Three and a half days after Hildi and Baxter left, Jake finished dropping his core. He’d need to do it some more when Baxter came back because he liked to lie in the room and sleep and eat snacks. And Jake liked having him there. But in the meantime, he guessed from Hildi relayed through Baxter that it was going to be at least four more days, more likely four and a half before the group showed up.

He still needed to do something about security. And, his big kilometer room was not done and he may or may not have told Hildi that it was. Alright, he had. Damn crystal memory made it hard for him to lie to himself. It was about a hundred skill-uses short. And, although they hadn’t asked yet, Hildi and the group was going to need someplace to stay. Someplace nicer than a tunnel. He did have a floor with twenty-two rooms on it. Then he thought of all the kids and the traps and thought that the combo was not a good mix. The dungeon part of him was a little too excited.

Using the rat’s vision he looked around Max’s some more. He wondered if there was some way to claim it as part of him and then he could do some remodeling. Kill some rats!

He thought about all the space that he’d claimed down below. All he had to do to claim it was to dig a hole and the space became his. Could he do the opposite? Could he enclose space and claim it that way?

He thought about that idea some more. He didn’t have a skill that created dirt or stones or rocks or wood. At least not yet. He did have that Loot Creation skill that he’d used to create that Archery Butte, but what he was thinking about doing wasn’t the same thing. That was still creating an individual item. Sure nobody would take the Butte, but they could. Heck, he could even claim that was the loot for killing the snake.

He thought about how he’d gotten most of his other skills: meditate, manipulate some mana, envision the result and concentrate on it as long as he needed to achieve what he was after. He hadn’t failed yet, except for gaining the meditation skill, which he found kind of funny.

He decided to go for it. He focused on his snake and started listening to its breath. It was funny he’d never thought about a snake breathing before. It was a new experience. The snake drew in air and then relaxed. Unlike Baxter, he had to spend some time trying to figure out what was going on. The lungs were different, the left lung seemed almost vestigial while the right lung seemed to be doing all the work. The snake breathed through its nostrils, then a little slit behind the tongue would open and allow the air in.

He almost gave up and created a mammal, but then his pride took over and he forced himself to focus. After a while, he was able to follow the snake’s breath in and out, through the trachea, down the bronchi into the right lung, and feel the oxygen exchange take place. Feel the snake relax and let the air flow out. The snake didn’t move a lot, the respiration was steady and constant. He used this breathing as a base to focus on. After a while, he tried to see the mana in his body, his gem, and circulate it. He was able to get a circular movement going and he envisioned the mana pouring from the center of the circle in a downspout, forcing the mana into a brick, a single brick of sandstone.

He was patient this time, the use of the snake helped him. Snakes seemed calm to him, at least this one did. Despite almost dying killing the man, this snake simply was. No real needs, wants, a slight desire for food, but calm, centered. He wasn’t sure if all snakes were like this or only his, dungeon monsters. He pulled his mind back onto the snake.

He felt the snake’s respiration, put his mind on the circular movement of mana in his gem and focused on his desire for change, for creation, for the existence of something new, something that wasn’t present before. Sandstone, sandstone, the word beat in his mind like a mantra, a metronome, his heartbeat.

How long this went on he wasn’t sure. At least an hour, probably more. He hadn’t checked the time before starting, but finally, 50 mana vanished from his pool and a single, ½ cubic meter block of yellowish sandstone appeared. And then he got a notification.

Nice! Who knew you could use a snake like that. Better get him a Baxter sized pinky. Or another jackass. Experience gained.

Skill Gained

Create Materials

Elemental Sphere: Earth

Rank: Bronze

Level: 2

Range: Within dungeon bounds, may be tangential to dungeon bonds.

Damage: na

Cool Down: na

Duration: Permanent

SP: 25 mana points per (cubic meter/Level) created per level of material

Ability to create matter either within or tangentially touching the hard bounds of a dungeon. Materials created are considered a part of the dungeon. Space enclosed with created materials is also considered part of a dungeon.

Material levels:

Metals:

* Bronze (Rank 1, Level 1)

* Copper (Rank 1, Level 2)

* Iron (Rank 1, Level 4)

* Silver / Wrought Iron (Rank 2, Level 1)

* Electrum (Rank 2, Level 4)

* Gold / Steel (Rank 2, Level 5)

* Platinum (Rank 4, Level 1)

* Mithril (Rank 6, Level 3)

* Orichalcum (Rank 7, Level 5)

* Adamantine (Rank 8, Level 7)

* Unobtanium (Rank 9, Level 9)

Woods

* Hardness (Balsa) (Rank 1, Level 1)

* Hardness (Aspen) (Rank 1, Level 2)

* Hardness (Black Ash) (Rank 1, Level 4)

* Hardness (Walnut) (Rank 2, Level 1)

* Hardness (Red Oak) (Rank 2, Level 4)

* Hardness (White Oak)(Rank 2, Level 5)

* Hardness (Canarywood) (Rank 4, Level 1)

* Hardness (Hickory) (Rank 6, Level 3)

* Hardness (Kingwood) (Rank 7, Level 5)

* Hardness (Plane Hybrid) (Rank 8, Level 7)

* Hardness (Strange) (Rank 9, Level 9)

Stone:

* Earthen fill (Rank 1, Level 1)

* Cinder Block or other composite stone (Rank 1, Level 2)

* Sandstone (Rank 1, Level 4)

* Breccia (Rank 2, Level 1)

* Limestone/Marble, (Rank 2, Level 1)

* Iron Ore, (Rank 2, Level 4)

* Granite, (Rank 2, Level 5)

* Basalt, (Rank 4, Level 1)

* Obsidian (Rank 6, Level 3)

* Quartz and other Semi Precious Stones (Rank 7, Level 5)

* Precious Stones & Hybrid Matter (Rank 8, Level 7)

* Strange Matter (Rank 9, Level 9)

Gases

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* Nonpoisonous, No odor, Clear, Non-flammable (Rank 1, Level 1)

* Nonpoisonous, No odor, Opaque, Non-flammable (Rank 1, Level 2)

* Nonpoisonous, Has Odor, Opaque, Non-flammable (Rank 1, Level 4)

* Nonpoisonous, Has Odor, Opaque, Flammable (Rank 2, Level 1)

* Poisonous, Has Odor, Opaque, Non-Flammable (Rank 2, Level 4)

* Poisonous, Odorless, Opaque, Non-Flammable (Rank 2, Level 5)

* Poisonous, Odorless, Clear, Non-Flammable (Rank 4, Level 1)

* Poisonous, Odorless, Clear, Flammable (Rank 6, Level 3)

* Mutating Gases (Rank7, Level 5)

* Planar Hybrid (Rank 8, Level 7)

* Strange Gases (Rank 9, Level 9)

Jake looked around and estimated the size of Max’s once more. It looked to be about 115 meters by 70 meters and about 7 meters high. A big rectangle. A very big rectangle. Although it was smaller after the apocalypse than it was before. So Jake did some quick math and figured out that it was going to take him about 7200 uses of the skill to get the blocks up to the roof. And that was just if he put blocks around the outside edges. That’s a lot of mana. That’s almost a year of using the skill day in day out. Well, three quarters of a year he figured allowing for skill increases. He had 4 and a half days.

His first floor was looking a lot better to him now. He could fill in the traps, create doors and boom, instant home. For some reason, he didn’t like that idea. It probably was something in his dungeon nature but he was uncomfortable with the idea of bringing people down to live in a space he’d created to kill them. Even if he remodeled the place. Maybe it was him not wanting to abandon an earlier plan. He wished he’d had this tendency, this drive to completion before. There would have been a lot fewer abandoned manuscripts on his computer’s hard drive. Turning back to the problem at hand, he started trying to think of alternatives.

He’d been pouring mana into this room and building for close to two weeks now and despite the giant rats which may or may not have been caused by the mana, there was nothing really inherently magical in it. Except for the glowing gas pump which now that he thought of it seemed to have vanished. And the mana that he’d been pouring out into the space wasn’t his mana, it was just mana that appeared in him. So even though he’d been doing it, he hadn’t really. It was like a body odor. Your body produces it, but doesn’t have any control over it once it left. He has a little dismayed with this analogy. He didn’t like thinking of himself as a big stink pit. Murder pit. Armpit!

But that was kind of what he was doing. Just randomly putting out odors or in this case mana. He did notice that now that his core had moved, the little tunnel no longer seemed to be producing the concentrated stream of mana that it used to. Instead, the larger tunnel dug by Baxter seemed to be producing more mana. Not producing, but allowing more of it to escape, he guessed. He wasn’t sure what it meant except that his actual core body, the pink diamond, was responsible for producing the mana outflow. The mana flowed from him, up through the dungeon seeking release and found it at Baxter’s tunnel. Not all, some continued down the hall and escaped via the original little tunnel, but far less than used too. Something else to keep in mind, he thought in case he ever gets moved. My body is somehow the source of an enormous amount of mana.

He wondered if the amount of mana had increased from the first day? He didn’t have any way of measuring it, so he didn’t know. Another thing he wondered was if it had increased, what caused it? The increase in his dungeon size or his increase in levels? He had another thought then, but it didn’t fully materialize, just left that sense of unfulfilled expectation.

It looked to him like right now most of the mana going out of the tunnel was unattributed. He figured he could change it to some attribute, but didn’t see a reason to do so yet. According to what the Bobs had said, unattributed mana would adopt the attributes of whatever mana it came into contact with, so it would probably become earth, air, light, dark, and life mana. Hopefully not too much death.

Also, if he did change it, then he’d probably have a pretty big impact on the environment. A life fountain, a death grotto, a mystical lake, a light palace, he kept imagining the kind of effects a large source of attributed mana would have on the surroundings. The environment would change to accommodate the release he was sure. He decided not to start outputting large quantities of attributed mana. It sounded to him like the Bobs intended him to be a rebalancer. A neutral presence to help keep things on an even keel in the natural world. And since his part of the world wasn’t or at least didn’t seem out of whack, he shouldn’t try to adjust it. The Bobs might not approve.

His mind was going all over the place. He couldn’t focus on the problem. He had four days and still had no plan. He looked around the interior of Max’s again, trying to get his rat to focus on the released mana, but that did nothing. Either the rat was not capable of seeing mana or didn’t have the skill. He wasn’t going to devote the time to try to develop the skill in the rat or the mana to create a rat that could see mana.

He looked around his dungeon again. Two levels, 23 and a half rooms, if you included the second-floor room. He focused on the air and again saw the brief shimmers as mana materialized and then flowed toward the exit. That was was the same, nothing had changed from before. He looked at the Archery Butte and saw that it glowed in his mana sight, rich brown and white. Earth and Light. For some reason, he continued to look at it, studying it, trying to understand its composition, the mana it contained. After a bit, he noticed that the wood also had the green of life mana and the grey of death. The grey seemed to be slowly overtaking the green. He watched this process for a while and then briefly, very briefly he seemed to sense something else. Something not a mana attribute nor the presence of Qi, like a third force. A gleam, colorless, but shining. A glow, a glitter, something that existed right at the edge of perception.

Hmm! Ok, we’ll allow it. Experience gained.

Ability Gained

Soul Sense

Elemental Sphere: All

Range: Within dungeon bounds

Damage: na

Cool Down: na

Duration: Permanent

Ability to sense the soul. All beings are made up of three components: Body, Energy, and Soul. Most beings are only capable of seeing the first two components. Perhaps because of your origin, you have gained the ability to sense the soul and its boundaries.

‘Just once it would be nice if you told me what you wanted! Just once!’ he whined to the Bobs. Of course, there was no response. He played with his new toy. Scanning the hallways, his snakes, his rat, the rooms, the traps. They all had a sense of belonging. Of being part of him!. All gleamed in his new sense. All had that bright shining luster that spoke of him. He looked at his gem and it shone in the sense, the mana in it was like a fire burning, shifting, moving. He tried to focus on the mana that he was somehow generating outside his gem and, although he could still see it, it lacked any gleam at all. It was not part of him.

He stopped then. And thought about that for a while. He generated it, but it wasn’t part of him. He looked at the edge of the tunnel that Baxter had dug. It went right into Max’s and as soon as it penetrated the floor, the gleam ended. It was no longer part of him.

“Can I stretch my soul? Blow it up like a balloon and take in something else? Somehow that’s what I’ve been doing by digging, by creating rooms, traps, and monsters. Enlarging my soul. Can I just stretch the boundaries over something that already exists and make it a part of me? Probably not a rat or something alive, but why not a floor or a wall? Why not?” he thought.

And so, despite not knowing what the hell he was doing, the cost of it, he tried. He reached out with his new soul sense and tried to manipulate it, tried to cast his soul over the entirety of the building, tried to somehow incorporate the stuff of the building into himself.

Enough. We’ll allow it. Max’s is yours. But that’s it. You will no longer have the ability to manipulate your soul boundaries or the soul boundaries of others except by natural processes. You can still view your own and possibly others soul boundaries, but, for now and the foreseeable future, that is the only soul ability that you will gain.

He was pretty sure that he’d pissed off the Bobs. Not the best thing to have done, but, well, what’s done is done. And he now had a building that he could house people in, house his parents and his brothers and sisters in, and that was worth a little divine anger.