A small green little tree sat in a small valley between a sea of red hills. The tree just barely managing to poke the tops of its branches above the tops of the surrounding hills, giving it access to a wonderful view of the wasteland surrounding it. The green little tree was alone in its vibrance as any other plant life it could make out was just as sad and brown as it had once been. In truth this proud little tree had once been a small pitiful shrub desperately holding on to the last few tendrils of life, but now it sat proudly in its valley.
In a little hole beneath the now proud tree hidden by its roots sat an equally brilliant orange gem surrounded by a small pool of water, what little light managing to find its way into the hole illuminating a white fog held within its body. The fog slowly drifted about within and gave off a calming aura, if one were to hand this little gem to a person having a mental breakdown they would surely come back to their senses.
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Halfway through expanding my domain to the tops of the hills I had realized something, that something made me feel stupid for not taking the time to consider all my options. Dungeon Crystals could change the world around them and I had somehow failed to grasp that, I was trying so hard to imbue more material with my mana so that I could over the hills surrounding me when all I had to do was will the bush above me to grow into a small tree. I had somehow managed to overlook that I could in fact see from the bush and could also manipulate it and force it to grow bigger.
In my attempt to make the shrub larger, and thusly taller, I found that I was manipulating something much much smaller and complex than I could have ever understood or even knew existed however as I was poking around I had an idea of what all these small little things did for the tree and knew what would happen if I changed them. Getting to work I quickly turned my small bush into a small tree just tall enough to peek over the tops of the hills. Pushing some mana into the plant in order to get it to grow quicker, within a day or two I had just what I wanted.
Something was bothering me though, I found the tree still looked as sad as it had before despite the changes. Then it struck me, given my previous career as a farmer I had no idea how I overlooked the fact that all plants need water. Having learned from my earlier mistake of overlooking my abilities and not taking time to think out a proper plan. With nothing else to do I decided to continue expanding towards the tops of the hills while I thought of how I would get water to the tree.
Finally I decided I would get two birds with one stone as the humans would say, though it was more like three birds than too but that's detail isn't too important. Wanting to test just how powerful I was I did a fair bit of experimenting, I found that I could impart my will just as I had to the bush onto the dirt and rock around me. Doing so I found that if I willed a small stone to move five centimeters to the left then the stone would move itself to exactly where I wanted. But that wasn't all, I found I could do so much more, if I wanted some dirt to levitate into the air it would, if I wanted the dirt to turn itself into a hard black stone it would, but most importantly I found that I could compel the land around me to disappear. Now I had no clue where the land had gone to nor did I care, for all I knew it had actually disappeared turning itself into nothing.
Having figured out how to use this new incredibly powerful ability I quickly set about to carving a small little hole beneath the main body of my now not so small companion. Creating a large pancake shaped hole around two meters below the newly created tree, one meter from top to bottom and two meters in diameter. Willing the dirt to disappear I quickly saw much of the sand and dirt from above actually fell down into the hole. Having realized I overlooked actually reinforcing the edge of the hole to keep the ceiling from collapsing I made a mental note to keep that in mind should I create another hole either of this size or larger.
Know what I needed too I went around willing the dirt around the outside of my hole to be tougher and less resistant to caving in, I then told the dirt that had fallen in to put itself back where it was previously. Towards what felt like the North I created a small tunnel just wide enough to fit my Dungeon Crystal, while inside the hole I dug a trough shape throughout the majority of the pancake like chamber while leaving room in the middle to store myself on a bit of dry land.
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My next two steps were to get my Dungeon Crystal in the hole and fill the trough I had created within it with plenty of water to sustain the tree above. Trying to move my Dungeon Crystal I found I could not just will it to get up and float down towards its spot in the middle, which made sense if you thought about it, the brain didn't move itself it told muscles to move it to where it wanted to be. So using the dirt around me I willed it to push my Dungeon Crystal onto the little island in the middle of the trough.
Next I just had to fill up the trough with water but that was relatively easy now that I knew what I was doing. The dry soil quickly sucked up the water and little bubbles formed from the water displacing any air trapped in the soil.
With how quickly the soil sucked up my water I knew it would be troublesome, I most definitely did not want to be refilling the hole with water every day, it would be too much of a hassle. Trying to think of a solution that's when I had a brain wave, there were mages out there who could turn their mana into spells that conjured water one of my cousins being one such mage. This quickly turned into a little bit of brainstorming on how I could create a perpetual flow of water that never exceeded the top of the trough.
After about a day or so of trial and error I managed to create my solution, at one end of the pool sat a small blue ball of water which would produce a constant flow of water so long as I had enough mana. But I didn't want a constant flow of water, that would quickly fill up the entire chamber. However as part of the spell I had made it so that it would stop producing water when it reached the top of the pool.
Sitting back to marvel at my creation I realized something, my distant cousin was extremely wrong about dungeon spells being inefficient because this was by far the most efficient thing I had created. Deciding to do some more testing I turned to the sky above my tree and went about casting a spell to shoot lighting, in truth I only knew how to cast this spell because I wanted one my aunts to stop asking me when I would learn some magic.
Around halfway through casting I quickly noticed that a large majority of my mana was disappearing, so I quickly stopped creating it. Taking a moment to calmly figure out what had happened, and after some experimenting I came to a conclusion I didn't like. It seemed that spells were incredibly easy to cast also incredibly inefficient for Dungeon Crystals, but that was seemingly limited to spells that didn't rely on my ability to change the world around me. So this meant that I could cast a spell that created water and it would hardly drain my mana reserves, but if I wanted to cast a fireball practically all of my mana would disappear. There was however one small flaw with this, I found that one of my old spells to cast little orbs of flickering light didn't cause half my mana to disappear and actually used an even smaller amount of mana than my water spell. Whatever the reason for this I could not for the life of the Rift Maker figure out so I simply left it alone and moved on.
With everything was working perfectly and my tree looking much greener I decided to take a moment to look out through the top of my tree. Looking out I found that I was in quite the wasteland, there was almost no plant life to break up the rolling red hills I could see in every direction though of note I could see that to what felt like the West and South was a huge mountain range. The mountains were honestly extremely impressive and I wished I could have seen them before I became a Dungeon Crystal.
Grand mountains aside it was honestly quite surprising just how little life was here, having been dragged along by some family members to the supposedly grand desert of Death's Reach even I knew there should be more out here, and it would probably be apt to name this place Death's Reach if you compared the two. For some unknown reason there was barely any plants or animals, while I could see over a dozen plants from my view only five were actually close enough. There were three different clumps of grasses situated on top of the the hills closest to me, in between one of the clumps was a sad skinny little tree which seemed to only grow leaves at the ends of its thick branches, tucked between another clump of grass was a little bush incredibly similar to the one my new tree had once been, it was equally sad if not more so the now proud tree once was.
Looking around from my new vantage point I spotted something moving in the sky, the dot coming ever closer as if wanting to investigate this small green pond in a sea of red and brown. Realizing what it was I jumped for joy, well I didn't actually jump due to the fact I was an orange gem. However I had to act, I could not afford to miss this opportunity, quickly sending a cone of mana out towards the bird in order to bring it under my control.