“He that is taken and put into prison or chains is not conquered, though overcome; for he is still an enemy.”

-Thomas Hobbes

Tam appeared the next morning to do his usual cursory inspection. I had expected some reaction since my skill level had increased, but he showed no particular reaction. I was not entirely sure if he was not interested in the skill leveling up, or he didn’t get that level of detail from the spells spying on me. Given how effusive Tam usually was about everything that happened I would have expected at least some reaction. For that reason I would just assume he couldn’t tell anything had changed with a reasonably high certainty. One more potential weakness I could use.

When Tam canceled his spell I used the mana and studied my earth manipulation. Nope, still seeing nothing.

Tam was busy drawing on the walls with more chalk. This time my emotions were more subdued. I had panicked each time in the past and it hadn’t been that bad. Honestly he could probably shatter me by picking me up and throwing me at a wall or the floor. There was no reason to assume that he was trying to do something terrible. The rune array he drew last time was annoying, but had not truly left me any worst off than I had been before I leveled up. That had actually been a pleasant surprise. Besides, there was still nothing I could do.

Like the runes that he had drawn out last time, these were all outside my aura. The new designs were smaller, but there were four of them spaced equidistant around the perimeter of the room. As far as my senses could tell, they were all identical. They would need to be in my aura for me to be sure. As I watched Tam I did my best to memorize them. However, a large portion of what went into them was probably the spell cast to activate them.

After a check that all of them were perfect, Tam burned them into the walls and filled them with the same coating of metal charged with a ridiculous amount of mana. As far as I could tell there was no change.

My practice with holding mana had barely resumed when Tam walked back into the room. He was carrying something that looked similar to the stand I was sitting on. They both had a large white crystal on the bottom, but there was a clear egg shaped crystal held on top with three prongs instead. The runes on the other stand were different, though I couldn’t see details. There was a small circle of metal with a single rune on it embedded in the ring holding up the egg.

Huh, am I being exposed to some other type of dungeon? Eh, too soon to tell.

Regardless, I watched with curiosity as Tam pushed that small circle after casting a long lasting diagnostic spell. Mana started to flow, but not downwards from the egg. Instead mana drained from the white crystal upwards into the egg.

Efforts to try sucking mana out of either the egg or the white crystal underneath proved fruitless. As the mana flow slowly continued the crystal egg began to turn white and glow. It was also becoming increasingly opaque to my aura. Looks like I get to see the effect of mana density on my perceptions happen in real time. Some time passed and Tam was simply waiting and reading in his chair. Eventually the crystal on top started to emit pulses of light. His vision gained the familiar far away look as he focused on something only he could see.

With a last flash of light the mana was expelled into the air as the egg rapidly turned back to clear. For a moment shock kept me from acting, but I quickly sucked up all the mana. Was Tam feeding me? Honestly I am not sure why Tam wanted to feed me mana, but there was already a plan for what to do when I got mana, so I hopped to it. Stone grew from the walls even as I studied how it happened. And as fast as I could create it, it was unmade by the beam of light from the runes.

As far as my senses were concerned, that beam was doing the same thing I did when I unmade stone. There might have been a tiny bit of turbulence in the air, but I couldn’t tell for sure. It wasn’t disintegrated though, there would have been a very noticeable expansion as the stone turned to gas. Where the hell did the extra mass go?

My new feeder had resumed its slow accumulation of mana and I waited for it impatiently. This time when it flashed I was ready. My concentration at the fullest, the mana drained into me as quickly as it was released.

Since watching my stone fruitlessly try to grow out of the walls had not shown any kind of results, another course of action was called for. Time to examine these runes.

Energy flowed through me into my aura. And nothing happened, except one of the runes on the wall flashed with light. Anywhere I tried to expand my aura in the room simply resulted in the closest rune glowing and my mana being spent to produce nothing. Worried, I tried to expand my aura in one of the sections deep behind the wall and my aura grew as it was supposed to. Whew, glad that worked.

Well this was not how I had planned to understand how the runes worked, but on the bright side at least now I understood what they did.

I took the time to use the mana to test the new restrictions. I was unable to create new aura at all within the radius of the sphere Tam thought I controlled and a few feet beyond. If Tam had erected defenses like these when I first arrived I would have had no real hope of escaping. Funny for me to be grateful that Tam was studying me, but if he was simply holding me captive there would have been little chance for me to do anything about it. It was obvious to me that Tam was engaged in research. And research required me to be active or responsive in some way.

I assumed that he knew I was a new type of dungeon. He had created me, after all. Obviously he was unaware of my continued, or perhaps even starting, intelligence but I had no idea if he even knew exactly what he had summoned to make the new hybrid. Regardless, it would be hard for Tam to study the characteristics of a new type of dungeon if I was a static object and never grew. Be grateful for small favors I suppose.

Attempting to expand my aura repeatedly to test my new limits had burned through most of my new mana. What little mana remained was simultaneously spent on tendrils of stone and expanding my aura farther away. If I only had access to my mana regeneration… Honestly I was pretty sure I could escape, if very slowly. For now, best to keep on chugging.

The next time the feeder activated the mana simply sat in my storage. I had about ten mana each time it fed me. I counted the seconds to see how long it would take for me to lose a point of mana. Then I did it again and again. Averaging out the results it was about five minutes per point of mana drained. And that was while I was slowly generating twenty points of mana a day. It was hard to tell exactly how much mana was flowing into me by draining the ambient environment, but I felt it was around half my natural regeneration. Assuming that there was a twenty four hour day here, which, admittedly was a rather dubious assumption, a few mental calculations told me that I was being drained at the rate of more than 300 mana a day. I was barely generating a tenth of that. There was no likelihood of me generating that kind of mana without some revolutionary new skill.

I had some mana still left, but it would all be drained away before the feeder activated again. Honestly that was expected. If it could overlap I would be able to slowly accumulate a larger amount of mana and level up again.

So I raised some stone where Tam and his chair would block a straight line from the beam array. With no particular feeling of surprise I watched as the beam of light curved to hit the new stone. Sigh, it would have been too much to assume that Tam had left in such an obvious flaw. I tested more and the beam could curve to hit anywhere in room.

The next time I had mana I tried something new, though I sincerely doubted that nothing would prevent it. Slowly I lowered the stand I sat on into the floor. I did this with extreme caution. There might only be a distance of three feet between me and floor, but I had no desire to learn if that was enough to damage me. Being made of crystal had given me a newfound respect for heights.

I snorted. I could just imagine it. I died and was resurrected into a new world. Then I died again by falling off the stand and shattering. Ha, that might even be a dumber way to die than tripping over the balcony.

Only the tiniest bit of the floor had sunk when the beam shot down and created stone instead. Well that was expected. The only thing worth noting was that the new stone didn’t match what used to be there. If it had worked it would have made my life, and escape, much easier, but it was not like the easy way had been been available so far.

Reinforcing the stone in the wall to make it denser met with no response. Well at least I could still do something.

For a while I considered just doing nothing. Odds are Tam would get frustrated again. Still, I didn’t know what he would do. Besides, there were still things to test, and the free mana was allowing me to spread my aura farther and farther back. That increased my odds of escape, so no reason not to keep at it.

I could always boycott Tam’s experiment later. Tam seemed even less patient than me anyway. If at some point my progress seemed to stall out and nothing new happened Tam would probably try to test something else.

My only real worry was that the end of the experiment might be my destruction. If that seemed likely I would start communicating for all I was worth. With the ability to change the nature of the walls without having them remade I could probably draw out pictograms in different colored stone.

I resumed my practice and by the end of the day a decent amount of practice was beneath my entirely metaphorical belt. I had tried making different types of stone and had no issues replicating different colors. The structures seemed to be somewhat different from the actual stone around me, and I could not replicate any particular type of stone deliberately. When I grew new stone tendrils they were the exact same type of stone that they grew from, unless I was focusing on a color.

At the same time, as I worked with stone and kept growing my aura I tried to make use of the mana more efficiently. The aura never seemed to get any cheaper, but I did seem to get a little better at making stone cheaply. Tam turned in for the night after turning off the feeder and dismissing the spell monitoring me.

Tam had spent much more time watching me today. Honestly that wasn’t terribly surprising. This was one of the few times I actually had the capacity to do anything. No doubt I was more interesting like this.

With the feeder off, my nightly routine resumed. Mana was held in place as best I could as I watched. There seemed to be no particular progress on seeing what the aura was doing to hold the mana. I couldn’t be sure if what I was attempting was simply difficult, or there was no real progress. Well my mana sight might be improving or not, but I definitely was getting better at holding on to it.

The next day saw the feeder turned back on. I tried to overwhelm the beam by making stone in multiple places simultaneously but it simply produced more beams. I even turned part of the ceiling into sand and then released a bunch at once. A multitude of tiny beams destroyed the sand effortlessly. For a moment I thought that the runes on the wall looked slightly fainter, but honestly that could have just been in contrast to the light of the beams.

Then I tried extruding some denser stone that I refined from the wall. No noticeable difference in the time the beam took to destroy it. I crudely polished the walls where my aura reached. No reaction to this.

When I tried to polish a section of floor the beam rebuilt it in exactly the same texture. I thought about it for a moment and the precaution made sense. Tam didn’t want me messing with the floor and making it slippery like ice or building traps.

I wasn’t particularly keen on harming Tam anyway, but Tam had no way to know that. And Exsan was considerably less sanguine about the situation. His blood lust continued to occasionally derail my thoughts.

Near the end of the day I thought I caught tiny glimpses of something when the beam destroyed my work over and over. I still saw nothing when I manipulated stone, but I was happy at any sign of progress. I saw more flashes the next day, and could see something that looked vaguely like fog when I held mana stagnant the next night. The day after I started to catch my first decent glimpses of what was happening as the beam destroyed or created stone.

When stone was destroyed it formed a three dimensional lattice of mana that became finer and more intricate until the details simply looked like fog. The creation process was the reverse. An ultra fine net of mana gradually became larger as the stone was assembled. No idea how this did what it did, but at least I could see something.

The fog as I held on to the mana grew more pronounced and I started to see fine wisps of that fog throughout my entire aura. Other aspects of mana sight also seemed to be gradually getting better as well. The enchantments on the feeder and stand started to shimmer into existence like perfect glass. The threads that ran through my aura from the beam runes on the wall were more elusive, but I would see thin flashes of them periodically. The actual runes on the wall kept their secrets as well as ever, but I was fairly sure I wasn’t seeing any of this with the sight I got from my crystal anyone. This seemed to be some kind of aura sight.

After a few more days I received the notice I had been hoping for while I examined the beam repairing a section of floor.

You have gained a new skill!

Enhanced Aura Perception I

Your aura’s ability to perceive itself, as well as mana, and mana constructs in your aura is enhanced.