Chapter 1: A Modestly Sized Dungeon
A small crystal, no bigger than a fingernail, drifted in the pure blackness of the void. Nothing exists in the void naturally. The only things that can be found are drifting pieces of destroyed elements, garbage from other worlds, planes, or fragments of long-dead creatures. And here is where our story begins, as we focus on this small shard of a once-live dungeon core, floating in the void.
Dungeon cores are not normally found in the void, they are naturally occurring lay lines evolutions, bringing mana into worlds. They are meant to enrich the surrounding environment, as well as convert void fragments and chaotic essence into mana, thus pouring it out into the world. Lesser dungeon cores, live off of the mana in the world and merely diversify the mana types into more elemental mana. Thus, this small fragment is a tiny, useless shard of a greater dungeon core. It has been drifting through the void for an uncountable amount of time, without any change. However, this moment is when a change is about to occur.
A small silver bell with a flickering light of a soul attached to it drifted closer and closer to the dungeon crystal fragment. This was a trinket once used by an intelligent race, now forgotten by time, and is no more than trash. The silver bell collided with the dungeon crystal fragment gently and a significant change happened. The flickering soul bonded with the dungeon crystal fragment, melting the silver bell into liquid metal and solidifying it into a new form of core, never before seen in the universe. The result was a clear gem of pure crystal in the shape of a ball. It thrummed with a soft light of sentience, glowing with the ability to absorb the scattered chaotic energies, creating a source of mana for itself.
Strangely, this dungeon core could retain mana within itself, exactly like a mana core of a sentient race. It continued to condense more and more mana as time passed, growing bigger and bigger. Another 2000 years passed in this way, and the dungeon core has grown from the size of a tennis ball to the size of a basketball. It retained a small compact size, but its density was abnormally high, resulting in a very strange property. It was as dense as a black hole, but it did not act in such a way. It didn't affect gravity in any way, due to the density being made of mana and some special properties of the core. If someone tried to move it, it would be as if they tried to lift a planet.
At this moment, the core finally gained awareness.
...
'Where... Who...' the dungeon's thoughts echoed inside its own mind.
It recalled fragments of memory from the soul it absorbed. It was a memory of a great mage, who attempted to break through his world's source wall to travel to a higher world. He had been a genius, unrivaled in his era in the subject of magic and the elements of mana. Unfortunately, he didn't suspect that beyond his world's source wall was the void, which tore his body and soul apart the moment he entered. His last moments were of horror and disbelief. He had been a classic Icarus, he flew too close to the sun and his wings melted, killing him in his arrogance.
'Icarus is a fitting description of that story.' The dungeon thought as he recalled from the fragment.
The dungeon flipped through the memories in the soul fragment like the pages in a book. It contained decades of research on mana, magic, transformations, and techniques of one of the greatest Archmages of that era. It was a wealth of knowledge that the dungeon core devoured greedily in its early curiosity after waking up. The archmage was a recluse, he had rarely found friends in his life. He focused his life on his life's work: universal shift. This spell was his search for worlds beyond the planes, he hoped to connect to them and open a new era of magic exploration. The world of his had long lost the wonder of exploration and awe of magic. It had been fully explored, conquered for generations, and everything was within humanity's control.
It had bored him to death. He felt that humanity had begun to stagnate, deteriorate, and turn to debase passions due to the feeling of safety that it provided. He hoped that adventure and drive could be brought into a new era from his Magnum Opus: Universal Shift. Unfortunately, he died. However, the dungeon core absorbed some of this soul's attributes after his death. It absorbed the man's want for adventure, trial, and drive. It absorbed his hate of debasing passions: lust, laziness, and slavery.
From absorbing all these things, the dungeon core formed its own sense of self. It took what it needed to do this from that old archmage's soul fragment. Now, a new miracle has been created in the universe: One of a kind, sentient, dungeon core. No, it probably can't be called a dungeon core, it also acts as a magic core. For now, it decided it would consider itself a different kind of dungeon core.
'Should I name myself?' It thought to itself.
Dungeons don't usually have names, they are usually named after their location. An example is The Twin Ocean Dungeon. It was a dungeon between two oceans. But this dungeon had no location, it was not anywhere that it could reference since it was in the void. With this thought in mind, the dungeon felt like it had a good idea. If it can't find its location, he could just make his own location.
The dungeon recalled the magic and mana manipulation that the old archmages' memories had. He then stirred his mana and released a large-scale transformation spell. A large amount of blue mana flowed out of his dungeon core and transformed into the earth, rocks, and gravel. The mana seemed endless, it poured out into the surrounding void, solidifying a set of earth and land underneath his orb body. He realized that it was much easier to manipulate mana than what the archmage's memories detailed. The spell he was using didn't even need to be activated, he just needed to will his mana to transform and it acted as if a part of his will.
'Perhaps I am a mana creature.' The dungeon thought.
The dungeon continued to push out and build more and more earth. He then added the necessary elements to the atmosphere from the archmage's memory. He added a thing naturally occurring gravity and made his land in the shape of a round planet. He added wind mana, fire mana, earth mana, and water mana into the atmosphere from his mana core. The huge influx of elemental mana began to alter and change the terrain on his planet. Large areas of the planet's crust became like molten rock, and larger areas of water and ice formed. Large mountains spring up and wind carved out large canyons with tornadoes and great gusts of wind stirred up large surnames on the expanses of oceans that appeared.
The dungeon core felt the land under him going through many changes and he was a bit surprised. He realized he might have accidentally released too much elemental mana into the atmosphere and the planet had absorbed it greedily. He spread his consciousness across the planet and deep into the earth. The soil contents were incredibly rich, the oceans were bright with water mana, the volcanoes were flowing smoothly, and the earth's plates trembled with excitement. The entire planet had absorbed the amount of mana and shrunk. It grew denser and smaller.
'Too small.' The dungeon core thought.
It transformed more of its mana into elemental mana and released it into the atmosphere as well as transformed more land, growing the planet's size. He continued to do this once every 10 years, allowing the lands to absorb the elemental mana he released, before adding more layers of earth on top of it. During all this, the dungeon core kept himself on top of all the planet's layers, he did not want to bury himself inside his own planet.
After 160 years of continuous growth, the dungeon core stopped growing its planet under him. The planet was now a ridiculous size with a radius of 40,000 miles, which is 8 times the size of the earth. It now had settled down in its layers upon layers of mana-rich lands. The skies had a layered atmosphere and the entire planet felt alive. The dungeon core considered its work carefully. It looked over the planet carefully and felt satisfied in its mind.
'It is missing its sun.' The dungeon thought silently.
It remembered that the archmage's planet had day-night cycles and wanted to imitate that. A large amount of mana funneled out of the dungeon core and into the void. He tried to create a large sun in the same way that it had created the planet, but it didn't seem to work. Each time it tried to make a kind of 'land sun' with a lot of fire mana at the center, but it felt like this was wrong. The dungeon core pondered in silence with its experiments. It continued to try and transform different mana types from the archmages memory fragment. But the experiments were slow. He didn't want to continue to feed mana to his sun to keep his planet bright.
After 2 years of experiments, the dungeon core came across the archmages memories on dungeon cores. He recalled that greater dungeon cores could intake chaotic essence to generate mana. It was an important part of the planet's energy intake. He studied the knowledge of the greater dungeon cores to try and create them artificially, but he couldn't do it. Mana couldn't transform into a dungeon core, that creates mana. It seemed to be a once way of transformation. The dungeon core felt a little sad after this realization. Perhaps it would be impossible for him to create a sun that self-sustained itself.
He tried one more method to create a greater dungeon core. He formed his mana into a sharp mana blade and chipped off the surface of his mana orb. The chip was so tiny, but the amount of power contained inside it was overly abundant. He hurriedly focused on repairing the damage to himself, before experimenting with the chip of his crystal. The chip was further divided into multiple pieces, one larger one the size of a third of a penny, and 41 other pieces the size of dust.
The dungeon core took the larger piece and forced light and fire mana into it. It glowed and slowly rounded out into a tiny marble. He sent it up into the void, where it continued to grow in size and emit bright light in all directions. He then took the second largest piece and filled it with light and water mana. It also formed into a small orb, which he put out in the void to act as the moon. Then he covered each of these new creations with lots and lots of land, making them bigger and bigger. After he finished with both the sun and moon, a strange mutation happened to the mana in them. The land surrounding the sun and moon cores merged with them. They became a part of the sun and moon, respectively. The light and fire mana of the sun merged into sun mana. And the light and water mana of the moon merged into moon mana. The new forms of mana brightly lit up the surface of the planet in day and night cycles.
The dungeon core was surprised at the newly formed mana types and studied them for a while. It was pleased with these newly created dungeon cores, adding new variety to its planet. It now had day and night cycles, just like the archmage's memories. It felt good. It felt right.
The dungeon core then took the remaining 40 pieces of its shell and created a variety of combinations of lesser dungeon cores to enrich the environment around the planet. Each of these dungeon cores would combine many of the four element mana and the two celestial mana to create new types of mana around the world. These included: Wood mana, life mana, dark mana, light mana, death mana, poison mana, metal mana, ice mana, steam mana, lightning mana, and many others.
In addition to these mana types, the lesser dungeon cores also began to instinctively build their own dungeons to protect themselves. It was a little funny when the dungeon core watched the small parts of itself become independent and build its own little houses. They burrowed deep into the earth instinctively and didn't retain any consciousness. Of course, these lesser dungeon cores didn't have any kind of thinking and couldn't create or attract any creatures to defend themselves.
Dungeons usually act instinctively and attract creatures to protect themselves in order for organisms to grow and utilize the high mana environment. But since the dungeon core didn't create any creatures and there were no creatures on the planet, all the lesser dungeons could do was alter the terrain in their dungeons. The light mana dungeons produced beautiful reflective environments. The ice mana dungeons produced freezing cold glaciers to house them. The dark mana dungeons produced pitch-black ores and environments. The lightning mana dungeons positioned themselves in high areas on mountain peaks, constantly being struck with lightning and storms. All the terrain began to change with the dungeons settling in.
The overall richness of the planet was far higher in quality than the archmage's old world. Mana was constantly being enriched and sent in from all over and two greater dungeons also existed in the form of the sun and moon. The archmages world only had a single greater dungeon, which was studied by the royal family and his connections. It was kept under complete control to keep their world filled with mana. But this world had two of them. And it even had a dungeon core that created everything. A dungeon core that was a rank higher than the two greater dungeons it had made, from chipping a piece off its own body.
The dungeon core fell into deep thought. It could create greater dungeons from its pieces, and lesser dungeons from the specks of dust and debris from its shell. It was a rank higher than greater dungeons. But there was no known rank for a dungeon higher than that. It couldn't consider itself a dungeon then. Dungeons could not create a planet. Dungeons could not create lesser dungeon cores. Dungeons could not think. He couldn't be called a dungeon, even if he felt like he was. He had created a planet and the dungeon cores around it. It was a new plane for explorers like the old archmage. An outer plane as he would have called it. It felt a desire to name itself, to proclaim itself different from a dungeon core.
'The planet must have a name.' He thought.
'Artronia, it shall be called Artronia and so shall I be.' It declared to itself.
At that moment, a bolt of power came from within the planar core. Its mana deepened into a golden color. It transformed from a dungeon core completely. It was now a named intelligent creature and its mana core had evolved. The mana of the entire planet of Artronia shook as it was filled with glittering golden specs and sparkles. The air became thinner but denser with golden mana strings. The varying mana types became brighter and more distinct. The earth and planet shook as if crying out of joy at its naming. The sun and moon mana also jumped in density from the evolution.
Artronia felt inside himself and within his core. He saw the golden mana inside his core, which was different from any memories of the blue mana in the archmage's memories. It was thick in quality and it felt extremely comfortable. His thoughts had cleared up much further and now he felt as if he could truly think.
'This planet needs more. It needs life, creatures, and more.' He thought to himself.
He made his mana create a pedestal underneath him. Lifting himself up high into the atmosphere. He transformed a large land and infused gravity mana into the bottom of it, to make it float in perfect balance. The gravity mana transformed the normal rocks and minerals into a dark purple ore. It glowed with lavender light as the island floated steadily in the atmosphere.
'This place is nice. It is good.' Artronia thought to himself.
This island was similar to the archmage's memories of his dream home. Unfortunately, the mana was not thick enough to support such a floating island in his world, here, however, was a different story. Artronia then took some naturally formed silver ore from the planet and pumped it full of water mana. He inscribed it with a magic array he created himself, transforming the silver ore into a gateway to the plane of water. Water poured out like a flood from the now azure rock. Artronia carved out an area for the water to flow down so a river would form and a waterfall would cause the water to disperse in the air. Water flowed down from the floating island beautifully. It looked like an island of paradise.
'Next... what to do next. I want to add life, but I don't know how to do that.' Artronia thought.
He could manipulate the elements and the planet easily. He could make dungeons because he could use a piece of himself, but creating life was not easy. He could do the other things because he had a reference already from the rich memories of the archmage or he could just mutate the pieces of his core. But he didn't think he could make something from nothing.
Artronia thought about what he should do until he remembered that he could just pull in some lifeforms from the planes as he did from the plane of water. It could try and retrace the universal shift spell that the archmage made, to reconnect to other worlds. Then he could use them as a reference, study their physiology, and mutate them into what he wanted.
'Perfect. I just need to combine the planar gate spell with the universal shift coordinates.' He thought.
...
Another 400 years passed while Artronia played with the spell combinations. It was not an easy task to try and make the universal gate spell he was hoping for. The archmage had spent his life researching his magnum opus, if it was so easy to modify it he would have been a fool. Throughout this time, the lands changed and became denser with saturated mana. The sun and moon mana pushed in new mana, while the lesser dungeon cores converted it into other mana types. The world naturally expanded and grew 100 miles in size of its radius. The heavier saturation of the mana types caused new transformations in the land and metals. New metals appeared from the mana's influence, new rocks appeared, landmarks, land formations, land biomes, and the oceans adjusted slightly from the change in the land.
72 continents formed as the land masses drifted apart and settled. Artronia remained on his floating island all this time. He was finishing adding a final piece of a ritual to connect the previous world of the archmage and the planet of himself. He used a variety of different metals and space mana to condense a special alloy that could process the full level of the spell. This spell would consume about one-fifth of his mana, which is a lot considering his extremely dense mana reserves.
'Finally finished. Now let's begin.'
Artronia pushed his mana into the ritual rings and the glyphs lit up from his golden mana. The surroundings pulsed as the power of the ritual gateway tore open space between worlds. The mana kept swirling and swirling. Condensing further and further, as if a powerful explosion of power should occur at the final moment.
*SWISH FWUUSHHH IIIINNNNNNNGGGGGG*
A loud ringing rang out as the spell finished working and the mana disappeared into the ritual.
...
West Continent, Blaze Forest outside the Capital City of the Gorgon Empire, Reston.
*SNAPP IIINNNNNGGGGG*
A loud clap of high-pitched thunder rang out followed by a loudly growing ringing in the area above the forest. All the animals and the hunters inside it were instantly alerted. It was loud and it seemed to come from all directions. The rabbits, owls, squirrels, deer, moose, and human hunters immediately felt a sense of danger and began to leave the forest in a hurry.
"Come on Doug! Get your legs moving!! Something isn't right, the animals are running for their lives!" A hunter wearing leather had a set of arrows and a bow in his hands.
He hurriedly grabbed his friend who was staring at the stampeding animals of the forest coming towards him in a daze. Every kind of animal was running away instinctively and it was a strange sight. Even the insects could be seen with them, buzzing noisily. The man called Doug shook himself from his trance and sprinted after his friend. The entire forest was running as fast as possible, goosebumps formed on the backs of the hunter's necks, and their hair stood on end.
*INNNNNGGGGGG*
The ringing grew louder and louder and spread over the stampeding group of forest life. It stretched passed them further and further and the space around them began to vibrate intensely. The air grew thin and the animals slowed down until they all passed out from oxygen deprivation. The hunters gasped for air, their eyes dimming as they looked into each other's eyes in panic.
*INNNNNNNGGGGGG ZIIIP*
With one last crescendo, the ringing ended and the entire Blaze Forest was wrapped in a purple layer of mana, shrunk and shoved into a tiny hole the size of a pipe, and then disappeared. All that was left in the area of the Blaze Forest next to the city of Reston, was a deep and creepily smooth crater. It was like a perfect ice cream scoop dug out of the Blaze Forest, leaving a smooth crater of rock behind.
Two boys dropped their wooden toys with their mouths wide open in front of the crater. They had watched the entire forest disappear before their eyes. They hurriedly ran back to their families in fear and excitement. This was a rare day for the empire. A day that was filled with mystery.
...
Artronia watched as the ringing finished and the universal gate spell finished. The ores and materials for the spell were used up and the ores disintegrated into nothingness. Instead, now a large forest appeared across the island, the Blaze Forest. Artronia was a bit confused about the result this time. He didn't want to bring such a large landmass over, he only wanted a small sample of land. But he got much more than he anticipated. He quickly scanned the forest from the archmages planet for lifeforms. He quickly found them, he found deer, insects, squirrels, rabbits, and even a few human hunters. However, there was a problem, they were all dead.
That's right, after traveling through the universal gate spell, all the lifeforms died. Even the forest trees had withered and Artronia was a bit sad, he didn't mean for this to happen. But he couldn't do anything about it, he could only make do with what happened. He spent the next few years studying the bodies of the animals and lifeforms from the Blaze forest. He was able to use the seeds from the forest to replant a variety of plants and trees. He didn't influence any of them into anything specific when he grew them. With all these corpses, he was able to study the difference between plant life and animal life. After 4 years, he successfully revitalized a flower seed from the forest. Strangely enough, the flower changed immediately from the dense mana environment of Artronia. It formed its own small mana circuits within itself, breathing the mana with ease.
After his first success, he moved on to recreate the trees of the Blaze forest from their seeds so that they could grow here on Artronia. He managed to recreate all the plants of the forest from their seeds within 27 years. All of them were far stronger than their parents, each of them had mana veins flowing within them and strengthened them with different effects.
He took these plants, trees, and seeds, and spread them out across the continents. He made sure that all the lesser dungeons noticed them so that they could copy them and mutate them for their dungeons. After spreading them all over, Artronia felt that these things were good for his planet. He made a note to check on their variety after a few years. Next, he focused on recreating the insects, then the small forest critters, then the small predators, and on and on up the food chain. He had to take extra care to add further adjustments to the animals. They all needed mana veins to survive in Artronia, unlike their evolutionary counterparts that did not have the ability to use mana.
In addition to each animal's mana veins, Artronia felt a bit more creative. He added a small gene to their make up so that although they did not have a full mana core, like sentient creatures, they would have a small mana shard that formed at the back of their brain. With this, they could naturally gain and use mana on their own, perhaps one day they could be considered a sentient group and evolve a full mana core.
Artronia was quite happy with this idea. He watched the animals roam around the continents from his island. He even kept a few animals and plants on his island here. This was his test ground and garden in which all species could be found on his planet. From time to time, he would play with the wind rabbits by moving the mana in a small twister of wind to chase them. His world was getting more and more full, but now he needed some sentient races.
He glanced at the human corpses he had been studying and scanned them with his mental power. He could see the small mana cores in them above the heart, but they were no longer filled with mana. The sad part was, he couldn't find a way to recreate the humans here. They were missing something, or their mana cores just couldn't handle the golden mana on Artronia. He had already tried a dozen times, with each experiment ending in a complete disintegration of the bodies. He felt like he wasn't ready to recreate the humans just yet, he needed to find what was missing. Perhaps he could try to create a few races on his own.
Thus, Artronia began to make his first two sentient races on his planet. He used the human body to detail the designs for mana veins and mana core interactions. And then he took some inspiration from the forest lizards and butterflies he had recreated. He spent day after day experimenting as time passed slowly. He gathered up all his information and prepared.
After 10 years of research, he was finally ready to finish creating his first race of Artronia. The reason he was able to do this, was because of the mutant sun and moon mana. He mapped out two different races that could gather and transform mana based on the moon and sun mana. It produced a special kind of the core, different from the human mana core. The human mana core was generic, meaning that all kinds of mana could pass through it. Human's were not limited to any spell's spell types, and this was why the attributeless mana from Artronia was the only mana that could be used to form their cores. It was too powerful and thus could not be used until he discovered how to handle it.
These new cores were formed with reference to the human cores and the sun and moon mana from the environment. The races with these cores would be incredibly talented with respective mana and be enhanced during the respective day or night cycle. However, they wouldn't be able to use other kinds of mana for now. This was the best Artronia could figure out at the moment, but he still felt that it was good enough for his first try.
Two ritual outlines filled with unique ores once again were lined up on the island. Artronia waited until it was at the perfect moment of sunset before he began his work. He stirred up his massive reserves of golden mana and started the magic ritual. The afterglow of the sunset lit up the runes on one ritual circle with bright red sunlight and the light blue moonlight of the moon, lit up the runes on the other ritual circle. Fourteen bodies formed in each circle. The mana condensed and burned brightly as Artronia conducted it like an opera conductor. After ten minutes, two circular pulses signaled the end of the ritual and the birth of the two new races.
On the left, stood 14 small humanoid creatures. They were around two feet tall and had large and beautiful butterfly-like wings. The moonlight shined off the wings as the moon rose up into the night. These look like small humans, with wings. They hovered elegantly in the air, their bodies light, carried by their wings. Half of them were male, and half of them were female.
On the right stood 14 larger humanoids. They had deep red skin and their veins flowed hot blood like the sun. Even at night, their veins naturally shed the light their blood produced on their surroundings. They stood tall, around 7 feet, and their bodies with like humans with dark red skin. On their backs, they had a set of single-row black scales, which flowed down to their feet.
"Greetings my creatures," Artronia said. He condensed his mana to make his voice heard by them.
The 28 creatures looked at him but didn't understand what he said. They were looking around curiously, like newborn babies.
Artronia realized he had forgotten that they wouldn't understand. He accidentally used the common language he had in the memories from the archmage. Of course, they were just born, they couldn't possibly know the language. So he projected his mental meaning into their minds so they could understand.
'Greetings my creations,' Artronia said mentally.
He turned to the left group and decided on their race name.
'You are to be known as the Fae. '
The 14 humans with wings flew around happily after hearing their race name. Their cores lit up and condensed, recognizing the name from their maker. Their eyes focused on Artronia with happiness and joy after receiving the racial name.
He turned to the right group and did the same thing.
'You are to be known as the Yuel. '
The 14 tall humans lowered their eyes in acceptance, almost like a bow. The bright blood could be seen visibly pumping faster from excitement, but it could not be seen in their expressions. Their eyes and blood were honest enough, revealing their excitement and happiness at receiving a racial name. Their cores also condensed, recognizing the name given by their maker.
'Now, go down and multiply yourselves. You are my first creatures.' Artronia projected his commands to his new creatures with pride.
The 28 humanoids were gently swept off the island and placed on the ground below with Artronia's manipulation of the wind mana. Artronia felt fulfilled now that he finally had his own sentient creatures. He felt tired and now, he wanted to try to rest. He calmed his mind into a meditation-like state until his consciousness dimmed healthily. He entered his own version of sleep peacefully.
CREATORS' THOUGHTS 
DaoistHn8PLZ
DaoistHn8PLZ Have some idea about my story? Comment it and let me know.
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone