Space Core

Once Lethe got her name, she started roaming around the room I had created. Thankfully, it seemed as if my measurements for height were about right.

Deciding to leave her be, I started work on the next part of my dungeon. It was a simple corridor that would connect my core room to another room that would at one point contain a boss of some kind.

It was after about five minutes of me working that Lethe went and asked me an extremely confusing question.

"What are you doing?", she looked disappointed somehow...

confused, I answered her question. "I'm starting to work on the next part of my dungeon... aren't you supposed to know this stuff?"

From the way she looked at me, I could tell I hadn't given the correct answer. "Off course I know 'this stuff' I spent more than a century making my dungeon, but what are you even doing right now? This room is the same as it was when I arrived here!"

I mentally shook my head, how is it that she didn't know what I was doing? It was so simple that I bet even a toddler could do it! "Well obviously nothing would change right away, it needs time! Look at that wall to your left, can't you see that I'm digging right now?"

Even though she obviously thought that what I was saying was stupid, she went to the wall I was working on and began to look carefully. After a few moments, she seemed to have realized something because her eyes widened and she turned around to look back at me.

"Not only is it the most inefficient and idiotic way to make a dungeon, it somehow manages to be impressive!" 

That... wasn't what I expected.

Continuing on her rant, she pointed a finger at my core. "How is it that you managed to even make such a room without using any skills? Just the amount of delicate control you'd need for that is unbelievable!"

Now she just annoyed me, "What do you mean I'm not using skills! I'm clearly using the [Dungeon shaper] skill!"

"No you aren't, you're just surrounding particles with mana and then disintegrating them into energy! Have you ever tried to activate your skill before?" Her eyes suddenly seemed way more dangerous.

"Well- I, I kinda assumed that it just activated automatically..." And while that was embarrassing, something else came to mind. What did she mean by 'delicate control'? It's the same that I've always used, I had a lot of time in the voi- ...oh. The void, a place where I was able to affect what I could only say was the fabric of space. It was a place that I spent more time than I could think of, a place where I spent thousands upon thousands of hours carefully controlling the delicate fabric of space. Of course I would have the capability to delicately control my mana for such a task...

I could tell by her face that Lethe was in disbelief, "So, you're telling me that even after finding out how to move through the systems different interfaces, that you've never tried to simply think the name of a skill with the intent of using it?"

When she says it like that... it does seem kind of dumb, the entirety of the system works by focusing on an option with the intent of selecting it.

With a small voice, I tried to sound as if I hadn't just realized that I had wasted weeks or perhaps months of hard work... "No... I didn't think of it..."

Lethe simply sighed, "I guess I'll explain the skill as well. The [Dungeon shaper] skill has two different ways of using it, one of them is by focusing on an object or whatever you want, you'll then be able to modify and change it in anyway you want. The other way of using the skill is by trying to do change the entire dungeon, it'll put you in what some have dubbed 'Developer Mode' whatever that means, some random Outer-Worlders just started calling it that and it caught on."

"I guess I'll try developer mode then..." It seems more interesting anyway.

For a moment I concentrated on activating the skill, all the while making sure that I was thinking of modifying the entire dungeon... which wasn't much. Then, all of a sudden, knowledge about how to use the skill simply appeared into my mind like some sort of weird instant tutorial. Deciding to put my newfound knowledge to the test, I then focused on the dungeon and everything that I felt about it, it wasn't too hard as I was quite literally the entire dungeon. There was nothing going on in it that I wouldn't know about.

Then, I tried to do something simple, make a five meter long corridor. I concentrated on it and after a little bit, knew instinctively the cost of mana it would take me to dig out what I wanted. Only five Mana, Five Mana, that usually only went to about 13 centimeters into the rock. I was currently cursing myself out inside my mind for not ever trying to use the skill properly.

Mentally confirming, I refocused back onto my core room. I looked closely at the wall from where the tunnel would appear from, and after a few seconds the rocks on a certain part of it suddenly began to melt and compact themselves into the floor and walls of the area it was digging out. The result was a perfectly smooth corridor that would put modern glass to shame.

Confirming the incredible results, I then tried to put the fractal patterns I had come up with for my core room onto the walls. Problem was, that it simply didn't work. A thought then occurred to me, what if Developer Mode was only for general stuff? Maybe if I went and tried with the more direct way of using the skill I could make the fractals...

It worked perfectly! Using the more direct approach seemed to give more control over how a specific thing or item looked like, though it was more Mana expensive than the general one.

I was so excited about my success that I quickly went and looked at Lethe to tell her of my accomplishments, but I quickly found the old dungeon sleeping(or at least seemed to be) all the while floating in mid-air. Guess it would make sense for her to float, she's kind of a ghost when you think about it, even being a bit transparent when you looked closely.

Though why she was sleeping stumped for a second before I remembered the description the system gave me of her, 'a bit lazy'. Mentally sighing, I prepared myself to wait for her to wake up, I still had some questions for her after all.