The infinity dungeon 214

Chapter 214

Michael slept in. It felt good to rest, and with only precious little magic to fuel his body, he needed sleep. Waking up with a full mana pool, he stretched and looked out the window of his treehouse.

Things were strange in the Valley, and it felt stranger still to be back after all that happened to him. To all intents and purposes, he was no longer the same person he was the last time he had been here. He had slept countless nights in the very same bed he had just occupied, spent countless years in the treehouse and the Valley.

Yet, when he looked out the window and into the forest, he did not see the same old Valley. He was different, his eyes were different, his perception of things was different. He had been humbled, his power stripped away from him.

He sighed, walking across the wooden balcony that surrounded a portion of the treehouse, until the rest of the Valley and the river came into view.

After reaching rock bottom, he had clawed his way back up. He had regained power. He was given a second chance. So many other things happened. In the end, he had won, but his victory felt hollow. Why did it feel hollow?

Perhaps it was because the Renegade was still at large and his inner space was a mess.

The mana inside his batteries, a full 15 silvers of it, hummed with power in response to his thoughts. At his current rate of regeneration, it would take 26 minutes to refill them if he used it all up, making him feel as if his power was nothing more than a front.

The forest was silent as he walked. Leaves rustled in the wind, and thin mists hung about the trunks of the gigantic ancient trees, but the Fae were strangely missing. Perhaps Infy’s command was still keeping them away, and Michael was fine with that for the time being.

He needed to think, to reflect on what happened. To feel human again after being put in a blender and spit out of it half-dead and almost powerless.

Try as he might, though, he didn’t feel safe enough to truly relax. The Renegade had disappeared into the mists at the edge of the mountains, where Michael didn’t even dare to look, but how could he be sure that the man wouldn’t return in much the same way?

To end what he had started. To end his life.

He turned around, choosing another path, letting his feet carry him to the plains by the river. It was no coincidence that he found himself at the center of the valley, the farthest point from the mists at its edges.

After two days, he decided it was time to get back to work. Thoughts were still swirling in his head, crowding it with many things that clashed with each other and more often than not made no sense, bringing only pain and wasted time. But being in the Valley also reminded him of what he used to be able to do, of what he had lost.

He remembered when he could walk in great strides that ate the ground. When he could command the world around him with a thought. When he could see and sense all. When his aura blanketed the world and wrapped around him like a cocoon.

He found himself hating his lack of power. He wanted those things back.

On the dawn of the third day, he donned the cultivator’s spatial ring, emptied it of all the junk inside and filled it with supplies. Then he left for yet another walk.

“If you need more time to think, Michael, you can take it.”

Michael watched the horizon. The mists were not visible without magic vision, giving the illusion of a real horizon. “Thank you, Icarus.”

“You are currently the only delver on this floor and time dilation is at its maximum. I’m using Johanne’s micro-burst portals to get up to speed with the outside world, but it will take a while.”

“Right,” Michael smiled. “What’s the data compression factor?”

“Awful,” the AI replied. “And I want to be thorough.”

Inside the inner space, Michael could see the data flow towards Icarus from the far reaches of deep space like a pulsing laser beam of focused information. There was little of it, just like the AI had said.

Better, Michael thought. He needed the time, both to center himself and to regain his power. He did not even realize that he had punched the ground at the thought until pain radiated up his arm.

“Of course,” he muttered, “no stats to enhance my body anymore.”

He looked inwards again, where he found himself sitting on top of the concrete block that acted as the spawning location for his consciousness. The rest of his base spread out from there, catwalks leading to collectors and batteries. Further away, the mining drone, the foundry and the artillery station were dark. There was simply not enough power to keep them running.

They were orbiting around the black hole, which had a spiral at its center. The orbit made him weightless, but Michael’s will was enough to keep him anchored to the concrete. He looked at the spiral and its accretion disk, at the occasional explosion that resulted in a brief flash of brightness and surge of energy.

“What do you think would happen if I went inside it?”

“Nothing good, for sure,” Icarus said. “Are you going to be moping for much longer, or will you actually start rebuilding your power?”

“And for what?” Michael found himself saying, “just to lose it all again? It’s starting to be very unfunny, you know?”

“What’s the alternative?” asked the AI.

Michael scoffed, “well, for instance, I could stop playing some strange multiversal entity’s games. Be done with the dungeon.”

“You might decide to be done with it, but it is not done with the Earth. You’d rather watch from the sidelines than bear the risk?”

“Of course not,” he said with a sigh. “I was just… I don’t know what I was doing.”

“Perhaps you could talk to Infy? She can give you tips,” Icarus ventured, “if you call her, I think she will come.”

“No,” Michael said. “Despite everything, she is still the dungeon spirit. And I still don’t know how to feel about her. You said you have news about the state of my inner space, let’s start from there.”

“Of course,” the AI complied without comment, “look at the boundary of the space.”

Michael flew his consciousness out there. “Interesting,” he said.

Things felt strange so far from the center, fuzzy and ill-defined. Reality did not have the same level of presence it had back at the base, and magic felt much more powerful. There was a membrane at the very edge of the space, like a curtain of darkness. Little glowing shapes littered it like tiny shells at the bottom of an ocean.

Spirals.

They were too tiny and too dim to be seen from the base, where the light of the black hole’s accretion disk was bright. From up close, however, they were like tiny points of light in the darkness, some tiny and others even smaller. They pulsed, an echo of the giant spiral at the center.

Michael extended a hand, and touched the membrane. The spiral glyphs lit up around his finger like bioluminescent algae. Their light was soft, and they felt warm to the touch.

Michael pushed a bit more, and the light increased until the glyphs parted and the membrane was pierced. A bone-chilling cold assaulted him. There was simply nothing on the other side, not even the familiar void of the inner space.

It felt close enough to the void of real space to remind Michael of his time on the elven Seedship, and the same dread he felt when looking out the giant window of transparent leaves crawled up his back again.

Then something changed. He thought he could touch something.

Air. Some traces of elements and of mana. A whiff of Qi.

He opened his eyes to the real world. He touched a pebble, went back inside, probed the boundary again. His fingers touched something very real, and through the veil he pulled the pebble into his inner space.

“The boundary is permeable now?”

“So it seems,” Icarus said.

Michael let go of the pebble. It lazily started to fall towards the black hole, although its acceleration was almost imperceptible. “Interesting indeed,” he muttered.

As the stone fell, it flew faster and faster until it finally reached the black hole’s accretion disk. There, it hit something and ignited in a fiery explosion. The effect it had on the collectors was laughable because the pebble was small, but Michael’s eyes twinkled nonetheless.

“Very interesting,” he said.

“Not to put a damper on your mood, but you would have to absorb actual mountains to achieve a meaningful change. The mana cost would be insane.”

Michael shrugged, “don’t be a spoilsport, Icarus. This is momentous. Or, is it? Wasn’t the boundary already permeable before? Come to think of it, I did pull the nuclear element inside of it back in Sitea. I even pulled the Force Lance in by using the cultivator’s ring. What’s changed?”

“Something has to have changed,” Icarus said.

Michael tapped his chin. He squinted, layering some mana on his eyes. There was plenty of magic in the air all around him, the Valley teeming with mana and elemental energies. Humming in thought, he remembered the sensation of magic from the real world on his arm while he was poking it through the boundary. He spread his arms wide, as if welcoming the breeze on his skin, and then pulled.

“Ah,” Icarus said. “Glad to see you figured it out.”

From the boundaries of the inner space, a rain of strange cosmic rays rushed towards the spiral at the center, coming from all around like a shower of magic and elements.

“Nice to have some environmental regeneration back,” Michael said.

“Better than that!” Icarus said enthusiastically, “you can spam batteries and store all of it! Try to intercept it, before it falls into the spiral.”

“First I want to see what happens when it falls into it,” Michael said, watching the last of the cosmic rays disappear. “Weird. Nothing happened.”

“I don’t know,” the AI muttered, “I feel like something has changed. It smells of potential, doesn’t it?”

“Perhaps the inner space has expanded? I did feel stretched, if only for a moment.”

“No way to test that,” Icarus said.

“For now. Anyway, I want to do another test. Can stuff leave the inner space?”

Sadly, no matter how hard he tried, he failed to materialize his machines in the material world. It would have been fun to suddenly make an artillery station appear out of nowhere in a fight, but no such luck.

“Although, I might be able to bend the rules a little…”

That’s where Michael’s experience with raw magic came in handy. He created a portal from the inner space to the outside and lined the artillery station in front of it. Taking control of the machine, he aimed and split his attention between the real world and the inner space.

In the real world, there was no portal. In the inner space, there was a window to the verdant prairie of the Misty Valley, a boulder occupying most of the view.

Michael could only hold the split attention for a fraction of a second, the effort feeling as if he were splitting his actual brain in half with a scalpel, but for a moment the two images coexisted in his mind. He gave the command to fire.

The boulder exploded, blown to bits. The portal vanished. The twin flow of information ceased, and Michael was back to being only in one place.

“That’s not how you did it last time,” Icarus said.

“It’s not. This is different. Last time, I was trying to imitate skills, like this. Watch.”

He located another boulder, and this time he cast his magic the usual way. He activated the artillery station, and then let magic deal with the rest. The boulder did not explode, although a decent chunk of it was carved out by the resulting explosion.

“Same energy, much smaller explosion.” Icarus observed.

“Not the same energy. It takes a lot out of me to create a portal and split my attention. But the results speak for themselves.”

“That they do. I’d say it was a rather productive day.”

Michael grinned, “yeah, I’d say!”

“Feeling better now?”

“I am. I’m finally seeing the light at the end of this shit tunnel! You know what else I’m feeling?”

“What?” asked the AI.

“Hunger. I’m ravenous. Let’s see if the Fae are still throwing feasts.”