According to the clock widget exactly a month has passed since my blackout and my crystal actually cracked in a few places. I didn’t feel strange or anything. All it did was limit the amount of mana I can spend at once.
About a half of the Island was reclaimed by us and was thick with plant life. That’s when I ordered my long forgotten mushroom to go underground and drill as deep as it could and make every so often a spherical room. These rooms would act as valves for mana and would be a place where mages would train.
I ordered the tunnel to be reinforced and covered in runes that move mana downwards. I was planning to move my core into a giant pool of semi-liquid mana. Upon completion I realized that my greed for more mana made me create an absurd trap. Now my wonderful audience! Time for a lesson on mana!
Every living being can use mana and has at least some mana inside their bodies. The creatures that aren’t designed to be mages upon consumption of big amounts of mana begin to heat up and start screaming in agony because their body is rearranging everything so it could withstand big amounts of mana moving through.
Using simple words, the body of a knight after oversaturation in mana will start mutating to become the body of a hybrid or mage. Hybrid is a rare body type that is both strong physically and magically so it can be used as both motor and the heavy duty wire.
That’s nice and all but when the body is rearranging everything it passively absorbs mana, when the mana that caused the change isn’t depleted. Body heats up even more and rearranges even more. Here's the problem: the runes in my new home will constantly liquify mana into it and by doing so the mana won’t go away. Ergo, the greedy adventurer or animal will either die by steam explosion (as the water inside the cells heats up too much) or by frying itself.
I accidentally made a well of greed…
I choose the third reward as for decorations I choose number 2,3,5.
Now you might be asking. Josh, why did you pick these weak looking options? Since I’m not bound to the system and absolutely adore one of the old gods from that card game StoneHart, also I believe that by choosing them my guardian will be able to inflict corruption of old gods to the challenger.
For the altar and the artwork I pick my favorite! I bleed for Y’thm. I’d like the altar and artwork to have minor aspects of C’shaj. The material of the top part should be polished stone with silver runes on the sides speaking about the history of the Old Gods I picked. And a gold path directly to the Well of the Worthy. Halfway to the bottom the walls of the well from polished stone should give way to mercury that freely interacts with the mana but the generall mass of it is kept in place of the walls.
The guardian Should be a humanoid clothed in dark robe that hides the corruption of the Old-ones and crystal armor that was described as the first reward. It should be intelligent enough to hold long discussions about this place, the challenge and the possible repercussions.
The guardian should be able to sacrifice all of it’s armour, health and sanity to perform either one instant death attack that nothing will be able to resurrect from, become extremely fast enemy with lethal poison on its entirety or kill itself and fill the Organic Dungeon with poison that will kill everything that isn’t a part of Dungeon or was made by it.
Each scenario should be triggered respectively by: directly insulting Old-ones and mocking the guardian, attacking the guardian before it has a chance to speak and by trying to trap him or skip him entirely by invisibility or other means.
Before a normal fight begins the challenger/s must listen to the guardian and answer his questions. Failure to do so but not triggering the scenario explained before will make the entirety of Organic Dungeon either weaken the challenger/s or buff the guardian or both depending on the severity of the failure.
My answer probably was too specific to System liking because it fell silent for an hour during which I was moved by the generic Zodarii and dunked into the bottom of the Well.
All I could say at the moment was “Oh fuck”. All of my flora and fauna turned into miniature suns, probably because they started outputting a 100% more mana than they should and because I was perceiving mana directly the elemental mana had different colors, earth was brown, fire red, air green and the water was blue.
The creatures were little stars with multitudes of different colors spread out on their bodies.The plant’s were mostly a mixture of 4 elements with white near the organs I made turning them into unique plants.
