Anther continued to roll on the ground, making audible humming noises as he thought hard about the riddle.

“… Is the answer a sock?”

“No, the answer is not ‘a sock,’” Deorsa shook her head impassively.

“‘Cause you should put a sock in it,” the boy finished, flopping back onto the grass in defeat.

Eventually, he sat up with a sigh.

“I don’t know. It’s almost dinner time, so I need to go home. See you tomorrow, friends.”

The illusion above Deorsa’s blossom vanished without a word as the elf child departed, and Archimedes wished the boy farewell on behalf of him and his residents.

The remaining explorers were slowly starting to filter out too, and with less requiring his attention, Archimedes turned his thoughts back to his research.

Etherium was an amazing yet outwardly simple substance. According to his analysis, it was Ether, pure life energy, that had been manipulated into a tangible form. Its properties included preventing the permeation of everything besides Ether.

How it was made wasn’t as easy to understand.

Mana was, essentially, energy, and energy and matter were essentially interchangeable. Ether was also energy; Mana and ether were also interchangeable. Typically, creation was all a matter of perfectly calculating every piece of every atom that would make up a substance or creature, reducing that calculation to a formulaic expression of mana as compact as possible, and lighting the whole thing on fire.

The last part was figurative, of course. But it took more energy than one could imagine to turn energy into matter and bind atoms together in a way that wouldn’t break down. Thus, the end of every creation process Archimedes engaged in was capped off by a spark of creation, which was his pretty term for splitting a single particle of mana or ether in half. As long as his calculations were correct, the energy unleashed would be devoured by the starving process of creation, and something would be made.

If he ever were to create such a spark without giving it anywhere to go, the unbound energy… did absolutely nothing. It was surprisingly harmless. All it did was direct itself toward repairing the particle that had been split to create it.

As for the creation of Etherium, all of that knowledge could be discarded. There were no atoms, no transmutation into physical matter, and no spark of creation. There would certainly be calculations involved, but Archimedes had yet to work those out.

Etherium was structured like woven cloth… sort of. Particles of ether appeared to be stretched and woven together, but they only stretched long enough for a single “stitch”. Also, instead of wrapping around the other stretched particles, they intersected each other. This intersection appeared to create something of a small energy leak, and that leak combined with all the other surrounding leaks to produce a thin but powerful energy field. It was that energy field that kept the stretched particles from separating, allowed people to “touch” the material, and prevented any outside interference from affecting the vulnerable particles. Though this did mean that Etherium was inherently a material that would eventually decay back into free energy, that was a process that would take thousands of years.

Archimedes had a high opinion of whoever invented this material.

I don’t know who created the piece I was given, but there’s no way I can’t do it too.

He first had to experiment with the basic motions involved: stretching and bending a particle of ether as well as intersecting two ether particles together. Considering that Archimedes typically used mana for all his endeavors, this was akin to practicing calligraphy with his left hand when he was right-handed. Still, he didn’t give up and gradually had some basic formulas to expand upon. He stepped things up to intersecting ether particles that had already been stretched and bent. Once he had a stable way to do that, it was easy to expand the process into weaving large swaths of Etherium.

In theory, anyway. In practice, he had only succeeded at crafting microscopic patches of the stuff. Unlike the atomic transmutation formulas he usually used, there was no extrapolation or compression happening here; no taking advantage of natural laws to assist the process.

For all the trillions of atoms in a Foxbat, it could still be created with a pittance of mana. But every micrometer of Etherium was tightly packed with ether particles. The price was astronomical.

Even then, no other substance that I know of could possibly allow me to go beyond my natural capacity to store mana. It’s worth the price since it can do the impossible.

Because he was curious, Archimedes tried to replicate the process with mana instead of Ether, just to see if he would discover a second useful substance.

[New materials added: Mananite]

As expected, Vow acknowledged his discovery. Archimedes searched Ulbert’s memories for the typical use of Mananite. As expected, it could store Ether, but since ether and mana were essentially interchangeable, and since outsiders had few ways to harness raw ether, Mananite wasn’t popular.

But Archimedes thought differently.

Thanks to things like the Fertile Cave Biome and the Mandrakes, his dungeon produced ether in abundance. He converted that into mana and that was why his mana regeneration was so fast. Having ready-to-use mana stored away was obviously useful, but ether was just a single step away, and manipulating mana to make Mananite was easier for him than making Etherium out of ether.

Also, he was curious. If he tried to use the power of creation in a liquid mana or liquid ether environment, how would that affect the results? Submerging a person in liquid mana would restore any mana they had spent. Drinking liquid mana had the same effect. These were things Archimedes knew from Ulbert’s memories. What about liquid ether, then? The outsiders knew almost nothing about it as an energy form. Being pure life energy, could it restore wounds? Reverse or accelerate aging? Archimedes didn’t need to care for these things, but the outsiders would want such knowledge.

This is how they use us, Archimedes suddenly realized. This is how they benefit from giving out knowledge freely to dungeons. We advance their technology and return it to them.

He wasn’t unhappy, however, because the manipulation was done mutually and everybody benefited from it. It was sly and sneaky, but there was no ill intention. Rather, he would be happy to trade his knowledge away if doing so could help advance his goals.

Anyway, Archimedes continued with his experiments. Ulbert’s memories didn’t include knowledge about how many points of mana were stored in each milliliter of liquid mana, so he needed to complete a small Etherium container and test it for himself.

When he found out the exact number, Archimedes did a double take. He compared the number against the number of liters drained for one standard use of a body caster and felt like throwing up. All the pools of water throughout the dungeon bubbled and heaved in the wake of his absolute disgust.

I’m actually going to be sick. By their own mad god, are they even using a compression formula or are they transmuting at a one-to-one ratio?

Instead of sending out a spark of energy through a formula to cascade into a physical transformation, an equivalent volume of mana particles was being converted into atoms.

He briefly wondered why other dungeons hadn’t chewed the outsiders out for this yet, but maybe they had. Maybe it was unavoidable. Perhaps they just couldn’t build a machine with complex enough mana control to do anything better than this.

Or, perhaps, it was a safety measure; to make sure that there would be no variance between the original and the remade copy during calculations. But was the cost really worth it then?

Archimedes’ respect for creature cores instantly rose, and he decided to simply let liquid mana accumulate while following his current train of thought.

He examined and compared the cores of Thesia the slime, Minute the golem, and Lilith the neo-human for a diverse sampling. As always, they seemed quite impermeable, or else he would have grasped their workings by now…

Impermeable?

Archimedes recalled thinking something similar recently about a different material. With that in mind, he examined the cores again via a different method and a shock of cold air blew through his halls.

It’s solidified!

The core wasn’t any substance made using mana or ether, it was made of mana and ether. Both were in solid form, and he was forced to probe slowly while constantly transmuting the energy he was probing with each time it met the other substance and hit a wall. The map that was slowly being constructed of the interiors of these cores was much more complex than the cores’ sizes would imply. It was crafted with two layers on the atomic level, after all.

In contrast, mind stones were easy to probe. They had the same complex structures inside, but they were carved from ordinary crystal.

No, not the same. Mind stones can contain far less information given the molecular scale they're working with. How do they express equally complex creatures with this much less data? How are solidified mana and ether created?

The sheer number of new techniques he had to learn even after living this long was amazing to Archimedes. Maybe, as he learned more, his seemingly unreachable goal would become attainable.

To think the level of technology in these is something you can just be given right after birth.

That simple awed comment caused Archimedes to pause. Would it make sense for creature cores to be the only starting boon to contain advanced technology? Until recently, he had thought of them as a supernatural gift he had no way of understanding, but as he gained knowledge about liquid mana and liquid ether, solid mana and solid ether ceased to be beyond imagining.

Archimedes had lived two lives now. Between them, he had obtained three boons, and the same six starter boons had been presented to him both times:

Increase Creature Strength

Increase Creature Speed

Increase Creature Wisdom

Increase Creature Loyalty

Decrease Creature Cost

Bestow Mana Cores

Could those six boons each be hiding some advanced technology? If so, and Archimedes marveled at how he’d never wondered this before, why? Why did dungeons get a starting boon? It was understandable for a race to be bestowed with natural physical abilities, and he believed most of his powers fell under this category, but how did it make sense for a race to be born possessing technology that they didn’t even understand? That was akin to a human being born with a steel sword in hand in the stone age.

Or maybe not? Maybe he was being too closed minded. In a sense, many races were indeed born with technology they didn’t understand. They could reproduce, couldn’t they? If they fully understood the process, should they not be able to build a machine that would handle reproduction for them? They had brains, did they not? If they truly understood the biological technology behind a brain, they should be able to make one.

In this sense, the technology behind each boon could be considered natural ability indeed, and dungeons would manifest different boons at birth similarly to how humans had different hair and eye colors.

Am I really reading into it too much? Archimedes wondered.

Perhaps if he himself truly understood the process by which he was created, he wouldn’t feel a need to attribute it to intelligent design.

All the rest of it aside, he was sure he would need to investigate the boons he was aware of more thoroughly in the future. Unfortunately, the sun was already beginning to rise again, and he would have to welcome visitors back inside. Further experimentation would have to wait until evening.

Damn it. Is it too soon to lock my doors again?