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Erick glanced toward the guildhouse-like structure sitting at the southern side of the main courtyard, opposite the ironcrystal castle that held the dungeon entrance. Except for the construction material, which was a facade of ironcrystal over normal grey stone, the guildhouse was a rather normal space meant for gathering and coordination. There weren’t any normal guildhouse structures, like a library or adventurer clerks, or all of the normal accoutrements, but there were a few large leaderboards, and a large restaurant and bar space that took up most of the main floor. Some offices in the back looked like they were for dungeon guides and other paperwork spaces, but there were only two actual clerks working right now, and they were both arguing with a team about their place on the boards. It looked like a complicated argument about depth versus ‘decoration’.

‘Depth’ was easy enough to understand, but ‘decoration’, in this context, seemed to mean the amount of metiron and metamonds that a team could field, in full. The very fact that ‘decoration’ existed as a stat meant that there was some sort of limit to the amount of power a person could wield on the field, which was good to know.

That was very different from Veird, where everyone had access to their full Status whenever they wanted.

Erick glanced at the leaderboards again.

There were actually a few leaderboards, and looking at the argument between delvers and guides, Erick realized that they wanted to add another leaderboard to the mix. Which was whatever, Erick supposed. Anyway. The two main leaderboards were Depth and Decoration.

A team called the Iron Bandits was down to depth 191, and Erick disliked their naming immensely. Bandits? Seriously? Well whatever. The closest team behind them was at 159, with a bunch of people at 149. One of the ‘teams’ at 149 was actually an individual delver named ‘Clarice Icewind’.

Was there a 10 floor breakpoint? Or something? Probably.

The Decoration board was listed by individual name first, team name second, if applicable. Clarice Icewind was in the lead there with no team name, and with a ‘metiron cap’ listing of ‘3450’ and a ‘spells known’ of ‘239’. The next person behind her was from Iron Bandits, with a ‘3250’ and a ‘108’. A big drop off in spellwork, for sure.

A few other team names popped up, but there was no repeat from Iron Bandits, and most people on the Decoration board had numbers similar to the guy from Iron Bandits, but lower. The guy from the Iron Bandits was named ‘Bob Woodvale’, and since he was the highest decorated Iron Bandit, and that team was at the top of the depth board, Erick made a mental note of his name, and moved on.

Erick rapidly deduced a few things.

Clarice was probably an archmage, or equivalent. Everyone on the Decoration board was probably a mage of some sort, with a focus on spellwork.

And the ‘metiron cap’ was the amount of mana that a person could draw upon; the amount of metiron bits and bobs they had on their person. So like their mana well. 3000 mana was about the top range for a delver, for whatever reason. Erick suspected most people were far below that number.

The ‘spells known’ was rather clear; it was the number of metamonds a person had on themselves. Probably.

For comparison, Erick glanced at his Status, here on Veird. Mana comparisons were easy to find. Erick’s current mana well stood at a maximum of 55,800 mana. His spells known was a metric that was a bit harder to suss out of his Status, because Erick knew a lot of spells.

Well over 450.

According to the basic numbers, Erick was a lot more learned than the top delvers, but Clarice Icewind, which was probably not her real name, was either an archmage or a wizard or a dragon, and she was rather competent… Probably. Erick wasn’t sure how the Gem Dungeon worked, exactly, but Clarice was rather far up there… Or ‘down there’. Hmm.

Whichever!

Erick furrowed his brow, and suspected he was probably wrong about something to do with ‘Decoration’, because the people in the courtyard, under the morning light, did not have hundreds of little colored-gems stuck into their ironcrystal armor. The most Erick saw was…

Ten.

Quite a few people had ten gems stuck into their gear here and there, and none had more than that. A few people had seven or even four gems. Many had none; they looked like first time delvers, ready to get into the dungeon for the first time, just like him.

Hmm.

The most impressive display of ironcrystal was on the woman with the large shield and the ironcrystal tunic, who was surrounded by people. She was not, as Erick had first suspected, talking to her team, for her ‘team members’ each only had a few metiron and metamond pieces to them; they were rookies. She was instructing the lot of them on this and that, but mostly on various tactics for fighting a boss on floor 5, and for progressing fast through the first floors, and she was doing it with a beer in her hand. Day drinking, this early in the morning. She was truly enthusiastic about her instruction, but her charges were not. They were ready to get in there and go.

Erick was ready to go, too, but there was just one more piece of information he needed before he stepped into the dungeon. Now where could he find... Ah. There. That conversation.

“I’m at my limit and I told you this already. I said what I said before we even went in there!” said an exasperated woman, coming out of the dungeon castle. She and her younger male partner had come out of the dungeon itself not two seconds ago. Both of them only had two metairons apiece, each with a single gem stuck in them; they were rookies. “I’m not dying in a dungeon. I hit my 10 saves, and I’m done.”

The younger man was exasperated, but he tried to keep his voice even as he said, “This is the easiest dungeon we’ve ever done and we can live here if we can get past floor 5. We can brute force the boss with a few more tries.”

“No, Jono. I’m done with this place.”

“Please, Kerri. We can…”

Their conversation turned into a quiet quarrel, and Erick stopped paying attention because he had heard enough. Based on that conversation and a few more conversations across the courtyard, he suspected that there was a special system to prevent the need of [True Resurrection] all the time. A ‘saving’ system.

He wouldn’t need to [Time Stop] or [Return] when he was in there, which was good.

And that was enough information gathering for now.

Erick strode forward with confidence, right into the open doors to the ironcrystal castle.

Beyond the large, thick open doors, the black [Gate] into Darkness loomed in the center of the otherwise-empty-looking, shadowy space. The castle doors could be closed and the main entrance locked down in case of a dungeon break, but a quick check through the manasphere revealed that the doors to the main castle hadn’t been shut in at least the last week. They probably hadn’t ever been closed, since a properly maintained dungeon never broke, and the Gem Dungeon was a Grand Dungeon and therefore incredibly stable.

A much more thorough check of the manasphere and a flexing of his [Water Domain] revealed a monster hanging in the shadows above and all around. It was not an amalgamation moon reacher, like Quilatalap had at the entrance to his Grand Dungeon of Candlepoint, but instead a massive spider of a hundred legs, standing over and around the interior space of the dungeon gatehouse, with the shadows acting as its web. That unseen monster held above the black [Gate], unmoving, waiting for something untoward to happen below, and then it would strike.

Erick ignored the massive not-monster, but he did note the perfectly-formed core within the center of its head. The ‘monster’ itself was hidden through a bunch of magics, but that core was definitely a core, and not a grand rad. So it wasn’t a monster at all.

The spider was either a person, like a dragon doing a job, or a sacred beast.

Probably a sacred beast.

Sacred beasts sometimes happened these days, since dungeons and their arcane rules allowed for the safe accretion of uniform mana. Dungeons were made (partially) in order to allow people to grow their own magical production, and eventually their own cores, so the advent of sacred beasts was a rather normal ‘side effect’ of that allowance.

Not many people had cores these days aside from shadelings and Shades, so there was still a lot of stigma about a person making their own core. Dragons didn’t even have to have cores in their human forms; that was just an option for them. Erick always had a core, though. Anyone who had a core these days was either an extreme xoatist, or one of the rarer cultists of Melemizargo who didn’t care about being open about their ties to the Cult. Or a shadeling.

… Reluctantly, Erick decided that ‘Ashes’ would be a xoatist, if his core should be revealed, and it probably would, if Script-based spellwork eventually eroded further down in the Gem Dungeon.

Erick glanced around.

People walked in and out of the dungeon without worry about anything snatching them up, and the sacred beast didn’t move at all, even when people accidentally tripped the few shadow webs that lay across the path. Erick put his own worries out of his mind.

Beyond the black portal, the dungeon itself was grassland.

Erick stepped forward, into the dungeon gatehouse, under the spider.

The spider didn’t move.

A few strides later and Erick stepped across the [Gate] threshold.

He was in the dungeon now, upon a dirt path where others walked in and out of the dungeon. Yet again, Erick was reminded of Quilatalap’s Grand Dungeon, back at Candlepoint. Everywhere Erick looked was grasslands, but a forest held in the far, far distance, and beyond that lay mountains.

Down the dirt path lay what looked to be hillsides, raised up here and there. According to what a few people were saying around him, those hills were where he would find the entrances to the first floor, or whatever passed for a ‘first floor’ around here. Some people were even talking about stepping into the hills and arriving directly at floor 5… Because that was a thing they could do? Well sure.

This grassland was simply the entrance zone.

He’d get to all that eventually.

First, though: Just ahead of Erick, about twenty meters distant and ringing the entrance like a low fog, lay a ring of shadows. That demarcation was the true separation point between the ever-safe entrance, and the unknown.

People stepped across those shadows without worry or care.

… And so Erick stepped to the side of the path and watched for a while. As people entered the dungeon from outside, their ironcrystal bits and bobs remained ironcrystal, until they were inside the dungeon space for maybe ten seconds. After that, those jagged crystals transformed into almost-shiny, smooth iron. Going the other way, headed from the hills to the dungeon exit, it took people about three seconds of being in this safe space for their bits and bobs to transform the other way, from smooth, shiny iron, into jagged, hard grey crystal. The same thing happened to their gemstones. Smooth gemstones turned into jagged twists of colored crystal, or jagged crystals turned into smooth gemstones of every color, filled with fractal light, depending on which way the person was walking.

A lot of people had spellwork on them, too, and the change there was perhaps stronger than the change taking place in their ironcrystal.

Going into the dungeon, nothing much happened; [Personal Ward]s remained.

For those stepping out of the dungeon, their spellwork gained inside the dungeon washed away like broken glitters, as people stepped back into normal, Script-based reality.

So the dungeon had [Personal Ward]s of its own? Looked like.

Physically, there were also changes.

Going from reality to dungeon, a lot of people seemed to stand taller, and walk surer, gaining power inside the dungeon that they didn’t have under the Script.

Going from dungeon to reality was much more pronounced, though. Many people seemed to gain an inner strength in that transformation, with shoulders evening and eyes clearing and backs straightening. Just as many people had just as many transformations in a negative way, seeming to lose power and ability as they stepped back into reality.

Looked like the Gem Dungeon had systems similar to Strength and Vitality and otherwise. Going away from the Script would cause people to gradually lose Script power, but they would gain Gem Dungeon power.

Erick watched for a while to confirm what he was seeing, and yes, all his initial observations looked to be correct.

A few people looked at him, wondering what he was doing. A few of the more veteran delvers knew what he was doing; he was new, and he was checking out the dungeon, trying to see what was happening to everyone as they walked through.

A guy and his friend walked by, and the guy tried to be helpful, “The first floor is safe! Just go on in!”

Erick smiled, saying, “There’s no way any dungeon is ever safe, but I get your meaning.”

That earned him a few chuckles from the guys, and from other people all around, but nothing more than that.

Erick rapidly decided at least one thing:

All these people are way too comfortable with dungeons.

… But this one seemed safe enough. Erick even saw some people step off the dirt path, to head into the grasslands. And sure, that was one option. Just go out there and see what was what. Always a valid choice, unless ‘what was what’ was the emptiness of space which would lead to explosive decompression…

But then again, the first floors weren’t that bad according to the guide back there; Blacksmith. This entrance zone was certainly fine.

Erick gazed across the inner world of the dungeon. Ophiel, on his shoulder, did the same. Soon the little guy would need to step off, because he was a mana construct and this dungeon would kill him, as most dungeons would do to all ongoing magical effects. For now, though, Erick studied his greater surroundings, with Ophiel on his shoulder.

Grassland in every direction. A dirt road that went toward some hills. And then one more nearby thing that Erick didn’t know about.

Behind the [Gate], on the other side of where people came out, there was a squat fort over there. It sat about a hundred meters away from the backside of the entrance. It was off on its own, and Erick wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, for no one was headed there for some bizarre reason.

Erick asked a passerby who looked competent, with all his silver pieces, “Pardon me. Why does no one go to the castle over there?”

The passerby didn’t even look back as he said, “That’s the start of the Eternal Depths… Sorry, you look new and I’d love to help, but I gotta catch up to my friends. Good luck! Just do the tutorial!” The guy kept walking.

Erick pulled back from further interactions.

He people-watched for a while. Mostly, all he saw were people heading either into the hills, or away from the hills, where black shadows formed doorways leading elsewhere. Sometimes some people stepped off the path, to hunt for what looked to be slime/lizard things, hiding in the green.

The amorphous lizards dashed across the ground, praying that the heavy grass overhead would protect them from the hunting delvers. Mostly, they got away.

People just kept trying to kill them, though.

One guy who was chasing a slime-lizard couldn’t quite catch the darned thing, so he flickered through the air, almost like he was airstepping, his bracelet flickering with white light. The guy caught and killed the beastie, and the beastie shattered into light and mana. That mana then soaked into the man, and then into his bracelet. The man smiled.

Erick was rather sure he understood what was happening there, too.

The guy had a bracelet that was mostly dull iron, with a single white gem insert, and the gem had flashed when he did that airstep. When he actually caught the slime lizard, driving a sword through the thing and as the thing popped like broken magic —and not like a living thing at all— the animal vanished and the guy’s bracelet turned almost cleaner. The gem was brighter, for sure.

And then the guy went back to his friends, who were waiting for him to finish.

Not many people were hunting the slime lizards, but those who were hunting all had some dull bit of metal on them. Successful hunts made their metal shiny again.

They were recharging their metals? Through basic monster kills? Maybe. Seemed logical.

Anyway. Erick silently bade Ophiel farewell, and the little guy fluttered off of his shoulder. Intangible and invisible, the little guy hovered in the air on this side of the [Gate], outside of the way of others, while another Ophiel sat on the roof of the building on the other side of the courtyard, outside the dungeon [Gate] house. Ophiel had line of sight to himself, so if Poi or anyone else needed to send Erick an emergency message, they could. Erick wondered how valid this whole setup was, because Script magics failed deeper into the dungeon and if the mana got too thin… Eh. Erick would be fine for a few hours.

If Ophiel revealed himself, things would rapidly turn serious for a great many people here, and they could contact ‘Ashes’, for sure. Erick soundlessly told Ophiel that and Ophiel fluffed up, prepared for duty.

Erick smiled at that, feeling an inner warmth, knowing that Ophiel could do this task. For a moment, he lingered. Ophiel gave him a salute. Erick chuckled a little, and probably looked like a crazy person to those walking by, but whatever!

And then he turned and walked into the grass, prepared for death, and to fight death off.

And then...

He was in the grass.

No big deal.

Stepping off of the path would have caused some monsters to attempt to kill him over in Quilatalap’s dungeon.

… Erick kept walking, right through the smoky line of shadows encircling the safe space around the entrance—

Erick almost jolted as words appeared in the air before him. There was no box; just words, untethered.

Hello, <NEW DELVER>. Welcome to the Gem Dungeon.

We see you are a new user. There are a great many differences between the Second Script here in the Glittering Depths and the Script out there on Veird. We suggest you try the tutorial, though it is not required. Do you wish to experience the tutorial?

If you have any questions or concerns, or if you wish to engage the tutorial, speak to the dungeon, and the dungeon will respond.

Well that was a change.

“No blue boxes,” Erick said to himself, feeling some kinda way about that.

… He probably would do the tutorial. But first, he wanted to test out some things and he needed to be further out of sight of the traffic at the entrance. So Erick stepped deeper into the tall grass. The green came up to his knees, and slime-lizards scurried around under the tall fronds, but only to get away; nothing attacked.

Out a good fifty meters from the entrance, Erick made sure of a few things before he selected ‘yes’ to the tutorial. First, he checked out his mana sense, stressing his ability to be ‘one with the mana’ to his current limit… and his range was about 400 meters. Less than usual, but not too much lower than normal. He couldn’t mana sense beyond any of the nearby entrances to the first floor, though, and some people had some sort of weirdness on them that completely prevented mana sensing around them, but other than that, mana sense worked exactly how it should.

The mana sense blocking mostly pertained to those who came out of the black doorway to the first floor, which meant that anti-sensing spellwork was probably necessary further down.

Erick supposed in a dungeon devoid of mana, that mana was the most important resource, and so monsters and people would need to learn how to cloak themselves from mana sensing, completely.

Erick suspected the range and usefulness of his mana sense was probably going to go way down, but not too much down, and not because of any actual dungeon restriction, either.

A dungeon could very much limit one’s mana sense, like they did at the Pit at Storm’s Edge, but that was not normal. The purpose of leaving mana sense alone, as Quilatalap had explained to him a few times before, was to reward those people who actually learned that most basic of skills; not to punish everyone who had the skill, to make that learning useless. It seemed the Gem Dungeon followed Quilatalap’s guidelines more than they followed the guidelines of the Pit, at Storm’s Edge, or other similar places. There were surely places inside the Gem Dungeon where mana sense was actually blocked; security places, and such. But other than that...

If the density of mana went way, way down, which it was supposed to do, Erick’s mana sensing range would go down, too.

Moving on.

For the next test, Erick tried casting a [Force Bolt] through the Script, as he normally would.

Nothing. Not even a flick of mana and a premature spell break. Erick’s mana felt dead to him; it was there, he could feel it, and he could also feel the mana he kept inside his core, but casting as he would with the Script was right out. Not happening.

To be expected, really.

A few people were watching him from over by the entrance, but not too intently; they were new, too, and they were watching everyone, everywhere that they could, just like Erick had been doing minutes ago.

Erick ignored it.

Next, Erick kept his [Water Domain] tight around his core as he flowed his aura out of his core, into the air, to use the mana he kept inside his core to manually cast a spell—

His Domain-enhanced aura ripped apart before he could extend it more than a centimeter past his skin. All intent was… scrubbed from it? Whatever was happening, it was clear that manual casting outside his body didn’t work.

Erick could still shape mana inside his body, where his soul fully encapsulated the area where he would work his spells. Interior magic would therefore work. Stuff like [Greater Treat Wounds] would even work, but since the Script was not here, then it would be a rather shitty heal job. Not something to rely upon for anything outside of emergencies, and trying to cast Healing Magic on himself would likely result in cancers. Erick knew he could flex his Domains a lot harder than he was and actually cast normally if necessary, for a spell like [Return], but for now, this was fine.

Erick tried a trick.

He conjured a [Force Bolt] in his mouth, where his soul fully encapsulated the space, and then spat the Bolt onto the ground.

So that was good. Manual casting worked if he could fully enclose the space. He could probably [Benevolence Breath] too, if—

Manual caster detected.

Congratulations! You have passed the test for floor 2!

But not really.

You have also found a known vulnerability in our Rules. This vulnerability exists here on the entrance zone, but it does not exist on floor 3 and below. We suggest you don’t rely on this method going forward, or else you will have a bad time once the mana saturation falls below naturally fluctuating levels, and your soul covering a space will not protect that space from the Rules of the Glittering Depths.

NOTICE: All mana you attempt to exude into the air will be sucked away by the dungeon soon enough! Use the mana gained inside the dungeon to work magic inside the dungeon!

NOTICE: Since you haven’t done the tutorial or gained any meta-irons or meta-diamonds, you will not be able to actually use any real magic beyond this entrance zone. Please try the tutorial to gain your first bits of casting iron and diamonds, to then brave the Glittering Depths!

Well okay then.

So ‘mouth casting’ wasn’t going to get him through all of this, and eventually, even casting inside his body wasn’t going to work, because all the mana he tried to flow from his core would be wisped away by the dungeon…

Soooo…

Erick still had his core and all of his mana therein, so he could use any of his Domains and create a space for his own magic to work, but that would be about as bad as trying to cast spellwork out in the middle of space…

Which had been horrific.

He’d save that for an actual emergency.

“Let’s do this how they want,” Erick said, “Let’s do the tutorial.”

The ground opened up.

Erick let himself fall.

- - - -

Erick landed on his feet in the dead end of a white hallway.

His mana sense ended ten centimeters into the walls, floor, and ceiling, which was how it was going to be going forward, Erick thought. Whatever the case with that, the hallway was empty, and it led off into an open room ahead.

Words shimmered into the air.

Welcome, <NEW DELVER>! Please pick a unique name for yourself, and clearly speak that name to the dungeon, for the dungeon does not know what you are thinking or doing at all.

NOTICE: All commands must be said verbally to be understood by the dungeon.

“Ashes Woodfield is my name.”

Accepted! Name is not taken. You are now Ashes Woodfield.

Your current status:

- -

Ashes Woodfield.

Mana Production (MP): 1 per day.

- -

That is your entire Status for now. More parts will unlock later.

Don’t worry about having a low MP right now. 10 mana per day is the average mana production for a normal person on Veird, and you will reach that soon.

Your MP here in the Glittering Depths will increase rapidly as you complete challenges and reach new floors, and if you gain a [Meditation] meta-diamond, you can turn that ‘per day’ into ‘per hour’, just as under the Script.

The current maximum mana production of the deepest delvers in the Glittering Depths is around 100,000 per day.

There is no Health until you get a metamond for Health and can channel Mana into Health.

Erick tried to mentally dismiss the messages in front of him, but nothing happened.

So he looked away, and that did it. The messages vanished.

Erick reconsidered the leaderboards he had seen before. That ‘metiron cap’ of 3200-ish was a mana well cap, but a person’s mana production was personal… Which, yes, that’s of course how it worked.

Another message popped up.

NOTICE: The tutorial has robust messaging. Robust messaging does not exist inside the actual dungeon, except in special locations. The quantity of messages you receive will go down drastically beyond this tutorial.

NOTICE: Without an [Identify] meta-diamond, you won’t get much information outside of this tutorial.

NOTICE: The robust messaging of the tutorial will change based on your actions herein.

Do you acknowledge these notices?

“… I acknowledge these messages.”

Please continue forward into the main testing room. There is little lethality in the tutorial, but it does exist. This is mostly a measure of your own capability for violence.

… Erick did as he was told, he supposed, and walked forward into the large room ahead.

The large room was simply that; large and featureless and a dome, about 20 meters in diameter, with no exits except the one he came in fro—

The wall behind Erick slid shut, and now the room was completely featureless.

A different wall opened up on the other side of the room and a standard green slime rolled out. The wall shut again, and then it was just Erick and the slime, each about 18 meters away from the other—

The slime rolled toward Erick, menacingly.

Erick almost laughed at the little guy. That little tilt of its tiny core, that little rumple on its front side where it was rolling forward too fast for its slime body to keep up, the way it was moving with purpose; everything about it spoke of menace. Rage and hate.

All that menace in a form barely the size of a toddler.

Erick let it come to him. He let the slime attack a little, but all it managed to do was climb onto his shoe and then flop off when it couldn’t climb him at all. It struggled, oh how did it struggle!

“Sorry little guy.”

Erick stomped it.

The slime became a splat of green goo that rapidly turned to motes of mana, to vanish into the ether. It wasn’t a real monster; just a facsimile of one, like the ones above ground. Erick wondered if there would be any real monsters going forward, or if the entire dungeon was filled with fakes.

Real monsters couldn’t exist inside a mana vacuum, after all. If all of the Glittering Depths was a near-vacuum, then… Where were the monsters? Because there were surely monsters in a dungeon; that’s just how it worked.

Erick filed away that query for later, because words appeared in the air.

Test 1 of 5 complete!

MP up! +1 mana production per day!

Erick furrowed his brow at the message. His mana production went up? Just like that?

Well okay then.

Another door opened up and a mangy dog launched into the room. The door shut behind the beast, and the beast yipped and squeaked at Erick. The dog was the size of a large toddler.

It attacked, as best it could, aiming right for Erick’s groin.

Erick slapped the back of the dog’s neck with the edge of his palm. The dog fell to the ground, limp and dead and rapidly turning into mana. A part of Erick was ashamed for killing a dog, even if it was a summoned creature, but there was an instinctive reaction that happened when the beast went for his family jewels—

The dog vanished into motes of mana.

Test 2 of 5 complete!

MP up! +1 mana production per day!

Another, different door opened, and out walked a teenager with a big stick and grubby clothes. Erick’s eyes went wide. A person? Well. Person-shaped. Probably not a person—

The skinny, 40-kilo-at-the-most teenager, rushed at Erick with his big stick. Erick caught the stick, took it from the kid’s grip, hip checked the boy to the ground, and then stepped back, holding the stick; it was his weapon now.

He waited for the kid to attack again.

But the kid just sat there on the ground, and smirked. The kid turned into a splash of broken mana. The big stick remained in Erick’s hands—

Test 3 of 5 complete!

MP up! +1 mana production per day!

Another, different door opened, and out stepped a full-grown man, the size and shape of Erick. He wore leather armor and had a stick big enough to be classified as a club. That club even had some nails driven into the head and out the other side. It was almost a morningstar.

The man did not rush at Erick; he took a measured walk—

He exploded into motion, crossing the distance in a matter of a second, his mace swinging down, aiming for Erick’s head.

Erick casually raised his stick and adjusted the course of the man’s attack, opening the man’s side up to a punching counter, which Erick expertly delivered into the space just below the man’s armpit. The man crumpled under Erick’s Strength, his breath stolen from him, and Erick helped him down to the floor. The makeshift-mace skittered across the room, away from both of them.

The man vanished into motes of mana before Erick fully put him down.

Test 4 of 5 complete!

MP up! +1 mana production per day!

A small portion of the wall opened and a floating ball of mana drifted into the room. Without getting close at all the little cloud started throwing [Force Bolt]s at Erick, one right after the other. Multiple Bolts hurtled through the air before the first one even struck, which meant that the cloud-thing was manually casting.

The first Bolt never struck, because Erick raised his stick and intercepted every Bolt. Bolts always went toward center-mass, so it was rather easy enough to navigate those trajectories—

The little cloud adjusted its angle of attack, throwing Bolts wide to let them arc up and out before they came at Erick from oblique angles.

Erick still slapped the Bolts out of the air with his stick, but his stick was rapidly failing him. The stick began to split after seven Bolts, and then outright broke after ten. Erick almost considered getting the nailed mace to fend off the attacks, but he could also just raise his palm and stop the Bolts that way, but neither option would stop the cloud from attacking, and the little cloud didn’t seem to be running out of mana at all. In fact, it looked to be building up power—

A [Force Beam] lanced out from the cloud and Erick put his hand in the way of the beam so it wouldn’t hit his head.

The Beam didn’t do shit.

Broken Force spilled into the air; Erick’s innate absolute damage reduction and his [Unbreakable Form] [Personal Ward] were more than enough to handle this level of threat. He could have let the Beam hit his face, directly, and nothing would have happened, but that would be taking a risk he didn’t want to take.

The Beam continued to spill its attack directly at Erick for a full 15 seconds, before it sputtered out, and the cloud faded some.

One more Bolt came for Erick, and Erick batted the Bolt away.

The thin cloud vanished into tiny motes of mana.

Test 5 of 5 complete!

Challenge room complete!

MP up! +5 mana production per day!

A chime echoed through the room like the singing of divinity, and then faded.

Tabulating results!

Results collected. Martial ability vastly exceeds minimal parameters. Defense vastly exceeds minimal parameters. Unknown magical capability.

Ashes Woodfield is accepted as a delver.

Current Status:

- -

Ashes Woodfield.

MP per day: 10

- -

Three different doors opened up on the other side of the room, each of them leading to a different hallway.

Beyond those hallways lay rooms exactly like this one. Erick wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen, exactly. Obviously he needed to go through a door, but was this room done?

He didn’t have to consider his options for very long, because words began to scroll down from the air, informing him of what was going on.

What you experienced in this room was a normal challenge for basic mana gains, and you gained the normal amount of reward for clearing the room, as everyone does who manages to clear the room.

NOTICE: You killed the smaller threats, hesitated to kill the people, and you brushed aside the damage of the force cloud instead of killing it directly. It will not be so easy to gain your rewards later. Later, you must actually kill the threats in a mana challenge room if you wish to claim the rewards.

NOTICE: Whatever personal power you have active now will fade when you go deeper into the Glittering Depths, and you will not be able to brush off a [Force Beam] as easily as you have.

Nothing you fight and kill in the dungeons is real, but the danger is real, and the outcomes of those fights are very real. If this should change, you will be alerted before the change.

If you fail any fight that is stated as a fight, and if a monster looks to kill you, then you will be saved by Glittering Depths Saving Protocol 10 times per month. If you go over this allotment, then you will be killed, as you would be killed in any dungeon. Delvers killed by the Glittering Depths will be subject to a [True Resurrection] and deposited on the grasslands of the entrance.

There are ways to gain power that do not require killing, but you will need to seek them out specifically.

Look now upon your new status, and upon the choices laid out before you in the rooms ahead:

- -

Ashes Woodfield. (10 saves remaining)

MP per day: 10

- -

The words of the message began to fade away as words began to appear in the air above all three different paths forward.

The first pathway was labeled ‘martial progression’.

The second was labeled ‘magical progression’.

The third was labeled ‘death this way’.

As far as Erick could mana sense, there was nothing in any of the rooms. That would probably change when he made his choice. Whelp! Not much to do except make a choice.

… Erick went through door 3—

The doors shut behind him and the door at the end of the hallway shut, too, trapping Erick in the hallway.

Spikes poked out from the walls, each of them aimed at Erick—

The world flashed blue, and the spikes suddenly retreated.

Erick was prepared to fuck up this part of the dungeon or [Return], if necessary, and he was absolutely sure that a hallway of spikes could not kill him, but he didn’t get the chance to prove himself in that way. The danger was over.

A message appeared along with an update to his status, and Erick realized what had happened. He had been ‘saved’.

Lethal damage averted.

- -

Ashes Woodfield. (9 saves remaining)

- -

The door behind Erick opened and the spikes slid into the floor—

Erick almost taunted the dungeon to come at him for real. But then he decided that there was no need to do that yet.

With the way ahead of him closed and the entrance back to the previous room open, Erick turned around. Words hung in the air as he stepped into the previous room.

Danger is everywhere. Most of the time it is clearly labeled.

... Erick went into door #2, the one for magical progression. This time when the door shut behind him the hallway did not fill with spikes, and the door to the further room remained open. Erick walked through into the larger room, and the door shut behind.

Once again, Erick was locked in a featureless white room.

Six panels slid open in the floor in the middle of the room, and six motes of differently-colored light drifted up from the darkness below. The dots moved through the air, to form an octahedron shape. The top light was white, the bottom was black, and the four lights between those were red, yellow, blue, and magenta. It was the standard elemental array shape and coloring code. Light on top, Shadow on bottom. Fire, Stone, Water, and Air forming four more points between them.

Words appeared.

The number of spells a person can have under the Script is unlimited.

Inside the Glittering Depths a person can also have unlimited spells, but you will find that every meta-diamond socketed into a meta-iron is a cause for weakness in that meta-iron. Mana leaks rather easily from that which is too holey.

Therefore, the maximum number of meta-diamonds anyone can have active at any one time is 10.

Once you find the option, excess meta-diamonds can be stored within the Glittering Depths.

Once you find the option, excess meta-diamonds can be joined to each other in order to attempt to create new spells!

Try to create a basic spell now by joining together two meta-diamonds! Pick and choose and make a basic [Force Bolt]. If you put too many of them together, you’ll get a spell that’s too expensive to cast. Choosing just one meta-diamond will produce a pure variant of a Bolt spell, and be cheap enough to use repeatedly.

NOTICE: This is your only gifted meta-diamond in this tutorial.

NOTICE: Picking Light and Water will make [Rejuvenation] instead of a Bolt spell, which we feel might be what you want, based on your fighting style and actions previously.

NOTICE: The [Rejuvenation] you receive here is not like the one in the Script.

NOTICE:  If you forgo this option now, and if you want [Rejuvenation] later, you will need to make [Rejuvenation] yourself. This creation will not be so easy out there in the real dungeon.

The floating bits of light broke away from their octahedral formation to form a line of floating gems, each of them floating about a meter away from each other and sparkling brightly, like beads filled with fractal dimensions.

Erick’s choice was barely a choice at all, especially with that notice at the end; the Glittering Depths had him pegged rather well with his desire for Healing Magics, but not for the reasons it stated.

Undirected Healing Magic was perhaps some of the most dangerous magic possible, because it led to cancers, misalignments, excess blood leading to dangerous pressures, and a bunch of other maladies. Erick had to know how this [Rejuvenation] was different, and exactly how different it was, and if it didn’t cause cancers.

Perhaps this [Rejuvenation] was a simple touch of Elemental Healing, applied to the soul and to the body, making for a generalized healthiness. A heavier touch might produce actual healing, but only if used sparingly, and perfectly.

The [Rejuvenation] of the Script was none of that. The Script version of that spell was a heal-over-time applied to Health, to repair the ‘shield’ that was Health.

But since the Gem Dungeon didn’t have Health…

Erick had to know how it worked. So Erick went and plucked Light and Water from the air. Both of them felt a little bit like hard gummy bears. Erick held the white and blue gems together…

And nothing happ—

Would you like to combine Light and Water together? NOTICE: the other choices will vanish.

“Yes. Make [Rejuvenation].”

The unused gems shattered like so much broken magic, and then there was a flash, and the solid, glowing gems in Erick’s hands turned into liquid and flowed into each other. In a rapid moment the two liquid gummy bears became one, blue and white swirling into a bright blue that remained rather dull. Two more moments later, and Erick held a single, marble-like gem made of pale blue crystal with fractals all throughout. It didn’t glow at all; it had lost all power.

A divine chime echoed, briefly.

Words appeared in the air.

You have selected [Rejuvenation]!

This is a basic heal-over-time and endurance-increasing spell, but it doesn’t heal Health, like in the [Script]. As long as this [Rejuvenation] is empowered with a flow of mana, it will increase the body’s natural ability to heal itself. It will not heal someone on the brink of death, but it will allow a person to fight at a low level for a rather long time.

Think less [Treat Wounds] and more ‘one week of sleep for every night’s sleep’.

This is how basic, SAFE Elemental Healing works without the Script, and without gods to help direct that healing. Later on, you will be able to make your own Healing Magics, but according to the statistics we have, whatever Elemental Healing meta-diamonds you create beyond the tutorial, on your own, will simply cause cancers and other malformations.

Use of such disastrous Healing Magics on yourself will cause the dungeon to save you, using up one of your saves. You will be deposited in the entrance zone, and directed outside to receive proper healing.

Use of such Healing Magics on enemies inside the Glittering Depths will probably not cause enough damage, fast enough, to win any sort of fight, though don’t take our word for it. Try it, if you wish!

NOTICE: When combined with a Health meta-diamond, [Rejuvenation] will heal Health instead of increase endurance, granting or supporting the Health that others or yourself might already have. Doing this sort of combination will consume the [Rejuvenation]. That means that you can’t use the original spell anymore. This goes for all meta-diamonds you find and seek to use with each other.

NOTICE: Unlike in the Script, when meta-diamonds are used to create a higher tier magic, the original is gone forever.

Well that was rather informative!

And it made Erick feel a lot better about choosing [Rejuvenation] as his starter spell. Erick grasped the dull gem in his hands—

Three doors opened up on the other side of the room. Writing appeared over the options. The first hallway led to ‘offensive healing’ while the middle hallway read ‘support healing’. The third path read ‘self healing’.

Other words appeared in the air.

Choose your meta-iron starter.

NOTICE: The form [Rejuvenation] takes will change based on your choice.

Well then…

Erick had no interest at all in causing ‘offensive healing’, and he was by himself, so… Third room it was.

Erick went through the third archway, into the next room ahead.

The door shut behind him and a hole opened up in the expansive white floor ahead. A thin stream of mercury-like metal flowed up from below, splashed upon some unseen ring-like object, and then settled down onto that ring, like iron filings falling upon a magnet. In a flickering second, the splash of liquid metal turned solid, and then expanded a fraction.

It was a bracelet. A dull, metiron bracelet.

Erick walked forward and took the bracelet out of the air and stuck the gem into the metal. Fascinatingly, the metal wrapped around the gem and then settled down, almost like an ooze, or a slime, but more like metal that felt like being not-metal when it encountered something interesting.

Erick was not surprised when a divine chime echoed through the room.

Words appeared.

Congratulations!

You have received your first meta-iron, your first meta-diamond, and you have joined them together!

You have created a Bracelet of [Self Rejuvenation]!

Upon placing the bracelet on your wrist you will feel a chill as the item takes your mana, both to store and to use. Since you only produce 10 mana per day, all of your mana production is going into the item, so this chill will persist until the item reaches saturation. Kill some slimezards in the grasslands for a quick boost of mana to fill up your first bracelet and the drain and chill will vanish.

Your starter bracelet can hold about 100 mana, and the personalized [Rejuvenation] will always be active at a low level on you at all times.

You can also activate the spell, for a quick, temporary healing boost, that will actually heal small wounds. Activating the spell is as simple as calling out the name, and the spell will activate, draining the power of the bracelet in order to power the spell contained therein.

This need to speak the name for the spell to activate goes for all basic meta-irons.

There are mental-based meta-diamonds that can be joined to any existing spell to allow one to circumvent the need to speak the spell for activation.

Proper aura control can also be used to activate your paired meta-irons and the spells therein.

NOTICE: It will take about 10 minutes to heal from several small cuts or bites. Missing flesh will take longer to heal, and will require a second activation of this magic, preferably after an hour has passed since the last activation.

NOTICE: Overuse of the active healing function will cause the dungeon to save you before you start to develop cancers. <Estimated safe healing: 5 activations per day, no more than 1 per hour>

Well that was interesting.

Quite nice of the Gem Dungeon to have all that robust messaging, too; it answered most of his questions about cancers and the like. Erick was rather glad that he went for the third door. This was all working out rather interestingly. Soon enough, Erick would be making his own magic, too, and that thought brought a smile to his face.

Erick put the bracelet on his left wrist—

The metal was cold, and it rapidly got colder as something slicked away from Erick’s body and fell away into the bracelet. Erick had to pause for a moment to try and understand what had just happened, because the thing had not taken his mana directly. It had taken some mana that had overlapped his body without his noticing, until it was gone.

The dungeon had said that this is exactly what would happen, so… Erick wasn’t worried. The other thing that made him not worry was that Blacksmith had explained earlier that the Gem Dungeon didn’t operate on the mana a person actually produced; it operated on the mana a person had won from the Gem Dungeon’s system.

And since all of Erick’s Gem Dungeon mana was currently going into the dull gem, set into the dusty-looking bracelet, of course he was already ‘empty’ and ‘cold’. But the bracelet seemed to be doing great.

The gem began to faintly glow as some inner fire began to rekindle—

The bracelet turned pleasantly warm as a certain kind of heat flowed into Erick. It wasn’t the warmth of his missing dungeon mana. It was more like he had taken a shot of espresso. He was already wide awake, but now he felt almost ready to move. He smiled as he inspected the bracelet.

“Well aren’t you nifty,” Erick said to himself—

Congratulations!

You have completed the tutorial!

As you explore the Gem Dungeon, you will find rooms filled with all sorts of challenges to overcome, with most of those places labeled beforehand. Sometimes the challenge is labeled, and sometimes the reward is labeled instead. Sometimes nothing is labeled at all, and you must find your own way through the thick of it all.

There are many secrets to be found in the more dangerous parts of the dungeon, but risk doesn’t always end in reward. Keep in mind your own limits, but push them, too, and gain all you can gain!

SPECIAL NOTICE: In order to progress past floor 1, you must find a spell creation tome and make your own spell, and then you must find the way down to floor 2. It’s a lot more complicated to create your own spell than what you did here in the tutorial.

Good luck, Ashes Woodfield! Here is your new Status:

- -

Ashes Woodfield (9 saves remaining)

MP per day: 10

Meta-Irons: 100, 0 in storage

Meta-Diamonds: 1/10, 0 in storage

Bracelet of [Self Rejuvenation], 10/100

- -

We hope you enjoy the Glittering Depths!

SPECIAL NOTICE: Escape is always easy outside of dangerous situations. Just call out ‘Emergency Upside Exit’ and an exit to the entrance zone will be provided. Getting back down to where you were is not nearly as easy, for in escape, you might have given up everything that you might have gained.

Good luck!

NOTICE: robust messaging is now off

A door slid open on the other side of the room.

A familiar grassland waited beyond; it was the entrance zone. In the far distance stood the hills, the Eternal Depths castle, and the black [Gate] entrance to the dungeon itself. People still walked up and down the road leading from that [Gate], headed off to wherever they desired. Erick took one more look around the tutorial area, the featureless white room…

And then he stepped out onto the grasslands—

The door behind him vanished, as though he had stepped through a [Gate]. All was grassland, all around him, knee-high and as dense as an unmowed lawn.

Erick smiled a little bit as he took in all that had just happened.

Overall, he liked that experience back there. It was simple, direct, and full of explanations. Erick’s introduction to the Script of Veird all those years ago had been similar, but Irogh, the Registrar of Spur, had needed to explain a whole lot more to him than he had needed to explain to normal inhabitants of Veird. That conversation had taken hours, and Erick hadn’t learned nearly enough in that conversation to do anything on his own until after a month had passed, and after he had become familiar with the Script.

Erick suspected that he would acclimate a lot faster to the Glittering Depths.

Erick turned, and sought out a slimezard, since those were good at replenishing mana. As he looked out across the land, he saw people killing ever-present slimezards right now.

Erick went hunting, too.

He found his prey twenty meters away, having popped out of a hole in the ground that was not there until the slimezard left it. The creatures ‘respawned’, as Jane would say, rather often. The small creature was at home in the deep grass, slipping and sliding around and sometimes passing directly through the thick undergrowth, but it was not nearly fast enough to escape Erick and a quick stomp.

As the facsimile of a creature vanished into motes of mana, those motes fell into Erick, warming him briefly, before that warmth slicked away into the bracelet on his wrist, leaving him chilled again. The [Rejuvenation] metamond glowed ever so slightly brighter, and the bracelet was a bit less dusty.

Erick checked his ‘status’ to try and see if there was a change…

Nothing happened at his mental command.

“Right,” Erick said, realizing what he had done wrong. “Status.”

Words appeared to him.

- -

Ashes Woodfield (9 saves remaining)

MP per day: 10

Meta-Irons: 100, 0 in storage

Meta-Diamonds: 1/10, 0 in storage

Bracelet of [Self Rejuvenation], 20/100

- -

Verbal commands would take some getting used to.

It seemed each slimezard earned him 10 mana, through some sort of soul-resonance and flow system, and then that 10 mana flowed into the bracelet. Erick wasn’t sure if that’s what he expected to happen, but it made sense after the fact. There was probably some sort of [Renew] action happening in there, in order to make the mana adapt through three different systems without much loss… Or maybe something else was going on.

Erick would find out later.

After eight more slimezard kills Erick’s bracelet stopped absorbing mana from him and a warmth began to return to his body, though that warmth was already moving on. A person couldn’t hold onto mana here in the Gem Dungeon, but metirons could.

The metamond was bright blue and filled with fractal flashes, while the metiron was shiny as silver. With that basic task accomplished, Erick turned his attention to the hills in the distance; where everyone else was going.

He walked that way to see what was what.

- - - -

By happenstance or fate, Erick arrived at the dirt path in front of the entrance just as the woman with the shield and sparkling tunic walked into the dungeon, her charges tailing behind her. As the woman stepped further into the dungeon, her tunic transformed from sparkling crystal to shimmering metal, the links so fine that it almost looked like fabric, while her shield became a slab of silver on her back.

She was talking about what to expect in some part of the dungeon that Erick didn’t have enough context to know, but when she looked at Erick she did a double take. She went right up to him, and asked, “You’re new here, aren’t you? And that’s [Self Rejuvenation] on your wrist. Do you want to join a party?”

Erick paused a little, taking a moment to take in his surroundings again, and this time with a lot more information. First thing he noticed was that a bunch of other people were now looking his way, after the woman had called out his bracelet. A few of the morning delvers heading in or out (perhaps some of them were very late night delvers, actually) perked up, and then they looked Erick over. Two people spied the bit of silver and sky-blue on his wrist, tsk’d, then promptly ignored him for whatever reason. Most simply opted to ignore Erick; he was too new, with too few bits of metiron on him, and he wouldn’t get very far because most people didn’t get far. Maybe. Erick could be misreading some of what he was seeing.

Only the tunic-wearing woman was truly interested in him, for she stood in front of Erick waiting for an answer. Three of her five charges seemed to want Erick to say ‘no’ while the other two wanted him to say yes, but they didn’t truly care.

The woman was eager, and she seemed honest.

But Erick didn’t want to go anywhere with other people right now.

So Erick said, “This is my first day here and I’m not looking for a party, but thank you for the offer. I do have a question, if you don’t mind answering: Is Healing Magic actually rare enough to be called out like this?”

The woman gave a small, resigned smile. “Ahh. Well if you change your mind, just look up the Crystal Raiders in the delver’s hall and leave a message for us with the clerks. We’re a small but growing group of delvers looking to push far and raise others up to push far with us, because the Glittering Depths can more than support you if you choose to live here, and the only way to trade items between people is to use a grouphall, which is like a guildhall but for groups, like us, the Crystal Raiders.” She explained quickly, “But anyway. To answer your question: Yes, Healing Magics are rarer than anything else down here, and the tutorial wouldn’t have given you the option for [Rejuvenation] if it didn’t think you knew how to manually use Elemental Healing. It doesn’t even matter if you chose the Bracelet of [Self Rejuvenation] right now, because the fact that you have Healing as your first item means that you’ll be able to use Healing Magic elsewhere in the dungeon without causing cancers and the like.

“Because you can manually make these items, you can find and make some more Bracelets of [Self Rejuvenation] and then sell them to others, making you a rich man— Well. Locally rich, in this dungeon.

“As another treat of information: you can turn the [Self Rejuvenation] into [Touch Rejuvenation] easily enough with the right metamonds. The [Aurify] metamond does that, but that’s a damned mana-sucker once you get down to where the manasphere is thin. A better option is the [Bequeath] metamond, which will allow you to imbue individuals with [Self Rejuvenation] for a time; it’s more limited than the aurify version, but it’s more mana-cost friendly.

“But if you’re not up for partying, then there’s no real need to go in those directions.” She smiled brightly, with a faint hint of alcohol on her breath. “I know a lot more than that little bit of information when it comes to the Glittering Depths. You sure you don’t want to join us? We could always use more skill.”

Erick returned her smile. “I’m grateful for the explanation and for the hint of where to go next, but my answer is still ‘no’, for now. The name is Ashes Woodfield. It was a pleasure to meet you…?”

“Veracity Speed,” the woman said, without seeming to lie, but who the heck had a name like that? Crazy. Erick almost asked her about her odd name, but she noticed Erick’s doubt, smiled a bit more, and said, “It’s the name I’m using these days, ‘Ashes’.”

Erick laughed. “ ‘Ashes’ is a perfectly valid name!”

“Sure sure sure,” Veracity rambled as she winked. Then she moved on, saying to her charges, and maybe also to Erick a little, “Come along now! We’re gonna get you all some real starter spells, and work on getting you the pieces to make the truly fun ones, like [Curse Bloom], [Mana Purge], and [Fireball]! I’m partial to [Fiery Corruption] over [Fireball], though, because single target touch-spells are much more mana efficient once you get past the early levels, where mana density is still high. Any spells that go wide often fail when the mana gets thin, because, like I said earlier…”

Veracity’s voice drifted on the air, like all the other small conversations happening on the main dirt road, from the entrance to the hills. Her charges followed along, one of them muttering, ‘she never shuts up’. A different charge elbowed the one who had disparaged the verbose Veracity, whispering, ‘You stop that, Migh.’

Erick watched them go for a moment and felt that if Veracity’s group wasn’t so absolutely filled with teenagers, that maybe he would have gone with her. She seemed like a nice enough person.

Erick gave a quick mental look back at Ophiel, and a telepathic check-in. Thankfully, the telepathy-connection worked fine, even in the dungeon, since Ophiel was a part of Erick’s soul; the dungeon didn’t seem capable of blocking his omnipresent connection to his [Familiar]s at the moment, and it probably never would. He would probably lose his [Telepathy] connection as he got deeper into the depths, but even in the deepest parts of Ar’Cosmos and past the Edge of the Script, his [Familiar]s had remained intact.

Here, on the grasslands, where his actual [Telepathy] connection was strong, Poi informed Erick that nothing bad was happening out there right now. Just a bunch of paperwork, for now. They wouldn’t even get a meeting with a judge for another 14 days.

So Erick bid Poi luck.

Then he walked down the dirt road, toward the hills in the distance, where open doorways were set into the base of the hills, and shadows lay beyond. Half of the hills were entrances, and half were exits. People vanished into those shadows, in twos and threes, or as singles, and came out in similar-sized groups—

Two people rushed out of an exit, calling out for a ‘Jool’, yelling their heads off.

Almost as fast as they called out, someone stood up from the grasses over in the field. Everyone who had looked their way during the yelling moved on, and so did Erick. ‘Jool’ had been [True Resurrection]ed, and so he ended up here, on the grasslands. According to the soft words of the group, that Erick couldn’t help but overhear, Jool and his team weren’t going to do anymore delving here at all.

It was too hard of a dungeon.

When Veracity’s group of six got to their hill, Veracity told them all to rush in quickly and together, otherwise they would get separated. One of the guys in the group, Migh, almost held back at that, but the one who had elbowed him gripped his hand tight.

Veracity went into the darkness first, followed rapidly by everyone else, linked hand in hand.

Erick picked a different hill and stepped into the darkness.

- - - -

Darkness slipped away from Erick like the popping of a foggy bubble.

Two sensations happened fast.

The first was the cold; the chill of something solid escaping him, instantly followed by an inner bloating from his core, that threatened core fracture. Erick rarely felt uncomfortable these days, but his core began to leak mana as though it was overfull, and that mana flickered through his body like sparking lightning. That leak didn’t do anything at the moment, except to drain away Erick’s Script-granted mana pool. But it didn’t have to do more than that. Taking away his mana was more than enough of an existential threat to raise his hackles.

Theoretically, Erick could empty himself of all his mana and become, temporarily, a creature with an empty core in his chest. That would cause a whole lot of problems, though, from preventing him from casting anything at all, to making his body weak. Dragons were not mundane creatures, after all; everything about them was magical, and Erick was no exception. Remove that magic, and he was just a person. If enough magic was removed, then Erick would even lose his Constitution and other Script-given Stats, and be locked into this current body.

Erick was almost 100% sure that this dungeon wouldn’t actually disconnect him from the Script, though, so his Wizardly mana production wouldn’t start flooding the place. That had almost happened when he went past the Edge of the Script all those years ago, when he fought Holo...

Erick shivered.

And then Erick instinctively shored up his internal defenses, and the drain stopped; his core-held mana remained inside of him, underneath his [Illusionary Soul]… Hmm. Which he would need to manually cast and keep cast, unless he wanted to be found out as a person with a core. But he could, and would, do that, so that wasn’t too big of a deal… Probably.

The second sensation Erick felt after stepping through the darkness was emptiness of an emotional sort, for Erick found himself at the top of a flat-roof tower, watching over a night-cloaked city that sprawled out at the base of the tower. The sky held few stars, and the city below held even fewer, for the city was dead, and filled with monsters.

This land had been a metropolitan area long ago, but now the spires and close-quarters businesses and apartments were broken here and there, as though they had been shelled for months, or years. Maybe just weeks, though, for war had a way of reducing things to rubble pretty damned fast.

Scorch marks and wild-churned stone walls, as though from mutative [Stoneshape]s, were all hallmarks of that unknown war, not too long ago. The streets and the first floors of every building were fully covered by dark water, too, so much of the destruction was hidden below that darkness. Maybe a river had been diverted into the city, or maybe some Water Mages had called down liquid horrors and flooded the place. Maybe both had happened, for slippery things swam in those waters, almost unseen, save for Erick’s enhanced perceptions.

He had to blink a little bit to focus on the further things out there in the water, for Perception was a Script-granted gift, and it was starting to fail here in this place. Erick estimated that the mana density was about 80% normal, and that his eyesight would become baseline-human further down in the depths. Fortunately, he had made this body rather perfect already, so while he would lose his supernatural senses, his natural ones would remain.

And he already knew that the dungeon had sense-enhancing and body-enhancing capabilities, so he would just need to find those, wherever they might be—

Oh.

That’s not a moon.

Erick looked up at the black sky and saw countless stars, but he also saw something unexpected.

Far, far in the distance, there was a moon that was not a moon; it was green and blue and had a great big chunk missing from the southern half. That exposed core of the world was not a core, either. It was more of a world, located below the surface of the rest of the planet.

Erick suspected it wasn’t a planet at all. But a plane of existence.

Goosebumps raised from his skin as he began to suspect something about this place. This dungeon was already special because it had a Second Script, but it probably also had some intrinsic connection to Atunir’s history, and maybe to other people of the Old Cosmology—

A message appeared, confirming some of Erick’s thoughts.

Welcome to Floor 1, the destroyed city.

This is a city in the drained world of Insten, of the Old Cosmology.

This is a true story, turned into a learning experience.

Insten was always at war with itself and in particular, with Riam, located across the Mana Ocean up there in the sky. Mana might be impossible to destroy but it could certainly be contained; drawn away from one location, and sequestered in another.

In this way, Riam ruled over Insten.

In this time and space, Atunir and her people eventually came to Insten and delivered unto them a grand bounty. They helped Insten overthrow their oppressors and eventually bring Insten itself back from the edge of destruction you see before you. That would not happen for centuries more.

This, here, was at the start of the ever-war; the Emptying.

You are alone in this world.

Everything else will try to kill you, so kill it first.

Seek remnants of power located on this ancient battlefield and make for yourself a weapon with which to fight against The Emptying.

Make some magic, and make your way to the next floor.

“… Ahhh,” Erick said to himself, realizing the depth of Atunir’s commitment to this dungeon. “This is a historical reenactment, based on facts of Atunir’s life back in the Old Cosmology.”

The similarities between ‘the Emptying’ and the mana voids of the New Cosmology… There was something there. Perhaps just coincidence, though. Coincidence enough to build a teaching experience upon? Sure.

It shouldn’t have surprised Erick that there were similarities between the emptiness of the New Cosmology and the vagaries of the mana ocean back in the Old Cosmology. Nor should it have surprised him that there were direct examples that Atunir could draw upon in order to guide her people into making this dungeon.

What did surprise him, though, was that anyone would want to make a dungeon with anything at all approaching the facts of the Sundering, where the mana ocean emptied out into the New Cosmology and almost killed everyone. But then again, this wasn’t the Sundering, this was the Emptying; this place was steeped in the history of the Old Cosmology…

And people (and gods) liked to keep their history, and teach it to others. So this made sense?

The Core of Veird was filled with places that the gods remembered from the Old Cosmology, after all, so this sort of reconstruction was not unheard of. Of the Core, Erick only really visited that peninsula-island kingdom and Wizards’ Tower, and that small village beforehand, but there were hundreds of thousands of places down there in the center of Veird, where the Core hung in the ‘sky’ like a blue world all its own. Millions of places were filled with memories down there.

Of course Atunir would want to see one of her triumphs recorded for all to see, even if it was only in a reenactment in a place just on the other side of Darkness. Erick had no idea how important Insten was to Atunir, but it had to be somewhat important. This story could be apocryphal, but Erick doubted that most severely…

Probably.

The first floor message began to vanish from Erick’s sight, leaving him with an unobstructed view of the dark world ahead.

There were several paths to choose from.

The tower Erick stood upon had been a watchtower (?) in the center of the city, but it had lost all of its top floor in some magical strike that melted the upper floors and the walls all around into a low, wax-like stone obstruction. But the staircase leading down into the guardhouse (?) below still remained. The mana here was kinda thin, so Erick could only mana sense a hundred meters down, but that path, though dark, was rather unobstructed. There were odd holes in the manasphere here and there inside the building, which Erick suspected might be monsters lying in ambush… Could be something else.

Going into the guardhouse was only one option.

The other option was to leap off the tower, onto a slanted roof down below, and then onto the roof of another building across the road. Aside from the ten meter fall to the roof below, the other jumps were a lot more manageable for a ‘baseline’ human; between 2 and 4 meters between roofs.

A few lights held here and there in the gloom of the destroyed city, and Erick might check out those things, whatever they were. Maybe they were ‘angler-fish’ monsters luring people to their deaths, as those types often did; one should never trust a light in a dark place, for it was often a trap.

But traps often contained treasure, so… He’d get to those lights soon enough—

Splashes echoed across the cavernous, empty canals down below. Something long and slithering moved in those depths of stagnant water, dragging a struggling meal down into the dark. That splashing sound passed across the city, and various things in the dark responded. Chitters called out from a decrepit structure that might have been a church, down the road. One of the lights on a roof over there fell off that roof, off the opposite side of the building and did not make a sound; it did not splash down into the water which was surely there.

A few more rooftop-lights vanished here and there, going back into hiding.

Definitely monsters.

Whatever had fallen off that roof had been the size of a boulder, and now that Erick was looking, the roofs of several buildings were missing more than the lights that had been there until that noise had been made.

Erick considered the need for a weapon of some sort, to conserve his mana for emergencies.

Well. This was a watchtower, which meant that the place underneath his feet should be some sort of weapon’s house. There might be some weapons down there, in that dearth of mana sensing.

Putting one foot in front of the other, Erick descended into the partially-melted watchtower.

It was dark down here, but the light of Erick’s cerulean metamond was enough to see the insides of the tower. There had been a massacre here, long ago, and something had made this place a rats nest shortly thereafter, with bones scattered here and there and a pile of partially burned wood and blankets and trash forming something of a bed in one forgotten corner. Whatever had moved in and claimed this place as a home was dead and gone, though; the bones were white and dusty. The air smelled more of mold and water, than of anything living.

Erick spied a rusted mace in the nest.

… It would serve, so Erick went digging and pried the weapon out of the former monster’s bed. The length of steel was still good, and the rust appeared surface-only. Erick instinctively tried to shift his senses and activate his Class Ability of Metal Sense, to truly figure out if the metal was good or not, but the Script was blocked here. All he got for his effort was a wispy bit of white glows tumbling below his skin; ineffectual, yet disturbed enough along its path into the metal to produce broken magic.

He could force the issue through his Domain magic, but… Nah.

Whatever. Erick slapped the mace into his hand a few times, feeling the weight of it, then he gripped it in two hands and swung it like he was hitting a home run. That wasn’t the proper way to wield a mace, but the weapon had good heft and balance. It would serve.

Erick continued down the stairs, further into the dark, his tiny bracelet forming enough light to see—

A head-sized spider right before it detached from the ceiling, to try and face-hugger him.

Whip-crack went the mace. A splatter of green-grey spider guts rained over Erick and the staircase, while the remains of the spider struck a wall and rolled down into the dark below. The spider was very dead.

Its friends were not dead.

“Ah,” Erick said, as the various invisible parts of the mana all around began to make sense. “Spiders in the building; gotta burn it all down.”

Or rather, smash it all down; Erick had no Fire Magics right now.

The spiders screamed as they ran at Erick from odd angles; on the walls, on the ceiling. Five at first, and then twenty. Erick did not relent. Down came the mace, over and over and over. Out went his fist a few times, when the mace wouldn’t have reached the jumping spider fast enough. A quick punch to the face, right at the fangs, earned Erick no injuries at all, and killed a spider each time. He probably could have let the things crawl over him and they wouldn’t have been able to injure him.

But there was no fucking way that he was letting spiders crawl over him.

Spider #37 was the last of them.

Erick did his best not to slip on the slick staircase as he descended into the tower—

He slipped.

He did not fall, though! He instantly righted himself, his heart suddenly pumping hard at the unexpected action. When he was solid, he paused. And then he laughed. He laughed and laughed at the sheer absurdity of it all. When was the last time he had slipped? Not since before he started running his Benevolence full time, and that was years and years ago; two decades, if he counted by subjective time spent in [Hasted Shelter]s.

When Erick stopped laughing, he resumed his walk down the stairs.

He eventually made it to the point in the staircase where water lay below, and an open archway to an office space held to the side. He chose to go to the side room, on the third floor, just to see if he could find anything informative about this place, on this third floor, the first floor above the waterline.

The first thing he found was a tangle of desks and hat racks and a pile of debris, all webbed together with a wide hole in the center, forming a nest. Two large eyes, set into a collection of smaller eyes, turned a little bit blue as the spider eyed Erick, and more specifically his bracelet. The monstrous spider chittered, flexing its fangs; drips of venomous green power collecting on the tips of those weapons.

The spider crawled out of its nest like an accordion expanding, rapidly transforming from human-sized, to orcol-sized. It came at Erick with all of its legs and all of its fangs, trying to attack, grapple, and wrap him in webs, all in one fluid action.

Erick smashed the spider in the face, his mace passing halfway through the creature’s head, sending the monster flying. The spider crashed against its own nest, and the nest held firm. The spider’s construction fared fine in the confrontation. The spider did not. Green-grey ichor pumped out of the beast, onto the ground, and soon, the bleeding ended. It was dead.

Erick looked at his mace. It was bent.

Erick tried to bend it back into shape, but the head broke off and now all he had was a slightly bent length of metal that was too short to do anything with at all.

Well that was fine.

Erick had already mana sensed a good two and maybe three possible replacements inside the spider’s lair. With a few grabs and tugs, Erick pried apart the thick webbing that created the nest, disturbing dozens of small spiders along the way. The smallest ones ran from him, opting to flee the disturbance rather than fight. The hand-sized ones tried to bite, but he shook his hands, and the spiders went flying. With his hands held strong around the top of an ancient desk, Erick heaved the wooden barrier away—

A good hundred spiders scattered—

Oh. Three of the spiders on him were not trying to eat him, actually. Erick watched as several spiders tried to eat his blue metamond. Apparently they could actually do that, too, because the blue light faded a fraction, and two of the spiders grew bigger, pulsing larger like the beating of hearts. Erick slapped them dead, then made sure all the spiders on him were gone.

It took a bit.

Manavores.

Didn’t surprise Erick too much. Shadelings ate rads to keep their core stable, and other monsters did the same. Usually when a monster ‘ate mana’ it was more subtle than a spider sitting on a magical bracelet, consuming mana from that bracelet.

The monsters here were weird. Weren’t they supposed to vanish after being killed, like the slimezards upstairs? None of the spiders he had killed had faded, or turned into mana. What was up with that? Eh. He’d figure it out later, probably.

For now, Erick rooted around for the weapons tangled up deep in the trash heap of the spider’s nest.

Two of the three were like the mace he had procured on the upper floor; a sword and another mace, both rusted to shit, but generally serviceable. The replacement mace would be a good replacement, but the sword should just go back into the pile, for it was a thinner sort of weapon, made more for fencing, perhaps, than for beating up beasts. The sword would break the first time he tried to use it, for sure. It was missing a handle, anyway, and a bare tang made for a bad grip.

The third weapon was different in almost every way.

It was a wrist-thick rod, a meter long. Erick had almost mistaken it for the bar of a cage or a cell, or some similar enclosure. It was not a simple bar, though. It had ridges on one end, for a better grip, and a fist-sized sphere on the other, and the whole thing was an even, iron-grey color, though the exact color was hard to tell in this inadequate light. What set it apart from every other option was its singular-material, and the fact that it was the same color that his metiron bracelet had been, back when the bracelet had been at zero-mana.

“So a baton of some sort. A caster weapon?” Erick asked himself, as he swung the rod around a little... He changed his mind about it being a caster weapon rather quickly. “You’re for melee, for sure.”

Erick went to the body of the large spider and brought the metal rod down on the corpse.

The corpse buckled under the strike, exoskeleton shattering.

… And the weapon bent a little—

Erick shivered as several things happened at once.

His body filled with warmth, and then rapidly faded, a chill setting in as his bracelet drained him dry, and a secondary drain joined the first. The baton. And then Erick’s newest weapon straightened, every single little defect or problem of age vanishing as the metal righted itself to a pristine state. Physically, anyway. It was still pretty damned dull-looking. It looked like soft iron, rather than like the silver shininess of his bracelet.

Finally, some messages appeared, laying out what had just happened to him, but without telling him directly; the tutorial was over, and robust messaging was done.

You have cleared the infested guardhouse!

MP up! +10 mana production per day!

- -

Ashes Woodfield (9 saves remaining)

MP per day: 20

Meta-Irons: 400, 0 in storage

Meta-Diamonds: 1/10, 0 in storage

Bracelet of [Self Rejuvenation], 92/100

Rod of the Guardian (depleted), 7/300

- -

“Rod of the guardian, eh?” Erick hefted the weapon and almost made a rude joke to himself, but he decided not to. “How’s about we look for a way to make you non-depleted…” He paused. “But maybe there’s another concern about being in this dungeon that must be addressed.” He looked himself over, and felt, perhaps, a little bit uncomfortable being dressed in spider-guts muck. Rapidly after he had that thought, a realization came to him. “… Ah. There’s no [Cleanse] down here… Shit.”

He looked down at all the spiders.

“I was really hoping the muck would vanish like the slimezards upstairs.”

But that didn’t seem to be happening.

Erick brushed his hands on his shirt, ensuring that his grip on the rod was good, and played over in his mind all the various ways in which magic was different outside of the Script’s assistance. From [Cleanse], to Healing Magic, to all the other ways...

Erick thought of magic as he splatted a few more hand-sized aggressive spiders on his way toward the guardhouse’s third-story balcony, which had been blasted open by some old explosions, and which looked to be the only way out of this place that wasn’t through eel or snake-infested waters, or whatever those things in the water down there happened to be called. They were probably eels. Erick stepped over webbed rubble, out into the open night, onto a balcony positioned above open waters. It hadn’t always been a balcony over open waters, for there were buildings all around the space, and all buildings to the sides had large windows. Or at least they had had large windows. Now they just had holes where water barely flowed…

It was probably a town square. Erick’s mana sense was a little fuzzy and it would be getting worse soon enough, but below the dark waters, in the center of the space, lay an inactive fountain, while all around the town square lay areas cordoned off by tiles. Each tile-cordoned space looked to be about three meters square. Market stall space? Probably.

Made sense to have the market right next to the guardhouse.

On a lark, Erick cast his mana sense back as far as he could go, to see if this place had any [Witness]able history—

The shadows shifted.

The world flexed as though through a dozen soap bubbles.

Erick felt an unreality settle within his eyesight as his mana sense tripped into the distant past. As some kinda shift began to solidify, Erick felt, almost, as though he were standing beside the ghost of a guard, looking down at a familiar sight that was changed forever by the war—

- - - -

Ashes Woodfield stood upon the balcony outside his office, gazing down at the farmer’s market below.

It wasn’t the marketplace that he was used to seeing. Three years ago, the market here used to be packed with all manner of offerings, and Ashes would have needed to be down there, in the thick of it, ensuring that no damned mages snuck in and tried to pilfer goods or currency from the non-warded vendor stalls. The permanent businesses around here had good wards so they could keep tele-finger mages out of their business, but the Emptying made securing a temporary vendor stall near impossible.

So it was Ashes’ job to keep tabs on the rare mage that came through, and make sure they didn’t step out of line.

His job was almost obsolete these days.

The mages didn’t come to Iben much anymore. Not since Riam deepened the Emptying, calling it a ‘tax’ for all the ‘good they did’. Pah! It was a slow murder, that’s what it was.

Half of the people of Iben had fled over the last two years. Some went to the larger cities that remained on Insten, which was fine, but some people went to Riam in the sky, like the fucking traitors they were—

Ashes sighed, his brief anger at the world rapidly subsumed by a melancholy, and then he almost laughed, for melancholy was yet another symptom of the Emptying. As his emotions evened, he gazed down at the scattered stalls below, and then to the empty spaces between those stalls. Used to be, there were no empty spaces here in the market. Now, everything was turning to shit. As people left his city, the mana went with them, and now… This place would be dead in five years if this didn’t change.

Markie’s wife had given birth to a malformation last week, and she wasn’t the only one to suffer that horror. Markie, Ashes’ oldest friend, had even been talking about leaving after that happened. Markie of all people! Ashes would have counted Markie among the never-leavers, like Ashes, but a malformation in the family changed things.

Some people would always remain here in Iben, and Ashes would be one of them. The never-leavers.

It would be tough, but he could stick it out.

Ashes glanced over the market again and spotted specific problems that he could do nothing about.

From their goods on display, it looked like the Emptying had finally gotten to O’Ley’s farm; they only had whiteroot and leafies, and all of the leafies looked wilted. The O’Leys were only a few kilometers out of town and they should have been fine for another full season of growing, but their farm was failing, too. All the distant farmers were already gone, and the O’Leys would be next. Would they get bought out by Riam, too, once they couldn’t grow shit on their land anymore?

Once they couldn’t pay their taxes?

Probably.

“How long do we even have left,” Ashes whispered to himself.

He gripped the hilt of his baton and hated that he couldn’t fight Riam; that he couldn’t bash in a skull and end all of the problems of his home. That thought, that feeling, managed to cut all the way through his melancholy, for he had too many thoughts on the resistance to fully categorize most of them.

If the resistance came here, to Iben…

He might join them this time.

… Maybe he might go looking for the resistance in the city, already. The resistance was everywhere, after all. Ashes had purposefully not looked too hard into all that because if he found those lawbreakers then he would have to do something about them, and he didn’t want to do that. The resistance was where the term ‘never leaver’ came from, and Ashes shared more in common with them than with most people, except for when it came to following the law.

But now…

Seeing those wilted leafies on O’Ley’s market stall… That had been the last stalk.

Maybe it was time for him to become a law unto himself.

- - - -

Erick yanked back from the past that wasn’t the past at all.

A moment of panic passed quick enough as he analyzed what had just happened. It was like a [Witness], but stronger. A lot stronger. He had become ‘Ashes Woodfield’, guard and guardian of Iben, the city that lay ruined all around. But it hadn’t been ruined in the vision. It had been on the decline.

Erick could still smell the faint memory of the market on the air; the freshness of the ‘leafies’, which were cabbage, the dirt of the whiteroot, the crispness of apples...

And then that memory faded, and all Erick could smell was spider guts, stagnant water, and decay.

He knew the name of this city now. ‘Iben’, of the world Insten, of the Old Cosmology.

Erick gripped the rod of the guardian and considered ‘Ashes’s decision to go to the resistance. Seemed like a good idea to Erick, too. They probably had magical options for him to plunder, if they didn’t get used in the war itself. Either way, they probably had caches here and there filled with the contraband that should have been in the guardhouse…

Maybe there was still some contraband here, though? Maybe the manavore spiders hadn’t eaten it all?

Erick glanced back at the guardhouse, sending his mana sense into the depths. He looked again at a storage room down below the first floor, down below the water. Something lurked down there in the basement, beyond a large metal door that had been blown apart, where the upper floor had partially caved in. Erick could go rooting around in the contraband room for trinkets, and there was probably something in there…

Erick turned around and went into the guardhouse, to the stairs. He was on the third floor, but a few steps later, and he stood above the waterline on the second floor, a step above where bad things swirled in the murk below. It was not clean water. Desks held tight to the left side of the office space, where the slow flow of the water had pushed them to pile up before a hallway. He would need to go through that hallway to get to a separate stairwell that led down, into a storage area on the first floor, where a lot of different things obscured his mana sense.

Going that way would require him to swim through the water, though, and Erick did not want to do that at all.

Another option held on the far side of the office space, where something had cracked the floor, creating an opening directly above the storage room on the first floor below. Either way, he would have to go swimming, and he’d have to clear away some sort of obstruction. Going through the wooden detritus would likely be physically easier, since getting proper leverage on that crack in the ground would be a problem without having access to his real magic.

But he didn’t want to swim.

Eh. He could go swimming. That was fine.

He was going to get down there, one way or another, but there was a question: Would he be cleaner, or dirtier, if he kept his clothes on?

It’d probably be a wash.

… Erick opted to keep his clothes on.

He stepped into the cold water, sighed as he shivered, and then he stepped down onto the next step, then the next. Soon, water swirled around his stomach and he began to swim a little, wondering when the monsters would come out to eat him.

Didn’t take long.

Leg-thick eels slipped out of their hiding places among the detritus and up from the crack in the ground. Five of them converged on Erick—

The world flashed blue and paused—

The eels froze, but Erick could move just fine—

A part of Erick’s status appeared.

- -

Ashes Woodfield (8 saves remaining)

- -

He had lost another save.

“… The fuck?”

That didn’t seem fair. Erick was rather sure he could take some eels, even if they were in their element, and he was not. Erick pressed forward, toward the crack in the floor. He was going to try and break it open while the eels were frozen—

The eels flickered as blue magic washed away from them like so much broken spellwork. Whatever ‘pause’ had affected them was gone, and they advanced on Erick as though on fast forward. All five of them got within a meter of Erick when the world flashed blue again, the eels froze again, and his status reappeared.

- -

Ashes Woodfield (7 saves remaining)

- -

Erick frowned.

“I can take some damned eels. This is too much babying.”

To illustrate his point, Erick glanced around to see which eel was closest to the surface, and then he smashed his mace down on that one. His mace cracked through the water but struck the blue magic surrounding the frozen eel, and bounced.

Are you sure?

The words had appeared above the [Pause]d eel.

“Yes,” Erick said.

Safety protocols temporarily removed.

All five eels unfroze. All of them attacked his legs and lower body at once.

Erick knew that a rod of the guardian wasn’t a very good weapon against enemies in the water, but with enough Strength and with enough Constitution, he figured he could get out of the scrape just fine. His clothes might be damaged, but that was fine, too. His clothes were going to get absolutely ruined by the end of this adventure, anyway.

And Erick was right. Mostly.

As the eels attacked, he smashed down with his mace, fountaining water everywhere, managing to strike the eel closest to the surface well enough. That eel was down for the count. The others all managed to nip a piece of him, even as he twirled a fraction to deny their attacks on his center. The rest of the melee went about as expected.

Erick won. Eels died.

Erick had to exit the water, though, because he was bleeding everywhere.

Two nips out of his left thigh. A bigger bite out of his right calf. Most of the eels went for his center mass with each strike, and he was able to protect that well enough, but eventually, as the eels had begun to realize that Erick wasn’t an easy mark, they had changed their fighting style to more of a wearing-down; that was when they managed to take flesh.

And now, Erick sat on the stairs, in the dark, looking at his wounds.

His innate absolute damage reduction was already gone, wasn’t it? Mostly, anyway. The [Self Rejuvenation] of his bracelet seemed to be doing something good, though. The bracelet glowed cerulean, and his bleeding had already stopped, his body scabbed over where flesh had been taken. Erick hadn’t activated the active form of his bracelet yet, but… He went ahead and did that now.

… Nothing happened.

“Right,” Erick said, “I need to say— [Rejuvenation].”

It was so weird to have to say the words.

Warmth spread throughout his body. His scabs began to itch as flesh knitted at a ‘rapidly’ increased pace. It was ‘natural’ healing, for sure, so it would leave scars, and this sort of healing was a lot damned slower than anything he was used to, but this body was made to be healthy, and even with his usual spellwork inactive, the dungeon’s form of [Rejuvenation] seemed to be working more than Erick expected it to work. In ten minutes, his wounds were reduced to barely-visible scars. Perhaps the scars would vanish too, in the future.

No messages from the dungeon had graced his sight while he waited, because, Erick suspected, he hadn’t actually gotten to the treasure yet, and that’s when the previous message had appeared. There was something down there, for sure, now that the monsters were clear and Erick had taken some time to truly sense what lay below. Whatever was down there felt like a dull beacon in the dark.

Back on Veird, if Erick had sensed something like he was sensing now, he would have called that something a minor magical item. Like one of his rings, back when he was first making them. Or like a wand of [Mend]. Something small, yet useful.

There was a very good chance that everything there had been ‘looted’ before Erick had come along, if he was going by the story that the dungeon was setting up for him. That crack in the floor looked like side-effect damage from some sort of magical attack, but the vault door downstairs had clearly been blasted open, if that twisted metal down there was anything to go by.

Someone had tried to go in through the floor, too, which was why there was a crack in the floor at all.

Had other people come through this floor before him? Or was this all ‘battle damage’ from the war? Eh. Erick would talk to others about all that and see what they said.

Erick proceeded with his initial plan to break the floor and get to the treasure. There was a chance that he would break the floor and the falling stone would break whatever lay in the storage room below, but that was a chance he was willing to take.

So he got back into the water and went to the crack in the floor, directly above the storage room. With his metal rod gripped by both hands, Erick aimed down, and with all his force, he smashed. Water went flying. A loud crack filled the air. The break in the ground collapsed, falling down into the storage room—

Right onto whatever magical thing was down there.

A flicker of red mana filled the waters and then vanished, dispersing out into the world like so much broken magic. A simultaneous and partially-recognizable warmth filled Erick, and then even more warmth filled him, for the red mana of the broken thing below had filled the area, its glow briefly illuminating patches of weeds and algae and other dark things growing in the water, before fading fast.

Words appeared.

You have cleared the flooded guardhouse (Special)!

MP up! +100 mana production per day!

+2 saves (Save protocol is now lowered. Say aloud ‘resume save protocol’ if you wish to reinstate normal parameters)

+950 temporary mana (overflow discarded)

- -

Ashes Woodfield (9 saves remaining)

MP per day: 120

Meta-Irons: 400, 0 in storage

Meta-Diamonds: 1/10, 0 in storage

Bracelet of [Self Rejuvenation], 100/100

Rod of the Guardian (depleted), 300/300

- -

So there was a lot there to digest, but it was all rather self-explanatory.

The only part that Erick truly considered was how all the mana in this dungeon worked nicely with all the other mana of this dungeon. Normal mana from one caster did not usually play nicely with mana from another caster, so, in a normal situation, the mana of the artifact down below should not be ‘absorbable’ by him and his currently equipped meta-iron weapons. So what the dungeon was doing instead, was overlaying a new mana system on top of his body, giving him a ‘secondary mana pool’ that was usable by the various artifacts of the dungeon, like the rod in his hands, or the bracelet on his wrist. All the mana in the dungeon was the same. Even the mana from creatures and otherwise was the same; it all played nice with each other.

But that’s what the Script did, anyway, right? The fact that mana didn’t play nice with each other was an edge case that almost no one actually knew or cared about, but which Erick had overcome with his creation of Benevolence and [Renew].

Erick hesitated to say that this Second Script would have mana compatibility issues if this system were exported to a new world, because that problem was already solved by Benevolence (And by pure volume; if one were to consider grand rads and the automatic charging of magical items). The meta-irons would just have to incorporate some actual [Renew] methodology in order to work properly…

Erick held up his wrist, and looked at the cerulean gem, and the sparkling bracelet. Then Erick hefted his weapon. The rod of the guardian looked rather pristine, now that it was topped off with mana; like a silver length of steel. It also seemed to weigh a bit more. Maybe 15 kilos? 16? A rather weighty weapon, but small compared to some of the weapons people walked around with back on Veird. Both his meta-iron objects looked pristine, and well made.

… Perhaps the dungeon was simply warping physics so that his [Renew] methodology was present inside all meta-iron? Like how the Script had designated lead as antirhine, the anti-magic metal—

Oh.

That’s exactly what the dungeon had done. Other people had already explained that to him.

Meta-iron was like the exact opposite of antirhine; it absorbed intent and made it whole, instead of scattering intent, and thus erasing magic.

Interesting!

All the mana currently inside Erick and in the environment seemed to be playing nice with itself, for his bracelet was working fine, and he had no wounds.

Erick smiled to himself as he began to trudge through the waters, back to the stairs. This was quite fun, actually. Lotta different systems coming together into a shifted world that was both simpler, and easier to keep safe, than the world of Veird. All you had to do was ensure that criminals didn’t have access to meta-iron…

But then again, restricting access to magic would lead to problems of a different sort. A lessening of learning, for one, but maybe there could be schools with a proper mana density, to allow for a student to learn how to properly cast magic? … Oh. Now there’s an idea.

As a plan of attack for Erick’s current situation formed in his head, he also considered the far future, as he made his way to the top of the watchtower.

Once again looking out across the city of Iben, but with a solid weapon in his hand this time, Erick spread his senses wide… And when that failed to produce good results, he simply looked out across the land.

Now... Erick wasn’t absolutely sure. But he was pretty sure that the building in the distance over there, on the other side of the city, looked important. It had towers and a walled yard and a half-shelled clock tower. Hard to tell exactly what it was, but it seemed important.

It looked like a campus. A university, perhaps. Maybe even an arcanaeum.

A student campus seemed like a great place to go for revolutionary thoughts. Maybe ‘the resistance’ was there. If not there, then somewhere nearby. And if not there, then in any of the other important-looking places all across the city.

There were mansions over there, sitting a bit above the water line and looking like they had survived the worst of the shelling. A church to some forgotten god stood over there, with its broken spires and missing bells. Some sort of castle stood in the far distance, ringed in walls and only half visible; surely something important lay inside there. But that campus called to Erick, if, indeed, that’s what it was.

Erick hopped off the side of the watchtower, crashed into the roof, slid down the angle, and then launched himself across the road well before he reached the last moment, for he didn’t trust the edge of the roof of a war-torn building to remain solid. He easily made the five meter jump and landed in a controlled tumble on the apartment building across the way, his rod of the guardian still in his hand. He rose to his feet, just in time to intercept a gator-sized grey lizard that had darted up from the other side of the roof, its nose-light flickering soft white.

Erick was almost tempted to call it Rudolph, but he refrained.

Whip-crack went the rod of the guardian, heavy in Erick’s hand. The ball-end of the weapon smashed the roof gator’s skull and splattered brains out into the open air. The monster never had a chance.

MP up! +1 mana production per day!

“Well whadda ya know,” Erick said, winding up to strike the next roof gator that should show. “Random monsters might be worth 1 mana per day.”

Another roof gator slipped over the edge of the other side of the building, its eyes trained on Erick, its nose flickering with a white glow. All of its body except for its nose was barely visible in the night gloom all around, and it barely made a sound; nothing more than a slithering of scales and claws on stone.

It attacked. Erick countered.

The roof-dolph gator died.

MP up! +1 mana production per day!

Erick began hopping across roofs, killing everything that attacked him, keeping his mana senses opened the whole way, as he tried to find more challenges on his way to the university. Five roof gators and seven buildings later, Erick found a deep shadow in his senses, laying at the bottom of a blown-out business. He was one roof over from that location, and the place wasn’t exactly in his path, but he detoured anyway.

It was another eel-house.

Erick crashed down into the waters, slamming his rod right into the head of the largest eel. Water went everywhere and the largest eel slipped away, but it was mortally wounded. Three smaller eels, each of them still two meters long, tried to eat Erick.

They failed to do much besides cut into his clothes, for Erick knew how they fought now. His clothes were absolutely wrecked by the end of it, with his left pant leg barely hanging on around mid-thigh, so Erick grabbed the fabric and ripped the dangling pant leg away. To even himself out, he did the same to his other pant leg.

And then he dove into the waters, down into the basement. A chair blocked the way further down, having lodged itself in the middle of the stairwell, but Erick grabbed and pulled, and the chair came apart in his grip. Erick smiled underwater at that, and the taste of the murk all around wasn’t too unpleasant, for he was having fun. Erick rarely ever got a chance to use his strength, and there was something about the action of it all that felt nice.

Still holding his breath, Erick swam down into the basement and went right for the prize; a pale grey dot of magic laying among a bunch of chicken-egg-shaped eggs, all of them buried in the black muck upon the floor. Erick grabbed the meta-diamond and made his way back to the surface, all the while wondering what magic the metamond held inside, and if eels back on Earth laid eggs. Perhaps they did? He… Honestly did not know.

Most fish laid eggs, and eels were fish, so eels probably laid eggs back on Earth, too.

So his Intelligence was clearly fading a bit. Intelligence was just having access to memories, though. Erick wouldn’t lose himself by going into a mana void, but things would become simpler for him. Less distractions, probably.

He hoped there would be a way to fix that, too, through some buffing gems courtesy of the dungeon, or something similar. There was clearly buffing magic available, but Erick hadn’t seen any of it yet. Probably. This new gem in his hand probably was not an Intelligence buff spell.

Erick breached the surface and words appeared.

You have cleared the flooded house (Special)!

MP up! +100 mana production per day!

- -

Ashes Woodfield (9 saves remaining)

MP per day: 227

Meta-Irons: 400, 0 in storage

Meta-Diamonds: 1/10, 0 in storage

Bracelet of [Self Rejuvenation], 100/100

Rod of the Guardian (depleted), 300/300

Unused Meta-Diamonds: [Murky]

- -

“… What the fuck is a [Murky]?”

- - - -

“Look at this [Self Rejuvenation] weirdo!” George said with a bit of laughter. “He dives right into an eel house and then proceeds to kill them all with a mace! A mace! In the water. And now he’s playing with a metamond!”

On the other side of the viewing screen room, Quince sighed. “For the millionth time: you’re way too excited for this job, George. Take it down like… Four pegs.”

Ignoring his partner’s dour nature, George excitedly said, “Look at my screen, Quince!”

Quince looked over the screen. “… So what? He’s a high level adventurer and the Drain hasn’t gotten to him yet. Probably has good aura control and he obviously has a mana sense since he seems to be carving— crushing through the… eels...” Quince narrowed his eyes at the screen. “What’s that he got? A [Murky]? That thing is useless.” Quince narrowed his eyes at George. “What’s a [Murky] doing there?”

George rattled off, “It’s that thing I put in there for the eels to use to make more of them a year ago. Good growth environment.”

“I know that. But what’s it doing in the delve zone? None of those monsters are real. They don’t actually give birth. That’s the part I don’t understand.”

“That’s what I’ve been telling you, Quince! This guy is weird. The dungeon is spawning stuff for him that it shouldn’t normally spawn!”

Quince wasn’t convinced. “… We’ll look into it if it spawns something truly odd, but [Murky] is useless so I don’t care. We’ve got ten thousand delves to watch over and you’re spending too much time on that one.”

“Most people don’t get past floor 2, but this one is different.” George smiled as he said, “He’s going to make it all the way here.”

Quince scowled. “Do something useful and go get me a coffee. Sugar and cream.”

George got up from his chair. “If you add that much sugar and cream, is it even coffee anymore?”

“Yes it is, now go get me one.”

“Watch that guy, Quince!” George said, walking out of the room. “He’s gonna hit floor five in under a week!”

“Yeah yeah yeah…” Quince studied the screen, mumbling, “Maybe if he stops trying to play with [Murky] and goes kills some more fakes… Great aura control, though… Yeah.” Quince had to admit, “He’s gonna make it all the way here.”

- - - -

Playing around with his bracelet and with Healing Magic would have been a bad idea for too many reasons to list, so Erick had not done that.

But [Murky] wasn’t Healing Magic.

On the third, dry floor of the abandoned house, he tested out [Murky]. Mostly, he failed to do anything with it at all. He tried pushing the gem into his bracelet. He tried pushing the gem into his mace. Neither metiron would accept the metamond, and he didn’t get any dungeon messages asking if he wanted to join the items either.

So he asked the air, “Make [Murky] join to Rod of the Guardian.”

You cannot do that here.

… Well okay then.

The next thing to do was to try to activate [Murky] on its own, without a metiron interface.

Erick almost wanted to channel mana from his core into the thing, but normal people didn’t have cores, and therefore Erick would pretend to not have a core. People were probably watching him right now, so he wanted to play at being normal for a while longer.

He did manage to touch the metamond with his aura, though.

Suddenly, his body turned cold as dungeon mana flowed across his aura, into the gem.

… And then splashed away like so much broken mana. So that didn’t work, and now he was chilly again. At least it wasn’t a real sort of chill; it was more like an emotional feeling, than a sensation. A melancholy, like ‘Ashes’ in the [Witness] had described.

So Erick tried something else.

If a metiron was necessary to interface with a metamond...

Erick gripped his mace, and like he was perpetually ‘holding onto’ his bracelet, he interfaced with the rod, funneling a bit of his aura into the weapon. His aura wisped away once it broke contact with his skin, but since his mace was right there in his grip, his aura latched on. This was completely different from his attempt to directly interface with the [Murky].

Because his mace spilled forth iridescent white mana.

The color of that released mana was concerning, since it revealed his Benevolence coloring, but… Whatever.

Erick cut his aura, and the mace’s glow died down. He spoke out, “Status. Rod of the guardian.”

Rod of the Guardian (depleted), 294/300

So he had successfully tapped into the mana pool of the rod and released some mana, just like he figured. Why was the mana Benevolence-colored? Eh. That didn’t matter right now. What mattered was that Erick had access to some mana.

Erick held the [Murky] gem between his thumb and forefinger as he gripped the rod with the rest of his hand, holding the gem to the side of the rod. And then he used his aura again, but this time in a more controlled manner. White light burst forth from the rod, and Erick funneled that dungeon mana into the gem—

[Murky] promptly spurted black sludge everywhere and launched out of his grip.

Erick spent a moment just standing there on the third floor of the house, covered in what appeared to be dead plant matter and some mix of Elemental Shadow, Water, and Stone, that all began to fade away, leaving just muck behind. Maybe even some Elemental Ooze, if he wasn’t mistaken. The metamond [Murky], unlike the sludge it produced, rolled across the floor, fell off the edge of the broken half of the house, and plonked down into the waters below.

Erick dove back into the nasty water and retrieved the gem, while also washing off most of the gunk. Not all of it, though, this shit was sticky—

Which gave him an idea.

Maybe he could turn [Murky] into a touch-based spell that caused constriction on a target? Like with his [Tangled Bloody Ooze Bolt] spell? Could he even do that with an already-created metamond? Or would he have to make that spell himself, using one of the spell creation tomes that the Dungeon Guide Blacksmith had spoken of?

Either way, maybe he could slot that spell into the Rod of the Guardian, and make a real crowd control magical weapon. He could strike a target and wrap it in ooze! All of that seemed beyond him, for now, but it was a fun little goal. And hey! Maybe he’d run across a better magic to put into the rod of the guardian? Always possible.

He was headed toward a school, and he’d learn how to do that there, for sure. But for now—

Erick held up the barely-glowing [Murky] and asked the air, “Can I use my storage to store this?”

Storage unlocks at the completion of level 5.

Not right now, then.

Time to move on.

Erick put the gem into his pocket, hefted his mace, and made his way over to a crumbled wall. Soon, he was back on the rooftop, and facing the path ahead.

As he leapt across from rooftop to rooftop, occasionally killing roof-dolph gators, Erick wondered how much of this whole experience was being witnessed by the people in charge of the dungeon, and how many other people there were on floor one. Most people never made it past floor 2, according to everyone upstairs, so where was everyone else? Were there thousands of flooded Ibens layered upon each other, like in Ar’Cosmos, in Fairie? And observers watched each one?

Probably not too many observers, though. Quilatalap didn’t oversee all the people running through his dungeons all the time; he had, like, two or three people watching, and then again only if the dungeon core alerted them to a problem.

The dungeon core probably did most of the work around this place, too.

Erick probably wasn’t being watched all the time, but some of the time? Yes, some of the time, for sure. Maybe all of the time, actually, if Atunir told people to watch for him, but Blacksmith didn’t act like he was talking to the Apparent King, so if Atunir had told people about him, then she hadn’t spilled that secret to Blacksmith. Atunir wanted him to have the real experience of her Second Script, after all.

And he was having a pretty good time so far.

Erick murdered thirty seven more roof gators and cleared out one uneventful attic of spiders, netting him another +10 MP per day, all before he managed to make it anywhere near the university. A suspiciously-nice belt had been his reward for clearing out the spider horde hoard. The thing fit his rod of the guardian well, so he didn’t need to carry the rod in his hands at all times anymore. The rod held at his left side like one would sheath a sword, but it was clipped into his belt on a tension spring that could be unlatched for easy use.

So he was definitely being observed by someone. These drops were tailored for him.

… Hmm. His long sleeve shirt and pants had become a t-shirt and shorts somewhere in all that fighting, so maybe the dungeon would replace those, soon enough? That’d be neat.

All in all, Erick’s Status was looking rather healthy… Maybe? He wasn’t quite sure how to judge these things. He was certainly feeling great, even with all of his Veirdly Stats slowly fading, so there was no stopping this rod-wielding Wizard dragon ‘guardian’. Not yet, anyway.

Not until the monsters got a lot bigger.

This was kinda fun.

Erick smiled as he imagined Jane doing stuff like this all the time—

Ohh! Maybe Jane had delved the Gem Dungeon before! Maybe maybe! He wouldn’t put it past her. Jane had visited all of these Grand Dungeons, and a lot more besides. Erick chuckled to himself as he imagined having that fun conversation with her in a few days.

He was almost at the university’s gates.

- -

Ashes Woodfield (9 saves remaining)

MP per day: 265

Meta-Irons: 400, 0 in storage

Meta-Diamonds: 1/10, 0 in storage

Bracelet of [Self Rejuvenation], 99/100

Rod of the Guardian (depleted), 274/300

Unused Meta-Diamonds: [Murky]

- -