Chương 78: Friendship is a disease. So is life. Everything is a disease if you put your mind to it!

So is life. Everything is a disease if you put your mind to it!

The existence of diseases and viruses are in a strange state in the world. Non magical or "mundane" diseases are well known and documented but mostly ignored – levels help protect you from them and usually only the weakest people or children ever contract them. Conversely magical diseases have a much wider variety of effects and can prey on even the highest of leveled persons…

but are in a strange state where the majority don't tend to form naturally in anything more than a few already dangerous and documented locations. If hundreds of your citizens gain the "bone burning magma hives" you know someone out there has a plague class. Either that or a virus-related monster is skulking around the city or an alchemist went insane. Occasionally a dungeon contains magical diseases…

but those are usually well maintained enough to not spread beyond the dungeon so we shall ignore it for this pamphlet. This doesn't mean magical diseases aren't common or dangerous… just that any time one comes across them, there's usually an underlying – and more importantly fixable – root cause. Find the source – send priests or guards or hire adventurers to take the underlying source out… and most magical diseases will naturally crumble away like so much filthy sand.

Excerpt from the Aristocratic pamphlet "What you need to know as a city lord" Amy: Hey everyone, is everyone here? I don't want to start without anyone. The dungeons slowly affirmed they were all here and then Amy began her lesson. Amy: Okay everyone! Please stop me if you have any issues, I don't want to leave anyone behind! Amy: Magical diseases are a spell that's grown. They aren't built like a monster or item – you have to let it do its thing.

Amy: To start off we are going make a simple necrosis that spreads through human touch. Nice and simple. Does everyone have their disease starter? Innearth looked down at the stone bucket with an "Innearth <3" on it. Looking around, everyone had a similar bucket with their names and a heart written in dungeon script along the side. Abe: I'm sorry but what even is the starter? It looks like mud. Amy: it's human waste! Innearth: interesting.

Amy: now because our goal is touch based, we want to add a bit of the medium it's going spread through. A severed hand flopped into the center of the work area and was immediately separated into unrecognizable cubes after some artful absorption. Amy: there we go, adventurer just lost that fresh so it should be perfect. Abe: What. Innearth: … is this step needed? Amy: yep! Take your medium and mix it into your disease starter while bathing the whole pool with pure mana.

This stage can't be rushed you really want to mix it good. Innearth hesitantly picked up and dropped his "medium" into his "starter". He then began swirling it about with mana - his weak strength able to handle the small materials easily. Amy: this is usually the state where I sprinkle life mana into it, but our goal for the first disease is necrosis, So! Instead I'm going ask everyone to push death mana into your batter. Brutality Queen: … I don't think I can use death mana. I've tried but can't seem to grasp it.

Amy: that's okay, I have a death root for us… you can substitute most of the mana requirements for materials. Diseases are very forgiving. Innearth focused on spritzing death mana into the unrecognizable and sketchy lumps inside his pool. At first, he felt like he was doing something wrong. The mix looked as gross as it had always had and the death mana just clung to the inside of the bowl – refusing to mix with anything. However! After a few minutes of stirring, everything seemed to start breaking down slightly.

It was still a sketchy bowl full of lumps but… now it was a magical sketchy bowl full of semi-melted lumps. Amy: Perfect! Innearth has got it! This is the stage where a lot of the base has already been made. Now… you've actually already managed to make a magical disease! You should be proud! But… well it's pretty weak right now. Amy: A level one human could eat this and only get a minor stomach ache. We have to grow this disease to be much stronger over a several day period!

Considering its necrosis, a good plan would be to incubate it on a dead body – but I've been pretty good about keeping my adventurers alive recently, so we'll have to figure something else out. Brutality Queen: I have one! Give me a sec. A few minutes later and a massive blob of muddy mana sloshed through a portal, depositing an only "slightly" fresh corpse in front of the group. Amy: Perfect! Thanks queen <3 Amy: Has everyone gotten their weak disease yet?

If you have, place it on a free spot on the incubation station! Amy: Oh hey, Fated Eternal Design let me help you out there. Its kind of tricky but you should make sure not to include air mana in the stirring – at least unless you want it to spread through breathing. I know that little cyclone is probably easier for you to use but it's corrupting the spell. Fated Eternal Design: Tch. Okay. I don't need help I'll just switch.

Innearth carefully collected and levitated his disease up and brought it over to the "incubation station" picking a nice solid patch to lay his gunk. Faint purplish black wisps rose from the pile while Amy continued the lesson. Amy: Now, that minor necrosis disease is something most undead have naturally. It's all well and good having a good form of danger that's harder to heal from than normal… but where do we go from here?

Amy: The next step is for everyone to make a potion using a mana type they are interested in trying out. Life mana-based diseases are harder to deal with so I'll be here to help you every step of the way! Abe: … I feel like it's expected of me and no one will be surprised when I say this but… Bruh. Explosion disease! What will that look like! Someone gets a minor case of the splosions? Bro. Tell me that's not funny… Abe: Okay, gonna start mixing Explosion mana into the spell – wish luck.

Innearth looked in his new bowl filled with fresh starter and tried to organize his thoughts. Well I don't have any specific goal in mind? I guess I'll just see what a crystal disease looks like it's kind of like what Abe just said in that it's probably expected of me… but it's not like I can think of anything else right now. Innearth began the process of mixing his bowl up – adding more "flesh" medium to lock the spell to flesh, and then sprinkling a few dots of crystal mana about the bowl starting off small.

Innearth: Why are we just using humans as an ingredient? Amy: oh! That's just because they are easy to gain. Adventurers lose limbs constantly and humans are the most plentiful. Amy: Technically you are making a touch based disease but it's most common carrier is humans. If you want a disease that only targets a certain type of Dungeon monster you use a part from that dungeon monster.

If you want it to only target dungeon monsters in general, you use a whole bunch of different kinds of dungeon parts – if you use enough it covers all of them. Technically you should use flesh from a bunch of different species and give it plenty of options… but this is good enough for our practice. I have some contacts if you need materials for all the different kinds of adventurers. Innearth: What happens if we skip that step? Amy: Well… it will still work if injected or ingested by anyone. At least it should.

Like if you really want to give a disease to one particular guest and cover their food in it, it will work. It won't spread beyond them though and it's much harder to infect stuff in general. Innearth: Alright. Thanks for the information. Innearth began swirling small streams of crystal mana into the bowl – a constant funnel of mana transmuting his blob of disease. Amy: I heard someone say dungeon disease spells are our form of potion making.

If you combine it with our material making spell it's the reason we can't make the same potions as sapient's. Amy: feel free to have fun with it! Toss any materials you want into the mix… the more the merrier. Innearth printed out some fragile crystals and wet the whole mix with liquid crystal – turning his bowl a pleasant blueish with wet sparkles hiding the original goop. Amy: All I'm going to mention is that the more you add, the harder it is to control.

Quantities start mattering and you can overpower traits you want if you use too many. Lots of similar added ingredients are usually good but stuff that are vastly different and not added correctly… well that can be a problem. Innearth: huh… I got a system prompt. Amy: oh? That probably means you made a transformation one. Unless you want to try and break it with madness you should accept those – like otherwise the system with destroy your disease. Let's see what you made! Weak crystal lung crystal heart disease.

[Airborne]. Description: Upon breath of this disease, crystal spores will begin growing upon the inside of a host's lungs. As the host gets sick, crystals spread to the bloodstream turning blood into liquid crystal. The last stage of this disease is when it reaches the heart. At that point the whole body stops working as the disease transmutes liquids into solids in a chain reaction. Information: Can be fought off with lots of liquids and a strong lifeforce. You could be reading stolen content.

Head to Royal Road for the genuine story. Amy: ah, boring one. Not to say your disease is boring! Just… most of the transformation ones are more exciting. Amy: Here this is what a rabbit transformation disease looks like. Hare shift. [Contact Based]. [Water carrier]. Description: Partial nearly instantaneous transformation into a cross between current species and a long-eared rodent. Very hard to fight off.

[Skill alteration]: skills, spells and actions will be twisted by the theoretical new species you have gained. Results vary. Information: Disease spreads through prolonged contact to liquid containing this disease. Disease is broken upon consumption of the raw meat of a predator animal or monster. Disease can be dispelled by strong cleansing magic or upon 40 days of first contracting said disease. Disease can be worsened and time extended upon consumption of grains, carrots, grass.

Fighting off this disease without cleansing it will increase resistance against both this transformation disease and others. Innearth: huh… what's with all those rules? That's a paragraph of them. Amy: The stronger a transformation disease you make the more the system meddles. Sometimes it lets you choose the ways to revert it! This is actually a good thing as far as I'm concerned – it lets us make some interesting scenarios where we hit adventurers with a debuff and they have to figure out how to remove it.

Amy: I have one disease that turns people purple and shrinks them to roughly a quarter of their size. Adventurers who contract it have to eat sweets and I've planted a bunch of sugary fruits about a miniature secret area. They can find a bunch of secrets in there and then fix themselves back to normal by eating one of those fruits! Doesn't that make a fun scenario! Fated Eternal Design would be proud. Sure even after fixing it, adventurers look a bit purplish for a few days and have a sweet tooth…

but it's still pretty fun and they get compensated for their troubles. Innearth: Okay, So try again? Amy: The good thing about magical diseases is that you can use magical diseases as ingredients! There's no need to revert back to your starter… you can try using this result you made to make another more interesting one. I recommend adding more liquids and trying to remove that airborne pathway – it's much harder to control airborne diseases I don't recommend them unless you want it literally everywhere.

Innearth: Thanks, Amy: Oh! One last thing, Doc has a lot of transformation unique materials. If you ask him nicely he can share them – those are how I've made some of my best ones. Abe: Flatulent disease? That's… not what I was going for. Amy: let's dissect this result together and see how we can shift it into something you like more okay? … Innearth split his failed disease into several bowls and started trying to figure out how to magnify certain results.

Grabbing a pure corrupted crystal, he started mixing the bowl once more. I think this is another one of those spells where I don't like how random it is. Should I add more of something? As Innearth spun his bowl about, he saw the corrupted crystal initially start to work like it usually did – it sucked in roughly half the mass in the bowl and all the mana he was trying to spin about almost breaking the spell… but then, something about spinning it caught on its natural process.

The spell seemed to pull the reaction out of the mass of corrupted crystals that had begun to form. Spinning about the inner chunk shattered began growing and then shattered again – growing smaller and smaller with each break while every lump and sludgy material in the bowl transformed as well. Soon all that was left in Innearth's bowl was a powdery sort of rainbow sand – colours so mixed, they appeared greyish brown.

At the exact moment he stopped stirring, a system confirmation prompt appeared and upon confirmation, the following description was shown. Crystalline Petrification Virus. [Contact based]. [Threshold saturation]. Description: Spread through prolonged touch, this virus turns flesh and blood to crystalline solids in a single fast-moving reaction. Information: Can be fought off with high vitality and willpower. Is broken upon being exposed to sunlight. Cannot penetrate cleansing barriers.

So this turns people into a statue? And they will revert back to being whatever they were when moved to daylight? What's different about the sun and regular light? Innearth: so… exposure to sunlight? Amy: that's a pretty standard transformation breaking state. Most petrification effects have something along those lines… The statue is freed upon daybreak or the light of a full moon… that sort of thing. What have you got? Lets see it!

Innearth sent a copy of the status description and waited patiently for Amy to respond. Amy: yep! That's a relatively good version – if a bit weak. If you want this virus to affect high level adventurers, we have to keep fiddling with it until we remove those two "can be fought off" lines. Vitality is what most warriors have and willpower is a… It's not the mage equivalent because it's not really an energy but it's close enough. Amy: here. Let me help you remove those traits. Can I take over for a bit?

Innearth: Oh, sure. Of course. Take it away. Innearth watched as Amy added a stream of what had to be blood and a glob of some white mucusy substance. She then began weaving together a strange multiple swirl mixing effect – with 5 distinct whirlpools of life adjacent mana touching down and drawing up the disease. Like different coloured cyclones of greenish mana.

More sketchy blobs of what looked like roots were added and then – suddenly out of nowhere – a long Tentacle shot out of a portal and tossed a live squirrel into the tub. Scrambling against the side this squirrel was flash petrified into a crystal statue and then pulled into a portal. A brief moment later a second unfrozen squirrel appeared from the same portal scrambling about this time as it was dunked into the bowl.

After two more cycles past, it was apparent the squirrel was the same one each time – for it seemed resigned to its fate, hanging limply as it was crystallized and then removed one last time. It hung for a moment then was removed – tentacle dragging into the closing portal with a wet squelch. Amy: ta da! There you go! Innearth: … is that squirrel okay? Amy: … why do you ask? Innearth: ah idk, it seemed cruel. Amy: Ehh… I didn't realize it would upset you.

Snookems found a toy and was playing with it so I figured I'd use the thing to break the willpower trait on your disease before it was eaten. Do you like squirrels or something? Did you want it? Snookems is really attached to it… but I can tell them to drop it if you want it. They drag all sorts of things around my dungeon and leave them in weird places so I'm sure they can find a new toy if you wanted this one? Innearth: Oh don't worry about it!

You don't have to justify this or anything, I just felt like they didn't have a chance and... Idk don't worry about it. Let's see the new effect. Crystalline Petrification Virus. [Contact based]. [Threshold saturation]. Description: Spread through the touch of a host, this virus turns flesh and blood to crystalline solids within three seconds of continuous exposure. Asymptomatic hosts can be formed when ingesting the virus in sunlight and remain carriers of said virus until they have been cleansed.

Information: Is broken upon being exposed to sunlight. Is broken by strong cleansing magic. Amy: That's a great petrification time! Usually I get a petrification version that takes minutes to even hours to freeze them and then have to carefully strengthen it to a more effective point. Innearth: It's probably the corrupted crystals doing that. So that's it? I have a virus? Amy: Yep! This is the point where you can make a monster out of your batch or spread it about an area.

If you want more of it, the easiest way will be to create a monster that constantly produces this and heals it back up. I think the convention is to call those "Subject Ones". Innearth: no need for incubation or whatever? Amy: Not unless you want it to work faster than 3 seconds. Incubation is usually what I do to grow its strength or concentration. Sometimes you can dilute results with a bunch of water and then incubate its strength back up… but viruses aren't really poisons.

Most of them work on a "you get infected or you don't get infected" basis… Amy: … I guess I don't know how you would strengthen a crystal virus so a subject one monster is your best bet. Amy: Oh! Last note. If you go that route with a "subject one" monster it becomes linked to the magical diseases in a weird way... killing the monster will cure all those who have contracted the disease. If you make multiple monsters you can spread it out so all of them have to be destroyed to cure it...

but that also weakens it in general. Hope you're having fun making diseases! Please tell me if you need anything else... Innearth: well thank you for your help, I guess I'll try a few more ideas. Innearth made a crystal turtle using his crystalline virus and a simple mechanism that caused it to scrape virus gunk off of itself constantly – like a shedding bowl that wandered around a little terrarium he made for it.

He saved a tiny bit of the virus and mixed it with several starters to try and prime them with the work he already did… and then began using different mana types and materials just to see what would happen. As Innearth made various disease potions, his mind kept drifting to what had just happened. He tried to understand his feelings about the squirrel. Maybe it's because I used to watch animals delving me? Whatever the reason… it feels like they are small furry adventurers.

If they get eaten or die in a trap they didn't notice – or while fighting – it's fine, that's life… but getting trapped with overwhelming force and essentially tortured makes me uncomfortable. Torture isn't fun to watch. Not like action and real fights are. I feel like Amy's monsters are overkill and the squirrel didn't know what it was getting itself into… idk why I'm focusing on that so much. I'm kind of interested in seeing different magical diseases let's focus on that instead.

I know I'm being dumb no one else seems to have had a problem with that. … Innearth soon forgot his misgivings and created a wide variety of magical diseases – sometimes viruses, sometimes fungal or bacterial strains, sometimes even parasites – with dangerous or interesting sounding effects. At some point Amy taught them how to mix multiple diseases together and they went through a period of combining diseases with old strains or throwing everything into a chamber to see what survives.

Innearth really liked the animal transformation viruses… but didn't want to make them when he found out they usually required a live animal or two as one of the spell's ingredients. He wasn't squeamish or anything – he just kept imagining the animals were adventurers and not wanting to do it. At one point, FED and Innearth combined a mental confusion disease with a crystal parasite and mutated it into a mind-controlling crystal parasite.

Essentially it caused a nest of crystals to sprout from the head of anyone infected by the parasite… and then controlled them to attack and attempt to infect anything nearby. Great fun to infect a few super-soldiers and watch them chase each other around a quarantined section of the facility. The highlight of this period, however, was a combined monster schematic that every single dungeon added to. Their disease magnum opus.

The schematic was centred around what appeared to be several stacked wheels of syringes on a unicycle. The boss had dozens of different diseases stored in each syringe and a piston method that Doc came up with and everyone enhanced to deliver the payload. A steam mana organ, Kinetic mana accelerator, Entropy mana projectile hack, a piercing void spout and a liquid controlling case all combined into something that would infect any adventurer dumb enough to get close.

Other than a complicated part air elemental, part kinetic mana movement system, the rest of this boss went into defence. A sleeve of indestructible void surrounded its central core, and all of the dungeons worked hard to make it durable enough to survive the attacks of high-levelled adventurers. And then four of them were made. Each with different diseases stored about. Everything from essentially poisons, to petrifications, to "transformative temporary mutations" were included.

The release of these four instruments of disease marked the return to dungeon building and for a time everything seemed to be working out. Storylines were made based around some of the strangest diseases and the group had some of the most fun they had in a while. Slowly however friction began building between dungeons. There was a solid split between FED who kept telling them they weren't done and Abe/Queen who were getting more and more annoyed by how bossy he was being.

They claimed they were getting bored of building without a payoff, or said they could add stuff to the facility later like they did in their own dungeons. Amy tried to mitigate the fighting while Doc and Innearth mostly worked on their own projects not having as much of a stake in what happened. If Innearth had to pick a side… well he could see why Abe and Queen had a problem with FED right now – his perfectionism was getting more and more annoying and lead to his collaboration being slightly overbearing…

This was supposed to be for all of them but FED was taking control of nearly all the processes claiming they couldn't use certain designs because they looked dumb or didn't match the theme. But on the other hand, the main reason Innearth found it hard to care was that FED was taking over a part of the process he didn't care about as much. The fact that while FED wanted everything to be perfect and was bossing Cores around… he also was willing to put in the work himself.

He was everywhere constantly simultaneously building complicated structures everywhere and adding furniture or embellishments to their spaces. Considering at the end of the day Innearth liked pretty much all of FED's designs it seemed weird to get mad at FED for doing his thing. In fact… it was to the point where Innearth kept comparing how well put together the finished sections of the facility looked – and then comparing them to his "finished" sections of dungeon and finding them lacking.

Innearth slowly panned over how his dungeon was set up. There were different areas designed around variety – huge changes between zones and transitionary floors to help make sure delvers didn't get bored – but stuff was kind of disjointed. It felt slightly slapped together despite how much work he had put into the place. When he looked at the facility, he could see dozens of distinct areas with different feels – unique areas that all tied together into the greater theme.

There were plant overrun hallways beside more orderly greenhouses. There were experimental pods and rooms dedicated to single massive experiments beside quarantined areas with hazards, flashing lights and blaring sounds. Yeah… I think I want to just leave all the story and decoration design to FED. I can experiment just fine and he can be the one to deal with fitting it into the theme. As annoyed as some are getting, I really appreciate it. …

The only part of all this is how it makes me feel like my own dungeon is lacking somehow. … I think… I think once I finish my nightmare floors, I want to do all of my future design in this facility – or at least by extending this facility. That feels like something I can work on forever. I'm not going to rip up my own dungeon and replace it with a facility… I just feel like I want to transition to this when I clean up my old floors. …

Innearth had expanded his own dungeon a huge distance while digging raw materials for the facility… but left it mostly empty for the past two years – not performing any massive design. Mostly his expanded area was taken up by the nightmare version of the ice caverns… but Innearth had only done the bare minimum to make it cold and lazily let it slowly gather ice and snow related mana types. Now that he had nothing else to do he focused on solidifying these last few floors.

The frozen gasses and incredibly cold ice materials made for some obvious upgrades.. while his increased circuit knowledge let him start the process of designing strong monsters to center this floor around. A solid three-month span of steadily increasing bickering passed in what felt like minutes… before finally FED was convinced and somewhat forced into saying he was done. His final desire was to make a joint quest through all of their dungeons to unveil the opening of the shared facility.

Each dungeon took and hid a dozen keys and nonchalantly placed a powered down gate to the facility in their depths. Soon the adventurers would arrive. Soon.