Kyther’s Theory of Mana states that Aether (Anti-Mana) and Quintessence (Mana) apply an equal opposing force upon each other, and that Quintessence-Aether pairings will annihilate each other. - The Physical and Meta-Physical by Garmon of Torley

----------------------------------------

No one had come. My dungeon sat waiting, and no adventurers had appeared. Not that I was eager to see them, since for every adventurer simply seeking wealth and levels, I was sure there would be someone hungry and greedy enough to eye my core as a potential prize. I did seemingly need them to grow my core, and then perhaps have a chance of getting off this mudball before it came to a messy end. And I expected them sooner. Surely my fall had been seen across half the world. It seemed unlikely anyone had missed a fireball streaking across the sky. Had it been so long since a star fell that they’d forgotten what it meant?

At last after the first day of waiting, my Queen’s Robes was finally ready.

It didn’t look like much. The plant was about four feet tall, with scraggly branches growing off a woody central trunk. The leaves, if that was even the right word for them, were more interesting. Fluffy, fur-like fibres grew all along the branches. I imagined they would do a good job deterring your average predator - a mouthful of fluff didn’t sound appetising. However, I couldn’t figure out a use for it just by looking for it. I checked the System menu to see if it had given me any clues.

Plant Name

Climate

Properties

Growing Time

Mana Cost

Damage Type

Queen’s Robes (Mollusca regina)

Subtropical

The soft, downy leaves of Queen's Robe may be spun into a fine silk.

48 hrs

2

N/A

I looked at the leaves again. I couldn’t see it myself, but I knew mortals liked soft things, so perhaps it would make for an interesting loot item. I’d have to see if I could craft the fabric myself. Or perhaps if I just put the plant inside the dungeon, as a gathering objective… Maybe a safezone they could access in between minion rooms. I’d have to think on it.

Still, I didn’t bother planting more of them for now.

Two more days passed without any sign of adventurers, so I spent the time relocating my gardens to large walled outdoor areas, freeing up the temple as a receiving area, and planting Mana Blooms when I had spare mana. I had boosted my daily mana growth up to 23 by day three.

When I finished laying out my gardens, with plenty of room for expansion, I had nothing immediately pressing to do , so I decided I needed to be able to see more of the world beyond my dungeon. My area of influence had expanded quite a bit, but I was still strained to an extra barely a few hundred feet beyond the temple. So far the upper limit to my influence had remained the same. But I had an idea to test that.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

***

Long ago, a great mortal king had built a grand tower to reach towards the heavens. I thought I should know his name, but when I tried to reach for the memory, it was shrouded in mist. I tried to push the mist aside, but pain shot through my core, and I relented with frustration.

I wondered where my core fragments had landed. Perhaps they were lost forever. What was the use of ten thousands of years of memory if I couldn’t remember what mattered?

Still, I remembered the tower well enough. It had been futile - no object of stone could reach all the way to the sky. But it had been grand and beautiful, a testament to the ingenuity and hubris of mortals. I’d always wished I could’ve stood upon its pinnacle.

I set to work on it through the night. I was able to see just as well in darkness or light, and didn’t need sleep, and I had nothing else to do while I waited, so it only made sense. I located a spot on the open plain in front of the temple, where the bedrock was solid, and first laid a foundation of solid stone, one hundred feet square. Then I raised massive stone walls on each of the four sides, to a height of two hundred feet. The walls tapered, getting thinner towards the top, and I carefully smoothed any imperfection in the stone as I worked. I didn’t know how much weight the walls could take, so I supported the whole structure with another central column of stone, around which I wrapped a spiral staircase.

The next floor was in the shape of an octangle, fifty feet across, and with stone walls a hundred feet tall. This allowed room for a large ledge around the base of the octangle, which I decorated with statues of some of the beasts from the temple’s ceiling mosaics. The original tower had featured four huge statues of an ancient god, but instead I placed dragons, griffons, serpents and humanoid creatures with horned heads and large leathery wings. Sculpting was getting easier each time, and once I’d made one statue, it was easy enough to copy it to another location. My core seemed to store a copy of things I’d built, and I just had to will that copy into existence instead of focussing on the details one by one. Even if no one else ever saw my menagerie of statues, they pleased me.

Half way through building the octangle itself I reached the limit of my influence. Previously, even with mana, I hadn’t been able to force my influence to go higher. Now, when the stone reached the limit and stopped growing, I pushed some mana into expanding my area in a square the width and breadth of the tower.

At first, it seemed like nothing would happen. Then the System seemed to catch up to what I’d done and it started growing again. As I’d thought, the upper limit had been a product of distance from the ground, or perhaps my structures. By building the tower, I had convinced the System to raise its limit. It felt good to have figured out a rule like that with no one to explain it to me.

Now with more room to build, on top of the octangle I placed a final cylindrical segment, twenty five feet across and fifty feet tall. I used bronze to create tiles for a dome, and at the very pinnacle of the dome, I built a viewing platform, surrounded with a low fence of bronze filigree. If I ever figured out a way to have a physical body, I’d enjoy standing here and watching the sky like mortals did. It was something to look forward to.

I recalled my memories of the original tower and realised I’d forgotten something. There had been a statue on the pinnacle of the original. It had been a statue of a mythical figure, but I had a better idea. I formed a small pedestal in the middle of the viewing platform, and started to work.

The memories were fuzzy, but unlike his name, I could still mostly see what the tower’s builder had looked like. Strong and tall, glad in gleaming bronze armour. Everything the heroes in stories always were. It had seemed almost a given that he would ascend as a god core upon death.

Yet he hadn’t. I’d waited, and he hadn’t come.

Why had I waited? What had I been expecting?

I stared at my finished statue. The face was blank, empty, just a smooth half-sphere of stone. I couldn’t remember his face.

I turned away, unable to look at it any longer.

I hovered there and gazed out, over the jungles that surrounded my temple. There were more ruined buildings out there, almost swallowed by the tangle slowly growing over it all. In another decade, there would’ve been no sign this place had ever existed.

Did anyone else remember the hero and his tower? Had it too been overtaken by nature, or buried deep in the ground?

As the sun rose over the landscape, it turned the horizon golden and red and blue. It was beautiful, I reluctantly admitted to myself.

I narrowed my vision. There was something odd about the horizon.