Chapter 67 Inspiration (Patreon)

            The dungeon was thrilled with his gains after he killed the tier two mages. After their deaths, the dungeon’s area of influence grew another mile and a quarter taller, and a third of a mile deeper into the earth. The mana they released was massive. If the dungeon’s area of influence had not been growing quickly and steadily from the electricity from his nuclear power plant, he would have likely been knocked out for a decade as he tried to adjust to the massive new information. Instead, he felt euphoria from all the mana, and something akin to a headache from all the new information he was processing.

            Even though the dungeon wasn’t knocked out, he still had to process the massive amounts of new information from his expanded area of influence, and that took a few weeks. Once he could organize his thoughts about the expanded view he had, he was able to go over the new knowledge he gained from the mages, and that knowledge was impressive.

            His first gain was finding the mana channel patterns that let them draw mana channels in the air. He wasn’t surprised when he found that every type of mana used a different mana channel pattern to do the same job, that said it was obvious that the mages had worked hard to make the mana channels as efficient and small as possible, if not individually then as a group, as some of the mana channels seemed to be larger than necessary but their size allowed the mana channels the benefit of avoiding each other. The efficiency wasn’t what was important to the dungeon though; this knowledge would allow the dungeon to create his own version of mages, and also allow his radio humans to begin working on their own spells… at least for earth, wind, and electricity.

            Although he would allow his humans to use draw essence channels, he had no interest in putting them into combat situations with mages of this moon. The mages of this moon had hundreds of thousands of years of history to call upon for their spells, not to mention that they had significantly more types of manas with which to craft spells. Between their ability to heal and cast haste, the dungeon’s radio humans would always be too weak to fight them. Instead, the dungeon hoped access to spell creation would make his people smarter and more creative to help him with his long-term goal.

            Although the direct benefits from killing the mages were immense, one indirect benefit could significantly outweigh them in the long term. After the tier-two mages died, a tier-three mage showed up and continuously folded space within the dungeon’s area of influence. More importantly, the mage used folding space to move the dungeon's LIVING essence creatures, allowing the dungeon to gather significantly more information on folding space than ever before. Although the dungeon was dazed at the time, the dungeon had a perfect memory, and as often as he wanted to, he could look back and watch as space itself was pushed, pulled, folded, warped, and twisted, with unmatched clarity thanks to his living essence creatures being in the middle of the turbulence of warped space. As an added bonus, the tier-three mage had some sort of bottle that was much bigger on the inside, and in fact, it was so large on the inside that the dungeon could not see all of it, despite his essence creatures being pulled in. What the dungeon could see, though, was how cubic miles of space were crammed into a small ten-inch bottle, and how this folded space interacted with regular space.

            Back in the dungeon’s home world, NASA had written papers on something called an Alcubierre drive. This drive theoretically worked by contracting space in front of the spacecraft and expanding space behind it like a bubble. This would theoretically allow a craft to move faster than the speed of light. In fact, nature itself used stretching space to move galaxies faster than the speed of light, as the observable universe the dungeon was from was almost a hundred billion light years big. Strangely, stretching space wasn’t just scientifically theoretical; it was actually a religious doctrine among some Christians, as their Bible said God stretched the heavens several times.

            NASA theorized that you would need exotic matter that had negative mass to work. As far as the dungeon could remember, they had no idea what that matter would look like, but the dungeon was pretty sure that the energy that the mages used was negative mass. Instead of using negative mass to move things far faster than the speed of light, they used it to take thousand-mile steps, and to make bottles bigger on the inside. After a moment of consideration the dungeon had to admit that if the average person on his world were given a chance to choose between faster than light speed travel which would take half a decade to get to a dead star system, or having a bottle, car, or house that was bigger on the inside, they would choose the latter. For a moment, the dungeon wondered if a scientist on his world ever cracked negative matter if that scientist would be disappointed in the mundane uses people found for it in their everyday lives, like making a gigantic improvement to book bags.

            Then the dungeon remembered what the immortal had said. That one day they wanted to build a shell around the sun, what the dungeon’s people called a Dyson sphere, before traveling the stars. Perhaps one day the immortals would use negative mass, or just their folding space abilities, to move their Dyson sphere faster than the speed of light and make a cluster of Dyson spheres traveling around the universe. Perhaps the immortals’ long-term plan for dungeons was to make them the power source for a Dyson sphere-sized faster-than-light ship.

            The dungeon was well aware that on his world, they had no way to make negative mass matter, but he had magic, so between magic and his material world’s scientific method, he should be able to figure it out eventually. Well, that and a Hadron collider. Then, as the dungeon thought about it, he realized he would likely need a lot more power than what nuclear gave, but he should have a much easier time making fusion power than the people on his world, since it wouldn’t take him twenty years to build a fusion plant every time he needed to change something. As a plus, he would have to learn how to make electromagnetic shields to guide the plasma from the fusion reaction.

            With all that on his plate, the dungeon got to work and informed the radio humans of his plans.

            A few months after they started working, more tier-two mages came. This time, they were much more prepared for the void dolphins. This time, all the mages used rain and slurry magic, and not only did they dig their way into the dungeon, they used slurry magic to turn rock into liquid and then move it into the tunnels the dungeon had made, thus slowing down the void dolphins. It was clear that this first group of mages did not want to deal with them.

            Half a year later, another group of mages dug their way in, blocked all the tunnels to them, and then somehow merged poison magic with their rain magic. Because of how the void dolphins were designed, poison couldn’t penetrate their skin, and they could hold their breath for a very long time. By the time the mages realized their magic wasn’t working, one of them died, but the others managed a retreat.

            Six months later, a new group dug their way into the labyrinth, and instead of blocking the tunnels like the last two groups, they kept the slurry liquid and, with their rain magic, practically turned the biome into an aquarium. The dungeon was confused about what the mages were trying until the void dolphins reached the slurry, and the mages turned the liquid rock solid. The void dolphins were able to just get past the slurry before it hardened, only to become stuck when all the water the mages conjured was turned into ice. It took the mages a few seconds afterwards to figure out which spells worked best to break through the void dolphins' defenses, but once the mages were done executing the void dolphins, they gathered the bodies of the essence creatures and left the labyrinth.

            The dungeon was flummoxed for a bit. His void dolphins were so effective that the mages had to flood a several million cubic yard room, and then freeze all the water to catch them. The dungeon thought that was pretty good. That said, his opponents were able to flood a several million cubic yard room in less than a minute, and then freeze the entire room. The dungeon had to go to the drawing board and find something that could counter all that. Fortunately, he now had access to spells.