The infinity dungeon 222

I apologize for the delay, but I decided to scrap this chapter and rewrite it at least twice before I was satisfied with it!

Chapter 222

The disappearance of the master immediately brought changes to the environment. Michael was hit by the full force of the blizzard, but it was something else that truly destabilized him. With the blizzard also came the dungeon Gaze, and Michael realized that even though the old master had claimed that he could not help him, he had shielded him from the brunt of its effects.

Michael returned to the hut where he had spent more than a year of his life. For some reason, the time he spent with Master Yu felt much longer than the ten years he had spent in the Misty Valley. Except now, with the Gaze back, he knew that his days here were numbered.

He ignored the call of the Room of the Four Pillars, knowing that he was not ready for it.

“Well,” he said with a chuckle, “four pillars and an altar.”

“Indeed,” Icarus chimed in. “I wonder what the altar’s all about. Master Yu said nothing about it.”

“Oh, look who’s back,” Michael said with exaggerated drama in his voice. “The prodigal AI.”

“I simply wished to let you learn without interference. I was definitely not scared shitless of the old man.”

Michael chuckled. “Whatever the case, do you think it’s time to finish what we started?”

“Please,” Icarus said, “before the ‘taint’ of the dungeon Gaze turns you insufferable again.”

Michael frowned, but did not take the bait. Instead, he sat on his hard bed and closed his eyes, projecting his consciousness inside his inner space. Close to his spawn location, the golden coins the master had given him shone with inner light. Their magic was Qi, and they were easily the most powerful thing in the whole inner space, save perhaps for the central black hole.

Indeed, Michael could feel the black hole’s attention on the coins like a physical thing. It yearned for them, hungry and greedy. The coins shrugged it off, however, unaffected by its gravity. They spun, hovered and moved lightly according to their own whims.

Michael wondered whether to feed one of the two dozens of coins to the black hole and its strange spiral, but then a shiver ran down his spine. Perhaps it wasn’t the best idea. Not right now. He had other stuff to worry about first. 

The massive project he had worked on for the better part of a year stretched out before him.

It was a blueprint. A truly massive holographic construction, intangible save for its metaphysical presence in the inner space. The spiral’s gravitational pull had no effect on the hologram.

There were also no materials available to turn the blueprint into an actual tangible inner space structure. The spiral had sucked all available matter toward it, with most of it disappearing beyond the event horizon and a minor part ending up in the accretion disk, providing light and a modicum of mana regeneration to Michael via the collectors.

“You got a plan, or are you just going to stare at the blueprint all day? I don’t need to remind you that the Gaze is back, I hope,” Icarus said.

Michael snorted. “I can feel it alright. It’s not exactly pleasant, not this deep in the dungeon.”

At least it was not crippling him, or paralyzing him with fear. No, what it was doing to him was much more subtle yet also much more dangerous in the long run.

The blueprint glowed green against the empty backdrop of the inner space. The original plan had been to come to the hut and leave this floor as soon as possible. Instead, Michael had found himself in his inner space, staring at the blueprint while the two dozen gold coins full of Qi rotated and spun around beside him. They were big, each of them as big as his body in the real world was, except that in the inner space, sizes mattered much less than outside.

The coins called to him. They tugged at something deep inside Michael’s consciousness, at a sort of strange awareness of what was right and true in the world. The feeling was not too dissimilar to a very mild application of Truth–back when he still had the [Unity] skill and skills in general. At the same time, it was fundamentally different.

He decided to let it guide him. He moved his hands around, painting over the existing blueprint. The ring of metal and circuitry changed before his eyes, like an old canvas being given a new coat of paint. It transformed, similar but fundamentally altered. Michael kept moving, now a painter and now the director of an orchestra, moving things around, tweaking the design.

He still lacked materials to make the gigantic particle accelerator he had envisioned as a way to gain back his aura, a structure so big it surrounded the central spiral and its accretion disk like a strange glittering ring, but he didn’t need them right now. With a wave of his hand, he directed his magic toward the golden coins. The Qi within them sang and surged in response to his touch, flowing like water.

“I like this Qi,” Michael said. “Gentle, powerful. Very different from the residual Qi in the cultivator’s spatial ring.”

Thinking about the ring sparked an idea. He pulled it into the inner space, noticing with a part of his mind that there was no averse reaction despite his earlier mistrust of the foreign artifact. He unraveled it, stretching the ring into a band. It grew, larger and thinner, until it was as thin as an invisible thread. The far end of it reached the spiral, hovering above it, resisting the gravity of its pull, then beyond it, only stopping when the impossibly thin ring was the size of a solar system.

“What are you building?” asked Icarus.

“The particle accelerator, of course.” Michael smiled, feeling his mind race with ideas and knowledge. 

Understanding was not being imparted into him by a higher force or being, rather it was being born deep within him. He felt his mind expand and take in the very magic that made up his inner space, coming to terms with its quirks and needs, with its peculiarities and strangeness.

“You’ll see,” Michael said. “I feel like I am truly seeing my inner space for the first time ever. I finally feel like I belong here. Like this place is me and i am it. Icarus, it’s… it’s hard to put into words.”

“I too am feeling strange, Michael.” The AI said. “Remember when I first re-emerged from the nova of Demiurge Particles that Infy helped you build to rekindle your magic? I had told you back then, that I had knowledge. But then the knowledge had faded, slowly disappearing and slipping away from my grasp.”

As Icarus spoke, the runes and glyphs on the surface of the planet that was his consciousness lit up. They were radiant gold, a second sun whose brightness rivalled the spiral’s accretion disk.

“It’s coming back to me now,” Icarus said. His voice betrayed the pure happiness and ecstasy he felt. “Whatever you are doing, Michael, don’t stop now!”

“I won’t!” 

With a wave of his hand, Michael made the golden coins of Qi float in front of him. He plucked the first out of the non-air of the inner space, feeling its heft. Then he slotted it into the golden ring that had once been the cultivator’s spatial ring, and that now surrounded the spiral like an infinitely thin golden thread.

The coin and the golden thread touched, and then the thread sank into the coin until it came to a stop at its center. The golden coin expanded, and its center became translucent. A pulse emanated from it, lighting up the golden thread, traveling its length once before returning to the coin itself.

Michael slotted the second coin and gave it a push with his mana. It slid across the thread like a bead of a necklace, coming to a stop exactly on the other side of the circle. When it did, it pulsed like the first coin had. When the pulse reached the other coin, it hummed and responded in kind.

Then the hum faded in the silence of the inner space.

“Did you feel it?” Michael asked Icarus.

“Feel what?” the AI, who had been busy with his own revelation, asked.

“Here, let me do it again. Tell me what you feel.”

Michael fed some more mana to the coin in front of him. It hummed, the vibration becoming energy that emerged from where its transparent center met the golden wire. It became light, and the light traveled in the two opposite directions until it reached the other coin at the other end of the circumference. When it did, the coin hummed, but there was no second pulse.

There was another effect, however.

“Aura,” Icarus said astonished.

“Aura,” Michael confirmed.