A few days later I try my first experiment I’m going to add the terrain feature gravesoil. Odd, the prices changed; 5 for a wall or 3 for gravesoil, or twenty five for a death crystal whatever that is. I quickly check creatures and see haunting spirit is 1, skeleton 3, and zombie 10. Interesting; it seems the costs have roughly halved with a new addition to each. Was it a new addition to each, or something else? Well test number one, I create gravesoil. As expected it takes three from my manna field, entirely unconcerned with how empty my manna is. Interestingly while the point cost is listed as three, the actual gas used seems to be closer to two and a half, which suggests that the half simply isn’t tracked in the interface despite being accounted for in actuality. That’s something I might have to keep an eye on since fractional usage may save costs later.
For my next test I will be digesting the gravesoil. I send the black gas to it, but as it turns out that is entirely unnecessary, all on its own the gravesoil breaks down into gas once more, but something went wrong. Firstly and foremost the gas it broke down into is black gas not clear gas, which is to say it can only be returned to my manna field and not digested for manna, which is disappointing. Secondly it looks like I only got half the gas back, due to the uncounted fraction it looks like I just lost two points of manna field to the experiment, but in a few hours the fraction should catch back up into being a full point. Still, this is mostly disappointing. Perhaps useful in that it means my field can be stored at all, but with a return of only half it will cost me not to use it. Then again for the first time in a while nihility beckons, I wonder about that… No, no, I shouldn’t rest yet, there’s work to be done, tasks to be completed, experiments to be tested, what’s next? Oh yes.
A few days later and some more water and soil annihilated I create a second skeleton and send him outside my field. I watch for a few long moments, but nothing really happens to him. When I tell him to step back inside I notice the problem. My means of communication is telepathic, speaks to the motes directly, and it seems requires them to be in my field. We may be able to work out a verbal communication system for any in my field to communicate with those outside. Johnathon, it seems, is just as capable of communicating with his siblings through my field as I am, and has volunteered himself to teach all his new siblings freeing me up to wait about idly. In addition I observe that when it reenters the field it absorbs several wisps of black gas at once, as if catching up to the consumption it missed. Does that mean there’s a time limit? Will it kill them to exceed it? Following tests showed that the skeleton could survive just fine without the gas, but it wouldn’t always play catchup. Johnathon says it’s like what I describe holding one’s breath to be like, only that as undeads they do not need to breath. On the other hand breathing seems to grow their soul motes so isn’t it better if they do?
In a few days we repeat the gravesoil experiment but this time with it exiting my aura for a day before it comes back in, it seems it can be absorbed just as readily but remains a black gas.
A few days later we try creating a wall. I would like to say it’s unimpressive, in a way it is, being a simple wall, but in another way it’s actually rather fascinating. It seems to be custom designed to interact with my manna field. Firstly and most notably, my manna field can neither permeate through it nor passively absorb it. Additionally it seems that when my aura presses up against it a portion of the black gas will flow into it reinforcing it and giving me some general sense of it as if the wall itself were part of my field. Lastly I know what this is, I’ve seen it before; this wall is that imminent threat, which means the massive dangerous entity that collapsed under me before is likely to be a dungeon. I say likely to be and not likely to have been because the danger stones never stopped being danger stones. The danger muted slightly and the section of stone had broken apart, but the danger persisted suggesting that even while broken those stones may still have been a part of it. As expected the wall can also be reabsorbed into black gas for my field. That only makes me more wary of that other dungeon since that means it intentionally refused to reabsorb those walls, believing that they would be more useful where they fell rather than as more resources to fight against whatever made the wall or walls collapse. As for the size of the wall it seems to be five and a half Johnathon feet by five and a half Johnathon feet. Anything but metric I think with feelings proximate to the smug grin I cannot form.
I may have entered a span of nihility lately, I made some gravesoil in the middle and whenever my field got too dense Johnathon fed me something, so now I have about fifty handfuls of gravesoil and
[Todd, The Dungeon of Death, Level 2]
[manna field 20/25]
[54/100 manna]
All together I could have a soul mote by now, but there is another test, one I want to be well prepared for. I first spend almost all my manna creating twenty one more skeletons bringing me up to twenty two skeletons and one zombie in total. Knowing they’ll improve over time makes me less inclined to buy stronger ones, after all, even if they eat the black gas to grow, they put out an equal amount of clear gas with the exception of when they’re engaging in some activity that spurs their growth.
Actually, now that I have more bodies there is another test to do first, I have Johnathon kill one of the skeletons within my field. Oddly no fragments of soul mote float to Johnathon like when he killed the bugs, instead it just floats through my field the same as it floated through its own body. Rather if I were to say that anything had changed it was that the soul mote is now breathing in the black gas in big breaths and gulps, far more than if it was starved. If I had to estimate this is about one point worth. No, correction, one point worth before I leveled, it seems I need to get used to how the volumes of gasses shift without the numbers reflecting that. I wonder to myself, if Johnathon got magic how would his units of manna compare to mine? Would they match by level or would it be a wholly new metric? I will term one manna from level one as one base manna for now to keep it simple. It seems after absorbing one base manna a new skeleton is forming around the soul mote. It’s fascinating, it takes me five base manna of colorless gas to create a skeleton, but most of that must go towards creating the soul mote because colorless gas is clearly more valuable than black gas seeing as I produce the latter passively but need to digest or consume souls to gain the former.
I critically eye the newly reformed skeleton, the rapid absorption and use of black gas seems to have helped its soul mote grow if only marginally, probably by about as much as johnathon’s would grow from me speaking to it for a full day, but the efficiency is much lower by comparison since Johnathon would take in nowhere near a full base manna unit per day. On the other hand, there Is also the matter of the skeleton’s corpse, while it’s standing healthily in front of me it’s former body remains on the ground and isn’t immediately digesting. I get the feeling I probably could digest if if I really wanted to, but I notice something interesting, the soulless corpse is releasing black gas. It’s a slow release, not even a tenth of what the skeleton passively consumes, and now Johnathon’s consumption is probably ten to a hundred times that, but there’s some generation which doesn’t come from me which is just fascinating. How many corpses would it take to double my production? OK, that’s a stupid question, my field stretches across less than a cubic meter of space, even if I filled it entirely with shattered remains I’m not sure I’d notice much difference. It might be enough to sustain a skeleton or perhaps even a Johnathon, but it would not compare to my passive production, even the twenty three of them combined consume less of the black gas than I produce.
OK, the soul mote recovered into a skeleton, but it seemed to be in part due to an interaction with my field, I instruct Johnathon to kill it outside my field. The skeleton dies. I mean it died before, but it also came back, this time its soul mote shatters when it dies, fragments go to Johnathon’s soul mote the same as when he killed those bugs, but the bulk of it just seems to melt into the world, disappearing from my sight. To be more specific it floats upwards dissolving into colorless gas and passes through the dirt out of sight, spreading conically outwards so likely not pulled to any one point. It seems I will not be getting that skeleton back.
OK, the final test, for real this time, no more sidetracking. I need to know what happens when my manna field is saturated. I’ve been avoiding this for literal years afraid that the pressurized digestive gasses would melt through and destroy all of us, but seeing how we all regularly live within their swirling flows I’m no longer so certain. Nervously I watch my field slowly tick upwards from nineteen to twenty, twenty one, two three four, then it happens, not immediately but a day later when it hits twenty five. The edge of my field ripples and sputters, like a drop of sizzling oil thrown into a pool of water. I see blades of gas cutting through like knives, or perhaps the careful piercing strokes of a needle while sewing. I watch some of the black needles of gas slip beyond my control, wisps lost to the outside world, I see others clash and melt against the air as a fractious rift forms around my field. Lastly I see the black gasses pushing outwards, expanding my field itself, pushing its bounds outwards.
When my field was first establishing itself all that time ago I noticed that it dissolved air faster than stone, this holds true today too, my field rippled outwards rapidly, but it didn’t get far, my manna field total stayed at 25/25, it seemed only the excess was being consumed in this process making it a sustained slow moving growth. Well that was one of my concerns with this experiment, who knew if the black gas would be depleted by whatever happened? So I turned to the prepared grave soil and began to reabsorb it, releasing plumes of black gas into my field, and as it emerged the field began pushing out in earnest, visibly spreading to fill out living chamber, gnawing at the floor and ceiling as it tried to remain circular. Any dregs that my field hadn’t digested were similarly expelled in one fell swoop into the strange eddies of exchanged gas. Bugs and grubs rained into the collection pool en mass like some desperate hungry tide looking to eat me. Just the sheer wall of flesh alone I knew would deplete my black gas if I let it, so I tried my best to swerve it around them, sparing their corpses. It worked, but it was getting noisier, the sounds of bone claws and fists hitting stone, the splat and crunch of bugs dying, the baying and howling of animals outside.
My field had grown to the size of a small room, barely containing the twenty warring skeletons within it. Thinking carefully about it there has to be some rational scientific explanation for this phenomena, the expansion of my field isn’t like my pure digestion of manna, it’s more like an exchange of manna with the matter outside being devoured but my own black gas is pissing in the wind with more and more lost to the outside every second, and as soon as the black gas began leaking out of my field, bugs. They’re attracted to it, there’s some advantage they can get from it, from me. Absorbing the black gas has allowed Johnathon’s soul mote to grow, could it be that? I look closer at the encroaching hoard of bugs now that my line is holding and I’m not wrapped in the same abject terror as last time. Yes, it seems their soul motes are also absorbing the black gas, if anything they’re absorbing it and releasing clear gas at a much faster rate than my skeletons ever have, it’s like comparing the absorption of a wet sponge to a dry one, or maybe it’s a replacement therapy where they just happen to have more clear gas and less black gas initially than skeletons? In any case I hesitate, should I stop the expansion? There is still some gravesoil left, but what’s the risk benefit assessment on doing this? There’s no way this kind of wholesale slaughter is sustainable for the local insect population, but it’s not a bad thing to keep down populations of local pests. I take a glance at my stats to get an idea of how useful this is.
[Todd, The Dungeon of Death, Level 2]
[manna field 25/25]
[92/100 manna]
I’ve gained literal months’ worth of manna in minutes. Yes, this is a good thing. Oh ducking hampsterdog poopies in bread! I see seven rabbits duck in followed by two snakes before a loud frustrated roar sounds overhead followed by something smashing at the dirt. I don’t know that that is, but yup, we’re done here. I stop converting gravesoil back into black gas, and instead create one new gravesoil bringing my field total down to 22, and immediately switch menus to buy as many skeletons as I can. This is a numbers fight and I don’t want to die! At least I hope it’s a numbers fight, that roar isn’t promising. Johnathon’s holding me carefully in his now thankfully flesh-padded palm with a full sixty skeletons gathered around us. Unfortunately only thirty can comfortably fit in my field, at least if I want them to have space to fight. Johnathon’s commanding them, keeping around twenty five in my field at a time with the rest standing safely behind us. Good going Johnathon, thinking with your head. I meanwhile am trying my best to keep my field in check, a task which is far from easy. It seems like everywhere my black gas goes it wants to corrode something. Corpses of bugs and several living small vermin litter the floor, meanwhile my field is stretched through a room, this is a result of it expanding in an excavated room where it was easier to expand to the sides, but it clearly wants to continue expanding that circular dip in the floor and pull in along the sides to regain its former spherical glory. Moreover this will probably lead back to continual-falling syndrome. Don’t get me wrong, the solution is obvious and easy, I need walls, lots of walls, boxy walls that will hold my field in a reasonable shape. On the other hand making a single small section of wall costs enough black gas to revive a whole ten skeletons, there’s no way we can afford that expense in the middle of a fight where every claw matters! Well, probably matters, if not I can always buy the floor after.
It’s hard but I’m managing it, keeping the dark manna trapped in an internal spiral that doesn’t touch anything with only trace amounts slipping out to the edge of my field to eat stone. Taking the chance I glance about at the war in front of me, it looks like bugs are no longer our primary opposition, rodents, burrowing rodents, field mice, rabbits, squirrels, and gofers, I even spy a fox. More snakes too as well as some lizards and frogs that probably followed the others down their holes. It seems most still favored our sinkhole as it’s the easiest path down, or maybe the air carried the black gas easier? I glumly note that there’s a decent cloud of it in the greater surroundings outside my field. I guess while it does disperse it doesn’t do so instantly when released in larger quantities, as if it’s being subtly pulled towards the grass and the trees and the animals. Then the first skeleton dies; too many bites to the joints. I pull the black gas guiding some over to it to revive it, but I fear that the black gas in the surroundings has already painted a target on our backs.
I cast a quick glance at the fight, skeletal fish impacting furred hide, winding scales bound around its arm. I can’t watch this. Not because it’s disturbing or uninteresting, I mean I can’t afford to watch this, in my quick glance I spy no less than six grey soul motes floating in my field, so I redirect the swirling gas to allow it to approach them. I see them absorb the gas frowzily, a new skeleton growing out of thin air in seconds, but even as it’s still forming I see a wolf’s jaws shatter a freshly grown skull that was only just getting its bearings. Sorry little guy. With a glance I see twelve more grey motes.
Time to try something new, I find a quiet empty place at the back of our lineup and make the gas swirl ineffectually there, than I start pulling the grey motes into it, allowing them to regenerate there. All this while soul motes have been entering my body, and from the look of the front we’re no longer coming out on top in our exchanges. It looks like the wolves can overpower skeletons, particularly skeletons who were only just born. The twenty that Johnathon instructed seem to be doing better, but I shift my attention to spawning in more new skeletons, making sure to use every resource I have to help us survive this. Is it necessary? The thought distracts me for a moment. Is it necessary to fight so hard? Am I losing or in desperate straits? Maybe? I have trouble answering that since in truth the skeletons are still holding my foes at bay, they’re still killing their way through. Maybe the fight’s not even close?
A moment, apparently, is allot of time in a fight, I watch as the last of the black gas fades into nothing, any output produced in real time doing next to nothing. Meanwhile the brawl in the cave is slowly stilling. Skeletons climb over a mound of corpses, their clawed feet tearing readily through bloody viscera, splattering blood and sliced fragments of intestines onto anyone who happens to be standing in front of them; groups of rabbits, mice, and wolves likewise charge over a pile of discarded and sometimes fragmented bones. I even see a few mice impale themselves on the sharp ends of bones as they attempt to burrow under or sneak underfoot. Johnathon seems to have noticed the only one that made it through, crushing it’s skull with a soft pop under his bare heel.
Then a furry arm as wide around as a skeleton’s torso, with claws as big as their heads, reaches through my sinkhole. Well at least it’s fur not pulsating demonic scales or anything fantastical, so it’s just an animal right? Johnathon does the irrational thing and steps closer, directing the skeletons to charge. Then it makes sense to me, he needs my field, he knows they’re going to die, many of them are going to die, and he needs my field so that they can fight up close and personal with that claw before the whole monster gets down. I continue summoning new skeletons as fast as I can for Johnathon to send into the fray. The slaughter of rabbits is still underway as the last wolf is cornered and the second to last impaled. Several skeletons jump at the claw as if they were going to belly flop into a pool. The first one gets batted harmlessly aside, the next smashed directly against the stone, but in the span of a second no less than six had jumped and three managed to hold on, behind them more and more are jumping onto them, locking bone into bone to create a multilayered anchoring point. The claw heaves upwards, and for a moment the whole skeletal scaffold tenses and sways, even lifting ever so slightly off the ground. I hear two arms break against the ceiling before the skeletal structure manages to pull down, physically dragging the creature deeper into the sinkhole.
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There have to be at least a hundred claws scraping against its skin and all they have to show for it are a few paper cuts, but the skeletons are not giving up easy. Where the thick fur is torn they stick their claws in, tugging and wrestling against the muscles and fibers inside. A splatter of blood flies out like a burst hose painting ten of my skeletons red in an instant and one of them extra dripping wet with nothing left white. Flumpermonkeys in a basket that’s messed up. The arm is slowing down and weakening, but the roars are starting to sound really pissed. I see the cuts along the arm expanding as the skeletal hands work at them, the limb has gone limp and they’re working to tear it off when the head and torso emerge. It’s a bear. I don’t know what kind of bear looks like that, but it’s a bear. The ceiling begins to shake more vigorously as the bear roars, the skeletons don’t care however and manage to peel the fur down the end of his arm exposing a bony joint which they haven’t had much luck prying apart. Blood is draining quickly from it, but the bear ignores it, seemingly lost in rage. It opens its mouth and a torrent of flame comes out bathing my skeletons in sparks and scorch marks. After a moment it stops and I begin berating myself. Why was I expecting skeletons to be flammable? Why was I thinking of the sizzling burns and internal damages that a human experiences from having the water heated and ripped out of them when these are dry aged skeletons? With a heavy shake of the room the bear dislodges itself from the sinkhole and falls heavily onto the skeletal scaffold. I probably should have expected this but it does not continue to hold, Half of its participants die on impact with the other half mostly injured.
Getting a better look at the bear I see it’s bigger than a grizzly and with a long almost serpentine tail, its teeth look slightly more serpentine which probably gives it difficulty when chewing its food, presuming it needs to. Judging by its actions I’m going to guess he’s more of a rip and swallow kind of guy. Blood is still pouring out of his wounded arm, and somehow I think that’s the only way we’re going to be able to win this. My scarce understanding of biology says he’ll bleed out like that eventually, but from the looks of it that won’t stop him from killing us first. Anything that comes close to him gets smashes, but every life is buying us just a little more time. I continue spamming the spawning of new skeletons burning up all my remaining manna, but in reality it’s probably up to fate now. We’re down to fifteen skeletons, and Johnathon sends eight of them towards the bear as he backs up until the eight are just barely in my field, but all they need is a finger in for them to live again someday as long as the rest of us do. The bear sways unevenly on its feet and runs after us. Johnathon cups me to his chest and leads the retreat through the tunnel cave we once came up through; down towards the underground lake with the danger stones, the bear hot on his trail.
I hear the skeletons being smashed behind us as we run, and out of habit I begin to count. Six, five, four, three, an angry roar floods the narrow tunnel with flames, the bear looks furious that it can’t seem to fit its massive frame any further into the tunnel. Johnathon steadies himself, kneeling down hunched over me as his soul sings out orders to the last three. One of them climbed halfway into the bear’s mouth trying to savage the inside while another wrapped its legs around the bear’s throat trying to reach for its eyes. Flames flared to life around the one in its throat, killing it with a slow crackling like logs burning in a fire, but the charred bones remained in its airway, and were now covered in soot. The bear rose onto its hunches to smash the second against the ceiling just as the third slid into place to take advantage of this, shoving its hand into the bear’s poop hole. The bear reacted violently and aggressively as anyone might, smashing its body into the offending skeleton, but that only managed to work the arm deeper, well it also shattered the skeleton, but there was blood flowing down the shattered end of the embedded arm. For about two more minutes the bear flailed and clawed and roared bloody murder before it began to lose energy.
Johnathon merely waited, watching twenty new skeletons appear around him. Oh cat piss, I was still spamming skeletons, and that bear soul mote was juicy. Johnathon leads the skeletons to tidy up and hide traces of the battle as well as can be done. The black gas is still lurking around to an extent, but most seems to have been absorbed by vegetation and flora. Our sinkhole has only gotten wider. Johnathon has a good idea for layout, but my reserves are far too floored to pull it off. Instead we improvise, a few skeletons act as structural supports, gripping the wall along the sinkhole’s descent, and the others pile dirt onto and also into them creating an obstruction of view for anyone looking down into the hole, through a similar system he tries to narrow it, but at some point we admit it’s as good as it’s going to get. Between the two of us we agree that’s far more exposure to the outside than we need for a long while, so we set up a plan of procedures and protocols and escape paths, mostly ending in danger stones and hoping any monster that comes crawling can duke it out with that other dungeon instead of us.
Over the following months as my manna field regains its spherical nature Johnson gets more and more skeletons in turn to hold him up. The idea is that because my manna field doesn’t eat through them, they can hold me up so that we won’t sink forever downwards. Small detail I’d forgotten is that I will never be able to regain enough black gas to create a wall until my manna field is once more spherical, until all the corpses are digested, and until all of the skeletons are revived with new bodies. Casting my gaze at the grey motes I realize that there are over a hundred now, maybe two. I really did a bad job of keeping track of everything in the fight. “Maybe dungeons just aren’t meant for all this fighting, we’re more long term planning kinds of creatures.” I reassure myself, knowing full well how stupid an excuse that is.
The days pass slowly, tensely, a little bit nervously. Apparently we caused quite a commotion, because the one thing the days do not pass by as is quietly. For weeks we hear people skulking about day and night. First are the heavy footfalls of many boots, likely investigating, and monitoring for future disruptions judging by the patrolling pattern of feet overhead. Next is a mixed crowd, likely investigating the rumors or come to gawk. Some sound arrogant, others sound noncommittal like bored tourists, and most sound disappointed. Don’t worry, I too am disappointed because I have no clue what any of you are saying! I’m going to avoid the classic pitfall of going to another country and demanding they speak English, but that doesn’t change my disappointment that the crystal can’t translate their words without a soul connection. I don’t know why they’re disappointed or what they expected, but that seems to be the most common reaction. Also worth noting is every third week some kind of tribal choir group comes to sing and dance on the surface nearby. I’d have taken it as a great sign of thriving arts and appreciation of cultural heritages, except that I noticed, every time they sing bits of that black gas seem to emerge from the ground and surrounding foliage and gather towards whatever they’re doing. I hate not knowing anything about this world, but I’m too scared they’ll kill me if I walked up to ask. Lastly and perhaps most interestingly people occasionally toss offerings into the sinkhole. Most of it seems to be trash but some looks like coins or accessories. I’ll sort through that later. Seems quite a few people thought to steal from it because the patrols have caught several trying and there have been a few more they didn’t catch. Mostly they seem interested in the coins, but I have johnathan store a few things out of reach of my field for us to parse through later. As time passes the trash content seems to rise precipitously as if they were just looking to fill the hole with trash.
Black gas is in high demand down here these days, those revivals will take me half a year, the corpses will keep me fed for two months, I’m just thankful they’re not rotting on me. At least that’s how long everything should have taken, but in actuality it takes twice as long. It seems that hundreds is allot of skeletons for a measly little level two dungeon to sustain. They drink the black gas in around half as fast as I produce it. Sure, I get manna out of that so can’t complain too much, but that’s even after factoring in the black gas that’s coming in off their corpses.
A year later when we’ve finally managed to do that much the sounds of patrols is muted and infrequent, even thieves have given up on us. The choir sometimes comes, but it seems like they’ve canceled a few meetings due to weather or perhaps scheduling conflicts. That leaves the question, walls first or digesting the garbage. I opt for walls. The design Johnathon made is really simple, it is a room, a big giant boxy room that’s more tall than wide. We’re going to make it one field length in width and five field lengths in height. The plan is to get some solid walls around us so that we don’t have to worry about my field as much, and this way my dungeon as it were, will simply be a giant hole in the ground filled with skeletons; more dangerous perhaps than a pit of vipers but ultimately rather simple and to the point. At first I admit I looked at him like he was stupid, but he explained the logic readily enough. Firstly, he knows I hate the idea of crazed expansion. Putting aside the waves of literal wild beasts we’ve had to fend off, what really worries me is running into more danger stones, danger stones that are bigger and stronger and hungrier than I am. Honestly my phobia of the surface is similar in effect. This design allows us to take advantage of our numbers advantage, allows us to house, contain, and nurture the many undeads while minimizing our footprint by taking advantage of the fact that none of them need to eat or sleep to just pile them up on top of one another like some kind of mass grave. He suggests tiering it out into some kind of reverse pyramid in time with a wider top and narrow point at the base for me to sit, but the idea is simple enough. He also suggested that we could try walling it off entirely from the world, like a closed box, though we’re both a bit apprehensive about if that will work. It’s kind of a thing in fiction that dungeons never close off like that, but I admit to curiosity, just hopefully not dead cat levels of curiosity.
Ten base manna field may mean five days of generation, but with half claimed, it takes ten to eleven days per section of walling produced, and every one I make reminds me of how empty my manna field feels. I should clarify, it’s not that it feels empty because it is, I mean it’s that too, but one of the reasons it feels empty is because the actual amount of black gas I can contain did not increase when the field grew. That seems to only increase when I level up, so it’s all spread allot thinner now.
An interesting thing happened, I love and hate that this is my life. Idly waiting to notice things that are equal parts fascinating and horrifying. Oh well, you can’t choose your life, and if you could many would line up to beg for a life that turns you instantly into an autocratic ruler like mine, so I can’t complain. The interesting thing is I think I know what the ability Inhospitable does now. A few mice and bugs came down chasing after the garbage, when they entered my field and began absorbing the black gas, more than they could possibly survive poured into them all at once causing them to liquefy into some kind of putrid puss before being digested. That looks like putrefaction to me, but with all the horrific efficiency of a bug zapper. It produced a fair bit more manna than digesting them should, so it seems I no longer need to worry about tiny pests, at least as long as I don’t intentionally force my black gas away from them like I did in the big fight. On the down side producing more manna means taking more field manna which means my already stretched black gas is even more in demand.
My design is four by four walls on the bottom and top, with ten walls in height, so overall I need 192 walls total to make a rectangular prism, or 1920 base manna, that’s three years of consumption, six if we account for all the hungry eaters in my home.
Well, not sure that’s great to be honest. I try placing a wall below my crystalline form and note that it sinks down if not held, additionally my manna field seems to bend and hang off it like a giant mound of jelly or perhaps viscous fluid. It takes a while to just outright surround my wall, but once it does the ground beneath it begins being digested evenly making it entirely useless for holding me up. Looks like I’ll need at least half the full structure to keep my field from crawling down along the sides. In fairness my field seems to want to be round, perhaps there is kind of surface tension at play, so it’s not seeping along the walls uncontrollably so much as stretching out around them to still be round and not be constrained. Maybe if I was at the end of a tunnel it’d work better since it wants to be centered on me, so that would keep it held in shape like water drawn towards the base of a cup.
The walls themselves were rather fascinating in their own right. They weren’t the physical stone walls I’d expected, rather they seemed ethereal constructs of magic which could be moved and directed within about one field radius outwards from my manna field. Only when the black gas of my field flowed into them would they truly gain rigidity. I looked closely at them just to see if they produce any black gas like skeleton corpses or absorb any like living skeletons, but while they interchange with my field I can’t see any discrepancy between what is absorbed and released. Suspicious, grave soil seems to put off some too, so I’m not fully convinced this is as simple as it seems, but I’ll have to accept it for now. Without experiments perhaps I can meditate and think through all that has happened. I’m not sure I like having to do that, it’s certainly not time efficient, but habits are hard to break.
Four years passed before I knew it. I’ve let Johnathon sift through the garbage burying some things that look useful and throwing useless trash into my field. I have also completed half of my new dungeon, which is to say my field is now perfectly cupped in an open box. Finally I no longer need to rest atop a skeleton jenga tower. I’m not complaining, not really, after all I wasn’t the one who had to hold me up for years on end, but it felt a bit precarious at times so it’s nice not to need to. For their part the skeletons seem apathetic. To spice things up I’ve let them sort through the trash we’ve received as offerings a few times. The vast majority as it happens is garbage. Lets see what we have in this trash, dolls, digest, toys, digest, dead animals, digest, old furniture, broken pots, worn out shoes, vegetable roots, bones that someone ate meat off of, frayed dirty torn cloths that look like they have too much grease on them to ever get out, nightsoil, a broken cup, digest digest digest, they really are using this as a garbage dump now, broken barrel, splintered boards… I try to work us down to the good stuff. We have a few pieces of jewelry, seven artistic looking tokens, fifty seven coins that I cannot appraise the materials of because again I am not a geologist or wood specialist or metallurgist or whatever I’d need to be to even guess. In any case, breaking it down is giving me that final push.
[Congratulations on reaching level 3]
[Detecting you have watched those under you without pause]
[You have gained the ability voyeur]
Oi oi oi! I object! Why do all of these sound like insults? It seems this one’s easier to understand than the others, suddenly I see more. I mean, I mostly see the same, but I see it from many angles, thinking through it slowly I notice I can now see through the eyes of every skeleton at once. Heh, it looks like I can even see through those in the walls of the tunnel above, outside my field. That could be really handy. Wait, no, that’s beside the point! What if someone sees my status? Is that a thing, seeing other people’s status? They’re going to think I’m some kind of pervert! System, in your infinite wisdom, could you please please rename it?
I don’t think begging is going to work.
Wait a moment, what’s up with that? I carefully observe to make sure I’m not seeing wrong. The skeletons themselves are unable to see the black and clear gasses, but I’d swear my production has doubled again, and it doubled at level 2 as well, does that mean…?
[Todd, The Dungeon of Death, Level 3]
[manna field 1/25]
[0/100 manna]
Still out of twenty five and one hundred, but now each is four base manna units, the cost of a skeleton is now two the cost of a wall is now three. If I had blood it would probably be running cold now. This growth, it was exponential, I was expecting linear growth, perhaps logarithmic. Maybe, just maybe I’m being paranoid, but in a world where people grow exponentially stronger with every level, and gain a level every approximately three years, it’s frankly terrifying the sorts of threats that must be out there. On the other hand, how rational is this? So I stop and think about it. I have three data points, three. I should wait a while longer, and what if it’s only low levels, what if at level 5 it stops doubling?
Johnathon, how many levels did you gain as a skeleton? TEN? That’s, that’s allot. I quickly check with several others and find most around level six or seven, with the highest at eight, he seems a bit spacy, can skeletons be mentally disabled? No, no, I’m getting sidetracked. I conduct several skeleton fights to gauge the degree to which level impacts strength; fortunately it seems the effect is much more moderate with them, which is… odd. I’m firmly rejecting delusions of grandeur. One moment you expect the universe to revolve around you the next your dead. Maybe there’s another factor at play here.
So, what are my options? Firstly it could be reincarnation, or whatever happened to let me get here is called. It certainly doesn’t sound normal to be born remembering a world that never existed. Option two, it’s a dungeon thing and the danger stones below are a lot more dangerous than I thought. Option three, my fellows only progress so slowly because they’re undeads, or because we’ve only had one real fight to date. It could be that this world is filled with level 5000 heroes and dragons. Presuming any sort of immortality through magic exists that doesn’t even really feel unlikely. It bugs me that I don’t even have the means to verify the levels of those who were trouncing around above me, but I guess I should be thankful that they hadn’t come in seeking my death.
In another two years I have the walls complete, when the last section of wall falls into place completing my box, I immediately begin sensing imminent danger from all my own walls. That is probably not a good sign. I try waiting and see the danger steadily increasing and decreasing with the quantity of black gas in my manna field, yeah, something bad might happen if my pressurized digestive gas bubble was boxed in and pressurized even further without being allowed to vent. Still, my field only fills half of it so it should be okay right? I try settling in for a long wait. Right my foot! Who can relax like this?