The Infinity Dungeon [LitRPG]

Michael hauled the gathered material back to Icarus' planet. It was a daunting task, with little scraps of ore constantly escaping his mental grasp as he struggled to will the bigger pieces to move into a messy heap that followed behind him as he flew through the empty space. He powered through the pain and the discomfort, not obsessing over the little losses but trying to keep the cargo as compact as possible to avoid material falling through the cracks of his mental net and being left behind.

He might not have his stats anymore, but his Resilience had once been his highest stat for a reason. Magic had only amplified what was already there, which was a stubbornness to single-mindedly focus on magic that most people lacked.

Michael kept the objective at the forefront of his mind, and before he knew it, he was at his destination. Only when he stopped did he realize what a titanic effort he had made, and it was only the beginning. In the real world, sweat dotted his forehead and little droplets of blood were flowing down his nose. The muted sensations made their way to him, but he didn't focus on them.

He didn't stop. He directed the ores and debris into Icarus' orbit. With the space utterly empty, they moved without friction, creating a cloud that slowly spread itself out into a planetary ring.

"A good temporary solution," Icarus said. "Do you know how to build the collector already?"

Michael did. Even though this was his Inner Space and things could take any form he wanted, he knew that in order to make them work he would have to believe in their form and function. Or rather, he was pretty sure he knew. Nobody had actually explained the rules of this place to him.

Still, it made sense to work with a form he was familiar with.

With a flick of his fingers, and a flex of his will, Michael summoned the ore. Extracted straight from the soft gravel of the asteroid, it was pure and easy to work with, unlike other debris and raw ore mixed with stone he had also grabbed.

Except, as piles of iron, copper, gold, platinum, and titanium floated towards him like a swarm of glittery particles in many colors, he realized a problem. He had no idea what materials went into making a solar array, nor how it was actually built.

Intention might be all he needed, but there was no intention without knowing what one was doing.

"Good thing you have a cheat code, don't you?" Icarus told him, also somehow managing to send the idea of a smirk through verbal communication.

"You?"

"Me. Not only do I possess the total sum of knowledge of the human race, but I also happen to be a very advanced artificial intelligence capable of utilizing all of that knowledge, all at once." the AI explained, "And I can also synthesize new knowledge. Bet your run-of-the-mill AI can't do that."

"That's right it can't. You are a hell of a cheat!" Michael cried out, "Can you project a schematic?"

"Woah there, slow down." Icarus chuckled, "I might have grandstanded a bit too much. I have all I advertised, but I'm a little low on processing power. Let's take it a step at a time, shall we? Plus, this is your space and I have no senses. Give me a picture of what you want to make."

Michael focused on an empty spot of space. He pictured the solar collector, with arrays spread wide around a central support structure. Since this was the first iteration of the design, he imagined it rather bulky, purposefully leaving room for improvement. It came with a sturdy cubical body and four solar panels like wings at its sides.

"You done? Send the thought to me."

Sending thoughts over was more intuitive than Michael would have feared. After a minute, he got a thought back from the AI, an improved schematic based on his initial design that entered his mind and superimposed itself in his vision. It was a blue outline, like a hologram, that he could manipulate and divide into sections and parts so that he could build it with ease.

It also came with estimated material costs.

Michael took a deep breath. "Huh, there's air here."

"Only because you conceptualized it by breathing."

"Right," he said, "here goes nothing."

Michael selected the first step of the schematic: the collector's central frame and the support beams for the solar arrays attached to it. The rest of the projection dimmed, leaving a neat interface he could work with and adjusting the material cost to cover the single step in the build.

"Feels like playing a strategy game," he said while directing the materials towards the blue outline.

He had no idea what he was going to do with the materials once he got them all in place, but soon he realized that he needn't have worried. The stream of ores, mostly iron and carbon and some other trace elements, entered the hologram. They sunk into it, and slowly the blue lines began to fill in, becoming real, taking the shiny color of the space alloy Icarus had come up with. When the last of the ores sunk in the almost-full hologram, the whole frame snapped into place, even the filled parts suddenly becoming much more real, acquiring actual substance with the magical equivalent of a pop.

Looking at the partially completed collector, Michael got the sensation that there were still two more stages to go. He mentally selected the second step in the schematic, and the holographic outline of the collector's main body appeared. The same process followed, the stream of ore slowly turning into circuits, accumulators, condensers, printed boards, and cables. Then, the walls appeared and sealed all the inner workings of the collector in a thin layer of space steel.

Already, Michael could feel the mental fatigue building up. Manipulating matter, building things in his Inner Space, and directing all the energies was leaving him winded, stretching his magical muscle that had atrophied in the last few weeks. Not only that, but it was as if only a part of what he had been doing with his old magic applied to the new system he was building, while other things had to be trained and figured out from scratch.

He psyched himself up. "Onto the last step, come on."

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Ores flew, slowly filling up the hexagonal patterns of the solar array.

The magical pop at the end of the process was extremely satisfying. Along with it came the rush of energy and magic, like water in a desert, slowly nourishing Michael's dry soul.

"Curious," Icarus's voice echoed distantly.

"What is?"

"The detector is online, but I'm only detecting–"

There was a flash, and then the flow of energy ceased. The backlash had Michael reeling in pain, suddenly thrust back to the real world with his nose bleeding freely and shivers of cold sweat.

He blinked the spots from his eyes, and re-entered the Inner Space. The collector was no more. There were still flames licking at the debris of the red-hot circuits, while the tattered remains of the solar arrays spun wildly.

Seizing control of them, he commanded them all to stop. This drained the last of the energy he had gathered, forcing him to dip into whatever mental and magical resource he had been using and overusing while gathering and moving the ores and building the collector in the first place.

A roaring headache told him that he didn't have much gas left in the tank.

All the while, Icarus had been muttering something to himself. His monologue reached a conclusion as Michael massaged his temples, moments before he decided to go to the real world to rest.

"Well, of course it exploded. Makes a whole lot of sense now that I look at it with my 20/20 hindsight."

Michael grumbled. He wasn't sure he liked this version of his AI. "Care to explain?"

"Sure. You built a collector, but where did all the energy go?"

"To my… soul? Or something?"

He got the impression that Icarus was shaking his head. "Yeah, nah, man. This is your Inner Space, right? This is it, as far as your personal magic is involved. There's no other place, no other metaphysical location magic can be sent to. Anything that there is, is here. The magic the collector was gathering was going nowhere because it had nowhere to go. It overloaded the condensers and exploded."

"Are you saying I should build what, a battery?"

"That's what I'm saying. This is all uncharted territory, you're building your very own magic system, but it would fit the theme."

Michael hummed, "And magic seems to be much more holistic than we initially thought. If it fits the theme, and I somehow make it work, then it will work."

"It will work for you, at least, which is all we can ask for right now."

Together, Michael and Icarus spent a good hour designing a battery and a magic transmission system. This gave Michael some time to rest his magical muscles, the headache receding almost completely.

Then it was time to build. The battery was first, a set of four cylinders held together by what from a distance looked like a black zip tie. There was a circular hole at the four sides of the structure, a key component.

After tweaking the collector's blueprint with Icarus, Michael started the building process. It expended the last of the easily processable ore and strained him close to his limit again, but he managed to grit through the pain and headache and see the build to its completion.

It looked much like it did before, except its main body. Now the smooth metal of four of the side panels featured a single black spike each. One of them was aimed at the hole in the battery pack, and as the solar array gathered the energy from the star, the spike began to light up red.

The energy buildup reached its apex in less than a second, and a laser shot out, aimed at the battery pack.

Michael felt the flow of energy. Before, it had been a trickle, now it was a flood.

"How much do you think you got?" asked the AI.

"At least one Copper per second."

"Talk about a flood."

"You try being powerless for a month then tell me if a Copper doesn't feel nice."

"Need I remind you that I am, in fact, powerless right now? My planet does not generate magic internally and its surface fractals absorb all the magical radiation."

"To do what?"

"Hell if I know. I don't get any of it, though."

With the last of his willpower, Michael made a small holographic spike appear on top of the battery pack, aimed at the planet. While not in Icarus' orbit—which was being used as a storage for all the materials in large concentric rings—they were close enough to shoot a laser at it.

"Feels good," Icarus said as Michael immediately felt his own magic being drained a little. "Efficiency loss is 23% at this distance. Also, do you see it?"

"See what?" Michael squinted. Icarus was catching the laser in a hole of his own, making sure the light didn't reach the surface and its fractals. The laser dispersion was manageable, but they were rather close and it was only bound to get worse as they got further out in the Inner Space.

"The laser. Its point of origin is static, right?"

Michael checked. The solar collector was static relative to the star. He didn't know why or how he knew, but he did. "No translation in space, nor rotation."

"And look where the laser hits."

The hole. The laser hit Icarus right in the middle of the small hole he had dug in the surface of its planetary body, and the beam wasn't moving. "Everything is static unless we make it move."

Indeed, the only things moving were Icarus' rings because when Michael built them he was under the assumption that they needed to move or their orbit would decay.

"Good to know," Icarus said, "We can make use of it. Now, let's focus on the energy. Do you not feel anything strange?"

"Shit," Michael said. "It's pure mana. Where's all the rest of the stuff?"

"How long did Infy say the resonance pill is going to last?"

"She said it would last me the whole day. It's currently…" he briefly opened his eyes to the real world. "Ah. It's morning. The day has long passed. Fuck. We wasted it."

"I wouldn't say we wasted it. We accomplished a lot. You have magic now!"

Michael narrowed his eyes, not convinced. Icarus suggested he try something, just a little test, so he flew back to the asteroid where he had gathered the first round of materials.

"What now?"

"Try to gather more."

Michael did. He swept the asteroid again, using the trickle of magic he could command to help him in the process. Even with it, though, it felt harder than ever before.

"It's gotta be the fatigue."

"Nope," the AI said. "I mean, yeah, but you have rested enough to lift at least some ores. You barely got any, and you're using magic to help you! This means that without the resonance pill you would have never, not in a million years, have been able to kickstart your magic. You would have had to extract the ores by hand, then you would have had to carry them over here, and I don't even want to imagine what strange convoluted ways you would have had to come up with to build the collectors. Now you have magic and you can keep cheating, but before you had none. Maybe without the pill, the Inner Space would have simply continued to be an empty space with a star at its center and some asteroids you couldn't access."

Michael hummed. With the rush of magic fading, the reality of the situation was settling in. "Even with all this, it feels like I'm back to having nothing. It took a whole day to build capacity for a Copper a day. I used to command Silvers worth of magic! I don't even know where the rest of the energies are hiding, and Infy even said I should hurry and bring resonance to the dantians or… or… something."

"Deep breaths, Michael."

A rumble shook the outside world, forcing Michael out of his Inner Space. A voice boomed through the whole of Sitea, rattling windows and making even the shield ripple.

"Well, well, well. Looks like the uninvited guest has shown himself. I can feel your magic, visitor! Let me be a good host and welcome you to Sitea, and your death!"

Michael eyed the elevator, then swept his gaze across the city. He grabbed the Force Lance, its eerie weight comforting as it wrapped itself around his arm.

"Deep breaths indeed," he muttered. "But now I can fight back."