Tree of Aeons

Chapter 344. Long Unused Titans

Year 320

As more and more of the Order's recruits rose up in power and in levels, the types of valid, meaningful challenges I could provide had shrunk. The peripheral worlds were not very dangerous to level 100s generally. They could handle almost all dangerous threats except for demon kings, and perhaps, hostile domain holders. 

Those who are at least level 150 like the domain holders could take on demon kings with very little risk other than time, but for those below that, facing each demon king was a risky, potentially life-threatening proposition, even with the presence of heroes and other domain holders.

This meant there was this uncomfortable gap in difficulty and experience gain between Level 100 and Level 150. At that range, demon champions were not much of a challenge, but they were still very far away from the strength of the demon kings. 

Within the Order, this was where many Order operatives stagnated. 

Internally, we referred to this as the Level 100 to 150 plateau. 

It was entirely possible to use my past level fruits to bring them up to Level 125, but our own statistics quickly indicated that this free level gain was not 'free'. There was a cost to them, and interestingly, those who took the level seeds ended up ahead only by a few years. 

Putting in the work and facing realistic, valuable challenges had real meaning. Real purpose. Gaining levels was a shortcut, but just like my own domain ability to instantly push someone up to Level 60, it was having the tools but not the skill to use it. There was a skill debt that the Order's operatives had to pay. 

Thus, the Order needed real challenges. 

Steamrolling relatively weak demons on peripheral worlds, even when faced with massive numbers, was not much of a challenge, but more of a chore. I could send five level 100 to a world swarming with demons and sure they gained levels, but it didn't help them hone the kind of skills needed to fight things like demon kings. 

A demon king was not in the same class as regular demons and fighting a thousand or a million demons did not prepare one for facing a demon king. 

For many operatives, they needed to fight threats of a suitable level. Something challenging that scaled to their strengths. The thought then began to circle back to where it all often tended to start. 

Dungeons. It had been a decision I'd put off for a while, but now, it was time to finally make use of it. 

The Dungeon Titan.

I quickly called on Patreeck and my artificial minds to bring up worlds where I could use it safely. Ideally a lightly inhabited world, and since I had three clone slots, I intended for the clone to serve as a 'protection' just in case these titans spawned creatures that the rest of us could not control.

Deadworld was one of the front runners. A world now removed of its demons and home to nothing. We freed the world from the demons that were already at the world's core, it just hadn't completed the last bits required to turn it into a demon world.

Deadworld's energies and magical ley lines were, as a result of the demonic meddling, fairly concentrated. 

Over time, these leylines would spread out and take new paths throughout the world, but right now, they were the best places for me to place a Dungeon Titan. We'd decided this was the best place to put it. Even if the dungeon ran wild and spawned powerful monsters that escaped, there were no living persons to destroy. All that was left on Deadworld are plants and vegetation and lately, monsters. 

This was the perfect dungeon world. 

Lumoof held my clone seed on the edges of one swirling mass of magical energy. Deadworld's mana, untainted by the demons, flowed out to the surface. 

"Alright." Lumoof said and placed the seed on the floor. It was the size of a full sack of grain. "It's bigger than I last remembered it."

I wasn't sure why either. 

I felt a connection from it as a part of myself emerged from that seed and pierced the rest of the world. 

I had, at the moment, the ability to support a total of 14 titans. 3 of these came from the Titan Frames of the deceased heroes, while another 11 came from the [Titan Substitution] where I had 1 titan for every Clone Body I have. Seven clones were deployed. My original body on Treehome, Branchhold, Threeworlds, Cometworld, Lavaworld, Tropicsworld, and my most recent deployment on Twinspace.  ɽ𝘼NỌ𝔟Ёꞩ

Four clone bodies remained, and my old thoughts were to keep them in reserve. 

But four was a little too many. I only needed one or two.

So, my eighth 'main' tree's roots spread through the ground and reached deep into Deadworld. They exploded outwards from the seed, both roots and vines drilled into the walls and grounds around us. They moved quickly, and I felt the roots quickly reach close to the Core of the Deadworld.

Just like that, I felt a connection form with the Will of the World.

[Clone deployed on Deadworld - You are now able to receive the souls of those from Deadworld and also the soul fragments of the Deadworld's heroes]

It was also no longer appropriate to call it Deadworld, because now I could glimpse the world's history. It once had a thriving population of regular humans that lived throughout the world. Alas, the demons came, and everyone died. 

My clone helped the world recover, and in turn, I could subtly guide the magical leylines of the world where I wanted it to be. This would have been significantly harder without a cooperative Will of the World.

My clone grew overnight, and I became the single largest organism in the entirety of the future Dungeonworld. A towering tree larger than mountains and reaching into the skies. My roots reshaped the ground around my body and turned the once flat soil into a massive valley where it was much easier to access the magical leylines.

My roots spread across the newly renamed Dungeonworld and followed the leylines to where they were the strongest. Next, my roots grew along and around those centers of power, and amplified the magical energies with whatever we had.

After what was a month, I identified two strong areas where the magical areas were most intense, and then, activated my long dormant Titan ability. At the heart where the leylines were strongest, a gigantic wooden door appeared. It warped the world around it, a spatial ability common in the dungeons I'd made so far. 

This was my 10th Titan, and I'd used my titans for various, more passive uses over time.

I used three of my titan slots to support the captured [Aeonic Stem Masses], 1 titan slot to support the converted [Aeonic Infestor Champion], Ally. I also had Hytreerion, my demonic walker, Gantreethor, my flying beetle carrier, Patreeck, my first Grand Mind Tree, and his assistant Grand Mind Tree, Patreeck II. I also used one of the Titan Frame slots to help create Lightwood with Lausanne.

It took the shape of a door. 

[The Greater Leveling Dungeon - Level 120 ]. 

It was higher leveled than the ones before, both as a result of my higher leveled skills, and also the added magical ley lines. The door began to radiate a thick magical miasma and spread out to the world around it. 

Monsters started emerging from this miasma almost immediately, though interestingly, they were all as if they were in a dream. They walked about the miasma and the vicinity and did nothing else. 

"Well." Lumoof watched from afar. "I'll try it first."

The dungeon's door swirled as my avatar approached, and then, we heard an announcement in our minds. 

[ Dungeon has not yet completed monster creation. Entry is currently not permitted. ]

As it turned out, creating a high leveled monster was not easy at all, and we waited for about two weeks before Lumoof was permitted entry. 

I knew almost instinctively when we entered that this Titan Dungeon's layout constantly changed and the walls were made of an exceptional magical material. The dungeon warped space itself, so that the door actually led to something more of a 'pocket dimension' where all the monsters were spawned. 

We were walking about and felt our senses numbed by a kind of haze. The entire area felt like it was coated with a thick layer of oil that prevented our senses from going too far. 

We saw a creature, a giant werewolf resting at the center of the cavernous empty hall, and we admired the amount of spatial distortion that allowed such a space to exist. 

A dungeon was just like my [secret hideout], but decked out to extremes. 

Then, that giant werewolf attacked with glowing claws. 

"Oh." Lumoof dodged it and then punched it back. The werewolf, to our surprise, shapeshifted at that moment into a different shape and dodged our fist. But it still suffered recoil, and the sheer power of my avatar's punch still sent the transformed werewolf flying backwards. "The level 100 werewolf can take a punch." 

The werewolf vanished before our eyes as if it had an ability of some kind. When it reappeared, the creature slammed into a wall of bark, and this time, it was squashed between it. The creature died. 

"But it can't take being squashed." My avatar looked amused as the dungeon monster perished. 

There were many more monsters throughout the remaining chambers, but it was clear Lumoof was the real monster in the dungeon. Lumoof was too powerful for this dungeon, and so nothing here posed a challenge. His aura was the weight of the divine, and even monsters could tell the difference. The next few creatures were so petrified by his presence that he could walk next to them, stare them in the eyes wherever that might be, and then walk past them. 

The dungeon's cavern eventually led to the boss room, where a larger level 140 creature loomed. It was a gigantic golden spider, surrounded by an army of smaller golden spiders, all level 100 or so. These things could ruin entire kingdoms with their incredible speed and toughness. 

"Well, I suppose I approve of this dungeon." Lumoof said as his aura made the spider's huge legs curl up, and it skittered backwards and tried to hide. The large boss room never felt so small for the spider-boss, as the bigger spider flung the smaller spiders at Lumoof as if they were sacrifices. 

The smaller spiders were not mindless. They were afraid and Lumoof could tell it from the way their entire bodies were tense. They were all prepared to attack, even as they landed. 

Vines emerged from my avatar, in an instant everything was killed, including the gigantic boss spider. Lumoof's vines sucked the juices out of the Gigantic golden spider and left it nothing more than a husk. 

It crumbled, and a golden chest emerged from its body.

"[Dungeons] are so strange." Lumoof sighed. "Do you believe there is a god of dungeons, somewhere? It's almost always that the boss monsters consumed or swallowed a chest in its body." It was fascinating to think about the origins of boss monsters. If the world had been a proper ecosystem, these boss monsters would have gotten to their level of strength by consuming many other lesser monsters, and these lesser monsters also would have consumed many others. These bosses would thus have accumulated the resources and energy of many other beings in a chain of consumption.

"It is a standard of the [System]. Dungeons are a part and parcel of the mechanisms that allow [adventurers] as a class to exist, and they also feed the heroes. For heroes to exist, they must have dungeons."

"That is the problem." Lumoof said. "Do heroes come first, or dungeons?" 

"Dungeons, of course. How can it not be more obvious? Heroes are artificial creations." I theorized that dungeons were just natural evolutions of monster hives.

"Are they? Or they, as a class, evolved from something else? Perhaps [Heroes] are just a modified version of [Champions]." Lumoof countered. "Level 150 is a line where individuals are defined as [champions]." 

There was a beautiful set of weapons inside, a set of silver-colored parrying daggers that was made of a rare blend of materials. A suitable sidearm for someone around Level 110 to 130, once it was properly cleaned and maintained. From our brief examination, it was also loaded with an array of protective effects that could be triggered by those of a suitable class.

"Well, well." Lumoof picked one of them up and looked at them as if they were ancient things. They looked ancient, but we all know they were 'generated'. 'Created'. It was an unnerving feeling to know what we dealt with wasn't there months ago. "I sometimes wonder whether these things will vanish when they reach their time. They feel unreal."

I could feel Lumoof's emotions. The weapon had weight, and structure. It was real in every way, but we both knew they were ‘pulled out of the void’, if that was one way of describing it. 

It was the same, uncomfortable sensation in our hearts. A sensation we felt when we encountered and interacted with Shrubhome. 

For those of us who knew that these things didn't exist before, it really felt like it was hard to grasp whether what was real and what was not. These things, popping out of nowhere, was an attack on our memories, because they contradicted what we knew of a location's history. 

These sort of contradictions would likely be missed by most who did not dabble in the levels of power we were in. For non-domain holders, it was a hard thing to grasp how so much of our reality was malleable. 

"We've seen things go from one way to another, from nothing to something." Lumoof said as he placed the two powerful daggers into a pouch. "I wonder if things can vanish, like how some demons disintegrate into dust when destroyed."

I have only seen demons vanish, and even then, not all demons vanish. Most of the demons we saw these days actually left rotting corpses, even if the rotting process was measured in hours, rather than days. For what it was worth, even demons from different worlds disintegrated at different speeds, as if their permanence was influenced by the worlds they came from.

"It probably won't." I answered my avatar, who looked unconvinced. "If we could just banish demons back to unexistence. That wouldn't be such a bad thing."

"Perhaps some day." I theorized. If we could influence the system sufficiently, it might be possible. The entire dungeon shook briefly.

[ Dungeon Completed. Return in two weeks for a new challenge. ]

Lumoof looked around, and a door emerged where there wasn't one before. It looked unnecessarily ornate for a door that would only be used once. 

We stepped out, and the dungeon vanished behind us. 

"We should make another one." Lumoof said. 

"Agreed." 

And so, in another area where there was another confluence of magical leylines, I activated a second [Greater Leveling Dungeon]. 

Two dungeons, hopefully sufficient to accelerate my Valthorns' leveling. 

But the question of permanence lingered in our minds. 

I wondered whether Core Mana made this difference. Core Mana, from what we researched so far, seemed to do nothing much, and yet it was so important in certain spells that we used. It gave structure and weight to the Void paths, and when used with Rift Gates, we noticed it reinforced those paths and walls.

But it did nothing much for everything else, and we had not found ways to use it for much.

So Core Mana served a different purpose, and so I wondered whether Core mana's role was not so much as 'mana', but more of a reality-binding substance. That it existed to make something ephemeral real. 

If this was true, then the term 'Core Mana' was a bad choice of naming that set us off on the wrong starting point. If so, I wondered whether they were more like unprocessed 'reality dust'.

Because they were most useful in places where things had no sense of reality. They made a stable path in the Void Sea. Was Core Mana also the element that drove and reinforced the creation of a 'reality bubble'?

Thus, I commanded my mages to experiment on Core Mana on Cometworld and also to use what Core Mana we had to work with illusions, ghosts, and other more spiritual objects and wondered whether there was an interaction. 

It would take some time for results to show itself, and so, I diverted my attention to the rest of the Order. They moved to set up operations in the newly created Dungeonworld and set up a dungeon-diving plan for the Level 100 to 149s.