Name:Aether Cael Level: 10 HP: 121/121

MP: 70/200

PP: 46/120

KI: 46/120

STR:12 DEX:10 CON:11 INT:20 WIL:12 CHA:7 Unused stat points: Status effects: Skills:fire resistance 2, pain resistance 1, mana bolt 1, medical magic 4, ki healing 2, psionic healing 2,KI conversion 2, MP conversion 2, PP conversion 2, blood conversion 2, ki boost 1, elementalism 7, meditation 3, shadow foot 1, ESP 2, Mana sense 2, ki scan 2, analysis 3, aether blast 1, spear mastery 1, hidden presence 1 Feats:Basic regeneration, basic magic affinity, basic blood affinity, basic ki affinity, basic Psionic affinity, monster hunter, friend of trasgu, basic aether affinity. Feat points: 26

Still pretty far away from my goal of 100 feat points, but…

I kept walking, looking for a way to get to the roof and meet with the goblins. I barely noticed as the walls went from stone to cement, the floors from flagstone to tile. It was only when I realized that the light from the torches turned to light from ceiling lamps that I learned that I was definitely in a different section of the dungeon. Continuing with my exploration I finally found the computer room… INTERNET MY OLD FRIEND, HOW I HAVE MISSED YOU!!!!!!

And then I realized that none of the computers had internet connection…

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU…

Interestingly enough, each of the computers was opened to the same file, titled: Experimental log ( P3RF3C7 570RM megaprion/ code name Perfect Storm)

Day 1: subject omega, an albino lab rat, is fed the final form of project perfect storm mixed in with its regular feed

Day 7: subject omega has demonstrated an enormous increase in endurance, strength, and notably intelligence.

Day 13: subject omega has died of unknown cause. Autopsy reveals no damage, all systems seem perfectly healthy, if not well above what is expected of a simple rat. Nervous system shows increased development, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, as well as in the increased muscle mass.

Day 16: subject omega tissue samples have all been lost. Previous containers of tissue samples are found empty, possibly an error on the part of the hygienics engineer.

Day 20: strange black stain found in lab. Unidentifiable until José, the bloody genius, decided to put it under a microscope. It was identical to subject omega’s missing tissue. It appeared to act as a colonial organism, with different cells acting out different functions, but each being an individual organism separate from the whole. Captured for study.

Day 27: the sample, named subject Taw, has gained additional biomass from unknown sources. Its size, strength, and intelligence seemed to have increased, demonstrating the ability to solve increasingly difficult puzzles.

Day 32: we’ve found a clue as to the source of subject Taw’s apparent intelligence. Each cell acts simultaneously as a muscle, nerve, and blood cell. This allows it to use a form of swarm intelligence, where each cell acts as part of a much larger “brain”. This was proven by comparing the intelligence of the organism before and after having a part split off, where the part that was removed retained a very basic ability to respond to stimuli, the main body lost a portion of its cognitive capability, the equivalent to a single year in grade school. This experiment was repeated several times, each time finding a similar drop in cognitive ability proportional to the mass removed.

Day 64: we’ve allowed the mass to grow. We still do not know where it obtained the biomass needed to feed itself, as it lacks any form of photosynthetic, filtering, or lithophagic organs. It's been a bit over a month and it is now the size of a large dog. It is also able to learn quite rapidly, at the current level of a 10th grader

Day 78: it escaped its enclosure. We were eventually able to corral it back in, but it seemed to leave a black ichor around the floor. Upon identification with a microscope, we found that it was individual cells as well as extracellular fluids. We mopped it up immediately.

Day 176: it's been two months since Jose turned. We figured out the root cause of the infection, P3RF3C7 520RM turned into a form of pseudo-virus. This virus overwrote the natural DNA of subject omega, changing it at the cellular level. After a couple months, it was already capable of infecting other microorganisms, and a week after that, small insects, a day after that, any lizard that it could come across. We found a way to fight it off, an enzyme that's attracted to the enormous protein structure it forms, destroying the infection before it can take over the host. We already took this enzyme, and are processing more, but we believe it may be too late. We would need to dump this onto the main body to kill it permanently, but our first priority has to be containment.

Day 184: we’ve almost completed containing the spread. We simply painted the perimeter of the area with the enzymes, it apparently can't stand the smell, possibly an adaptation after we almost managed to kill it with a good splash.

Day 186: we managed to complete the perimeter, however, it appears that we were too late. The thing took over José’s body, mocking us from outside the door, as it continuously tried to burst it down. Luckily it couldn't get through, for now. This file should appear on the computers in the computer room. If you’re reading this, the key to the lab is 1337, get in there, grab the enzyme solution, and kill that thing. If we haven't starved to death yet, thank you for saving us. And if we have… well, thanks for trying…

WELL THEN…

It appears I went from a fantasy dungeon to a Sci-Fi one, not to mention one with what appears to be the beginning of a zombie outbreak. And in video games, zombies form a third of the “guilt free murder” holy trinity of Nazis, zombies and robots, in that order.

Now, when you stumble on a quest in a dungeon, you goddamn complete it. So, of course, I begin my trek towards the lab room, where they synthesized the enzyme. I also managed to find where the perimeter was drawn, because there was a straight line dividing the floor between clean tile, and a black goo.

So of course I bravely stood behind said line like a little bitch, and lobbed attacks at the goop.

Of course my first instinct was to kill it with fire. That actually turned a section of it to ash, but the rest of it recovered the area and regrew so fast the ash might as well have been an inflatable. Next was trying to electrocute it, like a fly buzzer. It made the thing jiggle a bit, but not much else. It did get me a skill that was immediately eaten by elementalism though. Tried using cold to freeze them, ended up the same as using fire. Crushing them with rock didn't do much, or anything I could do with air at my level. Finally I decided to try using radiology, or blasting it with gamma radiation from my old light manipulation. It actually made it stay down, but it took a lot of resources compared to the effect it achieved.

I decided to meditate in front of it, activating analysis as well as my sensory skills. Focusing on it helped to relieve the information overload, but I could still only hold it for a couple of seconds at a time. Any longer than that and my brain couldn't digest all the information at once. Eventually, I came up with the bright idea to use medical magic to try and replace the enzyme.

It worked very well. The goop began to run away from the area. I thought this was great, then the robots appeared…

There weren't any terminator style humanoid robots though, it was made up of a small carriage with tank treads, and a… is that a laser?

I immediately ducked down as a pulse of ionized air formed a line between what appeared to be an array of lenses and the wall behind me, going right through where my head was a second before.

Of course a quick EMP put the little bugger down, getting me a magnetic manipulation skill, which was then absorbed into elementalism… I feel this elementalism skill is going somewhere…

Just in case, I decided to try and “bend” time and space just a little, creating a small pocket dimension. Nothing really big, with an event horizon too small to even see. I knew it was there because it sucked up an enormous amount of resources, but… I think it was smaller than an atom…

On the bright side, it did give me several skills, including the space and time manipulation ones, who merged into dimensional manipulation, who merged into elementalism…

And with that my elementalism skill reached level 10… I feel like I satisfied some form of requirement for something, but something is still missing until I get the reward… at least that's what the analysis skill said.

Either way, it seems that the goop won't be back here for a while, but just in case, I went behind the corner of the halway to meditate for a while until my resources filled back up. I decided to think on what each of those resources were. Ki, blood and psionics were simplest. They were my energy, vitality, and thought. Ki was a driving force that let me go beyond, blood gave me the power to keep going and grow and change, while psionics was my ability to think and decide according to my own will…

magic, on the other hand, seemed a bit more complicated. It allowed me to manipulate the world around me, but didn’t seem tied to my intelligence the way psionics was to my will, ki to my strength, or blood to my constitution. It almost seemed like my intelligence was a magnifier rather than the origin. In fact, intelligence seems like a fairly interesting stat in and of itself. My will, strength, toughness, and alacrity increase by predictable amounts with each stat, but my intelligence… it seems a bit different.

I guess that’s because intelligence is really hard to define. Is it how much you know? No, that would be knowledge. Is it how fast you can calculate? In that case my old calculator would be smarter than every human in the world despite its inability to form any manner of speech. Perhaps it’s the ability to recognize patterns? Then what about when there is no pattern, and it’s just an unsustainable conspiracy. Intelligence was a combination of all of those and more, but as I raised it the increases to my own abilities were minuscule. The main effect it had was increasing my ability in magic, increasing my control. Maybe that was it, control? Maybe magic was the ability to control, but what was it controlling? The movement of particles? The flow of space? The laws of nature? Perhaps a mixture of all three, but the question of how remains…

what gives it that ability. Does it stem from my knowledge? My computing power? Or something else…

Analysis leveled up?

Oh, it leveled up again. Seems like something about those musings was on point. Maybe…

I tried analyzing my MP. It told me it was determined by my intelligence, and was the power of “potentiality of information”. It appeared that every thought, every action, every stray bit of information added a tiny bit of force. My intelligence dictated how much of that potentiality I could store, as well as how much I could use. That potentiality was then converted into an actual force upon reality, causing magic.

Analyzing the other forces, I saw that ki originated from my strength as I thought, acting as a force that hid in my muscles, strengthening them and accumulating itself up to the limit said muscles could hold, psionics was similar, but based on the power of my will being stored in my mind, and blood was still my force of vitality, my body trying to keep itself together in the face of anything.

Meditating for another hour finally brought me the welcome notification of my affinities reaching the beginner level. It seemed that actually contemplating the affinities made them evolve more quickly, neat. Each of them gave me 2 feat points, for a total of 8. They also felt easier to use, as if they were another limb. Using analysis, I found that now I would level up skills that used those resources faster, as well as regenerating an extra 1 per hour.

After that little boost, I decided to return to the hallway, seeing the remains of the robot slowly being dragged back by the goop. Of course, quickly using medical magic to kill it, I took the robocorpse for myself. Back in the fantasy section of the dungeon, I only really had stones to work with to make my spear, but right now I think I’ll make a bit of an upgrade using the metal from the robot. Forcing the metal to expand like I did with the stone while defending the hallway with Milesio, I began to shape the metal the same way I made my spear. This time, however, I wanted to try something. If magic came from potentiality, then theoretically something that was more than one thing at once, like a word with a double meaning, would generate magical potential. Of course, I was never good at puns, so I’m just going to use math instead. Technobabble incoming, you have been warned.

X2=1 has 2 possible solutions for, 1 and -1. This means that it, like Schrödinger’s cat, is technically both states simultaneously. This plurality of existence, should theoretically generate a magical potential that can then be used to power different effects. Of course it could be made even more efficient and easier to write by writing x squared as:

X

Get it, x in a square? This should generate slightly more magical potential according to the running theory, as well as being easier to fit next to each other. Then, engraving that onto the entirety of the handle, each taking the minimum amount of space possible, gave me a knurled surface. I mean if this doesn’t work, at least the handle is non slip.

Using analysis on the spear just told me that it was a spear with a nonslip handle… looks like that didn’t work. I tried feeding the engravings mana, to “start them up”, but the metal seemed to resist the mana. Hmm… I could have sworn that would work. Having x^2 be either positive or negative should at least provide a conduit for mana to flow through, like AC electric wiring. Let’s see, X^2=1 means X*X=1 so X is either 1 for 1*1=1, or X is -1 since -1*-1=1… oh look it’s working now.

mathematics skill unlocked, consumed by analysis assists with the calculation of quantity, structure and change. analysis evolved into evaluation assists with collecting, processing and comparing information runic enchanting skill unlocked allows you to enchant object with special runes elementalism leveled up, level 11

Well, I am now close to 50 feat points, and I think I might know how to get more…