*tok tok tok*

*buh-kum buh-kum*

*shush shush shushh*

If you close your eyes and listen during a quiet moment, you may find that the world around you won’t be as quiet as you imagined. The sounds of breathing, the sounds of your heart beating, the sounds of small animals rushing in the distance, the sounds of the wind… There’re countless sounds around you, mixing and intertwining, fading in the background but never truly leaving.

It’s during moments like this that you realize that you’re alive and that the world around you is alive too. There’s a strange and mysterious sense of closeness of yourself and the world, a chance to truly appreciate the act of living and to celebrate it in the highest and noblest way – by appreciating the mundane.

It’s in the mundane where we need to seek happiness for the mundane constitutes that which is life. Life consists of countless ups and downs, but in the end it’s in the middle where we find ourselves in. To find pleasure in simply lying down and embracing the mundane in you, to close your eyes and let your consciousness sink into the endless and countless sounds, the everlasting rhythm of life, to let it rock itself with the life’s pulse, is the apex of human wisdom and that which is right and good.

“It’s all swell, but the matrices won’t rearrange themselves. Up, up, get up and work”

“No need. I think I have achieved enlightenment, Ralph. I am above all these trivial things and now I understand that all of my previous cares and worries are so, so infinitesimal. I have understood the five virtues of wisdom, kindness, patience, generosity and compassion as well as the four noble truths of suffering, the cause of suffering, the end of suffering and the path which leads to the end of suffering. I was so very blind and repent upon my own ignorance”

“So, you’re not going to work?”

“Nope”

“…”

“…”

“Well, then let me enlighten you upon the questions of how you are, whether you will exist in the future and whither you shall go”

“No need”

“But I insist”

“…”

…

Hey, everybody! It’s Victor Norman!

Don’t you think that through our hard work and only through our hard, unforgiving, slave-like (wipes a tear) work can we find the feeling of accomplishment? I, for one, can guarantee that it’s very rewarding to push oneself beyond one’s comfort zone.

Oh, so far from that zone…

What the fuss am I talking about, you ask? Well, let me explain:

Last time I figured out that in order to have a chance to get out of the dungeon alive, I would have to design new matrices for spells in order to create new and more intricate and powerful spells that what I had before.

As I found myself in a tight spot, I didn’t have much MP and couldn’t create the spells from scratch. That is why I had to rearrange and rework and redesign the spell matrices that I had on me before.

This kind of approach was tough, incredibly so. First thing first, the new spells, as I mentioned above, are much more intricate in the design and they are much harder to realize in practice. I will not be describing the torturous process of creating, designing, testing, applying, failing, failing, failing… testing, rearranging again, testing again, failing several times more and finally getting the finished products, nor will I tell you of several episodes where I simply refused to do anything and pretended to be a rock, nor will I tell you about the length of the period of time that I used in order to go through all of it.

What I will be telling you about though, are the new spells in question!

The Labyrinth spell, created from the old Autumn spell. I originally wanted to give it a cooler name, like Ozymandias or the Fallen Legacy, but the spell, in fact, is quite humble in its effects. It modifies the terrain by creating a large amount of debris that block vision and hinder movement. The debris can be of many shapes but primarily they would look like ancient cracked stone walls and giant rocks.

Despite their looks, the debris crush easily and leave a lot of dust every time they are destroyed, hindering the vision even further. The dust is not dangerous to breathe in as experiments have shown. A rather cheap and simple spell for breaking down and repelling the dust solves most of the problems. The spell lasts, neither debris nor the dust will disappear for… at the very least twenty hours. The experimental rocks are still in front of me.

Well, the dust doesn’t last as long, but I have come up with a new trick for it. The trick is to create invisible threads of arcane material, or mana throughout the entire arena. The threads are filled with simple arrays that were very hard to design. The arrays disperse and collect the elemental mana in the atmosphere, in this case they collect only earth element mana, creating a constant flow of dust that will increase with time.

The treads are really unstable though, mostly because to create stable threads I would need astronomical amounts of mana, so they will only last for some six hours and then the dust will be no more.

This particular spell forced me to remember a lot of the advanced mathematical knowledge I have learned in the university. How to create the debris and how to randomize their shapes well enough to be somewhat chaotic but not too much, how to place them, the distance between different created objects… It was hell. It was pure hell.

It was hard to design, hard to realize but it should at the very least be easy to use. This is my bottom line when it comes to spells. They can be anything but hard to use. Not only that, I will be able to slightly manipulate the layout of the debris in real time by using some of my personal matrices, like through a remote controller.

As a child of the generation where most things could be achieved by pressing a few buttons, I have my pride too. Though there’s a downside of the long time to cast the spell. The way I have decided to go around that problem is surprisingly simple and straightforward:

The enemy won’t attack me until I attack it. So I will simply put the matrix inside the arena, activate it and wait for it to work.

A fog-creating and tracking spell, Nightmare. Well, I love exaggerated names and Nightmare is synonymous with Horror and when it comes to foggy places, I always remember that one horror game series… Anyways! This spell was created earlier than Labyrinth, but it was only because I was working on them simultaneously. The experience I gained when working on Labyrinth was very useful when it came to Nightmare. Besides, they are similar in many places, only Nightmare is easier to realize in practice.

The time required for it to start working is about half of Labyrinth’s, that being around 1 minute. Once the time comes, the entire space will be filled with invisible threads of mana that will disperse and collect water-element mana. It was for this spell that I came up with the whole thread trick. Its basics are similar to the ideas behind the previous big spells I created, like Summer, where mana in large quantities leads to a leap in qualilty. There’s some influence of the thing where mana of similar elements tends to gather together too as well as some things I simply was able to observe but have no idea about the what and why’s of it.

I swear, the whole ordeal would be much simpler and quicker if I had full access to my Mana Insight. Though I understand that Ralph sealed it for my own good, I can’t help feeling a bit bitter.

The threads of Nightmare are much sturdier as for both the Labyrinth and Nightmare spells I used my big spells, Autumn and Winter, as the bases and they both had similar amounts of mana in them. Just Labyrinth has a lot more in terms of functionality, so the dust threads suffer in their quality.

The Nightmare’s threads are basically what the spell is made out of. That is why it can last for much longer, for 11 hours, to be precise. The threads could potentially last for days, but I came up with an array that could act like a sensor. It’s not very precise, but with Mana Perception I can see through the debris because of the sensors on the Nightmare threats. The sensors significantly shorten the thread’s lifespans. Creating the threads was a pain that I prefer not to remember because of the sensor array too.

I used to treat Mana Perception as an inferior version of Mana Insight, but now I think that it’s not just an inferior version, it’s an inferior version that can be useful at times.

There were some problems because of the different threads and how they meshed together and all the elements, but I was able to resolve them. Anyway, in terms of mastery over the landscape, I have a big advantage. My enemy’s vision will be all blocked while I will be able to sense the entire field. Their mobility will be hindered too.

So, in terms of mobility I have an advantage too! Not only because of the Labyrinth spell and not because I came up with an awesome way for me to move like a superhero, which I didn’t, no. I simply improved upon my anti-undead fog so now it can hinder the operation of more stable death mana constructs

I used a bit of my imagination and a stupid amount of the mob undead wandering around the labyrinth and ended up creating a small construct of undead mana that lacks any functionality but has the same stability as the minions of the boss. At least from what I had remembered of the minions. After working on the fog for a while, I reached the state where exposure to it for half an hour destabilized the construct to the level of the mobs wandering around the labyrinth.

Surprisingly, what was used in fog in order to strengthen it was Life mana. Well, the two types of mana are called life and death mana respectively, so maybe there’s some connection there. Though, for better or worse, it’s not the kind like in rock-paper-scissors where one type tops the other. It seems that there’s a strange kind of interaction instead, like that between acids and bases, or at least it seems like it to me.

Well, I am not nearly knowledgeable enough to understand what is going on between those types of mana.

I could strengthen the fog even further, but it would become harmful for me too. Ralph told me of the many cases where mages played with magic too much and ended up getting all kinds of illnesses that were incurable. It’s like being exposed to high-energy waves can cause cancer.

There was also once an incident where a powerful mage caused an entire city to die out of a horrible plague when he worked on a barrier to protect it. It was because some spells, when working together caused some microorganisms to mutate and it all turned bad very quickly.

I asked Ralph to remind me if I will try to do something dangerous again and asked him whether I have created any spells that could cause damage to myself. He agreed and said I was fine.

Next, the spells for attack and defense.

I worked a lot and prepared a lot for a short battle. Ralph said that that is pretty much how mages battle on the same level of strength. With enough prep time, a mage is invincible in the same level range. One can go against an army even in the more exaggerated cases with preparations lasting for months and months and even years.

I guess a mage is like batm-, cough, baton-man of this world.

And boy, did I prepare! I replenished my stock of fireballs and doubled it even. I dried my MP to the half of its value several times and slept a lot because of it, so I’m not really sure how long I have been here.

I also worked on stone arrows, stone bullets and other simple spells. I ain’t running out of ammo any time soon, baby. What I will run out is my mental fortitude, I feel.

I got Ralph to teach me how to use MP to temporarily reduce my need for food and water, though I will have to deal with many potential problems because of it. I feel like I am more of an undead then the residents of the dungeon. Like, damn.

I have a lot of MP, but the method to suppress my need for substance and the method to prevent muscle-deterioration both take a lot of MP constantly.

I haven’t seen my MP bar being anywhere close to full for quite a while it feels. My mood has been going down constantly because of it. It’s a strain on both my sense of security and literally, on my spirit.

I’m challenging the boss tomorrow.