'Well, this sucks,' thought Amy as she took stock of her situation.

Amy was minding her own business, sitting on her bed while reading fanfiction and watching TV when her room started to shake. This was quite unusual as there were never any big earthquakes in the area of Canada that she lived in. Then, the room began to shake more and more, to the point that she could feel the vibrations to her bones. Soon, it got too much for Amy to bear, and she passed out.

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When Amy woke up, she was not in her bedroom. She didn't know where she was, but she could see and move around a bit. As Amy took a look around this new area, she saw something that scared the shit out of her. No, it was not the stereotypical transportation to another world trope that she so often read about. What she saw was a room, like a small cave, in a clear and transparent rock formation. It took a couple of seconds, but Amy realized that no, she was not encased in crystal or underground. Instead, she was encased in ice. It really was the coldness within the room that tipped her off to what enveloped her.

But it was strange to her that she could feel the coldness in the air and not be affected by it. That was the cause that told her that she may want to look at herself. When she looked down, she saw that she was floating above a rough-looking stone with a cobalt-blue colouring that seemed to have an indistinguishable power radiating from it. Her body was transparent, something like you would see in a movie with a ghost.

Amy stared at the rock and her body with her mind blank, like a blue screen on a computer.

'This can't be happening! It just can't!' Thought Amy frantically as she realized the situation that she was in. Throughout her foray into online books and such writings, she has read countless stories about reincarnation, being pulled into other worlds by gods or such, and the most important, being reborn into dungeon core.

She quickly took stock of her situation. How you may ask, well, she simply tried to do things that she read about.

The first thing that Amy tried was to see if somehow, there was a system or something like a status page. That did not work.

As she was thinking of 'status page,' 'status screen,' 'system,' and any other alternatives that she could think of, Amy started to feel the power within the cobalt stone more and more clearly. It was like nothing she had ever felt before, and she paid attention to what it did.

Amy felt the power start from her core, circulate throughout the room, and end up back in her core. But it moved strangely, kind of like an air or wind pattern, but there wasn't anything that Amy could feel pushing it.

Amy stared at the power within the room and her core and decided to name it. It wasn't like she knew the actual name, but she got tired of calling it 'the power.' So she decided to call it mana, a power source that she had read so much about. It made it much easier to just think of the power as 'mana' until she could figure out what it was or called.

Amy reached out to try to touch the mana. Even though her body was transparent, she still tried. As her hand touched a section of the circulating mana, it moved. Startled, Amy quickly pulled her hand back. She watched as the disrupted mana corrected itself back to before she touched it.

With the more common aspects of dungeon cores, controlled or used in a system, ruled out, Amy knew that she would have to do this by herself. She would not have a guiding system unless there was a dungeon helper, like pixies, faeries, or nymphs, that would somehow find her and direct her. So, Amy decided to start discovering and learning about her surroundings.

All that Amy could feel was the room that she resided in. Everywhere the mana circulated was, as she guessed, part of her territory, if she was going to define it. But the room was small, and she knew she had to learn how to manipulate or move the mana to what she wanted. So, Amy focused on trying to expand the circulation of her mana and increase her territory.

She watched the mana streams circulate the room and chose one that was close to the edge of her territory. Amy figured that if she could touch and move the mana by briefly touching it, then she might be able to split it. So she quickly gripped a portion of that mana steam and, with one hand, pulled a piece of the mana, creating a small split in that stream. Though it was still connected on both sides to the circulating mana.

It took a while, but Amy was able to cut off one end on the split mana, creating a more malleable rope of mana that was still connected to her core. For example, the mana circulation was like a river. Due to a particular need, a small part of the river could become manually diverted into a branching stream. That was essentially what Amy did. With the portion of the freely movable mana, Amy knew that she could start exploring the surrounding area and trying to figure out where she is and what her new abilities are.

With the newfound grasp of the circulating mana, Amy went to work.