My name is James Erikson. I am a 22 year old, Physics, Electrical Engineering double major at Stanford in my senior year. It had been a long day prepping for semester finals, I needed a good hot shower. I was on the way back to my dorm from the Green Library having returned some books on Quantum Mechanics, the Interaction of the Strong and Weak Nuclear forces under the influence of Strong Gravitational fields, and a book on the history of modern electronics. It was about 8:45 PM on Monday, November 15th, 2021, and I was getting ready to cross Campus Drive near the Student Services center, when unexpectedly, Lisa, my younger brothers girlfriend called out to me. I turned towards her, twisting my ankle in the process, and started to fall. I am looking at her face, I can see her eyes widening in shock in the street-lamps glow. I can see her start to scream the word “NO” when I am suddenly plunged into utmost blackness.
I am highly confused, what just happened. I can’t see anything, I am pretty sure my eyes were open. I can’t hear anything. I can’t feel anything, not hot or cold, hard or soft. For some reason, I am not freaking out. I try to ask a question, but I don’t hear myself, and the words don’t go beyond the boundaries of my thoughts. If anything, I am experiencing a feeling of lassitude that I would not have believed would go hand in hand with the sensory deprivation I am currently experiencing. I have a vague feeling that time is passing, I don’t know how much nor how little time has passed. After some unknown length of time, something changed. I can now see something in the darkness, the darkness is no longer absolute. I can see what looks like stone and loose rock illuminated by a dim blue light about an inch away from my viewpoint. I can now feel pressure from my surrounds, and I try to take a breath, only to find that I can’t breathe, but I don’t seem to need to either. The fact I am no longer blind or insensate is a major comfort. However, where am I? The loose stone in front of me precludes a hospital. If I was buried, I don’t see a coffin, I don’t think I would have been buried with a light source either. It was the fact that I no longer seem to need to breathe that lead me to the inescapable conclusion, I am no longer human.
My next immediate question is, what am I? I try adjusting my viewpoint so that I can see a bit to the left so that I can identify where the glow I see is coming from. Surprisingly it isn’t all that hard, although the view doesn’t really change all that much except I can see where the small cavity that I am in ends on my left. Still about an inch from where I am looking at, in a wall also composed of stone and gravel. I try turning around completely within the tiny cavity, not that I expected to succeed, however, I do. I can now see the source of the blue glow, and what I assume is my new form, a small uncut blue crystal. I stop in shock, fear, and not quite rage, and then started cursing. I had read various books and light novels about being reborn as a dungeon crystal. Right now, I am assuming that first, somehow, I died when I was first plunged into the blackness, and second that my new life isn’t one going to be like one of the easy over-powered style dungeon rebirth types that I had read about. I hadn’t met some god or goddess that explained anything to me, and I don’t see any dungeon fairies floating about.
I start thinking the word “status” very strongly and hoping against hope that there will be a help menu of some kind, to no avail. I sigh, mentally. After a minute or two pondering my situation, I realize that based on what I assume is now my past life’s reading, there are only two methods for growth and in general surviving as a dungeon crystal at this point. First, assuming that my strength will grow passively with the amount of volume under my influence, and second, that I can actively increase my strength and my ability to influence the world around me by attempting to cultivate mana or energy. Since I am not, nor have I ever been, one for passively sitting around, I decide to see if I can somehow, feel any energy within myself and attempt to gather it in some form or fashion. I think about closing my eyes and visualizing an empty inner space within myself, and to my surprise, that initial visualization of that inner space came about very easily, almost naturally. In my surprise however, I mentally blinked, and saw my surrounds once more, as I did when I first started to see in this world. I sigh, again, and give it another try.
Within my inner space, I attempted to search deeper for an energy of some kind, trying to perceive a light or spark. Some time later, slowly, as though mists were parting for me, I see a small blue spark. I smile to myself, and think, ok, step one complete. Now for step two, attempting to absorb more energy to feed my inner spark. I focus on the idea of pulling energy to me, and concentrate on that concept, trying to feel anything that might be energy touching on the surface of my crystal. I must have spent at least a couple of hours trying, before I felt anything. I have to admit, it was with some relief that I started to perceive within my inner space what I saw as a very thin blue mist. A short time later, when it contacted the spark at my center, the mist caused it to flare slightly.
What I really wanted at this point in my new existence was to actively absorb this new energy as subconsciously as I had breathed previously. I fell back upon my physics background and visualized the accretion disk of a black hole, how it continually fell into the event horizon feeding the black hole at its center. I figured I may as well attempt to see if inducing a spin in the mist-like energy will help feed my inner spark. I then tried to manipulate how the mist was coming into contact with the spark at my center. Trying to induce a spin to the mist as it entered my inner space. It easily took another few hours before I had even the slightest success in inducing that spin to the mist-like energy entering my inner space. The spin I had managed to impart to the energy had the effect of causing my inner spark to start spinning slowly on its own. The once spherical spark becoming slightly more ellipsoidal where it contacted the mist-like energy, much like the accretion disk I had visualized.
With this small measure of success in my self-experimentation with what I assume is my primary energy source for survival I tried perceiving my surrounding, whilst continuing to pull energy into a spin towards my inner spark. Fortunately, I succeed, although it took some mental strain initially, to do both things at once. After a couple of minutes, however, the strain eased and I didn’t need to concentrate on it nearly as much as I had needed to initially. My next task would be to expand my influence and essentially build my dungeon.
The question though, is how do I expand my domain? Do I pull energy from my spark and spread it into my surroundings, or do I try to mentally push my surroundings trying to compress them into the material behind them. After a few minutes, with the thought that my new life as a dungeon will be very boring if I don’t figure this out, I make my first attempt to manipulate my surroundings. I realize of course, as a crystal, I no longer have hands or anything else to directly interact with my surroundings. I hope that I have phantom limbs that may actually be able to interact with what I can see. I direct my mental right forefinger to scratch at the middle of the cavity wall in what I hope is in-front of me. To my joyous surprise, I succeeded in scratching away a few grains of gravel from the wall. To my some-what annoyance, I find the wall isn’t in front of me, it is above me.
Based on the fiction I had read, dungeons have at least some ability to absorb parts of their immediate vicinity in addition to manipulating it in some fashion. As I had just successfully tested manipulating my surrounding, my next test would be to see if I could absorb parts of my surroundings.As the granules of gravel that are lying on the surface of my crystal were conveniently close, and to my surprise not obstructing my view, I decided to attempt to absorb them. Following the phantom limb principle that I had just successfully used to dislodge the gravel, I attempt to open my phantom mouth and swallow it, to no avail. Turns out I have phantom limbs, but no phantom mouth, sigh.
Following the pitiful failure of my non-existent phantom mouth, I decided to try and use the energy in my inner spark to try and break the gravel down and convert it into energy. I coated my phantom hand in the energy from my inner spark and tried to squeeze the gravel out of existence. On Earth, the laws of physics indicate that neither energy nor matter can be created or destroyed, only converted from one state to another, I hope that remains the same wherever I am now. Having to learn completely new laws of physics on top of everything that has happened to me so far, would be most annoying.
As I tried squeezing the gravel with my energy coated phantom hand, I was surprised to find that the energy that I have coated my phantom hand with seeped into the gravel. As it did, I feel the gravel become a part of me. As the gravel became part of me, I got a sense of the molecular structure of the material. The good news as far as my initial hope in clearing the gravel is concerned, is that as the material becomes a part of me I can will it to become energy which I then reabsorb. Unfortunately the efficiency of that conversion was utter garbage. A rough estimate at this point in time indicates it is about 1% efficiency, going by a rough guesstimate of the mass absorbed and calculating E=mc^2.
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Based upon my two successful experiments in manipulating my surroundings, I decided the next obvious step should be to search for the surface. I decided to try using a combination of both methods to dig pinhole tunnels in six directions out from my crystal at approximately 90-degree angles from each other. Hopefully I am not an enormous distance from the surface, it would be good to see sunlight again. Deciding the method and executing it, I soon learned are two entirely different levels of difficulty. As I reached further away from my crystal, the harder it was to absorb the material and the more energy it took to do so. I did a rough estimate of how much more, and to my joy and dismay it was to the square of the distance from the surface of my crystal. This meant that the inverse square law was in effect, and most of the physics I had studied regarding radiative phenomena were still in effect in this new life of mine.
After some mental gymnastics, I determined that the energy consumption from my spark was going to get ridiculous very quickly. As distance was the biggest problem to overcome in dealing with the inverse square law, I decided to see if I could affect the distance the energy I was using to absorb material had to travel. Fortunately it did not take me long to realize that technically the inverse square law only came into effect when what I was trying to affect was beyond my influence. Additionally there could be no air-gaps, or for the distance of the air-gap, the efficiency of energy consumption would follow the inverse square law.
As such, I got to work and coated the surface of the cavity I found myself in with the energy from my spark. I slowly added the surface to become more of me. I had to work slowly because I didn’t want to extinguish the spark of energy in my inner-space. I got a bad feeling when I realized the light my crystal was emitting was slowly dimming as I added the surface of my cavity to myself. I realized that if my spark was extinguished, I would probably go unconscious until my spark either, relit or I died. As neither of those options was desirable, I carefully monitored my energy consumption as I slowly expanded out my domain along the six pinhole paths I had started to form.
After what seemed like half a day, I had only managed to expand out to about a foot along each of the six pinhole paths. Thinking about that rate of exploration, I sighed, as I realized how much work this was going to be. Also how annoying not having a clock would make holding to a build schedule.
Despite the tedious nature of my expansion, the one thing that kept it somewhat interesting was the intimate knowledge of whatever material I absorbed down to the molecular level. Despite not focusing on chemistry and material sciences, I suspect that it was due to my studies in my prior life that I even had a vague sense of the atomic level. I was hoping that my perception of the atomic level of the material I absorbed would sharpen somewhat as I grew my domain, continuing to absorb matter whilst doing so.
I realized that despite my not having focused on material sciences previously, I was going to have to pay more attention to them now. I decided that I needed to recreate the periodic table so as to better understand my surroundings, also to have convenient samples of the elements available if I needed them in future. So as to have room for my desired periodic table, I decided to expand my domain into a 1ft cube, initially centered upon my current location.
Once I completed that, I would leverage one of the walls as a periodic table, small square cut-outs would contain the samples of each element that I would store as I encountered them. Of course, hollowing out a cubic foot of soil and rock will be significantly more time consuming than just six small pinholes worth, sigh.
After about five days of frustratingly slow labor, carefully watching the status of my inner spark and the inflow of energy, the entire time, I have finally hollowed out my cubic foot room.
I had managed to place a few samples in my new periodic table, carbon among them, I was going to have to figure out a good way to store gases later. I had come close to causing my inner spark to gutter out on more than one occasion, however, it was all worth it at this point. The rate of my energy absorption increased as per the volume of my influence. Also, it seemed as though the rate of the induced spin of my energy inflow, did appear to have at least some positive effect on my rate of energy absorption. This affect didn’t appear to have a simple linear relationship with rate of spin, as attempting to speed up the spin too much actually slowed down the rate at which I absorbed energy. I suspected that there was a natural spin rate which I could leverage that wouldn’t consume additional energy and attempts to go past that consumed more energy than I was absorbing.
I swear, I have been bored almost out of my mind, I freely admit I have been using my inner space to escape the boredom. I was fortunate in that I was mostly a loner in my past life, unlike my brother who was the life of the party. He would have probably gone completely nuts or extinguished himself by now, if he had been in my place. Somehow, I suspect he and Lisa have broken up by now. I doubt that he could have gotten past her being at the least a witness to my death, however that happened, that I can’t recall how it happened is probably a good thing for my sanity. Poor Lisa, I really don’t think she will have taken being a witness to my death at all well, sigh. I just realized, I never got to know what she wanted when she called out to me, sigh.
Despite my somewhat depressing self-reflection, I did discover one good thing during this time. That was the complementary ability to my molecular level perception of all the substances that I absorbed, either converting directly to energy or maintaining as part of my domain. The ability to synthesize said molecules directly from the energy I had absorbed. If it wasn’t for the absurdly low energy efficiency, I would have been mentally jumping for joy and shouting, that Star Trek replicators are here, unfortunately the energy efficiency was a mere 0.0001% compared to the energy I received when absorbing said matter in the first place.
Additionally, it isn’t as though the synthesis of the material is instant. No, it appears to draw energy for several moments as it organizes the structure that you are attempting to synthesize, and then all at once takes on solid form. The whole process feels very odd to me. It was almost like I was summoning the matter, but had to organize the components on a subatomic level beforehand, very odd. I will have to investigate the process in more detail later. Until then, I will simply be glad that I do have the ability, no matter how poor the energy efficiency, as it will allow me to build out my dungeon space the way I want, and not have to deal with an empty cave.
As I finished out my work room, such as it was, I noticed that the surface of my crystal was no longer the fairly even spheroid it once was. Further investigation led me to note a correlation between the spin of my inner spark and the new more ellipsoidal shape of my crystal. At this point, my inner borderline OCD came out and told me that if it had to choose, it would prefer that I grew my crystal as a sphere and not as an ellipsoid. As such, I spent the next several hours working on converting the flat spin of the inflowing energy into a ball of twine spin, which would hopefully even out my growth rate. I spent at least a day working around the already wider belt of crystal, growing the rest of the crystal to match. Once I had evened the surface of my crystal out I spent what must have been several hours getting the full ball of twine spin to function as subconsciously as had the earlier simple spin. Hopefully, my crystal would now grow evenly for the foreseeable future.
As I surveyed my work room, replete with my still to be filled periodic table, my inner borderline OCD came out and poked me again. It wanted to know how long I have been working, guesstimates would no longer satisfy, it wanted a clock. To build a digital clock, first I would need an electric power source. Unfortunately for my new plans, most of the material I had absorbed from what is now my work room was limestone. In other words, good old calcium carbonate, not really good source material for either a NiCad or Lithium Ion battery. It also wasn’t a good source material for silicon based electronic circuitry.
Thus I needed to continue my initial exploration, with an emphasis on searching for searching for alkali and transition metals. Although the limestone did have a fairly small amount of silica, and a few flakes of jasper. The jasper fortunately had about a half gram of iron spread throughout, which at the very least gave me some metal to play with. Not nearly enough however, nor of the types I needed to finish the first phase of my plans.
To appease my need to know how long things were taking, I restarted my exploration phase by creating a new pinhole tunnel heading towards the surface. In addition to discovering how far down I am, for my sanity, I needed to see daylight. As boring a 500 nanometer pinhole got to be quite boring after a few hours, I started to expand downwards as well. Not as a pinhole, but as a shaft, slightly bigger than my work room. I placed a few supports at the corners of the floor to my work room, so that for now I can expand downwards without having to constantly deal with adjusting my domain to support my upwards exploration. In future, I planned to modify my work room to be much like an elevator car and traverse the shaft I was now excavating.
Until then, I made fairly minor progress. Over the course of three hours I managed to expand downwards a mere half inch. For my sanity, I think, despite the mind numbing nature of the expansion, I will focus on my upwards exploration. The desire for daylight, and the more measurable sense of time it will bring, will be my motivation to get me past the boredom.
About twenty hours and 350 ft later, my approximately 500 nanometer squared pinhole tunnel, finally expanded beyond limestone and hit soil. I could almost cry, it was so beautiful, so many different compounds to absorb. Also there was the hope of daylight. Almost half an hour, and about four feet later, I finally hit grass roots. As I expanded my domain into the first root, the root sucked up my influence as though it hadn't had water in a month. Within a mere minute or so my influence had expanded into a single tuft of grass, and wouldn't you know it, it was night outside. However, the fact that there were two moons overhead was an interesting change.