NOVEL WEB Chapter 7: Confusion.
W-What was that? I had just made the corridor and then... ouch. From what I can tell, the fact that I was hurt was due to mental stress. Mental stress, he had already found out to be connected to the size of ones dungeon. When thinking about it, it made an awful lot of sense of just why it had hurt him. Assuming that mental stress was used to maintain his dungeon, he could safely assume that it had something to do with his subconscious. The system had said that my mental stress levels were rising too quickly, maybe that means that I could have made the insanely long corridor without hurting myself if I had taken my time.
Anyway, I had to start on the first room to my dungeon. I knew that if I wanted to survive, I'd need to make something absolutely insane. So I chose an area under my influence(My influence is what I began calling the area in which I could control and sense things well. It was also the area that I could modify using skills) and began working.
I had a very specific idea in mind, one that would stump anyone who would try to enter my dungeon. A labyrinth surpassing all other labyrinth, why would it surpass all others? Well, that's quite simple really. My labyrinth wouldn't be a labyrinth, at least, on the surface. I was taking inspiration from a painting I had once seen on the internet, it was called 'Relativity'. The painting showed a bunch of staircases and doors all at different rotation and angles, and yet people still walked on them as if everything was normal.
To recreate the effect, I wanted a massive room. It would need to be around a hundred meters cubed to give a convincing and accurate effect in real life. To do this I resolved myself to make a 10 meters cubed room and then try to use space magic to make it the size I wanted.
Something that I had noticed when making my almost infinite tunnel, was that the cost for using my affinity was dirt cheap. I had managed to reach practical infinity and only had 57 in my mental stress. The best part was the cost in mana, which was precisely none.
Once done, I was left with a perfect room for what I would call the confusion hell. I then made sure that everything was perfectly smooth, didn't want anyone to think of my dungeon as having cut corners. After that, I put a few layers of a beautiful smooth white rock that I managed to make using [Material Creation]. I also tried to make more complex elements, but it seemed that the skill wouldn't be able to make any until it leveled up.
With that done, I then made another room that would contain a thick layer of the same white rock as the floor. I made sure that this room had around ten meters in height and then went back to the original room.
A cool thing that I had managed to do with space, was shortening the distance between two areas that I wanted. Now, one might brush it off as simply a way to make travel take less time, but I saw it differently. If one shortened the space between to places enough, they basically became one in the same. This could be used to make portals, though I had another use in mind for this.
I took spaces from the second room I had and put it in the first one. This made it so that I could have floating platforms if I wanted, but something else was even better. You could rotate the space itself. Using the rotation of space and how gravity wouldn't change since you technically never really rotated, I made it so that one could walk everywhere in the room. I made stairs and entryways, all with their own 'gravity' that made you stick to them.
The result was a true beauty, a room with no true up or down. It wasn't even finished yet!
I continued work by making some of the entryways connect to others and added tunnels that would lead to you suddenly walking on the roof! I continued working at this for days, making a room where nothing made any sense. In the end, my final touch was what truly made the room perfect. I created two other rooms that looked exactly like the first, same gravity tricks and same style. Then, all around the rooms, I added little spaces that would transport anyone walking through to one of the other rooms. Those 'portals' were put in such a way that one could walk through easily without noticing but wouldn't be able to go back through. The only way to get back to the first room was to wander and pray to walk through one of those special spaces. Of course, you might just end up in the other fake room.
I considered the result perfect, now I only needed to add a way to get to the next room I would create. I started with choosing a random path through different spaces that would be incredibly difficult to just get through randomly. Then I made it so that once one reached to end of the path, they needed to jump off of the platform they would find themselves on. At the moment, I only had a placeholder room for the next room since I needed to come up with a good idea for it.
All in all, I finished the room at only 35/100 for my mental stress. I was thankful that Lethe seemed to have slept through the entire building process of the room, though how one could sleep for several days in a row, I didn't know.
