of the point, but there is a world of difference between instantaneous and the blink of an eye. I could feel it as the teleports happened, at both the start and finishing points, even before they had visibly moved.

Which is why gaining a sudden extra depth to my senses wasn’t too much of a surprise.

I didn’t look at the notification right away. Instead, I lost myself in the new sensation. Space was… beautiful and strange. On the surface it was simply an additional sense in the usual three dimensions. I could feel the waves from Otga rushing by like vast thin tsunamis. Incredibly powerful, but spread so thin and fast that the tidal effects were unnoticeable on anything less than a planetary scale.

Space, however, was constantly bent. I couldn’t see gravity, though I could see the faint bending it creased into space. Gravity induced only a slight change, but that faint change was enough to keep an entire world together.

There were, however, more subtle effects I could detect. Teleportation was distinctly not happening in three dimensions. I couldn’t make sense of exactly what direction it went, but connections were formed that dipped into some other dimension and then popped back out. For the briefest moment teleportation made the two places identical. It drew two places together and bridged them before it let them snap back apart.

Originally, I had assumed that teleportation was pushing someone through an extra-dimensional space. Instead it was more like a dimensional sleight of hand. In the process of connecting two places, it slipped aside the bit of space where the teleporting object existed, which allowed it to smoothly become a part of the new connected space. From the perspective of space, no travel had happened at all, just a slight reshuffling.

Portals just created an overlapping section of space, allowing two areas to become the same. There was a connection, but it still felt like nothing actually traveled. I still didn’t understand how they blended everything together seamlessly, but failing to understand the vast intricacies of the system seemed both common and natural.

I created some old style emblem based portals to study, and as expected, they operated differently. The one directional ones were massively unstable. The reason they constantly destroyed anything that went through was not a constant teleportation effect separating things into pieces, like I had originally assumed. The terminus of the portal rapidly vibrated space at the exit point. When the space moved, it disconnected everything that should keep an object together. I still had no idea why it didn’t kill living creatures. The system’s direct interference was my only reasonable guess, but even with my new abilities I couldn’t detect anything.

My two directional portals were unstable too, though the ends were stabilized by latching onto a connection on each end. Unlike the system made ones, these ones functioned like I first thought, by puncturing a crude hole through space to the new destination.

After losing myself exploring for a while, I let the notification pop up.

You have gained a new skill:

Space Perception II (Space, Dimension)

You can perceive the fabric which underlays the world.

You have been awarded a new title:

Dimensional Specialization I

Space and dimensional magic are rare, but you have enough skills to show the beginnings of understanding. Their power is vast but often specialized, unstable, or both. It is up to you to forge a path to new heights, new depths, and to go into the dimensions that define them all.

+250 AP

+5% Faster learning for abilities focused on space or dimension

+5% Discount on purchasing space or dimension skills

+Attempts to bypass the paths of the dungeon via dimension or space skills are moderately more difficult

+Resisting your dimension and space skills is moderately more difficult

I looked at my status for a moment, noting that my Interdimensional Repository and my Teleportation Integration were both marked as space and dimension magic now.

I browsed through the AP store, but I didn’t find anything new. Some of the skills I had previously considered were now labeled with the appropriate magic type, however. I was tempted to buy some of them as I scrolled through, but my attention was drawn away.

A light tugging pulled me into the altar room. I could have resisted, but I was curious. Zidaun and the old Adar were there together, and they seemed to be waiting. I assumed it was for me. So I manifested my avatar.

Zidaun started to speak, and I could feel the understanding of each word unfold as it entered my mind:

“Dungeon, ancient progenitor, thou who art the God of my people, hear my plea. If thou art Awakened, hear me. Know my words and heed me. In this I speak for my people.

Bind together thy fate with ours. Take from us our service. Take of us our flesh. Take all that we can possess. Make us thine.

Give to us refuge. Give to us growth.

With this compact shall we protect thee. With this shall we serve thee. And together we shall be bound, each raising up the other. And I shall be thy servant forever.”

That seemed a little intense, but the language carried the solemn tones of ritual. Honestly, ritual and religions were often more formal and grandiose than they needed to be.

“I offer thee a seed borne of my own flesh. May it be a symbol of our accord.”

Zidaun plucked one of the ferny hairs from his head, mana swirling around it in a cascade of power, repeating what he had done once before. Once again it grew and he placed it into the bowl on the altar.

I didn’t let it dissolve, as I took the time I needed to think.

What exactly was he asking for?

The request of refuge and helping his people to grow wasn’t exactly a challenge for me. I was already planning to let them build at least a small town. Becoming a more permanent installation wasn’t a problem. And I had already guessed that his people needed dungeons to reproduce. It would be easy enough to set up a nursery and grow some of the Adar. It was a little bit of a strange thought, but I assumed that making deals with dungeons like this was how the race spread.

In exchange, they would naturally want to protect me, and that was part of the deal. I wasn’t really sure I needed their service, but if nothing else they could fetch plants and animals from outside. Having people who can go outside the dungeon would be useful. The knowledge they could provide would also be invaluable.

There was the weird bit where they called me a god though. I wasn’t particularly comfortable with that bit. I thought briefly about the meadow and all the other areas I had created. Okay… to be fair, I did have some god-like powers. I would just have to explain that I wasn’t a god later, I was fine with the rest of the deal.

I dissolved the small bush.

The minor connection I had felt with Zidaun suddenly grew stronger, snapping taut between the two of us. I knew instinctively that it was now unbreakable.

Before I had much chance to deal with the implications, the old man stepped up next to Zidaun. He squeezed his shoulder lightly and spoke a few soft words. Then he placed one of his hands on his chest and seized something invisible, pulling it out. Mana coalesced into existence, pouring out of him into the object which quickly became a visible book that he held in his hand.

The book dropped into the bowl of the altar, even as the man fell backward. Before the man reached the floor he was dead, a flood of mana racing outward. The book dissolved without any input from me, and I was slammed with another language as it started to enter my mind.

Without any spare shards, my mind quickly drowned beneath the waves of knowledge, and I lost awareness of the world.