The infinity dungeon 218

Chapter 218

A stream of thick frosty energy shot from the cube in response to Michael’s pulling. It was thick, powerful and fast. So fast that Michael almost did not manage to dodge it in time. It grazed him, freezing him to the bone, and as he was forced to expend even more mana to combat the elemental energy, he watched the stream of frosty particles travel the length of the inner space. It curved slightly, affected by the gravity of the spiral glyph, and plunged into the black hole.

As it disappeared inside the event horizon, Michael felt the stretching sensation that always accompanied energy crossing the event horizon of the strange celestial glyph at the center of his inner space. Except this time, it was ten times stronger than usual, making the whole space quake and morph only to snap back to seemingly being the same as before. The empty space was still empty. The main base was still there.

The tip of the ice cube…

Michael flew towards the boundary, where the frayed edges of the inner space’s limits shimmered in myriad colors where they touched the ice. The thing was like a thorn, lodged into the inner space from the outside.

“Is it me, or did the ice get pushed deeper in?”

Icarus’ reply came several seconds later. “I think it’s not the ice that’s moved. It’s pretty much stuck there. It’s the inner space that has expanded.”

Michael hummed. “At least that’s one question answered, then.” He moved back to stand before the tip of the ice cube. “What are we calling this thing, by the way?” he asked.

“We can come up with a name when we know what it is.” Icarus said. “Pull some more ice element from it.”

Michael did as asked. A stream of ice erupted from the thing, but this time he was ready for it. He tugged at it, changing its trajectory and making it orbit him.

“I always thought ice was supposed to be stillness,” he said.

With each orbit, he sapped it of some of the beam’s energy until it finally stopped moving. The moment it did, it transformed from a stream of energy into a perfect cube of ice. Poking and prodding the cube revealed that it was very stable, requiring a lot of effort to turn back into a stream of energy. At the same time, it felt much tamer compared to the source it had come from.

Michael opened his eyes to the real world. He left the glacier, emerging back into the forest where he kneeled and touched the ground. With a slight effort of will, he unraveled some of the smaller ice cube, directing the familiar energy outwards. The ground all around him froze, blades of grass stilling and becoming little icicles. They were cold enough that crystals of ice were forming on their surfaces due to the moisture in the air freezing upon contact.

Back in the inner space, Michael studied the giant ice cube. It was still there, still gigantic, still immobile. This time, Michael tried to pull energy directly from it and to direct it to the outside world.

The stream of particles shot towards his projection in the inner space. He was in the real world, however, so he was unable to stop it.

“Fool me once, that’s fine.”

His projection reacted almost on its own.

“Fool me twice, that’s on me,” he finished muttering. The projection moved, and the stream of particles shot towards the black hole and disappeared inside it.

Space stretched yet again revealing another new, infinitesimal percentage of the ice.

“Glad to see you are getting better at splitting your focus,” Icarus said.

“No pulling directly from the source, it seems. Too high-energy to be useful.”

The AI whistled, “You think it’s a source, then? You sure about it?”

“Pretty much. When I pulled energy from it, it didn’t show any signs of change. The only mana I spent was to do the pulling, which means that all the ice energy came from there. Did you detect any changes?”

“None,” the AI said.

“Then for all intents and purposes, it’s a source of ice element! We don’t know if it’s finite or not, if we are consuming the parts of the ice cube we don’t see, or if it’s a conduit to some elemental plane of ice or some shit, but… I’ll take the win for now.”

As he spoke, the small ice cube floating in the inner space’s strange nothingness shattered and disappeared in a burst of raw magic.

“I guess we’ll need to figure out a way to store it,” Michael said.

“Storage, noted. And what about automatic extraction from the alleged source?” Icarus asked. “Unless you want to have to manually extract ice after every use, that is. You already kind of have to do that with mana, I suggest you don’t add yet another chore to the list.”

“Agreed. So, how about we call the big ice cube ‘Borealis Block’?”

“Borealis Block, really?” Icarus said deadpan.

“What’s wrong with it?” Michael asked, grinning.

“Nope,” he said, shrugging. “It’s all you.”

***

Two days later, most of the week’s worth of stockpiled materials from the still ongoing mining operations had been turned into a gigantic extraction and storage device. Hovering a few feet away from the Borealis Block, four arms of polished titanium traced the four edges of the cube’s faces for the better part of a mile.

At their ends, crystal tips projected a focused beam of energy that dug into the ice of the Block, causing ripples of magic to propagate inside of it. The ripples all converged at the vertex point, where pure ice element shot out like a frosty laser and impacted a mirror-like dish.

The dish collected the energy, reflecting it towards a nearby structure made of stacked cubes. A similar dish attached to the structure scattered the energy into many smaller beams, which in turn were directed towards the storage chambers. The chambers were stacked cubes. Transparent, their walls were made out of specially reinforced glass. Some of them were full of ice, others had small ice cubes growing inside them, with one of the scattered beams providing the energy. All of them had at least one face touching another cube, but the symmetry was somewhat diminished by a slight offset that created the sensation of a structure grown out of cubes rather than carefully designed to look a certain way.

It had all been the result of extensive trial and error, as well as some sort of enlightened state Michael managed to reach while working on the blueprint. His familiarity with ice allowed him to understand its needs deeply, to know at an instinctual level what needed to be done, and Icarus provided the technological solutions to make his vision happen.

“It’s…” Michael began, looking for the right word to describe his handiwork as he regarded the glowing blue storage chambers and the still empty ones. The whole structure was storing ice from the inside, with the deeper rooms filling up first. “I wouldn’t say beautiful, but it has a certain rugged charm to it, doesn’t it?”

Icarus laughed, “It’s certainly functional.”

“Yeah, let’s leave it at that. Functional.”

Looking at the numbers, Michael was very satisfied with his work. Even though the ice was not a mutated element like he used to have before, it more than made up for it with sheer quantity. The Borealis Drill—when active—used up to five copper mana a second to extract and safely store the ice element, making it readily available as needed.

After that, it was time to do the other element Michael sorely missed: fire. This time, however, he wasn’t keen to replicate what happened with ice.

“I already feel a bit weird having a portal to the ice dimension in my inner space. Let’s not add more oddities at least until next week.”

Icarus hummed, clearly distracted with everything. “It’s a source, and even that’s a maybe. Who’s to say it leads to the ice dimension?”

“Whatever. It’s still a gigantic ice cube lodged in the wall of the inner space.”

“I’ll give you that,” the AI conceded, turning his attention to Michael. “So what’s the plan for the fire?”

Michael thought about it for a minute. “I mean, all we need to do is produce an effect, right? The magic system will adapt to whatever we come up with. So, how do we produce and stabilize fire for later storage?”

“Well, plasma comes to mind,” Icarus said.

It took two weeks to create a strange machine that took mana, turned it into some sort of plasma beam, and filled a series of strangely asymmetrical egg-shaped containers with glowing-hot plasma.

“It’s short-lived, though,” Michael observed as the magic inside the chamber ignited and turned white-hot.

In mere seconds, the plasma cooled down. It became yellow, then orange, then red and finally infrared before disappearing. The metal of the chamber’s structure remained red-hot for a while longer, but eventually it too radiated its heat off into space and returned to normal.

“The structure wouldn’t be able to handle it otherwise,” Icarus said.

“What about an electromagnetic field?”

“Could work. Let’s see…”

Several iterations later, the problem was still present but much mitigated. Michael could produce and store fire element, and the cool thing about it was that it wasn’t normal fire, but an exotic version he called Plasma Fire. The downside was that the Plasma Fire was short-lived. He could produce it in bursts, but it was a very expensive process and the resulting element had to be used within a minute or two before it lost most of its power.

“Well, let’s leave it at that for the moment,” Michael said. “Plasma Fire chambers mark one.”

Using them cost a whopping 10 Silver per activation, but the element was strong.

Back in the valley, Michael was beaming. He had not managed to work out all of the kinks of his new creations just yet, and he was especially unhappy with the limitations of the Plasma Fire chambers, but no momentary limitation could compete with the happiness he felt at having yet another piece of his former power back. Without ice and fire, he had felt incomplete, and only after having them back did he realize just how badly he had missed them.

Before turning his attention to aura and Qi, Michael decided to ride the euphoria of his elemental wins and add yet another element to his stockpile. Drullkrin’s words at seeing his successes fueled his greed. “How hard must it be, my lord,” the goblin had said. “To add another element to your stockpile? The Valley is rich in many elements, much more than it is rich with Qi, after all. It is only logical that you should focus on them before tackling Qi, and even more so before you rebuild your aura. After that is done, the time dilation will once again start to wane, and you will lose your advantage over the outside world.”

Thus, Michael set out in search of inspiration. He wandered the valley, feeling the many elements. None of them stood out particularly, nor did they call out to him, but he didn’t let it affect him. They were all unfamiliar, after all. It only made sense. How hard could it be, after all, to learn a third element?