Chapter Two

Dungeon Core, tangentially located in the alley behind Pa Pa Jiang’s Chinese Restaurant, New York City, Day 0

  The dungeon core awoke to a sense of immediate surprise, as its senses extended instantly from nothing to a scale many times greater than it felt it should be. After the initial disorientation, it was able to confirm this when it identified its core, a crystal gleaming with a rainbow shine, and determined the size of the room it currently occupied to be well over a thousand times its size, almost fifteen times what it had expected. That it itself wasn’t bad, as already mana had begun to slowly come through the larger walls and be drawn toward its core, causing it to glow faintly brighter, no, the other thing it noticed was the bad news.

  The opening between the dungeon and the mortal plane was a grate, many times its own size, occupying an entire edge of the roof on its long side, a good third of the roof overall. This terrified it, as it instinctively feared dealing with creatures so large until it could handle them, something it most certainly could not do at the moment.

  Security was its top concern, it had to find a way to keep creatures out until it could properly fend them off from its core, or they may kill it. The dungeon quickly scanned its innate knowledge, and came up with only three feasible possibilities, summoning terrifying monsters most certainly being the more appealing option of all that it had seen, but sadly not feasible as it couldn’t even sense any impure mana trickling in through its entrance yet. The three feasible options were: move the core, place traps, and obstruct the way to the core. It decided it would be smart to try all three.

  The first option was by far the easiest, as the core naturally knew sorcery was easier than creation, but still took a few tries. Its first attempt, it created a simple one layer earth spell but it didn’t include enough mana and the spell broke down. On its second attempt, it did the opposite, putting too much mana into the spell caused it’s brown light to roughly grab the crystal and chuck it at the wall, but fortunately the walls were made of packed soil at the moment, and the hit was not damaging. Its third spell was once again under-fueled, being the two layer . It had to wait a dozen or so minutes to gather the mana to fuel the two layer spell again, though it went very smoothly this time, the brown light gently lifting the crystal and melding the wall around it to hold it in place. Fortunately, moving its core to the back wall also had the side effect of giving most of the mana flow a unified direction, slightly improving its speed of absorption.

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  The second option was its first attempt at creation magic, so it drew on a pattern it instinctively knew, a stone spike, and located it beneath the entrance grate, pointing up. It took another five minutes to absorb the mana required to materialize the spike, and the most of an hour to materialize eleven more spread out to hopefully catch something if it tried coming in.

  The third option was the first real test of its creation magic, as it carefully focused on the surface around its core for a few inches, and then carefully focused its mana on extending that space out and up, creating a small tunnel a few yards long and sloping upwards, pushing its core back into the wall. Sensing the mana flow settling into the tunnel, it then promptly declared that spot at the end of the tunnel the start of its dungeon, and not the conspicuous, trapped entrance.

  The dungeon core began to slowly build out the dungeon from there, according to its instincts. It first made one room, then another separated by just a doorway, and another. To its surprise, it had outpaced its expected rate of growth, at least until it remembered that it was technically larger than it should be already; so, actually excited for the first time, it pushed and managed to finish a total of five rooms in one week, getting faster and faster in small increments the more it expanded. It made sure to keep its core in the back wall of the last room.

  It did grow concerned, however, about the fact that no creature had entered it in all that time. It knew instinctually that creatures would be drawn to it by the mana that it released, and if not that then by the flows of tainted mana being drawn back into its entrance so it could extract the miasma. The fact that neither was effective was concerning, but for the time being, it decided to sit on its miasma supply until it could create a creature capable of scouting around from one of the patterns it instinctively knew, but even with the healthy inflow of miasma that had begun midweek, it would take about a month to reach that point.

  The only thing it could productively do in the meantime was to continue to expand. As a short term goal, it decided it wanted to complete its first floor and get started on its second within ten days. It was less a creative task than an instinctive task at this point, given the core had no experience in real dungeon building, but it distanced rooms with corridors, then bent and twisted those corridors, then split them and sent them into loops and dead ends that it felt was fit for a proper dungeon. Then it began working on its traps, steadily developing them, what was on the first day a spike or pit, became a spiked pit by the sixth, and then a hidden spiked pit on the eighth. It made sure to upgrade its entrance defense as well, creating even more spikes and putting them in a pit to trap the invaders, though in that case it didn’t bother to hide it with a cap. Everything seemed to be going very well as it started building its second floor.

Everything that is, except its lack of any intruding creatures whatsoever.