Chapter 69: Upgrades

  ***

  The portal behind him flickered once, then folded in on itself with a sharp snap of arcane energy, leaving nothing but silence.

  Alex crumbled onto the stones, looking like his insides moved to his outsides. Left arm still mangled, and his chest still constricted painfully. His thigh still had an arrow-hole in it. He quickly pulled a potion and downed its contents. It took only seconds for the magic to take effect, his bones popping into place and mending, gashes closing up. He felt the pressure inside his body give way.

  He exhaled slowly, his body was healed but his entire body was still covered in blood, dirt and bone dust. The remnants of his many dozens of battles in the first floor of the dungeon.

  Alex rose to his knees a look about, finding a quiet that contrasted heavily with the silence of the battlefield above. It wasn’t dead silence. It was as if the room was waiting, watching .

  He moved down the tunnel he found himself in. His boots scraping on smooth obsidian stone etched with silvery lines that curved and wove through the floor like veins under skin. The lighting came from nowhere and everywhere. It was a soft, cold blue glow that pulsed gently in the stone walls like a heartbeat held in stasis.

  “Obby?” He asked, voice low.

  “ Hmm, an interesting change , ” Obby replied, his tone clipped and curious. “ If you want my guess for this floor... Combat: Low. Likelihood of puzzles... high. Very high. ”

  “You sound excited,” Alex moved down the hall, finding himself dumped into a large handmade cavern.

  It was a stark departure from the grave-choked battlefield of the first level. From what he could tell, Alex now found himself inside a sprawling underground archive. It was part arcane study, part living laboratory , and part abandoned research institute once used by perhaps a long-dead order of magical engineers.

  He looked at the previous notification again. Looked like it was a lab belonging to these so called ‘ Sigil-binders’ .

  To one side there were tables cluttered with various tools and objects Alex didn’t know a use for or recognize. A bookshelf of sorts stood close by but it didn’t have any noticeable scrolls, or books for that matter. Instead it was covered in shelves with thin rock slates stacked on top of each other. Opposite the tool strewn tables was a long bench covered in glassware and fine objects that looked to be used for advanced alchemy. The center of the room had a ring bench with stools, a smattering of stone cups, rock slates, and other items.

  The large room had a tunnel leading opposite where he had come from. The wide tunnel immediately led to a three way fork. The three passages leading into only darkness from what he could see.

  Everything hummed with a quiet, terrifying potential .

  “Definitely some kind of lab. Enchanting and glyph-work there, alchemy there, a neutral workspace in the middle.” He made his way toward the center of the room and spun in a slow circle to take it all in.

  “Ooooh very nice, they have aether-slates. ” Obby’s voice went up an octave higher than usual. The shelving he had seen before was highlighted in his vision. “ Those flat rocks are used to store information and memories. If they are still working, you might finally have access to a huge boost to your basic aether, spellcasting and combat knowledge. Your skills can skyrocket.”

  “Isn’t that what I have you for?” He asked as he stepped towards the shelf. Despite his words, he was finding himself also excited by the idea of some long ancient mage knowledge.

  “Yes, if you had your wisdom stat higher I could—”

  “I understand now. Okay let’s look. I’m guessing to activate it, I just hold it and inject a bit of my aether?” He had never run into or heard about these things before, but they had fantasy novels back on earth, and as a nerd he read a bunch of them. Coupled with the time he had spent interacting with magic object in this world already, he could guess how these things would work.

  As he picked up a few of the rocks and found them much lighter than he anticipated. It was like holding a thin cell-phone instead of stone. Each were about the size of a large playing card. He tried injecting his energy into a few dozen of the things, each time getting no response. He went shelf by shelf, making sure not to skip any. Finally, he found one that had some intricate veins light up on its surface when he pushed his energy inside it.

  “Oh you got a live one,” Obby carefully walked him through the process of connecting his mind to the item.

  Turned out it was like getting a hologram of a book inside his mind. Alex could browse through the information inside as he pleased. Reading it wasn’t an issue, as the information seemed to be stored not in text or letters, but by the understanding of the person who had made the object.

  He could intuit not only the information at hand, but even got a trickle of emotion of how the author felt about that information. Most of which was useful, but not all of it.

  “Elemental glyphs, their uses and opposing glyphs in the context of enchantment work.” Alex summarized the contents as he read through it. It was information he already knew thanks to Obby’s lessons.

  “Disappointing, try the others.”

  Alex found only a half dozen more aether-slates still in working order. All of them on topics involving glyphcrafting or alchemy. Which made sense given where he had found them. All were pretty basic information though.

  He grabbed them all, and even picked up most of the ones that didn’t function. Given the items themselves were made through [Glyphcraft], he might be able to repair them. It wasn’t guaranteed, and Obby informed him that even if the items started working again doesn’t mean they would be able to recover the imprinted knowledge that was on them.

  “I’m willing to bet we will have to repair some of these and then get some info off them to escape this floor. You said there’d be puzzles here right?”

  “More than likely you’re right, and yes, definitely puzzles.”

  He walked back to the middle of the room and picked a stool, which he was surprised was able to hold his weight. He set all the aether-slates on the table in different piles and cleared everything else away. Next to the slates he pulled out the enchanter’s plate he got from the kobolds, as well as the enchanted bone and the cursed dagger. Then came the aether crystals he enchanted, his glyphcrafting tools, alchemy tools, everything he thought would be useful to him. It all came out of his bracelet’s storage.

  “ Wait— there, ” Obby said, voice a hushed murmur. “ See that pedestal? ”

  Alex looked about until he saw Obby highlighting something in his vision once again. Tucked in the far right corner of the room, past a collection of broken stone benches and cracked mural fragments, was a waist-high plinth carved from dark marble. It bore a flat, circular surface with a shallow depression in the center. Faint threads of aether traced concentric rings around it like veins under glass.

  “A glyph port, ” Obby breathed. “ An old one. ”

  “You sure it’s safe?” Alex asked as he walked slowly toward it.

  “Nope. But I am sure I’ve seen ports like this before. Think of it like a computer terminal, if we can connect to it, we can find out more about what this place is. ”

  Alex stepped forward, hesitating only a moment before placing his hand into the depression. A pulse surged up his arm. The world narrowed, his vision blurring around the edges. He didn’t black out but everything else around him became suddenly muted, like being underwater. A thin beam of aether shot upward from the pedestal, forming a flickering spiral of glyphs in the air, a three-dimensional weave of meaning and memory. Most of it was unreadable. He watched as symbols folded into symbols, syntax layered across several planes.

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  Obby’s presence surged from inside the bond with Alex, he could feel the rock’s consciousness move down his arm into the glyph stream like a fish into current.

  “Okay, ” the construct said, voice echoing slightly inside Alex’s head now. “ I’m in. Scanning. ”

  The glyphs rotated, pulsed, then began splitting off like tendrils. Many lines were blacked out or blurred, like it was a report issued by the CIA after they went crazy with their favorite colored highlighter, the black one. Alex felt a tremble in his soul space, his brain stung slightly as his mind tried and failed to parse the deeper structures in front of him.

  “Ah. Of course. Some of it’s locked behind Tier-Three Glyphcraft, that’s the skill level after Novice. ” Obby said, annoyed. “ And a lot of it is sealed by the System itself. Lovely.”

  “ But, what can you read?”

  “Enough to get a general idea. Hold still. ” He felt the construct’s consciousness pulse once more and the glpyhs spun yet again. A pause.

  “Okay. This is an old record node. Ancient even. It was encoded by a group called the Sigil-Binders. An order of Arcanists. They were among the first to develop structured glyph syntax as a form of divine interfacing. Basically, their way of providing intent to The System. ”

  Alex blinked. “So… proto-glyphcrafters?”

  “Exactly. They didn’t just use glyphs, they believed them to be fragments of creation’s original language. Carvings of pure logic designed to echo how the world thinks itself into being. It was almost a reverence, or worship of the craft in some ways. ”

  A flicker in the glyph stream pulled Obby’s attention.

  “There’s more. This floor of the dungeon, this level, wasn’t originally meant to be a lab. It was designed as a trial for Glyphcraft Initiates . A proving ground. Mental strain. Pattern recognition. Sigil memory and compositional intuition. ”

  Alex tilted his head. “So the goal of this floor isn’t to fight through it, it’s to understand it?”

  “Right. And to survive long enough while doing it. ”

  Obby’s consciousness pulled another filament of data from the web of glyphs in the hologram. “ Looks like they used aetheric energy, essence pressure and puzzle chambers to refine their initiates' minds. Sort of like mental training using stress-induced clarity. That graveyard, the battlefield, it was just a stress test. A warm-up ”

  “Great,” Alex muttered. “So we’re past ‘fight to survive’ and heading into what? Memory palaces? Logic deathtraps?”

  “Hmmm… There is a mention of mnemonic glyph mazes and layered illusions. Plus a few rooms marked with something called ‘Bound Thought Constructs.’ That’s weird. ”

  “That sounds like brain demons.”

  “Well, I’m not saying it’s not brain demons. ”

  Alex pulled his hand back from the pedestal. The stream of glyphs flickered, then dissipated. The pulse in his arm faded along with it and Obby settled back inside the bond in his soul space.

  “That’s all I can access for now, ” Obby said. “ Unless your Wisdom jumps a few dozen points or we get our hands on an access cipher. ”

  “Still,” Alex said, flexing his fingers, “that was helpful. Gives us some context.”

  “Well, where do you want to begin then? Seems the puzzles are down one of those three tunnels over there. Do you want to go look at what we are dealing with, or do some prep work first?”

  “ Prep first. We have been holding off on a lot of projects as of late. Now that I can’t even spend my experience points, we need to do everything we can so that I’m at my best. Who knows what we will face next.” Alex pulled the item he picked up from the Grave-Tyrant boss of the first floor. “First, what the hell is this?”

  It was the first time Alex had taken a look at the thing. It was another crystal piece, but it was dark in color, swirls of light showed inside it sporadically. Like it was pulsing with energy in a strange organic rhythm.

  “You really are lucky aren’t you? Well besides being taken to a new world against your will. Then getting your core shattered. And being captured and thrown into a dungeon— you know what forget I said anything, lets move on.” Obby’s pebble pulsed and grew slightly warm in Alex’s other hand. “ That is a Vital Essence Fragment. Remember those arcane beast cores I mentioned? Those are the mage cores naturally formed by the aether inside a beast. These fragments, are like that, but formed by monsters inside dungeons. They contain the condensed aether and spiritual essence of the thing that dropped them. Compressed fragments of a dungeon’s denizens. ”

  “So a dungeon containing arcane beasts will have them drop these instead of beast cores?”

  “No, no, it can have them drop both.”

  Now Alex was confused. Were the enemies inside these dungeon real or not? Was this an alternate dimension created by The System, or was it a real place? Did it even really matter? Probably not.

  “Alright, what can I do with it then?”

  “Well, normally I’d say you can sell it or use it in enchanting an item or weapon, or something along those lines. It is quite obviously dark element attuned, so if a mage was dark attuned, they could absorb it to improve their core. In your case, you could probably absorb it slowly to vastly increase your cultivation. Doing it all at once would make your energy balance harshly skewed toward dark. But over a day or two… it should be fine. ”

  “That’s actually useful. How much would it increase my [Aether Attuned Body] ability?”

  “Hard to say,” Obby’s pebble pulsed again, runes lighting up like a computer doing a calculation.

  Alex watched the rock’s little light show. Is that how he looks when he’s thinking? I always keep him in my bracelet, so I can’t see, but he might be more computer than I first thought. Do I have a personal magic AI or something?

  “I don’t think it will increase your ability’s attunement much at all. That’s not what the energy does. It will instead strengthen and increase your mental stats as you use it. Dark Elemental affinity is heavily connected to Willpower and Wisdom, with Intelligence lagging behind. So it will increase those stats as you use it. Given the potency of the energy inside, I would say it can increase the rate your aether gathering technique refills your body threefold. So there is that.

  “ Holy fuck,” Alex looked at the object on the table with a new sense of hunger. It could help increase his stats and triple his aether gathering rate, each of those alone would be a huge boon. Together though, this thing was essentially a priceless boost for his power. “Let’s get to cultivating then.”

  He swiped up the item and quickly dropped to a seated position on the stone floor.

  “Slow your roll there flesh-sack,” Obby’s pebble pulsed erratically. “ You forgetting something? The essence gate enhancement that I said we can do through your [Glyphcraft] now?”

  “ Should we do that first?” he looked at the Vital Essence Fragment remorsefully, like a kid holding a Christmas present but being told he couldn’t open it yet.

  “It will make things faster all around. Enhance the efficiency of your gathering technique, and the absorption of that fragment. You will save time in the long run. Especially once that fragment is done and gone. Your enhancement will stay with you.”

  “ Efficiency, efficiency, I’ve heard that phrase more than any other since coming to this world.” Alex sighed and tucked the fragment away in his bracelet. He gathered up his glyphcrafting tools instead and set them around him on the floor. “Walk me through it then.”

  “Oh goody, self mutilation time, my favorite.”

  “ What?”

  “I didn’t say that. ”

  Obby pulsed softly, Alex was certain the little fucker was laughing. “ Okay, grab some of those smaller aether crystal pieces you couldn’t enchant, and your alchemy tools. We have to prepare some ingredients. Then I will guide you through the process. ”

  ***

  Alex sat cross-legged on the cold stone floor, surrounded by tools that shimmered with latent energy. Obby’s pebble rested in front of him like a miniature altar, glowing with pale light. Aether crystal shards had been ground down into powder and mixed with alchemical oils, forming a thick, iridescent paste inside a shallow dish.

  The air tasted like metal and ozone. The scent of scorched stone lingered in his nose from Alex’s earlier tests.

  “Alright, ” Obby said, his tone no longer teasing. It had taken on that rare, unnerving seriousness he only heard when something could kill him.

  “We’re etching a glyph directly into your Essence Gate. One wrong move, and your gate collapses like a punctured lung. No pressure. ”

  “Cool. Love that. Thanks,” he muttered, dipping the enchanted glyph stylus into the glowing paste.

  “Start by drawing the base formation on your skin. Directly over the back of your neck. Just beneath the skull. ”

  “I can’t exactly see back there.”

  “Then don’t fuck it up. ”

  He grunted and reached behind his neck, angling the stylus was awkward, but he proceeded with careful control. Every stroke of the glyph stung. Not because of the stylus, but because the paste he was using. The moment it touched his skin, it sizzled like acid laced with sparks of cold fire. He grunted but pressed on, drawing the glyph Obby projected in his vision. Lines, spirals, a pointed triangle wrapped inside a circle, each curve precise, and the damn ink refused to stay still as he worked. It writhed faintly, as though the stuff was alive and resisting a single form. Alex felt like he was trying draw on a canvas with paint that kept trying to literally jump off of his brush.

  His hand trembled. “Obby, this stuff is crawling .”

  “That means it’s working. The aether wants to bind itself to something alive. Keep going. ”

  By the time he finished the base diagram, sweat poured down his forehead and back. His muscles twitched. The paste had sunk into his skin, staining it with glowing sigils like branded tattoos.

  “Now comes the fun part, ” Obby said with zero joy.

  “That wasn’t it?”

  “No. That was the loading screen. Now we do the real install. ”

  The moment Alex focused his will and fed aether into the glyph, the pain hit like a fist made of lightning and fiery glass. His whole body jerked. Aether poured from his muscles and tissues, racing up through his tired body and shooting toward his Aether Gate like a damn spear.

  The glyph ignited.

  He screamed.

  The mark on his neck pulsed and glowed, then split open, just slightly , but enough to let dark azure blue and crimson red threads of aether spiral out. It wasn’t blood, it was raw spiritual energy, curling into geometric shapes midair before vanishing. Just as quickly, his body tightened and he felt the familiar refinement process begin in his body. The typical black corruption and detritus was forced from his ears and pours, his teeth clenching so hard his jaw ached.

  “Hold. It. Together, ” Obby hissed. “ The glyph is syncing with the Gate! Keep feeding it your intent. ”

  “What intent?! I’m too busy not shitting myself-!”

  “Then intend that, very hard! ”

  The glyph surged once more. And then… everything stopped.

  For a heartbeat Alex felt something click, a gentle suction at the base of his skull, a whirlpool forming behind the gate. The glyph dimmed, settling into his skin and the sensation of tearing was replaced with one of stretching. His awareness of the ambient aether near him expanded. Like a window had been wiped clean.

  Breathing through his gate was now easier, more natural.

  He slumped forward, gasping, his hair clinging to his forehead from sweat. The stone beneath him felt hot and cold at the same time. His fingers twitched, coated in dried residue from the ritual ink.

  “It’s done, ” Obby said softly. “ You lived. ”

  “Yay me.”

  “Also… that scream was embarrassingly high-pitched. Just saying. ”

  Alex let out a ragged breath and flipped Obby’s pebble the bird.

  “Okay, next, the fragment. ”