NOVEL NEXT Chapter 13: Meow.
I was bored. It had been about a week since I had opened my dungeon and nobody had found me. I spent my time with Lethe or changing tiny things in the dungeon to make it better. I added in English the words 'The cake is a lie' in one corner of the first room, just in case another Outer-Worlder happened to come by. Might give them a good laugh.
It was quite boring, and without anything to do, I found myself thinking about what few things Lethe had told me about her dungeon. She had sometimes muttered under her breath about things she missed from her dungeon, and one of those things I heard of was monsters. I wanted to find a way to make some, who knows what I could do with them?
I looked once more at Lethe, she was reading a particular book about how in my world we had industrialized everything and how it was done. I knew that she too, was bored, and was probably trying to ignore her own trauma.
I really wanted to make something for her but I didn't know what! But an idea struck me, monsters and a way to get rid of boredom...
"Hey Lethe, can I ask you a question?" I gently asked her. After her time in the hallway, any loud noise frightened her... ain't proud of that.
She lightly jumped in surprise at my voice, before turning towards me, "O-Oh yes! W-What is it?"
"I was wondering about how I could make monsters... There doesn't seems to be any way to do it inside the system."
Lethe looked a bit surprised, "Oh! W-Well, all you have to do is to compress a bunch of Mana together while forcing the image of the creature you want to make onto it."
As much as I wished it made sense, it didn't. "How exactly am I supposed to... force... an image onto Mana?"
"O-Oh, you need to... sort of... imagine it? It isn't really easy to explain..." Lethe said, embarrassment at the oversight obvious in her voice.
"It's okay, I understand!" I don't understand, "I'll try to work on that okay? Talk to you later!"
After that, I started trying to figure out what Lethe had meant by 'forcing' an image onto my mana. I made a little testing room close to my core and got to work.
I tried simply thinking about what I wanted, all the way to trying to draw an image onto the ground. None of my methods worked, It simply didn't make sense! I was trying everything I knew, one after the other. Until finally, after hours of work, I got it to work. What I did was quite simple really.
First, I made a ball of mana. Not all that complicated. Then, I compressed the Mana that was there as much as I could, though I made sure that I had a little bit of room to compress further inside.
What I then did could only be described as madness inducing to anything without the mental capacity of a dungeon. I 'modeled' my monster inside the ball of Mana by compressing Mana together to leave an outline of my monster inside. I even added in a bit of my space affinity in there to try and achieve a specific effect.
When I was done making it, I tried to simply crush the whole thing into the smallest size I could make it. It shrunk down to a pebble, and then a grain of sand. I thought it failed after that, but I was quickly proven wrong! The Mana in the air around what I had made suddenly stopped floating around uselessly and rushed towards the tiny bit of compressed mana that was floating there.
The Mana took shape around what I would later learn was a monster core, and then started a process not to different from my [Material Creation] skill. The mana became bones and muscles, then other kinds of gross stuff happened until I was left with the perfect way to help Lethe all the while protecting myself.
It was a cat.
Yup, a cat. Never doubt just how much their claws can hurt... and that's without the space mana making them able to cut through anything(though I did make it so that it couldn't cut through my own stuff.)
What I had made was a black cat with claws that could cut through anything, and it also had tentacles on its back. The tentacles used space to be able to reach way further than one would expect. (The eyes are purple.)
I then made another monster, a fish. It was a fish that would treat any surface as water and you would even be ably to see ripples from them 'swimming' inside the floor. I made it in a variety of colors and made their scales as strong as I could make them using my space affinity.
It wasn't hard to spread them all around the dungeon and with a bit of struggling made it so that they always knew where every traps of wrong paths were. I also made it so that they would stick to a territory, I wanted to make it a bit better so that they wouldn't all concentrate in one area or go into my core room.
I nervously went to talk to Lethe once more, "Heyyy, so I managed to make some monsters! And I have a little surprise for you!"
I quickly teleported one of the 'space kittens' next to her.
"So what do you thi-" I was stopped in my tracks by Lethe giving my core a hug, all the while keeping the cute cat in her arms, (I'm really thankful I made this one docile.)
Lethe seemed to be kind of crying, however a spirit could cry... "Thank you Lor... thank you!"
It was at that moment that I realized that I was one of the few who actually did something kind for her without any ulterior motives. It was probably something the Lethe hadn't received a lot before. Sadly, I couldn't feel the hug from her, but I was touched nonetheless. It's gonna take a long time to make her heal from the destruction of her dungeon... oh well, guess I'll just have to help her along the way.
