When Teaghan woke up, she was in a dark room. Darker than the one she was summoned in and darker than the one she first met Lilith in. It was an inky blackness that made you feel like you could get lost in it forever.
Inside of that room was herself - her previous life. The girl, the body, that just a short while ago was her and what her soul inhabited. When she saw the body, Teaghan went on an emotional rollercoaster ride.
First, she was afflicted with sudden anger. The sudden onset of red hot blinding rage, it came out of nowhere. She screamed, cursed at the being who brought, and she ranted. Then the next emotion rushed into her, sadness. Teaghan cried and mourned for what she had lost, for the potential life that she could have lived. She then felt fear, disgust, and then loneliness.
These emotions just kept on coming, over and over again. Teaghan was mentally exhausted. Everything that was suppressed that she hasn’t felt since her soul was stolen came up in these cycles. When those cycles finished, images appeared inside of the inky blackness. They were her memories, from her childhood to the lessons at school, to the day she was summoned. The memories that were lost when Lilith became a part of her.
Once her memories from Earth finished, the ones of her time as a dungeon core came up. The memory of her first waking up and building her first floor. Too her experiments and creatures that she has created appeared in the inky blackness.
When the images disappeared, the inky blackness started to close in on her. Startled and scared of what was happening, Teaghan tried to move away from the blackness, but it kept on approaching her. Soon it started to swallow Teaghan up. At first, this terrified her greatly, but as the inky blackness kept on rising, she felt some sort of quietness and peacefulness. She was at peace as the darkness covered her. She was at ease as she was fully submerged.
* * *
When Teaghan woke up, she was in the room where she first met Lilith, the space inside her core. Her whole body was aching as she woke up in the room. Teaghan blurrily took account of herself and something that she realized was precious to her, her memories.
With what happened when Lilith fully integrated into her being and the loss and damage to her memories, it was the first thing she checked.
What Teaghan found relieved her, her memories were back in place, and some were a bit more clearer. Going through each memory, Teaghan found a side effect with whatever the inky blackness did. While she got back her memories, the memories with strong emotional attachments became blurry when she tried to view them. But with other memories such as the earth sciences and biology classes that she took in high school were more clearer.
After Teaghan took stock of her mental faculties, she decided that it was time to check on and survey the dungeon. And boy, was she in for a shock.
When she pulled her consciousness out of the room in her core, Teaghan appeared in a vastly changed core room. When she looked at her core, it had a large, somewhat healed crack growing through a significant portion of her core.
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But before Teaghan was able to do anything else, she was bombarded with blue screens.
0% Personality uploaded to dungeon interface and status.
Warning! Mana amount in the dungeon has exceeded the retention limit of mana.
15% Personality uploaded to dungeon interface and status.
Warning! Mana retention is being overwhelmed.
Warning! You have been afflicted with mana poisoning.
Warning! You have been afflicted with an overabundance of mana.
Due to having too much mana flow through your core, it has been damaged.
79% Personality uploaded to dungeon interface and status.
By enduring mana poisoning and an overabundance of mana has evolved into a mana leyline.
Congratulations! Your dungeon core now acts as a mana leyline. The leyline's power gets more potent as it gets closer to your core.
Congratulations! You have gained a new biome effect: Mana Forest.
Congratulations! You have gained a new biome type: Mana Enhanced River.
100% Personality uploaded to dungeon interface and status.
Personality successfully uploaded to dungeon interface and status.
Teaghan looked over these screens and got overwhelmed. She knew that something would have been different when she exited the room in her core, but Teaghan didn’t expect to have such effects.
Teaghan dismissed all the screens and started feeling and looking around her dungeon. She instantly noticed many changes.
The first was that her domain grew five times bigger than before, reaching further into the mountain, covering a sizeable above-ground lake, and getting closer to the sea.
Another significant change was the actual floors and environments of her dungeon. The effects of the mana having less strength the closer you get to the dungeon’s entrance. However, there were significant changes to her dungeon either way. The first floor’s main effects were to the creatures and monsters. The rabbits and kobolds were the most affected. From what she could see was that there were multiple evolutions in both species. On the second floor, most of the creatures and plants gained poisonous or venomous evolutions and mutations. On the third floor, the whole floor was affected. Every plant, creature, and monster species was touched by the mana forest biome effect. It changed the species on this floor in different and unknown ways. Even the ambiance of the floors was different from before her core had taken damage.
Inside her core room, the unknown seed had grown into a small tree. It looked like it was carved from crystal, and while still small, it looked magnificent.
All of these things just made Teaghan smile. This was a good thing after a string of bad things that have happened to her recently. But she was still healing from the damage to her core, so she figured that once she got her dungeon all sorted out again, she would start to feel better.
But then Teaghan realized something. If something as big as what happened to her caused a mana leyline to be created, then the outside world probably knew that something significant happened. She realized that she had probably gained a lot of unwanted attention towards her dungeon, or at least to the area that she is settled in.