“Great!” Ryia exclaimed. “The first step will be to create a space for the dungeon to operate. This twenty thousand inches under the surface thing you have going on is nice and all but, funny thing about surface dwellers, they need to breathe.”
“How do I do that?”
“Ok, you know how you fractured the quartz around you? You had probably passively invested some of your mana into the stone. Because it was such a large amount in a small place, when you were startled it affected your mana as well, which in turn affected the rock it was invested into. You can invest your mana actively if you concentrate. Think you can do that?”
I probed at the stone that made up my world. At first, I felt nothing, but as my concentration intensified, I felt a mounting resistance. As I pushed further, I felt a force flow out of me and into the stone. The quartz glowed briefly, before slowly fading, gradually allowing the darkness to return. However, despite the seemingly unchanged quartz, I could feel the power I had invested.
“What now?”
“Just move the mana you invested. Because the mana is integrated within the matter of the stone, moving it should move the rock as well.” I did as she said, and a small space opened in the stone.
“Great! Now just do that, but about five hundred times larger. You're always passively absorbing mana from the space around you, so you don’t need to worry about running out for something this small. As the area that your mana is invested into expands, so will the area you see. Try to invest the stone around you until you can see the surface, then hollow out a shaft leading up there.”
“What then?” While the idea of spending all of my time on a repetitive task might seem less than ideal to a normal mortal, time had little meaning for me. I instinctively knew that Dungeon Cores were almost immortal, barring outside influence, so boredom was more of an intellectual curiosity than something I could actually experience.
“Eventually, once you have claimed enough mana, you should be powerful enough to manifest materials directly. To do that, you’ll need to invest your mana into a material before you can replicate it. There’s a long technical explanation for why that is, but the short version is that as you invest your mana into a material, it becomes a part of you. Dungeon Cores are basically intelligent mana bound to a stone, so investing is actually expanding a part of yourself. Once you have a Dungeon, you’ll be able to watch everything inside because the entire dungeon is basically you. Since manifesting a material requires perfect knowledge of how it is made up, Dungeon Cores are one of the only beings that can manage it.”
As I expanded my domain, which was what Ryia called the area my mana was invested into, she explained some of the information that wasn’t included in my basic sentience package. As it turned out, a new dungeon core could only store so much information without going insane, which was the reason I didn’t know all this already.
The main reason Cores chose to become dungeons were because of its benefits. Every time a spell was cast, or a person was killed inside their domain, a dungeon received some of that spells or person’s mana, which they could then use to expand their domains. The larger a Core’s domain, the more powerful that Core became. The increase was not just quantitative, but also qualitative. There were things that a Core with a large domain could do that a smaller domain couldn’t manage, even if they had the same amount of mana.
There was only one rule Dungeons had to follow to keep ENADs (Everyone Not A Dungeon) from launching a campaign to wipe them off the map. There had to be loot. Apparently, some Cores had claimed to be Dungeons just to lure people in without expending the mana to manifest loot, which had led to more than a few Cores being wiped out by an infuriated, magically prepared army. Loot is a reward given out to ENADs who completed a portion of the dungeons. It could take the form of magical weapons or valuable materials, like gold. It was basically a trade: I got mana from dead Adventurers or spells and the Adventurers got some materials that I could manifest with little effort.
Once my domain was large enough, Ryia showed me how to manifest materials. It basically came down to focusing on everything I knew about a material I had infused and concentrating mana where I wanted the item to manifest. She had me practice by forming spikes along the shaft. These would serve as a defense against ENADs trying to corenap me. Apparently magical intelligent rocks that passively absorbed ambient mana from the world were extremely valuable.
After a while, I didn’t know how long exactly, a portion of my expanding domain ran into dirt. Now while this might not sound terribly interesting to ENADs, for me this was a gold mine of resources. This dirt was composed of a wild variety of elements, mostly Silicon, Aluminum, Iron, Calcium, and Sodium, but also a crapton of microscopic dead stuff Ryia called microbes. While Ryia said dungeons who used biological warfare were usually avoided, I was pretty sure I could make some nasty pathogens using the information I'd gained.
I focused my expansion in the direction I had struck dirt, and eventually the dirt gave way to air. I wasn’t paying attention at the time; as the task of expanding my domain became more familiar, I gradually began to do other tasks while expanding. As a result, I was busy talking with Ryia about why ENADs were so obsessed with gold when it happened.
“They can trade it for other items, like food or weapons.” Ryia explained.
“Then why don’t they value food as payment?”
“Food tends to go bad, and a little bit of gold can buy a lot of stuff.”
“What if their infatuation with gold suddenly ended? Then those with food would be rich and the people with gold would go hungry.”
“That would never happen. Even if people aren’t enchanted with gold anymore, they would still need some way to represent value. Gold is a steady measure to use. As long as they don’t do something crazy like valuing pieces of paper, they should be fine.”
“What about-” It happened right then.
The dirt suddenly gave way to a vast emptiness, and the mana I had been expanding with suddenly began to leak out like I had burst a blood vessel. The light I had been giving off as my domain expanded visibly dimmed as I rapidly lost mana.
“Granite? Granite speak to me.”
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
I grunted with the effort of slowing the flow of magic to that area. I had been infusing new terrain for so long that it took a few seconds for me to remember how to stop. By that time a third of the mana I had accumulated had been siphoned away. Imagine a vampire sucked all your blood out while keeping you alive, then you took a shot of whisky on an empty stomach while lying on your deathbed. The feeling of losing all that mana was about twice as bad as all that. When I was sure I wasn’t leaking anymore, I explained what had happened to Ryia.
“Oh, forgot to mention that. Must be pretty windy up there. Ok, so as you’re infusing your mana into the air, the air is constantly moving, carrying all of that infused air away. Your infused air is still out there, but it was probably diluted so fast you never even noticed you were expanding. By now it will have been influenced by the ambient mana of the world to the point where it reverted back to its natural state. That’s usually not something Dungeons have to worry about except in a few specific situations. Moving air currents is one, as are rivers.”
There was a long silence as I wondered when my domain would stop spinning, before I finally responded. My mana was regenerating, but even so it would take a while before I was back to normal.
“What’s the solution?” I asked in a slightly slurred voice.
“It’s easy really. You just have to…”
After she told me I felt like an idiot, the solution was so obvious. I waited until my mana had recovered, then once more tried to expand into the air. This time, the instant my domain had seized control of a portion of the air, I would stop the infused air from moving, creating a dead zone in an otherwise windy day. When I had my dungeon fully set up, I could simply stop my infused air from leaving the dungeon, refreshing it by either bringing in new air, using plants to refresh the air I already had, or manifesting fresh air directly.
The air was way, WAY easier to expand through then the ground. Expanding through the ground was trying to move a boulder, while expanding through the air was sliding down a hill, almost effortlessly. Now that I thought about it, the dirt had been easier to move through than the quartz and granite mixture that made up the majority of rock I had moved through. I had also found bare specks of gold and silver, meaning I could manifest an almost endless supply of the stuff. It made sense why ENADs would want to capture one of us, we were awesome. Period.
I found the area I had broken through to was lush jungle, filled with life. Almost instantly I tripled, then quadrupled my knowledge of how to create various microbes, pollens, spores, and other errata. However, all living things had their own inherent mana that resisted my influence with a surprising ferocity and effectiveness. Even bringing all of my mana to bear, it was all I could do to infuse a single shrub. Ryia said that while almost nobody cared if a dungeon infused living non sentient things, infusing a person was, like biological warfare, something that would at best have me avoided and at worst have an angry mob at my doorstep. It turned out that while “A dungeon must have loot” sounded great as a dungeon's only rule, there were a million and one little unofficial just as important.
“So, Ryia, what’s next?”
“Next, make a shaft leading down. Not all the way to your core, but close. Add in some twists and a few rooms here and there, maybe some spikes along the ceiling to make it a bit more ominous. The more dangerous a dungeon is, the more suicidal Adventurers will come running. Don't ask me why, it's just a fact. Also, stick some strengthening enchantments down there. Adventurers have a nasty tendency to blow stuff up.”
"Strengthening what now?"
"Oh right, you have no idea about the most basic aspects of the world. Silly me." She sighed. "There are two types of mana engraving. Enchantments and runes. Enchantments are used to modify whatever they were created on. Strengthening a pillar, sharpening a sword, that sort of thing. Runes affect things outside of the engraving, like heating up a room or making a torrent of flame. Both forms of engraving respond to Intent, which is just you wishing really hard something will happen. If someone was dying and with their final breath infused a spike rune, those spikes would aim better and more powerfully. Nobody knows why mana responds to Intent, but you didn't need to understand gravity to fall on your face."
I sent a mental nod her way, then got to it. Ryia showed me the strengthening rune, a weird symmetrical swirling pattern. Engraving the thing probably would have taken an ENAD hours of painstaking cursed filled labor, but I just smacked the thing on as I went. Turns out being a magical sentient rock made of mana meant I would be better at making magic stuff than an ENAD. Who knew?
As my domain expanded, I'd become more adept at the wordless speech we used to communicate. Ryia had explained a while back that it was a sort of mana interaction that precisely communicated intent. It was something almost all non-corporeal or purely magical creatures shared. Apparently, Dungeon Cores were close enough to count. I picked a spot a good distance from my core, then began to hollow out a tube. I set up four rooms, with a winding staircase leading from one to the next. I followed Ryia’s advice and set needle sharp spikes along the ceiling, honed to a molecule’s fine point. It was a bit overkill, as they were so sharp an ENAD wouldn’t even know they had been cut until they started bleeding, but I thought it added a nice touch. I finally began to form a staircase leading towards the surface, planning what the entryway would look like.
BOOM!!!
Now, while dungeon cores don’t have any auditory mechanism like an ENAD would, we are very sensitive to the movement of our own mana and how ambient mana brushes against it, giving a similar end result. However, no ears or ear alternates were required to sense the eruption. The ground trembled as a huge plume of dirt and mana sharpened stalactites exploded from a seemingly peaceful patch of jungle. The canopy around ground zero was shredded, blown away by the blast, leaving a canopy deadzone around the crumbled remains of a half-formed stairwell standing, like some monumental painting on stupidity. The sound could be heard from dozens of miles away, causing a temporary pause to the forest's normal activities as animals glanced in the direction of the noise. For a pure, perfectly innocent bunny it was the last thing it heard as a stalactite plunged from the sky, skewering the poor thing like a shish kabob. The event was not an isolated one, as stalactites rained over the jungle like the world had gone mad.
After the aftershocks of the explosion had subsided, I pulled together what parts of my domain that were still within reach and asked a single, very pertinent question.
“Granite?” Ryia, her incorporeal body unaffected by the blast, hovered in a way somehow implying that she was thinking.
"Yes Ryia?” I responded, confused at the seemingly random question.
“Did you remember to manifest air as you made your dungeon?”
“Uh…”
It took me a good bit to figure out what happened. The space I had hollowed out had no way for air to fill it up, creating a pure vacuum. As the vacuum lead towards the surface, losing the support of the surrounding rock, the pressure reached past the point where normal stone would fracture. The strengthening enchantments supported the stone, loyally holding the line between the pure, unblemished vacuum and the roiling mass of uncultured air that sought to taint it. They stood bravely... right up until they didn't. A single enchantment fractured, spraying out its mana.
Which of course caused another enchantment to fracture. In an instant the entire enchantment army had turned to cowards, dying rather than facing their duty. Air flooded into my dungeon, bringing with it a slew of ambient mana that only exacerbated the problem. The mana density spiked, then some brilliant mana mote decided it would be a good idea to spontaneously manifest into an air particle. His buddies, seeing how fashionable the PARTICLE OF AIR looked, immediately copied him. All of this combined to make a shockwave starting from the bottom of my dungeon as air manifested in droves, rippling out, the manifestations driven on by the compressed wave of air behind it. And so it was that the cowardice of enchantments and the fashion sense of mana combined to bring down a fledgling empire.
“Well,” Ryia said in a far too casual tone. “It had to happen sometime. Welcome to the fantastic world of Dungeon Physics, making the most unique explosions on the planet.”