My immediate path was fairly clear: first, use a DP to get some benefits and mana; second, make basic changes to the first floor of the dungeon; third, make a new monster.

  Right. The first one was extremely simple; except it wasn’t.

  I had used a DP to refill my mana pool before, so I knew what it felt like and the mechanism of how it worked. But in hindsight, I now realized I had done things incorrectly, resulting in inefficiency.

  At that time, I had–yet again!--assumed that DP worked like it would in a computer game–I spent a point to fill my mana reserves and they were instantly filled. But that was not what actually had happened. My core became inundated with a flood of mana, far more mana than it was able to process or hold. The DP hadn’t purchased me a ‘refill’ in that sense; it had purchased me the mana itself. The quantity it had purchased was far more than what I could hold, so as the mana washed over me, most if it was simply lost, wasted. I had massively overpaid.

  Not this time.

  I had reasoned out two plans to obviate the problem:

  

  
1. Try to use the surplus DP power and my experience with my propulsion well to expand my main well.


  
2. Make an external back-up to gather the excess mana, a “mana catcher.”


  

  For the first one, I was pretty much ready to go on, but the second one would require some preparation. And by preparation, I was thinking “try to exploit the ever-loving-shit out of Interface.”

  The concept I had come up with was pretty crazy, seemed like it would break some fundamental rules, and probably just wouldn’t work. But I was determined to try.

  The mana catcher was a possible answer to one of my many random notes about the system and its mechanics that I had jotted down, in this case, in a category of ideas for increasing my mana regeneration. One of those ideas discussed a question, which was, “is it possible to enchant my own interface?”

  I went back and reviewed my memories of when I had used the DP to refill my mana pool. At that time, I had been overwhelmed by the sensation, but had thought of it as a sort of hurricane. But now, in retrospect, the direction of the mana hurricane was important. As I remember it, the mana didn’t flow across my core in a single direction, but chaotically swirled around it. It was less a hurricane and more a tornado.

  If I had more time, I could probably put together something great. But I didn’t, so I went with something “good enough.”

  I created five Interface screens and set them around my core like the sides of a die, leaving the bottom face empty for now–I realized I needed to do something first. Using some of the dregs of mana I had remaining, I created an empty chamber underneath the floor of the Staircase Room, directly below where my core rested.

  Now, I made the final sixth face of the cube, but this one I heavily morphed. I stretched the center downward, creating a funnel that passed through the floor and came to a stop just below the ceiling of the chamber down below. I made a rectangular hole in the bottom of the funnel and replaced it with a separate screen, which I stretched downwards a couple of inches, making it into a box.

  That was the easy part.

  Until now, “enchanting” was a mystery wrapped in an enigma to me. The Silverium coin was my first exposure to it, and I only got some component parts to look at, not the how or why of it. When I created the tablet, I got some more pieces. In total, I currently had: cohesion, connection, denotation, recording, termination, and transmission. Maybe, if I made another artifact, I could pull whatever concepts were needed from my butt–the system’s butt?--easy peasy.

  But not this time. First, I wasn’t manifesting a physical object, so the system might not fill in the gaps. Second, letting the system do all the real work meant I wasn’t learning anything; I wasn’t stretching the boundaries of my abilities. Finally, I could make what I wanted using the concepts I already had.

  On the outer side of the construct (i.e. the side facing away from me), I inputted the transmission sigil. On the inner side, facing my core, I put termination and cohesion sigils. Hopefully, this would work to create a mana “hotel:” mana could pass the external barrier, but would be blocked from escaping back out once inside.

  On second thought, I needed to control the mana churn inside, too. I created two more screens and twisted them more than I had any other, turning them from 2D rectangles into twisting strips that curled around and down, functionally making a helix out of them. I then added more transmission sigils to encourage the mana to flow properly.

  I used more sigils in the box, to hold and compress mana that entered from the funnel. This part, I knew, I did not have sufficient capability to make properly; I would have to let the system fill the rest in.

  Right now, the sigils were little more than ink-on-paper, figuratively speaking. To bring the construct to fruition, it needed intent and mana.

  Much like when I had created the table, I started pushing mana and intent, with a focus on infusing them into the whole construct. More than that, I also kept a clear image of what I wanted, and what each piece was meant to do. The tricky thing was that this time, the construct needed a few conditionals, something I hadn’t tried before. I hadn’t? No, I had. The traps I made using Trap Creation all used conditionals. So I used my knowledge from that skill to refine my approach.

  The magic, the system, gave me almost no resistance except for a slight reproach–a soft push for the final missing piece rather than a complaint that what I was doing was wrong. Fortunately, my skills all worked together so that I intuitively understood what I needed. Enchanting needed an anchor. Usually, this would be the physical object. This was the case with the tablet and even the coins.

  But a physical object for the mana catcher? Yes, I could attach it to a rock. I probably could even add it to Quinn’s tablet as a sort of app. However, there were considerable downsides. An enchanted rock could be stolen or destroyed. Using the tablet would also be putting more eggs in one basket by creating a single failure point.

  The obvious answer came to me quickly. I cancelled everything and reset myself.

  Then I went to my status screen and, just as I did the first time, I spent one more DP to create my second Holding, covering the Grand Staircase (excepting a small sphere around where I was). I didn’t fret about spending it and did it right away. Although I was spending the point earlier than I had originally planned, it was still an expense I had baked-in.

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  The new Holding–I hadn’t come up with a name for it yet–came into being with the same features as the first one. That was good.

  I restarted the enchanting process. The early steps went swimmingly. When I got to the anchor part, I played with Interface and made a connection that slotted right into the empty component of the Holding.

  As I worked, I began to understand some of the mechanics of enchanting. The concepts, which I previously denigrated, were not high-level magic. In fact, it seemed they were the opposite–simplied forms that someone could more easily grasp. ”Sigils for idiots.” But that simplicity also gave them an advantage: mutability. The words of the sigils did not just have definitions, they had definitions that were vague. By tweaking the enchantment's definition one way or another, I could adjust the overall effect. Similar mechanics to sigil arrays, but definitively more user friendly. For example, I adjusted the Transmission sigils to provide better flow direction so the mana would circle around and downward with less turbulence.

  I moved on to the next step: the output function.

  Currently, there were four ways that I could store mana. They were:

  

  
1. My internal mana storage. This maintained mana in a “liquid” format (easily earned or spent).


  
2. My supplemental mana store for Vestigial Propulsion. Functionally, it worked the same as my main mana well.


  
3. Mana storage for the Holding. The mana held within it was completely segregated and unavailable for use. Extremely illiquid.


  
4. My own dungeon. Features, such as items and monsters, that were reabsorbed provide some mana. Granted, the conversion rate was awful, but there was one exception–Silverium. The efficiency still wasn’t amazing, but it was far better than anything else.


  

  So, the final part of the entire contraption was to take the incoming mana and spend it on making bars of Silverium. This was easier said than done. I made things in my dungeon through the judicious, direct, and active application of my intent, but the enchantment would be passive. I needed to make sure my intent was properly and permanently imprinted. Something sticky, something like wax for a seal.

  I took hold of just a dollop of Essence, put my will and intent (“create Silverium”) and infused that into the construct.

  Everything settled into place.

  Several system notifications came in. I put them aside to check the final result.

  The component worked. And with a bit of foresight, I included an additional status screen that allowed me to set what the processor would produce in the dungeon. It only gave options for material I had already discovered, obvious but limited. However, if I ever came across a more efficient material than Silverium, I could easily change the processor’s status (rather than having to delete it and make it again).

  As for the rewards from the system–they were a little bit surprising.

  What. What. and WHAT?!

  Well, okay–they did make some sense. I thought about the two skills that levelled and why that may have been, and realized–again–that I was thinking about my skills in narrow terms.

  Take Landscape. It had always levelled when I was working on the natural physical features of the dungeon. That seemed obvious; the name matched what it was doing. Here though, I wasn’t doing any physical landscaping, but I was affecting the landscape of the dungeon through the application of the Holding. In this sense, It was a sort of “meta” Landscape (for a lack of better terminology, “Field Landscape” seemed most reasonable).[1]

  As for Absorption, there was the same problem. I used the skill to absorb things, which was obvious, but I had only “absorbed” physical matter. At the same time, when I did that, it always appeared to me to be like I was simply deleting something from reality (like deleting something in a computer file). But ‘absorb’ can also be something like a sponge absorbing water. The water is retained in the sponge–not deleted–waiting to be released by the expedient application of squeezing. The Mana Processor was basically acting like a sponge.

  The level-ups were revealing and provided future avenues for further experimentation.

  And finally–at long last–I got a new skill.

  I mentally recited a quick prayer of thanks to the system for yet another useful and detailed skill description. I was sure I would figure this skill out, but I wanted to finish this project first (and I needed the mana).

  Without further ado, I prepared myself–conducting stretching of my internal mana well as if they were lungs. When I started on another intake, I spent the DP.

  Immediately, a torrent of mana rushed towards my core. The mana passed through the walls of the processor without obstruction. Much of it was entering into my core, but the processor’s internal elements were also working. The mana that came in was not escaping back out, but instead turning into a swirling whirlpool vortex that pushed excess mana down towards the bottom. The mana pooled together in a dense soup as the processor worked. The first bar of Silverium was created then immediately was ejected out and dropped to the floor of the chamber.

  I kept my concentration on trying to expand my mana capacity, but all too soon the rush of mana was over. I checked my status and it showed “103/103.” That was a much lower boost than I had hoped for. I was disappointed.

  The mana processor was still going through the agglomerated mana it had collected, dropping Silverium bars onto the floor.

  Also, Quinn had woken up. “What the heck happened?” she asked. She had left her room and entered the grand staircase, but was looking disturbed with her hand on her forehead like she was getting a headache.

  “Good news, everyone!” I texted back. “We have enough mana to finish the dungeon!”

  “Who is ‘everyone?’--anyways, this place seems weird now,” she answered.

  I explained to Quinn what I had done and the creation of the mana processor. We figured out that even though the mana processor was incorporeal, Quinn’s [Sigil Sense] was still able to sense the sigils I had put into all of the interface screens. Quinn didn’t see the sigils themselves, or their locations, but felt an eerie sensation on her skin when she was near or standing in the Holding. Quinn described it as “I feel a slight tingling sensation on my skin when I am, like I am in a magical area.” When she stood next to my core–a space not in the Holding–the feeling went away. I worried that constantly having that sensation would bother her, but Quinn decided she could tamp it down so it wasn’t actively in her mind. It was a neat interaction, but not particularly useful at this junction.

  With that out of the way, I was giddy with excitement, “We have little time left and a full tank of mana–are you ready to build this dungeon?”

  “Oh, hells yeah,” Quinn smiled enthusiastically.

  [1]dunpedia/holding/properties/

  I defined “field landscape” as the idea that my demesne, the actual demesne, acts upon or acts as part of the physical landscape contained within it. This relationship may be reinforced or made accessible through the properties contained within the Holdings system. I theorized that mundane effects for an entire holding may now be possible, such as weather systems, day-night cycles, etc. For an extreme example, what if I could create a Holding that made the space within treated as existing in zero gravity? Or, potentially, if I stretch things even further, I could even jailbreak something I had thought not possible–creating realistic or simulated ecosystems.