Saga of the Soul Dungeon

This… this is just too much to take in all at once.

Ugh, I almost died… again.

What am I even supposed to think, do… about all of this?

There was comfort, knowing that the soul was real. I died, and then… I had still existed. I even had a chance to ghoulishly reflect on my own corpse, before I was yanked away and merged with the core here. Yeah, and now it looks like I'll really need to deal with Exsan, too. Honestly, I still had no idea what the real afterlife was supposed to be like. Assuming this isn't it, anyway. How strange would the universe be if this was perfectly normal experience?

My mind went blank for a minute.

Yeah, I am not even sure what kind of cosmology I would need to imagine to make that work.

It was possible, maybe, that everyone goes through something like this. Everyone started out their first life then it just... never ended. They would be reborn and then just continue on, over and over again.

Maybe not.

Why am I thinking about this again? Oh right, I nearly died again. Funny how that is a little distracting. I now had an answer for my old philosophy professor about how to get me interested in philosophical arguments. All I needed was a near death experience.

That and have other major philosophic questions I want to avoid. Like, what the hell does it mean that I am a twin soul with Exsan? My other half had just been impulses, but it had half the mana now. And I was going to need some of that mana to level up.

Well, time to actually start cataloging changes. My crystal, my core, had gone through a drastic change. First was the most obvious. I was larger. Not just a little larger, either. I was… well it was hard to tell exactly. Five or six feet tall I'd guess? Most likely, this change was simply from forming the dungeon.

The other obvious changes were more ominous. I was a different shape and color, ah... colors. I looked a lot more like a natural crystal now. A diamond shape where the bottom end elongated into a longer, narrower, point. Much of it looked perfectly natural, but other parts had a glassy sheen, with a curved rippling smoothness, that I had seen before on pieces of obsidian. It was the look of a crystal that had sheared under pressure. That was almost certainly a sign of the extreme damage I had taken.

Different bands of color also now bled into each other. A deep ruby red at the top, just like I had been before I merged with Exsan. That transitioned to the more familiar purple I had been until recently. And finally, that became an obsidian black like the original dungeon core.

Exsan's core.

Unfortunately, I suspected that this was a very clear representation that my core was no longer a single integrated whole. As if my status and the system messages wasn't a large enough clue already.

Oh, yeah, couldn't forget that I was hanging in midair too. Wonder how that works?

As I was musing a different thought came into my mind.

'I? What? Who?'

Well this feels familiar. Looks like I can have deja-vu as a disembodied crystal. Yay for knowledge, perhaps I should test my slow slap feature, too. Those had not been my thoughts. Nor could I call them thoughts exactly, either. I was feeling… concepts. Oh, and on a positive note, I was not feeling any impulses or instincts.

This was not a hidden instinct manifesting through me. There was clear feeling of connection, but it was a connection. A knowledge that it was something other.

I felt at the shape of the connection. I think… I think I can send a thought down this.

'Exsan?'

There was no response. I tried to send feelings, proto-words like had been sent to me. There was still no response.

Right, okay. So that feeling in my head has become a little more… individualistic. That's not a problem, right? I laughed to myself, and if my internal laughter started to sound a little hysterical, that was just between me and the voices in my head. Just a bit. I mean, I was just sharing… everything, with a dungeon that had seemed psychopathic. What could possibly go wrong?

Maybe those messages had a point about a therapist.

I forced myself to calm down. Fake breath out, fake breath in. Not like I can actually do anything about this, right? Even if this was the point where I would be yelling at a horror movie that the protagonist was an idiot. I… just need to do what I can. For now, I was going to act like nothing was wrong. I would deal with Exsan if he became an issue. Or if I actually found a method to influence the situation.

Okay, well, time to grasp the situation.

First, the positive, I saved someone's life. Even if I got a reward that practically told me I had been responsible in the first place. Not that I didn't already think so. The timing was too suspicious. Eh… it's possible I got that reward simply because I felt responsible. I'm not sure who I'm trying to fool, because it definitely isn't myself. Yep, definitely not doing that, nope.

Regardless, I saved someone. And even gained some nice titles in the process. To be fair, with the memories of that pain… I'm not sure I could save them again... Not knowing what it would cost. There was a part of me that ached at the thought. Father would have, even with the pain.

It was done though, and I would have a much easier job healing people in the future due to my new title.

Thinking of, the title about the surface… Honestly that sucks. I didn't need sunlight, air, or the normal requirements of a human, but I did crave light. I wanted to experience more in the open air. I had imagined dungeon sections with a vast forest filled with rivers and meadows. I had specifically headed more toward the surface in the sewers so that I could get the materials to build that type of environment. Well… it said a tiny distance in the title. Maybe it won't be a big deal. A tiny distance, to a dungeon, could be a hundred feet. I wouldn't have the tallest trees at that height, but it would be enough to have a forest. Sadly it could just as easily be an inch though.

Right, getting ahead of myself again:

Healed. Check.

Not in any danger that I can sense. Check.

Okay, going to stop for a moment and actually look at where I am.

I had a few questions after all. Like where the hell I was.

I calmed myself and opened myself to my senses.

They were much vaster than they had been before. The area of the dungeon was… large. Much greater than everything I had held before. It was more than my mind could hold, all at the same time.

Probably why it was why it was so easy to tune it all out.

Well, start with the center.

The center was me. My core floated in the air, where all the countless threads of my aura converged. That had changed too. It had a greater density of threads, and the main threads were stronger, thicker. Within my aura sight, the world almost seemed clogged with a fog of my own aura. It was dense and omnipresent, especially around me.

Below me was water. It was deep, dark, and slowly flowing downwards into the earth. Water was everywhere, and as my senses continued to expand outward I could feel it. Mostly it traveled in caverns that same water had carved over the ages, but in other places it squeezed through porous layers of stone until hitting impenetrable rock and clay. Then it pooled or seeped out elsewhere. Water dripped off stalactites. All through my aura the flow of water was present. It dribbled here; a stream flowed there; waterfalls fell; and ancient slow rivers glided. It carved away at the stone, dissolving it with endless patience. Elsewhere it deposited what it had stolen, layer upon layer, age by age, and formed new stone with the immeasurably slow construction of nature.

And what nature had not given through water, was given by fire.

Far beneath, at the edge of where I could reach, water bubbled up due to immense heat and pressure. A few places, it even reached the rest of the main cave systems, forming hot springs, steam vents, or geysers of water.

Hmm. Should I still call them geysers if they expel underground? Wonder if there is a specific term for that?

Constantly burbling mud formed where the water mixed with sediment. Other places, there was no water at all. There, super-heated gas formed sulfurous yellow fumaroles.

Above me, there was another obvious clue to the nature of the place I now occupied. The natural layers of stone changed into another type: basalt and obsidian. Exactly how much there was, I couldn't say, since my aura reached its edge, but they were several hundred feet deep, at least. There was tension, along with changes in structure, indicating different layers deposited at different times, as well as lava tubes and various minerals.

No real signs of weathering between layers though. Means they were all deposited fairly quickly.

I was near a volcano. And the various geologic activity pointed to it being at least semi-active. For now, this seemed to be a good thing. Everywhere, emerging with the water and air that was forced up from far below, came mana. Mana was everywhere; it was just part of the environment, but the water and gas emerged practically glowing with it.

All of this was wonderful to me. It was beauty, nature, and power, but the life was what really mattered. Everywhere that I looked I could find life. Life in the water, life on the stone, and tons of it swarming around the rich nutrients brought by the geothermal areas. Huh, looks like my dungeon has extremophiles.

I wasn't sure how to start a dungeon properly, but this looked like a perfect place to start one.