The next time they saw a Monster, cloaked and formless in suspicious darkness, Archmund immediately raised his Ruby and blasted it with his Infrared Lance.

It vaporized instantly, and a spherical Gem, larger than those of the skeletons, dropped to the floor with a tinkle.

“Damn,” Mercy said. “I wasn’t expecting you to get one that quickly. How’d you even do that? I didn’t see anything.”

“It’s Infrared,” Archmund said. “The color below red is hot, but invisible.”

“Hmmf. One of my tutors tried to demonstrate that once, I think. Using a prism. I didn’t understand, then.”

So this world had the ability to make reliable prisms — unsurprising for a culture with such an emphasis on gemcutting — but the value of a prism was presumably more than the modest Granavale County could afford. Which meant Mercy Stirpstredecim de Omnio was probably rich. Oh, and that this world had advanced its natural sciences enough to understand optics.

His knowledge was at best a few hundred years ahead, not a few thousand. It was highly unlikely he could make massive economic improvements from basic innovations like crop rotation.

But then again these things depended heavily on cultural context. Something obvious to the goose was nuts to the gander.

He picked up the dropped Gem. It wasn’t perfectly spherical: there was a slight deformation. It was small - smaller than his thumb. It felt cold to the touch, as if it wanted to drink his energy and his magic.

“So, what are you going to do with it?” Mercy said. “Something so raw could buy enough grain to feed my Sacred Guard for a week.”

Archmund probed the unshaped Gem with his magic.

It accepted him instantly, drinking of his essence, as if it were a bottomless pit he could pour endlessly into. There were no cuts to direct and shape his magic, nor any outlets for transforming raw magic into light or heat or sound — only a blank canvas, a tabula rasa, on which he could create.

“Or you could do that,” Mercy said disapprovingly. “You just made it almost worthless.”

Archmund stopped pouring his magic into the unshaped Gem, albeit reluctantly. “How does that make it worthless?”

“Because you’ve started Attuning it to yourself!”

It always came back to Attunement.

“How much is it worth now?”

Mercy shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe about as much as one of those un-Attuned daggers?”

Archmund turned to Zankto. He seemed to be the most senior of the four guards. “How much is an un-Attuned dagger worth?”

“About a month’s wage, milord.”

“Including room and board?”

Vurl snorted. “Who counts field provisions and tents as not room and board?… Milord.”

Archmund kind of liked this guy. Sarcastic despite the overwhelming difference in status and power. He could relate, though not in this life.

“Well, if I’ve already ruined it, there’s no reason not to keep going.”

Archmund poured his magic into the unshaped Gem again. Mercy sighed. “I suppose I did the same, once. But don’t do too much.”

He could feel his own magic clashing against the natural limitless possibility of the uncut sphere. Where once he had been as blank a slate as this, through practice and grind his magic had narrowed, constraining his prospective futures.

That was simply a fact of life. The better you got at something, the harder it became to change to anything else.

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

He kept feeding the Gem as they kept moving through the Dungeon’s corridors, which hadn’t changed. They were the same mockery of the living world as before.

He’d proven himself, so he walked just a few steps behind Mercy, with the guards trailing them from five paces. Monster hunting had become a competition between the two of them. Whenever a lumbering mockery of an animated corpse appeared before them, they competed to destroy it and claim its Gem. So far, not counting the initial seven in the dining chamber, the count was seventeen for Mercy and ten for Archmund.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

These Gems were valuable and would certainly boost his family’s fortunes, but they were too small to cut into anything practical. His Ruby dwarfed them in size. Frankly, he still didn’t fully understand the economics of this.

“I really thought there would be more,” Archmund mused. “With how dangerous everyone thought this place would be.”

“We’re here early,” Mercy said. “Dungeons get more dangerous with time, as the Monsters from the depths make their way upwards. The ones up here expended most of their power building a pathway up.”

They walked in near silence when they weren’t slaying monsters, and Mercy kept glancing back to check on him.

“You’re not still pouring your magic into that unshaped Gem, are you?”

Archmund stopped in his tracks. So did everyone else.

“What else would I be doing?”

“My tutors told me that pouring magic into a blank Gem is bad for your progress with other Gems. Which is especially bad if it’s a small one that you can’t repurpose for something else.”

“By how much?”

“Much less than it takes to make progress. Why does it feel like you’re trying to negotiate with the fundamental Systems of the Universe?”

Archmund shrugged haplessly. This was something to review later.

He pulled out his Ruby and shot an Infrared Lance into the wall. The Ruby gladly accepted his magic, and without the heat of battle his control was fine. He burned a smiley face into the wall of the dungeon, barely creating any ambient heat, a much more controlled use than the fire-and-fury laser cannon he’d unleashed in battle.

“Should I be impressed?” Mercy said.

“How could I possibly know?” Archmund said. “I’m from a backwater. Practically a country bumpkin.”

They kept walking.

“I’m just saying. If you keep doing that, you’ll undo all of your progress,” Mercy said.

“The way you’re talking, it’s like most people only ever pick up one Gem in their lives and master it.”

He’d seen Mercy use two Gems, after all. The Gem of shielding, and the Topaz of Lightning.

“For a minor noble like Granavale? That’s quite likely. If you want my advice, get so good at using your Ruby that you’ve mastered light or heat or below-red. Then it won’t matter how poor the Dungeon leaves Granavale County— you’ll be able to be a courtier or the mage of some other noble family. There’s always a place for specialized mages.”

Archmund didn’t like how that sounded. This was what he got for comparing this new second chance at life to “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” by Cal Newport. Obviously the way to not being tied to the fortunes of the land was to get so good at magic the world couldn’t ignore you. Obviously there was no way to live both a quiet, humble, peaceful life and one spent delving into the deep powers of the universe. Obviously not.

Mercy held up a hand. “You see that?”

He pointed at an engraving on the wall. It looked like Zalgo text, or maybe Wingdings font.

Archmund frowned. “Can you read it?”

Mercy snorted. “No. It means we’ve transitioned into the Middle Subtier. The Monsters here aren’t as pitifully tied to the idea of the outside world.”

“Meaning?”

“The Monsters in the Upper Subtier are the ones that tried to escape the hardest, because they value life no matter what it means, which is why they take on the most humanoid forms and wasted the most power. Here, though, the Monsters have abandoned their aspirations for mortality, which is why they’ll look more… inhuman. But because they’ve given up wasting energy on climbing impossibly to the surface… they’ll be stronger. ”

“Stronger in that…”

“They’ll be able to manifest more Gemstone gear, of different purposes and causes, much of it worthless. The shapes they adopt are… alien, to be frank. You or I wouldn’t be able to make any sense of them, for they’ve abandoned human form. And they have greater power to draw on. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Kill them faster, and they’ll drop bigger Gems,” Archmund said.

Mercy smirked. “You really think it will be that easy?”

They pressed onwards.

Archmund paid close attention to the structure of the Dungeon around them. The stone and compacted dirt of the uppermost subtier gave way to rougher, more natural looking stone.

He ran a hand over the wall. “Feels natural.”

“Might as well be,” Mercy said. “Usually Monsters burrow out of the ground searching for a way up. The Upper Monsters expend their power trying to break into real basements and shape the world around them. The Lower Monsters try to preserve what they once had in life, and they have the power to do so. But Middle Monsters don’t really care. So they just wander around aimlessly like ants or termites. This part is the worst kind of maze you could possibly stumble into.”

Archmund walked for a bit. He supposed it made sense. Already, his mind was drawing analogies and connections to attitudes towards death, or perhaps society. Some clung to the familiar so hard that they created mimicries and mockeries of it. Some knew what they wanted and the power to achieve it and made everyone else’s life a pain when they did so. But many people just didn’t care. They wandered through life and then wasted away. Like the silent shades in the Fields of Asphodel, in Greek myth.

It all felt a little too clean, a little too convenient. Frankly, it lent credence to his fear that this whole world was his dying dream, which meant he fell into the category of people who clung to the familiar far too hard.

“How do you know all of this?”

“Because I’m a genius prodigy,” said Mercy, a bit too quickly.

“That explains why you remember it. Not why you’d be told it in the first place,” Archmund said. “Honestly, seriously, who are you? Why are you here, really? If you’re this smart and this powerful why the hell are you going on suicide missions into opened Dungeons instead of sitting up there with the Omnio elite—”

“I am letting you come along with me as a courtesy—”

There was a high-pitched screech, bearing sorrow and terror. Their four guards rushed before them, raising their arms in defense.

There was a Monster. But it wasn’t like the skeletons from before.

No, this one hurt to look at. It had tentacles in sevenfold symmetry, a writhing star, made of shadow that mimicked rot around a pitch-black hole rimmed with knife-like teeth. It screeched again, latched its tentacles to the walls, and lunged towards them.