“No, I don’t understand the soul. Its vastness is beyond description.

I can tell you about parts of the soul. Tell you about what I have gleaned from searching, again and again, tiny pieces. And I can tell you that the pursuit of such truth is worth devoting an entire life.

However, at the end of that life, while you may understand vastly more than you started with, you will still be a beginner with the soul.

Anyone who would tell you otherwise is a liar, or worse, a fanatic.”

-Telethgra, Soul Sage

The adventurers slept in the building Caden had made for them, each taking turns to keep watch over the rest.

Exhausted from their ordeal, Caden had little doubt that they would sleep well through the night.

He had been putting off his meditation and been feeling the strain a little. With his new enhancements to his soul abilities he needed to explore what that might mean as well.

Caden settled his mind, slowly diving deeper into himself as he slowly canceled out the noise of the world, leaving only water. Then with slow deliberation he closed out his thoughts. He failed a number of times, his thoughts focusing on his guests, but he slowly succeeded and dropped into meditation.

There, before him, was a binary star system, two souls made of light tethered to one another as they moved closer together at glacial speed. The same connections as last time strung across the soul space, stretching to unknown destinations. These were joined by two new connections, one from himself and one from Exsan. These went to a place he recognized; he gained a sense of the Adar through the bonds.

The damage to their souls he had felt before had faded further, the scars healing with rapid speed.

All sense of distance was skewed here. The souls felt vast enough to swallow whole worlds and yet tiny enough to fit between atoms.

The surface of the soul was clearer this time, and as he approached it grew vast in his sight. He could see… something, beneath the surface. A hint of more. He drew closer and slipped through.

There was more, so much more.

An infinite ceiling extended up around and to the sides finally meeting itself again. Far more existed within.

Images rose and then flashed to something else. Worlds with bridges of gossamer strands between them. Great trees with worlds cradled in their branches. A mind with different parts highlighted as lightning bolts flashed between neurons the size of countries. A person simultaneously in all parts of their life, the past and the future laid out in an infinite ribbon of themselves. A crystalline fractal with tiny parts shifting and growing, becoming the whole and then shifting down again, then the process repeating itself again with another part.

It was a metaphor. A symbolic representation of something he could not comprehend. He could feel only the edges of it.

Size, vastness, infinity, these concepts were repeatedly drawn to the fore. The scale of what lay beneath was simply beyond him, even with a mind far better at dealing with larger scales than he used to have.

Gradually a tiny part called to him. A tiny twig on a world tree, a strand in a bridge, a single neuron, a single facet at the edge of the fractal. It grew, it rose to meet him as he stayed still, he descended. All of these and more were true simultaneously.

He lost himself and then found himself again. He was on his knees.

Knees, holy shit, he had knees!

The space around him was white, or not white, but shifting, shimmering with all the colors and therefore, white, but not…

This space hurt his head.

And how happy he was to have a head. And elbows and feet and hands, and eyes, and everything else, and he was naked. In this place he was human. And apparently this place was also much more stable than his meditation usually was, because there was no way he wouldn’t have snapped out of it by now.

He wished he could see himself, and then there was a mirror in front of him. It was like it had always been there. Yep, wow. That was his old body, dark brown hair, dark blue eyes, and exactly 5’11”. It was, he was, reasonably proportioned with a slight gut, his birth marks where they belonged, even his few scars from a burn and chicken pox were there. Not some idealized version of himself then. Damn he was happy to see himself.

Wait, could he do other stuff in here?

He quickly imagined himself in clothes. They promptly appeared.

He imagined a perfect burger. It appeared and he tried it.

Damn it, Damn it!

It was utterly and completely tasteless. He had tried to imagine the flavors but nothing happened, it might as well have been air as far as he could tell.

He tried other things, seeing if he could use this space to his advantage. Simply being able to become his prior self temporarily might help, hell, perhaps he could use this space to sleep, but he was hoping for more.

Sadly it wasn’t meant to be. He could imagine books he had read, but the covers were blurry, imperfectly remembered and that reflected in their appearance. The words inside were… well not really there. They were symbolic representations of what should be there. Essentially summaries that his mind was using to represent what he remembered.

The mirror has similar flaws around the edges when he looked at it carefully. His body was the only thing that was utterly and completely real. Well… as real as this space actually was, which was an unknown amount.

Caden sighed.

Well… hopefully he could get back here. Actually, first concern, hopefully he could get out of here.

As that thought occurred to him a door appeared, standing upright in the space surrounding him. With a few steps he opened the door, seeing only blackness within. He stepped through.

His body fell to the floor next to his crystal core, the stone and air both chill against his skin.

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=

Caden had retreated into the half sleep of meditation and Exsan’s thoughts were growing.

In more than one way, in fact. He was focused on growth, one of the strongest of his desires. To become something deeper and deeper, wider, stronger, to simply become more.

However, his thoughts were growing too.

It was not something he had hungered for originally. He had not understood Caden’s desire for it, nor his insistence that it should apply to him.

He had listened though. He always listened, even before he understood what that really meant.

Caden had told him how they were connected, what he had seen as he delved deep within them. Exsan knew that his mind was growing.

Language had been the heart of it. New thoughts had become possible as he had learned the words for them. The words were concepts and meaning was loaded into them. By following one word, one idea, he had found more.

Some ideas were simple. Eat, kill, grow, die. These were familiar, they had been a part of him forever.

New ideas had come creeping in. Familiar, but more nuanced. Anger, vengeance, exchange.

And now he planned. He could see a branching set of possibilities, and even consider that he could not see all the possibilities. He could plan for that which he did not know.

He could not account for Caden. He knew this. He saw that his thoughts were different. He had even come to see the value in this. Caden built elegant traps and also places simply to soothe the adventurers. Even now their income had grown a slight but measurable degree from having them stay inside the dungeon indefinitely. How many more adventurers might they get to live within them, dozens, hundreds, thousands?

The law Caden had insisted upon was costly. A decent chunk of their normal mana generation was spent now to uphold it.

He could count on some things though. Greed. Such a beautiful familiar idea. He knew that his entire being had been shaped around this one idea. Even if the people who invaded his dungeon came to know the protections that had been put into place, some of them would trade it away for what they could hold right now. And then they would come back, and eventually… they wouldn’t ever leave. And for those who were smarter, well they might be harvested many times.

He… was growing smarter. He even understood that Caden considered him to be stupid. With equanimity he agreed. Exsan was stupid, but he was growing smarter every day. The connection he had to Caden fed him new ideas and concepts every minute of every day.

His hunger had grown. He craved all the things a dungeon normally craved, but now he wanted more. He wanted to know more. He wanted to see all the ways he could kill, how many creatures could be made, and everything else.

And he wanted vengeance. Tam, as Caden called him, had trapped them, wanted to study them. He knew now, that he would almost certainly never get the chance to have his vengeance, but he craved it anyway.

His own ambition and greed had flourished with his knowledge.

Still, with the slow, infinite patience of a dungeon, he expanded his reach towards the people who he knew were waiting for him. Soon, very soon, he would reach them.

A ripple in the dungeon mana reached him originating from his core as Caden’s consciousness snapped back from its dozing state.

What had Caden done now?

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=

Curled into his warm bed, Zidaun snapped awake. He had felt something. Like a dream the feeling slipped away from him. After minutes of waiting and feeling he slipped back beneath into his dreams.