Chapter 52 Active Support (Patreon)

            Although the dungeon was just told that mages would soon come to his labyrinth, the dungeon had other things to worry about. For starters, after killing that tier-two warrior, the dungeon was expanding rather quickly. It wasn’t overwhelming to the dungeon because the dungeon’s area of influence wasn’t doubling; in fact, its area of influence only went up another ten percent. That said, thanks to converting electricity into essence and the various tier-one warriors the dungeon had taken down, and the constant supply of essence and mana beast that challenged the dungeon’s labyrinth, the dungeon’s area of influence was now one-third of a mile in diameter, and starting from ground level one mile down into the earth, and one mile and a quarter high.

            This height allowed the dungeon to see some amazing sights with its simple telescope. Out in the world, there were definitely at least two dungeons that rose at least a hundred miles into the air. The dungeon thought he saw movement around their top, so the dungeon had no choice but to assume these were the vacuum dungeon labyrinths. The dungeon assumed that the vacuum dungeon cores needed to touch vacuum, and to do that meant that the dungeon core had to have moved drastically from the time it was placed in its original starting point hundreds or thousands of years ago. This was comforting to the dungeon.

            The dungeon's new height also allowed him to see some interesting towns. That said, every town was fortified. Some to some extreme degrees. But with random essence and mana creatures out and about, it wasn’t a surprise. Almost every town he could see was near a labyrinth, and it appeared they used the labyrinths to draw essence and mana creatures away from their homes.

            The labyrinth's new height also allowed the dungeon to have a better look at the surrounding moons, although the dungeon has not even reached ten thousand feet yet so is still blinded by significant atmospheric interference. As far as the dungeon could tell, there were twelve moons with life orbiting the gas giant. The dungeon's telescope was too primitive to get a good look at their worlds, but the dungeon strongly suspected that if he could, he would find that they were covered in dungeons and fortified cities and towns. That wasn’t what was important to the dungeon, though. At his new height, he was getting a better sense of the strange orbits of the moons, and those orbits interfered with his long-term goals. One of those goals was to make the labyrinth at least a thousand miles high. The dungeon wanted his labyrinth to become a space bridge. With so many nearby moons with odd orbits there was a possibility that carbon nanotubes would not be strong enough to hold up the labyrinth, even if it was enhanced with essence, but there was another possibility. Active support.

            Active support simply meant using moving objects inside the structure to help the structure maintain its shape and in this case height. The dungeon had a lot of hurdles to overcome to make a full active support structure, but there was no time like the present to start the process. With that in mind, the dungeon changed the labyrinth's root system to be very similar to a subway system, where each root now becomes a circle. Since the goal was active support the dungeon adjusted the root system, the tunnels to begin spirriling around the trunk all the way to the top. That said the dungeon did not add the subway system to the branches so those continued acting as pathways to the outside of the dungeon.

            Once the tunnels were complete the dungeon laid down carbon nanotubes designed to carry electricity along these new circular tunnels, then added rails. Once the rails were complete the dungeon made subway cars for ever yone of the circular tunnels. These subway cars used up most of the dungeon's stock of copper to make the electrical motors for the cars, but the dungeon considered this a good first step of active support research. That said, the cars were empty. Although they could be powered by a battery monster, the dungeon chose to use nuclear power to keep them running. Long-term, the dungeon would have to decide whether using essence creatures as living batteries or nuclear power was better for active support but that wasn’t a decision the dungeon would make right away.

            Part of the reason why the dungeon was so focused on building the subway system was because he wanted to use it against the mages. Every single time the dungeon created something useful, the mages brought something that was able to shut down his new creation immediately. So, the labyrinth was going to fill the passages the mages had to go through with trains. Very fast electric trains. Yes, they would eventually morph into active supports, but the dungeon wanted to see how in the world a mage would deal with a hundred thousand-pound train car traveling at two hundred miles an hour.

            Why didn’t the dungeon build this earlier? It's simple. He really hadn’t thought about it until it realized its long term plans would need active support and this was a very early version of that.

            It only took the dungeon a week to make the tunnels and trains. In all honesty, it made them fairly quickly because they were by far the simplest things he had made in all the years he had been trapped on this world and also because the dungeon only needed to modify the tunnels slightly, so most of the work was already done.

            With that out of the way, the dungeon began working on what he thought would be a long-term project, metallic hydrogen. In his previous world, metallic hydrogen was thought to be a possibility for a room-temperature superconductor. The problem was that, on Earth at least, making metallic hydrogen was impossible with his world's current technology. If they ever did figure out how to make it, then it was thought that once it was a metal, it would not dissolve into gas and be able to survive at tempertures higher than that of room temperature. Perhaps much higher. If it was a superconductor, as theorized, then they thought they could change the world, going from the age of electricity to the age of superconductors.

            The dungeon's first attempt to make metallic hydrogen failed. The dungeon found that normal hydrogen atoms did not link in the orderly way that metal should. The dungeon wasn’t surprised his first try failed. What surprised the dungeon was that his second try succeeded.

            On the dungeon's second try, he made hydrogen atoms with two electrons instead of one, which are hydrogen atoms known as anions. Then the dungeon connected eight hydrogen anions together in a cube, and was shocked when it was stable. The dungeon then went through the tedious process of making billions of these cubs and forming them together into one large sheet of metal. When the dungeon saw that it was stable, he connected electric cords to it, and was delighted by its first property. When electricity ran through the hydrogen metal sheet, it began to float.

            When the dungeon saw this, it had to make sure it wasn’t floating just because hydrogen metal was so light. With that in mind, it put a hundred pounds of iron on top of the sheet while it still had power going through it, and the sheet of hydrogen stood solid in the air. The dungeon then cut off the power and watched as everything fell hard on the floor. This proved that metallic hydrogen was a room temperature superconductor as it floated against a magnetic field in something called the Meissner effect. In this case the magnetic field it floated against was the moon that they were on.

            Metallic hydrogen was very important to the dungeon as theoretically, he could replace copper with it. Although metallic hydrogen should produce magnetic fields significantly stronger than copper could, at this point, the dungeon didn’t understand electronics well enough to make full use of them, so at the moment, the ease of gathering hydrogen was more important to the dungeon than its superconductor abilities.

            That said, the dungeon had a quick experiment he wanted to try. The dungeon first created a battery bear and then created a metallic hydrogen ring grafted into the paws of the bear. Then created, a metallic hydrogen frame grafted into the back of the battery bear to support the bear's weight. It took a few minutes for the battery bear to gather enough essence to discharge, but when he did, the bear began to float after a few minutes of testing, the bear figured out how to control his discharges so that he could move around intentionally.

            The dungeon was so excited about his new find he told the imp, “When the mages come, they won’t know what hit them.” 

            The imp said, “Good. If they survive, then they will be better prepared for the path of immortality, if they die, then they were unworthy.”

Authors note- I do not know how many more chapters I have left in "The Great Black Tree Labyrinth", which is the current title. It could be ten, or twenty, more or less.

That said the series following this will likely be a story where earth has become pretty advanced thanks to metalic hydrogen, and the research and development section of a weapons manufacturing company named Sloth industries (R&D internal name, not corperations name, probably make that a boring name) accidiently opens a diminsional rift into a cultivation world, and is very impressed by how outgunned they are by everyone who has entered the foundation establishment realm, then immeditly starts experimenting on the locals to figure out how to copy, market, and sell these abilities on future earth without bringing problems how with them.