Chapter 68-Magic (Patreon)

                   Time passed as the dungeon started work on all of its projects.

                   The first project, and easiest to implement, was giving all his radio humans the ability to draw essence channels in the air. This gave them the opportunity to figure out how to make their own spells, so the dungeon wouldn’t have to. Giving this to the more than five thousand humans took a bit more than a year, and making the changes inheritable by the next generation took more than two. The dungeon took the time to make being able to cast spells inheritable because he did not want to have to constantly draw essence channels into every baby that was born.

                   With that said, changing the genetic structure of his humans wasn’t difficult, and the dungeon had been doing it for some time, as the radio humans came from just eight people originally. After just a handful of generations, the dungeon had no choice but to make changes in their genome, otherwise his humans would have been so inbred they would have been retarded.

                   It wasn’t long until the humans started figuring out interesting things to do with their new ability. Nothing ground-breaking, more like interesting things a child would find to do with a new toy. However, that’s when the humans discovered a problem. Although the radio in their heads were amazing, they had no way to send visual data with it, and even worse, they couldn’t record their discoveries accurately.

                   The problem with essence and mana channels was that they required fairly precise shapes to make an actual working spell. The dungeon, with its perfect memory, could easily recreate something it had seen or figured out. The mages and immortals of the outside world preferred to learn spells from the corpses of essence creatures in labyrinths around the moons, as the essence channels stayed in essence creatures even after death, giving the citizens of the moons an exact template to work with to copy spells. The radio humans asked the dungeon to record what they were doing and make projector images of their spells as they learned, as they had issues exactly recreating what they had done right after another. The dungeon did not have time to become their cameraman man so the dungeon told them about cameras, film for projectors, and even televisions. They asked what the dungeon knew, and he told them everything, and they went to work.  

                   During this time, the dungeon started his second project, building a particle accelerator. Building the initial particle accelerator only took a few weeks. The labyrinth had been so tall for years that the dungeon used active support to keep the labyrinth from having too much stress placed on its structure. Turning one of the active supports into a particle accelerator was tedious but simple. The active support already used magnets to push ball bearings in a gigantic circle that made its way around the structure of the Great Black Tree Labyrinth, simply making them more powerful, and able to push much smaller “particles” near the speed of light, and colliding them into other particles, was finicky, but not much different than what the active support was already doing.

                   In the dungeon's home world, they had sensors that kept track of the changes in the particles after their collisions, but thanks to the dungeon's area of influence, he was easily able to keep track of the changes in the particles. If anything, the dungeon was the perfect creature for the project in ability, but the dungeon was woefully uneducated for his future physics experiments, so although he would be able to get data quickly, he may be a bit slow in understanding it. That said, if he ever made something with negative mass, he should be able to tell immediately. The dungeon even got to prove the point on his thirty-fourth use of the particle accelerator when he made antimatter. It only existed for a matter of a fraction of a second, but the dungeon saw it, and was even able to make it a few more times, although containing it was currently impossible, because the dungeon didn’t know how to make a magnetic bottle yet.

                   On a side note, the dungeon’s work on fusion wasn’t going well because the dungeon had yet to figure out how to make a magnetic bottle. Although admittedly the dungeon had a lot of other things on his plate at the moment, and since power was not the most concerning issue, thanks to all the power he made with his nuclear reactor, he decided to focus on more important things.

                   For instance, the dungeon needed a way to overcome the mage’s defensive abilities. Although their strongest defense was their vacuum bubble spell, the void dolphins were designed to overcome that. What the void dolphins were having trouble overcoming was the mages’ rain, ice, water bubbles, and slurry spells, which used water to make the bullets the void dolphins fired at two miles a second lose most of their power, not to mention trapping the void dolphins. The solution sounded simple: just give all the essence creatures in the dungeon lightning abilities, and use the heat from the lightning to evaporate the water. Unfortunately, the mages killed everything they could before entering the labyrinth, so having lightning creatures lay in wait to evaporate all the water wouldn’t work, the dungeon tried, and now the labyrinth has lightning rabbits, wasps, and a lightning version of every other essence creature in the labyrinth. The dungeon also tried just making electric heaters to vaporize the water needed for the mages’ spells to work, but the mages destroyed the machines, what the mages called traps, before they could really stop the spells.

                   What the dungeon needed was a fast-moving creature or creatures able to bring massive amounts of heat to a large area. This creature would not be intended to kill the mages, as the mages were somehow able to survive insanely high and low temperatures. This new creature’s main duty would be to allow the void dolphins to get off their two-mile-per-second shots, without the mages’ defensive spells getting in the way.

                   With all that said, the dungeon wanted to future-proof his design. The dungeon was tired of constantly having to make new essence creatures every time the mages threw something new his way, so this new essence creature would have to be able to use spells. The dungeon didn’t have a lot of lightning spells yet, but fortunately, the dungeon had several thousand humans playing around with the concept, so sooner or later, he would get some interesting ones.

                   The dungeon was aware that the bigger the creature, the bigger the essence channels they could have, or in this case, draw. That said, a massive creature would have a difficult time moving through the labyrinth unless the dungeon got very creative and created a creature that, as far as the dungeon knew, only worked with electricity. The dungeon decided to make a creature, or, depending on how you looked at it, hundreds of creatures with a radio-powered hivemind.

                   Thanks to the power of radio, the dungeon should be able to create a species of creature that had one mind and thousands of bodies, able to move as one creature.

                   This creature would have many advantages. First of all, by design, it would not have a weak spot… besides jamming. Jamming radio signals would certainly be a weak spot, but the dungeon was gambling on the mages not figuring that out. Second, the mages could conjure massive amounts of water, but thousands of these creatures should be able to turn that water into steam just as quickly. Third, even though each individual creature should have its own essence system, including a mana core, if they could link their essence together with draw essence channels, they would have massive essence pools rivaling any immortals’ mana pools. Fourth, assuming their essence channels were able to connect, they should be able to use draw essence channel to draw gigantic essence channels, creating spells so powerful they rivaled what immortals could do. Fifth, each time the dungeon learned a new essence channel spell, the hive mind should be able to learn it as well. Sixth, thanks to the metallic hydrogen, any creature chosen as the base creature would be able to walk, run, or fly on air or vacuum.

                   Although the advantages looked amazing, the dungeon was also aware that this was going to be very difficult. This project would only work if the dungeon found a way to make both a hive mind with radio, and found a way to combine the essence pools of the hive mind creatures. With all that said, this would likely be an easier project than making negative mass.


Note-Starting next week my schedual may or may not get weird for a couple of months. Will try to keep everyone updated.