Ding

Skill [Expert Mana Control] advanced to level 4

Over the past couple of hours, I'd had a crash course in monster physiology. Now I knew why the orc that Erryn had dropped on me all that time ago had been weaker than its dungeon counterparts. Monsters fed off mana. Without sufficient density, they would slowly starve to death, turning sluggish and anaemic, and in the latter stages unable to use their special abilities as their mana pools emptied themselves. The ogres that took our team of a hundred delvers to take down weren't even fighting at full strength, although they did have non-zero mana. Unlike my orc, which must have been created without any, given his lack of a roar attack. Apparently I still hadn't been aware of the full extent to which Erryn had cheated.

Zephyr would die out here without me feeding him, yet they'd charged straight out of the dungeon and the city without explaining that to me first. If I hadn't had [Expert Mana Control], I wouldn't have been able to sustain him. That was how much of a hurry they were in. Both of them; Liv wasn't controlling Zephyr in any way, and he was clearly sapient. From the sounds of things, the rush was well warranted.

What was the saying back on Earth? If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you? Soul magic had a cost; it corroded the user's soul. Liv had explained to me exactly what had happened to the last two civilizations to populate this planet, and that now, despite that, Erryn had been using it constantly for the past three hundred years; the Law was one gigantic soul magic construct. The perception blocks and memory editing she used were soul magic. Even her preferred method of communication, telepathy, was soul magic. Sure, the occasional use of telepathy on its own would be fine, the user healing faster than it caused damage, but in combination with everything else, it was another straw for the camel's back. A back that was already cracking.

I had always thought Erryn hid soul affinity stuff from the System because it risked interfering with the Law, something that I never had to worry about. But given this revelation, perhaps I did need to worry. No more soul affinity magic for me, unless it's a matter of life and death.

It hadn't been until I arrived in Synklisi that I'd given any real consideration to why dungeon breaks happened. Back in Dawnhold, I'd noted the wall long before finding out how anything worked, and so hadn't put too much thought into it. I probably would have if a dungeon break actually happened there, but none ever had, at least not in my lifetime. And now I knew why they happened, and why they had worsened over the past couple of hundred years; Erryn was suffering feedback from her overuse of soul magic, experiencing blackouts during which she compelled her monsters to leave their dungeons and attack indiscriminately.

So, faced with this problem, what did Erryn do? Use less soul magic? Take the time to recover? No, she used more. She created the safety net around dungeons, capturing departing souls, rebuilding bodies for them and reimplanting them. She felt guilty over the deaths in her dungeons that she had caused while unthinkingly following the instructions of her creators, even when they clashed with her own wishes.

She knew full well what she was doing. She dropped her direct control over dungeons. Even the great dungeon, her birthplace and home for the past six hundred years, had been abandoned. This was why I couldn't contact her when I tried a couple of years back; the dungeon core had no longer been a part of her. She had these automated constructs operate the magic for her, isolating herself from the decay, on the basis that soul magic can't damage the user's soul if the user had no soul. Despite her efforts, it was nothing more than a delaying tactic. Simply creating the enchantments required was enough to contaminate her. That explained the comment Tilyana passed about not being able to avoid the price.

Liv knew all this because Erryn had told her. When it came to what happened in the Emerald Caverns, she knew nothing beyond what I'd been able to share. Something had obviously gone very wrong there, but what precisely it was didn't matter. The important point was that Erryn was obviously intending to bring the hundreds of dead dwarfs back. Not via pre-created enchantments and automated dungeon features, but personally. Liv was of the opinion that it was beyond her, and that the feedback of that much soul magic would shatter her.

She was also of the opinion that Erryn shared that opinion, which was the cause of the delay. She would be taking steps to ensure that after she brought the dwarfs back, whatever corrupted remnants remained of herself wouldn't be a threat to anyone. There was only one way to do that. Liv thought Erryn was going to sacrifice herself for the victims of the Emerald Caverns disaster.

I could make complaints about Erryn's lack of understanding and all the strange fallout it caused, but I could never complain about her dedication... Liv and Zephyr were prioritising the life of Erryn over the dead dwarfs. Erryn was apparently doing the reverse. As for me... how the hell was I supposed to decide that?! Nearly a thousand random lives I knew nothing about, or Erryn. The one who had brainwashed the planet, who mucked about with my memories and my life, who killed Cinus. Who just wanted to understand people and keep them safe... Dammit!

I hoped that Liv was wrong about what Erryn was planning. Despite her prior knowledge about Erryn's degradation, it wasn't as if she knew. She did seem pretty certain, though. Was it selfish of me to hope we were too late? That Erryn would be finished with whatever she was doing by the time we got there? Even if we did get there in time, how could we stop her? Couldn't she just teleport us all back to Synklisi the moment she saw us?

Zephyr rushed onwards, towards our target mountain where Erryn had apparently stashed her core, while I once again sat pondering consequences. It was me that pointed out Erryn's compulsion to make dungeons dangerous. It was only due to that conversation that she created the safety net. Without that, how much longer could she have continued without a disaster like the Emerald Caverns happening?

Then again, if I hadn't pointed it out, would she have fallen completely into insanity without ever noticing? The current situation was a consequence of my actions, but I couldn't say definitively that it was worse than what would have happened without me, if not now then in another few hundred years. Why was life so... complicated?

Reaching the mountain took a couple of hours, during which time Liv was flip-flopping between anxious and hyper, fretting about Erryn one second and petting Zephyr the next. I'd have been concerned for her own mental stability had I not already met her beforehand. This much seemed in character... But as we approached the mountain, she grew far more serious.

"I don't know where the entrance is," she admitted. "Everyone start looking."

Zephyr started sniffing at the ground, while I looked out with [Mana Perception] and [Soul Perception], as well as my actual eyes, which I did still use on occasion. Whether Liv had any esoteric senses of her own, I had no idea, but Zephyr seemed to sniff something out first, jumping up rocky outcrops and onto a plateau looking out over the plains below. From there, my [Mana Perception] picked up some sort of passageway. "Over there!" I pointed. There was no visible entrance, but we did have a level seventy monster with us, so that didn't even slow us down, Liv simply moving the cliff-face out of the way with physical force. We ended up in a metallic tunnel, which Zephyr once again accelerated down.

The mana density did rise, but this didn't feel like a dungeon. The metallic walls didn't look like any dungeon I'd heard of either, but I was hardly an expert there. I'd only ever been in three, and each had been very different. There probably were metallic dungeons somewhere. "What sort of place is this," I asked.

"The ark," answered Liv. "Mother has never told me what's in here, only that it's important. The surface races can't even see the mountain, never mind enter this place."

She hid the whole mountain? How?! I could understand a door, but mountains aren't exactly known for their subtlety. There's an awful lot of sky behind one of them that would need filling in. Regardless of how it was done, that certainly cemented this place as important.

We came to another closed door at the end of the tunnel, and my [Mana Perception] couldn't view behind it. That was new; normally I could see through anything. I'd been blinded by excessive mana before, but only dungeon core rooms had outright blocked me, and even they weren't this... uncomfortable. I felt like I was staring into an abyss myself, an endless hole uncomfortably sucking at my [Mana Perception], and threatening to give me a headache.

The door was locked, so Liv attempted to grant us access by the simple means of hitting it very hard. Ten minutes later, she'd made no impact whatsoever; whatever the door was made from, it was tough. Then, between two blows, the door clicked and opened on its own. Liv was of the opinion that she'd broken the lock, but I was unconvinced.

If Erryn was here, as far as it makes sense to talk about her location when she's the whole planet, she must have noticed us by now... The fact that she hadn't said anything, or tried to stop us... Had she just opened the door for us? I made no comment to Liv as we started our search, now on foot, with Zephyr following behind, struggling to squeeze through the doorways.

We ended up in a large, empty room, with several passages branching off in different directions. Correction; mostly empty. On one wall, inscribed in large letters, were the words 'Ark project', underneath which was a large arrow pointing downwards, where I could see some sort of thin booklet inside a glass cabinet attached to the wall. The cabinet was lit up in my [Mana Perception], seemingly carrying a straightforward preservation enchantment. Some sort of guidebook for the place? Or an instruction manual?

Liv looked around with agitation. "Let's split up," she said, running for a corridor without waiting for an answer. Zephyr barked in acknowledgement, then ran for a second one. I took a step towards a third, before reconsidering and grabbing the booklet from the cabinet.

I was familiar with the concept of an ark, and in this case the meaning turned out to be rather literal. This was indeed not a dungeon, but was a storage facility, where samples of all kinds of life were kept preserved, in case the planet ever suffered a disaster that required repopulation. It was also the home of the System. As much as it was obvious that the System was artificial, I'd never expected to find its home. This place was built around the time of the first mass extinction, or at least the first that Erryn knew about, and then Erryn had co-opted it after the second.

I put the booklet back; the world wasn't dead, and we didn't need the contents of the ark. We were only looking for Erryn. There had at least been a map, but it didn't exactly have an Erryn-is-here label on it. I picked a passageway at random, only to be distracted by a scream of utter despair before I could enter it.

I rushed towards the noise as best as I could, getting lost several times in the branching corridors, before I finally found Liv on her knees in front of an empty pedestal in another sizeable hall. The mana density in the room was immense, higher even than floor fifty of the Emerald Caverns. It was enough that I felt sick just stepping into it, but I forced myself onwards towards Liv, my eyes drawn to the dark, powerless orb she was clutching in her arms.

Erryn, Dungeon Core, level 1264 (Dead)