“Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.”

- Thomas Aquinas

I hated waiting. I was good at it when necessary, but I still hated it. The surface was in reach of my aura. However, the conversion of aura into dungeon territory was slow. I had tried to speed it up, but nothing happened. I had tried to get my core to leave the dungeon and go into the rest of my aura, but it had refused. Maybe I could have forced it, but the last time I did that was what lead to me being stuck in the dungeon in the first place. And I did not want to be damaged with no way to repair myself. So, since waiting looked to be inevitable, I continued with other projects.

The most important of those was simple, but dull. Fortunately, one of my mind pieces could do that all the time while I was still doing everything else. I continued to spread my aura out evenly in a sphere away from my dungeon, so that there would never be a time when the dungeon expansion would be delayed. I honestly had no idea what the maximum size for my dungeon would be, but the more area I covered with it and my aura, the more mana I would be able to take in.

I expanded my aura farther along the surface now that I reached it. Even though I couldn’t actually see any of the surrounding territory, I was getting a definite mountainous feeling from what was in my aura. Most of it was buried under tons of snow, but I had run into a few areas with sheer drops that left bare stone exposed to the elements.

As I had expanded my aura the surrounding area was actually starting to go down in elevation. I had no way to tell if I had reached the summit or a just small outcropping. Time would tell.

The depths beneath the dungeon were more interesting for the moment. As I extended my aura into them I could feel the richness of the mana continue to grow. I had started to follow quite a number of branching paths of geothermal activity so that I could find the source and access the source of all this mana. My aura was starting to look like tree roots extending down into the depths. It branched off into cracks, vents, and springs as it descended into the world. I probably extended my aura down a good half mile by now. And they were not extending straight down either. They had a definite angle off to one side.

Exsan’s tunnels had reached somewhat farther away than my own forays into the depths. Of course, his were perfectly straight, so he had an advantage. I had taken some time and watched Exsan work. He would start by working on a hollow cylinder. First he would fill in the cracks, and then compress the stone in the interior into the walls to reinforce the structure. It was an interesting method, and I could see that it would prevent cave-ins, leaks, and other structural problems. I started to incorporate parts of his methodology while making the entry hall.

I eventually decided that shock and awe was probably the best way to go. The dungeon might not get thousands of visitors, but if it did then I was going to be able to fit them in. I was going to need to add detail work to Exsan’s tunnels once he reached the surface, but for now the room was more than enough work.

It had taken me a while before I was satisfied with the size and shape. It had become an elongated oval a little more than a half mile long and a quarter mile wide. The two tunnels entered the room across from each other on one of the narrow sides of the oval. A textured road made of stone that was slightly elevated in the center lead out of each tunnel. Gutters lined the road for drainage. At the moment the various caves with water had been redirected around the my new giant cavern, but I intended to reintroduce water once I had figured out some plumbing. This should neatly tie into using the patterns to recreate a sewer underneath as well. I had a fully functional ecosystem I could recreate, no sense in wasting it. Except for that slime anyway. I wish I had been able to get that damn thing.

The roads curved from where they entered until they met in the middle and then continued straight toward the other side of the oval. That side of the oval would have the entrance to the actual dungeon portions. The roads ended there, but I still had no way to deal with lighting the room.

For the last half day since I obtained my last level the feeder had continued to steadily put out more mana. It was very useful, so I did not want to break it, but I did want to learn about it. After all, it glowed, and I needed to figure out lighting.

So, immediately after it finished expelling mana I turned it off. The crystal on the top had gone back to being clear and I consumed a tiny part of the crystal near the top.

It had an unusual structure. I couldn’t tell the exact details, but the pattern in my head was actually fairly simple, and I could see how it worked. The crystal was made of overlapping helical structures. The overlapping pattern made the crystal quite strong and I could see traces of mana trapped in the areas where the helices overlapped. The mana inside was moving back and forth, creating a resonance. This resonance then affected the crystal which resonated in an alternate timing to the mana. Every time the mana resonated inward ambient mana rushed in and filled the gaps left behind while the crystal contracted. When the mana resonated back outward a portion of the mana pushed into the crystal as it expanded back outward and became light. Since a portion of the mana was removed the cycle continued again.

This was the first time I had really seen a completely natural inorganic usage of mana. It was definitely worth some experimenting. My core was the only part of me that could see light properly, so it would need to be in my core room.

I started by creating a hollow cube of perfectly clear quartz, three feet on a side. Then I created a series of quartz walls between my core and the test cube. If something went wrong, I wanted it contained. No sense in endangering myself.

My precautions ready, I created a tiny piece of the mana crystal inside the cube. It was about the size of a grain of sand. Then I started pouring mana into it while I observed. The speck quickly grew dazzlingly bright. I had not even invested a single point of mana when the crystal blew up and became a host of glowing dust particles in the center of the cube. Some mana dispersed with the explosion. The mana in the area was fascinating, too. It was almost imperceptibly flowing toward the dust trapped in the crystal, feeding the glow.

Hmm, I could probably make a good blinding trap by releasing a bunch of this dust…

With the large crystal I had been seeing a very soft diffuse light. However, these tiny ones gave me a bunch of bright point sources. No doubt if I poured a ton of mana into a large one it would far outshine these though. However, for light sources, a multitude of small dust sized particles embedded into some other crystal should be relatively cheap and effective. I could probably make a hollow crystal and fill it with mana to make light too. It was all a matter of surface area versus volume. I absorbed the dust motes so I would know exactly how to remake them. Even as I absorbed them I could feel the mana inside vibrating intensely with the density of mana inside.

Done with my experiment for the moment, I repaired the feeder and then turned it back on. I left it behind the quartz walls just in case I had done something wrong and it exploded. Hopefully it wouldn’t run out of mana anytime soon. It was inevitable that it would run out eventually, but I wasn’t looking forward to it. The shear amount of mana that it had poured out over time made me wonder just how much mana Tam had. He hadn’t seemed exhausted in any way after doing his magic. Of course… I had no idea if losing mana tired someone out.

I moved my core to the entrance chamber so that I could actually see the effects of the lights as I made them and then got to work.

Along the side the road I crafted a hexagonal pillar of flawless quartz, six feet tall. I created copies of the shining dust motes and wrapped each one in a thin layer of white quartz. It looked good, but I could do better. I moved them through the stone and formed a pattern. A spiral of light extended upward from the bottom of the pillar. The motes of light were sparse at the bottom, but gradually thickened until it looked almost solid and then met a glittering globe of light that was at the top. I absorbed the whole pillar to get a pattern to recreate it. Shortly afterward, identical copies sprung up along both sides of the road.

I considered them. The were beautiful, but they were not really bright enough for what I wanted, and even though each one cost almost nothing, the total cost of lighting the enormous room would be substantial. I had originally been going to light the cavern up to daylight levels, but it looked like I would need to reconsider.

Well I had moved my core down here so I could judge the lighting, and it was good that I had.

I made more columns following along the entire road. By the time I finished, the cavern near the roads had taken on an ethereal quality. The quartz was perfectly clear, so the lights looked like fireflies frozen in the air. The flash of the pillars sides intermittently reflecting the light as I moved along the road only added to the effect. The area was bright enough that I had no trouble seeing the road, and circles of the surrounding stone, but the light felt insubstantial. The surrounding area and over head quickly faded back into pure darkness.

I was not exactly sure what else I could provide for visitors. Water was an obvious necessity, as was food. However, I honestly had no idea what was edible for a normal person among everything I had absorbed. As a dungeon, pretty much everything seemed to be edible for me.

At least the water was easy. Several pure streams of ice cold water, devoid of much life, had been diverted around the cavern already. I would need to make proper drainage for them, but I was already planning on that sewer system.

I formed a grid of empty tunnels underneath the cavern floor. For now they were not actually connected to anything in the cavern, but they formed the basics of what I wanted. I enhanced the tunnels, reinforcing the stone and carving channels into the bottom of each one. Water should flow through that bottom section and people and animals could use the pathways on each side.

I should make my dungeon start here. I could already see it. Adventurers tramping down here to kill insectoid rats and mice. It would be just like an intro level in a video game. The ever popular rat killing side quest. Well… maybe it wasn’t a good idea. Eh, screw it. I was going to do it at some point as a personal joke. No one else in this universe might understand why it was important, but I would.

I had an entire culture, no, more than one culture, worth of imagery, history, and creatures to play with. Myths and legends from my own world probably had some parallels here. Humans were humans, after all. However the details would be very different, and I could borrow those for my own purposes. Not like anyone here would know I had borrowed them.

I started with a nod to my own dual nature. I was a human and dungeon. Struggle and fighting viewpoints were definitely parts of many cultural ideas. However they were most iconic to me in one form. Soon two statues, both enormous, stood fighting each other. Each on a different side of the dungeon’s eventual entrance. An angel and a demon.

Wings stretched out behind the angel’s back and its marble face was a resolute mask of determination. I made its eyes out of a brilliantly blue stone. I added seams to the stone to make them look like natural irises. A flowing robe of pure white marble rippled over its form. A sword was clasped in its two handed grip and clashed against the trident of the opposing demon. The demon too had wings, though its were bat-like and an inky black obsidian. Its face was contorted into a snarl, exposing needle sharp teeth and a hint of sinuous tongue. Most of the demon was a roughened obsidian, but its teeth and horns were an off white ivory, and its eyes and tongue were both a vibrant scarlet.

I had put light behind both of their irises, so they blazed brightly. Figuring out how to the light the rest of the statue had been tricky. I had finally coated both statues in an incredibly thin layer of mana crystal. I had added a tiny amount of mana to the whole layer. Not enough to turn opaque, but enough to limn both statues in what looked like like an omnipresent light. Overall the effect was otherworldly, especially in contrast to the surrounding darkness.

Other mythical, and not so mythical, beasts found their way into statues placed along the walls and by the roads. Dragons, lions, minotaurs, great feathered dinosaurs, elephants, unicorns, and other statues menaced from shadows or pranced proudly in the light.

After I was done with those, I created six pillars that extended all the way from the floor to the ceiling. Inside they were hollow and water drained from above where I had created large cisterns. The pressurized water shot forth into the air in large fountains that surrounded each pillar. The tiered fountains cascaded from one ring down to the next until they drained into a final depression that led to the sewers. I made sure to make a large u-bend on the drainage so that the smell of the sewers wouldn’t reach up through the fountain.

I made a single relatively large building next to each tunnel exit. I would probably need to create more buildings later, but for now I was going to make due with these. Each building was well lit. The floor of each building was made of wood. I had absorbed enough of various woods that I could recreate quite a few, even if I didn’t have enough of a pattern to recreate the actual trees for all of them.

The door opened into a large entryway. A chandelier hung from the ceiling, made of glittering crystals, and each contained a single speck of glowing mana stone.

I had actually run into a problem here. I had started by making metal for the chandeliers, but I stopped when I felt my mana start to drop drastically. This was actually my first attempt to create metal, before now I had only been working with organic material or stone.

I wasn’t sure if my earth manipulation skill wasn’t high enough, or there was a separate skill for metal. However, for the moment it drained far too much mana for me to create metal for most things. I was absolutely sure that much of the stone I had made had a high metal content. That made no difference.

It was magic, why should it bother adhering to logic. Hell, I knew that aluminum was literally as common as dirt. I didn’t know exactly what type of rock it was in, or the chemical reaction needed to extract it cheaply, but I knew it was very common.

Ugh. This made me want to bang my head against a wall.

I stored what metal I had already made and remade everything in wood or stone. Eventually I finished and the lower half of the building contained a large entry hall, a large kitchen complete with a fireplace, a dining room, various sitting rooms, a room with shelves everywhere for storage, and a long room with targets on the far end and dummies, made with cloth over a wooden frame, in a closer area to train on. The upper floor was smaller and had ten bedrooms.

I wish I had more samples of cloth, but I made due with the two types of threads I did have. And I didn’t have any spiders, so I didn’t have spider silk to work with either. I created a copy of each type of thread and then pulled them apart to get to the actual fibers they were comprised of. The threads were of various sizes, so I put them together with other threads of equal size. When I combined these back into cloth I ended up with varying levels of quality. The original velvet was quite fine, though I found a few thicker fibers. And the original thread I had gotten from the man in the sewers was fairly course.

After a while I combined some of both into cloth as well. The velvet material shimmered in a snowy white and I was fairly certain it was either silk or some kind of alien silk analogue. The other… I wasn’t actually sure. I was no expert in cloth. It was fairly sturdy and creased when folded. I was fairly certain it wasn’t dyed, and had an off-white tan color to it. The tiniest bits of DNA that were embedded in the material gave me the vague shape of a plant. The mix of the two was somewhere in between. Less stiff and draping more than the coarser original.

I took the time to play with the various types of cloth I had made. I was able to dye them with water mixed with stone dust. I used some hot water and some cold. Some of them just washed out immediately, while others would stain for a little while, but faded fast. I tried a number of things to make it work, and found better success with dying individual fibers then making them into threads and dying it again, and then again when it was a complete cloth. Eventually I ended up with a number of vibrant colors.

I was eventually able to dye the threads directly by creating the fibers and stone simultaneously. I overdid it at first and the threads shattered because they were too stiff, though I did make a note of this for later projects. Eventually I found a good balance and was able to make the fabrics more vivid than ever. I was fairly certain that I had actually fused the colors to the threads and that it was impossible to wash them out now. That actually reduced any worries I had about making poisonous dyes too. If the dye was stuck to the fabric it shouldn’t cause any poisoning issues. Hopefully none of it was radioactive…

I was able to use these new creations to create a color scheme for each room. Subtle shades of orange, yellow, and red cloth created a room that evoked flame, and the walls was an abstract mosaic of deep reds rising up into oranges and yellows in vaguely flame like patterns. Another rooms was a mixture of greens and blues to mimic the sea, another in black, white, and deep green with a mural of snow capped mountains. I continued on in this fashion.

Honestly I thought the effect was a little too over the top, but I was advertising the quality and color of the cloth on purpose. I was using these rooms to showcase what I could create. Good dye and cloth were extremely expensive for much of history. That might or might not be the case here, but I was sure it could make a difference. I was sure that many dungeons gave out gold, silver, weapons, and other common loot. How many of them gave out intricate works of art or exquisite cloth? The people in charge of decisions almost certainly indulged in luxuries and showed off. If I offered them something they couldn’t get elsewhere then they would preserve me. I was making myself unique, and I was demonstrating that as best I could.

I finished my work for the moment by focusing on the door to the dungeon. I felt it was okay to splurge on this a bit. I covered the door was a patina of verdigris that was perfectly smooth. I covered it with mana crystal and imbued a small amount of mana in it. The door shown with a subtle light and the blue green looked like shimmering water. Over this I placed the symbol I felt best represented my new life and what this dungeon meant for me here.

I died, but I came to this world and was reborn. I had almost died again and was remade into a joint creature with Exsan. There was only one symbol I could think of that represented what I wanted. I had not only reborn, but I would rise higher. If anything cast me down again I would rise from the ashes.

Upon the front of the double doors that lead into the dungeon was now a massive phoenix backed in bronze. The individual feathers were made with translucent layers of red and orange crystal wrapped around mana crystal charged to varying degrees. As I approached and moved around the door my perspective constantly changed, which made the entire bird shimmer and glimmer like firelight. The phoenix had its head turned to the side, its eye overlooking the cavern; its pure gold beak was open in a wordless cry of challenge and victory.