I Swear I'm Not A Dark Lord!

The Cleansing

With the crab gone, they could enter the lava tubes again without worrying so much about them collapsing. They didn't have to travel far to find the corruption; it was only a few minutes' journey into the mountain before the walls grew warm and sweated an ashy, greasy substance. The dense magic was unmaking the stone, turning it into something more basic than basaltic rock.

A voice spoke through the tunnels, echoing from the deepest layers of the mountain.

"I used to live among the living things. So pretty in my orange and yellow stripes. I used to tell them all, 'Believe in me,' at gatherings of spirits great and small. Unlike those lesser greats, I'll never fall. My veins have always burned with the creative fire of older, wiser gods who made our gods."

Taylor had heard enough. As soon as he found an intersection of tunnels, he opened his bag and removed a large mat with a purification circle bigger than the one he'd given Rasmusen. Instead of a mostly horizontal cone of effect, it was designed to work in three dimensions.

"Wen-Uroda," wept Saria. "Hang on a little longer. We're coming for you."

Wen-Uroda was the fire spirit native to the volcano, an embodiment of the mountain. When a vent opened inside her land, she crossed into the mortal realm to close it. Somehow, she was overcome with corruption and had been trapped for fifty years. Her long imprisonment had not been good for her mind. There was a good chance they'd have to fight her.

Purifying so much corrupted rock was more than Taylor could manage under his own power, so he used mana crystals to power his purification circle. Several great spirits had donated handsomely for the cause, enough to purify the mountain.

Section by section, Taylor advanced into the tunnels with the Praxium Brigade guarding him against monsters. There were fewer of them now, but they became larger and stranger: iron centipedes; twelve-legged spiders made of silica; moaning, insubstantial wisps of despair; living blobs of basaltic lava that he would have called lava slimes, if Aarden had slimes. All together, they nearly made up for the incident with the crab.

Sadly, none of the mana beasts left useful parts behind when they died. However, most of them dropped a high-quality mana stone. These were collected into a loot bag that Taylor would later ferry into Twilight. Just as summoned spirits couldn't die, they also couldn't take anything with them when they returned home. Transporting goods between the two worlds required someone who could pass between them. Taylor was the only mortal that he knew of who could perform that particular trick, but some talented spirits could, too.

The mountain was larger on the inside than it was on the outside, surprising no one. In Aarden, they called places like this a dungeon. Mana beasts spawned from the core but tended to stay within the corrupted zone. If the dungeon got crowded enough, the mana beasts could stampede, destroying everything in their path. The main reason dungeons hadn't destroyed civilization yet was that the beasts they spawned couldn't roam far from home. They were strongest on corrupted ground and became weaker the longer they were away from it.

The voice was always whispering, often too low to be understood. Sometimes, it rose into clarity. " Is that a mortal foot upon my floor? Does mortal breath mingle with my exhalations, poisons of the deep that make men sleep? Shall I puff him out with pillowed stone, and burn him darkly down to buried bone? Breath to fire, flesh to ash, bone to stone, soul to Goddess Death in her silent home."

Each section took time to purify, so it took them nearly three days to reach the core. They noticed early on that the process seemed to be calming Wen-Uroda. Instead of talking to herself constantly, she slept more and more. Taylor decided to avoid going straight to the core and purify as much of the mountain as they could beforehand. He wanted to avoid a fight against the great spirit, both because he didn't want to die and because he didn't want to kill her. Wen-Uroda hadn't been summoned to close the vent, but had crossed over through a gate of her own accord. If Taylor got into a fight with her and killed her, she would die.

To conserve his mana and rest his guards, Taylor disbanded a third of the army in shifts. While the circle did its job, Taylor rested, ate food from his stachel, and penciled new designs into his notebook. He took samples from rocks and lava tubes and analyzed them with his new Alchemy system. The lava here was less than fifty percent silica, with metal oxides making up most of the rest. If he wanted to mine iron or some other metal, there were plenty of richer ore deposits in the world. But if he could harness the vent while tapping the lava chamber in a safe, controlled way, he could use Alchemy to handle most of the process and generate a constant stream of refined metals. The main problem was what to do with the half that was silicate.

With a few minor inputs, he could make high-quality soda-lime glass, either in panes or as containers. He knew how to color glass in ways that hadn't yet been discovered in Aarden, so he could produce luxury glassware. This world hadn't thought of stained glass windows yet. Instead, they used paint to decorate their windows. Taylor wondered if he could make a market with a new idea.

On the other hand, if he could fuse the "waste" silica into stackable blocks, he could then use them as a building material. Glass had a very high compressive strength, but it wasn't ideal for building large structures.

"What's this?" Saria sat on the hard floor next to him and leafed through his discarded drawings.

"Just random ideas."

"You want to build a tower made of glass on top of a volcano, with a secret lair underneath it?"

"The glass is left over from refining metals in the lava. You have to do something with it, or it all piles up."

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Jalil looked over her shoulder. "Is he daydreaming Dark Lord stuff again?"

"Take a look." Saria handed him two of the drawings.

Tanya snatched up a discarded sheet. "Secret volcano lair! Very Dark Lord. I love it!"

"Come on!" Taylor pleaded. "It's a bright and shining tower of light!"

"On a volcano," added Jalil, "where a wizard lives on top of a dungeon, and transforms lava into gold through an unknown branch of magic."

"I'm not a Dark Lord," complained Taylor. "I just like to try interesting things."

The core was hard to miss, given there were multiple tunnels leading to a solid mass of mana crystal. It wasn't one crystal but many, long and hexagonal, packed together. Many of them were several inches thick and over two feet long. Most mana crystals were clear, with a play of colors along the surface. Sometimes they skewed heavily toward a particular type of mana and took on the associated colors. Corrupted crystals had a color that mortal eyes couldn't see, which translated to black.

Then, there was the voice. "It isn't real it isn't real it isn't real it isn't real it isn't real it isn't real it isn't real it isn't real it isn't real it isn't real it isn't real it isn't real it isn't real it isn't real it isn't real"

The first thing Taylor did, even before he set up his purification circle, was use a mana scope on the room. It looked like a wooden lantern, with sides that weren't quite square and lenses on two sides. He pointed the intake lens at the mass of crystal and aimed the other lens at the cavern wall. Saria held a white piece of paper against the wall to catch the projected image, while Taylor fiddled with the focus ring to sharpen the image.

The result was a graph of mana attribute versus intensity. There were calibration issues with the scope, quite a few of them in fact, but it was more accurate than Taylor's own mana sensing abilities. In particular, he had a hard time sensing anything at the far left-hand side of the graph, where corrupted mana lay. From that end point, the spectrum moved to mana-beast mana, then spirit mana, taming, life, earth, water, air, and then through several types of energy ending with divine magic on the right side. Taylor wasn't entirely sure if that was the whole spectrum or if there were more attributes lurking beyond the ends of his scale.

While the Army of Lighness worked the mana scope and traced the graph for his records, Taylor set up the purification circle and got it started. Dogeneh left to patrol the area, leaving a dozen spirits to defend Taylor in case of a monster spawn. It didn't seem likely they would get any new monsters because the corrupted mana dissipated into the purified areas of the mountain. Even Taylor could sense its movement. By purifying so much of the mountain, they were effectively draining mana from the dungeon core.

Once the circle was working, Taylor's next job was procuring more uncorrupted crystal. He started by carving away good crystals from the surface of the core and put them in a pile. The job had to be done carefully, because mana crystal didn't carve easily: it was prone to spalling microscopic shards that were toxic if inhaled. He donned special gloves, safety goggles, and a mask before cutting away twenty pounds of the good crystal. It was enough to keep the circle fed for a while.

There was a difference in scale between purifying something affected by corruption, versus purifying a concentrated shard of corruption mana. The core's volume was relatively small, but purifying it cost more than the rest of the mountain.

Progress was slow at first. Taylor saw he could use that time to make a second circle to speed up progress, or he could attempt something radically new. It would come as no surprise to anyone who knew him which path he chose. Starting with tiny crystals of corrupted mana, he began to experiment.

They cut away the layers of crystal from the core as it purified. On the second day, they uncovered an appendage, a bright yellow hand with fingers long enough to encircle a man's head, covered in amphibious skin. It shivered and flexed, then struggled to break free. Shards of toxic corruption broke free of the core and scattered everywhere. A fine dust of corruption filled the air, then quickly purified inside the circle's effect. If Taylor hadn't been standing inside the cone of purification … it was better not to think about it.

Saria rushed forward and touched the hand. "Wen-Uroda, my old friend. Go back to sleep. You'll be free soon." She looked to Taylor. "She's afraid. She can't tell where she ends and the dungeon begins, so this is like losing a part of herself."

"Do you want us to stop or slow down?"

"No." Saria put her cheek against the sulphur-yellow skin. "I'll stay with her. Keep working."

Wen-Uroda stirred from time to time, but was generally quiet after that. Saria stayed with her, connected mind-to-mind, and kept her calm.

On the third day of processing the core, Taylor had a breakthrough. He discovered he could coax the corrupted crystals to purify themselves by injecting a different attribute of mana that was tuned to resonate with the mana inside the crystal. Crystalized mana was so dense that the effect spread rapidly, and the entire crystal was soon converted to the new attribute. All it required was a potent source of carefully tuned mana.

By the end of the third day, Taylor had made several devices to do the job, shaped like wands topped with flat, red, cushion-cut gemstones at one end. The user touched the gem to a corrupted mana crystal, and the whole piece cleared in a few minutes. Not only was the process fast, but it was efficient. Instead of spending a third of their recovered crystal to power the purification circle, they only had to spend a tenth of it on the new devices.

Progress was impressive from that point onward. Spirits did the purifying while Taylor did most of the cutting. Premi, Jalil, and Tanya inspected the finished crystals to ensure they were thoroughly clean. The stack of recovered mana crystal grew, while Wen-Uroda emerged inch by inch.

The great spirit of Mount Uroda was a yellow salamander with orange stripes, about fifteen feet long (not counting her tail), and hot to the touch. Once Wen-Uroda was entirely free of the crystal, Saria sent everyone out of the core chamber. She didn't know what would happen when the spirit woke up. Taylor, along with everyone else, made the long trek to the outside. It was dark when he emerged. Instead of traveling to the camp at the rally point, he found the flattest spot he could, lay out his bedroll, and fell asleep on the mountainside.

The notifications woke him just after dawn:

[Purify the Great Spirit Wen-Uroda]: The quest you assigned has been completed. You receive minor rewards x 106.
Quest: [Seal the Uroda Vent]: Seal the vent to earn minor class rewards. Do you accept?

Judging from the cheering all around him, the Praxium Brigade was happy with their experience rewards. Taylor declined the offered quest and tried to go back to sleep.

Quest: [Control the Uroda Vent]: Regulate the mana vent to ensure the safety of Wen-Uroda and the surrounding area. Do you accept?

That was more like it. He accepted the revised quest to manage the vent and rolled over. He would be stuck there for a few more days, clearing out the rest of the mana crystals and setting up his control mechanisms. He needed to catch his sleep while he could.