“I love the man who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.”

-Thomas Paine

“Death is not the end. Though the Gods are sparse on the details, even we mortals can perceive the soul. That mortal uncertainty adds poignancy and joy to the life we do live.”

-Funeral speech attributed to Theins the Cleric

I stared down at my own body. I was pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to bend like that.

I didn’t want to believe I was dead. I mean… who trips on a pencil and fails over a railing, That had to be the most clumsy way to die. I looked up to the fourth floor where I had fallen from. It’s amazing how fast that fall was. One second I trip, next, crunch. Not that there wasn’t a certain timeless moment in the air.

I looked around. So… now what? No grim reaper, no bright light? I am not going to haunt my apartment building. I barely wanted to live here as it was.

The world started to fade away in white light.

Oh thank God.

Then, with starting suddenness, I was jerked… sideways.

I say sideways because I was moving sideways to everything. Not one direction, but away from all of them at once. I could see the inside of my body, the tiles and plumbing beneath me, everything unfolding and becoming more than merely three dimensional. Then it accelerated.

What…?

I screamed soundlessly.

The world around me jumbled into a series of impossible images and reality abruptly snapped back into place as though it had never had the indecency to get so mixed up in the first place.

I was in a room carved directly out of stone. The room had a flat floor and was in the shape of a hollowed out half-sphere. A single archway, simple and unadorned, lead out of the room into a hallway. The hallway turned a corner to the left and went out of sight.

The stone of the room, and hallway, was mostly shades of grey and tan, though veins of something I thought was marble ran through it in streaks of white and grey.

My emotions were dull. I was detached. I simply existed and observed. I had no concerns, no curiosity. I knew that both of those emotions would normally be appropriate, as I was not where, or what, I thought I ought to be after death. Would I normally be terrified? I should be more focused on death too. Surely that should have warranted some emotion? Now that I think about it, I am fairly sure I was in shock right after I died. It’s not important. I thought these things, noted them, and continued on with my apathy.

I could see all directions simultaneously, though the view below was mostly blocked by the object I was resting on. I was fairly sure I knew at the least the basics of what I was now, however. The were no objects in the room that were red, but there a pool of light on the ground that looked like spilled blood. So, I must be red and transparent. So, I am red glass or clear stone.

The room held other items that would normally have held my interest and now were simply cataloged for a lack of anything more meaningful to do.

Balls of light floated just below the top of the arch of the ceiling and gave off the gentle warmth of barely yellow light. There was also a black crystal on a stand. I was fairly sure I was on a similar stand. The crystal was black and the size a man’s heart. The surface of the crystal was like obsidian, dark and impenetrable, but with hints of translucence around the edges that suggested inky depths. The stand itself looked waist high and was composed of two hollow circles linked by a helix. The bottom circle rested on the ground and the black crystal was held aloft by the other. Directly above the circle on the ground a milky white crystal glowed with dull light, held in place by metal prongs. The metal of the stand looked like the silvery color of stainless steel, though the faintly shimmering writing that traced the outside of the helix was decidedly not so mundane.

So. Magic or sufficiently advanced science. I absently hummed in thought, uncaring.

Time had no meaning. My thoughts flitting about in contemplation of the room, the world, kittens, any thought that crossed my mind becoming as worthy of my interest as any other.

A timeless instant later a man entered the room.

All else analyzed I allowed myself to watch the man. I think I should be feeling surprise. I suppose I subconsciously thought he ought to have the standard wise and mighty wizard look: long white beard, possibly glasses and twinkling eyes, an ancient face that would give an old paper bag a run for its money, robes, a gnarled wooden staff, a pointed hat, the usual. Instead he was far more mundane and practical.

The man was, in fact, wrinkled, but it was the wear and tear of someone who had spent many days braving the sun, wind, and weather. Wrinkles carved themselves across his face like ancient river beds, now dried to dust. He was balding, with neatly trimmed salt and pepper hair forming a half circle near the level of his ears, though it was more salt than pepper. His nose was thin, short, and perfectly straight above teeth that gleamed like polished ivory. The man wore brown leather boots, with pants and a long shirt both the same shade of whitish tan. His hips sported a leather belt studded with various pockets and pouches across the front.

The first thing the man did upon entering the room was examine me. He moved his hands and spoke an incantation. As far as I could tell nothing had happened, but the man’s eyebrows rose and his eyes crinkled as he smiled broadly while nodding his head. He repeated more gestures and incantations several times, each time smiling afterwards. Finally he looked between me and the black crystal. With a smile he rubbed his hands together and took a piece of chalk from a pouch at his waist.

The man carefully drew a circle around the perimeter of the room. For all that it was done freehand it was a perfect circle. I knew I should be impressed. I was momentarily distracted, reminded of a story about an artist who proved their skill by drawing a perfect circle on a piece of paper. That was some time during the renaissance, wasn’t it? My attention wandered back to the present. The man was drawing two more circles. A larger and a smaller one. The way they were set up they touched both each other and the two sides of the circle 180 degrees apart from each other. Within the larger of the new circles he drew two new circles. These circles did not touch and were several feet apart. Me, and the stand I rested upon were placed in the center of one of these circles, while the black crystal and its stand were placed in the center of the other.

Between these circles the man wrote out runes in a straight line from the edge of one circle to the edge of the other. Off that line the man proceeded to scribe out branched lines of runes in many different shapes. Sometimes it was merely another straight line, but sometimes these lines had further branches, or other shapes: zigzags, spirals, and curving lines. Additional runes encompassed the perimeter of all five of the circles, though these runes were spaced further apart and had less complexity.

Once all the runes were drawn the man carefully checked that each one was correct. Afterwards, he did the same thing again. He made no corrections, but simply moved with a glacial slowness, checking every line for errors.

Once he finished his check, he carefully moved until he stood in the center of the smaller inner circle. With a few gestures of his right hand the chalk drawn painstakingly across the floor lit up with bright light. He kept his right hand still in the air and slowly and deliberately moved his left hand into one of the pouches at his waist. The rest of his body absolutely still, his left hand emerged with a handful of silvery dust and tossed it into the air. His right hand streaked down when the dust reached the top of its arc and the dust drifted downwards. It was pulled unnaturally towards where the chalk was waiting below and stopped an inch in the air above the lines, mirroring the runes and circles perfectly. He raised both his hands together and said a word; the chalk vanished.

The man started to gesture with both hands. Each moved independently of the other while he spoke an incantation firmly and clearly. The silver runes in the air glowed brighter and brighter until blindingly bright. The contained power blazed from them and the air thrummed with vibrating power.

Whatever else might have happened after this, I missed. As the chanting continued, my view grew more and more constrained. I was focusing more and more on the black crystal across from me with an inhuman intensity. The black shape grew before me. First it was a dark moon, then a black world, then a deep cave, and then all the world was darkness.

When I awoke my mind was functioning properly once again. Though I immediately started to have doubts about that fact. Mainly because the first thing I saw was a few floating screens of text.

Your status has changed!

Status

Name: N/A

Type: Dungeon Core – Soul Hybrid

Level: 1

Crystal Status: 100% - Undamaged

Status Effects: Mana Drain

Available Mana: 0/25

Passive Mana Generation: 10/Day

Next level: 15 Mana Cost

Subsections Available: 1

Ability Points: 100

Skills: Mana Absorption I,

Limited Omniscience (Dungeon)

Soul Mana I

Dungeon Aura Expansion I

Titles: None

You have been awarded new titles!

Reborn Soul

Your soul was captured just after death and reborn into something new. You are aware of yourself as a soul in a way few people ever are. Take this new chance and make the most of it.

+250 Ability Points

Learn and level up soul related skills in half the time (50%)

First of its Kind

You are the first of your kind, a dungeon with a mortal soul, and are potentially the progenitor of a whole new existence. The weight of the world rests on your shoulders, but you have unlimited potential.

+500 Ability Points

Learn the first level of any skill in half the time (50%)

New Quest Obtained!

Freedom or Dominion

You are being held captive. Some of your abilities are removed. Escape or kill your captor to gain your abilities back. Exceptional accomplishments in this task can earn greater rewards.

What?

My emotions whirled in a tumultuous mishmash, and the screens that popped up were not helping. I was first confronted with my quite recent experience of becoming post-mortal.

I died.

And… now I am reborn… well, sort-of.

Am I in a game? I doubt that, pretty sure we were a long way away from that being possible yet. More like I am in a place that functions like one. And I am going to rip out the throat of this petty magician that dares to…

What the hell? That was not my own thought. Well… it was, but not really. There was a foreign set of instincts that had momentarily twisted my thoughts.

I could feel that I was no longer alone in my own mind. I was sharing my new crystalline existence with something… other. It was darker and more primal, a creature of urges and instinct rather than intellect. Well… humans were admittedly not shining examples of intellect triumphing over instinct themselves. Still, it was something I wouldn’t want to be trapped in the same room with, let alone the same mind. I could feel the impulses that ran this foreign other half now that I was aware of its existence. I could feel how it was tied into my mind. The thoughts had been my own, after being twisted by these new feelings rising up with a murderous rage against the man who had placed me here.

Great. This could be dangerous.

My other half resented being trapped. It wanted to expand and protect itself. It wanted to bury itself within tunnels deep in the earth and form a lair. Most of all, it wanted to lash out at the man that posed a danger by being too close. TOO CLOSE!

I marshaled my thought, trying to remain calm and tamp down the rampant emotions of my other half. Right, lets focus on the now.

I still had sight in every direction, but now I could both see and feel everything within a few feet. Mostly I was focused on the man (too close), who was, in turn, seemingly fascinated with me. I wanted to make a joke about being amazing, but even in my mind it fell flat.

I was also keenly aware of myself. Unlike before I could actually see myself, and even inside of myself. I was now a purple crystal, more like a gem, in the shape of a large oval with dozens of small facets. And my lower end was held firmly in the same type of stand the black crystal was in before.

I could actually see more. Feel more? I could trace the faint movement of the air currents. I could feel each breath the man made, and the interchange of air flowing around me. And in the air, something else. I had no idea what to call it, but those instincts I was trying to bury recognized it with hunger. It was power; I could feel it. The power to change, something. My thoughts fell flat as the instincts failed to really provide an answer. This power was everywhere, it gleamed faintly in the air, and I could see it slowly swirling to flow towards me. It then condensed into a stream that entered into my gem. Then, however, it was pulled away and diverted down into the helix of the stand. There it followed the runes along the structure until it flowed into the crystal below.

My other half was, to put it mildly, rather upset about this. I was fairly sure if I let it alter my emotions it would have me ranting and raving in no time.

I could just imagine someone trying to sell this experience to me: “New resurrection package, now with 20% more murderously unstable roommates for your brain.”

Regardless, my mind was captured by a different interest.

The old man made a few gestures and spoke. Unlike before, what I saw was radically different. As the man’s hands moved, traceries of power gleamed like a web spun onto the air.

It was breathtakingly beautiful.

The web finished and sank into my crystal, leaving a filament of power that lead back to the man. The man squinted slightly, while his eyes went back and forth, looking unfocused.

It looked like he was reading. Perhaps he was watching the same type of screens I had seen earlier. I was wondering what kind of information he had on me.

Actually, now I was thinking about something I had been subconsciously avoiding. Sadly, my conscious mind was more than happy to wave it in front of my mind like a flag.

I am a dungeon. Well some odd form of hybrid dungeon. Plus I was dead, cannot forget that little detail. Well, that wasn’t exactly true though, was it? I was dead.

My mind seemed rather focused on this. The idea of death had certainly preoccupied my thoughts from time to time in my last life. Hard to attend your grandfather’s funeral and not be aware of it. And I thought that death would probably occupy anyone’s mind who was aware of what it might mean, and the mysteries that lay locked behind it.

Apparently beyond death lay a very odd form of reincarnation. At least for me.

I was past death now. I actually knew I had a soul. That… was quite a shift. I was not dead, but rather undead, formerly dead, not as dead as I used to be, the dungeon formerly known as dead. I laughed to myself at my own jokes, poor though they were.

I shook my head, or rather I tried and nothing happened. It was the strangest feeling I had ever felt, because I felt like I should have moved, but nothing had changed at all.

Hmm. Wonder if I will need to deal with phantom limbs.

Focus, focus. I was getting distracted, and I was letting it happen because I was avoiding the suddenly massive issues facing me. I died. My former life was now over. I had read books and watched movies where people are transported away and whined and moped until they got back home. That was not an option for me. The part about going home, I could whine and mope all I liked for all the good it would do me. I was dead. No ruby slippers could tap together and whisk me homeward.

I was dead. I repeated that to myself, because, while I knew that it was true on an intellectual level, it seemed hard to convince some part of myself that stubbornly argued that I was alive. My friends would mourn. My parents and family would cry over a grave. I wondered briefly if my broken body was still suitable as an organ donor. My old life was over.

I started to worry about my old life when I stopped. All of this felt hollow. These worries, this grief, had not hit me the way I was expecting. I had been avoiding thinking about these things because I knew what emotions I should feel.

I still remembered my old life, but all these wounds of death seemed like something that happened years ago. I still loved my family, and I would miss them, but I was not devastated. I wasn’t sure why this happened, but I suspected it was that period where I had had no emotions. Somehow that state of mind had quietly filed everything away without the usual emotional mess it would normally take to get there.

I wasn’t sure whether I should be grateful or feel wronged, that I hadn’t had the chance to properly grieve.

Regardless, I was not as I once was. From all that I could tell my soul, my emotions, and memories were all the same, with the only notable exception of the new set of instincts shoved into my head. It was a relief to know that while this world was vastly different, my old one being remarkably short on professional wizards, my mind was more or less intact.

This was a world with magic, and one styled as a game; that was fairly easy to understand as well. I knew of the many worlds theory. There were potentially an infinite number of universes and worlds with in them, and each universe might run on different rules that our own. I was grateful to simply land in one that was actually within my ability to understand, even if it went beyond merely being strange into the surreal.

Okay, one more time. I was a dungeon of some type. I was also made of crystal. I was the heart of a dungeon to be, even if all that belonged to me for the moment was about a diameter of four feet. Regardless, the dungeon’s instincts were fiercely possessive. I might not have much, but it was mine and mine alone.

For a moment I allowed myself to muse on how often I had desired more magic in my life. I did not want to die to make that happen, but beggars and choosers. This made me think of the birches poem by Robert Frost. Well, enough, I need to see what I can actually do.

I finally read through the screens now that I had calmed down. Hmm, doesn’t mention Caden anywhere. Does it not know my name or do I need to be named another way? The mana drain status explained why I could see the energy passing through me and leaving even as I consumed it. I now also knew that that energy was mana. Obviously I was being kept at zero mana so I could pose no threat to the man studying me and keeping me captive.

There was quite a lot of mana in the air. I was not getting anywhere close to all of it, and there was far more around him. So it was a reasonable guess that he was not simply keeping me as a mana battery.

Sadly, I still didn’t understand him as he spoke. I had been hoping that my merger with the dungeon would at least have given me the ability to understand the language. No such luck. I moved on to familiarizing myself with… well, my new self. I focused on each ability listed and new information appeared.

Mana Absorption I

Raw mana within your aura can be drawn into your core to increase your available mana.

Limited Omniscience (Dungeon)

You can see, hear, and feel everything within your aura. Living entities and dense mana sources may block your senses.

Soul Mana I

Unlike any other dungeon, you have a mortal soul. Mortal souls naturally create raw mana. This mana flows into your available mana.

Dungeon Aura Expansion I

You may convert any available mana to expand your area of influence (aura).

This all seemed fairly straight forward. I could draw mana in or create it myself and store it. Then that could be used to expand the area I could influence, called my aura. I also had some perks because I was reborn and a unique existence. I had the ability to level up, and that would likely open more options for me. Of course, I had no mana, and I needed that to level up. So I would need to find a way to fix that.

I focused on another element of my status, ability points, and a massive array of purchasable options appeared. They were neatly separated into categories and I could even search through it. My other half, being nothing but instincts, had no capacity to use something so sophisticated. I assumed it would normally purchase something by feeling somehow. Right now I could feel it just urging me to do something about the situation. It didn’t seem to know how, or what, just a desire for action.

Two enormous categories had plants and animals I could learn to summon, and a few things fell into both. None of the associated mana costs were zero, not that I was surprised, so none of them were useful to me at the moment. I took the time to search through the list, finding everything I could that had to do with mana. There was no option to purchase an increase in any of my skills. Either that was not possible, or it simply wasn’t available yet.

There were a few skills that looked promising. One skill resisted magic with the dungeon core as the target, and magic that altered the immediate area around the core. Another would give me a resist to magical drains of any kind within my aura. That one also gave a lesser drain resistance to monsters in my aura. Several skills increased the mana I received under certain conditions, like the death of my own monsters, other creatures, etc… However, since I had no way to make that happen they were useless for the moment.

Since I had a special affinity with souls I took the time to search for skills related to those. There were few options available. I was not sure if that was because I had not unlocked access to them via level, skill, some esoteric requirements, or because I was the first dungeon with a soul capable of using them. There was an option that would allow me to create undead creatures with the souls of dead adventurers. Another option used the death of creatures to create soul energy, whatever that might be. The only option that looked applicable and useful now was soul perception. It would allow me to more accurately gauge the power of creatures and people. Even with most of these not usable now I was mainly searching for ideas of what is possible.

The titles that I received had provided vital information. One skill told me that I would gain the first level of skills easier. This implied that not every skill needed to be purchased or granted. I could learn them. I wasn’t sure if I could learn all or even any of the skills that could be purchased, but I was hopeful. I was especially hopeful since the skills available for purchase were not cheap. I did not want to waste ability points if I could get a skill another way.

Almost all the skills I looked at I could not afford yet. At the moment I had no idea how easy points were to acquire. Would I get more each level? I didn’t know. Even if I got 100 every level I would want to save them for important things. And I could end up with far more, or far less. I could only get them from titles. Or I could get 100 per day. I would have to wait and see.

As long as I wasn’t in any danger, well, immediate danger, there was no reason to waste my resources. I was trapped and did not want to just sit here endlessly, but I could afford some patience. I was going to kill that man. No! Shut up you! Great, now I am yelling at my own twisted thoughts. I am sure that bodes well. Right. I was not going to kill him. I was just going to make absolutely sure that I escaped.