230 (Patreon)

The night was dark, and the university standing before Erick was pretty damned dark, too. Only a few roof gators prowled the walls and flat surfaces above the water lines, their illuminated noses adding star-like glows here and there. Or at least that’s what Erick assumed those lights were. Erick barely saw any actual roof gator bodies from this angle, for their noses were the only part of them that was truly visible when they weren’t moving around.

It was more than most other people would see, Erick assumed.

Erick suspected, if the drops of the dungeon were tailored for him, that other people in this same situation would have gotten [Light] spells, or something like that, to help them counter the darkness. Maybe the sky would have had more stars, or maybe this whole thing would take place during the day. The Old Cosmology had daystars, after all; they were like suns, but not, and every inhabited plane had at least one. There was surely at least one daystar up there… Somewhere?

Unless Riam had taken it for themselves, but then it would be orbiting Riam, wouldn’t it. Most planes of the Old Cosmology had multiple ‘daystars’, with one daystar serving as a sun and the rest serving as moons.

The [Witness] Erick had experienced back at the guardhouse, with ‘Ashes Woodfield’ overlooking the market, had been at day.

Eh.

Erick was fine in the dark, and he could find his way to the university, anyway, if that’s what it was. Now that he was here, he was absolutely sure that it was a university… Or maybe an arcanaeum. It was all about 25% destroyed, with rubble and open floors here and there, but this was definitely a place of learning.

The landscape itself was expansive, with hills and valleys, or at least it would have been before the war, and the flooding. Half of the buildings were still above the waterline. Erick suspected that many of the low areas should have had trees, but no trees grew in the water. Maybe they had been blasted away?

There were maybe 10 or 12 buildings in all, for Erick could not see everything from this particular angle, but he could see a lot. Most prominently, there was a coliseum-like place taking up a full city block in the back of the campus, while most of the rest of the place had a few different ‘main’ buildings, surrounded by satellite structures.

Erick would need to wade or swim between some of the places, but…

If he started over there, and moved through there…

He could avoid most of the need to swim unless he felt like visiting… Looked like 3 places were fully flooded. Maybe 75% of the campus was open to him, with a bit of wading.

It had been a depressing sight to see a city so torn up by war, as Erick hopped from rooftop to rooftop, but what actually sent a chill down Erick’s back was the fact that there was no reconstruction anywhere at all. No wooden bridges ramshackled together between buildings, to help people get from place to place; not even a single wooden board stuck across rooftops. No boats anywhere. No fires in the night, illuminating tiny spots of civilization here or there. No people manning the walls to fight off monsters. That big castle way on the other side of the city was completely dark.

This was a fully abandoned city.

Whatever destruction had happened here, in the course of the story of Insten’s past, had been complete. But then again, this was a dungeon. Maybe the story had become more apocryphal in the retelling.

Currently, Erick stood on some sort of business or apartment-like building across the street from the gated entrance to the university. That gate was blown to shit. According to the remains of the statues standing on both sides of what had likely been a very nice entrance, there had probably been some school name, done up in wrought iron and arching across that entrance. But that signage was gone, now. Erick couldn’t mana sense anything like a sign anywhere near the front entrance, and he was surely close enough to do that, if such signage existed.

Erick turned his attentions to other matters.

Erick had enough experience to understand what ‘a monster in the area’ looked like to his mana sense, and there was no characteristic cloud of unknown space down there, at the gate to this place of learning. He could go in that way. If he wanted.

He wasn’t going to go in the front way, though, because the front entrance led to a very wide, open lake-like space, and the front building nearest to that space was still a good hundred meters further in from that entrance. That was a lot of water to wade and swim through.

So Erick hopped across a few more buildings to the right, until he came to a space where the average land of the city rose a little, and only half a meter of water covered the roads. Over here, a gatehouse leading into the campus and the iron-bar fence had been ripped apart by some wartime force, giving Erick a clear line of entry into one of the buildings that was almost above the waterline.

Erick killed another two roof gators for another pair of MP-ups and made his way down to ground level, jumping from broken rooftop to broken upper floor, and then sliding down a rubble pile to finally splash down into the water. Rocks tumbled and water splashed as Erick trudged across a wide, open street.

He was the only one making a sound in the area, his tiny splashes echoing into the night, so Erick tried to make less—

Something growl-yelped from beyond the broken fence ahead, from inside the university. And then that sound deepened, becoming a minor horror that was the sound of death, crawling across the world, and then slipping back into the shadows—

Beyond the waters, up the incline, the entrance to the nearest university building was covered in shadows. And then some of those shadows split away from the broken door. It was only a small blob of shadows. No more than the height of a normal house cat. In fact, it was a normal house cat. The blob had become a black housecat. All Veird’s house cats were all 20 kilo tiny tigers, though, and this one was no different. It was as big as most normal dogs.

Erick hesitated to call it a shadowcat; those shadowy masterminds who, through shadow control, could turn most lesser animals into formidable infantry units. Shadowcats had multiple tails and were made of shadow stretched over exposed bone and meat and pain. This cat was quite different from that. It only had one tail. As far as Erick could tell, this cat was completely normal. It had normal cat eyes that did not glow at all…

Well maybe there was a bit of a golden glow, there? Could just be the tapetum lucidum; the ‘shining layer’ in cat eyes shining back at him... No. Ah. Yes. Those eyes were glowing a slight gold color. Yes. They were glowing, and flexing, focused on Erick, and glowing a little bit brighter as the cat recognized that Erick had seen it, and was looking at it.

The cat looked at Erick, over in the waters.

Erick stared back. He unlatched his rod of the guardian from his belt and hefted it, waiting for the fight.

The cat sat down on its butt, its tail languidly swishing back and forth in the air. It yawned, and half its body opened up, the face and ribs and all the way to the pelvis opening up into a great big maw, leading into some dark place beyond the cat, and letting out a tiny roar, before the cat closed up again, and resumed its patient wait. It was not about to get into the water.

It was a horror, and it was okay with waiting for Erick to come to it.

Erick walked forward, ready to oblige.

The cat stretched out, its butt raising into the air as it reached forward and clawed the ground with claws that were each suddenly the size of a tiger’s, carving five grooves in the ground for every claw scraping through stone. The cat soon stopped stretching. Its massive claws returned to normal size.

And Erick stepped out of the waters, to stand ten meters away from the cat.

The cat paced forward, not thinking Erick a threat at all. And then it casually leapt into the air, aiming to fall upon Erick with tiger claws spread wide and its body half open, its mouth ready to bite his head off, its purr turned into a hunting growl.

Erick stepped to the right, raised his rod of the guardian, and smashed to the left, aiming to catch the cat right at its butt, the only part of the creature that couldn’t turn into a full mouth.

The cat went spinning through the air with a sudden yelp.

It was like hitting a thousand-kilo boulder. Erick still managed to adequately deflect the cat, of course. He had put his entire force into that swing. The cat went tumbling into the waters, its yelp turning into a sudden shriek as it touched dark water. Freaking the fuck out, terrified for its life, and making sure everyone knew that by the tone of its roar, that cat was still unable to do anything but paddle around, frantically tying to get out of the water.

Erick thought about going out into the waters to kill it, but he had smashed that cat ten meters out there into the waters, and he wasn’t going to allow it to pull a watery trick on him. Instead, Erick stepped back, further onto dry land, to see what happened to the cat when it came out of the water. If it ever stopped panicking—

The cat suddenly stopped panicking.

Fully wet, and treading water easily, even though Erick thought that it should have sunk right to the bottom, the cat looked at Erick with hateful, golden eyes.

And then it melted into the shadows of the water, vanishing from sight, and all the water for fifty meters around suddenly turned invisible to Erick’s mana sense. The cat was out there, in the water. Waiting. Erick stared at the wate—

Erick’s mana sense returned to everywhere but right behind him, where a shadow leapt out of the waters, aiming straight for his head.

A twirl and a smash sent the cat back toward the university, where it turned in the air, righted itself, and landed on its feet right in front of the university door. Again, striking the cat had been like hitting a ton of rock. The cat looked fine, too. The cat sat down on its butt, its tail not moving at all, as it looked at Erick with bright gold eyes.

It was completely silent. No purrs. No roars. No whines of anger.

The cat turned around and slinked into the shadows. It was gone. Within a moment, even the shadowy space in Erick’s mana sense had vanished.

You have cleared a part of The Arcanaeum of an unknown threat! 1/13!

MP up! +50 mana production per day!

… Well okay then.

It was a good thing that the fight had ended there, Erick considered, as he looked at his Rod of the Guardian, and saw it healing from great scars. The rod had been fine as Erick killed all those roof gators and spiders, but every single time he used it too hard, it took damage. Before its two confrontations with the boulder cat, the thing had been pristine. But after two contacts with the boulder cat it had gained some scratches, as though the beast had managed to scratch the metal when Erick wasn’t looking. But he had always been looking, so that was odd. Perhaps the cat had a damage-reflection power? Possible.

Probably just had a damaging aura. Kinda surprising for it to have an aura when Erick couldn’t use his aura properly…

Maybe it had a Domain, then? And it was using it?

… Maybe.

Anyway. Whatever damage the cat had done to the rod had healed the very moment that Erick ‘won’ the battle, driven the cat off, and gained that 50 mana. A good portion of that mana had instantly slicked away from him, falling directly into the rod. Repairs happened immediately.

Erick suspected that once he gained enough mana per day and a [Meditation] skill that could turn his per-day into per-hour, any damage to his weapons would be instantly repaired, all the time, even in the heat of battle. But for now, the rod seemed to take small damages all the time when in use.

“Status: Rod of the Guardian,” Erick said to the air.

Rod of the Guardian (depleted), 274/300

The weapon being ‘depleted’ probably had something to do with it taking damage, too. But Erick was at an arcanaeum now, according to the previous message. Surely something here could tell Erick a bunch about how these metirons and metamonds actually worked, and allow him to actually make some magic of his own.

Erick fully expected to need to kill that cat later, but for now, he grinned as he stepped forward into the dark halls of the arcanaeum.

- - - -

If you’ve been to one arcanaeum, you’ve been to them all. This one was mostly the same as all the rest, and subsequently filled with lecture halls, classrooms, and a few specialized casting rooms. There were even a few different libraries.

No monsters at all, which was nice to see. There weren’t even any eels down in the flooded basement. Maybe the cat ate them all. Or maybe this was just part of the story. Erick didn’t feel safe enough to walk around without a care, but the game-like nature of the dungeon seemed to have certain rules, and those rules included things like ‘making noise in one area doesn’t attract every monster from kilometers around’ and ‘once an area is clear, it remains clear’. That might not be strictly true, but from Erick’s experiences so far, it seemed true.

According to the quest marker that told Erick that he had cleared out 1/13 of the arcanaeum, he suspected that would need to fight that cat 11 more times, and then another time at an unknown 13th location, in order to clear away that quest and actually kill that cat. Erick had gotten a better look at the rest of the buildings through the various holes in this one, though, and he only counted 12 buildings out there, including the coliseum. Maybe the 13th spot was a courtyard somewhere? Some hidden location?

Eh. Erick would figure out all that eventually.

For now, he searched this particular building for bits of magic, wherever that magic might be, starting with the least-most promising area. The library. There was a major problem with the library, though.

“All the books are fake!” Erick said, slamming the tenth book shut, and throwing it down into the rubble of the nearby broken wall. The library had been shelled by heavy ordinance and was half gone, but still… He had been hoping for something good. Some trove of information. Maybe even a ‘spell tome’; whatever those might be. Erick stared down at all the illegible pages inside all the open books laying on the ground, and sighed. “It’s all scribbles.”

Erick grabbed out a few more books, just to be sure that what he was seeing with his mana sense was what he was seeing.

And then he tossed those books to the ground, too.

The library was a bust, but then again, he had expected it to be… Well. Not a complete bust. There were many places in this particular building that looked promising. The library simply hadn’t been one of those places.

Erick moved on.

- - - -

After a few steps down the hallway, up some stairs, and around a corner, Erick arrived at the actually-most-promising space in the building; the whole fourth-floor hallway. There were two student laboratories and one professor’s office, and none of them looked like the rest of the wrecked university.

These rooms had lights, solid walls, and more. Erick couldn’t see the light from outside the hallway, or even in the manasphere, since the windows to the rooms were all blocked and boarded up, and there was some fuckery going on with the nature of reality here in the dungeon.

As for the rooms themselves, they were pretty special.

The first laboratory had what appeared to be a metal working furnace on one side, which was not meant for simple work, like cast iron or steel, with their beds of coals. This furnace was smaller, and looked like something that one would use with specialty metals, like for making enchanted items. The other half of that room held wax and carving tools, which seemed to fit with the specialty furnace Erick was looking at. It was all stuff to use in the lost wax casting method, where a person would take a wax shape, bury it in plaster or other materials, then burn out the plaster, leaving a hollow that could then be filled with liquid metal. Only in small quantities, though. The rest of the lab had some benches set before tiny anvils and assortments of metal files, which was again like what Erick would expect to find in a jewelry shop, or enchanter’s workshop.

This first room looked like a good place to cast metiron.

… But maybe not, now that Erick was looking closer. Maybe this ‘display’ was more of a hint of things to come, for though the room existed, it looked more like a museum piece or reenactment, than a valid work place. There was no visible fuel for the furnace and where the fuel should have been, all there was were pipes leading off into empty air. Over at the wax station, there was no sand or plaster or other material with which to surround a wax casting. Perhaps Erick could turn this location into a working workshop, through gathering supplies located in other parts of the arcanaeum, but for now, the other two rooms held a lot more promise.

For the other two rooms had actual dungeon script floating across their doorways, like ephemeral barriers Erick would need to break to cross.

The professor’s room read: Ask a professor ONE question.

The other laboratory read: Make a new spell, using remnants of other spells.

Erick didn’t go into either room, but he did look around inside both. The professor’s room was a standard office space, but without any personal effects at all. The walls were bare. The book shelves were empty. All the room held was one nice leather professor’s chair, a desk, and then a student’s chair sitting on the other side of the desk.

Across the way from the professor’s office sat the spell-making lab. That laboratory had quite a lot of stuff, and it looked set up for multiple experiments. There were black lab tables and bits of metamonds sitting on those tables, alongside various arcane tools. None of those metamonds were whole, though; they were all broken. Erick suspected that they would be used as fodder for the creation of new spells, as the writing on the doorway said. The most interesting item sat in the back of that space, beyond the lab tables. It was a large, dull-grey metal box, maybe 3 meters cubed, with a vault-like door and several small windows. It was large enough for most people to fit inside.

The walls of the container were opaque to his mana sense, but the vault was open, so he could mana sense inside just fine, and there was nothing in there. Looked to be easy to open from both sides of the vault-like door, too.

Erick was… Not sure what he was supposed to do in the laboratory. He had ideas. Some of them were probably correct. Obviously he had to make a new spell using remnant metamonds sitting on the various lab tables. But how? By using the vault in the back? Well sure; that was the obvious answer.

The goal of Floor One was for a person to make their own spell, using a spell creation tome, and then advance to the next floor. None of this here was a ‘spell creation tome’. But…

At the very least this probably served as instruction on how to use a spell tome.

Erick felt the [Murky] gem in his pocket, and wondered if he could use the stuff in these rooms to make that gem into something useful. [Murky] was an intact metamond, fully spherical and filled with sparking grey light, while all the metamonds in this room were broken.

Each table only had one color of broken marbles…

There were six tables, and each of those gems were color-coded to match the Six Primary Elements, of Light, Shadow, Stone, Fire, Air, and Water. Hard to tell the exact colors, but the flavor of mana there seemed pure to Erick’s mana senses. Metamonds weren’t normal items to sense, though, so Erick wasn’t quite sure if he was correct about them being ‘pure elemental’, but he was pretty sure they were pure.

Well.

There was one place to get answers about all this, and it wasn’t this lab.

Erick turned toward the professor’s room, where the words ‘Ask the professor ONE question’ floated, and he walked through the script—

The room came to life.

“Look, Debbie,” said the professor to her student, “Your grades are down, and if you can’t get a 60% on the upcoming exam, then your scholarship is over. I cannot state it any plainer than that, and it does not matter that mana is faltering faster and faster. The entire arcanaeum has adjusted its curriculum to help young dabblers overcome this Emptying and it is your duty to compensate right alongside the rest of us. Now please leave, and join one of the many study groups I have outlined for you. You have taken up enough of my student hours, and I have a new arrival.”

The professor was an average human woman of brown everything, from skin to hair to eyes, who seemed stern and solid in the face of Debbie, who looked just about ready to throw a punch.

And then Debbie suddenly burst into tears and raced out of the room, almost colliding with Erick on the way out. Erick stepped out of the way, though, and Debbie kept rushing away, down a hallway filled with students lined up for the professor’s office.

Erick was next in line, though, since he was already inside the room.

Politeness demanded he not take up too much time with the professor, and though Erick thought he had a question about how to work the vault-like thing sitting in the other room, he suddenly had a different question entirely.

Erick got right into it, “Hello, Professor. I would like to know how to make this item non-depleted, and what that would mean.”

He set the Rod of the Guardian onto the professor’s desk.

And the professor arched her brow. When she had spoken to the student, it had been with a voice filled with stern concern. Now, though, her voice came out as though half-robotic, without any real inflection or stress on any particular words, “I have more experience with meta-diamonds, for the meta-irons are rather more reservoirs than anything truly special. Are you sure this is your question?”

Erick realized he was not speaking to a real person rather fast, but that little act with Debbie had almost thrown him for a loop. He had almost thought that he would be talking to a real person, who was just sitting behind the scenes, as people sometimes did in dungeons. But, no. This was more like interfacing with a [Familiar] who was still a good half-century away from maturing into an actual person.

He was probably talking to a routine created from the Dungeon Core itself.

He almost asked some much deeper questions about the [Witness] he had seen with Ashes in the courtyard back by the guardhouse. But… He had time for that, later.

Erick stayed on task. “Yes, I am sure these are my questions.”

“Metairons are all created with specific metamonds in mind, for the whole process of item creation begins with a function, and form comes later. The metamond comes first. The metairon comes afterward.

“You have a depleted form. The function it should have is already ‘baked into the cake’.

“Therefore, create or find a metamond that will bond to the iron in the way the rod is missing, then soak the iron in enough of its own mana in order to loosen the metal, and then join the metamond to the metiron.

“Repairing a weapon-shaped metiron is almost impossible, though, so I suggest you focus your efforts on any other endeavor instead, and only use this weapon for as long as it serves. When you find an upgrade, or when you need one, break this iron and reshape it entirely into a new form, around a new function.” The professor tried to lift the rod to hand it back to Erick, but she failed due to the weight. She left it on the table, and said, “Please take your weapon and depart. There are more students to deal with after you.”

Erick easily picked up the weapon and clipped it onto his belt, saying, “Thanks,” as he took his leave.

Another student stepped into the professor’s office as Erick entered the hallway—

The professor’s office went dark. Every single person in the hallway vanished, and the sounds of soft conversation vanished with them. Only two rooms remained lit in the hallway; the metamond laboratory with its 6 elemental fragments, and the furnace room that had no supplies besides wax.

… Erick turned back toward the professor’s office. He wanted to see if he could get another [Witness]. And so, Erick cast his sight through the manasphere, into the distant past—

The world flickered.

- - - -

Ashes paused at the closed door, in the dim hallway. Classes were out, but the professor, Markie’s wife, was in. Or at least she was supposed to be. Her door was closed, and the hallway was silent...

The only sound was of soft crying coming from behind the closed door.

Ashes felt a chill sweep through his body at that sound. He froze, unsure how to handle what lay beyond that closed door. Ashes had never been the most empathetic when it came to crying people, and Sofie had told him that she was fine, and that she was taking some time off. But upon hearing that Sofie was here in her office, he had to go talk to her.

And here she was crying.

He realized what he needed to do. Stepping back softly, maybe ten steps and outside of hearing range, Ashes leapt up and came down on the floor rather solidly. With briefly loud steps, he made his way back to the office.

Markie’s wife, Sofie, was no longer crying.

Ashes knocked on the door.

“Co—” Sofie’s voice broke. “Come in!”

Ashes opened the door.

Sofie’s face was puffy and reddened, and tears marred all of the paperwork in front of her, but she noticed Ashes noticing her paperwork, she tried to smile at him as she slid a folder over what she had been working on. With false joy, she said, “Ashes! What brings you here?”

“Don’t tell me they told you to come in after what happened. You should be at home, Sofie.”

Sofie froze, and then her smile became both more strained, and more true. “I’m fine. We expected it might happen. And… There’s no baby leave if there’s no baby, right? I’m fine. Please, distract me with whatever you came in here for, for you never do social visits.”

Ashes frowned. He went over to their house for dinner and beers every week… But she was mostly correct. He wasn’t here at the arcanaeum for a social visit. Ashes got right to it. “I’m looking to contact the resistance.”

Sofie sobered up instantly. “… I don’t know about them.”

Ashes had stayed away from this specific conversation with Sofie and Markie…

But the time for subtlety was over.

“Even though you kept it quiet, I know you and Markie are talking about leaving. Until this recent horror, you called yourself never-leavers. And you’re a professor here, where students talk all the time about new stuff. You know about the resistance, Sofie. I never spoke about this around you, and you and Markie never talked about it around me, but I know. Sofie. I know.” Ashes stated, “And I’m looking to join.”

Ashes had taken a chance.

And Sofie took a deep breath as the full weight of his words settled upon her.

Ashes waited.

Sofie said, “Close the door.”

Ashes closed the door, then sat down across from Sofie.

Sofie brushed away a few stray tears. “Are you really doing this?”

“I am.”

“… Ramblewood Arcanaeum and University has absolutely nothing to do with the resistance. Nothing. We simply teach everyone who walks through our doors, and we try not to ask too many questions about any of our students, aside from what we’re legally required to ask. The Adjudicators of Riam routinely monitor RAU for violations in our lesson plans, and misappropriations are handled by them. People disappear, Ashes.”

Ashes knew a little bit about the disappearances, but his captain always told him that it wasn’t his duty. And Ashes had always accepted that it wasn’t his duty. But things had changed. It was hard to pinpoint exactly where the change had happened, but Ashes could not ignore what he was seeing anymore.

“What can you tell me?” Ashes asked.

“Not everyone can make a core and learn magic, and even cores can’t truly hold mana in the face of the coming True Emptying. So look to the ways in which mana and thus magic can survive the Emptying. In how mana can be collected and used outside of Riam’s power.” Sofie said, “Look to the ways in which magic is put into the hands of the common people, and how that magic can be used even in a True Void.”

Ashes furrowed his brow. “… Magic item creation?” He glanced at the silver bracelet on his wrist, and felt the weight of the rod at his side. Both of them were hand-down gifts from his father a decade ago, when he retired from the guard. The rod had become depleted long ago, somewhere in his father’s time, but the bracelet still functioned passably well. Neither of them would survive a True Emptying, a True Void, but then again, the plane itself wouldn’t survive that, either, so worrying about that was like worrying about what would happen ten thousand years from now. And yet... “They’re working on items that can survive a True Void?”

“And all other low-mana environments, too. The first working prototypes came out—” Sofie caught herself. “I heard the first working prototypes came out three years ago. Some of the resistance even used them to assault a Siphon and it worked. They could control their mana around the Siphon. Maybe one day soon you can upgrade the stuff you have now into something that can also survive whatever Riam may inflict upon us all.”

Ashes looked at Sofie, deeply, for that last line of hers had been well over the threshold that would get the Adjudicators looking at her.

Sofie knew that, too. She did not say another word.

Both of them were taking risks, but Sophie more so than Ashes.

Ashes nodded. “Thanks, Sofie.” He got up from his chair. “Thank you.”

Sofie struggled with something for a moment, then she went still, and simply said, “I don’t know how the resistance does it with their item creation, Ashes, but it's about mana crystals. Goodbye, Ashes.”

—Ashes paused.

‘Goodbye’?

He glanced again at Sofie’s paperwork, where she hadn’t managed to cover it up with that folder. He wasn’t entirely sure, but it looked to be paperwork to request true time off. Months or more, fully paid. But that was a ruse. If Sofie wanted true time off, then she could have it. She didn’t need to fill out a small stack of papers… So why would—

A realization.

Ashed looked down at the paperwork, and asked, “Tenure termination?”

Sofie looked down and away, saying nothing.

Ah.

She was cutting tenure and taking her money.

Sofie was leaving.

Markie would be leaving with her.

Sofie and Markie would be vanishing as soon as she got her money.

With a sad tone, Ashes said, “I’ll see you when I see you.”

Sofie froze. And then tears fell once again. “See you when I see you, Ashes. Good luck.”

“Good luck to you, too. Both of you. If I don’t see Markie, tell him I’ll look after his bees.”

Sofie sniffled once. “Thank you, Ashes.”

Ashes left. He closed the door behind him and soft crying once again filled the air.

- - - -

Erick yanked back into his own body.

For a moment he stood there, thinking about what he had seen. Yet again, casting his mana sense into the past had not produced a typical [Witness]. Instead of vaguely seeing the world as it had been hours, days, or however long ago it had been, Erick had been transported into the body of ‘Ashes Woodfield’, located somewhere in the distant past, and he had become that person for that interaction. He had known things that he did not know, and he had seen things that did not actually exist, for this dungeon was just a dungeon. It was not real…

It wasn’t real, right?

No, of course it wasn’t.

Not really.

Historically, all of this war and Emptying might have been true. There might have been a ‘Ramblewood Arcanaeum and University’ in the city of Iben, on the plane of Insten. But Erick seriously doubted that ‘Ashes’ and ‘Sofie’ and ‘Markie’ ever really existed. It was a story that the dungeon masters had put in here for those who went… Looking into the past? Or something? An ‘easter egg’, as Jane would have called it?

But how could an easter egg be tailored to Erick’s character’s name?

Well. Actually. That wasn’t too surprising at all. Erick had logged his name with the dungeon, and the dungeon had built a narrative around that name. It was some impressive magic, really. Erick could only assume that Wizardry had to be involved. Dungeons were in direct control of a lot of mana, so in a technically-true way, they were almost like Wizards. Though… Maybe not. Not really.

Erick moved on.

‘Sofie’ had mentioned mana crystals.

Erick pulled [Murky] out of his pocket and looked at the gem again. It was a ‘marble’ about two centimeters across, with grey edging from every possible viewing angle, while the inner fractal smash in the center was mostly black and grey. Erick rotated the metamond in his grip and shadowy light danced inside.

Full Wizards were fully-crystallized mana crystals made of their own particular mana.

Metamonds were crystallized power, twisted into a singular direction; into a single spell.

They were mana crystals, eh? Somehow Erick had expected them to be… Something else.

“This Second Script is cleaving rather near to how Wizards and soul-imbued spells function, eh?” Erick said to himself, to the empty, well-lit hallway. “Except the ‘cores’ and ‘spells’ are separated into metirons and metamonds…”

It was a bit complicated to do it that way, but separating the base mana capability from the spells would allow spells to be changed out as desired, and limit the base power capable through limiting publicly available meta-irons to something more the size of Erick’s bracelet, rather than his Rod of the Guardian. Even the mana in the rod wasn’t that great, though…

You’d probably need a meta-iron the size of a building to do any large, Wizard-sized magics.

Which was both a plus, and a minus.

… Eh.

Erick went into the gem laboratory, walking right through the floating script strung across the door.

The room had six lab tables, each with a single small metal box sitting on them, along with some assorted measuring tools and hammers and general arcane devices. Each of those small boxes had a broken metamond, each of them looking like broken, brightly-colored children’s candy sitting in a container that would have otherwise been used for frog dissection.

Erick recalled the Rod of the Guardian that Ashes had, in the visions. The rod had also been depleted for Ashes, and he was only really able to use mana to keep the rod properly shaped and maintained, which was, quite honestly, already amazing for a magical item. A weapon that never wore down was a fantastic thing to own. But when Ashes’s father had the Rod…

What had the rod been capable of doing...

“[Force Binding],” Erick said, recalling how it had been in the memory. He wasn’t 100% on that, because those [Witness] memories were all foggy around the edges, but he was pretty sure. And then he frowned, and looked around the room. “I don’t have any Force options here.”

White, black, yellow, red, magenta, blue; those were the colors of the gems. Just the Primary Elements, and all of them were broken anyway. He didn’t actually need these pieces right now, though. Erick turned his gaze toward the metal room in the back of the laboratory.

He went into that metal room, through the door set onto the corner of the metal box, and closed the door behind him, the metal sliding shut without a sound. First, he checked to see if he could get out again, and he could. The door operated perfectly well from both sides. So Erick shut the door again, and this time he flicked the locking mechanism.

Metal shifted inside the door, and inside the walls of the cubic room. Erick couldn’t see any of that, though. Shutting the room had fully shut his mana senses off from the rest of the world.

He could still look outside the small windows set on the edges of the chamber. The lab was still illuminated by wardlights in the ceiling. This small, metal room was also illuminated by lights, but they were lights that sat beyond special glass portals in the roof of the room.

This room was a special room, that prevented the transmission of mana beyond its walls. Erick’s initial guess was that the room was probably made of antirhine, but antirhine alone wasn’t completely capable of closing off a space from mana intrusion. When a person took in an antirhine potion, for example, they could still express mana from themselves, but that antirhine poisoned their body and their aura. They couldn’t shape that mana at all, since antirhine stripped all intent away from all magic, turning that magic back into mana. A poisoned person couldn’t make magic at all.

But antirhine —lead— still allowed mana to pass through, if that mana was in sufficient quantities.

Ever since Songli got their chelation treatments working well, there had been a lot more experimentation with antirhine potions, since it was possible to clear lead out of people after just a month of treatment. Of the more savory applications of chelation treatment, there was Tadashi, the original discoverer of the possibilities of chelation before Erick showed up. He ran a whole hospital now, dedicated to cleaning up antirhine the world over. He was once again a healthy young man and Erick had even given him a [Reincarnation] and Intelligence to help him along in his journey to remove poison from the world.

Erick knew a lot more about antirhine than most people.

Rozeta still hadn’t allowed Erick to know exactly how the Script worked, but he was almost 100% sure that lead was used as a grand filter, to strip all possible intent from all mana that anyone produced, the world over. This stripping of intent made that mana able to be filtered back into people, to be used by anyone with Script access.

As for Erick’s current predicament, with the antirhine walls all around him, the little bit of mana currently in the air of this room would generally stay inside the room, until the mana pressure inside the room got turned way up. Higher than what was required to create a mana crystal, too.

Since Erick was planning on doing exactly that, the lead room itself couldn’t be strong enough to pressurize mana into condensing into a crystal. So either this room was dungeon magic, and it worked better than it should, or else they had some secondary system surrounding the antirhine room, to truly contain the mana inside; like an Edge to the Script, but not really that at all.

Ar’Cosmos had some fae fuckery going on to make their mana crystals. One could make mana crystals over there a whole lot easier than one could make mana crystals on Veird itself, for a whole host of reasons. Over there, they used a system similar to this antirhine one here, but they used an Elemental Fae Edge and avoided antirhine entirely, to make a room that contained mana perfectly. Once they managed that, they simply turned up the mana pressure on the fairy box and if the mana inside was pure enough, it turned into first a liquid, and then crystal.

Mana was kinda special when it came to other forms than the form found in the manasphere.

When mana became magic, that was technically a phase change, but that phase never lasted that long, unless the caster put some Permanency methodology into that casting.

True liquid and crystal form mana remained in those forms, forever. Rozeta even had a vast collection of mana crystals as storage to use to power Veird, should an emergency ever occur. A lot of people in-the-know considered the entire Core of Veird as one giant mana crystal, and Erick was one of them. The Core was a very special mana crystal, but it was still a mana crystal.

And like a quartz crystal removed from the forces that made it, a mana crystal once it was removed from that pressure could be selectively transformed (mostly through aura control) into a work of perpetual magic. That was how Fairy Moon had transformed a block of mana into a stat counter all those years ago, to allow Erick use that block of mana to check on his stats while inside Ar’Cosmos.

Mana crystals and cores were not the same, for crystals were inert, dead things, while cores were alive with souls. But they were similar. It was like how a living person and a dead person were the same in a lot of physical ways, except for that most important one; an anima.

Years ago, Erick had done a pressurization of mana unto himself, to turn himself into a pure crystal of Benevolence, back when he was still trying to become a Full Wizard. He had done that pressurization through Domain work, and it had worked, but it hadn’t worked permanently for whatever reason.

Once Sofie had mentioned mana crystals inside that Ashes memory, a great many things clicked for Erick about this whole scenario. The meta-irons were cores for the common man; disconnected from the self, yet powered by the self. The meta-diamonds were mana crystals for the common man, also disconnected from the self, instead of how the Script did it, which was to imbue spells directly into a person’s soul.

With all those thoughts in his head, Erick gripped the Rod of the Guardian and flicked his aura through the thing, causing it to glow brightest white as it released mana into the room. Lightning flickered as pure white filled the air—

And collided with the walls.

The walls held—

Erick suddenly felt… pretty good. Which, as soon as he felt that way, he realized that of course he would feel that way. He felt a loosening of his soul, as though he had stepped into a warm bath, as the lightning in the room slowly faded into the manasphere and the mana pressure of the room gradually increased. Within moments, Erick relaxed against the wall of the room, his eyes half closing, his Domain around his core relaxing, as though he was finally setting down a weight. Which he was. It was a pain in the ass to actively hold 50k+ mana in his core all the damned time.

At least a thousand mana had already leaked out, despite his best attentions.

It looked like the room wouldn’t be leaking any mana, though.

Concentric rings formed upon the six walls of the room, looking like targets. Erick backed away from the ring he rested against and stood in the corner, out of the way of all six sets of rings. Maybe the walls weren’t actually antirhine at all, because the lines appeared directly atop the metal, and those lines were clearly a magical effect.

So this was more like an Ar’Cosmos crystal creation setup; done through magic, and not using antirhine at all.

Erick watched as the concentric rings began to glow brighter and brighter…

But they were still only glowing with the power of a distant candle. Erick looked to the rod in his hand, and it had lost most of its glow. Erick sent a flex of his aura into the rod, trying to make it pulse out more mana... Nothing… Ah. Erick realized. The room had reached equilibrium. He hadn’t poured enough mana into the space in order for anything to manifest.

Didn’t mean nothing was happening, though.

He had clearly tripped the minimum level of mana needed to activate the space, but he was only producing 315 dungeon mana per day, and the rod had a cap of 300 mana inside. Erick glanced at the rod again, trying to figure out how much mana he had released from the thing…

Since the mana density of the air outside this mana box was around 80% normal Veird-levels, but even on Veird the mana density was not a fully uniform thing, Erick suspected that he had dropped the mana of the rod from… 300 to 150? 125, maybe? Maybe a lot less. Hard to say without specialized tools, and the ones sitting out there in the lab were foreign tools to him. He could probably figure them out—

“Or I can just say: Status, Rod of the Guardian.”

Rod of the Guardian (depleted), 79/300

Ah. So Erick had been off by a lot.

… The discrepancy was probably in the 2.5 meter diameter rings of light on every single interior wall of the room, and all the smaller concentric rings located inside the bigger ones.

Erick studied those rings now.

… They were rings of light; unknown spellwork. Erick had no real clue what he was looking at.

But Erick did manage to suss out, through his mana sense, that the mana in the room was solidly inside the room, and being directed into columns of power that rose from the center of each concentric ring, to link with the direct other side of the cube.

Three columns of mana each intersected in the center of the room.

Something was there, in that intersection, but right now it was nothing more than an oddity of thickness.

Erick would need to pump a lot more mana into this room in order to make anything appear in the center. This is probably what the various broken meta-diamonds in the lab were for; for fodder for new spell gem creation.

Which is what the text floating in front of the room had told him this room was for. Duh.

One thing still confused Erick, though. Metal, like in his Rod of the Guardian, could hold a lot of mana. Erick felt that this rod should be able to hold millions of mana, if it was anything like the metal found on Veird, like platinum or gold or even iron, when properly runed to not decay as soon as mana touched it. But for whatever reason, the Rod of the Guardian only held 300 mana.

Even Erick’s bracelet, if it were made of platinum and this was Veird, should have been able to hold thousands of mana.

Eh.

Mana crystals, like the one inside Erick’s Bracelet of [Self Rejuvenation], should hold about… Hmm. Anywhere between 250 and 4000 mana. Hard to say with crystals. And yet the crystal itself wasn’t counted at all for the mana capacity of his bracelet… Was it?

… Maybe it was? Didn’t seem to be.

Eh.

Erick would figure all that out eventually. He had already figured out that he could freely use his aura inside this mana-soaked space. As Erick extended a few mana tendrils into the air, they glowed white in the mana-soaked space, just like his Rod of the Guardian. It was a bit odd to see his aura so clearly visible in the air, and Erick couldn’t seem to make his aura invisible at all, but at least his aura didn’t break apart. His sudden ability to use his aura like normal probably had to do with the mana in this room already being his… Or something.

He could make magic in here.

In order to take that magic outside, though, the magic had to be inside a meta-diamond.

So he needed to go out there, grab some mana pieces, and break that shit inside this room to release its mana into the space… Or something. Erick wasn’t too clear on that right now, but more importantly, he wasn’t too keen on leaving the mana density of this room either.

“Two more minutes, and then I’ll go check out the metamonds,” Erick told himself, as he relaxed in the density of mana all around.

- - - -

Erick waited three minutes before getting back to it.

Opening the vault door was like a shower suddenly running out of hot water.

Erick powered through. Then he spared a glance toward the various broken metamonds sitting on the lab tables, and spared a mana sense glance toward the [Murky] sitting in his pocket. And then he thought of how little mana was in his rod right now.

Even if those hammers and those gems were all suspiciously close to each other, suggesting that he take the gems into the vault and then break them and then… Make a mana crystal out of them? Sure. Sounded right. But that would just fill up the space with some mana, and probably not be enough to enable recrystallization. So Erick needed more mana before he did more experiments. If possible, he needed to find [Meditation], to turn his mana per day into per hour, and then he could really fill up that space in there.

So where to start?

Erick knew where. He needed to kill that cat, get +50 base MP every time, and gain access to the other buildings of the arcanaeum, whereupon he would likely have access to more looting opportunities. The rest of this place should have a lot of neat stuff! Which meant he had to leave this reward room.

Which might be a problem.

This lab would probably keep if he left before using it, and if it broke as soon as he left, like the professor’s office had broken, then that sort of event would hold true for every encounter going forward. In that case, it was best to find out now that leaving a reward room would void that reward.

So Erick stepped out of the lab.

Nothing happened to the lab behind him. The lights remained on, and the mana crystals remained there, on the lab tables, just as they were before Erick had arrived. He could leave reward rooms without taking anything, and the room would remain… Or at least in this case it worked like that. With a tiny smile, Erick left the hallway of educational rewards, and ventured back out into the night-cloaked arcanaeum.

- - - -

The cat tried to jump Erick on the water-choked path between buildings.

Erick had not seen the critter when he stepped out of the previous building, but the cat had been waiting for him, and Erick had been ready to counter.

The cat leapt out of the broken trunk of some burned-out tree, aiming right for his chest. Erick stepped backward and smashed down with his rod, cracking the cat in the skull and sending it slightly off its original trajectory, and himself up and away. Erick landed on his feet, easily recovering from the surprise of the weight difference between the two of them. The cat landed on its feet, its tail raised in furry fury as it meyowled at Erick, its talons more velociraptor-sized than housecat-sized at that particular moment, its mouth open up all the way to the base of its neck.

It darted off, into the shadows at the base of the burned-out tree—

You have cleared a part of The Arcanaeum of an unknown threat! 2/13!

MP up! +50 mana production per day!

Erick held up his slightly-bent and scratched-to-hell rod, and saw a few things happen almost simultaneously. First, mana popped into existence inside of himself, and then flowed into the rod. And then the rod straightened, regaining much of its luster.

“Status, rod,” Erick said.

Rod of the Guardian (depleted), 50/300

“Ah. Shit.” Erick frowned. “It was completely depleted by hitting that cat, wasn’t it.”

… At least he knew it couldn’t be destroyed in that way. Good to know!

“Full status.”

- -

Ashes Woodfield (9 saves remaining)

MP per day: 365

Meta-Irons: 400, 0 in storage

Meta-Diamonds: 1/10, 0 in storage

Bracelet of [Self Rejuvenation], 99/100

Rod of the Guardian (depleted), 51/300

Unused Meta-Diamonds: [Murky]

- -

Erick had vaguely desired a [Meditation] metamond and the accompanying metiron, but now he needed one. This low regen was tolerable for a while, but not long term. And yet… That would be complicated, wouldn’t it? As Erick walked toward the next building, he thought of what a [Meditation] metamond would even look like.

He couldn’t just manually meditate, for Erick tried that, and it failed, so he needed a [Meditation], for sure.

“But [Meditation] isn’t an Elemental construct…” Erick muttered to himself as he pushed aside the broken door to what appeared to be a building full of lecture halls, and stepped inside the front hallway. “[Meditation] isn’t even a Force construct. It’s a way of looking at the world and dilating one’s soul through the mind… Somewhat.”

Erick considered the problem of [Meditation] and made his way into the next building.

Three of the four amphitheater-like lecture halls were filled with lights, while the fourth one was part of the destroyed part of the building, so there was nothing there. Of the illuminated rooms, each of them held a 3-meter cube of blue light down in the lecture pit. Erick picked a room and went down the amphitheater walkway, toward the cube—

Writing appeared on the cube before Erick reached it.

Break the cube to fight a monster of dubious origins.

Erick went up and tapped the cube with his rod.

The cube shattered like a mana construct and a flying spiderwasp the size of a person rolled into the air, spread its wings wide, and came right for Erick with its trio of stingers. Erick swatted the damned thing out of the air and then kept smashing down on it when it wouldn’t die immediately. Soon, though, it died. His rod had bent again by the end of it, though.

MP up! +25 mana production per day!

The rod straightened again.

And Erick allowed himself a shiver. “Fucking spiders and wasps now? Gods above.” Erick shivered again. “ ‘Dubious origins’ my ass. What the fuck…”

Erick went to the next room.

Break the cube to fight a monster of abyssal origins.

Erick broke the cube.

A tentacled thing oozed across the floor, slapping the ground with its ooze-covered limbs, its main body a collection of open maws that snapped and bit at the air. Octopuses were a lot better than spider wasps.

“Smashy smashy,” Erick said, and then proceeded to do just that.

The messed-up octopus was a lot more resilient than most other animals Erick had encountered here in the Glittering Depths, save for that cat, of course. Erick guessed that the octopus was part ooze.

It still died.

MP up! +25 mana production per day!

“Not too bad. The rod even survived this fight mostly intact. Wonder what the next room contains.”

Break the cube to fight a monster of forceful origins.

Erick tapped the container with the rod and the container broke into motes of light.

A cloud spilled out of the broken blue mana and then proceeded to shoot Erick with [Force Bolt]s.

Fighting an immaterial cloud was difficult.

Erick’s clothes ended up with a lot more holes in them than he would have liked, and he was bleeding a bit from where [Force Beam]s caught him at a bad angle, but the fight ended with Erick as the victor. Erick eventually managed this improbable feat by striking parts of the cloud’s body away from the main structure.

MP up! +25 mana production per day!

Special fight option unlocked.

A chime echoed from the hallway outside of the lecture hall. Erick could already mana sense what had changed, but he didn’t actually see what had changed until he went to the bombed-out lecture hall. There, in the bottom of that darkened space, half filled with water and half with rubble, with lights flickering above, sat a blue sphere about two meters across.

Erick approached.

Break the sphere to fight a monster of special origins.

Erick’s rod was down to 36 mana out of 300, so he was rather sure that if a monster similar to the black cat should appear that he would not be able to kill it…

He took his chances and tapped the sphere with the rod. Blue light fluttered away, briefly revealing a normal man of brown skin, amber eyes, and a familiar face. A face that Ashes had seen every single day at the guardhouse, and had laughed alongside since they were kids.

“Markie?!” Ashes exclaimed.

And then Markie’s clothes peeled away, his hands turned into claws, his eyes ignited with a golden flame that spread across his body like lava appearing between cracks in stone, and he attacked.

- - - -

George whispered to himself, “Holy shit how the damn did that happen.”

Quince looked over at him. “… What?”

“I’m busy!” George rapidly began moving through menus, pulling up event diagrams to see where Ashes would have heard that name before. He pulled up everything he could, and yet... “… Shit?”

Quince scowled, got up off his chair, and went to see George. “What,” he demanded.

George showed him the event diagrams, and made the screen with Ashes larger. As Ashes fought with Markie, George explained what he could see, “Events conspired to create a story, which is normal with all the plotlines. Ashes Woodfield is on the guardsman plot. All the names in all plots are randomized, so even if he knew the plotlines from talking to other delvers, he would not know the names of the characters.” George jammed his finger at the spawn diagram, right at the space where the name for the current mob on the screen was. “This one is ‘Markie’. And Ashes called out that name when the mob spawned.”

Quince stared at the screen with the fight. Ashes was on the defensive, trying to understand what was happening in front of him, even asking the monster why he was here. Ashes would receive no answers, though, because the creature was a fake thing. George had already arrived at an alarming hypothesis. He waited to see if Quince felt the same way.

“… He has a core,” Quince said.

George nodded slowly. “Yes. He has to. His mana has leaked into the dungeon, the dungeon latched on, and produced a result which only he would truly know. Depending on how much mana he leaks into the dungeon…” George didn’t want to continue, so he fell silent.

Quince trilled his fingers through several screens, popping them and causing more to pop up with each tap. “… I don’t see a core anywhere.”

“He must have a Domain, too. He can still use his magic here, at least a little. This explains why he spent so long inside that mana container. He was genuinely relaxing. Like monsters do inside high mana environments.”

George had one more thing to say, about the color of Ashes’ mana. That iridescent white glow was not unique in the world at all, but it mostly occurred with Benevolence Dragons. Others also had that color of white, but... The simplest explanation was probably correct.

They had a dragon in their dungeon.

George began, “And his mana is white—”

“Stop talking,” Quince said.

George stopped.

Quince frowned a little, then he made a decision. “… Whatever magic he has hiding his core should be exposed in the next floor, and Greensoil demands to know when cored people come through and especially when... dragons…” Quince paled a fraction, but he maintained decorum, as he always did. He ordered, “We have a duty to this Second Script and to Atunir that is larger than Greensoil’s demands, so we’ll hide him. Stop watching so closely in case the inquisitors should come around for an inspection. Scrub the logs. Step away from him as much as you can. Hands-off, eyes-off. We have no proof he has a core, and Atunir willing… He’s good enough to keep that hidden.”

George whispered, “I could increase his chances for an illusion item to drop.”

“… No. That’ll be noticed. If it happens, it happens, but we won’t interfere that much. The dungeon might line that up for him anyway.” Quince said, “Get to work on the rest.”

And so George did.

- - - -

Ashes stood over the corpse of Markie, but not the Markie he had known all his life. This Markie was a monster. The Markie that Ashes knew never had bones at those horrible angles, only half of which were due to Ashes’ weapon strikes. This Markie’s wrists were triple-jointed, and—

Erick blinked out a dampness in his eyes as he sniffled.

He stared down at the body below him, wondering how this whole scenario had happened.

He stared down at the broken corpse at his feet, at the broken arms, and at the bones protruding from shoulders and elbows and other joints. Most of that damage was not from him at all. This looked like a monsterfication; like what would happen to any normal person who was unable to expel mana shards from their body. Those mana shards would always collect somewhere in a person, and then make their way to the heart, where they would consume the person’s soul and grow like a tumor, like a rad.

Markie had been monsterized—

Erick took a step back.

… And then he took a step forward again, and dove into the past, to mana sense—

- - - -

Ashes stood over the corpse of his oldest friend, in the middle of a lecture hall on campus.

After a terrible moment filled with sorrow, Ashes took a step back, and began to analyze the situation. He was a guard of Iben, and he had a duty to understand what had happened before him, and why… Why had he been targeted? Because he had been targeted. There was no doubt about that.

He was here, at the school, and a monster like this should happen to be released upon him? To go right to him?

Maybe this was his fault. Ashes had planned to wait a week after seeing Sofie before he started asking questions.

He had started early, after only 5 days, because Markie and Sofie had left without warning on day 4, over three days ago, without telling anyone at all that they were leaving. The week’s dinner had been a somber affair, too, with Sofie breaking out the big meals and the very good plates, for everyone knew that Markie and Sofie were leaving, but Ashes had to pretend that they were not. Markie and Sofie were gone the next day.

And now, Markie lay dead at Ashes's feet, having become a monster that needed to be put down.

Ashes had an appointment with the administrator of finance today, inside the man’s lecture hall, which is why Ashes was here, at this specific time. That appointment was one of many such appointments Ashes had had over the last few days, to ask questions of various people about Wizards and crystals and permanent magics, and about Sofie and Markie’s whereabouts, and about a bunch of other topics to throw off any potential trail.

Ashes studied Markie’s body. Those bone growths. Those teeth. The body was mangled from the confrontation, but nothing about Markie was orderly. Everything that was growing from him was growing in odd directions. That meant rapid monsterization over the course of a few hours.

Had Markie stepped into a mana stream? That would have caused monsterization like this.

But there were no more major mana streams on Insten. Not since Riam capped all the major mana rivers with their Siphons. Monsters themselves were becoming vanishingly rare, too, which wasn’t exactly a bad thing, but all the sacred beasts and spirit beasts were vanishing, too, which was less than great. Those Siphons were the cause of the Emptying, too…

Had Markie assaulted a Siphon?

… And then come here on his own?

No. That was an absurd suggestion. The nearest Siphon was a quarter of a plane away. There would have had to be a trail of bodies for Markie to end up here, and even with cannibals focusing on people nearest to them, to eat them first… No. The more Ashes even considered that possibility, the more he realized how impossible it was.

Markie had become a monster here. Somewhere close.

Or he had been monsterized and released locally. And very close.

… The Resistance wouldn’t do this to people who wanted to go to them, as Sofie had seemed to want to do… Maybe. The Resistance was largely underground and political right now. Sure, they broke into places and stole shit and tried to upset a lot of people. But there wasn’t open war. Not yet. The Resistance hadn’t actually killed anyone on purpose, as far as Ashes knew. There were a few widely known cases of deaths being blamed on the Resistance, but…

Riam purposefully killed people all the time.

As for cannibals…

Cannibals sometimes went after people they cared about the most, so in that way, it was not too surprising that Markie went after Ashes. The location of the attack was… Strange. But Ashes didn’t know enough to make any judgments on that right now.

Would Riam set loose a cannibal, to find… conspirators for the resistance?

… Ashes had trouble reconciling that ephemeral thought with what he knew to be true, as a guard. He hadn’t heard of any cannibal attacks recently, or at least none in Iben. But was that true? There had been a rash of murders north of the Arcanaeum, but that was well outside of Ashes’s district.

Either way, he would need to take this up with the captain. This was a cannibal attack and those must all be reported to the guard, so that the guard can track—

“Guard Ashes Woodfield, I presume?”

Ashes turned around, and every lingering bit of normalcy suddenly vanished from his life, as though it hadn’t already vanished when Markie and Sofie left. But now… Now, Ashes knew what an Emptying truly felt like.

It was a squadron of adjudicators, all dressed in sleek black and grey and gold. The enforcers of Riam. They had fanned out from the student’s entrance, at the top of the lecture hall. A woman of pale skin, bright red lips, and brilliant gold eyes, was the leader. She stared at him like he was an insect.

With a hateful grin, the woman spoke again, “Did you know that Markie Greenbelt was a rebel?”

Ashes flinched as though struck. “What? Markie wasn’t a rebel!”

Ashes surprised even himself at the vehemence in his tone.

The woman’s grin faltered. “Hmm. That’s a ‘no’, I suppose. A pity.” She gestured to her people, then toward the body below. “Clean it up.”

Ashes regained some of his wherewithal. He stepped over the body. “You don’t need to get involved here. I have ended the cannibal and I will be taking him home and burying him in the family plot.”

The woman smiled, once again hateful. “Please do resist, darling.”

… Ashes stepped away from the body.

They bundled Markie into a bag and took him away.

Finally, the lead adjudicator smiled again, then whispered to Ashes, “I hear you’re asking about mana crystals, so a friendly warning: Don’t go experimenting with that which is best left to others, dear Ashes. It leads to death in many different ways.”

Ashes felt his body heat as a spark of rage took hold. “Thank you for the advice, ma’am.”

The woman grinned, then took her time walking away, looking like a cat who had gotten all the cream. She turned around once more, her eyes flashing gold.

Ashes heard a purr.

- - - -

The purr continued as Erick pulled back into himself.

There, standing on the night-cloaked rubble where an exterior wall should have been, stood the black cat. Its eyes gleamed gold as its tail swished back and forth. It smiled. And then it —she— vanished into the rubble under her paws, the mana void of her existence rapidly vanishing beyond Erick’s senses, into the deeper night.

Erick breathed deep.

The cat was gone for now, but Erick would get to that cat soon enough, because he had to kill that thing. Erick had no real way to connect the cat to the ‘adjudicator’ in the memory, but he was sure they were the same. Somehow, someway, they were the same…

Erick snapped back to himself, in a different, more solid way.

This dungeon was just a dungeon, right?

It wasn’t a real memory… Right?

Erick shook his head. Even if it was a memory, everything about this place was already dead and long, long gone. Nothing Erick did could change any outcomes here, for the Old Cosmology was unmade in the Sundering. All of this story had been unmade, and Erick had merely stumbled into the part of that old story which naturally fit the choices Erick had already made inside this dungeon. And Erick had pursued ‘Ashes’s’ story, too, so of course more of that story had revealed itself to him.

Erick put Ashes, Markie, Sofie, and the adjudicators out of his mind.

He looked at the words floating above ‘Markie’s’ body.

Choose one:

Attack. Defense. Utility.

Erick had a weapon and some self-healing, and he was a big proponent of utility, so he said, “Utility.”

Markie’s body broke into motes of mana and became a necklace, hovering in the air in front of Erick. It was a simple thing of meta-iron chain, with a larger central piece that looked like hands clasping hands, surrounding a golden gem. The item floated gently toward Erick, and Erick raised a hand to catch the falling jewelry.

The necklace touched his skin, and words appeared.

You have cleared the lecture halls (Special)!

MP up! +175 mana production per day!

- -

Ashes Woodfield (9 saves remaining)

MP per day: 615

Meta-Irons: 450, 0 in storage

Meta-Diamonds: 2/10, 0 in storage

Bracelet of [Self Rejuvenation], 99/100

Rod of the Guardian (depleted), 126/300

Necklace of [Meditation], 50/50

Unused Meta-Diamonds: [Murky]

- -

“Oh. Meditation, eh…” Erick whispered to himself as he ran a finger across the clasping hands of the necklace, and the golden gem they contained. He put it on. Nothing happened. And then Erick said, “[Meditation].”

The golden gem activated and the world seemed warmer. Like a friend was there beside him, helping to guide him on the path forward; helping the mana move through him, and into every one of his items.

“How strange,” Erick muttered to himself.

Speak of [Meditation], and it should appear.

… Erick was on the path of the mage, anyway, so this wasn’t too unexpected.

As Erick’s various items filled with mana, he thought about what had just happened, trying to understand it from any angle he could grasp. Eventually, his various items were once again topped off with mana, and a few moments later, the golden gem quieted, its glow faltering in the gloom. Erick still hadn’t sussed out what had happened back there, with ‘Markie’, but he had a few ideas.

Dungeons were spaces in the Dark. Dungeons were subject to a great many different forces that were more primeval than the ones on Veird where magic itself was (mostly) fully controlled by Rozeta and the Script. The only true exception to this fact was when individuals with a great lot of personal mana production came into the picture. Meaning Wizards. But also dragons. More than a few people these days were so enamored with dungeons that they delved all that they could, and those forays into the Dark had gained them a great lot of personal mana production, too. Those people joined dragons and even a few archmages on the list of people with their own personal mana production that was large enough to upset the local environment. They were still far, far away from a Wizard’s natural production, though.

A normal person might have 10 mana per day. A dragon? 5000. A very good delver? 3000-7500.

A Wizard? 100,000 to a million. Erick was currently at around 5.5 million on an off day. 10-12 million on a busy day.

So this mutation of the dungeon was his fault, somehow.

… Erick put the nuances of his current situation out of his mind, hefted his fully-powered Rod of the Guardian in his grip, and stepped out of the wrecked lecture hall, across the rubble, into the night. He made his way across stepping stones made of broken walls, headed toward the next building.

Erick stepped back onto proper land and the cat attacked, snarling and slashing and full of fangs. Erick called out [Meditation] and sent the cat slamming into the ground at his feet, cracking its skull but failing to do any real damage to the feline. The Rod of the Guardian glowed brightly as it absorbed more mana from him, for it had gained several large gouges on its surface and was rapidly healing those wounds, even though the cat had not attacked the rod at all.

As those gouges healed, the cat slashed at Erick’s legs with claws too large for its body, and Erick nearly broke his rod over the cat’s skull. The rod gained even more gouges, even though cat claws hadn’t gotten anywhere near it.

The cat tried to slink away after three such exchanges, but Erick rushed at it and brought it back around for another three hits, his gem necklace glowing bright gold, as his bracelet glowed bright blue.

The unwounded cat finally decided it had had enough, and turned to shadows to get away.

“COWARD!” Erick shouted.

The cat did not come back.

You have cleared a part of The Arcanaeum of an unknown threat! 3/13!

MP up! +50 mana production per day!

Erick sighed out, into the night.

And then he went into the next building.

It was a cafeteria.

It was filled with bodies that had not been there until Erick had stepped through the doors. Some of the corpses had great big bites taken out of them, or large claw marks. Most, however, had distended jaws filled with razor teeth, and human-sized bites taken out of necks and legs and arms, or they sported burn marks, or large lacerations as from [Force Beam]s, or pock marks from Bolt spells. Erick instantly identified every single way in which all 87 people in that room had died, for he had seen it all before.

They had died screaming and in fear.

He guessed what was going to happen next, and a part of him welcomed the coming carnage.

Right on cue, words appeared.

The dead rise. Kill as many as you can and be rewarded for your efforts.

Erick’s new necklace flashed gold as he tickled it with his aura, manually flicking the [Meditation] into an active state. As the dead stirred to life, some rising on arms since their legs had been cut out from under them, some rising on legs but with an arm or both missing, Erick limbered up.

They came for him.

And Erick started swinging.

Ten minutes later, Erick came out of the building covered in blood that was not his, with another 100 mana to his Status, and holding a small book. Once the last zombie had died, words had appeared, and a Tome of Spell Creation had fallen into his hands. This book actually had words inside of it, unlike all the other books Erick had found. He had already read some of those words, but mostly he had thought about what had happened back there.

For now, though, it was time to go back to the first building he had cleared, to make a new magic inside that spell creation lab, and to revive his Rod of the Guardian. Maybe then he would go on a proper hunt to kill that damned cat.

- -

Ashes Woodfield (9 saves remaining)

MP per day: 765

- -

Erick had stuck around after the carnage long enough to [Witness] the past of the cafeteria…

But it was just another horror that may or may not have been true, and the scene had taken Erick a good half an hour to work through, since only some of that scene happened in the cafeteria itself. The [Witness] had started with Ashes confronting his captain in the guardhouse about cannibal sightings. The captain had given Ashes the runaround, and when Ashes pressed the issue, he finally got a very stern order to stay away from it all, and not to write anything down in any records.

And then the scene had moved along, to Ashes going back to the Arcanaeum, to join an open meeting of students concerned with the cannibal problem happening just north of campus. Some fliers had gone up around campus, asking people to come to talk in the cafeteria. No one knew who put the fliers up, but Ashes had to find out, no matter what.

Ashes had to know about Markie and Sofie.

The meeting had been a trap.

- - - -

Ashes walked through campus, headed toward the designated location.

Night had fallen, and campus security was nowhere to be found anywhere at all, but especially not at the cafeteria, where the posters had said to come to ‘Speak about the horrors of Riam!’. Ashes had expected to need to show his badge when he stepped on campus, or at least to show his hand-in-hand necklace that was his blood-bound oath of office. But. No. He just walked into the campus, like he wasn’t supposed to be able to do, walking past empty guard stations, and followed the crowd, toward the cafeteria.

A lot of students had good enough sense to not get anywhere near the meeting at all.

Ashes saw dorm room windows shut and the wardlights off, and more than a few kids staring out between blinds, their eyes open on the night, on lookout for danger. Those were the smart ones. Or cowardly. Ashes wasn’t sure yet.

A lot of students were angry enough to get together and see if they could do anything. That cannibal appearing last week, when Ashes had been on campus, had managed to kill two students before it got to Ashes. Those deaths, and four more as Ashes had found out, had been the last weight for a lot of the kids here. They wanted answers, and they were going to get together and force the administration to talk.

A lot of kids saw Ashes walk through campus and instantly knew who he was; he was the guard who had put the cannibal down. Some of them asked if he was going to talk tonight.

“No. I’m here for answers, too,” Ashes said to the two kids who spoke to him, “And you two shouldn’t be inside that meeting at all. It’s dangerous.”

The larger kid, an 18 year old first-year based on the insignia on his coat, puffed up, and said, “My family lost the farm to Riam two years ago. I know the problem here. I just want to see if other people finally know the problem, too.”

Ashes thought it idiotic for him to wear his affiliations on the outside, so he said, “You need to take off that pin and put it somewhere else. Don’t go to meetings like this and make yourself easily identified.”

The kid huffed a disbelieving laugh. “We’re not resistance! We’re just talking about shit that needs not be shit anymore.”

The smaller guy, with no identifiable markers, good boots, and who looked ready to run, said, “We know it's dangerous. But we all live here. We’re never-leavers, and we know it’s dangerous.”

… This event was happening in the middle of campus, so they were probably safe.

But Ashes didn’t believe that at all. He couldn’t just force the kids to turn around and go the fuck home, though. If something should happen, he wished the kids luck. Hopefully nothing would happen, but...

Ashes got into the meeting just fine.

There were no faculty anywhere. No security. Nothing.

The pit in Ashes’s stomach seemed to grow.

There were about a hundred kids. Maybe 125. Everyone was talking about all the rumors and facts they knew, most of them working in small groups, some in larger groups. The crowd was getting heated.

The meeting time started, and nothing official looked to be happening. No one got on stage. No one spoke up. And that was too much.

Some angry girl got up on stage, and yelled, “If the organizers ain’t gonna start, then I am! We want answers! Our faculty won’t give them to us, so it’s time to take matters into our own hands! We’re going to write letters to the capital, and we’re going to speak to our noble leaders, so let’s organize this now! Ideally, we can either get the capital to respond with inquisitors, because all of us know that the guardcaptains ain’t doing their jobs! None of them are willing to talk about cannibals at all!”

“Yeah!” “YES!” “Absolutely!”

The audience surged with emotion, and the air charged with mana. That was what every single one of them wanted to hear. A simple, actionable plan—

Someone yelled, their voice too loud to be mundane, “Talking don’t work! We gotta hurt people! Kill the Riamites!”

The girl on stage instantly raged, “WHO THE FUCK SAID THAT! WHO SAID THAT! We ain’t no rebels! We do this right! WHO THE FUCK SAID THAT!”

The crowd could do nothing but look around, trying to find the source of the voice, as the girl on stage rightfully raged. They would find nothing, though. Ashes already saw the script playing out before he got into this room, and now, the play was happening, with none of the actors knowing they were being played. A few students on the edge of the crowd, and a few in the center, suddenly realized what was going on, too, but they were either too used to non-violence, or they were too surrounded to move.

Ashes quietly saw three people try to leave through an open side door, but they hit something standing behind the door, where Ashes could not see. Those students slowly backed back into the room, their eyes full of terror—

An adjudicator in black and gold followed them into the room, and then shut the door behind them.

Every single door to the cafeteria gained an adjudicator—

Someone screamed, and panic rapidly took hold. The girl on stage shouted about how they were going to do things legally—

Power washed across the room.

Silence.

And then a feminine voice, “My, my, my! Such naughty little children, getting up to such revolutionary thoughts. Perhaps it's time to revoke RAU’s right-to-teach.”

The girl on stage was furious. She tried to yell out counterclaims, and she flexed the air with her power, but aside from a bubble of force that was quickly squashed back into the girl, there was no resistance at all to the power of the woman adjudicator.

The shadows near the stage flexed next, and the woman with the gold eyes stepped out onto the stage, her voice filled with clarity, “Resistance will be lawfully executed. Now be good children and line up to be taken away to jail, or to the Siphon. Your choice.”

One kid resisted.

He was killed on the spot.

Panic ensued. More murder happened.

And then it devolved from there. Instead of a few kills quieting all the rest, the crowd surged with as much violence as it could manage. It was not enough.

Ashes would have stepped in and sided with the students, but the woman with the gold eyes had slipped through the shadows, to stand next to him, there in the back of the room. She had put a hand on his shoulder, and then wrapped her arms around one of his, and told him simply to stand down or they would ‘adjudicate’ his garrison and town square, too.

“Or you could take up that rod and try to strike me down right now, Ashes, and throw your lot in with these kids,” said the cat-like woman. “I don’t believe you’re actually with the resistance, which is a bit sad for me, but what’s the life of one more guard added to the pile? Not much. I’ve already killed so many, including Markie and his horrible wife Sofie.”

Ashes felt rage unfurl inside of his soul and expand to fill every single part of his entire existence.

And yet, he did nothing. All he could do was watch the carnage in front of him, and steel himself against the evil hanging onto his arm.

“… What? No fight?” asked the hateful woman, as she dug her claws into his arm. “I was sure that would get you to try something.”

“I’m no fool, ma’am.”

And none of this was normal.

Ashes dealt with people trying to filch coins from farmers, or people getting into animated fights over the price of whiteroot. Not murder. Not cannibals. Not the end result of horrible politics. Ashes only knew how to fight because every guard was required to know how to fight, and he had gotten into several scrapes over his life. He had even seen dead people before, and he had killed two men in the line of duty, when they were in the process of killing a third. Ashes knew what death looked like.

But this was the first time he had ever seen a student uprising and a massacre.

He knew what he wanted to do, but he also knew that he couldn’t—

“It occurs to me you don’t even know my name.” The adjudicator purred, “Please, call me Fyuri. I have a feeling I’ll be taking you in for questioning soon enough, as soon as you stop being such a little mouse.”

“… I’m no fool, ma’am. These kids were all traitors.” Ashes lied to save his skin, “I heard that one yell out for…” Ashes couldn’t finish the lie. He had tried to lie. He had failed.

That attempt had been enough for Fyuri to grin. “Well now. That’s interesting, too. Iben won’t look the same when Riam is done with it, so it is rather smart of you to jump ship as soon as you can. Say, little guard? You want a job?”

“I’ll take the paperwork and see what the pay is like before committing here and now.”

Fyuri laughed, and then she snapped at one of her lessers to go get Ashes an application.

As Ashes took the paperwork, he hated himself for not fighting against her right then and there, but this battle was bigger than just him, and his need for revenge. This was much larger than the already-dead students inside the cafeteria. This was a battle for the very soul of Insten.

It was a battle he would win.

After the initial horror was over, Ashes scrubbed the arm Fyuri held many times.

- - - -

Erick closed the Spell Tome and set it on the lab table in front of him.

The little book had two possible uses, and it explained those uses well.

The primary use was to be consumed as a magical item; to be used to make a spell. To do that, the user would open the book, and then pour some metamonds of all types onto the blank pages in the middle. Then, some menus would pop up and a person could select what spell they wanted from the components they had placed on the spell tome. Excess metamonds would be discarded from the spell creation. This function consumed the tome.

Simple. Effective. That primary use was how one passed the major test of Floor One.

The secondary use was as an instruction book, to teach the reader how to use the large cubic container at the back of the meta-diamond lab, to achieve the same thing as the primary use of the tome, but without consuming the spell tome. The drawback to this method is that one would need to supply all the mana necessary in order to increase the density inside the mana container all the way into a solid state.

Using the mana-diamond chamber would not consume the spell tome.

Erick opted for option #2.

To work with mana crystallization was to work with mana density, and Erick already knew a lot about what was written in the spell tome.

The density of mana in its ‘ocean’ state was considered ‘1’ on the mana density scale, which was not an easy thing to measure at all. Mana was easily compressible and expansive, and also 4th dimensional, so that ‘1’ was under very specific circumstances; sea-level, 24 degrees temperature (Celsius, but actually called Yols), and with minimal disturbance. ‘Minimal disturbance’ was near impossible, though, because of the whole ‘fourth dimension’ thing.

Anyway.

The lower-end density of a mana crystal was about 1.05, depending on the specific element, but the minimal density for a mana crystal got up to 9 to 12 for some Elements, like Air. Elemental Stone was rather darned easy to turn into a crystal, requiring the minimal 1.05-times density in order to crystallize.

Once crystallized, though, the mana density of a crystal could go way, way up.

So Erick didn’t need to bring the density too much higher than 1 to start a crystal, but he would require a lot in order to make a good crystal, and for certain elements, he would require a lot to even start the crystallization process.

Elemental Benevolence could crystallize at around a 2, and could get much, much denser than that; like stuffing a never-ending flow of clowns into a car.

Since the current density of the current manasphere was .8, being at 80% of the normal density of 1, Erick guessed that the cubic room required... at least 200 mana to get back up to 1, and then a lot more to actually make it all the way to a crystallization phase.

Luckily! Erick had a [Meditation] necklace. His mana problems were nearly solved with just that one item, and some frugality on his part.

To finish floor one, all Erick had to do was to use the Spell Tome and whatever random shit he wanted to pile in there, in order to generate a spell, any spell at all, and that would be enough. But Erick wanted to go a lot further than a simple [Bolt] spell. He was pretty sure that he could do a lot more than that, too.

His first hope was that if he simply put enough of his ‘dungeon mana’ into the air, that it could make a gem. And then he could do something with that. Perhaps. Other than that, there were 6 half-gems here in the lab, one for each Primary Element, and he had [Murky], too. He could break those and make them into something new, using the mana cube chamber. And he had 10 more buildings of RAU remaining. There were probably some fun things out there, just waiting to be won.

Even if these first experiments didn’t work, Erick just wanted to play around with mana crystals, which is something he had only done a few times, and not much at that, when his attempts to become a Full Wizard fell flat. He had a nation to run, after all.

There had been some time for spell creation, but mana crystals had been a branch of magic that didn’t have much tangible use, since mana didn’t really crystallize on Veird without a lot of effort. This was because of the Script.

… Erick thought, once again, about [Onward], and him ‘not really being there’ as a reason he failed to become a Full Wizard. But the Script's restrictions on freely created mana crystals was also a possible excuse.

Eh.

Erick grabbed the small containers of broken metamonds and a few tools to break them up, and happily went to the vault, where he set them to the edge of the room, as far away from the center as he could. Then he took off his bracelet and set that down, away from the actual focusing parts of the chamber. The necklace would stay on, but Erick took the thing and turned it around, so the gem was on his back, instead of on his chest; it would still work like that, but it would be a bit further away from the experimental center of the chamber, and it should be fine.

That exact center of the chamber was where the magic happened, and Erick wanted to keep his important magic pieces away from it.

And then Erick shut the door, and grinned.

He turned on [Meditation] with a flicker of his aura, and the gem began to glow on his back. Erick flicked his aura through the Rod of the Guardian, too. Erick began to rapidly regain mana, and the rod sucked that mana away, before it promptly spilled white light into the chamber, gradually raising the level of mana in the room. Erick relaxed. And waited. He only had 765 mana regen per hour while using [Meditation], so aside from the initial spill of mana into the air from making his rod release that mana, it would take some time for the chamber to reach full. And then his rod would be taking away half that mana until it equalized with the pressure in the room.

Eventually, after maybe half an hour, the manasphere rapidly ticked up to ‘1’ on the mana density scale.

And that’s where the density stayed for ten more minutes, as the concentric rings on the floor, walls, and ceiling began to appear, and as ripples in the manasphere began to coalesce, like pillars slowly forming between each of the opposing concentric circles.

Eventually, those three pillars slowly formed a cross beam area in the center of the small room.

Erick maintained his [Meditation] and the flow of mana from himself, to the rod, to the room.

Another half hour later, something changed.

“Finally,” Erick said, staring at the intersection of the three mana pillars.

The white light in the room had begun to flicker at that intersection, as the underlying mana began to flex and shift, as though it was thick water. The switch from that, to more, happened faster than Erick had been ready for it. Almost right away, the innate condensing power of the cube, whatever that might be, was enough to cause a condensation in the center. A drop of brilliant white liquid mana rapidly formed, and then condensed into a spherical gem.

The mana density of the room rapidly faded back to lesser levels. The room was still rather packed with mana, but all of the action happening inside the pillar intersections was gone; reduced into a single, white gem, filled with fractals.

It floated there.

“… Ah. Hmm.”

Erick had expected to need to put some of the gem shards into the liquid mana, or to break them and release their elements into the room. But no? The room and enough mana, on its own, was enough to cause a condensation into a crystal?

Well of course it was. Erick hadn’t expected it to work so fast, though.

Erick wasn’t sure what to really do right now. He had no ‘extra’ metirons to use with the Benevolence bead.

… He stuck the ball-end of his fully-charged rod into the center of the room—

The white gem zipped into the rod, like it was metal falling upon a magnet, and then buried itself inside the metal. The gem rapidly moved all the way through the length of metiron, all the way to the hilt, where it popped out of the metal and held there just above the grip. Metairon wrapped around the gem, securing it in place.

A rapid series of words appeared.

Congratulations!

You have created a meta-diamond, and inserted it into an item!

MP up! +1000 mana production per day!

Meta-diamond: [Benediction]

You have completed the major task for the first floor!

Find the floor boss, and make your way through them, to the next level!

Followed promptly by:

You have revived a depleted magical item!

Rod of the Guardian (depleted) ~/300–> Rod of Benediction ~/500

MP up! +500 mana production per day!

That was all fantastic!

… But.

Erick looked down at his new ‘rod’. It was exactly the same shape as before, but the ball-end had turned into a bunch of open wings, and even more wings had unfurled down the length of the rod.

… This was not a weapon. This was a wand.

“Not sure about this specific creation.”

Erick scrunched his face. He had not expected the transformation, nor had he expected the Rod of the Guardian to even accept the Benevolence bead at all. The rod seemed like it would have wanted some sort of… Electrical, stunning enchantment. Or something more violent. Not... Whatever he had made for it. Wasn’t it only supposed to be able to accept whatever meta-diamonds actually fit with it?

This winged transformation was not a ‘fit’ at all.

[Benediction] was not a violent thing at all… But Erick was using Veird-understandings of that spell. Maybe in the dungeon [Benediction] meant something else? Erick hefted the weapon in his hands, thinking. [Benediction], of all flavors, was normally a divine-class Buffing Magic, meant to generally empower those who use it, generally with doubled damage or a generalized damage reduction. Specific gods empowered people differently. A goddess like Zephyrspray, the goddess of travel and luck, would make a [Benediction] that granted the caster extra speed and luck.

When a god granted [Benediction], it was like granting a person perfect buffing magic, that would never harm the wielder like normal buffing magic always did. But people could make a [Benediction of Fire], or a [Benediction of Air], or whatever, and achieve the same sort of empowerment outside of divine forces. ‘Benediction’ was generally divine in nature, but it was actually just a classification of buffing spell; a ‘perfect’ buff spell that didn’t harm anyone with extra downtime, or whatever, after the spell ran out.

And here now was a [Benediction] created using Erick’s generalized Benevolence-flavored mana. But then again, he was using dungeon mana to do this; not his own, not really. So the dungeon’s mana was buffing-Benevolence flavored?

Which was kinda fun to think about.

And not actually ideal at all. Not for his weapon.

The thing looked rather flimsy right now, but maybe it wasn’t? … No. It was flimsy. But what was worse, was what if Erick struck an enemy with the rod and it empowered them? That would just be… really bad.

Actually. Erick tested that out.

He held up the weapon, and said, “[Benediction].”

The business end of the weapon glowed, and Erick chuckled a little bit, as he could already see what was going to happen. And then he tapped his leg with the feathery end, and felt a buff settle into his body. Everything suddenly felt a whole lot damned easier to him, from breathing, to moving, to everything.

It was a very good buff. Very good. Erick had trouble understanding just how good because he had no [Identify] metamond, nor did he have any blue boxes to give him clues. But he could already tell it was a great buffing spell. It seemed like it would last a long time, too.

And this wasn’t going to work at all. A rod that empowered what he hit? Even if he could hit himself with the effect, this was just a bad, sub-optimal arrangement. If the rod would have empowered Erick automatically, and kept its original weapon shape? Now that could have been workable.

This feathery thing?

No thank you.

No offense meant, Ophiel.

Erick sighed as he chuckled, and flicked [Meditation] back on. Soon he was pouring mana back into the room, and at a much, much faster rate than before, and trying to pull the gem out of the rod as soon as the rod became a little looser. Soon, mana began to slosh in the center of the room like a floating liquid, but the gem still wasn’t coming out of the rod.

So Erick resorted to some extreme measures, as outlined in the spell tome.

He grabbed one of the little hammers he had brought into the room with him, when he thought he would be using those hammers to smash the already-broken gems. A few strikes upon the white gem in the rod of benediction and the white gem shattered, and then promptly dissolved into so much extra mana.

Rod of Benediction ~/500 –> Rod of the Guardian (depleted) ~/300

The rod ‘healed’ itself back into its original length of steel, with a ball-end business end.

White mana instantly coalesced back into the center of the room, ready to reform a crystal, but this time Erick was ready for it.

With the mana density of the room so high, his aura easily expanded past his skin, into the room, into the collection of mana densely churning in the center of the room. Using his aura directly, Erick stopped the full condensation back into a gem. Then he reached over to the Air and Light broken gems, sitting on the ground. With a hammer, he smashed both of those remnant gems, and the dust of both came apart in the mana density of the room, each of them turning into a splash of mana, flavoring the room with brilliance and with wind.

That brilliant wind collected on the concentric-ring pillars, then flowed into the center of the room, where Erick manually molded the resulting gem into something more akin to what a Benevolence Dragon did when they were angry.

Working in mana crystals was quite similar to working with a manacycler; that toy that Tenebrae had shown off that could be used as a whistle, alongside an expression of mana, to create a [Force Bolt], or a [Force Wall]. Erick hadn’t done much of this kinda work, but he had done enough soul work and mana work and all other kinds of enchanting to be able to figure out the Shaping required of a single gem, which was mostly a matter of imbuing his intent into the crystal.

As Erick pulled back his aura, the gem finally flowed together.

The resultant gem was brilliant white and crackled with inner lightning.

Erick smiled as the gem hovered there.

He glanced up at the air.

… He waited?

… It was taking a while for the dungeon to say anything?

Ah.

Erick stuck the depleted Rod of the Guardian into the center of the cube, the length of glowing white metal seeming to ripple as it touched that mana dense space near the gem—

Once again, the gem slipped into the rod’s ball-end, to slip through the center of the rod, to pop out right above the metal grip.

You have joined a meta-diamond to a meta-iron!

You have revived a depleted magical item!

Rod of the Guardian (depleted) ~/300–> Rod of the Lightning Guardian ~/1000

Erick hefted the rod in his hands, and smiled as he flicked his aura through the item. Once again, the head of the rod lit with power, but it was a crackling, dangerous sort of power. It was perfect.

“No gains for making an even better weapon than before, eh?” Erick asked the dungeon.

Milestone MP ups only occur once, and at the dungeon’s discretion.

“Fair enough.”

Erick proceeded to make a few more gems, because he could, even if he didn’t have any metirons to put them in. He rapidly ran out of extra resources, though, even if all of his gems began with a dungeon-Benevolence starter. He did not use [Murky] in his experiments, though. The expression of power within [Murky] was complex, for it had at least 4 different Elements therein and some Particle Magic, too, in order to create real matter, and that would be hard to work with. Erick was absolutely sure he could make something good out of it, but [Murky] could wait until Erick found some actual good use for it.

He needed some metirons, now, which he would probably find if he killed enough shit around here.

- -

Ashes Woodfield (9 saves remaining)

MP per day: 2,265

Meta-Irons: 1150, 0 in storage

Meta-Diamonds: 3/10, 0 in storage

Bracelet of [Self Rejuvenation], 99/100

Rod of the Lightning Guardian, 509/1000

Necklace of [Meditation], 49/50

Unused Meta-Diamonds: [Murky], [Benediction], [Flaming Ooze], [Shadow Bolt]

- -

[Benediction] would come in handy later, as soon as Erick found something to stick it in, or maybe when he was willing to risk his [Self Rejuvenation] in an experiment to make that item better. [Shadow Bolt] was just because he had the Shadow gem and he had to use it. [Flaming Ooze] would work well in a wand-type weapon, as soon as he found a metairon like that. It wasn’t [Fireball], but when the mana density in the air became a void instead of an ocean, a touch-type napalm-like spell would be a lot better crowd control than an indiscriminate explosion that would puff away into broken mana faster than one could blink.

There were a lot of positive things to say about napalm when it came to warfare against monsters.

As for the rod...

Erick hefted his rod, and marveled, a little, at the thick, yet flat celtic-like knot work that adorned the very top of the ball-end, and which the hilt had transformed into. The whole thing evoked the idea of lightning and blackened trees, and from Erick’s small tests of the weapon on himself, it worked exactly like he expected it to.

It had taken him five minutes to heal the lightning burn he had done to his own leg.

With one final check on himself and his gear, Erick exited the cubic room. Mana burst out of the space like uncontained fog, a moment before Erick burst out of the room like a man on a mission. The spell-creation lab remained lit behind him, remaining usable, which was great, but Erick did not expect to need to return unless he absolutely had to.

As Erick left the hallway behind, he happily said, “That cat is in for quite a shock.”

- - - -

Erick found the cat sitting on a broken stoop, leading up to the next building. The building itself looked to be administration. The cat’s tail swished behind it, and its eyes got wider as Erick got closer, before narrowing down equally fast, to take in all that it saw. It mostly looked at the rod in Erick’s hand, and its tail stopped wagging.

It stared at him, eye to eye, waiting for Erick to get closer, and for the battle to start.

Erick stopped twenty meters away. He called out, “Is your name Fyuri?”

The cat froze in complete non-comprehension—

Suddenly, every single hair on the cat’s body seemed to rise as its eyes went super wide in complete, unexpected surprise. It bolted, running away into the shadows as fast as it possibly could, hissing just before it got out of sight.

You have cleared a part of The Arcanaeum of an unknown threat! 4/13!

MP up! +50 mana production per day!

“… Well okay then.”

Erick went inside the administration building, killed four different zombie-amalgamations of the administrators, and then he looted three complete metamonds and a wand-shaped metairon. All of that went onto his Status, and since Erick had a good reason to go back to the mana cube lab, Erick decided to go back to the mana cube room to fix it all up, into proper, working power.

Before that, though, Erick took some time to [Witness] history.

Ashes was working for the Adjudicators now. He called himself a spy, but he had no Resistance contacts. It was the only way to stay alive, and to put himself between the people of Iben, to protect his fellow countrymen from Riam.

Or at least that’s what he told himself.

He could not protect the administration of RAU from Fyuri and her Adjudicators, as Fyuri took mana crystals and stabbed them into the hearts of those people, turning them into monsters right before Ashes’ eyes.

Erick spent some extra time than strictly necessary, inside the mana cube, just to relax a little.

An hour after going into the cube, Erick came out. He felt had done a lot with floor one. But had he done enough? Yeah. He had done enough. He could hunt down quite a lot more monsters and whatnot, and he probably should go looking for an [Identify], and a bunch of other utility spells, hidden inside RAU. But for now, Erick stuck the tip of his new wand into his mouth, and activated the magic therein.

A thick, warm gruel trickled out of the tip of the wand, making Erick think quite a lot about that fabled [Conjure Food and Water] spell, but different. The metamond Erick had found in Administration and then stuck into a wand he had also found there was sustenance, and not much more. It sort of tasted like oats, if one wanted to be charitable, but it was really just warm slop which was… Fine. He supposed.

The manner in which Erick imbibed the food was, perhaps, a bit degrading, but whatever. That was neither here nor there. What was here and now, was that it was damned weird for this spell to be here. This spell had almost turned Atunir Dark, which had directly caused the Fall of Quintlan, which had directly led to Rozeta Restricting [Create Food and Water] and stripping it from everyone except for her Registrars.

It was weird for this spell to be inside Atunir’s dungeon, even if the name wasn’t exactly the same, and even if the effect wasn’t the same, either.

Perhaps the story behind [Create Food and Water] was more complicated than Erick was led to believe. He had never asked Atunir directly about any of that. Maybe he should?

Anyway.

Finally eating something and drinking something did a lot for Erick’s mental state, since he hadn’t done either in the last several hours. After getting his fill, Erick went hunting for that cat, and for more loot.

He was rather sure he needed to kill that damned cat to proceed to floor 2.

- - - -

Erick approached building #5, ready for a fight.

… And the cat was not there.

… Erick stepped inside the building—

Words appeared.

You have cleared a part of The Arcanaeum of an unknown threat! 5/13!

MP up! +50 mana production per day!

You have cleared a part of The Arcanaeum of an unknown threat! 6/13!

MP up! +50 mana production per day!

. . .

You have cleared a part of The Arcanaeum of an unknown threat! 11/13!

MP up! +50 mana production per day!

You have cleared a part of The Arcanaeum of an unknown threat! 12/13!

MP up! +50 mana production per day!

Red lightning shot across the sky like the rending of night into crimson day, followed by a world-rumbling quake. The rumble did not stop. Buildings fell. The roar magnified and turned into the exploding bellow of a great beast.

Red lighting crashed down into the coliseum in the back of the arcanaeum.

Words appeared, rimmed in red light.

Challenge the Beast of Destruction!

Make your way to the second floor!

Red lightning flickered within the coliseum, sending up shadows of black tails and claws and eyes into the sky, onto swirling clouds of mana that drained down, down, down, into the red space beyond Erick’s sight. The earthquakes slowed, and then stopped.

Water began to drain from everywhere, and red glows illuminated the deeper parts here and there. The meta-item creation lab suddenly collapsed behind Erick, along with a few other arcanaeum buildings. Erick leapt back from the one he had almost entered fully, and not too soon, for it teetered and slipped backward, crashing, sending a cloud of debris Erick’s way.

He hurried to get behind a low wall, just in time for the dust to wash over him.

As the dust settled and Erick poked back out from behind the wall, a horrible yowling echoed across the city.

“… Well okay then,” Erick said, as he faced the coliseum. “... I guess I’m ready for that? And I didn't need to use the Spell Tome?” Erick had left the tome back in the metamond lab. It was probably buried under a thousand tons of building. “… Eh. Status.”

- -

Ashes Woodfield (9 saves remaining)

MP per day: 2,965

Meta-Irons: 1350, 0 in storage

Meta-Diamonds: 4/10, 0 in storage

Bracelet of [Self Rejuvenation], 99/100

Rod of the Lightning Guardian, 1000/1000

Necklace of [Meditation], 49/50

Wand of [Drinking Food], 156/200

Unused Meta-Diamonds: [Murky], [Benediction], [Flaming Ooze], [Shadow Bolt], [Paper Control], [Memorize].

- -