The infinity dungeon 195

Chapter 195

Michael was left free to roam the Seedship as he pleased. The doors would open automatically for him, and the walls responded to his magic intuitively. With Icarus’ help, he even managed to access what passed for the ship’s AI, although he doubted the Tree-Alfyr could have predicted that.

The ship’s intelligence was odd and alien, slow and ponderous. It communicated using emotions and blurry images, with a weight that betrayed its massive scope and ancient agelessness. It was, predictably, confused and in pain. Even in its state, it still stubbornly tended to its inhabitants, even as its body decayed and failed.

The elves gave Michael a wide berth. They mostly avoided him, letting him do whatever he wanted. Most of them were tall and slender, thinner than most humans. They walked with weightless grace despite the almost full-G gravity of the ship. Yet their expressions were strange, ranging from dreamy and detached to concerned and lost in thought.

They all had white hair and very pale skin, save for the Tree-Alfyr whose skin had been a healthy tan despite all its wrinkles and his hair had been blonde and long. Perhaps it was the lack of real sunlight, Michael thought.

“What can we do to help them?” he wondered out loud as he walked through a long, empty corridor.

There was darkness ahead, and the smell of rot. He wondered what the challenge even was about. Infy had given him no information to work with. Regardless of the challenge, though, his desire was to save this doomed ship. Thoughts of magic and challenges and rewards be damned.

He sat down a few feet away from the unlit area. In the distance, he could make out the outline of a door sealing away the Corruption, except the rot was spreading through it. Tendrils of dark ooze were already crawling on the walls of the corridor, reaching halfway across the unlit length. They didn’t advance fast enough to be seen with the naked eye, but just like shadows moving as the sun drew its path in the sky over the span of a whole day, they too moved. If Michael looked away for long enough, he could see that something had subtly shifted.

Crossing his legs, Michael closed his eyes.

“Welcome back to your Inner Space,” announced Icarus, sounding like an amused butler.

Michael’s consciousness floated a small distance away from the cluster of collectors, batteries and the Scrap Foundry. Even as he watched, the Foundry took all the spare mana regeneration from the collectors and used it to fuel its work, grabbing chunks of debris with its spider legs and chucking them into the forge at its center. Behind it, a trail of refined ore floated in space like a growing debris field, quickly losing momentum as the stillness of the Inner Space took hold of it.

“Looks disorganized,” Michael thought. But now was not the time to do neat things, or to build a control station where he could spawn rather than floating in space.

Now was the time to get to work.

The first order of business was restocking the Scrap Foundry. It was almost out of stuff to process, requiring another run to the asteroid field. On the way there, Michael had the time to think about many things.

Yet, his thoughts always gravitated back to the feeling of extreme dread he felt the moment the Tree-Alfyr had turned a wall of the Seedship transparent. Real deep space was different from the strange metaphysical existence of his Inner Space.

Real space was dangerous. Vast, sterile, empty. The stars that shone were far away and unreachable. The unforgiving reality of it was a whole Seedship full of elves: thirty thousand, five hundred and eighty six of them, doomed to die as their only lifeline rotted and disintegrated into goop beneath their feet.

Thirty thousand, five hundred and eighty six elves and a human, now.

The asteroid field slowly came into view. From this distance, he could only make out the features of the one asteroid he had already explored, while the others appeared as growing dots that became more detailed the closer he got.

Behind him, back at his budding base, he saw that the Foundry had run out of material and had shut itself off.

“First asteroid is pretty much barren,” Icarus said. “The Foundry could process the stone into something usable, but I think it would be better to mine the other asteroids first. It’s not like you have a shortage.”

Michael agreed. Before him, even though they were far away from each other, the asteroids extended out like a gigantic ring that slowly curved inwards in the distance, before it was lost to sight. Moving to a large asteroid close to the mined-out one, he commanded his magic and started stripping it of all resources.

Back at base, he left the stuff at the Foundry, grabbed the processed ores and quickly built a new Collector and Battery.

He breathed the surge of power in, then breathed out. “Feels good.”

Then he was back to the real world. Blinking the tears out of his eyes, he got up and stretched. As he did the exercises to loosen up his body, lamenting the lack of healing magic, he tried to peer into the dark corridor to see how far the Corruption had gotten while he worked.

The closest of the tendrils of rot was almost at the open door that separated the lit part of the corridor from the dark part. Getting close to the door, Michael watched it inch closer and closer, its movement now visible with the naked eye, until it reached the intersection and started turning towards the door.

Wood groaned and creaked, then the door snapped shut in Michael’s face. He jumped backwards, startled by the suddenness of the action, then watched from a distance as several elves rushed to seal the two halves of the door.

“And thus we lose another piece of ourselves.”

Michael turned around to see the Tree-Alfyr leaning against his staff. With a wave of his hand, the older elf made the wall transparent, sending a wave of vertigo and sudden dread shooting through Michael’s body like liquid fire.

The Tree-Alfyr peered out into the terrible vastness of space. Unlike Michael, the elf seemed to draw solace and peace from the sight.

“And Eden grows no closer.”

Michael thought about magic. Space and time and the nuclear thing in his Inner Space. He thought about technology, Sitea's shield and the Dungeon’s portals. He thought about how the vacuum of space outside reminded him of the terrors of Truth, except that Truth had been his while space was not. If he had to say it was someone’s, then he would say it was the Dungeon’s.

Forcing himself to gaze at the unmoving, sterile stars of space, Michael joined the Tree-Alfyr in his gazing. After a few minutes spent in silence, he spoke, feeling the weight of anticipation and the knowledge that what he was about to say could not be unsaid.

“Do you know of the Infinity Dungeon?”

The Tree-Alfyr looked stunned. “What of it?”

Michael considered what to say next, even as the old elf’s intense gaze tried to drill holes in his face.

“Why the Seedship? Why Eden?” he asked in the end.

The Tree-Alfyr sighed, turned to look back at the outside, and slowly whispered. “Our planet turned against us. Our sole refuge, our oasis. We elves can live for ten thousand years, you know? For a million generations we lived in harmony with our planet, tending to it like the garden it was. We cared for nature, and nature cared for us. Equilibrium, peace, the natural order of things.”

There was a moment of silence.

“Change happened. Sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly. Volcanoes rose and changed the landscape. Ice ages came and went. We always adapted, finding a new harmony. That was the way of things. Never did we need to discover the ways of science and technology. Mankind had done so before our time in the sun, and all that was left of them by the time we opened our eyes to the world was ashes and ruins.”

The Tree-Alfyr turned his full focus towards Michael. “We preserved those ruins, the scattered records of a past that was no more, so that we might gaze upon them and realize the folly of our predecessors, the former rulers of our world that were no more. We thought we were better than them, and for 7.2 billion years… we were.”

“Oh,” Michael muttered.

“When the sun started to change, we thought we could reach a new harmony. We had done so countless times before, so why was this time different? A hundred generations tried and failed, until one day we opened the frozen remains of humanity and turned to the wretched science that had failed a whole civilization before ours. We learned of terrible things on that day. Of horrible truths. Our eyes were opened to the stupidity of our ways, and in the pain and trauma of the realization we failed to see that humanity had destroyed itself in less than a million years from its appearance on the face of our planet while we had endured and thrived for billions of years!”

“No, all we saw was impending doom. Then hope. Our telescopes found Eden. In its pursuit, we abandoned our ways. Do not let the looks of the Seedship fool you, son of man. We ransacked our dying planet to carve in blood and tears and wood a feeble hope of salvation. The inevitable Corruption followed us here, but it was born of our terrible desire to save ourselves rather than let nature claim us, as the cycle of life would have wanted.”

Silence descended upon the two of them.

“I came here via the Dungeon.” Michael said.

The Tree-Alfyr’s face fell. He stammered unintelligible words, leaning on his staff like a tired old man.

“What fools we were,” he rasped.

“The Dungeon,” Michael said, “you said nothing about it in your story.”

“I thought it was obvious,” said the old elf, eyes vacant and looking at the empty space outside. He tapped his crystal-tipped staff, making it glow green.

“That’s how you gained magic,” Michael muttered, understanding now dawning on his face.

“We paid a terrible price for it. I thought we were done paying but… tell me, son of man. Are we now inside the terrible labyrinth of stone and sorrow and blood? Are we inside the Dungeon?”