There was barely any warning that things were going wrong. The experimental setup from his team for stabilizing transuranic elements seemed to work well, and the steady stream of Tenessium atoms did not decay in milliseconds as they would but lasted nearly tenths of seconds. Then the decay counters noticed an uptick in emission, and… everything went totally black. Not the black of the lab’s fluorescent lights turned off; it was more like the black of no-data-available.

  This should be the point where I freak out, Morris thought.

  There were multiple hints that this was a really bad situation. An absolute lack of any form of visual sensation was one, but there was an equal lack of touch, sound – not even a heartbeat secondhand from blood flowing in his head – and other sensations. Even the “sixth” sense of proprioception, the knowledge of your limbs’ positions and movements, was absent.

  Morris had once tried the sensory deprivation tank experience for fun, pushed by his brother, but this one was qualitatively different. There was nothing, not even the absence of anything. It was somehow what he’d think of as being born blind in every sense.

  So, there’s life after death. Or at least consciousness, his conclusion was.

  The curious detachment made sense as well. Without a body, without the brain and all its messy chemical stuff, emotions would be… absent? Is that how the dead felt like?

  Do I become mad after a while?

  Then another thought came to him. Given the sudden and definitively abnormal way he lost his existence…

  I hope we haven’t managed to blow up the Earth or make a black hole. Or worse, destabilize a false vacuum state and start erasing the universe.

  Time did not seem to matter anymore. Thoughts were the only part that gave duration to his existence. Then Morris realized that, with time, there was also space. Whatever place he was in, the space now felt like it existed. And with space came directions. There existed a direction in which he could orient himself. Nothing could be used to move “him”, but he could… focus. Or move. Or perceive in directions. And one direction felt more real than the rest. Less empty.

  It’s supposed to be a tunnel with light at the end, not absolute black, Morris mused. He realized that he’d made a joke. He might feel emotionless, but he could still make a light joke nonetheless.

  He contemplated the direction. There was no hint of anything he could do since he had nothing to do with. Just focus on the sense of direction. The direction was, in a way, becoming more and more specific, precise, strict, clear-cut.

  Then, everything blew up again, and sensation came back.

  The cave had been initially smaller. That was before the explosive detonation in the middle. Now, it was much more extensive and sported a pair of stone needles shaped by the explosion, making a symmetrical formation. And… a globe of darkness in the middle of it, suspended somehow between the two needles. For a physicist from Earth, this would have looked suspiciously like the event horizon of a black hole, including optical distortions. Then, said physicist would immediately have freaked out because a black hole of that size would mass a dozen planets and immediately start to swallow the entire world, bringing it to an inevitable end.

  But Morris did not freak out because he did not see a black hole. He was looking outward from the black flaw in space and couldn’t see himself.

  Uh? It’s dark, but I can see? his first thought was after the explosive burst of sensation.

  His focus swiveled, turning here and there, trying to take stock of his new situation. Morris quickly discovered he could focus in any direction: front, behind, up, down. Although up and down was simply staring at a stone nub at the end of a needle.

  Despite still having no sensation of body, movement, or anything, he quickly decided that there was a definitive sensation of up and down and that his perspective came from a mid-point between two rough stone stalactite and stalagmite. That was confirmed by the sight of some gravel, broken stone bits, and other debris littered on one side of the flattened sphere-shaped hole in the rock where he was located. Gravel on only one side only meant that one was definitively downward.

  So, gravity. And rock cave. Interesting.

  He hadn’t paid much attention to the classics and other humanities, too focused on cramming science, math, and the various bits necessary for a physics Ph.D. But the underground prison bit did feel like some of the afterlife stories he vaguely remembered. At least there didn’t seem to be a lake of fire or something like Hell. Maybe it was a Greek-style Underworld?

  After a while, he realized that there was still no sound, smell, or anything. Just this… darksight of a kind, seeing without any light. And while the cave seemed to have a pair of openings going further away, he seemed to have no way to change his point of view or move it.

  At least, there still didn’t seem to be emotion, panic or anything else. He hoped boredom and madness would also be absent. If that was the afterlife, it was going to be long. Eternally long.

  Time passed, without measure.

  “So what’s this? Is it the right place?” Naskel asked.

  “Looks like. I can sense Aether a bit, and there’s a definitive… draft going out of that cave opening,” Iulas answered.

  The woman set down her backpack and rummaged in it. She brought out a pair of sticks with oiled tufts – torches – and gave one of them to one of her three charges, along with a lighter, before flicking her own.

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  “Aether mappers spotted the perturbation after that mini-earthquake two months ago. This is the place that seems to be the epicenter, and there’s a definitive slight Aether imbalance.”

  “Is that how you find a Dungeon?” Vamalon asked, peering into the semi-large cave opening.

  “Usually,” Iulas answered.

  Seeing the uncomprehending looks of the three apprentice Runners, she sighed and went into teacher mode.

  “Aether can get unbalanced on its own. Sometimes, it accumulates in a location. If it’s underground, with little or no escape, it can accumulate to catastrophically high levels and then blow up. When it does, it leaves an Aether flaw in the fabric of the world.”

  “And that’s how Dungeons form?” Naskel asked.

  “If the flaw remains stable instead of collapsing on itself, yes,” Iulas confirmed. “The flaw becomes the Dungeon’s Heart, its central feature. The engine that powers up Dungeon areas. Not every flaw is big enough for that, so you can end up with a simple Aether well, a place with slightly above-average Aether, but if this one is still affecting Aether two months after the blow-up, it means it is probably relatively stable. A tiny, empty Dungeon.”

  The four people walked in line through the cave entrance. Vamalon copied Iulas, lighting his own torch, peering behind the opening. The cave itself was slightly large, covered in animal droppings – bats, likely – and otherwise unoccupied. There were two openings at the rear, and Iulas, after feeling her way, pointed toward one.

  “That way. Looks like fresh debris from the blowout, and the Aether draft comes from that end, not the other.”

  They started to descend. The tunnel twisted a bit, but not much. They had to squeeze themselves through a spot at one point, but the descent was otherwise uneventful. They came across a second, tiny cavern, but with only one exit, there wasn’t much hesitation.

  “I thought that Dungeons were dangerous,” Schastar asked.

  “This is a virgin Dungeon, months old. Nobody’s been there, not even beasts. Dungeons tend to evolve slowly as a reaction to people and creatures entering them, but until that happens, this will remain a simple, empty cave,” Iulas answered.

  “Well, mostly empty,” she added as they came upon the next cave and their objective.

  The first hint of something happening for Morris was light.

  Given that he was seeing in absolute darkness, being able to perceive light was a curious experience. Light… gave him so much more perspective. It was like seeing black-and-white, then suddenly having color added.

  Then, a person came out of one of his cave exits, bearing the torch that gave him light vision.

  Uh? Who’s that girl? his first thought was.

  She looked a bit odd. A bronze-dark skin even with the torch’s light, but copper-red hair. A nose that wouldn’t have been looking out of place on a Jewish caricature, so pronounced it was. She wore laced leather trousers, boots, a jacket… and a sword hanging from her belt.

  The blonde man that came just behind looked odd as well. Like the girl, Morris couldn’t place his ethnicity. He wore some kind of burlap clothes, with a short, commando-style knife at his own belt. Two more exotic-looking men poured out of the opening, the last holding another torch, bringing even more light to his cave.

  The bit that surprised him was that they were not talking in English at all, yet he understood them. Well, at least their words, if not all their entire meaning.

  “Whoa? That’s a Dungeon Heart?”

  “Yep. Nice size. Should be stable for a very, very long time unless someone does something wrong,” the girl said.

  What’s a Dungeon Heart? And… they’re looking at me? What do they see?

  He would have waved or shouted or anything if he hadn’t been bodiless.

  “I don’t understand. I thought doing Dungeons was very lucrative. But this is an empty cave, just with this weird… thing,” the other torch holder said.

  “Go look at the twin columns around it. Don’t touch the Heart itself. At best, it’s merely painful; at worst, it can kill you.”

  The three men came and surrounded Morris, mainly looking at his stalagmite. He followed their gazes, trying to see what interested them.

  “Uh? There’s a bunch of small white grains on it?”

  “Never seen Power Stones?”

  “That’s Power Stones? Really?”

  “Yes. They form as a kind of natural concretions from the flow of Aether out of the Heart. The purer and larger they are, the more they’re worth. White colorless is good. If the Power Stones here are mostly colorless, that’s a good spot, with nearly pure Aether. Color denotes impurities that limit the usefulness of a Stone. Two colors mixed is even worse. Ever heard the proverb, ‘Worthless as a Peacock’?”

  “Uh, yes.”

  “That refers to many-colored Power Stones. Unless you have one as large as your head, you can’t use it for anything useful.”

  She spotted one of the men scratching and trying to dislodge one of the white concretions.

  “Don’t!”

  She sighed, seeing the man catch the tiny rice grain-sized white crystal.

  “Okay. We’ll get one back as proof of the Dungeon’s presence. One. And yes, we’ll share the money from it. But seriously, guys. Leave them here to grow.”

  “They grow?”

  “Yes. The Heart’s Aether flow creates concretions, and then they tend to accumulate more Aether as it comes out of the Heart. You should only pick them when they’re large enough to be worth the trip and not too many at a time.”

  Uh? I’m… an oyster? For whatever that Aether thing is?

  “So that’s why Dungeon running is good?”

  “Partly, yes. The other part is the Aether flow itself. You can do exercise and calisthenics for two decades to build yourself a fighting man’s top physique, and then you’re old. Or you can come to a Dungeon to exert yourself and get the same in a dozen trips over a couple of years. People love to fight in a Dungeon draft. And learning magic is even easier if you have all that dynamic Aether flowing around.”

  She smiled before adding, “that’s the second good thing about a Dungeon.”

  “What’s the third?”

  The girl opened up a side bag and fished out a green-dull knife. No, it should be called a dagger, Morris mused, seeing the size, guard, and pommel shape. The thing was slightly tarnished and looked old. She dropped it in front of Morris’ stalagmite.

  “Loot stuff. The Aether flow tends to… reshape things. This old low-quality bronze dagger here, if exposed to the Dungeon’s flow for a while, should become a much better item. It’s a fundamental rule among Dungeon Runners: pick an item, drop an item. The closer you put it to the Heart, the faster it changes. The Dungeon’s Aether changes it into a kind of ideal dagger.”

  “Wow.”

  “Of course, the same effect is what changes Dungeons over time. They become more like their ideal versions. And that goes for any critter inside the Dungeon. They become leaner, meaner things. The bats that live at the entrance? After a while, they’ll become dangerous.”

  “Does it work for people?”

  “Didn’t I say you’d get top shape in a few dives rather than decades? Yes, it does. It’s also very dangerous since it can change you into some more extreme version of people. So you never stay too long within a Dungeon or you court disaster. You go out, you let Aether subside, and you can come later to train again.”

  She turned toward the exit.

  “And that concludes our lesson for today. Your first Dungeon dive.”

  “I thought it would be more… exciting?” one of the men said.

  “You can’t expect a fresh Dungeon to be rich or dangerous,” the woman countered.

  “Then how are we going to get better?” the man whined.

  “You’ll have plenty of time. I’ve seen plenty of Dungeons, and this Heart is good-sized. Unless something – someone, more likely – severely disturbs the flows, it will be stable for a very long time, centuries likely. That’s why you leave the smaller Power Stones. They help regulate the flows around the Heart. Otherwise, the Dungeon Heart destabilizes, and it blows again, and that’s usually it. No more Dungeon.”

  She quickly added, “Of course, it never lasts forever. Sooner or later, Dungeons destabilize anyway. Then you come in and raid all the Stones because if it’s going to blow anyway, you better grab what you can while you can. Good Dungeonmasters can estimate the best time to do a final harvest. It’s not easy because at that point…”

  The last of the torch bearers disappeared behind the bend in the exit tunnel, and the light in Morris’ room dimmed and vanished, along with the voices. They cut rather abruptly as if they went out of hearing range in an instant.