Chase paced back and forth slowly, gazing up at the still dark sky, two small moons visible, lit up crescent shards that looked almost red, glowing with the reflected light of the sun.

He had never been one for astronomy, living in the city meant he only got to see the brightest and most obvious of stars… but he did remember how to find Orion, the constellation that had passed by his part of the world in those early winter mornings…

And in this sky, there was no hunter bound by the Greeks. No belt of stars.

Not that he recognized, anyway.

Glancing down, he waved his hand and flexed his will, opening the materials menu before him, checking his progress- oh, that was new.

Material:

Quantity

Sand

18.4 Cubic Units

Sandstone

2.3 Cubic Units

Clay

4.2 Cubic Units

Salt

0.3 Cubic Units

“Well now. Salt’s an interesting addition…”

Chase glanced down and looked at the corridors stretching out away into the sandy well they had carved out, and paced along the hard packed red clay, eyes tracing the material for- there.

At one edge, to what Chase was fairly certain was the north path, and to the western edge of the corridor, the clay dipped down and away, the material beneath a much different color. Pale white striations through the red of the sunbaked clay.

Salt.

“Right… Chemistry time. Salt is… Sodium and Chlorine? ‘NaCl.’ Right? Though, I can’t break it down to components from the menu.” He knelt and scrolled through his menu, even as he looked down at the new material, the faint golden edge of his building design still pushing north less than a meter away as he tapped his ghostly fingers on the menu. “If I could just break a material into base atomic components this would be broken as hell, but instead I’ve got to do the hard part manually.” Pulling up the build menu, Chase marked out the spot next to the path, where the sand and salt sloped down slightly, and designated it as ‘Mine here’, queuing it up in his build menu to take place after the four rooms were marked out, but in line with the mining of the clay to a lower level.

Closing out the menu, Chase couldn’t help but run his fingers over the salt once more… before pausing.

‘Salt’.

“Why is it here?”

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Glancing up, Chase looked around and- there. Leaning over the podium, where the scorpion had settled down, His God was there, a flicker of endless void nearly hidden against the darkness of the world.

“God! Do you know any of the history of this world?”

His companion looked up, and tilted their head. “Not much. It fits the original criteria you supplied. Populated by Sapient and Sentient humanoid races, Magic rich, Earth Standard geological scientific laws, breathable atmosphere and environments, dungeons are a known, but rare, quantity.”

“No map?”

The God shrugged slightly. “I’m afraid I only caught glimpses of this world before we chose it, and none of my views gave a clear orientation for the world itself.”

Chase grimaced and glanced down… before looking up.

“Hold on.”

Pushing from his kneeling position, the dungeon keeper jogged up the slope of the sand surrounding the pit, and aimed towards the top of a nearby dune, coming to a stop on the loose sand as he glanced out at the dark, moonlit, desert.

“Sand… Salt… Clay.” The dunes and the uneven surfaces of the desert made it hard, but from his vantage atop the dunes… he could almost see it. The endless dunes had waves to them. Points of higher sand, and lower sand… but the farther away, the higher the dunes stretched. He had thought it was an endless plane of sand the last time he glanced around, and it was, but the core was in the bowl of the desert. The sand rose higher as it moved away.

“This used to be an Ocean.” He murmured.

It had to be… millennia past that age. Long since dried and desiccated, but as it had dried and pulled back from shores, it had left salt and sand and dried up land. Anything left above the ‘seabed’ had been dried and dusted by age and time.

But the salt had concentrated in the bowl. At the bottom of the bowl. Where he was.

“Clay, Sand, Salt.”

Chase repeated the words like a mantra.

Clay for building the foundations. Baked and dried and packed. He would need to find some way to generate heat, intense heat. A Kiln of some sort.

Sand could lead to glass. To lenses and containers and ornaments.

But Salt… Salt could be interesting. There was something about how it reacted to heat… Didn't the salt melt?

He sighed and put his budding plans aside for a moment as he glanced back at the base. There would be a time and place for that. For now, Foundations. Getting ahead of himself would only make him impatient. Would make him rush.

Deal with the ‘Now’ first.

The Scorpion would have to be housed somewhere… Possibly the pedestal itself? It was contracted as a Boss… and if that designation meant anything at all, that meant it had potential as a guardian of some variety. Chase, lowered until he sat cross-legged on the sand, his intangible form barely shifting the loose particles.

He would do more, would build deeper, later.

For now, the building queue was set and running, the progress would be consistent, and he needed to take a moment and… Well, not breath, but settle.

He and His God are out of the void, free of the endless pale darkness.

Despite the frustration of not having a source of ‘volunteers’ for the dungeon, Chase could at least admit that the lack of interference would help give him a head start on crafting the actual facility.

Closing his eyes, Chase leaned back and decided to watch the stars for a little longer, before sleep- wait...

Could one sleep as a ghost?

“Eh, might as well try.”