Novels2Search

Chapter 12: Folly's Price Part 1

Reinmund gasped awake, awareness flooding back to him along with his memories. He jerked upright, or at least attempted to. All he managed was to barely shift his body. He felt weak, so incredibly weak. Strangely, he couldn't pinpoint the cause of his weakness. There was no soreness from lingering muscles, no feeling of a fever, nothing explaining his body's complete lack of response.

He gazed at the rock above him, red bioluminescent moss illuminating the rough ceiling. Calming his frantic thoughts he focused within, carefully feeling out every muscle, searching for damage. Nothing. He once more tried to move, and this time managed to barely heave himself up into a sitting position. The sound of grinding rock snapped his attention back to his surroundings.

He was laying on a pedestal in the middle of a small, bare rock room. A doorway was set into one wall, little more than a rough hole hewn into the rock. The room had the look of something roughly carved into existence; uneven surfaces and jagged cracks reminding him more of a cave than a room. He turned his head to survey the rest of the room, only to hear the grinding sound again. He leapt to his feet, weakness suddenly gone, whirled around while raising his arms to ward off potential enemies.

His… arms. His…

His mind went blank as he stared at the two stone monstrosities hovering in front of him, responding to his commands. He looked down at the rest of his body, seeing the broken stone chest, the rock legs that kept him upright. The realization came with that sinking feeling you get when something has gone terribly, horribly, irrevocably wrong. He recognized this form, the molten lines traced across black stone, the heat emanating from every inch of his body. He slammed his stone hands to his face and screamed, the gravely sound emanating from the body of a lava golem.

He never knew how long he stood there, screaming out his horror and fear and confusion. When he finally came to himself, curled up on the ground, his stone skin heating the cold stone below, he had only one incredibly pertinent question.

How?

The only thing that was remotely plausible was that he’d died, but even that explanation had several flaws; like why he was alone or why the ambient mana still felt like that of a dungeon. Maybe this was some sort of trap? A mental projection of his mind into that of a golem? His Adventurer training finally kicked in, squashing any errant thoughts for the sake of survival. He would accomplish nothing by sitting here.

Clambering to his feet with the sound of grinding rock, he took a hesitant step. He expected his new body to feel unwieldy, but was surprised by how… right it felt, like this was how he was always meant to be. Reinmund experimentally sucked in some of the ambient mana. The mana of the entire room lurched towards Reinmund as his body absorbed at a prodigious rate, his cultivation working better than he’d ever experienced. The cracks along his skin glowed brighter, the heat they emitted rising along with the light. For a moment he stood there in shock, eyes wide, before the implications fully hit him. If his mind was projected into the body of a golem, there was no way it would affect his cultivation speed.

He truly had been turned into a stone monstrosity.

Sadness and panic threatened to come crashing back, but a small, flickering thing pushed it back. Hope. Because every curse had a silver lining. He strode out of the room, determined to make the most of this opportunity, to advance one more step along the path to the top. To become better.

Such is the mind of a cultivator.

____________________________________________________________________________

As it turns out, the cultivation of an Adventurer makes for a great magical matrix.

I watched the stone man awake, his core taking a few seconds to synchronize with his body. It had been the work of days to get to this point, ignoring the increasingly frantic actions of the Adventurers on the surface.

When I’d crafted the Underworld, as Ryia called it, I had a vague idea of a place where fallen Adventurers would be given a second chance. If they could prove their worth to him, they would be released. On the surface, it was a terrible idea that would lose ogles of mana for no return, but over the days Ryia and I had carefully planned the floor, we'd realized there were two redeeming factors.

The first was the draw of such an idea. When word got about the dungeon that gave second chances, we were pretty sure Adventurers would be interested. The second was that manifesting a person’s cultivation took less mana than I gained from an Adventurer's death, meaning I’d still make a profit from deaths in my dungeon.

Why not just the Adventurer as a human? According to Sigmundr’s books, stuff I manifested tended to melt outside of my dungeon. There was a long and complex explanation for this, but that was the long and short of it. Manifested Adventurers would never be able to leave.

I’d gotten around this by moving un-manifested materials from outside my domain into the Underworld, then overlaying the Adventurer’s cultivation on the materials. The golem wasn’t manifested by me, so if they managed to leave, they wouldn’t suffer any degradation.

The process had two major side effects. One was that a person’s cultivation didn’t tend to form a human. I’m sure there’s some cultivation technique out there that, if overlaid onto a fully formed human body, could animate it, but that sounded sketchy even to me. This guy’s cultivation technique had been based around flame and earth and required both of those elements to function. Hence, the lava golem.

I watched the Adventurer begin to freak out, screaming like he’d woken up in one of the nine hells. I didn’t see the problem. I had woken up as a rock in complete darkness with no idea of who or what I was, and I hadn’t freaked out.

Much.

Hopefully the guy would get his act together and start doing valiant and interesting things. The floor was set up with several sub floors in it, creating a complex 3D maze, with several PantherCats and other powerful mobs from the second floor.

I was mostly able to keep an eye on everything going on in my dungeon. In comparison to an ENAD, it was like listening to a conversation while their main attention was on something else. I could recall the general outline of what had happened, and my attention would snap to a person if they did something interesting, but my main attention was somewhere else. The end result was that I could watch the golem while doing other things.

Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

Leaving the cultivator to his own devices, I reset my dungeon. Some minor artwork was added to give hints about the Underworld, but nothing too major. I checked on the second floor and… uh...

The entire space looked like a rotten version of a chop shop, each of the mobs I had placed on the second-floor dead in their cubes. I stared at the corpses, scrambling to come up with a reason for the mobs' death. Ryia noticed my sudden silence and suspiciously followed my gaze. When she saw the corpses, she groaned.

“Granite, please tell me you remembered that mobs need to breathe.”

“Uh… maybe?”

“Ya knows, I suddenly understand why you focus on traps. You just can’t keep mobs alive.”

“Not true,” I muttered sullenly.

“Oh yeah? How long was your oldest mob's lifespan?”

I thought back. The first round of mobs had been slaughtered by the Adventurers about two weeks after I manifested them. The second round was reabsorbed when I kicked everyone off the first floor, once again about two weeks after I manifested them, and these mobs looked like they’d died not long after.

“14 days? Give or take a few?” All I got in response to my mental gymnastics was a flat stare.

Ok, maybe she had a point.

I repopulated the space with daisies to start up a primitive ecosystem, adding growth runes to their pedals that absorbed mana to keep the flower healthy. Why daisies? For free advertisement, of course. Now, every time an Adventurer who’d entered my depths saw a peaceful, serene field of daisies, they would suffer PTSD flashbacks of endless boxes of mobs and the deaths of their friends, collapsing into a sobbing pile on the ground. When their friends learned what was wrong, they would, because Adventurers are inherently suicidal, be drawn to experience the horrors for themselves.

See? Free advertising.

When everything was ready, I lowered the wall of stone that had sealed off the entrance to my dungeon, opening it to the Adventurers once more.

____________________________________________________________________________

Alessandro glared at the entrance to the dungeon, his hate filled eyes as hard as archway’s stone.

It had been days since they'd lost Reinmund, days of waiting for something, anything, to happen. Losing a party member was supposed to happen to the other guy, never to their team. Never to Reinmund. When the archway reopened the B rankers had asked for volunteers. Alessandro had been the first person to step forward, followed a second later by the remainder of his team. He knew they disagreed with him, thought his judgment was clouded by grief. They didn’t understand.

Reinmund’s death could not be in vain.

As he entered the dungeon for the second time, he scanned the room for changes. He knew the B rankers' warning looks weren’t about the traps, but he didn’t care. This wasn’t for them.

The room looked the same as it had before, same weird glowing greenish yellow moss, same tiled floor, same open archway. He raised his shield and leapt across the gap, bracing for the impact of wires, ignoring the part of him wishing they were there, wishing it was all over. Reinmund had been more than just another team member. Their team had been together for decades, since the very beginning of F rank. Reinmund was the closest thing to family he’d ever had, one of the few people he could trust growing up with nothing but his wits and the clothes on his back. Gone now, leaving a hole that Alessandro didn't know how to fill.

The thoughts slammed into him like the shock of his landing, bringing a small measure of clarity to his murky thoughts. He stepped out of the way, allowing Janus, Jeanette, and a replacement from another team to land next to him. The man was no replacement for Reinmund but was competent enough in his own way.

Ahead the empty room stretched, all signs of Reinmund’s death gone like they’d never existed. Alessandro paused at the sight, the simple stone room hitting him like a ton of bricks. For a second the word twisted, but he forced it back. They had a mission, one last mission. He would not fail.

“We play this one by the book” He growled, his team nodding before they each pulled out poles.

As the party carefully crossed the room, the occasional piece waved pole sliced off indicated the location of wires allowing them to cross the room with little difficulty. Such a simple trick, the difference between life and Reinmund’s death.

The world shuddered.

The third room was... weird. It was twice the size of the others, filled with twisting spirals of chipped and gouged stone, blocking sight to the exit. Alessandro barely had time to notice as dozens of insane cats washed over the party in a tide of bodies. A trio of stone spikes scattered half a dozen, the temporary wall doing little to slow the river of fur. Claws ripped at Alessandro's, his hands, joints in his armor, covering him in dozens of slices. Although individually each slice did little, quantity had a quality all its own.

Alessandro flung his hammer to one side, the weapon ripping through another half dozen mobs. Using the half second of reprieve he slammed Janus and the new guy to the side, giving Jeannette a quarter second of time and space.

It was all she needed.

Cultivators focusing on mana abilities have many weaknesses. Lower physical strength, less resistance to physical attacks, smaller resistances to poison. But the one thing they utterly excelled at was dealing large amounts of damage very, VERY fast.

A wall of solid flame, bright enough to make Alessandro's vision white out, poured over their heads. An ungodly racket filled the space, barely heard over the roar of the flames. The mana whirled frantically, rapidly gaining a flame attunement. By the time the wave of burning heat ended, all that was left of the mobs were a flickering pile of ash. Alessandro pushed to his feet, stepping through the ash. An entire room of mobs reduced to powder, simply because they lacked power. Reinmund’s death, because of Alessandro’s failure.

The world shuddered.

The instant he crossed the threshold to the next room, torches set into the walls of the square chamber ignited, red light reflecting off the tiled floor. A mosaic of red led between a row of pillars to a tall, elevated throne occupied by a monster of a cat double Alessandro's height. The beast's amber eyes glittered with an unnerving degree of intelligence as it watched Alessandro, its velvet soft tree limb of a tail making barely a noise as it restlessly stirred. Its fur, black as midnight from a coating of runes and enchantments, offset bleached bone claws as they extended with an audible ‘snick’.

Alessandro refused to hesitate, pushing aside all emotions, all logic for a single driving purpose: fury. The fury wasn’t directed at the mob, at the trap, not even at the dungeon. It was fury directed against himself, fueled by self-recrimination. He should have been the one to leap that pit, should have been the one sliced apart by the trap. The sideways glances, the snide comments, the whispers behind his back, all of it had built upon itself, enhanced by days of inaction, all of it leading to this moment, the final boss of the final room of the dungeon.

Then he was moving, his leap crossing the hundred feet to the throne as he drew back his fist, only now realizing he’d forgotten his ax in his mindless rage. An inverted force rune triggered, canceling his momentum. Before he hit the ground the mob was moving, so many enchantments flaring to life the cat was briefly wreathed in intangible, incandescent flames. The light illuminates the Throne Room, sending Alessandro’s comparatively small shadow skittering across the walls.

Alessandro whipped his shield around but had absolutely zero leverage. If he was an air cultivator or specialized in mana abilities, he could have grasped the mana around him, absorbed the blow with his body cultivation. But as he couldn't, his body impacted the far wall with the sound of snapping bone. Pain flared through Alessandro, along with a single inexorable truth. He was weak, would always be weak before true power.

The world shuddered.