A drop of mucus rising from the floor and hitting Dan in the chin was the first sign something was wrong. He watched as mucus from all over the cavern started being pulled up. It was as beautiful as it was horrible. The drops were almost slow to move, creating the illusion of frozen glowing rain. It reminded him of the holidays on Earth, specifically the winter lights draped across houses and roofs.

The glimmering anomaly was magnificent. As the mucus bounded against its low-gravity chains, they wobbled and wiggled. They glinted the cavern in dazzling sparkles, creating a blaze of grandeur. There was no combat, no survival, no death. The screeching and hungry monsters were drowned away, along with Dan’s pain.

He was utterly amazed, in a world so terrible, Dan saw the beauty in it. In magic.

There was something there, deep within his core. It teased him just beyond his grasp, dancing with the droplets as gravity pulled harder and harder. He wanted it, whatever it was. Even as the drums of anxiety beat in the back of his mind, Dan focused everything on the feeling within him.

He was lifted into the air, uncaring of the danger or the other monsters swimming through the air.

His eyes glazed in the brilliance, tears forming and joining their mucus counterparts in dancing. What he wouldn’t give for feeling safe, for being back home wrapped in a warm and tight blanket. He laughed at the thought. It seemed so far away, his goals were better suited to a more immediate future.

That roused him out of the majesty, he was still in danger. Just moments ago he had killed something beyond anything he had ever known. He understood that he was utterly powerless, he found his resolve wane. He wanted to be safe, that much was a given. But how? What was he to do? He was now flying towards the ceiling, gaining more and more speed as he went.

He could do nothing, and he knew it. So, he continued to reach out for the feeling within his core, the feeling of happiness.

Dan crashed into the ceiling without fanfare or recourse, only living through the trauma due to his hypnotic trance. He was well within his core as he landed. Pain shot through his side and hip, up his arm, and even touching upon his neck. Things were broken, but he hardly felt anything.

He was so close. He was right there. He moved slowly through the shards of his own mind, drifting with intent towards the captivating brilliance he had seen. Again he tried to touch it, allowing the alien language and concepts to invade him. He put up no fight, content with the process. If anything, Dan wanted to know. He needed to know.

The words were written in such a way that Dan had to proceed slowly. Each syllable, each letter, broke his concentration a million times over before they made sense. He splintered himself more and more. He was growing full, nearly half way, he’d guess. What happened if he over filled? He didn’t know, but from the way his head throbbed, he knew it wasn’t good

Light: Brilliance 0

Dan opened his eyes as everything slotted back into place. His mind was like a train, each stop only adding to the load. Slowly the pain came to him, he groaned and rolled to his back. Each heavy breath, each passing second, he noticed more and more. A pitiful cry a few dozen paces away drew his attention.

It was a monster the size of an elephant but looked like a gnarled log of wood. Its golden bones were jutting from its skin, broken and festering. It was dying, the gravity fall being the cause.

He scoffed at the sight, idly glad he didn’t have to deal with it.

Slowly, very slowly, Dan stood. His legs were raw and weak, but they carried him to a small mass of flesh and muscle. Behind it, out of the way of the primary path, was a small cut out. He and he alone could fit in the hole, which he decided was the most protection he was going to get. He hunkered himself in, and relaxed the best he could.

Before falling asleep he brought up the description of Light: Brilliance.

Inspire.

With heavy eyelids, Dan smiled to himself. He created an orb of light, slotting the train car of Brilliance into its frame. The orb split into hundreds of sparks, drifting with the subtle wind of the cavern. He fell asleep before they completely faded away.

He dreamt of fireflies.

----------------------------------------

Dan committed not to move from his hole until his body didn’t ache. His ankle and shoulder popped when he rotated them, but they didn’t hurt much anymore. Only his ribs and wrist hurt, and even then it was more of a dull throb than excruciating pain.

He wasn’t sure how long he sat in the hole, but he guessed it was a day or so. He was lucky to have kept the chunk of monster meat in his pocket during the fall, otherwise he would have needed to move earlier than he wanted. It was the same gross meat, but for some reason it was easier to stomach. His core was to praise for that, he knew.

The pill bottle sized magic core had done wonders for the young man. He allowed himself to fall into it, escaping the boredom of sitting around. As he did so, his wounds healed faster, his metabolism slowed, and he felt rested quicker. The ability to eat weird stuff seemed like a given, if he was channeling himself into his core, that is.

When he returned to reality, his stomach grumbled and squeezed, so he spent most of his time meditating. Dan wasn’t quite sure why his body changed the way it did when interacting with his core, but he wasn’t complaining. He only wished he could activate its mind-soothing effects at all times so that he could walk without fear of the shadows.

But hearing the death cries of dying monsters made him rethink that. Maybe being hesitant was the way to go after all.

It took another, what he assumed to be, half a day for Dan to feel up to travel. He unfolded himself from his hole and quickly moved around the cavern’s periphery. The shift in gravity did wonders for culling the monster population, he hardly saw any with hunting capabilities. The few that weren’t going to die were licking their wounds, preparing their new territories.

Dan didn’t want to think what kind of monster could survive a fall like that. A skyscraper of distance was lethal any one way… except with magic, he guessed.

Was that how he did it? Frankly he didn’t remember much about falling, only that he was within himself at the time. Did meditating within his core also make him harder to injure? Again, he didn’t know, nor was he willing to find out.

With the top of the cavern now being the floor, plenty of new passageways were open. In relation to how he entered the cave, he was now heading down? Or… was he heading up? Dan scratched his mucus covered head, finding a headache when he thought about it.

It doesn’t matter, Dan thought. I just have to find a hallway with a short ceiling in case it switches again…

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The first branch he found dead ended nearly right away, although he did find something of note. There were multiple perfect circles burrowed into the walls, about the size of a frisbee or basketball. They produced a hot wind and an odd sound of fake snoring. It was like someone was trying to imitate the real sound of snoring made from written description. The wheezing was wrong, enough to make Dan retreat with haste.

The next few walkways ended much like the first but instead of simple dead ends, they ended in long straight flights of smooth rock-muscle. Again, hot air came from the passages, but he couldn’t hear any snoring.

The first promising path was dark, very dark. Summoning a glowing ball and letting it float above his head, Dan cursed at the fall. He had lost his greed-red light crystal, as well as made his shovel impossible to find. He thought about venturing back into the cave to look for his only weapon, but a thought crossed his mind.

He had used Light: Salvation like a weapon. What was stopping him from doing it again? The obvious answer was that he didn’t know how, not to mention it was a finite resource. His core took time to create the power, or what he decided to call mana, to fuel the spell. If he ran out at the wrong time, he would be defenseless.

Still, the thought of the mucus cavern was enough for Dan to carry on.

As the hallway led up, the walls, floor, and ceiling became more and more alive. The floor twitched when he took a step, the walls tightened when his guiding light got too near, the ceiling rose and fell in rhythmic patterns. It wasn’t until a layer of skin formed that things started to get worse.

Gone were the red muscle strains and in its place was ghostly pale flesh. The color was more akin to a plant grown in the dark if the plant was originally the color of Dan’s consciousness. It was the madness, he realized. It was bringing the cave to life, twisting it into something beyond him.

He almost had to keep his eyes shut to continue, looking at the walls felt like someone was drilling into him. His whole body felt it, not just his head.

Breaking the illusions of the madness, Dan had always found oddities within them. A sound in the back of his mind, a memory not lining up, wrong details. But the hallway was entirely an oddity. It made no sense to him, it hurt him. After his fingernails began to feel like they were bleeding, he asked himself a question.

What if this isn’t the madness?

Since being kicked into the mucus cavern, he hadn’t felt any madness attempts. Was it playing a subtle game, or was it simply gone? Was falling into a paranoid fit the idea? Or was there something more sinister going on?

Asking himself questions was a good thing, Dan decided. As long as he was able to question his surroundings, he wouldn’t fall into another mind-loss situation, right? He held his core at the thought, grounding himself in reality.

I am fine, he repeated to himself.

A light filled his vision once he rounded a turn. It was far off, at the very edge of the pathway. He almost sprinted at it, but resigned himself to be cautious. As he neared, the idea that it was an exit filtered into his mind. He did, after all, fall the height of a small mountain. He should be near the surface, right? Or did he fall deeper?

He scrunched his eyes closed at the thought, a pang of pain ripping through his head.

Slowly he opened them and continued. Thinking about it didn’t matter, the light would reveal the answer. As he neared, Dan recognized the flickers of burning flames. A wave of déjà vu pounded his heart as he pushed past and entered the light.

It was a familiar narrow stone hallway with two twin poles with oil soaked aflame wrappings on either side.

Dan’s heart sank. He had made it back to the beginning. He… he…

Wait, what?

Nothing cracked in his mind, nothing bent in reality. This was no illusion. This was as real as the first time he saw it. Slowly he exited the flesh tunnel and felt solid rock. His toes dug around in his boots, looking for anything off. He felt the wall and floor, finding his fingers covered in off gray powder. Hints of bone crystals had fallen into the recesses, little gems lost in the gaps.

He could hear… pounding? Dan couldn’t quite put his finger on the sound. It was almost like repeated bumper car collisions. Almost rhythmic, but with short breaks every few seconds. A loud crack split through the solid stone declaring the sound’s identity to the electrician.

It was mining. People were in the cave mining.

Hesitantly, Dan looked up, trailing his eyes along the one-way drop he had climbed down a few days ago. When he did so, he fell back in surprise.

The skin tunnel was gone, sealed up by solid stone. There was no crease, no weld, no evidence that he had just exited through the wall. Quickly he fell into his core, his breath shuddering with near hysteria. Was everything fake, what was real? Was the mucus cave real? Was the pain inducing skin real?

He wanted to go home.

Minutes turned into hours as he confided in his core. Dan was at the brink of finally breaking, only finding refuge in magic. A golden orb came to life in his palm, it exploded into six small butterflies. They flew with each other, dancing in a well-trained choreography of spins and dives.

Dan smiled at the sight.

Just after they faded, an intrusive thought appeared.

Light: Brilliance 1.3

He took a deep breath, and pulled himself to his feet. He walked past the lit torches and entered the sacrificial room. The countless stalagmites and stalactites greeted him just like before, although there was no floating eye of flesh looking for him. The giant red door was tightly shut, the images depicted along its wood still unfriendly and fear inducing.

Even the sacrificial slab at the center of-

Dan stopped cold.

In the very center, standing on the polished marble, was a figure. If Dan looked directly at it, it was invisible. But through the corner of his eye, he could see something. It followed his movement around the room, watching him and slowly turning with him as he moved. Now, it stared directly at him with eerie stillness.

It was an ever growing smile.

A teeth filled grin, flared cheeks and all. It gave a singular I got you look, although it was devoid of a nose or eyes. It exploded into a web of vacuum black, an endless color Dan had seen before.

The hunter leader, his realization pushed life into his tired feet.

He sprinted past the dripstone formations and into a random offshoot. He didn’t dare try the door again, he would never go back in there. The fresh pathway led to a chiseled staircase with a roped off entrance exit. Past that, was a mundane route through the cave system. Stone and the odd pimple node were all that awaited Dan, that was, until he came across a miner.

The being was humanoid and covered in white powder. She pushed a minecart full of bone crystals and shrieked when she saw Dan. He made nearly the same sound and was quite glad when she didn’t block his path even though her appearance sent a cold snap through his spine.

The scream echoed through the cave, halting the sound of slamming pickaxes. He turned a corner and found trouble.

It was a brutish man in metal armor. His towering scale forced him to hunch over to fit through the pathway. A short sword hovered just beyond his wad of a fingerless hand.

As Dan sized up the man, power accumulated in the sword. He didn’t take the chance, diving as he felt his core blare into music. The sword split the cave into two, growing the length of the straightaway. It smashed into the far stone wall, creating a set of loose rocks and a splattering of cracks.

The man grunted, heaving the metal weapon down towards Dan. The human rolled, dodging the elongated blade and crashing against the wall. He pushed off and ran as another flare of power eclipsed the world, retracting the sword’s artificial size.

Dan took the brief reprieve and sprinted for an exit. The cave twisted and rose, spiraling closer and closer to the surface. It branched off many times, but he didn’t analyze which path he chose. He ran past more miners, other workers, and even a few other guards. Each time he didn’t take the chance of interaction, simply finding a new route.

By the time he found the rusty elevator, Dan was huffing and a large conglomeration of yelling had gathered behind him. Dozens of footsteps were converging on him. The elevator was in use, going up. It would take too long, he would be captured-

A bloom of light caught his attention. It was to the side, behind a set of barrels and buckets. Dan pushed through, finding a small tunnel he had to crouch to walk through. He hesitated. The light he saw was pure white. It wasn’t the golden-white of his magic, it wasn’t the pearl white of the man from the forest.

Was it the madness?

A whoosh and pop roused his thoughts. The elevator was coming down, along with the glow of multiple colors of magic.

The cultists, Dan sneered, entering the short tunnel.

The passage opened up after a dozen waddled steps. Inside was a pool of water embedded into the ground. A set of mechanical pumps had been placed on one edge, piping the water off through a man made hole. No other paths existed. No other ways out. He was trapped.

Oh, he realized.

The light wasn’t showing him a way out, it was showing him to his last meal. His heart sank and for the second time this day, he gave up. As he resigned himself, sitting and drinking from the pool, he thought of all the food he was missing from Earth. Having a clean drink was something grand, however. He was glad for the light. If he was going to be captured and possibly killed, having one last drink was thoughtful.

He could try to fight his way out, but his enemies were no longer instinctual monsters of the cave. They had brains, they had language. They would end him before he could so much as create an orb of light.

His last thought, before the cultists barged the room, was, If I ever meet the pure white magic user, I’ll need to thank them.

A moment later he was gagged and bound, being dragged out by a smiling man with puffed cheeks. The cult leader.