The day before, just after James discovered that there are two moons orbiting the planet.
At the tuft of grass a few dozen yards below the snow line, on the southwestern slope of La Cima del Mundo, the tallest mountain on Patria.
As I surveyed my surroundings, I quickly became quite grateful that I emerged where I did. A mere fifteen feet one way would have meant another several hundred feet to excavate till I broke through, although a couple hundred feet the other way and I would have broken though fifty feet sooner. Oh well, no use crying over spilt milk. Although the dirt and the grass I had absorbed provided me with a bonanza of chemical compounds to analyze, unfortunately, I was still metal and alkali poor. As such, it was time to resume my exploration into the depths. I really wanted to find some silver, copper, or gold, simply so as to be able to make some decent wire.
I was not quite desperate to get the right materials for either a battery or to be able to make some sort of generator.
By the time the sun started brightening the sky, some five hours or so later, I had made only marginally more progress downwards than before. This time about ⅞’s of an inch during those five hours. Hopefully, I will be making more notable progress soon as the volume of my domain continues to expand. Every time I encountered an element that I had not before, after feeling the structure of a sample and then weighing it to best determine its characteristics and its mass, I would then place the sample into the small cubby I had made for that element in the wall with my periodic table. As dawn brightened the sky, I had a decent chunk of the periodic table filled out but, the parts missing still are the important ones for an electronic society. At this time I decided that during my downward expansion, every six inches, I will put out eight pinholes around the shaft going out to about five feet in length. Just so as to try to ensure that I haven’t missed anything important.
By noon my downward expansion has progressed to 2 and ¾ inches below the floor of my work room. At that point I decided to take a short break to see what I can see from the surface. The answer to that is mostly lots of hills and forest, to the south and west of my location. To the north is a mountain, probably similar in size to Everest back on Earth. Also like Everest, it appears as though it is part of a chain, joining the chain of mountains to my east. That means that I should get past the limestone layer eventually and hit more igneous rock, and hopefully discover some nice veins of ore within it.
Despite my focus on the terrain of my surroundings, it was hard not to notice a pair of griffons soaring above the forest to the west, their massive wingspan and their lion-like paws standing out as they soared in the sky. It did make me wonder where exactly they nested, whether that was in some massive treetop or in and amongst the cliffs in the mountains to the east. That would be a point of interest for later though, back to the grind.
By dusk I had made it down 4 and ⅞ inches below where I started. The rate of my expansion was definitely speeding up, but slowly still. I do have hopes that before dawn breaks again, I will have progressed to a full foot below my work room. As dawn broke behind the mountains to my north and east, I almost laughed. I had progressed to 12 and ⅛ inches below my work room, yet another cubic foot of limestone absorbed. The pinholes I had put out at six inches below my work room did not discover anything of note, a few more traces of jasper, but that was about the extent of it. I have to admit the not quite glacial pace of my expansion thus far was making me impatient. So it was as dawn brightened the sky that I decided to discover how far the limestone layer I am in goes, and started an exploratory pinhole straight down.
Approximately three hours and fifty feet later, I had finally expanded beyond the limestone layer. I had finally reached igneous rock, in particular, glorious granite. After taking a few moments to celebrate, I decided to see if the griffons were flying again this morning, a quick glance over the forest to my west did not reveal them. However, when I turned to face the cliff to the east, and what I like to think of as behind my tuft of grass, I did a mental face-palm. The cliff face, at a casual glance was obviously granite. It was also significantly closer to where I had previously explored than the granite I just celebrated reaching, sigh. Despite no longer being human, I still have difficulty finding the trees for the forest, sigh, live and learn.
After I finished berating myself for not having noticed the cliff-face earlier, I decided to take a quick sample from the cliff-face from about a foot below the surface. A mere hour or so later, I had my sample.Yes, indeed it was as expected granite, albeit with a slightly different concentration of trace elements than the sample I took from below. I spent the rest of the day sending additional pinhole shafts down to the layer of granite I had discovered below, one from each of the corners of what will become my core-room elevator shaft.
A few hours after dusk, once I had defined the corners of the shaft by way of the four pinholes I had sent down, I expanded my domain such a that I closed the sides of the square just within the surface of the granite. I then started absorbing the material down to about two inches into the granite itself. A couple of hours before dawn I finished, and that ⅙th of a cubic foot of granite was an absolute bonanza of new elements for me to fill in my periodic table. I even lucked out and identified some thorium, and uranium. My dreams of nuclear power aside, I was also able to absorb samples of aluminum, potassium, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, and even a trace amount of titanium.
Just like I had been doing since I have been able to absorb material whilst I expanded my domain, I sent out several exploratory pinholes from my latest expansion. To keep things slightly new and different, I angled these pinholes out at a 45 degree angle. Both from the level of the floor I had just finished absorbing, and also the other pinholes, necessitating that I double the number of pinholes to keep things even. This time around, I decided that I would pause each pinhole about 10 feet in before moving on to the next.
Around noon, three days after I expanded my domain to the surface, and four exploratory pinhole shafts in. I struck it rich, I had hit a galena deposit, lead sulfide, and also one of the largest sources of silver on Earth. I now had all the elements I needed to make a lead sulfuric acid battery, I could almost weep for joy.
I now focused back on my work room for more than just filling in my periodic table for the first time in the past three days. Today, I was going to give my poor man’s version of a Star Trek replicator a workout. A quick glance at my crystal revealed that my crystal had grown, and put on at least 5 micrometers of new crystal. A look at my inner-space showed that it had grown as well. What had been my inner-spark, is now my inner-flame, and my inner-space appears to have a diameter of ten some odd feet, as opposed to my original twelve inches or so. My expansion has definitely had some benefit to the growth of my crystal and my inner-space.
I now had to decide the first step of my first self-imposed task, to create a lead sulfuric acid battery. What material to make the casing and the insulators out of, and where would I put it? After some thought, as I didn’t have access to any plastics, the best insulator, I could probably make was diamond. Additionally as it could be optically clear, it would allow for simple visual inspection of the battery, for when it would need maintenance. The trick of course, was, could I synthesize optically clear diamond from carbon, when I haven’t previously absorbed any. If I couldn’t, my industrial revolution would have to wait.
After several attempts, it appears that the answer is, yes. I can synthesize optically clear diamond when I had not previously absorbed any. Unfortunately, the previously bad energy efficiency of the synthesis, reached new heights of energy inefficiency. All told, it took me ten times more energy to create diamond initially than either sodium bicarbonate or graphite, this despite the fact that both of those are more complicated on the molecular level than diamond.
Regardless, despite the need to maintain a watch on my inner-flame during this project, I continued on. It was around dusk that I had successfully created a shell for my new lead battery. It took up the entire wall opposite my periodic table, and was three inches deep, the diamond itself a good half centimeter thick. If could have sold this on Earth I would have been filthy rich, oh well, no use dwelling on would have beens.
As I was about to start creating the lead plates needed for the battery, I had a thought, followed by a mental face-palm. Thus far, I had somehow managed to not open any of my exploratory pinholes to air. All the matter I have absorbed, I have not replaced it with anything. As such I have just over two and a quarter cubic feet worth of vacuum, that really needs something to fill it before I have an implosion. Frankly I am somewhat surprised, although pleasantly so, that I haven’t had an implosion already.
Before I started synthesizing the lead needed for my battery, I desperately need to take care of this problem. Probably the best method would be to expand my pinhole starting from about a foot below the top of the limestone layer over to the pinhole I have over by the granite cliff face. Then back fill the original pinhole I made through the soil over to the cliff, so as to have a more solid tube for the gasses to travel through.
Around midnight I was ready to relieve the vacuum I had so stupidly created. I crossed my mental fingers as I absorbed the last inch of the pinhole to the surface through the granite cliff-face all at once. The sharp whistling of the air as it rushed to fill the vacuum was extremely impressive, my core room shook slightly as the pressure started to equalize. Due to the rushing of air, there was some detritus that needed to be absorbed so as to unblock the pinhole. It took me almost until dawn, but finally, there was no new rush of air when I cleared the latest block of the pinhole.
With that done, I mentally breathed a sigh of relief. I then wrote a reminder on the wall of my core room, now with more air, “nature abhors a vacuum, be careful when making them.” The reminder written, I watched the sky brighten at dawn, appreciating this new life for a few minutes. I then returned to my original task from before I had gotten sidetracked correcting my own stupidity, preparing the lead and lead oxide plates for my battery.
By the time noon had come around, I had a test circuit in place, just waiting for the sulfuric acid to be synthesized into the battery. The circuit consisted of nothing more than a set of silver wires, insulated with a few layers of diamond, and an incandescent light bulb set immediately above my crystal. As I filled the battery with sulfuric acid, the light bulb brightened, but as I got past the quarter-way point in the filling process, the carbon filament of the bulb had burnt out. It seems as though I need to do some voltage and amperage regulation before I attached anything more delicate than my, now burnt out, light bulb. I finished filling the battery by dusk, and then reclaimed the light bulb and the wires going to the battery, so as to preserve the charge.
Having done that, I started calculating the output of the battery. Turns out that I, in my haste forgot some fairly obvious things. Such as the amperage of a lead acid battery like mine, which turned out to be only slightly more efficient than a car battery at 13 Volts and 2.3 Amps output, is significantly more load than the filament of my light bulb could handle. Additionally, I had forgotten the particular use case and general discharge time for lead acid batteries. It turns out that my battery would fully discharge in about two days, and last about 300 or so recharges without refurbishing. That was pretty good overall, still, that was a much faster discharge time than I would have preferred. I guess that means a generator needs to go on the priority list, that and finding either a better filament for my bulb, or getting samples of the atoms I need for full RGB LEDs.
Despite my lack of tungsten for good incandescent bulbs, and gallium arsenide for LEDs, I went ahead and built all the other components I needed for my digital clock. I finally finished all the components by dawn, including the appropriate level of step up transformer, and even NASA inspired vacuum channel transistors, instead of normal silicon transistors. I decided to use vacuum channel transistors, partly because I could, and also they should deliver better performance as I continued my industrialization.
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I had leveraged a 3mm piece of quartz as my frequency source. I would replace that later, once I found a more stable frequency generator. Unfortunately I wasn’t yet able to verify the fruits of my labor, not at least until I manage to synthesize some gallium arsenide. To my misfortune, the only real way for me to do that is to go out and find some examples.
Additionally, I needed to build a more long term power generator, my lead battery will suffice for an emergency back up, but it is definitely nowhere near enough power to run a full blown technological dungeon. Thus as I started my fifth day exposed to the sun, I went back to expanding my domain, and searching for elements to fill my periodic table.
At dawn, two days later, I was once again frustrated by my slow progress. I was almost five additional feet down from where I had left off. I had absorbed few new trace elements, and unfortunately, none were of the type I needed for my other projects, let alone my LEDs. I needed some other method to help me to expand my domain.
I thought back to the various otherworldly dungeon novels I had read prior to my arrival here, although my inner-flame and my crystal both had expanded, I hadn’t done anything to my crystal itself. Frankly I was a bit leery about making modifications to my crystal, I mean, what if I screwed up and killed myself or something. After a couple hours hemming and hawing at myself, I mentally said “screw it”, and then intensely focused on my crystal for the first time.
It turns out I probably should have done this before. I appeared to be a blue sapphire of less than optimal clarity, full of inclusions and imperfections, even with some unnecessary elements thrown in, heck I had a few atoms of niobium in my structure. Let me just add those to my periodic table first. Once I did that, I started by removing all the elements that weren’t bound to oxygen properly like the aluminum that was the base structure of my crystal. Having finally finished removing all those elements, I decided to take a short break. I took a quick look at the surface, and discovered to my surprise that it was dusk and the first moon was coming out. The sky was awash with a brilliant set of gold and red hues due to setting sun, sigh, even if I wasn’t human anymore, at least I could still enjoy scenery like this.
As I returned to my self-surgery, I took a quick look at my inner flame showed less improvement than I would have liked. However, as I hadn’t started realigning all the sub-crystals, I had hope that the improvements were to come. I started working on realigning the elements of my crystal, it was hard, no it was very hard. It was hard to keep track of time whilst I was in the middle of my work, as I found it difficult to concentrate on anything except what I was doing. I managed to persevere and when I finally finished, it was almost dusk once more. I was now a perfectly aligned blue sapphire with only an appropriate amount of titanium includes.
I took a look at my inner space to see what sort of improvement could be seen, and I was astounded. My inner space which had previously grown to ten feet, had now grown to almost a thousand, my inner flame was now a large spinning ball of plasma just waiting to grow up into a star. Taking another look, I wondered, if this effort was the best I could do. I wondered if a white sapphire would be even more energy efficient, and thus better for my growth than my current blue sapphire.
Taking a mental deep breath, I started on my third self-dungeon crystal brain surgery. I carefully, although with a fair bit more ease than previously, started replacing the titanium which gave my crystal its color with the correct aluminum molecule necessary to provide a perfect crystalline structure. Yet again I lost track of time, once I was done, I looked above ground and saw that it was early afternoon.
My crystal had become a pure, perfect white sapphire, and the effect on my inner space and inner ball of plasma was almost unbelievable. My inner space was now a mile in diameter, and my inner ball of plasma had expanded from about a foot in diameter to just over ten feet. I smiled, I could hardly wait to see the effects of my improvements on my ability to synthesize and absorb matter, and also to expand my domain.
I continued my expansion from where I had left off two and a half days prior. A short three hours of work later, I was ecstatic to find that I had absorbed the entirety of the limestone below my core room and between the granite I had taken a couple of inches out of previously. I swear, At this moment, if I still had a voice I would be in full blown evil overlord laugh mode. In the time before dusk fell, I expanded my influence throughout the top layer of soil in the clearing surrounding my tuft of grass. I did not absorb the soil, except where I encountered new elements. Twenty five feet southwest of the tuft of grass that I had absorbed, I got lucky. I discovered a nodule of bauxite, and within it, a trace of gallium.
Now the last element I need before I can actually construct full RGB LEDs is arsenic. As I didn’t have any arsenic at this time, I decided to get back to constructing my dungeon. First I planned to expand my core elevator shaft upwards until almost the limit of the limestone layer. If only to complete the bulk of the work for the elevator shaft, and also to be closer to the surface. After I have a few more things squared away, I intended to make a fairly large entrance in the cliff-face, so as to distract from the pinhole I had finally opened to air in the tuft of grass.
By dawn, I had expanded my core elevator shaft up 270 of the 350 feet of limestone above my core room. I absolutely could not be happier with my self-improvement, before, I would have been weeks at work before coming anywhere close to finishing. By mid-morning I had finished the shaft itself and started preparations to armor the shaft against intrusion, not that I expected that to happen anytime soon, but I might as well prepare now.
Later on I would work on the elevator rail system for my core room, there were many other things to do before then, especially high on the priority list at this juncture, was a permanent electric generator facility. As I was located in a mountain range, and also did not want a large surface footprint at this time, my current task was to locate a source of ice runoff. After I located a suitable runoff of sufficient size, I would then exploit that runoff by building myself a hydroelectric turbine generator.
A day and a half later, half-way through day 12 since I broke through the surface, I had managed to complete four items on my to do list. I located a decent subterranean water source for generating hydro-electric power two miles south of where I had breached the surface. I found some arsenic, further down in the same vicinity where I had found the galena deposit. With that arsenic, I was able to synthesize gallium arsenide, and I then used it to finish making my RGB LEDs. With the ability to now make RGB LEDs, I finally finished my digital clock. I was going to need to calibrate the clock over the next couple of days though.
Next on my priority list was building out my hydroelectric power plant. Soon though, I was going to need to build out a calculator, trying to use the limestone walls of my workroom for as much math as I was going to need to do to build out my dungeon, just wasn’t going to be viable in the long run. Trying to do that much math mentally, would be for the birds.
It wasn't until dusk, three days later that I managed to finish my first hydroelectric power plant. I had encountered my first problem two seconds after starting work. It turns out that running water works really well at pulling the energy I use to expand my domain, out of my control and downstream, even slight contact with the underground river started leaching the energy from my domain. I ended up pulling back from the river and damming the area I planned to work. It took a couple of days before I had the fiddly bits of the design finalized. It had helped that the area I was working in was a pegmatite layer that had several needed materials within, including a small deposit of scheelite containing tungsten. Additionally some monazite of various varieties, giving me cesium, lanthanum, samarium, and neodymium.
Thanks to the neodymium, I was able to leverage fairly strong rare earth magnets to do some of the heavy lifting for my backup power solution. I had built out a set of three flywheels per phase of AC current generated from my power plant to use as my primary source of backup power. When all was said and done, the turbine was generating approximately 12 mega-watts of power. At this point in time was really not doing much, as I currently didn't really have anything to consume that power besides my back-up flywheels.
Next on my agenda was a calculator. I was fortunate in that designing a calculator was a project from my EE course last year. As I had managed to gather all of the materials I needed to synthesize the components, I had no real issues building it before midnight. I even made the bulk of the circuits for it on a silicon chip that was less than a millimeter in size. It did take a little creative wiring of the LEDs, but considering that the amperage needed was under a milliamp, despite the megabyte of memory I threw in for fun, I considered the calculator a roaring success. Pressing the buttons for the calculator was somewhat frustrating at first, but I managed with a few hours practice. By dawn, I was finally ready to start building out my dungeon.
Of the various dungeon core novels I had read back on Earth, there were several in which all dungeons faced destruction upon detection. Due to the fact that I didn’t know what the locals reaction to my presence would be, hostile, exploitative or benign, I decided upon a multi-step approach to protecting my crystal. I decided that the first step would be misdirection, I would place what appeared to be the entrance to my dungeon in the cliff-face behind my tuft of grass, as it was both tall and wide enough to make for an impressive opening. The real entrance would remain the 500 nanometer diameter pinhole that came out in the midst of my tuft of grass.
Before I opened up my fake entrance, in order to further the illusion that I was protecting my crystal via my fake entryway, I decided to build out a twenty foot high and forty foot wide entry room with several mechanical traps to prevent intruders from going in further. To start I lined each of the surfaces with a few bilayers of graphene and diamond, which in turn covered titanium three centimeters thick, for extra durability. My first and largest active line of defense was a pair of bladed ten foot diameter rollers, which rolled inwards at a rate of thirty revolutions a minute. The gap between the rollers was a mere four inches, and almost entirely filled by the bilayer graphene covered diamond edged blades on the rollers.
As I didn’t want to appear immediately hostile to any visitors that may appear, I did design the traps to be completely hidden behind motorized sliding panels. I set up the motorized covers for the rollers to separate from the middle of the room out towards the edges. It took a little gear work, but, I managed to optimize the opening time for the covers down to a mere half second. Despite the unlikelihood of someone clearing a twenty foot span weighed down in armor, world class long jumpers routinely cleared such distances on Earth, as such I decided to add additional traps behind the rollers.
To change up the design of traps I used, I placed a large number of motorized spears of the same make as the blades on the rollers, in the space immediately after the cavity for the rollers. I designed each of the spears to extend up almost to the ceiling of the entry room, in some ways they were almost more great-sword than spear as they were bladed down their entire visible length when they were extended. I placed them so densely that it would take something the size of fly to bypass that set of defenses.
In order to be at least somewhat efficient in my use of resources, I set both of the rollers up as backup power flywheels. It was somewhat tricky setting up the axles, considering that I had both of the rollers 50 feet wide, extending well past the edges of the room. I set them up that way so as to ensure that there wasn't a way to go around the rollers on the sides of the room. So as to make entry even more difficult for prospective invaders, I had not only coated each of the surfaces of the entry room in a reasonably thick layer of bilayer graphene coated diamond, I also textured the walls and ceiling to be hydrophobic. This making the possibility of a wall crawling creature walking past my defensive roller system a fair bit more unlikely.
As I didn't want to come off as a murder dungeon with just traps everywhere, I decided to take a more intellectual approach to building out the rest of the accessible dungeon. It was a good fifteen days later and I had finished the entry room, two puzzle rooms, and an initial reward for getting past the puzzle rooms. In addition to the somewhat short dungeon, I also created a reasonably comfortable bunkroom, if I do say so myself, conveniently located just off the entryway. In the bunkroom itself I added several modern amenities, adjustable lighting and mattresses, a full kitchen with a walk-in freezer, also a full bathroom with adjustable showers and flush toilets.
As I didn’t know how sensitive visitors would be to my influence, and so as to not scare off anyone that would use the bunkroom, I pulled my influence completely back out of it once I had built it. I placed the door to the bunkroom immediately after the thin slice of granite covering the entrance to my dungeon. On the door I even included a simple bolt action lock, so as to give any non-hostile visitors some small sense of control.
Looking over everything I had built in my dungeon thus far, I double checked that the lethality of each room was toggle-able by me via a, thus far, simple analog control panel. Once I have built out a reasonably good computer I will have to change that out, but that is for the future. For the present, I absorbed the thin layer of granite covering the entrance to my dungeon, and did some cosmetic clean up so as to have a seamless entryway. Thus, it was at dusk, 30 days after I had broken through to the surface, my dungeon was now open for business.