Chapter 5

Ryan began by focusing his mana outward, spreading himself through the dirt and stone. He instantly absorbed anything and everything he touched, clearing out a space. Erin had given him a brief description of how the boss room and other two rooms should look, and he wanted to make her proud.

While he worked, Erin curled up on top of him, and was soon asleep. Apparently, she thought the basic labor behind dungeon building was uninteresting. Ah, well. That just meant he would be able to surprise her when she woke up.

He set to work, pushing out and creating a space large enough to be called his boss room. He still wasn’t sure what a boss was, but Erin would likely tell him when he finished. As such, he pushed his influence out until he had created a vast — well, vast compared to his small three-foot area — room. It had to be close to four – no, five – times the size of his own chamber, with square walls and a domed top. He liked the aesthetics of that curved ceiling, though the room itself was otherwise rather nondescript. He would have to ask Erin about ways to touch it up. If people were going to be in the room, he wanted to give them something worth looking at.

Focus!

He shook his head and created an arching doorway leading out of the room. As he worked, Ryan casually called forth his experience triangle, watching the bottom portion hungrily. The plus side of this expansion was he might just be able to get another level out of it! Erin had told him a dungeon would gain a small amount of experience as it spread its influence to new areas and created larger rooms.

He created a winding pathway out of his boss room, slowly angling it up. Ryan wasn’t sure how far underground they were, but he figured he had enough space to add a little depth and elevation to his first floor. As he carved away, he also noticed strange variations in what he was absorbing. By the time he had carved out his second room – this one a large, cavern-like expanse – he had found a few neat things.

First, several different metals had made themselves ‘known’ to him via his absorption of them. He found iron and copper, though Erin hadn’t woken from her sleep for him to ask her about them. He had also found a small strain of gold, but again, he wasn’t certain if that was valuable. The only reason the metals stood out was because they were different from the normal rocks and dirt he had been eating away.

The other things he had stumbled upon were the skeletal remains of a variety of creatures. Ryan wasn’t sure if it was his affinity for dark mana, but as he absorbed the remains, he instantly gained an understanding not only of bone, but also of the creatures the bones had belonged to. Frustratingly, though, some of the skeletons were incomplete. As he pushed forward with the excavation and his final room, he found himself hoping for more bones to complete his collection.

“Finished that boss room yet?” Erin stretched as she rose from her nap. How long had she been asleep? He really had no idea of time down here.

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It was taking a while, mainly because he needed to take breaks from his work to give his mana time to refill. On the plus side, as he grew larger, his mana began refilling faster, increasing the rate at which he could work. A busy dungeon was a happy dungeon, it seemed.

Once he reached his final room, he had been able to make changes without feeling much of a drain, but the boss room had taken him at least a day, if not two, to create. If he had to guess, he figured he may have been dungeon building for a week now? And Erin had slept the entire time. Lazy fairy.

“You could say that.” He was only half paying attention to her, having found a human skeleton as he was finishing up his final room. Spiffy. That made four different skeletons in his collection. In the silence, while Erin took a nap, he may have become a bit obsessed with completing his sets, to the point of creating a few offshoot tunnels here and there as he searched near the remains he did find.

“Well, let me take a look.” Erin stretched her feathery wings and took flight, heading through the small opening he had made between his room and the boss room, per her instructions.

Erin told him he couldn’t completely cut it off from the dungeon, but that his room should be hard to find. As such, he made a tunnel from his chamber that snaked up and a down a few times, before connecting through a small hole at the top corner of his boss room. He felt it was sneaky.

“Ugh, you couldn’t have made that easier on me?” Her voice was filled with irritation as it came through their bond.

Well, you can’t please everyone.

Ryan finished his final touches on the first room: a sprawling expanse like the second, seeming almost natural, not dungeon made. He wanted to talk with Erin about a few things before adding to it.

“I like this ceiling. This room feels eerie,” said Erin.

Dark stone illuminated only by a faint white glow – it was eerie. Especially since the room was too large for the light to chase away the darkness. But hey, Ryan didn’t have any way to add extra light. The only reason there was a slight glow was because it permeated everything Ryan had influenced. Erin had told him the glow represented objects that had been worked on by a dungeon’s mana.

“Well, eerie can be good, right? We are a darkness dungeon.” He sent his humor through the bond. Maybe she had forgiven him.

“Oh, how could I ever forget?” She huffed as she flew on to the next room. Erin zipped around the large space, inspecting the walls, muttering to herself here and there.

“Ryan?” She was inspecting one of his offshoot tunnels. Oops. “What is this?”

“Um, I was looking for something.” He could tell this was about to go south.

“Oh, like metals?”

“Yes, totally those.” Phew, that was close.

She poked around in the offshoot tunnel, looking at the soil, checking the portions he had absorbed away. He watched her through the walls and realized something just as she noticed it. He had absorbed the skull he had found there but forgotten to absorb the rock around it. The effect: a piece of stone with the perfect imprint of a human skull.

Crap.

“What have you been doing?” she screeched.

Yup, she was mad. So very, very mad.

“Come on. Throw me a bone!” Ha. Probably a poor time for that joke. “I didn’t do anything with it, I just absorbed it. I needed it for my collection.”

“YOUR WHAT?”

Oh, note to self: anything dark-related is a touchy subject.

“My bone collection.” He was quickly filling in all the other offshoot tunnels he had made. She didn’t need to know about those. It was easy enough; he found he could create anything he had absorbed with a simple thought and a minuscule mana drain.

“I’m going to act like I didn’t hear that for now, and finish inspecting the dungeon.” Her tone, and her feelings, told him this was not over.