Saga of the Soul Dungeon

“Illusion is the first of all pleasures.”

-Voltaire

==Caden==

If dungeons had their own language, they might have a term to describe what this felt like, otherwise it was almost impossible.

I wasn’t under any physical pressure, but I felt like I was standing in rising waters. The current passed me by and my shards were dragged under, each one helping to anchor me in place. Eventually, I was alone in my head once more. There were no additional shards and Exsan was submerged fully beneath the waters. I was a single mind for the first time in what felt like forever.

I could now recognize what had happened to Exsan. He was connected to me, and the same thing had happened to him much earlier as my language, knowledge, and skills swept him away. For now he was in a trance, his mind having immense amounts of knowledge downloaded into it. Presumably this new language had been added onto that as well.

Little flickers of words and meaning rose up to the tip of my tongue. My thoughts were mirrored with hints of another language, the meanings echoing back and forth in my head.

I checked on all of the new guests, but no one was entering my levels. Zidaun was talking to a few of them, but I could tell the language was yet another that I didn’t speak.

How many languages would I need to learn?

Eh, honestly, as long as people were willing to give me skill books, I didn’t care. Even if I had to learn them manually, though, being able to have someone actually teach me properly would be amazing compared to the pantomiming I had been stuck with.

For now I delved more thoroughly into what I could do with teleportation.

The answer turned out to be complicated.

Like portals, there was a cap on the speed something could be going when it was teleported. However, that speed was much higher. Enough higher that I only teleported a few tiny objects at those speeds out of their vacuum tubes and into a testing site. I did a single test of a larger object the size of a stone and then stopped with anything larger.

The stone never reached the ground. Its speed was so high that it might as well have hit a solid wall when it hit the air. An enormous shock-wave ripped out from it, pulverizing stone and creating a massive wave front that uprooted large trees and flung boulders around like pebbles. I had teleported it in near a wall, and the wall had fractured. The new cracks were so deep that my new steel supports were laid bare. Not only that, but the air had been blasted away hard enough to leave a vacuum behind. The resulting implosion created a secondary explosion, creating further damage.

I wasn’t aware I was going to be playing with cavitation today...

The shock-waves carried throughout my dungeon like an earthquake.

I did further tests in the vacuum tubes, being careful not to cause any more damage. Teleportation was different than the portals in another way. While I now had a new and higher limit on speed, I did not have one on mass.

My maximum speed was the same whether it was three foot boulder or a grain of sand. I did some careful tests with larger objects, but I never let their speed get too high. I might need to use them as weapons someday, but I now had a tool dangerous enough to hurt myself. Killing myself with a large enough tremor would be a stupid way to die.

Regardless, there were now some even more dangerous traps in my off limits section. And my environmental options had apparently interpreted the shock-wave as a combination of wind and earthquake. I now had the option to create an earthquake (minor), and wind (catastrophic).

Honestly, that felt about right.

Teleportation had also let me completely disconnect my core from the rest of the dungeon. The only way to get there was to be teleported there after successfully solving an impossible puzzle. Any incorrect answers would place someone at the every beginning of my dungeon entrance. And then they would be barred from entering my levels for a week.

Admittedly, if someone could actually manage to get through all the intervening danger and access the puzzle, I didn’t have much hope for keeping them out via force.

All of that was great, but as always, I was more excited with what teleportation allowed me to do.

Even if someone had simply offered me teleportation, it would have been less useful, because any automation would have needed my Dungeon Law skill, and that was currently completely used up. However, my Dungeon Control Menu was perfect for automation.

It actually seemed to be getting better over time. I wasn’t sure if that was the skill adjusting to my extensive use, or if I was simply getting better at using it. Regardless, adding in teleportation was revolutionary.

So far I could teleport anything, with the exception of mana. Okay, so there were other limits too. I hadn’t managed to teleport gravity, magnetism, etc… either, but I wasn’t sure if that was merely because my perception wasn’t fine enough to perceive them.

I could do light and sound though.

I am not sure what it said about me that the first thing I tried to do was make a laser. Probably that I had watched too many movies and read too much science fiction.

I couldn’t make it work. Aligning the light in the same direction was easy. That let me concentrate it together into a burning hot beam, but it lacked the cutting power of a laser. Essentially, I could funnel light like a giant magnifying glass. That was actually a rather crude application of my ability though.

Removing light from an area could create perfect darkness, and adding it can make something blindingly bright.

More interesting was transmitting light from one object into another area. Depending on how much light I moved and the relative brightness, I could create a full fledged illusion all the way up to a phantom. Additionally, teleporting all the light that passed through an illusion away made them almost impossible to tell from the real thing, except for their failure to react to changing light conditions. When used that way, the illusions would look almost otherworldly, glowing or reacting to shadows that didn’t exist.

More refined uses of light took me longer and required more practice. Scattering light around while removing a small amount could create the impression of mist. Creating moving effects first allowed me to make a phantom mist that could flow between (or through) plants and trees, moving with or against the wind. More complicated swirls, ripples, and whirlpools of mist were my next project. They took a decent amount of time, but eventually they became environmental effects that I could apply. Soon I had plenty of illusion (phantasmal mist) options to work with.

From there I made shapes of out mist, layering in illusions of real objects to enhance the illusion of a ghostly presence. Glowing red mana crystal provided light for the eyes. Real grey cloth, dyed as close to the color of the mist as I could get, was draped over a statue I animated with other controls. Hints of color in the clothes in the form of jewelry added an extra dimension of realism. I slowly added those together with trees that I had already grown into shape in stone molds.

Sound was actually easy to add. Before this I had used hollow stone pipes beneath the ground to carry sound up into the woods and anywhere else I felt sound was appropriate. The hollow sound of the pipes had actually added to the ambiance, but I had no doubt that people would have been able to figure out where all the sound was coming from. Now the sounds were paired with my illusions. When I finally managed to sync the two together reasonably well, I received the option to recreate them: illusion (phantasmal spirit).

Honestly, I felt like the options appeared a little faster than they should have. However, that may well have been due to my title, since that helped with illusions.

I already had an option to create whirlpools from water and other more exotic forms, but teleportation meant it was possible to try out far more interesting effects.

I could do something rather mundane, like teleport away an entire pool of water at the completion of a puzzle, but I enjoyed spectacle. I admit the fact I would soon be able to hear what people were saying about my dungeon was a healthy contributor to that feeling.

I might be a little vain.

So I decided to make some more exciting options.

Eventually, those were finished.

After that I worked to maximize some of the built in options.

One of those options was creating seamless transition between areas. I tested it with my initial teleportation “elevator.” I tested it with my avatar and it gradually faded out of existence even as the area it teleported into faded into existence.

That was cool, but it was still obvious that it was happening, even if the transition was smooth.

However, when I used identical tunnels, even I could not detect the exact moment of transition, except the sudden change of location. One moment my avatar was in one place and the next it was in another. No flickers of mana, light, or anything else gave away the sudden change. Since my tunnels were truly identical, something that was relatively easy with my dungeon abilities, no one should be able to tell when they were teleported, unless they had some additional sense of relative location.

I wasn’t willing to bet that no one had a skill like that, but it still should help sell my illusions immensely.

Exactly duplicating an environment let me play around with illusions in other ways too. I could create the perfect replica of a monster or animal as it walked around, slept, etc… in one copy and then transpose that image into the other. Doing that enough eventually gave me a host of illusory creatures that I could create. I didn’t get a generic option for creating creatures in general though. I could certainly create new customized illusions by manipulating light and sound on top of existing ones, however.

This was a real game changer for traps though. I had to randomize the damn things when I placed them down, because otherwise the scouts would just report their locations and adventurers would know to avoid their locations. If I wanted to do a memorization game with adventurers I would create a puzzle for that.

Illusions were interesting when combined with traps, because they could conceal the danger of a trap, or simply completely make it look like a corridor, passage, etc… didn’t exist. A fun trap I played around with made a tunnel entrance look like it was considerably taller than it actually was. I may or may not have spent far too much time watching a bunch of monsters run face first into an invisible wall.

I deny everything. Good thing Exsan was unconscious for this.

Even beyond messing with all the traps that already existed, creating areas where no sound or light could pass through was a very dangerous obstacle, especially if it was combined with any other traps, falls, etc…

I did have fun designing the leap of faith trap that I borrowed from Indiana Jones. It made a good puzzle. Unfortunately Zidaun could see right through the damn thing. The sound thing could too…

Somewhat frustrated by this limited omniscience, I designed some countermeasures specifically to deal with him and anyone else with his level of sensing. I infused the ground of some areas with a thin concentrated mana crystal layer a few millimeters below the surface.

The concentrated mana didn’t block my sight, because it was my mana. He was borrowing my senses, so this might or might not block him from seeing through the higher mana areas. After that, I designed some traps that it wouldn’t matter if he could see them or not. When every inch of a floor looked like it was trapped, it was hard to tell the real traps from the fakes.

By the time I was done, I had received a notice from the system.

Congratulations!

Your title Innovator III (Dungeon) has improved to:

Innovator V (Dungeon)

+600 AP

That made sense, I had increased the variety of my traps pretty massively.

In fact, I had worked all through the night, losing track of time.

I checked on my guests, seeing a series of Adar going through my testing chambers. I would be able to communicate soon, so I might get rid of the testing areas, or at least refine them. Maybe I could just include some basics to check some essential adventurer skills, like situational awareness, watching out for traps, and so on.

Honestly, I could probably convert the tests into training areas…

For now, I just watched, letting life in my dungeon resume with the morning.