“One is struck in the study of saints, angels, and gods by a pattern that seems quaint and harmless. Yet, it is so common that I know there must be a deeper meaning. There always seem to be guardians and spirits of doors, bridges, exits and entranceways.”

-Richard Rohr

==Caden==

Naturally, I had started to integrate portals into my transportation system right away. Removing the random tunnels I was incorporating to everywhere actually removed a decent chunk of room. Of course, what really improved my efficiency was no longer needing to keep all my level designs in order. Now any spare bit of space could become a room that was accessed by portal from anywhere in my dungeon.

Being able to redirect massive flows of water through portals was going to save me lots of room, too.

So far, I hadn’t run into a distance limitation with my portals. They were able to seek out the target symbols from miles away. If my dungeon got large enough that might become an issue, but I could always string together a series of portals.

Portals did have all sorts of knock-on effects to take into account, though.

Wind was the most basic. Connecting two points with different atmospheric pressures naturally lead to the air pushing into the portal in the higher pressure area. None of my dungeon was massively different in air pressure, but it was still immediately noticeable. However, in the same way I could passively set up the settings of the weather in my dungeon and have storms, fog, and wind appear from nowhere, I also discovered it was quite possible to do the opposite.

My transportation system didn’t have wind pushing through the portals, because I told it not to. Got to love bullshit magic.

Of course, I knew some ways to create some truly devastating things now that I had portals. The kind of weapons that could actually destroy my entire dungeon. Actually, if I really went too far with them, I could destroy most of the planet. Portals could theoretically allow something to accelerate without end. Anything raised to infinity could become ridiculous very quickly.

Needless to say, I did some tests, though I was quite careful. I didn’t want to accidentally create the equivalent of a kinetic orbital strike.

I started with a small vertical tube about a hundred feet long. I attached the two end points with a portal, and immediately noticed that the air started to flow through the portal on its own. Gravity shouldn’t act as a source of power on its own, that was a basic physical law. The fact that the air was increasing in speed due to gravity created pressure differentials in a sealed container was giving me a headache. I knew exactly why it was happening, but portals made my head hurt. Once again, magic seemed to be casually waving its middle finger at the physics I knew.

I would deal with that… later.

For the moment, I drained the air out of the tube by altering the environmental settings to a major vacuum. I had gotten the option to make that with the simple expedient of compressing a large section of stone in a sphere away from its own middle point. The space in the middle was as perfect a vacuum as I could create at the moment.

Anything I dropped into the interior at this point, even something as innocuous as a leaf or speck of dirt, had the potential to become a weapon of mass destruction.

I created a small bead of steel, no bigger than a drop of water and let it fall. It accelerated rapidly.

My first test was ten seconds. The sphere of steel hit the stone as I cut off the portals and then bounced off. Besides tiny particulates of stone from the impact, there was nothing other than the pinging noise of the steel as it bounced vibrating through the stone. With no air, it was otherwise silent.

I wasn’t expecting much after ten seconds, so the result wasn’t much of a surprise. From there, I started to increase the time. Noting the dust from the stone, however. I sheathed the entire interior with several inches of steel.

I started the experiment up again.

At first the steel pellets I was firing just bounced off, but then they started to leave dents. I added another portal I could activate below the lower point of the other portal, and started test firing through it into an environment with an atmosphere. After forty seconds, the tiny pellets produced a sonic boom when they reentered the air. The pellets didn’t have much mass, so it wasn’t a huge sound, but it still showed the effect of all the acceleration.

By the time I got to one hundred seconds, the steel pellets were embedding themselves into the steel sheathing. As I continued to let the time increase the pellets gradually switched from making deeper and wider craters to completely vaporizing upon impact.

After a certain speed, the emblem started to heat up, even when I made the entire thing out of folerth. I started hitting that point after about four hundred and fifty seconds. By this time, the tiny pellet became a flaming projectile when it hit atmosphere, and I could feel the shock-waves as it compressed the air ahead of it.

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I knew the speed of sound was approximately seven hundred miles per hour. I couldn’t get more exact than that considering I was on an alien world and the composition of the atmosphere, as well as its density and temperature, heavily factored into that. Even on Earth the speed varied wildly with altitude. Using my calculation ability and some armchair math, I guessed the speed of the pellet was around 10,000 miles per hour.

Even though that wasn’t as fast as a meteor usually was, I gained the meteor shower (yellow) environmental option. Another shard was assigned to try different materials, and I soon had plenty of others. Sodium gave me orange, copper gave green, and my many other materials and mixes of ores let me get a full range of colors.

Accelerating gold up to do the test strained my emblems much more than the steel, and I was quickly able to determine that the mass of the material I was running through my portal mattered. As soon as I increased the size of my steel projectile the emblem started to heat up at a lower speed. I was able to deal with the issue by increasing the size of the emblem. The thicker bands of folerth didn’t start heating up as soon, and the heat dissipated faster out of it. I was also able to brute force the issue and tell my environmental settings to cool everything down. I could easily have used water to cool the system down, but I went for an easier option.

After a certain amount of time, even with my alterations, the test shots I was running through the portals stopped getting faster, or at least I thought so.

I was able to verify that was the case by using larger objects. They would start falling and get faster and faster. However, past a certain point they would enter the portal below and emerge slower when they went through the portal exit above. When I tested this with a stone rod, it actually sheared apart under the stress of having the lower part of the rod decelerate so suddenly.

Eventually, I was able to figure out why this was happening. The ambient mana was flowing into the portal as fast as it could be used. This was actually a bit of a relief to me. A price was being paid by the mana to move objects against gravity repeatedly. That meant some form of conservation was occurring.

I should theoretically be able to power the portals more directly with reserves of mana crystals. The mana density was relatively low right now, since I was busy using all of it to condense the stone and make steel veins. I could accelerate a small object to tens of thousand of miles per hour already. Still, it was good that there were some limitations. I could do ridiculous damage using portals if I decided to invest enough mana into it. Still, even with my resources, I was more likely to blow myself up than wreck the planet. And, as long as I didn’t start augmenting the process recklessly, the amount of material I could move around was relatively harmless on a dungeon wide level.

Any adventurer who dealt with a steel BB to the face at Mach 10 would probably disagree, but if I was using that level of lethality it was probably in self defense.

Aside from creating horrific weapons, portals had also enabled a substantial redesign of the next area the adventurers were going to go to. It had taken a little work to make it function right, since I needed to create portals that worked on triggers and attached to my puzzle menu. The hardest part was creating a system that let me automatically switch out different destinations in the emblems. I could see other uses for that as well.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t found a way to manipulate space directly.

The portals were not something that I was really creating, even if I counted the emblems as being mine. This was an effect created by the system. It was either there to make portal creation easier, or to avert some kind of disaster from happening with overlapping space.

I had already discovered that bad things could happen, even with the portal’s precautions. If the portal formed and two solid objects overlapped they tended to react badly. So far I had seen the objects merged together into a single object with a number of effects: the excess density oozed sections of the objects out randomly, exploded, fractured, burned, and more. And, once again, if something was alive inside, the portal simply failed to form when there were any overlaps. The sudden deceleration from a portal reaching max speed absolutely could kill, however.

I did feel like I was starting to see something around the portals and when teleporting. I was hopeful I would get an improvement to my sensory abilities soon.

Anyway, fast forward and Zidaun and his team cautiously used my new portal to get back to their lodgings.

I was working on other projects as well, anyway.

I absorbed the design that had been left in the floor. I didn’t gain a new skill, but I did have the understanding of the ritual flow into my mind. Apparently they had performed a binding oath of some kind. My guess was secrecy, since Zidaun had talked about me afterward. Though I wasn’t sure how important an artifact was either. Maybe they had sworn an oath to share it or the money they would get from selling it?

I was very much ready to have my language issues dealt with. I guess I had more people to talk with now, though Zidaun was still the only one I could talk with discretely. Even the one other Adar who had come couldn’t see my avatar.

The other, truly exciting development, was a vastly increased store of patterns. Sure, I wouldn’t be able to evolve these into really dangerous monsters, but the sheer amount of variety was enormous. I wasn’t sure of the total number, but I now had at least tens of thousands of different plants and animals. All of them were level five or below. Apparently level five was the system’s cutoff for harmless.

Since even a brief check allowed me to see that some of these were animals that formed large groups, like bees and ants, I suspected this was another case where the system was being pedantic.

I certainly wouldn’t consider a swarm of level five bees to be harmless. Zidaun and his party could probably swat them like flies, but they would probably chew through anyone new to delving. Not a big deal though, I would just make sure they were placed at an appropriate depth. I already had a swarm of insects planned for adventurers to face anyway.

For the moment, shards started to supplement my environments, new creatures and plants slotting in to give them the full depth of biodiversity of a real ecosystem. Almost all the of the space I had just saved was subsumed by the addition of new areas dedicated to harmless adaptations. They were smaller than my massive main areas dedicated to mutation, since I just put together a few samples of the organisms I would like more variations of. Mostly, this time I was selecting for beauty.

I had, however, included a few very meaningful experiments in with the rest. A few monsters that were already above level five had been added in. It would be interesting to see if anything happened with those. The area might simply refuse to mutate them at all, or they might regress to become less dangerous. Or something I hadn’t thought of yet, that was the point of experimenting, after all.

Even while that was in progress, a shard was focusing on the other new ability I had gained from pulling off an illusion, environmental immersion.

I could already feel its effects. I could see subtle ways to make my environments feel more natural. Where certain species of grass would naturally grow due to the intersection of soil type, water, and shade. How to alter the weathering patterns on sections of stone to make it come in line with nature and the simulated winds. And I had a lot more sense of how to fine tune the settings for wind, rain, and light. I knew how to make the settings come alive, and that was before the more esoteric ability to generate actual illusions came into play.

In a similar way to new sense I was gaining for when my skills were getting close to cascading to the next level, I could feel a sense of a threshold from my new skill. Though in this case it was less that I was approaching a limit, and instead feeling that I had already reached it and spilled over.

All of my environments were ready for an illusion. I had built them for detail and I could feel my skill waiting for direction to take the next step.

So I took the next step, and pushed.