A sharp pain awoke me. I cannot say what it was, but it was gone when I was finally aware of myself. I cannot recall how I ended up where I am. I cannot recall much of anything, to be honest. The only thing I know right now, is that the situation I am in does not feel normal at all.

For one, I seem to be in a very dark, wet cave, and the surfaces I can see do not seem to be stone, but I can’t identify what they actually are. Second, I have a vague feeling that I should be human, but I don’t seem to be human anymore, at least. I seem to be a crystal, lying on the wet floor of the unknown material. I can see in all directions without moving the crystal, and my sight is not connected to anything physical.

I sat there for an indeterminate amount of time, trying to not freak out and sort my thoughts. I then realized that I felt hungry. For what? I’m not sure. The feeling would not go away as I tried to figure out what to do about it. Looking at myself, I didn’t seem to have a stomach, or mouth, or anything in this crystal body, but then I came to a realization. Despite my sight being able to rotate in all directions, my areas of vision all originated from a small area around my crystal, and there was a hard line that I could not create “eyes” beyond. I focused my attention on this edge of my awareness, and it suddenly moved. I slowly moved it farther, extending it to the nearest wall. As I touched the wall, I realized I was no longer feeling the hunger pangs. This left me baffled.

This edge of my awareness also gave me a sense of touch that I didn’t realize I had until now. Not only were the walls wet, but they were very slimy. I then tried to push on the wall, only for my area of awareness to pass straight through the wall, and to the other side. From that, I was able to gather that other than the crystal, everything else I had control of was intangible.

The other side seemed to be more of the same, but there was a harder substance along some edges of this wall. I pushed my area further, to touch the harder substance, when one of my intangible eyes caught a beam of light. I pivoted my movements towards the light, and once I got close, I realized this is not a cave.

Now that the walls were in the light, I realized the walls were all a bright red. As I pushed further, I saw more of the hole the light was coming through, and it looked wrong. It was narrow, but stretched for a long distance in both directions.

The hole was directly up from my area that I could see, so I pushed myself upwards. Once I was out, I realized there seemed to be patches of a red liquid that had dried up at some point not too long ago along the edges of the entire opening. I then had a revelation.

The cave I was in was a human body. The hole was a gigantic laceration that stretched from the right shoulder down to just below the ribcage. This person appeared to be a woman when she was alive, but upon looking around I realized her corpse was stretched across an entire mountain range. I finally looked up at her face, and was wracked with pain upon doing so. I blacked out from the overstimulation.

…………………

My name was Felix. I had lived a happy, if short, life, when I died. That was when I met her.

“Oh, my poor dear,” she said in her angelic voice. “You are such a cutie, you know that? How cruel for you to have such a wonderful life cut short.”

“Uh, thanks, I guess?” I had answered sheepishly.

“Oh! Where are my manners?” She then jumped back as if she suddenly remembered something. “I never introduced myself. I am Elsa. I am a Goddess of Fate, and am here to shepherd you to your next life.”

“Oh, I guess I did die, huh?” I asked back, still a little bit nervous now that I realized this was a goddess.

“Don’t worry about that, the past isn’t what we need to focus on, what we need to focus on is your future.”

“My Future?”

“Yes!” Elsa said as she pulled me in to a hug, where it dawned on me that I was nothing but a spirit without a body. “You are one of the souls I have been allowed from the higher ups to reincarnate, and you are such a cutie that you deserve a special next life.”

Stolen novel; please report.

I felt like this Goddess was a bit odd, I didn’t think I was that “cute” or whatever. Besides, I was literally a floating spirit now.

“I have a special world that I personally keep watch over, no major worries, and other reincarnates I have sent there have all had a grand time.”

…………………

Seeing Elsa’s face jogged my memory, I realized once I woke up from that black out. I couldn’t remember anything past her picking out that world, but seeing her corpse, I could make a guess as to what happened now. She had been hugging me so tightly that my spirit had been right in the middle of her chest, and whatever made the deep cut going from her right shoulder diagonally across to the bottom of her ribs must have hit my soul as well. I guess I should be thankful that my soul wasn’t destroyed, but that also made me feel fear. Someone had killed a Goddess, and I had no idea who it could have been. The biggest worry was that I was still inside her corpse.

I can’t do anything about her killer for right now, but I suddenly had ideas for the other problems. Now that my memory of my old life returned, I had a better idea of what I was looking at. For starters, my old memories from my past life coming back gave me recollections of reading stories on certain websites about dungeon cores, which seemed to be what my spirit had become, based on the crystal core that was still sitting near Elsa the Goddess’s heart.

I then remembered that dungeon cores usually had control of their “dungeon” and since my senses were already outside, I proved my earlier self wrong about being intangible by grabbing onto a piece of the mountain Elsa’s corpse was lying on and making a tendril of rock to extract my core from her corpse. I placed my core down just outside her corpse, when I realized something was WRONG.

Looking down the mountainside, I could see foliage further down, but it was all withered and dead. I extended my senses down to take a closer look, and realized it was still decaying. I tried to analyze what was killing the plants by surrounding them, and suddenly my eyes could see mana.

The thing that was killing all the plants on the mountainside was a violent wind of mana coming from the corpse, and as the wind hit my senses, I got a sour taste on incorporeal taste buds I didn’t even realize I had. One thing I did notice as I covered the nearby trees and shrubs was that they stopped withering once I engulfed them in my dungeon. Now that I could see mana I pushed the mana that I seemed to be absorbing into the plants and they immediately flourished once again. This seemed to be happening in every direction, so I started extending myself across the entire mountaintop to halt the damage.

Several hours later, late into the night, and I had spread across the mountaintop to stop the awful destruction. Elsa’s body was still plainly out in the open, and I really didn’t want to leave her like that, though. I had an idea, but it would take several more hours. Luckily, I didn’t need to sleep thanks to my new dungeon body. I extended my dungeon down, into the mountain below the Goddess, and just like when I used stone from the mountain to move my core, I manipulated the stone and excavated out the mountain under Elsa. I then opened up the top of the mountain, reformed stone into small tendrils to hold her, and gently lowered her down into the new chamber that had taken several hours to clear out. While I kept the mountain itself hollow, I reformed the top of the mountain to have the appearance I assumed it must have had before we fell on it. I then tried to make ice inside, to preserve and protect Elsa, but realized I couldn’t. It seems that I need to have touched a material to recreate it elsewhere. Luckily, I spotted a river near the mountain when I focused my attention outwards. Hoping this would further my plan, I extended part of myself all the way to the river, touching the water, and on a hunch decreased the temperature in that part of my dungeon.

The plan worked flawlessly as the part of my dungeon that touched the river froze the water into solid ice, which I could then replicate and put Elsa in to keep her preserved. I know I didn’t have to go that far, but she seemed to have genuinely wanted to give me a better life, so I thought I should protect her body from scavengers and keep her body intact.

To keep my core safe, I used rock tendrils to make a small hole in the ice, then lowered my core into it, and filled it back in with ice. Physical material had no effect on my senses, so it seemed best to keep my core near the body I was also protecting.

As I prepared to relax for a moment, without much thoughts for what to do next, a strange sensation came over me. Several of the edges of my dungeon were continuing to extend outward. I really wanted to stay in place, not move further outward yet, but my dungeon continued growing. I tried to halt the advance on one side, but my mental exertion only halved the speed of growth. I then tried to analyze what was going wrong, and my mana sight suddenly kicked in and showed me that the density of mana inside my dungeon was increasing almost exponentially. I then tried to find the source and realized that Elsa’s body was still pouring out mana like a faucet on full blast. I may have blocked the mana from killing everything else, but now I was absorbing all of it. At least my dungeon extending outward didn’t kill what it touched. But I still didn’t want to accept that I had almost no control over my dungeon’s growth.

“WHY CAN’T I STOP THIS DUNGEON FROM GROWING?!?!”