“I like the cover," he said. "Don't Panic. It's the first helpful or intelligible thing anybody's said to me all day.”

―Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

==Caden==

To the south, the mountains glistened in snowy splendor. From my position, high atop the mountain I called home, I looked down at the other peaks, all at least a mile below. The shallow valleys between mountains were shadowed and filled with even more snow.

Above the mountains, close to each other, were the sun, Shurum, and Otga, which I had only truly identified now.

Shurum no longer looked like simply a perfect white circle. A strand of glowing gas trailed off of it, to where it was just starting to wrap into the red ring of Otga, the black hole.

The. Black. Hole.

That somewhat diffuse red ring was its accretion disk.

Some part of my mind had considered the possibility, but then rejected it, when I first saw Otga. A binary system with a star and black hole shouldn’t be stable enough. The world shouldn’t have survived long enough to produce life, especially with Otga feeding off of Shurum.

My mind stopped for a moment…

I hadn’t known about dungeons at the time.

What if dungeons helped jump-start life on the planet?

Evolution, as I had known it, had taken about four billion years to develop humanity. However, things were different in a dungeon.

The level of mutation a dungeon could produce was staggering. A single organism could change over the course of a day in ways that might take normal mutation thousands of years. Not to mention incorporating metal and mana in ways that I had never seen evolution do.

Actually, wasn’t there some kind of iron snail that lived in the ocean near volcanic vents?

I mentally shook myself; I was getting distracted.

There was substantial evidence that the planet had survived long enough to be molten, cool down its crust, and have life spread across the surface. The time required just for the cooling crust and adding oxygen to the atmosphere was in the hundreds of millions to a billion years.

The areas that I had left completely alone, except to let the dungeon mutate them, already had balanced ecosystems. Those areas actually evolved substantially slower. There were no problems that the mutation could fixate on. Instead, small incremental changes happened as one organism changed, and then the other organisms adapted in response. Slow was relative in this case, but it made a good baseline if I wanted to consider what evolution might look like in a normal dungeon.

I thought about the two ecosystems I had been exposed to, the sewers and the snowy landscape outside of them. Neither of those seemed as ridiculously aggressive and over-the-top as what was inside of my dungeon.

Hmm… there was something I hadn’t tried before.

I had vast areas of aura that I was not doing anything with. Mostly I was waiting for the dungeon to expand and convert them.

I started creating small environments in that unused aura, taking as much care as I could to ensure that they were balanced. Each environment had clear crystal boundaries. I placed plants and animals into each one, as well as anything I thought they would need to survive, including lights.

After everything was ready, I withdrew my aura from the environments. I felt a reflexive protest from Exsan. Nothing verbal, my aura just quivered for a moment and tried to recapture the area it had lost. I kept it clear of aura while I reached out to him.

Exsan?

You there?

There was no response, my messages to him felt muted. He had been unusually quiet, even for him, after the entrances were connected.

I assumed he was doing something, though I had no idea what. Yet another thing to worry about later.

After a few moments of struggle with the aura, Exsan stopped fighting me, allowing me to clear it away.

Unfortunately I would need to observe the environments with my avatar, since only it could see outside my aura. Well my core could, but I didn’t feel like moving my core to keep track of the experiment, even if it could leave the dungeon.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

That brief pause to contact Exsan had snapped me out of my thoughts.

I was panicking, which meant I needed to deal with that.

So I had a conversation with myself, one shard taking the devil’s advocate, and the other being allowed to panic.

The first question, was if anything had actually changed.

The part of myself that wanted to panic pointed out that, in fact, something truly fucking major had indeed changed. There was a black hole devouring part of the sun in the sky. It hadn’t been doing that yesterday.

The calm voice of myself responded by pointing out that it was a black hole yesterday too, we just weren’t aware of it.

The panicking voice was petulant. It knew now, so it should be able to panic.

The calm voice didn’t disagree. I was allowed to panic. Failing to acknowledge emotions or just suppress them was almost always unhelpful. Something to be done in an emergency if needed, but otherwise it was a very bad idea.

The panicked shard continued. It wanted to find out how long evolution that taken, how stable the system was, how long until everything was utterly destroyed as a result.

The calm shard pointed out that we knew the system had been stable for a very long time. At minimum, we probably had thousands of years to figure out how to deal with the problem. We might still have more than a billion years. We didn’t actually know how stable the system was.

And not knowing made the panicked voice freak out.

Well what can we do about it, asked the other.

This made the panicked voice pause. It wasn’t sure what they could do.

What are the worst circumstances that you think might happen, asked the calm shard.

The other took a moment before listing off possibilities:

The sun could go nova if it was unbalanced enough, though the panicked side admitted that was less likely since things had been pretty stable.

The sun absolutely could have some very violent solar flares as a result of matter being drawn off of it.

The black hole would likely form jets from all the new matter swirling into it. We could be hit by the jet.

The tidal forces from the flux of gravity between the star and black hole could make the planet far more volcanically active than normal, and we are on the edge of a super volcano.

The response to most of these was the same. The calm voice pointed out that truly violent flares, beyond what we would survive so deep underground, would sterilize the surface. Since people had come into the dungeon, we could assume that wasn’t the case. Lesser flares could happen, but they obviously were not destroying everything. We should be fine.

The same was true for getting hit with a jet. The gamma rays would sterilize the planet. No idea if we would survive, since we were made of crystal, but since life was around, the odds were very low. Whatever orbit we were in, it kept the planet out of the jets.

The last objection was not so easy to overcome. We were next to a super volcano, and if it went off we would feel it. It could blow up the mountain we were currently in. The solution to that was simple. We expand the dungeon much farther, we bury our core as deep as we can, we strengthen the dungeon, and we find out everything possible about about the volcano.

We were already doing those things, except for two.

The two voices ceased to be as I focused. I had some new goals.

I was already learning what I could about the volcano, but a couple of shards were taken off of evolution duty to expand aura toward various locations below ground. I needed to learn more.

My core was currently much closer to the top of my dungeon than the bottom, that needed to change. I would need to move entire other sections through the stone as I burrowed the tunnel needed to move my core from where it was now to far below. Fortunately I didn’t need to make a large tunnel through the rest of the stone, but I did need to carefully wind the tunnel around the rest of my dungeon. At least this extended my core’s defenses, just in case I was overreacting.

As for strengthening… I had ways to do that.

I had ignored them because they were likely to be slow, and my dungeon was expanding fast enough that just waiting would deal with my space issues.

Firstly, I could strengthen my entire dungeon by running veins of metal throughout the entire superstructure. Steel was the strongest and most durable metal I had at the moment, but if that changed I could replace it with something else.

In addition to that I could condense all of the stone in my superstructure as well. It would require condensing the stone, then creating more stone in the new empty space. And then I would need to repeat that process over and over. The rigid nature of the stone should work in tandem with the steel running through it. Just like how rebar made concrete stronger.

I started to set up the programming needed to do that. Fortunately there was no reason I had to do it manually. So I had no reason to hold off. I would keep the steel out of the dungeon areas adventurers would be running through. It would be buried at least 20 feet into the walls. Someone might see it, but that was less important.

The condensed stone, though, would come right up to the edges. It would start after only three feet into the walls. If I ran into any problems, I would adjust that later.

It took a moment, but the automatic settings were dealt with a moment later. Stone would compress and form a hollow, then steel would be placed into the gap. More steel would branch off as more stone was compressed out of its way. The steel would run through the stone like human blood. Large arteries of steel with branching veins would then branch further into tiny capillaries.

Nature was often a good inspiration for this kind of thing.

After an area was full of as much steel as it was going to get, the remaining stone would be condensed, and then the process would repeat elsewhere.

I set it to run, and turned off the automatic creation of mana crystals.

My available mana stayed steady, and I had hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of mana in storage. My ambient mana fell off a cliff, however.

Vast sections of stone moved and were filled with steel, the stone itself changed to be stronger moments after. Mana twisted through my aura and the world, streams of it converging to change the nature of my dungeon. More and more mana was poured into the change.

The amount of material that was created and changed boggled the mind, but compared to the total size of the dungeon, the amount of was minuscule. Entire cubic miles of material needed to be dealt with.

I watched the progress for a time, checking the progress.

The amount of ambient mana in the dungeon was tiny now, and that had substantially slowed down the growth and evolution of creatures.

Still, even with my dungeon expanding, I expected my entire dungeon to transform in a week. If I didn’t have such a rich source of mana nearby, doing this would take far longer. Ironically, I was fairly certain that source of mana was the volcano, the same thing that I was trying to protect myself from right now.

A week felt like a long time with how much I was getting done, but it was nothing in the grand scheme of things. It would just delay my ability to do some things for a while.

And there was one other way that I might be reinforce my dungeon.

Runes and emblems.

I had actually been learning quite a bit about them. The mana required to use them to support my dungeon was even more staggering though. I was putting everything I was learning together, so maybe that would help.