Space Core

Waking up in a strange place is bad, it usually means that one drank a bit too much. Waking up in a perfectly round pocket of air in the ground was worse, it usually meant that you were not in a good situation.

When I woke up, it was strange to say the least. I had become so used to the feeling of peace and weightlessness that I panicked  for a bit. After calming down, I looked around myself, from what I was able to tell I was in a perfectly round sphere of air in the ground. I also realized that I was a small purple gem in the middle of that sphere.

This all matched with what I had read about dungeon cores, so I knew I didn't need to worry too much about unexpected things. Though it was really weird, I was basically everywhere in my little pocket of air. It felt like the entire thing was just my body, something that I could control just by thinking about it!

It was a little while after I got comfortable in my tiny space, that something interesting happened.

[WELCOME DUNGEON CORE, THIS SYSTEM HAS BEEN ADAPTED FOR YOUR USE AND TO HELP YOU CREATE YOUR DUNGEON.]

Well that's nice.

[TO OPEN YOUR SYSTEM, THINK 'SYSTEM']

That seems simple enough, 'system'.

[STATS
SKILLS
TITLES
RELATIONS]

It looked like a normal system window from the books I read, and it was fascinating. Even though I could see everywhere inside my area, this system looked like I was looking at it with two eyes! Wanting to see what was in it, I quickly went through all the menu's.

[STATS]
[LEVEL: 1
EXP: 0/100
MANA: 10/10
MENTAL STRESS: 0/100]

The stats looked about right, but the 'Mental stress' thing was weird. I would have to look into it.

[SKILLS]
[DUNGEON SHAPER: 1/20
SPACE SHAPER: 1/20
MATERIAL CREATION: 1/20]

That was about what I expected from the skills menu, a list of different skills that can be leveled up. It was simple and easy to understand. I then looked into the 'titles' and 'relations' menu's, but found out that they were empty. Even though it was logical that I wouldn't have anything in those menu's, It made me kind of annoyed.

Not having anything else to look at in the menu, I decided to finally try to start making my dungeon. I focused on a 'side' of my sphere and tried to simply destroy it by thinking really hard that I wanted that specific part to be gone. It was exhausting to think so hard, but after a little while, I could see progress! Pieces of the wall no bigger than specks of dust disappeared into thin air right before my... eyes?

Determination flooded me, I wanted to make myself a beautiful room! One that would make people gasp in surprise at how divine it looked! I threw myself into work, slowly but surely making a room. I used the dust particles as a way to properly size what I was making, didn't want to make a grandiose room that only a rat could enter.

It was during the process of creating this room that I encountered my first problem, Mana, it was used to dig out my room but didn't fill back up fast enough to let me enter a good work flow. I tried hundreds of different methods but eventually decided to work in cycles, I would work all the way until I hit two Mana and then waited for it to fill back up.

It was around cycle thirty that I finished digging out a 5*5*5 meters room, I was at the center of it on a pedestal that I had dug out. Everything was still pretty simple though, flat walls and flat pedestal. The room missed the grandiose that I wanted, and so I continued my work. I carved fractals into the walls and the floor of my room, always making sure that if I ever got access to water I could make it flow through the channels. Maybe I could add salt or sugar inside them at one point to make it look better?

I took me a long time to finish my room, apparently making fractals is more difficult than making a plain room. With my room done, I noticed something in the stats menu, my 'Mental stress' was now at 5/100. While I didn't know for sure what it meant, I could deduce what it probably was. It was probably a limit to how many rooms I could create and maybe a limit to other kinds of stuff. I would need to be careful with how I made my dungeon then.

Then, all of a sudden, the system opened up a new window by itself.

[ADDITIONAL HELP BEING SETUP, PLEASE WAIT.]

"wait- what?"

The window itself changed to a character selection menu, with a few different options... what do I do now?