Tipping point dungeon on.., p.1
Tipping Point: Dungeon on Earth: Book Three, page 1
Tipping Point
Dungeon on Earth: Book Three
Author: D. L. Harrison
Copyright 2023. This is a work of fiction. Names, Characters, Places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Jia
Chapter One
Cora
Chapter Two
Jia
Chapter Three
Cora
Chapter Four
Jia
Chapter Five
Cora
Chapter Six
Jia
Chapter Seven
Cora
Chapter Eight
Jia
Chapter Nine
Colonel Daniel Croft
Silvia
Chapter Ten
Cora
Colonel Daniel Croft
Chapter Eleven
Jia
Chapter Twelve
Cora
Chapter Thirteen
Jia
Chapter Fourteen
Cora
Chapter Fifteen
Jia
Chapter Sixteen
Cora
Chapter Seventeen
Jia
Epilogue
Afterword:
About the Author
Other books by D. L. Harrison:
Book Description
Prologue
Jia
The year 2091…
She was in the dungeon safe room, sitting safely in the corner far from the others, just in case something went dreadfully wrong she didn’t want to take anyone out with her.
The large, enchanted rod in her hands was covered with twelve spell glyphs. She was almost certain the spell to upgrade her channels to hold the more potent mana was done correctly, as were the two changes to her brain. She’d studied it and reviewed it endlessly, but in the end, she just had to trust she’d done the job correctly. It’d been seventy years since a mountain had fallen onto her mountain, back when she’d been a spy and geneticist in a secret underground government lab.
She looked even younger pushing a hundred, than she had back then hovering around thirty. The previous ascensions adding first decades and then centuries of life. She could live another four hundred years if she chose as a mature A-class, before taking the risk, but she was ready now. After the ascension, she’d have close to fifteen hundred years to reach true immortality as an ethereal, and the studies and research to attain that lofty status would only take two hundred years or so.
She wouldn’t be in as much of a rush for ethereal, but she needed to get to magi before she lived so long that she lost critical parts of herself.
The other two changes would remove a natural human frailty, the degradation of skills when not practiced. She wouldn’t have to fight every day in the dungeon, or to practice her spells so assiduously on a daily basis. It would let her focus on learning more spells, which she’d remember in perfect clarity. It would even preserve her fighting reflexes, not just the muscle memory of her martial arts, but would keep her vigilant.
That seemed almost wrong, but it would make her more powerful, not with less effort toward growth, but with less effort in maintaining what she already had. It would let her enjoy life more for a change, and only need to spend a couple of hours a day on study and cultivation.
It would also mean a greater breadth in magic, focusing on magical growth alone and not needing to practice spells constantly to keep them fresh in her mind, meant there was no practical limits to adding new spells or spell iterations to her repertoire.
The second change to her brain was perhaps even more important, it would allow her to keep her steadfastness, patience, and ambition alive and relevant in her everyday life, so it wouldn’t deteriorate under the decades and finally centuries of life to come. To be both enjoyed and endured.
She could see the great importance of that second one, as over the years her patience had been slowly worn away, if only when it came to dealing with dangerous levels of stupidity. She could see in another hundred years, she’d probably become waspish. As it was, she was looking forward to getting her natural equanimity and poise back in full measure, which would never fade or burden her again.
Those two extra changes weren’t in the guild books, but a gift from Silvia, who had created them herself after analyzing the faults and failures of the magi in the guild back on her world. They were truly all about stabilizing the mind and preventing a degradation of personality and will to live against the ravages of time. She’d come to learn over the last fifty years of service to Silvia as her administrator, that they had a lot more in common than she’d expected.
Silvia wasn’t quite as much a cynic, but they were both patient and tended to be easy going toward annoyances and things in others that they couldn’t change. Yet, they were both quick to end a true threat and enemy, without remorse.
The spell wasn’t sequential like the over a hundred glyph spell the ascension to Ethereal was. It wasn’t even a true ascension, it was just a very complicated compound spell that would make all the changes at once to her body, which would still be her body, the one she’d been born with, in preparation for her true ascension. Still mortal, just prepared to accept, channel, and hold greater amounts of power without being charred from the inside out.
If she did it all correctly.
Well, it could be argued it was all part of the Magi ascension. Even the part about her body being perfected, that it could no longer be improved by continuing to cultivate and pouring more essence into her body. Her senses, strength, speed, and balance, were all as strong as they’d ever be.
That, the spell of change, and filling her body with mana instead of essence, were all part of the ascension process. But it was only that last part that would truly make her a Magi.
She took a deep breath, and then channeled light and void magic, as well as pure essence into the spell, until it had what it needed to activate. Some of the changes creation alone could handle, some of the changes meant removing something to make way for the new, and lastly some few required a change rather than creation, so required life magic.
Without that affinity, a part of her spell would take that raw essence and convert it to life magic for her. It would also dull the pain of the transformation, soothing pain receptors and nerves.
She was sure that part was fine, and it wasn’t her first attempt at a cross affinity spell. She had created a healing spell in the past, a compound spell requiring the essence to life magic conversion as part of it. It’d only taken twenty of the last fifty years to finish mastering the seven advanced spells given to her by Silvia for her promise of service.
Of course, that included hundreds of iterations of all of her twenty light spells and one void spell she now knew. That had left her almost thirty years to study for this moment, and add a few non-affinity spells to her repertoire, at least as limited but extremely useful enchantments.
The good news was she was still alive at the end of it, and clear headed. All that really told her though was she hadn’t messed up badly enough to kill herself immediately. It was still a risk to proceed with the ascension, if her channels weren’t rebuilt correctly the mana would destroy her during the ascension itself.
She took some time to examine it, make sure she hadn’t made a mistake, as much as she could anyway. It all looked okay.
But in the end, there was only one way to find out. Take in some mana and see if her body could hold it safely.
She’d been practicing the magi cultivation technique that she’d found the most suitable to her nature for a while. Save of course, the part where it was converted to mana, since she wasn’t suicidal. So the effort of her ascension would only require her adding one more concept to the unified concept she was already well practiced in.
If nothing else, it had also cut her cultivation time to fill her essence pools from an hour to minutes the last few years. It took in a hundred times the essence, which was enough. A magi was a thousand times more powerful, but just ascending to magi would make her absorb ten times faster, and that final multiplier would allow her to fill her major chakra mana pools from empty in just an hour.
Regardless, it was similar to her A-class cultivation in that it was still a quintuple helix of five spiraling lines, one line for each Chakra as it filled her pools. But instead of a straight line through her body from the bottom of the dungeon to the top, it was something else entirely. Far more complicated in shape, yet easy enough to picture in her mind as a unified concept and focus.
She pictured a spiraling quintuple helix, instead of a straight-line ladder type, surrounding her body in a spherical shape. The ends were at the top and bottom of the sphere, and the center point of the spiral directly in front of her where the essence would travel to starting at both ends. In the past she’d had it simply route the thickest part into another spiral which connected her sphere to her body with another quintuple helix to feed her the essence.
But this time the concentrated and refined essence at the center point was pushed into a containment reservoir. Controlling magic was easy, a matter of solid focus and will, so it contained the essence under press ure merely because she believed it would. Eventually, the essence being fed to that container would compact so tightly it would be converted back into mana, which was a thousand times more potent and concentrated than essence.
That was the most dangerous part of the process, keeping her focus on that containment, if she lost that containment the mana built up inside of it would likely explode. Mana could be contained in her body, which was now meant for that purpose, but outside of her body mana was far too unstable to exist without her focus to keep it together.
Once the mana was formed from essence outside her body, her mental filter would allow it to flow from the reservoir through another spiraling quintuple helix, which would feed her five major chakras. The lack of logic in it didn’t matter because she believed the filter there would allow the heavier and denser mana through, while blocking out any unconverted essence from getting through.
Her will determined reality, where controlling magic was concerned.
That was only the cultivation technique for a Magi, however. The actual ascension to Magi required one more step in the unified concept, which she’d never have to use again.
To make room for the mana, she’d have to get the essence out first. So there was one further connection, a mental release valve and pathway of sorts, which connected her palm to the essence to mana conversion container. As the mana slowly pushed into her body, the essence would loop back to the container to be converted as well, and then taken back into her body.
She gained confidence in her upgraded channels and mana pools within five minutes. If she’d failed, she’d be dead already. The remaining fifty-five minutes she kept her focus on the unified concept, and she’d always been confident there. She hadn’t faltered in a cultivation technique in over four decades.
Mana was shockingly potent, she felt wired with energy, invincible. The spells she could cast would now be so much more powerful, ten times more powerful, with just a hundredth the use of her available magic. But it wasn’t just a mental change, the rise to magi.
She could feel all that power inside of her, and it was a heady feeling.
Fortunately, Silvia would help her keep that in perspective, having so much more power than she did.
She also wasn’t all that unique. Bobby and Liam had ascended days ago, and there was Nia, and a few other magi in the other locations as well. Their new fourth, Blane, hadn’t been as advanced in A-class when he’d joined them, so he’d had to find another group to join to finish up.
Well, in six out of the fifteen of them. The other nine didn’t have any yet. The original three dungeons had been busy, asexually speaking, and their first children had all reached maturity and had at least one child of their own now.
She stood and left, only to run into Silvia right outside the amphitheater entrance.
“Walk with me.”
She nodded respectfully, and they started down the mountainside trail to the village.
Silvia said, “Congratulations. I wanted to offer you some advice, if you’re willing to accept it.”
“Please.”
Silvia smiled, “You’re fifty years of service is over, and you’ve achieved magi with fifteen hundred years of life ahead of you, before you either bow out of this life or choose to try for an ethereal ascension. Which will only take you two hundred years to prepare for.
“I was forced to do it early on as a magi. Because of our arrival here, and being stranded, I owed it to my people to try and get them home. If not for that, I would’ve waited for centuries more after completing my research.
“So my advice is to go live and enjoy life for a while, you’ve earned it after seventy straight years of work day after day. Take a load off, for a hundred years, maybe two hundred. You can still learn spells and iterations, and of course you’ll need to stop by a dungeon to cultivate whenever your mana gets below eighty percent or so. But that leaves you a whole lot of time to pursue… other things.
“When you’re ready to get back into it, I’m sure I’ll have a town for you to rule over, as you prepare and study for the next ascension, which I am willing to guide you in assuming you don’t grow corrupt in the interim. And when that’s done, you should take another century or two, live another human lifetime or two. Then ascend, or decide forever on this mortal world isn’t for you.”
“That’s good advice, Ethereal. I think I will do that, though I can’t imagine not ascending again, I’m also not in a hurry to get it done. Enjoying the fruit of my labors for a human lifetime or two sounds… really good actually.”
The top of the mountain suddenly exploded behind them, sending up rocks and debris into the air as they both spun around. It was startling, but she took in that surprise with aplomb.
A second later, a single object sped off to the south.
“What the hell was that?” she asked, even as she had one of her light elementals trailing it with a thought. It looked like a fighter jet, a highly advanced one that could rival the highly advanced military technology of twenty ninety-one in the U.S. It was already going double digit Mach speed and still accelerating as it leveled off at eighty thousand feet.
Silvia shook her head, “Want to come see with me, before you start that vacation.”
She nodded, “When I imagine a dungeon going rogue, I imagine monsters running down the mountainside to destroy the town and kill all the people. Not a single monster, which looks more like a modern computer controlled military aircraft just flying off to gods know where. So yes, I have to say I’m curious.”
Silvia sighed, “Yes, me too, on the rage and kill everything idea, which is why I want to investigate before I decide if our dungeon just earned its demise. When dungeons go rogue, it’s never like this, but then our dungeon has always been rather unique, ever since it was juiced by a ley line.”
They just waited, no doubt Silvia had a light elemental following the fighter’s path through the sky as well. At that speed, it wasn’t long before they figured out where it was going.
“Egypt, there aren’t any dungeons in Egypt.”
Silvia said calmly, “That we know of, or that have been found yet,” then in flash of light motes they both disappeared.
The pyramids were the first thing she saw, the great pyramids and the Sphinx. A moment later she saw the glint of metal, and they moved that way. The aircraft was small, like a drone, and it started to melt and reform.
Hmm, no one had liquid metal, except in the movies. She’d also never seen anything like it in the dungeon, which made her wonder just how many advances and wonders the dungeon might have created over the last seventy years, with access to modern technology.
The thing looked like a sleek robot now, and only a little bigger than say, a linebacker in football. Almost seven feet tall, with wide shoulders and thick arms and legs. It moved fluidly however as it headed toward an oasis with what looked like a pile of boulders next to it. On a hunch, she pulled out her phone and checked, there was no oasis like that on record, not near the great pyramids.
The robot disappeared around the pile of boulders before they could catch up. There was a small opening just large enough for a humanoid to enter.
She sighed, “This has to be a new dungeon, but I don’t sense an area of dense essence ahead.”
Silvia frowned, “Me either, let’s go see. I think the dungeon led us here, for a reason.”
She nodded, and they moved into the entrance, which immediately turned into a ramp leading down below the earth. They hadn’t gone far, when they reached the first room.
It was the size of a typical dungeon room, except rounded instead of square like their dungeon seemed to prefer. There were two dead giant scorpions, about the size of a mid-size dog, not counting the tail and stinger. One of them looked pulverized by a single hit to the head, the other one had been hit by a clean burn. There was a two-inch diameter hole in its head. The kind of hole that might be made from a laser sidearm in a movie, except she was detecting the residual fire magic in the wound.
