Adventurer 1278: How safe are dungeons? Can I bring m' boy with me on my first adventure? He's good with a stick so I'm sure he can pound some monster-

Guard A: For seasoned adventurers? Relatively safe yeah. For you? I give it till the first thing stronger than a slime before you get injured. This is not a game, unless you want your kid to be eaten by a Dungeon Boss, you'll leave him at home.

Adventurer 1278: Can't say that till you see me fight can you. I'm already a Level 17 Knight and me boy why he just got his first level in Warrior last Harvest.

Guard B: It's his funeral Gale – let him into the dungeon if he wants, we aren’t paid enough for this.

Guard A: It's our job to stop idiots like him from going in unprepared – not like monsters ever come out of the dungeon.

Adventurer 1278: You heard the nice fellow. Let me in Gale.

Guard A: It's the principle of the thing Mike. Sure, he has some levels somehow. Probably Guarded his wife when she shopped or something but he's obviously still green. I'm also not letting him take his kid inside and that's final.

Adventurer 1278: Congratulations! This was a test and you passed. Well done Gale. I'll pass that along to your manager.

Guard A: Don't think I can't see you trying to smuggle an extra pair of feet through the gate. My word is final.

Adventurer 1278: Bah. I'll be back

Excerpt from the Gate logs for the entrance to the great dungeon town "Maliquencia".

Jumping right into trying out his brand-new rank 2 mana he was once again glad he had imprinted the primer instead of simply reading it. Each of the 4 elements were much harder to find naturally and each type of mana existed at a much higher resolution. What that meant is he had to focus incredibly hard on some of his moving monsters, before he could see faint lines of mana that were the naturally occurring brands of Kinetic mana for instance.

…Not that the primer was as “essential” as it made itself out to be…he was sure he could have figured it out with a bit more trial and error. Knowing where to look definitely saved some time, however.

Starting with Life mana he checked the unique flavour of the naturally occurring mana and tried to copy it synthetically. Surprisingly the process was easier than he had imagined it – only slightly worse than using Fire mana.

Deciding to make each material into a block shape he shoved Life mana into the “common knowledge" best material to use it on – Carbon. Disappointingly it didn’t seem to make much of a difference.

While the magic "took”, and the material definitely changed...the end result was lacklustre. Simply a rectangular brick with a faint green sheen to it.

Observing it for a minute and then discarding it into the corner he tried a mana type he had slightly higher hopes for next – Kinetic.

First checking the Kinetic mana’s flavour, he then pulled out a ball of mana and worked to convert it to the new type. This process was equally painless. Not nearly as bad as Air mana all things considered.

Taking out some Iron into a cube (apparently, Kinetic mana just worked best for solids and didn’t distinguish between metals and non-metals) he pushed the new mana into it from all sides and watched to see what would change. Slight faint shivers started appearing around the cube and it started to vibrate slightly – ever so slightly but consistently. These vibrations continued to blur the edges of the cube despite it being held in his control as tightly as he could.

Lowering the cube to the ground and pushing it slightly he let go. Watching as it slowly slid across the ground bouncing off the wall and continuing to glide as if completely frictionless, he wondered how useful it would be.

That was...interesting. I guess. What else can I do?

Taking some more Iron, he pushed the mana into it from one side to the other this time. As the mana took root, streaks of distorted air seemed to radiate out from the opposite side than he had first introduced it.

This time letting it slip from his grasp the new cube flew at a downwards diagonal hitting the ground with a skid before flying towards the wall and sticking to it. Pulling it back he held the cube rotating it to face upwards and then letting go – this time the cube flew towards the ceiling at a slightly slower rate then stuck to it.

Okay...So I can’t just shove rank 2 mana at something and hope for the best. It needs more direction than the easier types of mana. Oh, and it's not ignoring gravity it's just being pushed upwards harder than gravity is pushing it down.

Playing around with Kinetic mana a bit more he found he could alter the direction the Kinetic mana wanted to go. By varying the size of the cube or adding more mass and compressing it to be denser and heavier he could affect the amount of force that propelled the cube forwards...but no matter how he played around he couldn’t regulate it. The movement was simply "ON" and he could tell he was going to need more work before it would actually be useful. The force being applied to it was also…weird. It didn’t seem to be affecting anything but the block and was completely dependant on the direction it was facing – twisting the block in midair would curve it in the new direction. Not sharply switching but catching up as the previous inertia was kept.

Next, he moved to mind magic – he couldn’t seem to find any of it in his dungeon, so he didn’t really know where to start. He also didn’t have any of the ideal materials for it – silver and gold were both much much more effective for some reason.

He had already found faint traces of the previous 2 mana types in his monsters so he was sure he could find the 3rd. Staring at each of his creations one by one with the most focus he had given most of them in a while he finally found some. Faint pink sparks seemed to flicker deep inside the core of Silver as she sat in the living crystal room near his core. Seeming to be curious the snek was slowly watching the crystals – a flicker appearing every time one of the crystals vibrated or shifted slightly.

Wonder what she's doing? Is she thinking about something? Why haven’t any of the others given any signs of mental activity? Either way that's enough for me to try and emulate. Pulling out some phosphorus – for he had some and it was rated slightly better for mind magic than most of his other materials – he pulled the mind magic into a cube. But much like the other options, no obvious change took place.

Trying again he pulled from different directions and finally as if reacting to his decreasing interest in it, a slight pink haze only visible in his mana sight began to faintly waft up from it.

Carrying his block around the dungeon he found a test subject and brought it near one of the worms. It flinched a bit once the block came in contact with it but otherwise ignored the cube. Trying again he found the golem that was still alive and immediately got a result.

Gol1 had been peacefully sitting on the 3rd floor preening about how he was the strongest monster around but as soon as the mind cube came near him his ego popped like a bubble. A sense of droopy sadness came over him and looking around it tried to stab one of the worms nearby – it missed and Innearth could nearly feel the sense of "I'm worthless" "useless" "Can't do anything right" emanating from the poor monster. After removing his mind-altering cube, the effects seemed to slowly disappear although the golem remained less proud than it had before.

I think...I think I understand. Making another cube while thinking happy thoughts the whole time and focusing those happy thoughts on the cube Innearth finished his second mind cube.

Bringing the cube close to his test subject who seemed to beam in the way that only a traffic cone with stubby little legs and a shank could.

It's interesting but not nearly as useful as I thought.

One last time he tried using mind magic but this time he made two cubes and passed mind magic in a circle between them. Letting go he could see faint pink lines connecting the two in a sort of twisted cable that maintained itself when pulled further apart.

Taking one of the cubes Innearth slipped it onto his designated testing monster of the day – Gol1. Carrying the second cube away to find a second monster to place it on he paused. It was faint but a steady trickle of information passed down the cable towards the cube in his hand. Pulling the information towards himself curiously, he suddenly was hit by a stream of consciousness. "uhhhhhhhhhhhhh", the consciousness was slightly alien to Innearth. Not fully thinking about anything and kind of just watching the wall, his golem seemed...slow.

It has an earth core though? Silver seemed to be thinking more than this.

Pulling the cube over to one of the jumpers that still littered his halls he touched it to the jumper and continued to read the connection.

"Looking at me funny huh. Huh. HUH, I'LL KILL YOU." A clang sounded out in the cave as his golem stabbed a weird-shaped rock that had fallen off the wall smashing it into several smaller pieces. "That's what yOU GET".

"uhhh" the jumper seemed to settle slightly from where it had been priming to pounce on anything and everything while his golem...grew more aggressive. More aggressive but also more coherently aggressive than the jumper had been. Because the golem has a core?

After a few more seconds of this, they seemed to sort themselves out his golem staring curiously at the cube touching his leg. Relaxing more and more the golem sat happily ignoring the feedback from the jumper and staring at the original wall again.

What is it doing? Ah well, I’m sick of this – moving on!

The final mana type he wanted to observe was Death mana. He kind of knew something had to die before he'd witness some of it, but just as he was critically staring at each of his monsters wondering which to sacrifice he noticed the Life cube had given some effect.

Rather than the cube itself changing in any way, the walls around it seemed to have been altered- faint roots had broken through the wall and wrapped around the cube covering it more and more.

Following the root into the wall he saw it had seemingly sprung into existence around a bunch of weird brown wooden looking rock. Is that a fossilized tree? How is Life mana doing anything to that?

Even as he watched the effect taking place was more and more pronounced. Vines had started sprouting out of the wrapped ball of roots surrounding the earthen cube almost protectively while green strands of mana continuously streaked from the cube down the entire length of each root.

As the plant grew slowly covering more and more of his experimental room it seemed to pull material from the stone and air around it to feed its expansion. For the most part, this expansion seemed benign – the weird plant had grown several reddish leaves that twitched as it grew, but other than making it harder to move in the room the change wasn't that bad – he could even call it stylish in a random way.

A slight hiccup appeared as soon as the expanding plant found the Kinetic mana cube stuck into the wall and side of the cave. Hesitating slightly, it wrapped around the cube as well before finishing its claim of the room.

Rather than a drastic change, the small cubes of Kinetic mana didn't seem to affect the plant in as exciting a way as one would hope – every once in a while the leaves would rustle despite there being no wind...but at the end of the day didn't his living crystals do the same? Crystals were obviously a superior plant.

Anyways back to his final mana type. Deciding not to sacrifice one of his already made monsters he spawned 3 fire slimes in a hallway then sat back and watched the worms swarm. Keeping a faint eye on the moment of death, it took till the very last moment to notice a single red spark that flickered into existence and then faded immediately. It was hard to spot not only because of its size and immediate disappearance, but also due to it being the same colour as the Fire mana.

Trying to catch the spark it disappeared as if him trying to hold it had hastened the disappearance. The moment it winked out he felt the faint rush of the slime's few seconds of existence hit him.

I was trying to study that…stop returning to me I didn’t get a close enough look. Maybe something stronger has to die?

He was back to trying to find an older victim – for science you understand.

Finding a jumper that seemed slightly more weathered he realized it was the one connected by the mind stone to Gol.

Hey, attack him for me won't you?

Hey? Nap time's over.

The golem finally made a move. Turning to walk along the wall it slowly waddled to the jumper nestled against the wall like a barnacle. Stabbing downwards from the side it somehow managed to catch the jumper by surprise – nothing had done that so far.

Somehow rising again and stabbing down perfectly the long-spiked arm managed to hit the membrane on the bottom of the jumper breaking the seal and killing the monster.

…That went better than I thought. I’ve been mentally placing the golems and jumpers on the same scale, but I guess having a core really does help. They are back in my good graces! I definitely need to iterate on them though – keep the stabby arm...throw out the legs. Useless creations legs are, who needs them anyway.

As the older jumper died a much larger red glint appeared in the air and started to fade. This red spark lasted much much longer than the slime's had. Still less than a second to dissipate and return to his influence, but nearly a factor of 5x the amount of time was taken and that was enough.

The fading spark wasn’t Death mana – it also wasn’t red now that he had a better example. Rather the spark was still white but surrounded in an aura of red- this aura a manifestation of the fading itself, as if the spark was giving off radiation as it disappeared into nothing. Picking a new room now that his old experimental room was filled with roots, he went to study this last example of Rank 2 mana.

I need to start expanding again soon. I’ve taken a long enough break and now I only have to devote a third of my attention on the task.

Taking the cue from his previous examples Innearth didn’t want to make the same mistake by just shoving the Death mana into a material and hoping for the best.

Maybe if I make a monster with it? Taking the easiest monster to make – a slime, he tried to infuse the insides with reddish Death mana.

This slime came together quickly, but as soon as he seeded it with life the slime began to writhe about and die, just seconds after its birth.

I guess death is anathema to a living creature? If I want to use Death mana, I think I need an undead creature. Putting this on the backburner.

Opening up the chat he asked his new conversation partner about Death mana.

Innearth: Hey you mentioned ghosts. How are they made? Do you know what the best way of using Death mana is?

Bringer Of Serene Eternity: A disciple! This day was fated to come. I haven’t figured it out Per se…but I can introduce you to a core who has.

A minute or two later he got a second PM, the popup half-covering his conversation with Bose.

ZeMadDoctor: Fresh?

Innearth: What?

ZeMadDoctor: Is the body you want to reanimate Fresh? Do you still have the original soul?

Innearth: I’m sorry I don’t actually have a body I want to reanimate. I just want to know how to use each rank 2 mana type. I don’t know what you were told.

ZeMadDoctor: Inquisitive. That will do.

ZeMadDoctor: Ask. What do you wish to know?

Innearth: Anything? How does it work I tried to touch one of my monsters’ sparks as it died but it just disappeared faster?

ZeMadDoctor: Bah. Probably just a seed. To reanimate a body a soul must be fully formed. Not much you can do with a single spark. It's better if you have most of the parts still intact and they are fresh. Anything else?

Innearth: …not really. Have a good day.

The new Core's name dimmed slightly and Innearth was able to tell that meant he was no longer paying attention. Not fully sure what to make of the conversation – the other Core hadn’t even said goodbye.

Strange? I mean he wasn’t nearly as strange as Bose to be honest. And he did give me information for free so he can’t be that bad.

I think I want to try and put some of what I learned into practice. Let’s make a monster!