Necromancy used to have a bad rep back in my world, for quite some time, nowadays it’s viewed in a somewhat eccentric weird light, probably something that would make you cut off contact with someone, but nothing heretical, nothing to get your torches and pitchforks.

The main reason that happened was that through most of history it was believed that necromancy trapped souls inside a rotting body, when the soul was actually found and studied it was discovered that, among other things, no, necromancy didn't really trap someone's soul inside their body, well, most necromancy didn’t.

This is why it is with some trepidation that I examine the Black Diamond at my newest room. I mean, I already examined the dwarves themselves, but who knows maybe I am missing something.

Black Diamond of Necromantic Creation

This black diamond was created with necromantic and shadow mana, it directly taps into the realm of shadows to create brand new undead.

Or maybe I am just being a tad paranoid, but really who could blame me. One of the other things learned through soul research was that messing with it could cause several problems. Not the kind of problems you get for self-medicating or something, more like the problems you would get if you decided to light a match in the same room you found a bunch of TNT right under a large population center. The kinds of problems you have to be a real heavyweight master of the arcane to dodge. Well that’s what I’ve heard, I have no idea what the problems actually are, this is one of those ultra well kept secrets, you could probably count on your hands and toes how many know them.

Right, back to the crystal, I feel like I got a little side tracked there. It’s a really powerful crystal, this crystal is probably tapping the shadow realm to use its shadowstuff to create a body for the dwarves, and then the necromancy to give the body a life, a minor soul. This could be really good for me, I could use it to create other things too!

Shadows have a few similarities with illusions, the biggest is probably their end goal: To transform the fake into the real. Kind of like the philosopher’s stone for alchemists, doing this is the mark of a true master of the craft.

I gently tap the crystal with my mana, well, as gently as I can considering the sheer amount of power I have, and not even half the control I used to have when I had a human body.

The diamond immediately flashes gold! I see tiny drawings in varied golden tones all over the diamond, looking at them I see what they look like, and I think they might be logograms, which makes me shudder, because those are not fun to decipher without magic, especially because I bet they are magical themselves. I {Analyze} the golden lines.

{Skill Script : Bestow Skill}

Gives the skill {Inspect} to beings created by this Diamond.

{Skill Script}

A Skill given form and anchored in the world.

{Bestow Skill}

Give a skill you have to someone or something.

{Skill Script : Prevent Tampering}

Prevents tampering on the black diamond.

Interesting, I wonder what you could do with Skill Script. Could any skill be made into a Script? Could you {Bestow} any skill? This is something I have been wondering a bit, for example, let’s say you give a skill about improving blood flow to a being without blood, what would happen? Would the being get magical blood to flow around? Asterion got a literal stone skin, he didn’t get stone just on his bones, it’s stone sculpted as if he had a full body with muscles and skin, eyes and all. Haaah, I guess I can only wait and test and see what happens.

This is not the only thing in the room, let’s see what the diamond is sitting on. The pedestal is a thick plate with scripts all over it, under it are three legs connecting it to the ground.

Undead Command Station

Special item created for giving commands to undead.

Okay, I am pretty sure I can actually read these, unlike the {Skill Script} ones, it’s pretty normal magical stuff. I don’t really know how I can read these so easily though, I am very sure it’s not a language I know. Maybe this is again another power I have as a dungeon core? It could be just the script, there are forms of writing specifically made to be easily understood to all beings. I will have to find other writing to get a good idea.

I wonder though, why is it that I have to focus on it to read it? My dungeon view is… well I am basically seeing the entire room in pretty much all of its directions, but I can only read the script when I focus on it. Weird.

Anyway, the scripts are all commands for the created undead. The commands are pretty simple stuff, don’t kill humans with these visible tokens, take the ingots…. to room four? I observe the room again. It’s something I forgot, but now I am seeing it again and I can’t help finding it weird.

The room I am in has four walls, one with a door, the other with the giant crucible, and then another with a rack for pickaxes. All of them are dark brick walls. The last wall is a normal cavern wall, completely brickless, as if it didn’t belong here, even the floor and ceiling are made out of bricks. I stare at the script again, it says to take the ingots to a “room four”, put them in a teleporter and then activate the teleporter. There are more rules, but the one that really takes my attention is a simple one.

“Do not enter room 1”.

I look right to the doorway, right above it I can see a picture, I focus on it and I can tell it’s a number, the number 1. Right, that doorway is the one my skeletons came in, the one that leads to a big tunnel, which by the way I am blocking with a bone wall just in case something comes in, I don’t want anything from further in the tunnel to come into my dungeon unimpeded. I look at the door from the outside, in the tunnel. I did notice this when first finding this place, but did not think much about it. Outside I can see the tunnel walls, and then the dark brick wall of the room. The weird thing is the edges of the brick walls, the brick and the stone from the cavern wall seem to… be fused? Wait a minute, I start using {Analyze}.

Brick Wall

Cavern Tunnel Wall

Fused Stone.

It really is fused!

Damn, okay why is it fused? It doesn’t look like it was melted together. Maybe stone magic? Something pushed it down? Why though, also why is the black diamond on? As in, has this thing been running for years now? I actually have ten skulldwarves in this room, plus the Grimm Brothers, meaning twelve, two more than when I first saw this place, granted it could be that the other two were somewhere else and just came back. But I really don’t think so. Ugh. This is bumming me out. I can’t figure out what is happening with certainty, there’s just too much I don’t know. Hell, for all I know this is working as intended. The dwarves have only one wall to mine and leave the place, the other walls they can’t touch. That is another one of the commands, telling them to not destroy or damage the rooms, the dwarves clearly don’t consider the cave wall as a room wall and have made a hole in it. Whatever, I will get the answer for this later.

I take a quick look at the rack, it has the pickaxes, helmets and boots the skulldwarves use, all of them are steel. The rack has some normal engravings, nothing fancy, it's just making the metal stronger. The helmets do have a piece of oval stone on their fronts, The helmets actually look like miner helmets, even in the placement of the stone.

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Shinestone

A Special stone that can shine brightly.

They work by simply infusing mana into them, the dwarves can do that pretty easily, but they don’t most of the time. Actually another one of the commands, they are told to use these as weapons on non-undead monsters that are giving them trouble. I imagine the idea is to startle said monster with flashing lights? Or just confuse them.

Now for the last thing in the room. The big black crucible, it has the three molds, but I can now see that it also has a pull right in the middle, slightly low on it, a place where the skulldwarves can easily touch. I have one of them pull it open and I see a line of ingots.

Steel Ingots

Now, for the crucible itself.

Black Crucible of Transmutation

Magical smithing item, it can melt and separate different metals. It can transmute many things into metals.

Right, it does make sense to chuck metal there to be transmuted into other metals though, transmutation uses mana to transform things into other things, this does mean that the more outlandish transmutations can cost a lot of mana, and maybe time. There’s a common example, like transmuting water into fire or vice versa, sure you could just do it, make water into fire, BUT! It is much simpler, and cheaper, to transmute water into mud, then some type of earth, then phosphorus, and then fire. You can transmute X into Z directly, but most of the time it’s easier to transmute X into Y and then into Z.

Having said that, I do have a lot of mana. I could try and just pump this crucible full of mana and chuck a bunch of rocks there. I should wait a bit, this is a great boon for me, I don’t want to mess it up. Though considering what it is I might have to actually try pretty hard at it to damage this thing. I should look into changing the molds, so I can make blades and maybe armor. My bone and leather armor I’ve made for the soldiers is not bad, but not the best either.

This whole room is fantastic for me, The skulldwarves will certainly help me expand my dungeon faster.

I command the dwarves to just… mine stuff, I make them disregard the rules and just leave through the door. There are small tunnels peppered through this new corridor of mine, so I get a few to start mining there. I also tell a group of skulldwarves along with Asterion to dig the stone in between the room and my core room. I wish to connect the two.

Now then, for another thing I’ve been wanting to do for a while.

I see into my dungeon core room, it's where my aura and mana are the densest and strongest.

I focus and create a large flat bone circle, then create four smaller circles connected to the larger one, each one of the circles is facing another one diagonally, kind of like a drone. I then have the Grimm brothers start engraving it with small chisel bones. They are by far the best at this. The engraving is simple, very simple, in fact it’s something kids tend to do for school projects, though on a smaller scale and with paper instead of bone. It’s a mana floater, it can literally float and levitate on pure mana alone, with an extremely small cost, the only problem is that the size of the object you want to make float depends on the mana density. In most places this means anything heavier than a paper weight will need a better method of floating than this. This functions by creating pockets or mana under it to make it float, it propels itself by puffing out some of the mana. There are a lot more problems with this, and I will need to change it in the future, but it will do for now. As the brothers get done with the disk I create another one and they start again.

I then create a simple skull, just the top half of it, and fuse it with the top of the disk. Then I infuse it with necrotic energy. Soon enough the undead wakes.

{Minor Floating Skull} LV1

I can tell this little one is kinda weak, it makes sense, they are just a skull without any greater materials or large amounts of energy, without the rest of the body it can’t really have much energy, but it has to be the skull only, hell this skull is already thinner than normal, otherwise the disk would have to be even larger. I tell the skull to move around, it’s… trying its best I am sure, kinda wobbly. It will take a bit for it to learn to properly float around, I am helping it by trying to guide them.

These will be my little drones, my initial plan is to send a few of them down and up the giant hole to my left side. They will scout and see ahead. A few hours pass with me and the Grimm brothers creating the drones. They actually level up a few times, passing through ten, but not evolving. I am somewhat unsure why, maybe because they already are an evolution?

Anyway they got the skills for {Engraving} under miner and also…

{Teamwork}

Improve combined action with others.

They both got it too, only the skeleton soldiers have similar skills, though they don’t have {teamwork} specifically but rather {Line Fighting}.

I send two drones out of my core room and into the giant holes, they stop right in front of it and I use {Minion Sight}. I send them forwards. They are right in the middle of the hole, I can see where they came from and it seems to be the only opening around this level.

I send the two up, one slightly behind the other.

I ascend for a while, seeing nothing much beside rocks, I think I’m at least forty meters up, when I see… Light, Greenish tinted light. Again my undead pass me the feeling that it is not sunlight. The light is coming from all around the cave walls, I get closer and see that the light is coming from plants. The drone skulls start getting a bit wobbly, and I know why, these plants are probably absorbing the mana around, thus making this part of the tunnel less dense with mana. When my skull gets in range I take a good look at the plants.

Glowing Marchens

Glowing Marchens absorb mana to shine brightly inside caves and tunnels.

The marchens were growing alongside the circular walls of the tunnel, they have long dark stems, and at the end of the stems they ended in umbrella-like buds, those buds were shining, they were the part of the plant producing the light. I made the drones go down, but I told them to stop. I could see a small fissure on the side of the tunnel, and from it a starfish like being appeared

Star Shaped Cave Slug

…It's a slug? I watched the slug a little more, it really didn’t look that much like a sea star, outside its general shape. It has 5 large thick members ending in nub like feet, like a velvet worm. On the base where all the members connect there are five stalks that end in eyes that are constantly moving around. One of those stalks locks in, staring directly into me, or rather my drone. The slug lifts one of its arms, the one first out of the fissure, I make my drones drop faster.

From the arm a long transparent tube-like thing comes out! And misses by a long shot! Hitting the walls behind the drones. Huh, Guess it doesn't see so well, it is pretty dark after all.

Right, I am going to see what’s under. I make the drones dive down, soon enough I have passed the entrance to my dungeon, and this time it only takes twenty meters for me to see something. I see a smaller tunnel, it is actually directly under my own opening. I tell my drones to enter, again one behind the other. As they go in and start moving inside of this tunnel I can tell that it is slightly slanted downwards, since unless I tell them to, the drones will keep floating in a pretty perfect straight line. They keep going for another 10 meters at least before I see…light again, this time though I can see the orange tint, and again I can feel my undeads noticing it is not real sunlight, I am quite curious about this instinct, but I press on, that question can be answered later.

I see now the mouth of the cave where the light is coming, and furthermore I can see grass there and actual plants! And what I am pretty sure are trees!

As my drone passes the mouth of the cave and out of the tunnel I see a large, really large cavern. By really large I mean I can barely see the top of the blue colored stone ceiling. Wait, is that the sun?

I get closer to the trees, one of the things I have noticed is the improvement of my {Minion sight}, now I can see much farther away.

I have the drone fly up and it reveals a large, large expanse of a forest. I can even see a goddamn river! I make the drone turn around and start looking at the sky, I can see it now. That is not the sun at all, but seems to be some kind of large two dimensional light source? Right on the middle of the cavern ceiling, as if it was the midday sun. I don’t quite understand it, it might be some kind of magical luminous paint?

Huh,this place is oddly…slanted? Also kinda circular, or curved? I’m pretty sure this is some type of dome. Or at least some kind of dome or sphere shape.

I see movement at the corner of my undead eye sockets, rustling tree leaves, I turn and come face to floating skull with a snake. The snake is already in the air, mid leap towards my skull and it bites the skull, it doesn’t actually pierce the bone but the added extra weight immediately makes it plummet down. I have the other one start running, I mean, floating back.

I think this might be where the lizards are coming from, I mean what other place do I know that could feed a bunch of lizards? And is literally underneath where I am?

I am going to need more floating skulls to properly scout this place,it’s simply way too big, I should probably try and create some kind of outpost at the entrance to the cave.

I think it’s time for me to play the invader role.