Chương 76: I think...I think we are safe. Time for a change of state.

.. I think we are safe. Time for a change of state.

Mana is generated by living (Or undead) bodies infused with mana and stored in the soul. That's the common conception about magic and while its not common knowledge, its something every true mage learns soon into their journey. Personal mana stored in the soul is usually lost upon death, but the process of loosing mana is significant. The main side effect of this phenomenon is that it extends the transient state of mages – upon death, mage souls stick around for longer than others.

The other important point is that certain spells require this decaying personal mana to function... but at the end of the day most of those effects can be obtained without sacrifice and this variation of magic is usually just a lazy solution. This loss of life but not yet loss of soul (between death and decay of soul) leads to a very specific category of undead – the living undead – which shall be described in the following section. Souls are a strange existence. At low levels, souls are simply a spark of energy.

They are the fuel for life but do not contain anything else noteworthy*. As a creature gains levels and increases the strength of their soul, this spark of energy changes. Memories are imprinted upon them. Personality traits and achievements. Defining information. This usually happens around level 25-50 and is the default state of nearly every adult. This is the minimum soul level needed to create a specter – but any ghost made either naturally in a fluke, or through design at this stage will not be intelligent.

They will simply repeat memories endlessly – or react to stimulus in ways the soul's source did in life. The level 50-100 stage is an advanced variation of the previous soul's tier. Depending on a variety of aspects this is where you can consistently create ghosts – sapients killed in traumatic manners usually naturally create reactive ghosts in this stage (For notes on how best to kill a sapient to study the natural formation of specters see appendix B).

The transcendent barrier is typically defined as exactly level 125 but for our purposes the soul process starts as early as level 100. At this point the body starts offloading tasks to the soul. Brains become little more than fancy backups of the consciousness that is contained within the transcendant's soul. Muscles draw energy directly from the mana stored in a soul and digestive systems shove nutrients into the soul for storage.

Neurons send signals to the soul which routes them to other parts of the body creating strange magical paths for those who know how to look. The interplay between a transcendant's body and soul is fascinating but for our purposes it's the minimum stage needed to create an intelligent ghost naturally.

Enough of a creature's consciousness has been stored in their soul, that upon death they can continue to reason and act as they did in life – some can even cast spells and those with knowledge can even turn themselves into true undead with an inverted soul that does not decay. Additionally – while the reactive ghosts created with level 20-125 sapients are on a time limit of hours to days – the intelligent ghosts created with transcendent souls, measure their lifespan in years or even centuries for the oldest.

Now, how do these living specters differ from the undead variety? Besides nomenclature – life-aligned free roaming souls are usually referred to as ghosts and death-aligned "ghasts", or "banshees" A life-aligned ghost makes for a perfect reagent in some very useful rituals (See Appendix A for using ghosts and ectoplasm as a material). For an aspiring necromancer, wild undead specters are essentially monsters. They must be caged and controlled and can break free at a moment's notice or turn on their masters.

A ghost however can be converted into an undead and bound as a soul slave on a more fundamental level by the one who converted them. That is why most necromancers prefer to either find ghosts or create their own (relatively easy – the hard part is not getting caught) than work on the more difficult and dangerous "wild undead wrangling".

This concept extends to other undead varieties and is why most vampires turn themselves – strength non withstanding, if someone else turned them into a vampire they would be little more than a thrall unable to break free. *While this was true pre-system and remains true of the natural state of souls, the system leaves hooks in sapient souls – artificially storing data beyond the soul's capabilities.

If you ever attempt to modify your own soul do not attempt to sever these hooks and while experimenting on others take care not to modify the system's design. If you have possession of this book you no doubt already have a minor heretic tag but modifying system links will immediately place you upon a top ranked hitlist. If you do not have the confidence to hide from or face multiple dragons at once beware.

The adventurers wandering around trying to catch you on some quest are children in comparison to the system's top enforcers. Excerpt obtained from the private research notes of Q. The infamous soulsmith. A whole month passed with the dungeons mostly making sure not to start any major work on their shared floor.

They mostly reinforced and doubled down on what they had with their free time – FED finished his "grand mental array" by stringing hundreds of thousands of mental threads from post to post in a giant knot that was presumably keeping demons away. They all worked on the outer walls and hesitantly hid the hallway's entrance and made sure it no longer was a path directly to their inner sanctum.

Queen continued to send scouts out of the new hidden exit and reported back that a massive demon – presumably the same whale – had come back looking for them but been unable to find their sphere a second time. That was the sign they were onto something and the group hesitantly began expanding past their initial sphere making sure to try and cloak everything with time mana.

There was a brief moment while making a new shell and then shrinking it that they were visible – but mental mana seemed enough to protect them during those times. Innearth unrolled the void inside the sphere – making the inside roughly 10km in diameter instead of 2km – the added void from the whale making the process laughably easy. He could have kept going but they needed a minimum density to all operate in the same space and…

well as long as time mana kept working to isolate them they had infinite space out of their dome to expand into. As they constructed new spheres outside of their central one FED started taking more control of the proceedings. Fated Eternal Design: We need a theme. I'd argue it's the most important thing to focus on besides defense from outside obviously. ZeMadDoctor: Hmm?

Fated Eternal Design: Well now that we've decided its safe I assume we are working towards letting adventurers into the floors like we initially planned? Innearth: Yeah I think so. Fated Eternal Design: SO here's what I'm thinking. Doc has covered so many of the surfaces with tiles and this is all possible because of him so my initial idea is to make this place a "lab" or "lab adjacent" themed area.

Innearth: This place is novel and I'm assuming we aren't letting any low levelled adventurers in so we can work based on that plan. I'm down. What sort of lab? And what does lab adjacent mean. Are we just remaking Doc's dungeon? Fated Eternal Design: Well… personally an abandoned lab from an ancient civilization is what I'm picturing. Think about it. Research notes strewn about telling a story of a forgotten race. They made devices ahead of their time but something wiped them all out. Huge story potential.

Abe: Yeah I'm down for that. Can we make sections of the lab self destruct? That's all you need to do to get me on board. Amy: Oh! I can make little greenhouses and stuff the lab people got their food from! Fated Eternal Design: All great ideas. OH! Hey lets make some prop monsters like having test tubes like… like capsules with monsters in stasis! And then shatter some of them so adventurers have to hide from the "escaped test subjects"!

Oh and there can be sections of the area themed around different test subjects. OH! I've already started coming up with story points. They were trying to research immortality. OH Maybe they were trying to create artificial life but their chimeras were madness based! No, that seems to simple… Their goal was the creation of a ____ - something so horrible its been redacted from all the papers! Fated Eternal Design: Everything is coming together.

I can make some cool effects by letting my cult make an eternity potion that slows down everything inside. That seems like a perfect thing to fill my capsule with! Innearth: Well… we'll let you come up with a storyline. I'm going try making some monsters to fill the facility. I figured its better to make the monsters first and then work from there right? Match the theme of the place to the monsters. Abe: Bro! Its been awhile lets make something together.

I'm finished speeding up and plating the area I want to make some monsters. Innearth: Yeah sure. So what are you thinking? Switching to private messages Innearth began tossing out designs with Abe, Abe: I think we should try to make some new materials for the monsters. Innearth: Sure, so what are you thinking? Abe: … that's it. I think we should make some new materials. I've been thinking a bit about materials while looking at what everyone else is doing and realized for the most part…

I just use the "default" material spell if that makes sense y'know? Innearth: default? Abe: Well like. I've heard you guys talk about connections and Doc was talking about making magic that's loosly bound to matter and you have your ovens and idk. Like all I've been doing for materials is taking a block of something simple like iron, shoving mana at it and calling it a day. Innearth: So you're saying you want to try making something different? I'm not really sure where to go from there. Abe: Yeah bro.

That's why I asked to help colab on stuff. You're better at experimentation and stuff. I want help figuring out how to make other materials with more than just mana and fuel. Innearth: So you want advice? You could pick one of those two elements to focus on… Like you could focus on the mana and making it do something before making a material or while making it. For example. With void mana I have to continuously try to bind it to a material while it eats away at it.

That takes a while before it finally attaches and then makes a material that eats away at everything but that material. Theoretically there's a way to make it only eat that material but I don't think I've figured that out yet. Abe: Okay, focus on one of them. What would focusing on the physical material look like? Innearth: … that's a good question. Uh… let's pick something like Iron. What can we do to iron before adding mana to make it different? Abe: Could make it a magnet? Innearth: … we could indeed.

I'm going to go check the market on how to do that. See if anyone's done it before and what the process is. Abe: Sure. Innearth sent forth several queries researching their goal. The effects of altering the physical materials before turning them into magical materials didn't seem to be very researched – or at the very least were not shared – but there was a guide on how to make a magnet deep in a list of physical processes.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. To make a magnet you needed a magnet. … that's fun. Let's see if anyone on the market is selling magnets and go from there. Searching about Innearth found one core selling massive magnetic plates they made in some proprietary process. Buying two of them Innearth placed them directly in the void and started talking to Abe. Innearth: Okay, So! Here's what we do according to this handy guide.

We place one of these metals – just going use Iron – into a space between these two magnetic plates. It works slightly better if we heat the metal up first but much better if we hold it in place and mould it about while its still all shifty from being in our inventory as the guide says. Abe: Bro. You're my little researcher going off and finding the info so I don't have to. Innearth: … do you want to do this yourself? Abe: No professor Innearth.

Affixing the two plates relatively close to one another, Innearth began streaming Iron straight from his inventory in "mouldable" form. He passed it back and forth between the plates feeling kind of silly before adding crystal mana and watching the material shift into a… well a crystal. The result was shaped such that all the points and grains faced one direction but beyond that there didn't seem to be much of a change. It had slightly more strength in one axis and slightly less in all the others?

Well either way it wasn't an impressive result. Innearth moved to trying kinetic mana and found a more useful use case for this setup. If Innearth passed the kinetic mana through from a side running against the magnetic field it was more chaotic and if he did the process with the field than it was nearly twice as strong. Innearth: Hey! This is a useful effect. Abe: Eh, Its useful I guess… but kind of boring. As if to illustrate his attention Abe passed a few materials through and then tossed them to the side.

Abe: Hey! I've been thinking about how many different things you can do to matter and I came up with the solution. State change! I'm annoyed it took me this long to figure it out. Innearth: … like melting or freezing something? That's… that's actually something. Start trying different mana types! Okay sorry I'm getting ahead of myself we need to set up a process to make those state changes. Give me a moment.

Making a giant metallic tray of the hottest fire mana Innearth knew of and then laying lines of a hot but easily cooled magma mana material through the bottom the pair began melting down strips of iron. The metal grew hot and then molten and one by one the dungeons started trying out different mana types on the metal.

Fire mana heated the metal to a blistering white and cooled in that white state – producing a much hotter material than regular fire mana – besides the colour this material burned as hot as mundane magma. Earth made a strange pumice-like rock and so did stone mana. Air…

made the molten metal turn into a thick cloud of red gas and Water mana rapidly cooled the molten metal into an incredibly thin liquid metal that flowed in an exaggerated way – like whenever someone pushed it slightly it sloshed in that direction as if it had been shoved by a huge force. Melting various materials before using mana on them essentially doubled the number of materials they had and could make.

The most boring but useful were materials the process would enhance – like melting two materials together and then adding magma mana making hundreds of combinations including ones that stayed liquid at much much hotter temperatures than the version Innearth had been using in his magma spiders. Swapping out the materials in his "hard mode" magma halls and then moving about his dungeon, Innearth went on an upgrading spree.

After making these materials in a repeatable manner the system let him print and shove them in anything he wanted – no melting tray required and every better material he could swap out 1: 1 was a massive find despite being "boring" as Abe mentioned. He preferred the materials that were different in a way they hadn't seen before – like explosion mana mixed with melted phosphorus making a green explosive boom that spilled a caustic green radioactive mana everywhere.

In fact, Abe was happy enough trying out melting material – or vaporizing them and trying out mana on the gasses – that he left Innearth alone when the experimental core wanted to try the reverse direction. Creating a single massive freezer Innearth pushed in as many "super cold" ice mana materials he had – picking the absolute coldest materials he could despite most of them melting rapidly.

Then he snowballed when he realized there were even colder materials found from using ice mana on frozen liquids and gasses snowballing to even colder temporary temperatures. This room was so cold it began condensing the nitrogen and then even the oxygen in the room – creating liquid and solid versions of the gasses for Innearth's experiments. Not stopping there Innearth used this time to dump various other gasses like helium and hydrogen into the chamber to freeze them too.

In this cryogenic chamber resting close to zero kelvin, Innearth created strange twisted and almost unique feeling materials. The magical and technological difficulty involved with freezing materials was much higher than melting them and the materials Innearth made reflected that. Void mana attached and created bars of the standard "eat away at stuff" material stronger than even Rhenium, Bismuth and Gold.

In more strange notes, crystal mana made first a material out of oxygen that seemed to continuously half crystalize the air around it – essentially a field of space that was hard to walk through and shattered constantly like broken glass when someone or something moved through it.

There was also a crystal mana variation with frozen nitrogen that Abe was more excited by – essentially it made an incredibly fragile material that shattered into countless little shards at the slightest nudge – and then slowly reformed in still air. The crystals would slowly move back and repair themselves over a several minute period and, while they wouldn't be dangerous to any high-levelled adventures, they made an incredible sight.

In the same way Fed slowed down falling water to make an almost frozen scene of rain for the "aesthetic". Innearth could print these crystals about a path and make a destructible landscape. As a monster material, it made a sort of "weak" version of the Endless Crystal Mass – slime-like growing beds of crystal that could be broken by a fly but were nearly indestructible if you ignored certain magic attacks.

Innearth made a few of them with rare drops for his nightmare crystal zone – if an adventurer could kill these for good, they deserved a reward. Abe and Innearth made several "Experiment chambers" for the lab theme. They set up a room with a fragile crystal sculpture and then timed a small weak but endlessly repeating explosion material that set off roughly when the regrown statue reached a critical weight.

This whole chamber was sped up to the max Abe could manage – something like 20x speed in a small enclosed area – and thus repeated its cycle of destruction and recreation endlessly over a 20s period. Abe: There's something incredibly satisfying about smashing stuff y/k? Is it just me? Let's see how explosive some of these frozen materials are I haven't tried that yet.

Frozen nitrogen and explosion mana made a material that was even more fragile than the airy crystals – the lump of material exploded randomly in a magically suspended box nearly devoid of outside influence – blocking light, held at nearly a vacuum and chilled down to see if it exploded even while close to absolute zero. The material was so explosive it felt like it detonated if you looked at it funny – and Innearth was positive it did.

Why else would it have been stable for a minute and then blasted apart as soon as he focused on it. Innearth thought this material was useless but Abe seemed happy with it for a single reason – as a monster material in a monster that could heal itself this "fragile explosive" seemed to heal pretty quickly. It didn't reform like Innearth's crystals but with just a bit of life mana and a monster durable enough to withstand the blasts the explosion core was happy.

At least the monsters made with it and life mana could usually prevent themselves from exploding just by existing but they still went off randomly all over the place. Innearth went through over a hundred different experiments with state changes and different mana types in the following months. The lab's structure slowly began to form as the group added things here and there, occasionally arguing over designs but ultimately having fun.

The void whale came past once more but once more didn't find their time-shielded stronghold. The lab's layout shifted and settled into a final sort of "design" – there was a central spherical area with 6 additional "floors" (each budding out in a different direction equidistance from each other). Essentially, there was one following Innearth's "roof", another attached to his "floor" and four budding out in different cardinal directions.

Each of these "Areas" was themed slightly differently – each of the dungeons had final say on one of the 6 outer areas and they were biased following each of their tastes. For example, Abe made easily destructible walls and passages with closing blast doors so swarms of explosion bots could fly about or "TOP SECRET" research notes could be placed in heavily trapped self destructing rooms.

As far as the group was concerned this "zone" was named the "reactor zone" – they pretended it was powering the whole plant with a massive engine and themed both monsters and lore around that. Amy took her greenhouse plans and pushed them up to 11. There were a few greenhouses in the central area but in her "Life and living zone" the plants appeared to be breaking the facility.

At some point Queen took over – she was better able to make all of Amy's plant desires customizing the monsters and décor in a way simply by listening to Amy's wants and building off of that – instead of Amy's "buying plants off the market if they are close enough to what she wanted" theme. Between the two of them they made roots that broke through walls and wrapped around shattered devices – as if the plants had been so angry at being confined in the facility they decided to take it out on the chairs.

This was queen's first real effort at making something besides a jungle – and she ended up copying many of the designs for her own "natural zone". Queens was decidedly less friendly-looking than Amy's despite being the same basic materials. In the center of queen's zone was a massive Venus fly trap-like monster plant that liked eating human-sized snacks. Poisonous rooms and vats of glowing liquid was everywhere with her plants being mutated and unnatural looking.

Doc helped with many of the combinations and it bled over a bit into his area which was simply a blank area he was using to store dangerous looking liquids and materials. Fed of course was everywhere – he made hidden chambers; created key cards and access levels, security devices and hundreds of questlines that could only be found naturally.

Innearth helped make hard and transparent sheets of crystal everywhere – windows showing off the experimental display cases they were designing or as a way to look into the capsules Fed was so excited by. A creature of bright florescent yellow-green escaped from one chamber and tracked glowing footprints everywhere for one of Fed's questlines. To start it you needed to track the prints about a maze of hallways with the tracks leading through vents and backtracking through areas you had already passed.

Another questline was found by finding a room full of what appeared to be incredibly ancient blood splatters. A resounding roar would fill the room and key parts would shake before an "<Fated Eternal Design: [Placeholder] Please make super-strong monster and put it here." was let loose. The monster would then chase adventurers through a series of falling blast doors while screaming in a "<Fated Eternal Design: Someone should see if there's a scream mana. I want bloodcurdling>" manner.

Yes, the dungeons were leaving notes for one another everywhere. At least FED was. Despite literally being in the same space and having a constant chatgroup they could use to talk, Fed was leaving dungeon script words scratched into the walls and floors where he wanted things placed. Abe got annoyed at him at one point claiming. Abe: Bro. digging those notes into the solid materials has to be more work than just talking in chat. What are you doing! Fated Eternal Design: I do this in my own dungeon design.

Its so you see it when you look at an area and know what still needs to be done. Just fill the words in if the outstanding task has been done its simple enough. Innearth: … do you really need manual notes as a checklist? You should have perfect memory. Fated Eternal Design: … it helps me think okay. Now someone help me figure out how to block off this section of the facility in the chase scene – I don't want adventurers ducking into rooms and getting trapped.

Brutality Queen: if they get trapped just let them be trapped. If they die they die. If you don't want them clogging the place up just let the monster into the room to kill them all. Fated Eternal Design: it breaks the event! Amy: You should try and prevent adventurers from dying! Abe: Come check out the hammer man. Abe had created a humanoid monster with a giant hammer-like head.

The monster walked around and then suddenly exploded forwards – an explosion bursting out of its back and causing the monster to rotate forward smashing down in a resounding "bang". Abe: That's what I'm talking bout! ZeMadDoctor: It doesn't seem very practical. Look at how long its taking to stand back up. Abe: It's funny. Look at its little hands. Fated Eternal Design: Pretend it's a researcher that got into a weird hammer mana experiment gone wrong. New NPC right here.

That's actually perfect – just remake it with the ability to speak and I can tie in the warped room with it. Innearth: we have a warped room? Fated Eternal Design: I haven't made it yet. There's a note in the corridor with melty walls about making a warped room. Hey, I saw your crystal air experiment – we should use that to make it look like an experiment went so wrong it broke the air! ZeMadDoctor: when are we letting adventurers in?

I want to test how the atmosphere of the void affects sapients over extended periods. Fated Eternal Design: When we finish these 7 areas! We can move on after that but these should be done first! It breaks the illusion if they come in part way through the design. Don't want to be like "Yesss, this ancient building – under construction – thousands of years old!" Brutality Queen: I miss the demons. Is that weird? It's too quiet. ZeMadDoctor: Hmmm, we can try and corral them into a specific area.

I don't have much going on in mine, lets attract some weaker demons into it to experiment on. Innearth: I'm not sure what to do in my zone yet. Fated Eternal Design: Oh! I need more room for event checkpoints. Let me use the space if you aren't using it. Innearth: if you need more space we can always expand more. Fated Eternal Design: We might have to. There's not enough space for everything I want to put in. Or there is but I don't want it to be crammed to close together you know?

If it's side by side it's kind of unrealistic… ZeMadDoctor: We have 7 spheres 10km in diameter. That's roughly 3665km3 in total volume. How is that not enough for you? Fated Eternal Design: ehh… its less than that. There are walls and filled in spots taking up space. Besides. This is a shared dungeon for high leveled adventurers right? Some of them can run that in a few seconds. Its less than you think. Fated Eternal Design: Anyways, Hey Innearth, Help me design more experiment rooms.

Do you have any really unique looking materials? Remember, looking. They need to look weird not be weird. Innearth: sure. And time continued on, months turned into a full year of design. The more they did the more there was to do. Filling these spaces was taking longer than most of them had estimated when they made the outer shells. They each had to start expanding their main dungeons once more just to gain enough raw materials to fill the areas.

There was a huge difference between digging this amount of space out and filling it in – especially with the way the void and its extra dimensions seemed to need more materials to fill the same amount of space. After 15 straight months of work Fed claimed they were halfway through their "initial design". Fated Eternal Design: Stay with me guys, it's going to be awesome!