Although the grin fell from the man’s face, Sigmundr didn’t take back his offer. He did have me go through each of the provisions and promise to adhere to them. Apparently some Cores had pulled some fast ones with their wording, and for some inexplicable reason the World Core, founding member of the wisp race and mentor to all Cores, usually sided against the Adventurer Society. Ryia double checked everything, ensuring there nothing would leave me a slave of the Kingdom of Siegfried forever bound to mass produce items until I was left a mana deprived husk of a Core whose last sentient thought would be pure regret.
It’s the little things that keep a Core on its toes.
When Sigmundr was satisfied he nodded once before, with a sound like an avalanche in a tunnel, through the rock to the bright blue sky above. Apparently jumping through the HOLE HE’D ALREADY MADE was too much to ask. With a sigh, I filled in both the tunnels the crazy cultivator had left. Fortunately, the man had one redeeming factor. I turned my gaze to the small library of information encased near my core.
For an ENAD, this would be helpful but not world changing. After all, the thing about books was that you had to read them. Cores, uncaring of silly things like eyes or short-term memory, had no such problem. I carefully infused the tomes, unwilling to risk damaging the valuable books. As I finished, my mind exploded.
“AHHHHHH!”
“What what what?” Ryia asked frantically, hovering around my core like a worried mother hen. I noted she’d been less standoffish, and decided not to mention it. Pointing out that a wisp was going soft was probably the last mistake a Core ever made.
I couldn’t respond through the sea of information suddenly at my disposal. I found answers to questions I hadn’t thought to ask, formulas for even the most complex problems, runes and enchantments for almost every conceivable effect. Detailed research into physics, mana, and the interactions between flashed through my psyche, instantly cataloged and cross referenced. When it was over, my core was as least twice as bright as it had been, practically vibrating. Ryia hovered near my Core, worry radiating through her mana.
“The traps, oh the traps.” I finally responded, my voice full of glee.
“You oaf.” She barked, her orb darkening. “You just came back from the brink of death and that’s the first thing you're going to say? Do you even have any idea what just happened?”
“Uh… we're magical friends now?”
“You… just… ” She sighed. “Close enough. But seriously, I’m stuck with you now, and the first thing you want to talk about is traps?”
“Yup.”
“Well, at least you have your priorities straight.” Silence.
Ok, why in the crap was it so quiet around here?
I glanced through my dungeon. First room was mostly fine. Several spike traps had gone off for some reason, but nothing too major. Second room was just as empty looking as ever. The third room, filled with the never-ending cat melee, wasn’t filled with a never-ending cat melee.
Twisted ruins of creatures littered the ground, bodies fractured in a hundred different ways. Some were missing body parts while others had morphed into stone statues, leaving behind a strangely bloodless battlefield.
“Hugh.”
“That’s probably from you almost dying,” Ryia said, her voice unusually quiet. My newfound knowledge told me extreme mana fluctuations could do this, and extreme fluctuations were a rather nice way of summarizing the past few minutes.
We paused, thinking over how close we’d come to dying. If anything had gone wrong, that would have been it. Our stories would have ended as two broken mana beings buried underground. That’s a could-have-been, and the future waits for no Core, but this was still a moment to remember. This time we’d been lucky, if we didn’t grow stronger…
We got to work.
I began rebuilding my poor archway, but stopped as I noticed something that, in hindsight, should have been obvious. An A ranker had just died on my literal doorstep, releasing all that mana to the world. I reached out to a chunk of mana and pulled it into my domain. Or tried to. The stuff was so thick it was unbelievable. Seriously, Zimisite must have been eating his cultivator veggies or something because good grief was he loaded. I barely noticed the irony, a Core being unable to eat mana because it was too thick, too frustrated to care. An A ranker's cultivation sat before me, waiting to be devoured.
I carefully compacted some of my mana before slamming it at the ambient energy. My mana shattered, but not before chipping an infinitesimally small sliver off. I snatched at the sliver, applying all my willpower to infusing the thing. I could have swore the mana snarled before it died, taking a good deal of my mental focus with it. A ranked energy was something any reasonable Core would leave be, allowing it to slowly dissolve into ambient mana. I followed the reasonable course, focusing on building my dungeon.
Ha! As if.
My newfound knowledge told me mana was an energy created by matter. It usually didn’t interact with matter, with the obvious exception being Cores, who could manifest materials. Like any energy, mana abhorred a vacuum. Ambient mana wasn’t just some random mana laying around, but a mishmash of mana particles wandering off from materials, filing the any mana deficiencies in the world. Why the planet wasn’t gaining mana density was a question sages have struggled with for eons. All that to say, mana moved to spaces with less mana.
I carefully thinned out the mana in the shape of a tube, keeping an eye on the A ranked energy above. To my complete and utter shock, the A ranked energy nicely slipped into the tunnel. I extended the tube, guiding the mana several hundred feet below ground, well within my domain. As the mana ever so slowly dissolved, the energy released would be automatically infused.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Well that was strangely anticlimactic. Where’s the dungeon ending explosion as some unforeseen problem crops up? I gave it a good two minutes, nervously eying the A ranked universe juice, but nothing happened. I shrugged and moved on; It would be fine.
“Granite?”
“Yes Ryia?”
“You said that outloud.”
“So?”
“Why are you jinxing the A ranked bomb sitting next to your core?”
“Woops.”
“Woops? Woops!? You are totally getting us killed.”
“At least we’ll go out in style.” I smirked at the look of distilled incredulity she shot me.
With a rather large amount of A ranked energy just waiting to be used, I could finally expand to the second floor. And with the new knowledge I’d gained, I had the perfect theme. First things first though, my final room needed an upgrade. If it wasn’t for the pressure trick, my boss would have been dead nine times over.
Considering my first floor was dominated by traps, they seemed like a good place to start. I widened the room, adding a row of pillars along the center. This would add a third dimension to my rune traps, giving me a bit more flexibility.
The books on magical theory told me of an interesting effect. Writing a rune inversely, how it would look in a mirror, also reversed the effect. The reason for this had to do with how runes and enchantments worked, something about Cores being able to subconsciously manifest stuff using runes. Reversing the instructions would reverse the effects. It honestly sounded sketchy as all get out, but with no outside source to verify I had to take their word for it. While Ryia had been taught some basic engravings, she wasn’t too hot on the theory behind them.
I added several inverted force projection runes along the pillars. These tended to stop movement around them, though the effect seemed limited. Hopefully they’d buy my boss mob a slight advantage. Speaking of the boss, he could no longer be called a PantherCat. I’d nearly tripled his size and may or may not have gone overboard with the enhancements; A creature that big had a lot of space for runes.
“How did I do?” I asked. The end result of my mob tinkering stood proudly in the final room, twelve feet of fur and muscle. Runes were patterned onto the cat's fur so thickly the mob looked black, its amber eyes and bone white claws the only spots of color. Ryia hovered around the beast, ignoring the occasional swipe sent her way.
“Not bad, but where's the theme?”
“The what?”
“The theme! Don’t tell me you're going to make a deadly boss mob, stick it in a boring stone room, and call it ‘The boss of the first floor’ for the rest of your life.”
“Uh… ”
“Where’s your sense of drama? Your flair for the incredible?”
“Oh, that. I lost it the last time my dungeon blew up.”
“Har har. Seriously, a boss mob isn’t complete without a theme. Imagine if you were some poor Adventurer slogging your way through floor after floor, wouldn’t you want some flair to keep things interesting?”
“Sure, but it’s literally an oversized cat. What am I going to do, give it a throne and call it King of the Cats because it’s bigger than my hundred other cats?”
“Of course not, that would be prejudiced. You give it a throne and call it King of the Cats because it’s deadlier than your hundred other cats.”
Made sense to me.
With that taken care of, I could finally begin work on my second floor. Thanks to Zimisite’s generosity, mana was no longer a limiting factor. While I couldn’t use the entire lug of mana sitting in my basement at once, the small fragments I broke off provided a stead supply of energy. I was definitely not using the last vestiges of a Crown representative to fuel my dungeon’s growth, that was the dungeon next door.
What’s that officer? There is no dungeon next door? Eh, they probably moved.
One thing I’d learned was how to create animated or purely magical beings, like golems or elementals. It required a mana matrix complex enough to act as an intelligence, overlayed onto physical materials. Done right, the matrix would interact with the materials, creating the perfect minions. Unfortunately, matrixes were hard to get my metaphorical hands on. Infusing a wisp would do it, granting me knowledge of how they were created.
“So… Ryia… what makes you tick?”
“Don’t even start.”
Well, there went my plans for a second floor full of golems. Back to the drawing board.
My first floor, while strong in its own way, was lacking one aspect. Endurance. It was four rooms, two of them trap rooms, with the last two being hard, but short fights. I could expand the first floor, but they called it the first floor for a reason. It was supposed to be easy, or at least manageable for most parties. Which gave me my idea for the second floor.
It took a few days to absorb enough of Zimisite’s mana, but finally I had enough for my needs. I expanded my domain down and out until I had a box roughly a league long and half a league wide. On a side note, the league was equal to the average distance an F ranker could walk in an hour.
I hollowed out the space, my control over my domain making the task relatively easy. I engraved proximity triggered force projection runes in lines along the floor, separating the box into a 32x16 grid. Each of the runes were pointed inward in their box, acting as a sort of artificial wall. Why not just separate the space using normal walls? Because then the Adventurers wouldn’t be able to see the glorious army of mobs that awaited them.
It took several more days of work and a lot more bait mice, but I expanded my mob collection quite a bit. My biggest haul had been a snake I enlarged to truly monstrous proportions, but I had many other beasts as well, from a gorilla all the way to an honest to goodness Panther. Compared to my PantherCats it was a wimp, but still.
The Adventurers could descend a flight of stairs to reach the second floor, or take an alternate exit to the surface. If they went down they would start at one end of the room and fight their way across fifteen boxes to reach the center of the space, which housed my boss mob. Once the mob of a box was dead, the first wall of a box to be touched would drop. I’d scattered several chests through the space, and who knew? Maybe some suicidal party would double their time on the second floor for some loot.
The boss mob was special, a memorial to a fallen friend, and the most expensive manifestation I’d done so far. It had no runes or enchantments enhancing it, but its sheer mana density made it the cultivation equivalent of a peak C ranker.
“Tada!” Ryia just stared at me.
“What?” I defended.
“Where’s the theme?”
“Mobs. The theme is mobs. Lots and lots of mobs”
“That’s not… ” She sighed. “Never change Granite.”
And just like that I sensed it. Adventurers. And not just a team or even a group, but a full-on horde of them. After she had returned, Ryia had taught me how to sense the aura strength of cultivators. While most of the Adventurers were mostly at varying stages of C rank, there were a handful of high D rankers and two B rankers thrown in.
“Well, this should be fun.” Ryia’s grin could have cut glass. If I had glass. I could make a whole floor where the ground was a giant window to a lake of lava, and the Adventurer’s couldn’t move too quickly, or they’d fall in.
I really needed glass.