The infinity dungeon 204

Chapter 204

When Michael woke up, for the tiniest of moments he forgot that he was inside the dungeon and thought he was back at Site 00. Then he saw the blinding light coming from outside, felt the waves of heat from the fierce sun up above, and remembered all about the latest challenge he had been put through by the dungeon in his quest to reclaim his long-lost magic and help Infy, the dungeon spirit.

No door of light; the challenge must still be ongoing, he thought. 

With nothing better to do, Michael examined the ring he was still wearing on his finger. Its Qi was utterly depleted, no longer threatening to fry his whole Inner Space. A secondary effect of the lack of Qi was that the ring was completely unprotected from any attempt at brute-forcing it. Michael directed his mana towards it, and a small closet full of random stuff appeared in his mind’s eye without resistance.

“Let’s see. Robes, more robes, unreadable scrolls, ink and brush, stones full of Qi… I guess it’s safe to assume that the man was a cultivator.”

Michael tried to imagine what a Xianxia world under the rule of the dungeon would look like and failed. Perhaps his next challenge would take place there, or perhaps the purpose of this challenge was to find a way to reach cultivator lands.

Regardless, most of the stuff in the ring was completely useless.

“Why don’t you pull the ring into the Inner Space so that we can study it?” Icarus suggested.

“Is that even something I can do?” asked Michael.

He got the impression that the AI only shrugged in response.

“I’m going to pass on that for now. Even though the ring seems tame, who knows what it can do if I try to pull it inside the Inner Space. In fact, I’m not doing weird shit with my magic system until we have some defenses going.”

After asking Icarus to keep an eye on his surroundings, Michael entered his Inner Space.

“What’s the plan?” Icarus asked. He was piloting the mining drone, hovering close to where Michael’s consciousness had appeared.

“First order of business is security.”

Gathering iron and carbon from the cloud of ores surrounding the Foundry, Michael made steel. From the leftover stone, and with Icarus’s help, he made concrete, which he used to completely surround the battery packs and to anchor the solar collectors. Now, instead of floating in space, they were attached to a large platform of reinforced concrete on their dark side. 

He also completely surrounded the mana transfer units, built redundancies, gates, switches, and fuses, then sealed them all up with some more concrete. Expanding the collection and storage of mana would now be a monumental pain in the ass, but at least his artificial constructs felt much more solid than just a random assortment of floating spacecraft.

With the last of the concrete, he built himself a reinforced room where he could spawn instead of appearing in space. He then connected the various parts together with bridges of metal and more concrete, ending up with the best rendition of brutalism but in space, with thematic sections that were connected but also easy to isolate.

While he worked, Icarus kept going back and forth with his mining drone, collecting the last of the gravel and stone from the two asteroids the AI could access and processing them into more raw materials.

Outside, night had descended but Michael didn't feel like leaving the cave just yet. With the worm gone, he was in no immediate danger and he wasn’t in a rush to complete the challenge. 

It wasn't like he had any idea of what he was supposed to do to complete it anyway.

“Feel safe enough now?” Icarus asked, pointing the drone at the wasteland of concrete Michael had erected.

Michael ignored the sarcasm. “It’s a start, but it’s not enough.”

“What now? Please no more concrete. You already ruined the aesthetic of the place enough.”

“Shields. It’s high time I figured out how to make proper shields. Why not start with a shield I can manifest in here and use against any attack that manages to reach the Inner Space, and then work towards making it appear in the outside world as well?”

He set to work on the new problem with zeal. Despite his enthusiasm, however, days passed with Michael vacuuming all the resources Icarus was pulling from the asteroids and no success. The resources all ended up in literal piles of discarded designs and half-broken machines littering the place.

“We are no closer to cracking the problem,” Icarus said softly, as if careful not to upset Michael. It was not the first time he had said the same thing.

Indeed, if Michael wasn’t a disembodied consciousness, he was sure he would have exhibited the classic symptoms of sleep deprivation and the tail end of a manic episode. Certainly, the desire to vent his anger by breaking something was there. Instead, he grabbed the latest batch of failed designs and fed them to the Scrap Foundry so that at least some of them could be recycled back into usable materials.

“Why isn’t it working?” he asked with the soft voice of someone at their wit’s end.

“Why are you fixating on this?” asked Icarus. “Why not simply grow your power?”

“Because! Because… well, because if I can’t make something as simple as a fucking shield with sci-fi magical mumbo jumbo technology, then what? Not only did I already have a shield skill, but shields are like the staple of all space fiction! It should be easy.”

Icarus said nothing for a while, but Michael did notice that the AI had taken the mining drone on yet another ore run despite the Foundry being full of failed prototypes to process.

When the ship was far enough away, the AI spoke again. “Perhaps you could try another skill?”

“Like what?” Michael shot back.

“I dunno, perhaps something you have been spamming for days? Not. the. Shield.”

Michael’s mouth snapped shut. “If not the shield, then what have I been spamming for days? Huh?”

“The explosion, Michael.”

“Ah. Right.”

The monomaniacal focus, rekindled by a new goal that seemed much more within reach than the shield, lasted for four more days.

“No luck…”

Michael had long run out of rage and frustration, leaving only depression.

“And I have run out of asteroids to mine.”

“What?” asked Michael, “Really? Have I been at it that long?”

He squinted, activating his strange telescopic vision that was able to cross the vast distances of the inner space. There was nothing where the two asteroids had been. Not even a speck of dust was left.

“Say what,” Icarus said. “Why don’t you unlock a new asteroid for me? It will be a good distraction to take your mind off of things for a while.”

“Alright,” Michael conceded.

He fed the latest batch of failures to the Foundry and searched for a suitable asteroid among the faint outlines he could see against the blackness of the outer edge of his space. Right now, they were all unexplored, outside his metaphorical fog of war, and Icarus could not reach them with his drone. 

The AI had tried, but the drone was only able to go to places Michael had explored at least once, hence the request to unlock a new asteroid.

“Perhaps we have been thinking this whole skills business wrong,” Michael said as he flew towards an asteroid he thought could be interesting, Icarus following him with the drone.

“How so?”

“Well, so far I’ve been trying to create a machine that directs mana in ways that would produce a magical outcome. It was the logical approach, right? I mean, fractals did that, Johanne’s mandalas did that, even Travis’s cards are theorized to be conduits that shape the relevant magical energies into patterns, eliciting a magical outcome.”

“I see.”

“But what if,” Michael’s voice grew bolder, “that method no longer applies to me? What if what I need in here is actual sci-fi technobabble?”

“I don’t follow.”

Michael made hand gestures. Never mind that he had no body. “No magic. In here, mana is energy, like electricity. Only I can use like regular magic, but the machines only use it as a source of energy to extract work.”

“Right…” the AI said. Icarus clearly was not following.

“Whatever, it’s just a hunch.”

“Well, your magic system is quite peculiar. At least with what we have seen so far.”

“That it it. I’ll think about it some more after I’ve unlocked the asteroid for you.”