The infinity dungeon 217

Chapter 217

“What seems to be the holdup?” Michael asked. Icarus had been investigating the problem, as had Michael, but the conclusion Michael had reached wasn’t to his liking. He hoped the AI could offer an alternate explanation to why he wasn’t able to build the 101st battery.

“I think you maxed out your mana capacity for your Tier,” Icarus said. “Remember when you reached 100 Copper and couldn’t go any further until you upgraded your aura?”

Michael inhaled. It had been his theory as well. “It makes no sense,” he said for the sake of argument. “The magic system’s completely changed from before. I don’t even have an aura anymore. By all intents and purposes, if what you say is true then I shouldn’t have been able to reach this point at all.”

Michael got the distinct impression of a shrug coming from Icarus. The planet that hosted the AI’s consciousness flew past, much faster than Michael’s base was moving due to its lower orbit around the black hole. The planetoid’s surface was mostly dim, but some runes shone with budding magic.

Returning to the real world, Michael finished his walk and then retreated back to the treehouse. He considered calling Infy, but her parting words still echoed in his mind. Talks about her becoming his.

He slept fitfully that night, feeling a strange sense of urgency threaten to overtake him. Without an aura, the mana in his batteries wasn’t affecting the Valley’s time dilation effect, which was still at its maximum strength. By all means, he should have all the time in the world to regain the rest of his lost powers, perhaps even come out stronger than he ever was.

Except… was it the Renegade, he wondered? The man was still inside the dungeon, presumably, and he too had access to time dilation. What’s more, the Renegade surely had been able to enjoy the dilated time for much longer.

Strangely, though, the thought of the man felt distant.

Michael shook his head. From the vantage point of his house built at the top of one of the tallest trees of the forest, which itself was some ways higher than the river and the bottom of the valley, he could see gangs of Fae preparing for a day of work. Drullkrin had organized three shifts to cover both day and night, with Fae splitting between digging, refining ores, and some grand building project that would also double as an experiment to see if the dungeon would revert it after a month or not.

For now, they too were digging. If Michael’s hunch was right, the project was going to be a road leading from the usual spawn point of the valley close to the mountains all the way to the river and beyond, eventually connecting to all of the main points of interest. It was an ambitious project, but only because of the amount of work required, which the Fae had no trouble providing. Some of them were even choosing that over fighting, enjoying the much easier way to earn mana coins compared to risking their lives on battle floors.

“It amazes me that they would choose construction over battle, even knowing they can respawn after death,” Drullkrin said.

Michael hummed, “Even people who love battle like to take a break from time to time. Did you not enjoy digging?”

The goblin’s face twisted in thought before he nodded solemnly. “I suppose you have a point, my lord. I do enjoy a good day of digging from time to time. There is a strange form of satisfaction to seeing the fruits of my labor stack up in immense piles of valuables.”

After breakfast, Michael did the rounds absorbing the materials that had been excavated during the night and building solar collectors. The cycle repeated itself for many days, the better part of a month passing in the blink of an eye.

Finally, as Michael built the hundredth collector and realized that he could build no more, the routine changed. For two days he chose not to think about what he had to do, simply letting his mind settle. He still did the rounds, but he stockpiled the materials in gigantic floating warehouses rather than spending them, accumulating a veritable wealth of them in his inner space.

The two days stretched into a week, until finally he found himself before the entrance to the glacier.

After having hit a wall in trying to expand his mana supplies, he had decided to turn his attention to rebuilding the rest of his power set. The choices were many. He could try to figure out how to regain access to the exotic Chi and Jing. He could try to tame Qi, even though it was a higher form of energy and from his experience with the cultivator’s ring when he first tried to use it, not a simple one to master. He could dedicate himself to figuring out a way to generate an aura.

Or, he could start with something simple. Something familiar.

Deep beneath the glacier, Michael reached the place where the tunnel split in two smaller tunnels. One led to the Qi-filled chamber that had kickstarted David’s evolution to silver, the other led to the former Ice King’s chamber.

There, it felt as if the throne of ice was waiting for him. Layering mana around his body to shield himself from the biting cold and the wild energies, Michael approached the regal seat. He regarded it for a moment, studying its crystalline form, its blue sharpness, his own reflection in the ice. Then with a quick, decisive motion, he plunged his hand into it and started to absorb it.

He had no real plan. He had no idea what was going to happen. When absorbing the inert materials, they simply appeared at the edge of his inner space, but it was no guarantee that the same thing would happen now.

Michael relaxed slightly when he remembered that, actually, he had already done something very similar. Back in Sitea, when he had absorbed the raging nuclear element powering the Lair’s war constructs.

He grinned. It was perfect. The Throne, or some mental manifestation of it, would simply appear at the edge of the inner space and slowly start falling down due to the spiral black hole’s pull—which had been absent when the nuclear element had been absorbed. All Michael had to do was catch it, tether it to his base, and find a way to extract the element from it. Whether it would be a finite source or a renewable one was yet to be seen.

The spirals lit up.

“Beginning absorption,” Icarus announced. This time he wasn’t imitating a sportscaster, but some technician one would see in a sci-fi show. “Glyph patterns locked. Central spiral glyph is lighting up.”

Magic began to spread from where Michael’s hand was plunged into the ice of the Throne. As it did, more and more energy was pulled from the batteries to fuel the spiral’s effects. The pulling increased, and something appeared just beyond the boundary of the inner space.

“Alright,” Icarus announced, “cutting the energy flow to the spiral.”

Michael watched with rapt attention from a distance. The boundary parted, revealing sharp corners of deep blue ice, power radiating from the incoming artifact. The elemental energy felt familiar to him, and indeed he had known it well before losing his powers. It felt powerful. Barely a fraction of the Throne—or its inner space manifestation—had managed to pass through the boundary and already the power was off the charts. More was struggling to fit, stretching the passage, tearing the veil.

The batteries were emptying quickly. The process was taking way too much power, already reaching more than sixty silvers of mana being used up.

“Icarus?” Michael muttered, voice low but quickly gaining power as the urgency of the situation made itself clear. “Didn’t you say you were cutting power to the spiral?”

At the center of the space, the spiral shone with greedy brilliance. It did not produce any power, because the black hole was simply using power from the batteries, but its light was blinding nonetheless.

“I did cut the power, but it’s latched onto the connection and I can’t stop the process!”

“What has?” asked Michael. “The spiral?”

“Yes,” the AI said quickly, “it’s the centerpiece of the whole magic system, one we barely understand. It’s overridden everything, and I fear it won’t stop until the process is over.”

Michael kept hovering close to where the Throne was still in the process of entering the inner space. Less than a third of it was through, but it was gigantic. It appeared to be moving slowly, but it was only due to its size. It was like being on land and watching an enormous aircraft carrier sail by, almost unable to discern the true scope of things unfolding.

The energy flow ebbed a little bit. Glancing at the faraway base, Michael winced when he saw that the batteries were almost all empty.

“Okay, I think I got something,” Icarus said.

Michael was considering whether to intervene directly, using his will to command the magic to obey him. Something had been holding him back, though. A mix of fear of consequences, because messing with his inner space was bound to create problems, but also a strange sense of excitement. He knew the ice element intimately, and only now was he realizing just how much he missed having it. He wanted it.

Space snapped. The gigantic corner of solid ice, like the tip of an enormous cubical iceberg, ground to a halt. Around it, the boundary of the inner space shimmered like a forcefield kept open by a foreign body. It tried to close shut, but the opposing force coming from the bulk of the ice kept it open, the tip of the ice cube lodged against the veil and… leading somewhere?

In the real world, the ice king’s throne was no more.

Michael got closer. He moved gingerly, hovering close to the thing. Size was a difficult concept to describe in the inner space, but as a rough reference he knew that his disembodied consciousness was pretty much the same size as his actual body.

Even from what had to have been a dozen miles of distance, the chunk of ice was so big that it stretched from left to right like an imposing mountain. An aura of frost radiated from it.

“Even from a distance, it’s pretty rough,” Michael said. “I’m having to burn mana to keep from freezing.”

At least he was not using mana to keep the chunk of ice where it was. Whatever Icarus had done, it had worked, and the ice was fixed in place.

Michael stopped a few hundred yards from the impossibly sharp tip of the ice cube. Like a pyramid seen from the top, he could see four lines describing the four faces of the cube. Each face reflected the light of the black hole’s accretion disk differently, meaning that the tip of the cube was not perfectly aligned with the center of the space, and their slick surfaces were lit in slightly different colors.

The cold was almost absolute.

All instincts told Michael to stay at a safe distance. Instead, he approached the ice. He extended a hand, and pulled.