The infinity dungeon 227

Chapter 227

Michael looked at the bright colors of the accretion disk, legs dangling into the void below as he sat on the roof of the control room. Being in orbit around the strange black hole meant that there was no gravitational pull pulling him down, the net sum of the forces acting on him resulting in zero. 

The inner space was becoming eerily similar to the real world, he thought. 

At the same time, it was fundamentally different. For instance, Michael could sit on the roof of the room, just like he could stand inside it, and still have the vague impression that the floor was down while the spiral and its accretion disk were in front of him. It was as if the room itself had impressed upon this portion of the inner space the fact that up and down were a thing, a deviation from the normal rules.

Perhaps it had not been the room, but Michael himself. He had thought the room as being oriented in a certain way, and the inner space had adapted.

“Done pondering?” Icarus asked. He had figured out a way to manifest his hologram outside the room and anywhere in the inner space. He appeared to be walking on air a few feet in front of Michael, bending down to look him in the eye with a very irritating smirk.

Michael got up. “Yeah, yeah. I’m done pondering.”

He floated up and away from the room, creating a little distance between him and the Aura Accelerator right below them. The golden band of metal looked much more crowded than last time, with dozens of little pinpricks floating above its surface and just as many collector and battery pairs waiting near them.

Then he was out, in the real world. The stack of golden coins in front of him had dwindled considerably, but the three platinum ones remained untouched. To the right, all the silver coins were gone.

Michael made a golden coin float up in the air. With a snap of his fingers, the coin split into a hundred silver ones, which then shot toward him in quick succession like bullets from a machine gun. The moment they touched his skin, most of them vanished, transforming into raw energy that entered his inner space and was sucked into the black hole at its center.

Most, but not all of them. A few clinked to the ground, before being picked back up by magic and returning to their stack to the right of the gold coins.

“You’re getting better,” Icarus’s voice reached his ears from nowhere in particular, originating as it did inside his inner space.

“Better is not perfect,” Michael complained.

“You will not reach perfect, not before the taint gets you,” Icarus replied. 

Michael sighed. “Fine,” he said. He had trained as much as he safely could–if one could even define what safe meant when there was no way to measure taint.

He returned to the inner space. Lifting his hands, he took control of magic and the many pinpricks of light just above the Accelerator ring brightened in response.

“You know,” Michael said, suddenly lowering his hands and eliciting a groan from Icarus.

“What is it, now?”

“I’m just salty about this whole spiral business. Even with a hundred collectors, we are generating only ten copper per second!”

It was Icarus’ turn to sigh. “Even if you threw all the materials the Fae have gathered for you over the span of ten years at the accretion disk, it would only brighten by a few percent.”

“I know,” Michael said. “I had a whole ass star before. Now, all I have is this.”

“Well, this…” Icarus motioned with his hands, now suddenly beside Michael. “This might just save you out there, and you know it. It’s a black hole with a glyph at its center, shaped like a spiral, plundered from a deep dungeon floor where it had been used by the dungeon itself to vacuum all magic it could to keep the spirit alive. For all we know, the spiral might be a relic from the time of the dungeon’s creators!”

Michael was about to speak, when Icarus held up a finger. The lines of light in his clothes seemed to brighten for a moment as the hologram delicately poked Michael in the face with his finger.

“Let me finish. Even when you had the star, you weren’t really generating infinite magic. You used the stash of Demiurge Particles stolen from the heart of Sitea to ignite the star, didn’t you? This means you were burning a finite resource. A huge one, given that the particles were Tier 5 energy, but a finite one nonetheless. You would have probably run out. Eventually. Maybe.”

Icarus scratched his chin, dark eyes looking up as his face scrunched up in thought. While he did, Michael absentmindedly absorbed a mana coin from the outside world while still in the inner space.

The two watched the rain of magic in silence.

“The taint, Michael. You know how I hate to be the one who has to remind you of it all the time.”

Michael sighed. “Alright. Let’s get the show moving.”

He raised his arms up again. 76 pinpricks of light brightened up, like tiny diamonds placed upon the golden band of the Aura Accelerator. With a wave of magic, they all began to move in unison, slowly descending toward the ring.

Michael repositioned himself to be close to one of them. It looked just like the golden focusing lenses he had built using Master Yu’s gold coins. Except, compared to them, it was thin and looked almost flimsy. Its color was blue, mostly transparent.

Michael had made them out of pure Qi extracted from more golden coins that he dared think about. Many more coins had been sacrificed to the black hole as a result of experimentation and failed designs before he and Icarus had managed to create a functioning lens that could replicate what the golden lenses did. It was an inferior version, but it did the job.

The lens finally touched the metal of the Accelerator. Like the other focusing lenses, it just passed through until it settled, the thin band of metal piercing it at the center.

“Light it up,” Michael said.

Icarus was happy to comply. All the battery and collector pairs moved, slotting themselves to their respective lenses. The whole ring pulsed once, before chaos erupted.

“No,” Michael muttered, once again returning to his vantage point far away to take it all in with his sight. “Not chaos.”

“Beautiful complexity,” Icarus finished for him. He too was staring with wonder in his eyes, and a subtle hint of something else. Longing, perhaps. Belonging.

Then Michael shook him out of it. “Diagnostics?”

“Let it run for a while first, please? It’s beautiful. Can I watch from here?”

Michael nodded. “Of course.”

While Icarus watched from afar, Michael flew across the whole length of the Accelerator several times to make sure everything was working as it should. 

“They are working well,” he said when he returned. “Numbers?”

“Multiplier is one hundred. Your current regeneration is 9.65 copper, times one hundred… 9.65 silvers of aura. Congratulations, Michael, even though it’s a pure mana aura it appears you are no longer being affected by the taint.”

“I can feel it,” he said. “Like a burden being lifted from my back.” 

He breathed. In and out, the action felt effortless. “Almost ten silver of aura. I am officially back, Icarus.”

The hologram smiled, then smirked. “Hate to rain on your parade, but time is also flowing again in the real world. Very slowly, but it is. Satellites are detecting a build-up of exotic magic near Site 00.”

“It’s the Renegade. ETA?”

“If you want to catch him before he finishes whatever he is doing, you must leave within two Valley days.”

“Then perhaps we have time for one last thing,” Michael said quickly, wasting no time and pulling up one of the green holograms. A new design, for a new machine.

“The dungeon reward. The new blueprint,” Icarus said. His breath was labored, eyes wide as he looked at it. “It’s an upgrade for the collectors!”