The Infinity Dungeon [LitRPG]

The door was made of translucent bio-material, cold but soft to the touch and with a texture like slightly glossy opaque glass. It was dark green instead of brown, with a seam in the middle that divided it into two halves.

The seam was covered in opaque growth, like a scab over a wound. Tracing its lines, Michael had the sensation that this door had been sealed shut from the other side, with biological matter acting in the same way metal would when welding a normal door shut. It was airtight and quite resistant.

Michael tried to cut through it with a claw made of magic, sending sparks of pure mana fluttering about the room. Some of them were absorbed by dark leaves and thick vines, making him shiver while thinking of all the mutations such magic might produce. Meanwhile, the door absorbed and scattered the magic like electricity, sapping Michael's battery packs and diminishing the cutting effect to almost zero.

After he retracted the claw, his batteries almost empty, all he had managed to achieve was a tiny hole. Light coming from the outside scattered through the hole into a beam that illuminated a part of the pod room, drawing the vegetation to it like starved zombies towards living flesh and sending a shiver up Michael's spine. He did not want to spend one more minute in this room.

The light beam suddenly blinked. Michael had been resting, waiting for his batteries to recharge, but the disappearance and reappearance of the light beam jolted him to full alertness.

Squinting, he tried to peer through the hole. There were shapes moving on the other side!

"I can't make them out very well," the light hurt his eye, "Icarus, can you enhance?"

"What am I, Star Trek computer?"

"Can you or not?"

The AI grumbled, "I will need some more mana to do it."

Michael authorized the AI to take what he needed, and the blurry shapes became clearer.

"Humanoid," he said. "Humans? People?"

He had to fight the urge to bang against the door and scream so that they would notice him. The last thing he wanted was to find out that they were hostile, when his only weapon would bring down the whole building and him with it.

But then again, what could he do? If he kept cutting through the door, they might see that as a sign of aggression and attack anyway.

In the end, he waited for his magic to recharge and decided to go with the first option.

"Hey!" he yelled as he banged his hands against the door. "Hey! Open the door!"

Peering through the hole, he saw more shapes move in the distance. He thought they were coming closer, but then they disappeared from the field of view.

"Shit. Hey!" he used magic to enhance his voice. Another one of the parlor tricks he could do with his meager power. "Over here! Behind the door!"

He heard some shuffling, then the light blinked several times as it was interrupted by more and more shapes.

"Is someone on the other side?" he heard as more shapes moved in and out of his limited view.

"Yes!" he screamed, "I'm stuck here! Can you open the door?"

"Did you hear that?" asked someone on the other side, "did another pod open?"

"They are all empty," a second voice replied. "It might be an Abomination. We have to call the Tree-Alfyr. He will know what to do."

"Wait!" Michael banged his fists against the door, "don't leave! I'm no abomination."

Behind him, the ceiling had sagged and filled with liquid, and it was close to bursting.

"Please. The wall is coming down. I don't want to drown in rotting shit, for fuck's sake!"

"It's speaking," said the voice, "Abominations don't speak. Open the door, I'll call the Tree-Alfyr."

There was some more shuffling, then the door began to glow with a deep green light. The seam where the two parts had been fused disintegrated, and the door hissed open. The motion was clunky, with the right section getting stuck into the wall, but Michael did not have time to gather his wits when slender arms pulled him to the other side.

The light was bright and green, and it smelled like forest and flowers.

The door snapped shut behind him. Someone cursed, pulled the stuck section free and resealed the seam. Then the hands holding Michael receded, and the two shapes took several steps back.

He struggled to his feet, blinking several times to clear the tears from his eyes. Three people were standing in a circle around him, several paces of free space between them and him. The rest of the room was like a sort of treehouse, full of plants and green, and several tall thin humanoids were watching from behind strange wooden contraptions.

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"It's him. He just came out of the pod room."

Michael's head snapped to the right, where one of the slender humanoids was leading the way for an old, wrinkled man using a wooden staff tipped with green to walk.

Except… only now did Michael notice the long, pointed ears at the sides of their heads.

Elves.

"You are not a Son of the Forest," said the old elf. "Nor a son of the Seedship."

His voice was a weak rasp and a wheeze. "Your biology is wrong. Were you born of mutation brought by Corruption? An intelligent Abomination?"

The word sent a ripple of fear through the younger elves, who all took another step back and looked between Michael and the old elf with fright in their eyes.

"No," said Michael softly. "I am a human. A Son of Man."

"A human…" the old elf rolled the word in his mouth, tasting it, revealing rows upon rows of sharp teeth like those of a shark.

A predator species, then.

"Are you the Tree-Alfyr?"

"That is me," said the elf. He leaned on his staff, pointing to the door behind Michael. "They say you said something is happening on the other side?"

"Yes," nodded Michael, "the ceiling is coming down, foul rotting fluid pooling up. It's going to burst soon."

The Tree-Alfyr snapped to two of the elves still standing in a stunned circle around Michael. "You! Reinforce the wall!"

"But it will hasten the corruption!"

"So what? If what the human says is true, the wave of rot will do much worse to our structural integrity."

"As you order," they said in unison, nodding their heads. The wall began to glow, wood sprouting and leaves growing in haste, joining together and weaving themselves up in a tight lattice.

Amidst the green, however, dark veins spread from the depths of the wall. It was as if the other room's wrongness was spreading to this one, contaminating the new growth, spreading filthy miasma that stank with the smell of death.

"This room will have to be evacuated and sealed," said the Tree-Alfyr.

"At once."

The elves filed out and became a frenzy of activity, preparing to cut the room off from the rest of the structure. The Tree-Alfyr beckoned Michael to follow him, and the two left the now empty room behind.

"So, human. I have many questions. But as you can see, I have little strength to tend to the needs of the Seedship myself, and many problems to solve. I fear I will not be able to dedicate much time to you."

"Am I a prisoner?" asked Michael, concerned.

The Tree-Alfyr stopped, sized him up and down, and laughed. He made a motion with his hand, asking Michael to follow him into the corridor outside the room. Pointing his staff at a leafy wall, the gem at its tip glowed bright. A wave of magic spread through the broad leaves, the dew on their surface spreading to the whole leaf and stem and turning them transparent.

Michael gasped.

"We are all prisoners here. Why bother keeping you confined? What damage can you cause us that the rot is not already doing a thousand times worse? Gaze outside. If you fire your technological weapon, you doom us all and yourself with us. I remember a tale about humans, and mutually assured destruction. It did not deter them, will it deter you?"

Michael did not answer. He was too busy gawking at the outside.

The gigantic wall-turned-window showed the endless expanse of space. Not the night sky, like he had previously assumed, but deep space—empty and terrifying and vast. It did not look like his Inner Space. There was no reassurance of a symbolic place, knowing that it was his and it was not out to get him.

Real space was empty and primal and dangerous. Vacuum sucked the life out of you, while the sterile light of far away stars that were tiny points of light promised salvation and only brought doom. The stars did not twinkle, for there was no atmosphere scattering the rays of light coming from them.

At once, Michael realized that being in space while on a rotting ship of wood was not something he wanted to ever do in his life. Yet he was here, understanding the fright of deep space firsthand.

Below, the hull of the spaceship was like knotted fingers of wood and green against the darkness. The tips of the fingers were almost impossible to make out, the ambient light of deep space too dark to illuminate them, while the rest of the spaceship glowed with a soft inner light.

Entire sections were dark, even between the patches of light. Crisscrossing the whole spaceship, patches of wood had turned liquid and dark. Sections were bloated, exposed to vacuum, sealed by doors not unlike the one that had been barring his escape from the rotting room.

A sickness had spread, was still spreading through the living spaceship, turning solid plant matter into gelatinous pus and foul interstitial liquid. He could see the disease where it was advancing towards the healthy sections, encroaching them, cutting off entire parts of the gigantic spaceship like a cancer that could not be controlled.

"Ah," the moan of exhaustion escaped his tight lips.

"You understand. You see that light, straight ahead?" the Tree-Alfyr asked.

Michael nodded.

"That's Edenstar. Eden orbits it. Ah, that is to say, the world is hung in space around that sun."

"I know what an orbit is."

"Good, you surprise me," the old elf said. "Yet knowledge will only bring you more pain. It takes many decades for the light to reach Eden, and for every year the light travels, it takes us five to follow. You have seen what is happening to us. The Corruption. Many of us were not even awakened; they died in the pods where they had gone to sleep in hope of a better future. Those of us who survived wished they had died in their sleep. I am the only one left, a few millennia later, from that wretched generation. The younger ones have lost much, and in their blissful ignorance they have seen and known only the Seedship. And Corruption, and the Abominations of course. They do not know of the open skies, of the thrill of the hunt, of the forests and rivers. You do, don't you? They cling to the hope of Eden, not knowing that they will never reach it."

"You are the only one who knows, aren't you? Can't they see the Corruption spreading?"

"They can, and they do. But I keep telling them Eden is close by, and we will get there before the Corruption takes us. Truth is, the Seedship will not survive my passing, and my time is running out. Am I a coward, son of man? For not telling my children that they will all die when I die? Perhaps, but I ask that you do not break the illusion, the spell. What good would it do? The old generation knew; they lived three thousand years in despair, and yet in the end, they still brought a new generation into this wretched world. I do not want the young cursing their parents, cursing me. Knowing despair will not change their lives for the better; it will only hasten their demise."

With a sigh, the Tree-Alfyr made the wall return to its leafy luster. It was calming and comforting, hiding the treacherous empty space with a thin film of illusion.

"I am tired, son of man. I do not know what evil gods brought you here, but you better pray to them. For there are no other gods left. Trust me, I would know."