The Ritual was beginning.

"Soon I will be ready to take the next step!" the dark robed man thought.

People called him mad mage, heretic or possessed. But they did not understand, nobody on this god forsaken plane did. He was first and foremost a scientist.

Even after wandering this world for nearly four centuries, he never forgot the education he got in his last life, on a small green blue ball called earth. It took him 300 years, after being reborn in a poor family, a weak body and not much prospects of the future, to become a true immortal. Only to see his horizon expand to a bigger world. Now he knew, there were dozens maybe hundreds of immortals or even more powerful beings. Some of them were living for thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of years. To compete with them he needed a lever, something new, a game changer. After spending years, searching for ideas, he came up with a plan.

He would create a dungeon, one completely under his control. It would provide him with materials for his research, a safe haven and an army. He would use it to advance once more, to become godlike, so he could stand as an equal among the great powers of this world and maybe, only maybe, there was an even higher level, something nobody in the known world achieved. If it exists, he would reach it and if not, he would create it!

At first, he tried to use an existing dungeon for his plans. But all of his experiments failed. Every dungeon he conquered was putting up too much resistance against his control. So much that to overcome it, he had to use too much force for its crystals to handle and they exploded, all of them. He spent some time researching younger dungeons, but he only found out that most dungeons were already fifty to a hundred years old when they where discovered. Without the dungeon emitting strong mana, it would be almost impossible to locate one. The world was huge and most of them appeared in desolate regions. Like everybody before him, he concluded that this approach to his goal was futile.

So he changed his plan. Instead of controlling an existing dungeon, he would create one himself. A blank slate, something he could influence from the very beginning. After developing the right spells, spending eight decades searching for the right materials, today was the day, and he was ready.

Gargantuan amounts of mana were gathering at the top of his lone tower. The edges of his crystalline formation were glowing. Around it were eight crystals, helping him gathering and storing the massive amount of magic energy that was needed for the ritual. In its center lay a fist size diamond, and it began to glow in an increasingly brighter light. Everything was going as he planned and then a loud bang shook his whole tower.

When he got his focus back, he saw the outcome. Success, he finally succeeded!

The sense of accomplishment nearly overwhelmed him. Then he noticed something was pulling at him, at his very soul itself. He tried to fight it, tblock it, even to teleport away, but nothing worked. He was under attack! Immediately all defenses in his tower were activated, putting it in full war mode. It didn't help, nothing he tried to protect himself was working. The pulling just got stronger and stronger and he was starting to get scared.

Too late he realized, it wasn't an attack from the outside! It came from the dungeon core he created himself, and his last thought, before his soul was ripped out of his body, flying into the crystal and everything becoming white, was:

"Well, shit!"

System notification:

Dungeon core 3188e791-d765-47cb-a04c-ad3e4a8886c0 initialized

Congratulation Neo, as the living entity nearest the new dungeon core, it is your honor to be its occupant!

"God dammit! Motherfucking bitch! Couldn't you warn me earlier or ask me if I want to be its fuckin 'occupant'?"