POV Archmage Orius

It has been two weeks since he had first stepped into the Dungeon of the Lost, and Orius got a lot done.

He had finished warding and building his home on the plot of land he made in the forest outside of Porta. His home, on the outside, was a small, two-storey cottage with a clay-tile roof. But the inside of the cottage was another story. Orius decided to hide a good portion of his home from the outside to keep things more inconspicuous.

The cottage inside was about three times bigger than the outside, and it had a lot more rooms. Half of his home was dedicated to his research. Orius designed the cottage, so the house’s research side had a greenhouse in the attic, the menagerie to keep any live creatures that he was studying in, and a laboratory. Both the greenhouse and the menagerie area were built off of the house. Still, in both areas, he created wards to protect against unauthorized guests and hide them from prying eyes. His laboratory was the area that he warded the most. It had multiple spells, runes, and wards around it to protect him against any failed experiments, unauthorized access and to keep contained any ruined experiments. While the other half had a library and his living space.

The greenhouse didn’t hold anything so far. Still, Orius did place the specimens that he had collected from the dungeon into the menagerie.

As he finished building his new home, Orius also packed up his property and home back at Nodia and moved most of his stuff to the cottage.

He also had been in contact with some of his colleagues independent of any large or controlling group. Orius informed them of what he found in the dungeon and told them that he would study and protect this dungeon because who knows what would happen to it if a country, empire, or organization finds out that it has this ability and decides to enslave it.

Orius also called a conference, The Conference. The Conference was a conference that consisted of the most influential people that were mostly independent. This type of meeting is only called if something significant has happened or something was found that this group does not want anybody to control, like the Dungeon of the Lost and its ability to recreate extinct species. Every time The Conference is called, it is held in a secret location that only the conference leader knows about. The participants of The Conference are sent a warp stone to take them to that location.

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POV Teaghan

She waited until there were no adventurers before she decided to spruce up and widen her dungeon’s entrance.

Teaghan widened the entrance to be about one meter wide and two meters tall. After she widened the entrance, she decided to decorate it and make it more esthetic, matching her dungeon’s theme. She decided that she wanted to make a stone archway with designs carved into it.

Teaghan designed the archway to be made out of a combination of phantom quartz and amber. Next, she carved the same designs that she found on the cave walls, where she found the tablet of Ilos and Senos in the cave system.

The carvings within the arch depicted a giant wolf’s worship with a sun drawn around its head, a giant cat with the moon’s stages around its head, and people kneeling and worshipping the two beings. But those carvings were a smokescreen, a thing to draw attention away from other people looking too closely about what she could really do. Though Teaghan did give hints within the arch. She created hiding carvings of animal skeletons and fossils that were hidden in plain sight. These hidden carvings looked to be a part of the main design.

Teaghan took a step back and was pleased with how it turned out.

With that, she decided to go back to some of the projects that she had stopped, such as the cave system and underwater lake explorations. Since she last looked in on the cave system, she decided to work on underwater lake explorations.

When she turned to the part underwater lake in her domain, she found that she was so close to covering the lake’s main portion. She also found some more interesting things. The tunnels led out of the lake, all underwater, and this very much so piqued her interest. These tunnels opened on two of the walls and the ceilings.

What piqued her interest, even more, was that the lake’s cave was not shaped naturally. The walls and room were not rough enough, not jagged enough to be a naturally occurring cave. Teaghan did not notice this before, but the room’s surfaces were smooth, and the room was almost shaped in a perfect circle. Like someone or something carved the room at some point in history, then after a long time, the room turned into a lake.

There was more fauna and flora in the lake than she could have figured, and she collected more species. But what was interesting was that there were pieces of bones and skeletons around the floor. The strange part was that Teaghan could not absorb them. She tried over and over again, and all she got were error blue screens.

Error! You cannot absorb this.

Error! You cannot absorb this.

Error! You cannot absorb this.

Teaghan pulled back into her core room to think about the lake and the blue error screens with that failure. As she was thinking, a part of the core room that had been forgotten caught her eye, the ??? tree. Realizing that the tree was still there, she was quite surprised that the guy, Orius, did not notice it.

Teaghan took a good look at the tree and saw that the tree grew a bit. She figured that it was because of the mana leyline that core operated as. The crystal tree grew a couple of twigs with some new leaf buds. She couldn’t help but wonder what this tree will do and why it was so important.