Cara

“Alright, Brick, I am ready for you to explain how to make the skill crystals.” Cara had been putting it off for a while now because there wasn’t really a reason to learn it before. In the past if she wanted to impart skills to her troglodytes, she would just force the knowledge into their brains via their connection to the dungeon core. Now that she had just finished her tenth floor, however, she wanted a prize worth giving to the select few who battled their way through.

“‘Tis easy, really. First observe the shape of your core and see if you can find significance in its shape.” The brownie was excited to teach something new to Cara for the first time in a while. When he’d first arrived, he expected a newborn dungeon to help develop but had instead encountered Cara and Manning. Both of the two personalities were far more developed than any dungeon had a right to be for thousands of years.

It’s worth mentioning that their circumstance was also the first of its kind, as most dungeons were born of a particularly powerful beastcore. It was an extremely rare occurrence, but when a particularly sapient beast finally expired, sometimes they refused to let go of their life. Instead they would grasp onto their last vestiges of life, pulling the dregs of their soul into their beastcores. Even then, there was a very miniscule chance that the core would reawaken as a dungeon core and would only have the basest instincts when it was reborn. A grand phoenix might be reborn as a dungeon that thrived in a fire-like environment, or a sphynx for earth. Humans, however, did not have beastcores and shouldn’t be born as a dungeon core.

A strange circumstance indeed. What this meant for Brick and Ash was that their guidance was mostly not needed. Sure, they could explain a few of the dungeon specific abilities, but things like logic, floor design, and sapient interaction were mostly covered with their cores.

“I assume you want me to mention how their flawless nature allows maximum mana retention, and to mention the groves that are invisible to the naked eye that run along the inside of the gemstone allowing the mana to follow the channels freely. Did I miss anything about what makes them special, besides them containing my soul of course?”

“There's no need to get smart, Cara. I wasn’t doubting your observational abilities, just trying to figure out where the gaps in your knowledge are so that I can fill them in. You are right about the mana retention, dungeon cores are capable of containing far more mana than any item of their size should rightfully be able to. It isn’t just because of their facets though, it is also attributed to the mana channels you were talking about.

“They are called arrays, and whereas they are seemingly random, they spell out a pattern allowing for more retention, and all of your dungeon specific abilities. The creation of skillstones follows the same pattern. When you analyze a skill that you want to pass along and try to push it into a crystal, your dungeon instincts should guide you in carving along the inside of the crystal. The process challenges the integrity of the crystal, but if it works you will have a skill crystal. By pushing a little mana into the crystal a sapient will engage the transfer of the pattern, which their mind interprets as memories, and crumble the crystal.

“A well-made crystal will pass along the knowledge of the skill, be it a combat skill or trade skill or even a language. The composition of the crystal will have to change with the complexity of the skill. As complexity increases so does the required amount of mana channel arrays, and the crystal’s durability will need to synch up, otherwise it will crumble during creation.” As he finished his speech, the small dungeon companion did a slight bow.

Cara mentally rolled her eyes and decided she would try to make her first skillstone, or skill crystal. Step one was growing crystals, which she quickly found to be extremely expensive. This only reaffirmed her decision to not make them sooner, as it would have slowed the growth of her dungeon substantially. She’d ‘seeded’ a crystal garden a while back, but it grew painfully slow. Even now, the only reason she knew that there were quartz, amethyst, and onyx crystals growing was because her dungeon senses allowed her to see on a microscopic level when she concentrated.

After a bit of experimentation, she found that spawning a murky quartz was far easier than any of the other gems. It was strange, but the cloudier she allowed the crystal to be while it grew, the cheaper it was to create. It had something to do with the purity of the crystal and Cara fully intended to find the cheapest viable crystal composition for the skillstones. Curious, she spared a glance and found that the crystal garden was growing at a near 100% purity. That probably contributed to how slow-going it was.

Ten minutes and a considerable amount of mana later, Cara was the proud owner of 5 quartz crystals. They were all about the size of a grown human man’s thumb and of varying cloudiness, ranging from an almost entirely murky white to a clear quartz crystal. Now it was time to try and carve the mana channels along the inside of the gemstones.

She’d put a little thought into what she was going to try and carve into them after Brick explained the differing complexity of skills. This was supposed to be practice to learn a skill, and wasn’t necessarily going to be awarded as a dungeon drop. To that end, Cara picked one of the first skills she’d acquired after becoming a dungeon, one that would very likely not be overly complex.

Concentrating on the worst quality crystal that was lying on the floor of her core’s chamber, she tried to push the knowledge into it much like she would the troglodytes. Unfortunately, the quartz remained there inert. Since becoming a dungeon, Cara had become far more patient that she’d been in life and was not discouraged by her first failure. Almost nothing worth doing would be easy, after all.

At a loss for what to do, several attempts later, Cara stopped trying to assault the ‘mind’ of the mindless quartz crystal and just stared at it. She spent hours studying the crystal, trying to view it from every angle possible. The entire time she could just feel that she was close to the answer, that she just needed a closer look.

‘Maybe I have to manually carve them, and it isn’t automated like Brick thought,’ she thought to herself. The first step there was to identify what the array for the skill she wanted to engrave looked like, so she looked inward. As her consciousness shifted, she found herself in the center of her dungeon core looking out at the inside of her softly growing onyx abode.

The experience was always slightly disorienting, like a mixture of looking at the surface while you were underwater and realizing you were wearing glasses causing them to suddenly come into focus. Just thinking about seeing the inside of her core caused her point of view to snap back to the core, right back to where it was when she first awoke in the core.

She observed the microscopic lines that traced along the inside of her core, infinite and entangled going on for miles and miles. Every now and then she would see a particularly thick packet of mana fly along the channel, causing the already glowing line to look a bit like a shooting star with a bright tail trailing behind it. Cara spent a few minutes watching it and appreciating its functions, even while not entirely understanding them, before she decided to actively seek out the pattern she was looking for.

All around her consciousness, the core shifted. She couldn’t tell if every other channel dimmed, or if the array she was looking for just brightened, but one of the intricate spirals suddenly popped out to her vision. She stared at it to commit it to memory, only to realize that it was already memorized and there was no reason to try and re-remember it. That’s when she had an epiphany, there was one angle she hadn’t looked at the quartz from.

With a single thought, she shifted her point of view to an aerial view of her chamber before swiftly snapping it into the murky quartz lying nearby. The inside of this crystal was far different than her core had been. It felt cold and unwelcoming, far different that the homely feeling that her onyx gave her when she was inside of it. Another difference was that, while she could see outside of her core into the chamber around her, it was far too foggy within the quartz to see anything outside of the stone.

Suspecting the outcome already, Cara tried to bring to mind the pattern of the skill she wanted to impart onto the stone, only to find the process too difficult. Unlike before, she could feel that she was having an effect on the quartz, but it was not going to work out. It was akin to stabbing a particularly sharp dagger in the wall of her cave. It might pierce the wall, but attempting to drag it while plunged in to engrave an image was a very different game.

The first two stones were like this, but when Cara entered the third quartz which she personally labeled as ‘medium foggy’ she had her first breakthrough. When she entered the gem and was able to vaguely see the outline of her chamber, she knew it would work. It looked like she was staring out through an overly frosted window, but at least that meant she could etch along the inside of the surface of the crystal.

Mentally, she brought up the array’s pattern and it appeared around her as a dimly growing series of light blue lines. Every now and then she would see a channel that turned red for a distance, only to turn blue again after passing a particularly cloudy spot on the quartz. It took nearly an hour of shifting the array around until she found a position where the line was entirely blue. Once there, she forced her mana into ‘ghost channels’, as she was calling them, and watched as they flared to life and permanently etched themselves into the quartz.

Once the process was finished, she was pleased to find out that durability of the quartz was able to withstand the knowledge she forced into it, and she had her first skill crystal.

“Brick, could you pick up the center quartz and try and activate it. If I am correct, I think I just made my first skill stone.”

The brownie, who had long since fallen asleep for a nap while his dungeon core focused intently on her task for hours, awoke with a start and shambled over to the quartz. The tiny little quartz was dwarfed by his admittedly small hand, and he looked at it before forcing a portion of his mana into it.

The crystal crumbled away, turning into dust too small for even Cara to see, and blowing away. The brownie just stood there, staring at his hand with a confused expression. He sort of looked like a dog that heard a weird noise, his eyes slightly glazed and his head cocked to the side.

“Well?” All Cara wanted to hear was how good of a job she’d done, and that the quartz hadn’t just crumbled of its own volition.

After another moment or two of silence, Brick’s head snapped over to the corner of the room that Cara’s consciousness was watching from before remarking in one of the most incredulous voices she’d ever heard him use.

“Flower arrangements, really?”