Chương 38: An a-maze-ing chapter.

Confession. I hate humans. They think the world revolves around them and never realize how their actions affect others. They cut down perfectly good livable forests to make "towns" of dead trees and think everyone loves them. Did you know they claim there are 7 continents just because only 7 of the 15 have humans on them?! The others are "just islands"???? Muerk is bigger than the entire Mur continent you daft logger.

The worst thing about humans however, is that they have the gall to call their system given skills "magic". They claim to be mages when they need a system prosthetic just to cast the smallest of spells! Do you realize how annoying it is spending days crafting a perfect 12 x 8 x 12 x 4 x 12 harmony in a dead language then practicing your chanting for hours on end only to be compared to some hack with [Chanting] who yells nonsense, claims its "also a dead language", and gets a similar results?

I want to rip the tongue out of every human who claims to have "Invented" a spell.

"Yeah it came to me in the shower and I just had to test it out. I call it [Scratch my back with mana because my stupid stubby arms can't reach back there] or something. No. No you haven't invented a spell you useless excuse for a sapient. You've gotten a participation prize from the system.

You were so useless of a species the system had to step in and hold your hand and [chanting] is a joke and [mana manipulation] is a joke and if I hear even a whisper of a human "mage" claiming to be an "expert" at magic I will consult the ancestral text and turn myself into a tree or so help me... Proclamation made by the Dark elf Alsphern. A friend of the people, as long as those people aren't "blighted humans". Innearth spent a month working on several concepts simultaneously.

He worked hard while almost competing with the effort his scout was putting in. The snake scout's initial level was quite a bit lower than its actual strength so the initial few levels and ranks didn't seem to do a lot but it worked tirelessly fighting wild monsters and returning to rest in the crystal caverns every few days. At level 2 the scout had a rank evolution and evolved a small mouth below its spike which it used like a shark to rip apart and consume monster flesh.

(From what Innearth could gather through their updates the monster evolution system had rank evolutions that happened at double the previous one and had a second bonus for consuming "biomass" which could be used together to mutate and evolve further. The snake's crystal bridge magic evolved at level 4 into having more supports and being able to "hang" in the air and at level 8 it evolved once more into a crystal tunnel that protected the snake while it slithered through the sky. Every rank up so far doubled the snake's length while maintaining the same diameter and Innearth thought the scout was starting to look silly with how long it was getting. The first concept that Innearth was working on himself was creating permanently shrunk rooms – incredibly easy to do in all directions but not very useful. For this "Simple" generic case, all he had to do was start to create void and then hold it in its "shrunk" halfway position for several minutes until it stabilized. This worked better if he built the void into a "space". In this case, a space was represented by a room or hallway. The boundary of the "area being shrunk" the walls, floor and ceiling. Theoretically, they didn't matter – he could shrink an arbitrary section of air in the middle of a room. Theoretically, he could shrink something overlapping multiple rooms and shrink a section of material in the middle of another material… but doing so was unstable. Practically he needed that visible boundary to make a stable position. Most of the "arbitrary" location experiments he made, drifted in random directions at various speeds and then broke apart. It doesn't make sense. Nothing is pushing on them? Why won't they stay still? Why do they break after getting pushed around? Is there something special about an area like this? Does the mana need a room or is it a mental block and I need that room to focus on? Innearth made various experiments trying to figure out the answer and ended up with more questions than before. He could "Draw" a box or circle on the ground with crystal or similar and shrink the area in that marked-off area, with better results than blank areas. The stronger a contrast between the shrunk area and the unshrunk area he made the stronger a connection. A 2d shape on the ground was worse than a hollow 3-dimensional area and didn't scale as well to larger sizes. The area also broke apart if he tried to cover or break the shape he had drawn, to often violent results. A few random areas were given these "void bombs" as a trap, where scuffing the fragile line holding it together would revert the whole area, rapidly expanding and exploding anything stuck inside. These shrunk rooms were good practice, but functionally useless. They had a few beneficial effects – one being while shrunk the inside was much stronger. Pushing on the inside of a 1x1m box that was 10x10 on the outside spread the inwards force across a larger surface area. If Innearth also enhanced the walls before they were shrunk he could make the room a cage even stronger than before… but it wasn't worth the time and effort to continue. Another beneficial effect was that by shrinking the space an area was slightly isolated from the outside. The higher a compression ratio the higher this "isolation" effect was, with sound, heat, etc getting lost while crossing the "barrier" that marked the edge of the shrunk room. Either way, Innearth could make strong boxes with Earth mana and could use a combination of other materials to try and isolate an area. The waste of space didn't seem worth it for now, even considering Innearth had plenty of space to expand into in all directions. He did spend some time trying to shrink a room inside a room but couldn't manage it in a stable manner - the stronger shrunk room ate the other and normalized the shrinking level between the two (each shrunk zone really didn't like having a variable shrinking effect). He also spent time figuring out how to predict the effect of fast-moving items entering and exiting the "shrinking" barrier. It could be summed up as speed was gained heading inwards and lost heading outwards. Both at a perpendicular angle to the barrier. What that meant was tossing a ball at at shrunk cube at a angle would result in the ball speeding up as soon as it entered the shrunk room and heading nearly straight across it before exiting at the same original speed and angle on the other side. All that practice was just to set him up for completing a concept he had started earlier. Creating hallways that were shrunk on one axis. The exact method of doing so was completely finesse with void mana. There was no secret method or tips and tricks he could use to achieve this result – just control. Innearth started off by adding snake ways everywhere and attempting to make them smaller in one direction to speed up travel. Each tunnel was made bigger than needed to offset the inevitable shrinking that happened to the tunnel's diameter. Innearth also worked to shrink his dungeon veins to varying results and designed several "pointless" experiments to increase his control. An example of one of these experiments was a squished doughnut track with one side shrunk. Dropping a ball down the "normal" side would build up more than enough momentum to fly up the shrunk side and past its starting point with speed. The track sent the ball careening around endlessly. He could obviously have designed a kinetic system to keep something spinning forever instead of using Void mana but that wasn't the point. The point was applying his shrinking properties in different ways to improve his control. I've started getting really good at making "straight lengths of hallway" shorter, but getting bent sections is still annoyingly out of my reach. Looking through the guides it's possible, but well beyond my current control. The best I can do is chaining several thin straight paths at slight angles together and hoping it looks fine. Innearth's top few floors had expanded out to cover nearly a square kilometer and he had gained another floor after switching to using burrowers. This top zone was not very linear. He had started weaving random shortcuts about it, with dozens upon dozens of paths to travel through and a second entrance partway around the valley. Each floor had several archways indicating a floor shift and each floor shift increased ambient mana by 11. 11% after settling. Innearth currently had 9 floors and his deepest floor was 2. 6x the concentration at the surface. As far as I know, quite a few adventurers will be sticking to the beginner area and I want to make sure they are spread out enough. He had taken to drawing valid paths through the area in a black mouldable crystal, close in colour and texture to the obsidian used in the halls below. The paths were all 100% valid but not necessarily optimal – they meandered about and Innearth left rooms off the path that would eventually contain prizes. I want to reward adventurers who explore and head off the beaten path. They are probably more interesting to watch! Speaking of prizes, partway through this month his mana oven had finished cooking his attempt at loot. After focusing on it after its creation the system seemed confused for a second then started helpfully showing its information. Crystal shortsword. [Tier 2 weapon] Description: Crafted by a dungeon. Contains a solid core melded in an advanced way to a sharp crystal exterior. Fragile. * Slashing damage 1-250. Durability 88/0. Innearth was slightly disappointed in the result. To make this sword he had first made an iron+Earth mana rod that was both a handle and a core of sorts for strength. Afterwards he had surrounded the whole end of it in basalt and shoved it in the oven. The idea was that the basalt would mutate into some awesome unique crystal material while the Earth mana handle would resist the higher mana level and stay solid. He got what he wanted. A crystal outside and solid handle... the problem was the result was underwhelming. He could edit the description somewhat but not the name – shortsword? This "crystal shortsword" seemed pretty large. What part of it is "short?" Just because it's not a greatsword? Why can I edit the description but not the name! There was also the durability. 88/0... I'm 90% sure that means it can't be repaired… Finally, there was the "tier". Innearth created a tier 2 (short)sword by making a thin steel plant of sword mana and sticking it on a stubby earth mana handle. Butcher's shortsword. [Tier 2 weapon] Description: A mad Butcher used this cleaver for years to chop meat. After years of drudgery, he shifted to using it on monsters. Slashing damage 1-200. Durability 50/50. That "low effort" weapon cost him some raw material he had around, 400 mana and roughly 5 minutes of time (plus 5 more minutes of writing something different in the description). Similarly, with a bit more time and effort, he created a tier 3 weapon. Magma Mace. [Tier 3 weapon] Description: A rod of burning death which with to beat your way through life. Don't let the magma core leak liquid or you'll ruin the carpet! Burning damage 50-190, Bludgening damage 50-115. Durability 100/70. This mace was made with a core of uncooling magma and surrounded by spikes of fire metal that dragged the heat to their tips. The whole spiked mace was insulated with "Metal mana metal" and contained a mix of gravity/lightening and kinetic momentum increasing materials to make it easier to use and hit harder. This was also "dead easy" to make – about as hard as one of the magma spiders legs. Comparing these weapons to the "crystal shortsword" which took 4 weeks of time, an indeterminate amount of mana and took up nearly all the space in his oven. It was clear which one was a waste of effort. I don't have any more strong null stone and it's hard to make more ovens… I could cannibalize my panic door? But the door makes me feel safe… I want to leave it. This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it. Innearth was mostly using a combination of Pure and Crystal mana to increase the environmental mana in the oven to roughly 100x the surrounding areas in his dungeon. The point of the null stone was to make sure the container wouldn't mess with whatever he was "cooking" in it. He had actually attempted to make a crystal walled oven… I mean crystal mana surrounded by more crystal mana? Seems like it would work. The problem was efficiency. Mana... wasn't fully blocked by matter at all. It was blocked by more mana. To make a lid that wouldn't leak Innearth had to make a material that was at least as dense or "concentrated" with mana. To make a material that concentrated needed something close to a tier 7 core. To make that tier 7 core worth of density Innearth needed 7 layers of decreasing mana in a gradient – each leaking faster and faster the denser he made them. Each layer needed to be a certain thickness and making a reasonably large area took a lot of Innearth's mana... and then the larger oven didn't even work as well. The crystal walled oven made materials that melded and stuck to the walls and lid of the oven. It also resulted in less "interesting" unique materials on average. Innearth could have made a boss or two using a tier 6 core and it would have been a better use of his time. That being said. After a longer and longer time had passed without adventurers. Higher mana experiments were less… wasteful. Over weeks of time it was almost like Innearth had infinite mana to play with and play he did. He no longer needed to check how much mana he was using – it was still in his status in the "AMU" format along with several new stats he had added – his age, his depth below his entrance, the number of floors he had. But none of them were checked for anything other than review. Innearth Level 42 1203/2236 exp to next level. System Access Level 4 1/2 requirements met to advance. -1+ Ascended Monster ✓ -Level 48+ Stats Mana Regeneration 52. 10 personal unit / min Mana concentration 2. 52 AMU / personal unit Mana Storage 5643. 38/5643. 38 AMU Physical Storage 60% Capacity Age 435 days 1 years Distance underground 220 meters Number of floors 9 floors Titles. Earth Mana Specialization, Crystal Mana Specialization, Void mana Specialization. Either way, using the "original oven" Innearth placed a chunk of silver flesh into it and closed the lid. It's going to take a long time but… if there's even a slight chance I can make a material out of this that has fewer negative traits then it is worth it. It's incredibly magical already so I'm not looking forward to the wait but… it feels like the best use of my oven. Better than adding basalt repeatedly anyways. The shoddy second oven can be delegated to "random material creation duty". Should I try mixing more types of mana into this? … … While Innearth experimented, all his friends had long since started getting adventures. One by one by one, each started a conversation about it. Abe: Broooooo. Got me one! This green scaly bugger with a weird fan thing explored my first 6 floors! I wish you could have seen their face the first time a blast slug detonated in their face. Abe: Soot. Everywhere. Abe: Their face was comically black and their vest broke but they healed right up after chugging a potion. Amy: Congrats! What sort of loot do you have? Anything more you want to say about their face? Abe: Well I'm using the system loot system obviously. My contributions were various blast rods however. Nice disposable bombs. Everyone likes bombs! … Fated Eternal Design: I have my first convert. An allocated came to my abode to be reborn. They completed their pilgrimage and now have erected a proper shrine to the endless. Innearth: That did not happen. I believe you got an adventurer… but I can't believe they started a religion about you. Innearth: That makes zero sense. Fated Eternal Design: Believe what you will young apprentice. Someday you'll learn the truth. … ZeMadDoctor: Adventurers make great test subjects. Renovating my dungeon now. Innearth: Congrats… ZeMadDoctor: Bah. You'll be soon. Don't worry. Innearth: I hope. I really do hope it's soon… The next biggest time sink of Innearth's was his maze. With all his idle time Innearth started designing a maze situated between floor 4 and 5 (at the intersection between zones). It was a huge undertaking and Innearth put days and days of work into designing the maze akin to a puzzle – this wasn't just a series of confusing hallways no this was a proper labyrinth. For one, Innearth made frequent use of a multitude of gravity materials. Hallways were completely encased in an insulating "no direction gravity material" made from mercury. This mercury material was relatively expensive over the distances he was working at and Innearth felt pained at the waste of mana. He even went off on a several day tangent where he tried to figure out a mercury mana material in an attempt at multiplying his material. It's an offshoot of metal mana obviously. How do I reach it? Why can't I reach it? Is it just because I didn't choose metal mana as my affinity? That sucks. Whichever dungeon won the "mercury" affinity is probably filthy rich. Either way, Expensive materials aside Innearth designed completely gravity insulated hallways which blocked natural gravity by a huge factor. Roughly 11% of its regular state was the first step (dropping it more was doable but costly). After reducing natural interferences Innearth lovingly crafted "normal" gravity plates. Tweaked again and again. Angled at the perfect angle to offset the rest of the natural mana and distributed evenly over the hallways to reduce suspicion. Dropping items to calibrate, sending monsters through to ask them how it felt. These hallways had to be perfect. The glorious result made Innearth positively giddy with pride. The artificial gravity led to hallways that twisted and felt like you were heading downwards to a deeper floor while actually leading you back to your starting point. Hallways that felt like you were heading upwards on stairs but were slanted towards the exit with "upward stairs" that went down. Just in case no one figured it out and didn't appreciate the sheer amount of work Innearth had put into this there were a few large rooms with different paths that entered and exited on the ceiling, walls, and floor. An adventuring party that kept at it would eventually start to notice the point they had been previously far above on their apparent ceiling. These rooms were slightly broken by anything that could fly and Innearth tried to discourage people from taking shortcuts with spike launchers... but really the focus was just on how excited by his creation he was. Beside the "gravity" paths, Innearth dotted the maze with shrinking hallways artfully. A few areas were specifically made into a non-Euclidian mess, where one turned right 4 times and ended up in a "new" hallway. Paths were designed so that you could swear you were intersecting places you were previously. I wonder if I'm making this too hard?... eh it's fine. I can start giving hints until adventurers start making it through. It's too much fun not to. I can't wait to see how confused people are. After a good portion of the maze was finalized Innearth asked TheAbyssStaresBack how to make darkness mana. He didn't want to copy the blanket of darkness the older core used for his own maze completely. He just wanted to reduce visibility slightly – a lot of his special illusions broke when one could see far away. TheAbyssStaresBack: Hey! You've come to the right place lil guy. Still no adventurers? That sucks but hang in there. You'll get there someday. Anyways... Darkness mana is incredibly easy for me to make, but might give you some trouble. You sure you want to learn? I could sell you some darkness emitting materials if you want? Innearth: no I want to try making it myself first. It's already taking a lot out of me to ask you… TheAbyssStaresBack: Kind of weird lil guy. It's fine though! One Darkness mana lesson coming right up. First off, Fire has to be shifted to Light mana. I have a Fire affinity so it's easier for me, but that doesn't mean you will find it impossible. Either way, this is the step that might make you fail. Making mana types you don't have the adjacent affinities for, is incredibly difficult. TheAbyssStaresBack: If you do manage that step, the next should be easy enough with your Void affinity. All you have to do is combine Light with Void to create a mana that consumes light. That's Darkness mana. Making Ice mana by combining Fire and Void is slightly easier so I suggest you focus on that first. TheAbyssStaresBack: Ice is a tier 2 mana while Darkness is a tier 3. Both are lower than the Tier 4 Void mana but higher than the Tier 1 and 2 Fire and Light. Just a little piece of trivia. TheAbyssStaresBack: Another neat fact is Darkness works really well with Death mana surprisingly. Even though the mana types are far apart, the undead thrive in total darkness. TheAbyssStaresBack: If you are serious about trying to make it, you should first make Light sources with Fire mana. Focus on using the Fire mana just to light up a room. TheAbyssStaresBack: Next study the lights you have made and try again using the flavour it looks like now. Repeat that several times and you should be able to make a mana material that gives off light but no heat. That's light mana. I managed it in 3 iterations. Without a Fire affinity, it's definitely going take you more than that and again I want to stress it might be impossible. It can't hurt to try but don't get too sad if you can't I'm always here to make some cheap materials for you instead. Innearth: thank you. I really do appreciate it. The lesson and the extra details. Abe: don't mind me. Just taking notes over in the corner dododooo. Innearth took little time to think over his free lesson and prepare himself. Abyss is a pretty chill dude all things considered? He keeps mentioning to treat it like he isn't there and then goes above and beyond. He really has become apart of our group. Okay. Let's try this out. Innearth made fire crystals and placed them in alcoves or grew prisms of crystal and then topped them with fire crystals to make crystal torches. He was using the free crystals instead of pure fire because this combination gave off more light and less heat already. It was also something he was meaning to do, and he worked on bringing light to his whole dungeon. Abyss was right. 3. 10. 20, 100 torches didn't cut it. But there was marked consistent improvement and Innearth didn't give up. Finally, at nearly 600 torches – enough to light up his whole beginner area – Innearth made one that was completely heatless. Innearth studied this torch for hours. Getting a feel for the flavor of mana he had created and trying to capture what he had been thinking of while making it. Then, slowly remaking the mana type he held it beside the light and continued to alter it slightly until it felt right. Into a torch you go~ Innearth muttered while repeating his earlier actions using Light and Crystal mana. Immediately there was a huge change in the result. Instead of copying the best version again like he had been expecting, combining light and crystal mana created a material that shone with pure brilliance. A crystal that shot beams of light out of every single imperfection, as if it were trying to contain the sun itself while the sun threatened to escape through every hairline crack and fracture it could do so.... this isn't useable as a torch. It's much too bright and its beams of light are too uneven and focused on tiny points. It might have a use but not in this way so I'm going put it aside. The hallway Innearth had placed this crystal now had a disco ball worth of dots sprinkling it and the mana that was released was different from the Light mana he had originally been aiming for. He had yet to know just what he had created, for Laser mana would eventually be a huge part of his dungeon. Shelving it as useless he returned to his original practice. One light, two light, red light, blue light. Innearth practiced making small spheres of light mana in various materials. Half of which, tinged the light mana into different colours. Finally feeling practiced enough Innearth continued to work towards darkness. Okay. Step 1 is done. Took way longer than I had hoped but I've managed it. Let's see, dual mana materials for Ice and Darkness. First Innearth took his most plentiful dual material – quartz – and combined Fire and Void. The two melted together and created something different than the sum of their parts. Fire mana was the concept of energy given form. It was wild and raging and endlessly created energy. As soon as it shifted to ice that boundless synergy seemed to still. Instead of producing, it consumed. And slowly but surely it became colder and colder around the chunk of magical ice Frost spread out on the ground around it and the air turned frosty and sharp the longer it existed. Innearth stared at the ice entranced. Ice... Ice played really well with crystals. The frost that formed created patterns that spoke to him. As he broke away from the trance, his mind raced as he considered the possibility of creating a whole floor of ice and crystals deep below. It can be part of the crystal caverns! Would contrast the magma halls much more and I do need to expand those soon. They are really small when I compare it to the rest of my dungeon… what am I doing ignoring them! Innearth once again went off on a "Tangent". This time he made one of his burrowers stop digging the beginner area and dig straight down into the crystal caverns below. A straight drop from level 3 to level 9, the burrower started digging out large caverns as Innearth returned to his experimentation. The now level 20 snake scout had slithered in at this time and took the downwards pit as a shortcut. This was only noteworthy due to two changes. 1 since the last time it had evolved the snake now had two small crystal horns turning its single head spike into a trifecta of spikes and 2, the water slime which had hitched a ride on those very spikes holding on to the snakes head as it slithered straight down a 200m drop. Two gooey arms holding on for dear life, as it took a shortcut no slime was ever meant to take.... The point of this whole process was darkness mana and by the end of this I will have made it! - No more distractions! Innearth focused on creating light mana and then immediately made void and shoved them into a canvas of quartz. Darkness. Finally! Light mana seemed pretty natural. The materials made from it gave off soft light, like a fire trapped in a ball. Darkness mana was decidedly unnatural. Light was stripped from the walls and shadows grew, melding together and creating a thick darkness around the black crystal. Innearth created a ball of Light and silicon then moved it around the darkness. The light pushed back nearly as hard as it was suppressed, and it created a bright sense that faded away to nothing within just a bit more than a dozen centimeters. Effectively Innearth could fill his maze with darkness and then create torches that showed a meter ahead while hiding stuff further in. Pure darkness is boring. But hiding stuff in darkness when I have lights? Perfect. Innearth placed lines of torches along his maze while covering the ceiling with various darkness-creating materials. Every once in a while, a secret passage would be placed directly between two torches. Hidden where the spheres of light didn't reach. Innearth continued to add more and more to the maze. At this point it was large enough he was forced to consider delegating multiple floors just to this. He added hints and decorated the walls with faint patterns that could help differentiate similar halls from each other. He drew dancing snakes and otters miming solutions to the puzzles he had made (Up is down and down is Up! Down is up and up is Down!). He really was spending way too much time on this. Dragging it out more and more for a simple reason. If Innearth stopped working on this he would start spiralling again. He put all his attention on this single goal to forget about his lack of adventurers while any pause let faint doubt slip in. Will anyone ever even use this? Is there any point in any of this? Why do I even care?... Finally. Finally, months after he had broken the surface and months after his friends had gotten them. A sapient creature arrived in his dungeon!