Eternal Dungeon POV

Things were finally kicking off. Ever since that first group more and more people have been coming into my dungeon and adventuring. I’ve been having fun watching them get all excited at everything. My dungeon tokens have been a real hit, partially because you need them to receive rewards, but also because of how convenient they are.

Chip has also been having a blast interacting with people. He does a better job with the role than I did and I think it’s because he’s still a young spirit who has the excitement of a child. So far everyone who’s come in and beaten the boss has gotten the basic integration from Chip, which equates to a whole lot of bonus mana for him since I set up a system that lets any dungeon creatures turn in looted Eternal Coins for mana (I set the system up to futureproof for having more merchants).

So far every group that’s come in has either been underleveled and just grinded the prowlers for experience or has been overleveled, defeated the boss and then immediately bought the system integration. So far no one has died yet, which is fortunate for them, but not for me. They don’t even know about the revival service I provide cause I was too vague with my flavor text, I could’ve been more specific but I just liked the mysterious feel of it too much.

It doesn’t matter now, I’m not changing it. Besides, I have high hopes for this next group. So far their composition is made up of some very overconfident teenagers who think they’re future heroes. Their highest leveled member is a Fire Mage (Lesser) Level 11 and all of them have lesser classes. Oh I almost forgot the fact that in their party of 5 there are 2 attack mages, an archer, and 2 tanks. They. Have. No. Healing. At least they’re smart enough to recover their mana before the boss.

Looks like they’ve recovered their mana and are starting to move towards the boss. I had set the Maned Prowler boss to only engage if the halfway-point is crossed. However he does have conditions that will make him attack sooner such as casting a spell in his sightline or attacking him.

The Maned Prowler has 2 special abilities that are different from the normal prowlers. Pride of Pride’s which is a group buff that increases the stats of his three pride mates, the buff then gives him extra stats equal to how much each pride mate gained from it. His second ability is Predator Roar which is a CC (crowd control) that causes panic and fear in those who hear it. Sadly the fact that everyone has been fighting him overleveled has been negating the ability.

As the party of 5 teenagers confidently approaches the boss area I get to watch as my boss cinematically walks out of his cave followed by his pride mates and uses Predator Roar to intimidate them. This is a scripted movement I put in place to warn off people too weak to fight the boss.

At first it seems like it might work, but the one level 11 and level 10 in the party manage to shake the effects and rally their 3 companions. What a shame for them, I can honestly say after seeing them struggle against the groups of 3 lesser prowlers that they are very, very dead. I’m not sure if I even want to watch this, but for some reason (probably the system) I don’t feel any remorse or guilt about what’s going to happen.

Having rallied the level 11 fire mage begins his longest cast spell. I saw him use it earlier, it takes a staggering 30 seconds to cast, which is practically an eternity in a fight. However the effect is powerful. It creates 12 lances of fire that the caster can either keep hovering around him defensively or he can launch them at targets. It seems to be an advanced form of another spell he has which just shoots a fire lance at a target.

I think the mages goal is to go into the fight with the lances ready which is why he started his casting time now. Unfortunately for the party he’s in sight range of the boss who begins the charge with his pride. The front line of the party seem surprised by this, but they manage to move in front of their mage quickly enough. The archer begins to take shots at the lesser prowlers while the second attack mage (an ice mage) starts casting a much quicker Frostbolt spell aimed at the boss.

The boss uses his Pride of Pride’s ability and manages to cross the distance to the party in 8 seconds. Two of his pride mates follow close behind while the third begins to take a wide loop around the party in an attempt to flank them. The archer responds by swapping targets to the lone flanking prowler.

The warriors move forwards, one of them attempting to take the charge of the boss head on, however it turns out to be a mistake as the boss sends him flying 12 feet into the air and away from the rest of the party. The second tank manages to stop one of the prowlers, but is quickly flanked by the second. He’s saved from having his side torn open by the ice Mage who changed targets last minute from the boss. While he did manage to save his friend the ice mage left himself vulnerable to the unoccupied boss.

The boss gets in close with the ice Mage pouncing on top of him and biting into his throat. The screams of the mage are cut off by his own blood filling his throat. Finished with the Ice mage the boss then turns towards the fire mage who’s face displays both the anger and terror of seeing what happened to his friend. Before the boss can reach the fire mage a blur intercepts him taking the form of an incredibly bloodied man, with his left arm bent the wrong ways and his right holding a shield.

The warrior that got sent flying had gotten up and used a movement skill to intercede between the boss and the fire mage. The boss is not pleased with this interruption and empowers a swipe of his paw with mana making his claws sharp enough to cut through stone. His swipe rends through the warrior shield and flesh but is stopped after making it halfway through the body of the warrior. With my aura senses I can already tell that the warrior died, that swipe damaged his spine and destroyed most of his internal organs, but his body did stop the attack.

It takes the boss precious seconds to extricate his left paw from the corpse of the warrior, buying the fire mage even more time to finish his spell. The fire mage is still clearly filled with rage but there's also a level of determination that comes with it.

“IF I’M GOING TO DIE I’M TAKING YOU WITH ME!” The fire mage shouts as I watch his spell formation shift and warp as the mana is forcibly redirected into something else. The boss is having none of it and leaps forwards crushing the skull of the mage in his mouth. Too late. I already felt the mage die after using his ability, looks like my boss wasn’t quick enough.

The fire mages body becomes the epicenter of a truly massive explosion of fire and force that manages to kill the Boss, as well as the other 2 prowlers who had just managed to kill the other warrior. I move my focus to the only survivor, the archer. She got into a 1v1 with the other lesser prowler and despite being outleveled and forced into melee, she pulled through by sacrificing her left arm to create an opening. After stabbing the beast in the back of its neck and piercing the spine, she then managed to roll the body between her and the suicide attack of the fire mage.

The Archer manages to make a basic tourniquet around what's left of her left arm to stop the bleeding and then stands up, simply gazing at the scene of destruction and carnage in front of her. I can only imagine what she’s feeling right now.

After about 5 minutes of silent contemplation the archer begins to collect what's left of her friends belongings. She seems to randomly freeze up after getting to one of the more intact bodies. I watch as she quickly checks over all of her friends' bodies and grabs their things before bolting back towards the central plaza. Hmm strange, did she perhaps figure something out from the corpses?

I try to figure out what it is that caused the archer to start running back towards the central plaza and it's only when she finally reaches her destination that I realize what I was missing. Of course! It must’ve been the dungeon tokens! According to the system soulbound items usually just unbind after their wielder's death, but the fact that the tokens were missing made her assume her party was still alive. It’s actually a mistake on the archers' part, she doesn’t know that I designed the tokens to be destroyed when their user dies.

Well it all turns out well in the end. The archer enters the plaza and is immediately in tears at the sight of her entire party still alive. I set the revival system to only bring them back with copies of their mundane clothes although there are options to allow people to keep their gear, but those options are all locked until I get the Aether affinity. It's a good thing for me then that I set the revival penalty to a flat 20% of total experience. Originally I was going to be nicer and use a lower penalty but I decided that I was being nice enough by reviving them. If the penalty wasn’t big enough, the life or death situations would have no stakes for them. This would not only give them bad habits, but also make it harder for them to level. After all experience comes primarily from struggle with a smaller portion being from actually killing something.

Although now that I think about it, I should limit the number of revivals a person receives for free, that way the stakes could be increased even further. This was something I could do without the system's help for once. I added a function to the integrated system to display the number of revives the user has left as well as the penalty for reviving. I gave everyone 3 to start with and made sure to take away 1 from each of the people who just died (have to make it seem like this system was always in place after all). Lastly I added a new item in Chip’s shop that allows people to buy more revivals for 100 Eternal Coins. However the cost increases by 50 every time you buy one and only resets back to 100 if you manage to make it to the next floor.

WAIT! I’m getting completely off track! Stupid mind always wandering onto the next thing without finishing first. I was thinking of the revival penalty because thanks to the 20% I took from those 4 adventurers I was able to finally reach my first goal.

Level increased to 2 (New Perk available)

I made sure to check the system notification again just to be sure and there it was. Finally I could get my next affinity AND finish my second floor. I opened my system menu and quickly selected the perk I’ve been wanting ever since I saw my mythic options.

Greater Perk Selected: Aether Affinity

Gain access to Aether Affinity Mana and Aether Magic

10% Increase in mana potency to all dungeon creatures and objects that use the Aether affinity

15% Increase in experience gained to all creatures with a matching affinity while inside your dungeon.

Finally I had access to all the features that came with having space and time magic. Well mostly the space magic, I never liked time shenanigans. Although from what I’m learning about Aether magic from the system it seems like traveling to a different time then your own is basically impossible. Instead the time aspect is used to speed up, slow, or stop the flow of time for individuals. The only time reversal is all recovery magic that returns things to what they were X amount of time ago, but only works on a single target at a time.

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Now that I had access to Aether mana I had several things I needed to do. First was to figure out how to spatially enhance a space, second was to figure out how to seamlessly teleport things, and third was to work out how to add an inventory to the dungeon tokens. Hopefully items one and two on that list would give me an idea of how to do three.

I waited to make sure the adventurers who died got out safely before turning to my experiments. Ok let’s try to figure this out without the system help first. I created a separate room adjacent to my core room, but unconnected from anything and then sealed it with dungeon stone. Dungeon stone is a special type of stone that makes up the outside and floors of a dungeon. Dungeon stone is a system protected entity, which makes it impervious to damage and manipulation by anyone but the core who made it. The only thing stopping all dungeons from sealing themselves away was the rule that the core must be accessible from the entrance, a rule I did not have.

With my invulnerable laboratory now built I created a small box inside that was roughly 3 feet on each side and has a volume a little under 27 cubic feet due to the fact that the sides of the box were around 1/16th of an inch thick. I made several boxes out of every material I had available to me just in case one of them worked better than the others. With that done it was time to bring the mana!

*BOOM*

Another explosion/implosion marks the end of hour 12 of my testing. How did normal people ever figure out how to do this? I have perfect control of all the mana in my aura and I am struggling to stop the aether mana from going haywire. Everytime I fail, it causes the space inside the box to rapidly expand and then rapidly shrink onto itself, obliterating everything nearby.

I’ve managed to make some progress, I know that step one is to make a mesh surrounding the entire inside of the box by making little rings of aether mana and linking them together like chainmail. After that I got stuck. Every time I finish covering the inside with the mesh I can see the inside expand spatially, but anytime I try to add or remove anything it collapses. I hate to do it, but it's time to check with the system. At least I managed to get the first part of it on my own, hopefully in the future once I understand mana better I’ll be able to figure everything out by myself.

Checking with the system I learn what I’m doing wrong. I have to use a sigil to designate a hole in my mesh where the spatially expanded space can interact with normal space. The hole can be practically any size so long as the entire edge of it is marked by the sigils. Apparently when most people make a, let's say a bag they designate the entire opening of the bag to be the hole and put the mesh everywhere else. This allows the natural opening in the bag to anchor the entry/exit point of the expanded space, meanwhile the fabric of the bag functions as the anchor separating the expanded space and normal space.

With my new knowledge I manage to create my first spatially expanded boxes. From what I can tell the aether mana works about equally no matter what I do, perhaps it's just the nature of this particular enchantment. I notice that all the boxes have had their space doubled in size. Good to know, now how do I make it increase by more? Time to try some more systemless experimentation!

I try out different formations and structures of mana until I start to see signs of progress, then I focus myself in that direction until I manage to reach a breakthrough. I end up following several dead ends but after 9 hours I’m able to eventually find a consistent method of increasing the space further.

I have to form a structure that is 3 dimensional, luckily that was one of the first things I tried. What took me longer to figure out was that I needed to make the normal mesh and then fold it in on itself while using the hole sigils to bind the layers together. For each layer I make the size inside doubles, so I’m going by factors of 2. For example 3 layers would be an increased volume of 2 to the 3rd power, in other words an 8 times expansion. With my perfect mana control the most I’m able to do is 8 folds currently. However I think I just need another technique to go higher. I add figuring that out to my to-do list since 256 times expansion is certainly enough for me to get started with.

I start by spatially expanding the space of my second floor making sure to leave holes for both the entrance and exit. It takes me 2 hours of endless repetitive enchanting until I have enough tiny mana loops to expand the space of my floor to roughly 250 square miles of area, the size of a city back on earth. With that done I begin to fill out all the extra space.

First I pump mana into Wyla allowing her to grow from the first floor all the way down to the bottom of the second. Due to the spatial expanding the ceiling is around 3,500 feet high, surprisingly Wyla is able to grow all that way with basically no problems, she even leaves roots in the dirt of the first floor and just extends her trunk. By the time her trunk reaches the bottom and starts growing into the soil again she resembles a skyscraper more than a tree. Her trunk is hundreds of feet in diameter at its base.

I end up making a much deeper and more natural soil layer on this level, giving enough space to slowly shift from soil, to clay/silt, and then to softer rock, before after about half a mile reaching where the dungeon stone is. Once I finish that Wyla grows her roots deeper, easily piercing stone until she reaches the dungeon stone layer which stops her.

I give Wyla a little more juice to encourage her to grow more leafy branches until she looks like a tree instead of a giant wooden pillar. Next I create another Day/Night cycle, except this time I place 20 minutes of work into making the night sky a work of art. After that I move on to something I’m very excited for, weather!

With how high my ceiling is I should have enough space to put in actual clouds as well as a real weather system. I set up a dungeon rule that is able to create realistic localized weather by creating the proper conditions for it. I leave it set up on a natural cycle so that the weather will act like a normal forest would, well a normal forest with an incredibly high ambient mana level. Hopefully all the extra mana just makes the weather act like it would in a magical forest. If it goes wrong I can always adjust it, although it’ll be hard to explain to anyone who’s on the floor when it happens.

I then begin to add the flora. I create a large open grassland that surrounds the base of Wyla’s tree, it slowly turns into shrubland and then eventually forest. To make it seem natural I use the area that Wyla’s branches cover to determine where the biome changes. I make sure the light levels are correct across the entirety of the floor so that the plants can flourish even without mana (not that they need to worry about that).

With the baseline down I start to adjust various areas to create different biomes. First I turn the walls of the floor into a mountain biome that surrounds the entire floor, this way a more natural barrier is created as opposed to abrupt stone walls. Second, I carve out a large lake to the south and make sure that the treeline cuts off naturally as it transitions. I ensure that the slight slope of the ground places the lake at the lowest point so that the water table can fill up properly.

For my next bit of terraforming I create a water source to the north and use Aether mana to accelerate its natural course until it creates a river that leads from the northern mountains all the way to the lake in the south. The river destroyed some of the forest on its way so I made sure to regrow everything until it looked natural again. I now had a winding river that went from the northern mountains down through the woods and onto the grasslands before curving around the west side of Wyla and continuing to the lake in the south.

Now to add some features. I cleared out a space to the east and created a small tribal village using basic materials that could be found in the surrounding area. I built it in a spot where a set of steep cliffs directly abutted the forest. This way I could build the village partially into the mountainside. On one of the higher cliffs I create a large cave system with a spring, the spring partially floods the caves before spilling out into a small stream that winds its way down the cliffs before terminating in a small pool inside the village. I decide to leave the naming of the village to those I’m going to populate it with.

Next I create a small town that surrounds the base of Wyla’s trunk, I make sure to leave large open plaza’s on each of the cardinal directions touching the trunk where large open archways allow access in and out of Wyla’s interior space. I plan on keeping things like the town hall and bank as features on the inside of Wyla’s trunk so it needs to be accessible to everyone. Next I create several mercantile shops and workshops throughout the town and make sure to add stalls to all the plaza’s. I then create fountains in the plazas and wells around the town, the river does flow through the town on the west side, but it's always good to have alternate water sources.

I create a low stone wall around the perimeter of the town to mark the edges of the safezone I plan on creating. Then I add dirt roads leading to the north, east, and west which end after going into the forests for a bit. I also made a slightly more impressive gravel road that leads to the lake in the south. This road is not a safezone, but I do make endlessly burning torches that turn on in low light conditions to light the way. I also make a small dock on the lake with a lakehouse attached and create a few boats of various kinds (It takes me a couple tries to make a proper boat, but it's not too hard to figure out).

With all my current planned features made (excluding the boss lairs) I now have a decision to make. Do I create a race of sentient dungeon creatures to fulfill the role of NPC’s in my dungeon? It's a tough decision to make since I’ll be creating (in theory) a race of fully sapient people who will never be able to leave the confines of my dungeon without dying horribly.

Let's think this through, while I could never allow any of them to leave, what would they really be missing from that? I mean, my second floor is already pretty big. If I’m able to continue improving I could eventually make ones the size of a continent so all I really need is to make sure whatever I create is able to move between floors, doing that would also help make the whole world I’m trying to build more connected and alive for those adventuring in it. Besides, I chose to be a True Core so that I could create without limit!

With my decision made I do the most important first step. System, give me the rundown of the local races on this world so I don’t accidentally create a species that already exists, cause that would be really hard to explain. From the system I learn that the only sentient species that exist on Aven are Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes, and the occasional monster that gains sentience. I also learned that there are no major populations of anything but humans on my current continent.

With all that in mind it's time to start crafting. Since I already made chippy a sentient squirrel I decided on beastkin for my first race. Although since I’m going to be using spirits to give them souls I think I’ll call them Spiritkin instead. I decided to go for anime style beast people as opposed to full on anthropomorphic animals. I use a human base form and add the animal parts where I see fit. I spend a full day doing nothing but adjusting the biology so that everything works properly AND they’re distinct from normal humans.

My end result is what on the outside appears to just be humans with animal ears and tails, but in reality they have more animal than human in a lot of different parts. Such as having the eye shape and general form of a human one, but having it be mostly that of a cats’; or the hands and feet which have claws in place of nails on the ones who were derived from creatures with them. For now I only make a small sample size of Cat, Wolf, and Fox Spiritkin since I plan on only having quest givers and merchants on this floor.

I summon some more spirits and after they sign the contract I give them their new bodies and place them onto the floor. Most of the town is empty because I plan to let visitors buy properties and set up their own businesses if they want. To ensure none of my new people get too lonely I make sure to create them in family groups so that they all have connections without removing the chance to make their own. Since this is a fresh floor I simply give each of them their role as well as access to any memories from before my death so that they can develop their own personality. I also instill them with enough system knowledge and mana to perform their roles and then check their tags when I’m done.

Spiritkin Level 20

Is what all the tags read as. I also remember that I never checked Chips’ tag. I just made sure to obscure it from others but never took a look myself.

Chip Level 10

Interestingly his monster race is his name. Whatever, I'm sure that it's fine. Since Chip is now inhabited by a spirit his level will naturally rise from the mana I’m giving, so long as I don’t limit it. I decide to remove the normal floor level cap from all creatures who only live inside Wyla, allowing them to reach the dungeon level cap.

With my town now somewhat populated I make sure to add fauna to the rest of the floor. I fill the floor with some of every creature I’ve managed to collect up until now including the lesser variants. I fill the village to the east with a population of goblins which are lesser monsters that look like little green men with tiny tusks.

Now to try something new.