So after some time spent brooding about my impending doom, nothing has changed. I still don’t have a status window and I am still losing mana. How much time did I spend brooding? Good question. Answer: I don’t fucking know, still have no way to actually tell the time right now. Here I am at the end of my rope as my mana slowly leaks away with no idea how to regenerate it. And when given a chance to actually be useful the voices naturally decided to double down on being my psychotic inmates and hasten my demise instead.
Voice 2: “Master your ascension is not at hand yet. The heavenly grace given to you ensures your survival… You are far too radiant and divine to die. The will of the heavens protect you. This is all a part of the plan. Your grace shall spread across the earth”
Voice 1: “Why are you panicking? I will not let you die. Stay calm. Our plan is not yet finished; we haven’t even drained the blood of one corpse let alone the billions that shall be sacrificed.”
“Really? I should stay calm right? Just relax don’t get stressed out about it. It’s not a big deal I am just slowly dying. That’s life in a nutshell. Who cares? I have tried staying calm. I have been trying my hardest to keep it together all things considered but you know what? Fuck. That. Why the FUUUCK should I not be panicking? I have no fucking clue how I became a dungeon. I don’t know where my family or friends are. An equally creepy yet motivating cult leader and a bloodthirsty psychopath have been yammering away in my head since I got here. And I don’t even know where here is since earth doesn’t have magic last time I checked. On top of all that I now know that I am dying. And not in the morbid, inevitable everyone’s going to die sort of way. But the seemingly preventable way. As far as I can tell I am going to die of starvation. Fucking starvation. That does not seem like a pleasant and dignified way to go out. And I have no idea how to stop it”
Voice 2: “The holy light shall touch all that exists. You will rise up and wipe away all the faults of this world. You will be the vanguard of the ascension. To do that you must thrive. To thrive you must survive. To survive you must grow. And to grow you must struggle.”
“I am not in the mood for your motivational bullshit right now, Voice 2. And Voice 1, how do you not know how to fix this? You managed how to magical create a chart, why don’t you know how to gather more mana?”
Voice 1: “I am a part of you, I only know what you know. I figured out how to create a table by examining our self. If you had actually taken more time to actually examine yourself instead of hoping for some magical status window you would have figured it out too. As much as I would like to take control so that even heavenly angels weep tears of blood at my reckoning, I can’t. You are the dominant one. I can only influence. So get off your ass and stop whining. Figure it out. We have work to do. Nothing is going to be given to you. You have to earn it. Then we can start our reckoning.”
“…Fine I will figure this out. Just leave me alone.”
Voice 1: “For now.”
Voice 2: “As you wish.”
(long pause)
…As much as he is being an asshole, Voice 1 does have a point. Not the part about killing everyone but about earning what I want. I have been sitting around since I got here, hoping for a miraculous fix to all my problems. Desperately wanting a status window to get information. Really I wanted to be told what to do. That was me being too lazy to try and learn things out on my own. I am lazy. I know that, my friends know that, everyone knows that. It is a key feature of my personality. While a personality like that doesn’t really mix with being a college student, it never put my life in danger.
Now my life is in danger and probably will continue to be at risk. I can’t afford to be lazy right now. And I can’t afford to panic either.
I let the stress get to me and just sat around brooding. That didn’t help me. The most important thing right now is focusing on the task at hand. Finding a way to replenish my mana so I don’t die of starvation. I can worry about how I become a dungeon or how to reach my family later. That still is procrastinating slightly, but in a good way I guess? Anyway enough distractions let’s think this out.
I had assumed that there would a status window or a dungeon store that could help me. There isn’t. So no more thinking of myself as a dungeon from a fantasy novel written by autexousious, you are a real person and this is real life. Face the facts. My mana is still being replenished slightly. If my mana regeneration can be increased, my mana drain can be offset. I shifted my perspective back to my flesh in the crystal, determined to find the source of my mana regeneration. I wasn’t losing as much mana as I should from the mana circulation, so there had to be some place where mana accumulated.
But like before, there didn’t seem to be any noticeable spot in my flesh. It didn’t really make sense; my flesh was clearly linked to the mana. The muscles could circulate mana to the rest of me and without mana my cells would clearly die. Yet there wasn’t any place that generated mana. I did notice that when my muscles contracted there was a slight pull on the mana, drawing it towards the conglomeration of tendrils at the center which then pushed the mana outward again. This mass of flesh definitely behaved like a heart would, pumping mana back and forth like it was blood. So my mana was like blood for me. And my mana regeneration was like fresh oxygen for me; I could go a while without it but eventually I would die.
For blood to carry oxygen it needs not just a circulatory system but a respiratory system as well. I already found my circulatory system in my flesh. Now I just need to find my lungs. My flesh doesn’t seem to have any mana regeneration and there is just the crystal enclosing my flesh so I don’t know where else to… look… … …It’s the fucking crystal isn’t it? I am probably regenerating mana through the crystal aren’t I? How the fuck did I get into college? This is like getting basic addition wrong. No wonder I couldn’t get job. My perspective shifted this time focusing as much as possible on the crystal. My flesh now felt more like clothes than actual skin. I could still sense it but it was muted. But my perception of the crystal shell greatly increased. Sure enough there was a faint sensation of mana being drawn in from the surrounding rock towards my crystal shell. My lungs have been found.
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This is probably why figuring out the mana regeneration problem was such a hassle. Even when my attention was split between the crystal shell and the flesh, noticing the mana regeneration was impossible let alone when I was focused on my fleshy part. Right now the feeling of mana circulating was completely gone. Mana was still moving around but it was much more chaotic now. Since I knew it was circulating back to fleshy part I could recognize some patterns in the movement. The mana in the crystal was like the surface of boiling water frothing back and forth seemingly at random but really following convective currents beneath the surface.
And there was a reason for the chaotic motion. A single stream of mana would hit one filament of the crystal and it created a ripple effect pinging off nearby filaments until it echoed across the entire crystal. And there were thousands of streams of mana simultaneously surging or swelling to different filaments. It was very similar to how I opened that damned window before, just on a much larger scale. While this ripple effect did act like echo-location, giving me a better feel for my crystal structure, it didn’t seem to do much else. There wasn’t any concrete information being generated like that ordered filament did before. Like a crowd of people talking in whispers to create a din of indecipherable noise. There could be some meaning to it but I couldn’t understand it right now. The filaments in random places did grow a little with each mana pulse. As it echoed back and forth, the mana also changed the structure of the filaments slightly too. Voice 1 probably learned how to make that chart by observing this process. That seems useful to learn but it’s not important right now.
For now, the focus is increasing my mana regeneration. Every part of the crystal seemed capable of drawing in mana, but the mana absorption was mostly occurred on the filaments touching the surrounding rock. So I just needed to increase the amount filaments and spread them outwards to make contact with more rock. Son of bitch, Voice 2 was actually on to something when he was talking about growing to survive. I literally do need to grow to survive. That’s one issue solved. And I appear to already be on track; when the mana ripples through a filament it sometimes grows a little. It’s just way too slow. I will run out of mana before I grow big enough to regenerate mana. Now the question is how do I grow filaments faster?
(Sigh) Back to lab again. Alright mana seems to make these filaments grow, maybe by giving the filaments extra mana I can make them grow faster? Worth a shot. And so I flooded all my filaments with a mana pulse.
No one could hear the silent screams of pure agony the crystal gave off.
…In hindsight I may have been a tad too eager. Flooding all the filaments with a large pulse of mana caused a very large ripple effect. The whispering crowd transformed into an angry choir of death metal singers and blown out speakers. It was sheer torture, a migraine meant to steal your soul. The hangover that conspired not just kill you but everyone you know and love. I forgot how to think for a little while, all I knew was pain. But at least I wasn’t alone in my pain though. Voice 2 fainted apparently and Voice 1 said he was proud of me for trying to kill him and has stayed silent since. It would be tempting to use this nuclear bomb on the voices if they get too uppity however this is mutually assured destruction in its truest form.
Final evaluation for that mana migraine: Survival – Not Useful, Torture – Absolute Perfection. On to the next test. This time I tried placing a much smaller amount of mana outside of my crystal, to see if the filaments would grow towards it. Since I still hadn’t actually learned mana control and was still moving mana through muscle control, the mana didn’t actually stay still. It was like throwing a ball and expecting it to stay still right after you throw it. The mana pulsed outwards causing a decent amount of mana to be lost outside. Although the filaments grew a little in that direction, it was a pitiful amount compared to the expended mana. But before I could lament the loss of even more mana, something extraordinary happened. A fraction of the expended mana echoed back to me. It reached a filament and pinged to nearby filaments. The mana rippled out towards the entire crystal. The noisy din of all the filaments suddenly made sense to me. Instinctually I knew how to interpret the previously random information. It was a flash of sensory input. And like a blind man opening his eyes again, I could see. I could see outside the crystal. And I could see myself for the first time.
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And that's another chapter out. Fair warning this novel will have slightly slow development as evidenced by the fact that out little dungeon core hasn't even made his first room yet. I want the dungeon to struggle so that if and when he succeeds in something it feels worth it. And hopefully you all can also enjoy his struggle and successes. Leave comments, criticisms, and / or compliments if you feel so inclined. Thank you for reading.