The DAO of Magic

by Andries Louws

  “I wash myself every day and I’ll still be done in by my smell? And I’m sure it’s getting dark out; fuck my life. I hate these creepy fucking bats…”

  Further rambling can be heard as the lithe figure creeps out of her hiding place and slinks on, keeping an eye on the ceiling.

  ⁂

  A lobby is visible from the outside, so the plunging darkness part was slightly incorrect. But plunging into darkness sounds a lot cooler than stepping over a threshold, in my opinion. The lobby I’m standing in is just so clean. The design and state both scream clean. Light grey rock is visible from the little light that falls through the door opening. Clean lines delineate simple benches and tables.

  I send my qi out and notice that all is well with my sensory skills. I can’t even sense any dust, not even in the corners. The barrier around this place is fascinating though. Does it disconnect the place from the main dimension or something? Shaking my head in wonder I walk onward, passing a few clean and empty booths. Two doors are visible on the far end of the room, one a dark opening, the other showing a tunnel leading down.

  My qi can’t sense anything but stone around me. No proof of magical construction. There is only pure rock in a very dense form.

  Alright then, inspection of the holding area complete! Let’s go further and explore. As I walk through the open door I touch my necklace, probing it a little bit. Lola is asleep, sitting still on top of a tower is not really interesting. I would take a nap too. She might find what we are about to do interesting, so I call out and ask her to come out.

  As I step through the door a cave opens up around me. Looking at the wall I can’t decide if this is a natural or an artificial cave. Rough chipped stone is visible, and the walls have a flow that suggests it is formed naturally. The straight corridor that is formed by this rock is clearly artificial. Natural rock forming unnatural structures. I can even see some layered strata crossing the tunnel with a slight diagonal plane. This suggests natural sedimentary rock.

  As usual, I will chalk this one up to magic. A geologist would go clinically crazy if they saw this, a perfect blend of the natural and man-made. It really takes a load off your mind when you can simply blame magic for stuff you can’t understand yet.

  Lola is hopping around, slightly glowing eyes indicating that she hasn’t forgotten the eye enhancement trick I taught her. The slight amount of glow coming from her eyes is enough for me to see the cave by. That also means that the floating light specks in front of me are monsters capable of night sight.

  “Lola, pay attention.”

  She skids to a halt and looks up at me.

  “We are going to do some training. I think there will be animals up ahead, we’re going to fight them. Just kick them really hard and it will all be fine, okay?”

  Two black eyes with glowing pupils stare back at me. I can’t read the expression on her face. I really suck at ethology. I rub her head with a finger and she flops on her side. This isn’t going to work. Bunnies stomp the floor when they sense danger right?

  Standing up I stomp the floor. “Enemies!”

  Lola leisurely stands up and waddles ahead. She isn’t the epitome of alertness, but I don’t think she’ll die from the first floor of a dungeon. I now see six lights ahead of us. The air is slightly foggy, the murkiness combined with the darkness doing a great job of obscuring vision. I walk after the little bunny.

  Sending some qi into a specific part of my necklace I check what my little companion has been up to. Eating, sleeping and running is all she did the past day. I think I should bet on her instead of myself when racing with her now. She has been practising running a lot.

  The six glowing points creep back into the shadows when we approach the doorway. The half natural cave widens into a room. It’s not a nice square room though. It looks like someone let nature carve out their own design over the span of a few million years. Four openings line the room, coming in at odd angles and heights. I really like the natural rock style this dungeon has going on. Nooks and crannies litter the ceiling and walls and I spot some moss, grasses and small plants growing around the environment.

  Enough sightseeing though, my qi senses have been tracking the four shapes surrounding us. Lola and I are now standing in the middle of this cave. This seems to give the occupants of this room enough courage to poke their heads out.

  Big black eyes stare into my soul. Are they racoon badger dogs? They have white, grey and black fur and seem… anxious? They are twitching around, sniffing the air, shuffling in place, and they are incredibly cute. Their fur looks soft too.

  “Alright, I want some new pillows now. Maybe some fur lined boots? That tail could become a mighty hat.”

  A sudden yip pulls me from my delusions. One of the racoon dog things is flying through the air. Lola must not have a lot of patience. I pull my spear from my ring and throw it through one of the dog’s skulls. Kicking another dog across the room I spot a white blur. Lola appears from the blur, replacing one of the dogs. Head-butting is effective, but not economical.

  Quickly taking care of the rest I keep one alive. With a finger, I try to direct Lola’s attention.

  “Use a bit of qi like this.”

  I punch the last living dog thing with a qi filled fist. My fist hits the poor thing’s chest, I use the moment of collision to trigger the qi, shooting it forwards from my knuckles. The thing squeaks and collapses on the spot, chunky blood dribbling out of its mouth, its insides shredded by my qi. Looking at Lola I doubt if she followed any of this. Blinking at me she hops on, sniffing some grass at the edge of the room.

  “Use your head, you stupid rabbit. You have excellent kicking legs, don’t just head-butt everything.”

  Her nose keeps twitching up and down. It’s pretty cute but I can’t tell if any of this is getting through. I sigh and use some qi to skin the doggies. I don’t really need it, but their fur is really soft.

  Standing up I walk through a random door. Slowly breathing out more qi I begin spreading it through this maze. A mental map begins to form, showing me that this entire floor is set up like the previous room. Nooks and crannies litter the caves. Do these passages lead to breeding chambers? My qi seems to fade from my control when it comes into contact with the walls. I assign a new process to keep track of my surroundings, keeping my spiritual sense back from the rock.

  “Ahead are four,” I stick four fingers up in the air, “beasties. Want to take them on yourself? Try kicking them maybe.”

  Twitch, twitch goes her nose. Big beady eyes peer at me from a patch of grass. I need a “raising rabbits for dummies” book. Will she grow up alright?

  With worry in my heart, I keep walking.

  Chapter twelve

  Crawl

  These floors are pretty big. A lot bigger than the tower’s external size shows, that’s for sure. The amount of stuff that’s bigger on the inside than the outside seems to be related to the amount of magic in the atmosphere. It was everywhere in the Cultivation World. I’m not even a week on this planet and here it is again. Both planets have prodigious amounts of magical energies floating in the air so that hypothesis is quickly confirmed.

  Lola has just now head-butted her hundredth dog monsters to death. I hope that horned rabbits are not a thing on this planet. Head-butting would be a lot more lethal but dangling from your own horn stuck inside an enemy seems like a bad idea. I skinned a few more of the dog things but stopped after I accidentally poked my finger through the separated hide. Their leather is thin and of a shit quality, curing it would just make it weaker or brittle unless extreme care is taken.

  I hum a tune from the distant past while walking on. I have the majority of this floor covered with my qi. Keeping it away from the walls is harder than expected. If any of my qi even brushes the wall a large section of it fades from my control. Is that the dungeon’s doing or another phenomenon? I’ve got the majority of this floor mapped out, painting a nice floorplan in my mind. I would describe this level map as a natural
maze. Twisting corridors form an interlinked network of paths with a few dead-end tunnels thrown into the mix. I approach the only tunnel leading downward and start walking down the stairs, Lola hopping along behind me.

  The second floor has perfectly smooth floors with roughly hewn walls. Internal consistency is not a big selling point for dungeons, I conclude. My qi clad eyes pierce through the darkness, showing me a humanoid shape.

  “Oh god, Lola, close your eyes! They have furries here!”

  A dog-snouted being slowly walks in our direction. A white blur streaks across the tunnel and the dog snouts length is reduced by half, crushed back into its face. I get closer to get a proper look, waving the slightly stumbling Lola away from the body. It’s like the racoon badgers from the first level decided to walk upright. They have slight differences in their bone structure, allowing them bipedal movement. The rest of the body seems to be left as dog-like as possible.

  Scanning it with qi shows me what changed. Their pelvic bones and shoulder joints got the biggest modifications, the rest of its body is still distinctly canine. Is this dungeon retarded? Simply forcing a dog to walk upright would destroy a large portion of their firepower, right? It can’t grip anything with its paws and standing on two legs halves their jumping and lunging power. Shaking my head in confusion about this development I make a cross sign towards the cooling corpse.

  “Yiff in hell, you poor bastard.”

  Curious about what else this place has to offer I release a wave of qi. I might as well train while Lola mops up all these scrubs. Instead of spreading it out like a wave of gas I construct small wires. Chopping them into ten-centimetre-long pieces I float them into a triangular grid. Stopping halfway through I realize that I don’t need any structural strength for a scanning method, so I guide them into a more space efficient square grid. The points where six wires come together gets a disconnection rune. This way only the wires touching the walls will get eaten by the dungeon, leaving the rest of my detection grid intact.

  I hear another crunch as my little murder bunny sinks in another skull with her own. I do notice that she projects a tiny bit of qi forward through her head on attack, basically pulping anything she hits with her noggin. The result is another standing, now laying, doggy with a caved in snout. She does learn from me but uses this info in her own way huh. That is… absolutely perfect! Think for yourself little bunny, and don’t let the world tell you what to do!

  I focus on creating a detection-net generator rune. I don’t want to individually manage each and every strand of qi. A central control centre that I can just pour power in is much more comfortable. I tell it to do four things. First, it checks if there is a wall in the way. If the area is clear it will copy itself ten centimetres in front of itself and create a qi wire in between. Then it rotates 90 degrees in order to form the next spoke of the grid. A simple countdown eliminates the creation part of the spell after five uses, letting it die after all new angles are covered.

  Walking around while keeping the qi grid stationary relative to the world is slow but good training, but this floor is already bigger than the first, so I want speed. I stand still and activate the spell. As I keep walking to the middle of this floor the spell constructs itself around me and a few seconds later it overtakes me and begins spreading out. A perfect detection system, and it looks like a hologram.

  Lola is freaking out now though. Head-butting does nothing to the glowing wires, swiping and kicking seems to have no effect either. She darts through the perpendicular lines, small enough to fit in between the gaps.

  I take my stinger spear from my ring and throw it into a fat walking dog. The hard-headed rabbit is still darting through the grid while I pull my spear free. A pulse in my mind notifies me that the grid is no longer growing, all active spell instances eliminating themselves upon completion of their tasks. This floor has wider and longer corridors and is twice as big as the first floor.

  The death of the fat dog seems to have scared away all the other creatures. These walking dog people are gnolls or kobolds, right? Kobolds are dragon people if I recall, so I hereby label floor number two as the gnoll floor. I assume the fat dog was the king or something, so I take a left turn and begin walking to the only place with stairs going down. I wave my hand for effect and dismiss the grid. A thump followed by a small ‘squeee’ sound followed by an impact on my butt signals discontent from a certain freeloader.

  “Shut up ungrateful cretin, I’ll do it again next level.”

  White ears twitching she looks me in the eyes. I scoff and continue walking.

  ⁂

  I’m on the seventh floor now and things are heating up! The third floor was made up of big square tunnels, a few metres wide with a similar height ceiling. It hurt my eyes though, as everything was slightly crooked. I never had many compulsive tendencies, thank god. That floor would have driven me mad. Walls did not join at ninety degrees, floors weren’t level, etcetera. It was inhabited by bigger gnolls. These fellows started to have some streaks of colour in their fur. I assumed it was a sign of things to come and the fourth floor proved me right.

  The fourth floor looked weird. Think of a natural cave, including stalagmites and stalactites, made up of red brick and grey mortar. Beautiful dripping pillars carved from red brick walls. My eyes hurt again for a few minutes until I decided that this dungeon is pretty cool for pulling the style off. It was inhabited by bigger gnolls and big ass pigeons. Big ass pigeons that could use magic. Lola made short work of them though, so all I saw was the gathering of some mana to begin a spell followed by a lethal white streak.

  The fifth floor was the worst eyesore yet. Lola beat up the giant pigeon and we descended to the next floor where a truly horrendous sight greeted my eyes. The floor was made from stairs, the walls were stair-like, and the ceiling was smooth and flat. Everything was made of gold. I put my finger to the wall and forced some qi inside. Before the wall could cut my connection I could feel that it was pure gold, about ten times more compact and massive than ordinary gold. I don’t think a nuke could have knocked off pieces to loot or made a crack in the stuff.

  Its enemies where golden puppets. They were basically moving mannequins, made from normal gold though, so they were soft as butter once the magic operating them stopped working. I couldn’t loot them because they melted into the floor as soon as they were slain. I had to walk carefully again as the length of the steps were just wrong to walk on comfortably. Lola had no movement issues whatsoever and we could walk to the exit pretty quickly. There was also some massive golden boss thing, but I just threw my spear through the most magically charged place, making it collapse at once.

  I’m not talking about the sixth floor. As soon as I saw eight pairs of eyes staring at me, I created a flamethrower formation and an air bubble and burned the entire floor down.

  Now we’re on the seventh floor and I can’t control my laughter. I am standing in ankle deep water. Lola ignored this fact and dashed down the stairs. Seeing her crawl back up, absolutely soaked and dripping was hilarious. I shook her dry, spinning her around at high speed while keeping hold of her feet, which she seemed to enjoy. I then placed her on my shoulders.

  Standing in the middle of a large room I take her in my hands again. “Time for another lesson; look at my feet.”

  I pulled one foot from the water and pushed some qi through.

  ‘WATER SUCKS, SURFACE TENSION RULES, COHESION AND SHIT!’

  Shouting some encouraging words in my heart I lower my foot and step up and out of the water. Now standing with both feet on the liquid I cast my reconnaissance formation, causing a flow of light blue lines to appear around me in a grid. As it picks up pace and speeds through the tunnels, I realize that this floor is bigger once again.

  Lola seems agitated while looking at the lines. She shuffles around a bit and jumps off my shoulder. “I can see where this is going.”

  I pull the dog leather from my spatial ring and hold it in front of me. A fraction of a second la
ter a deluge of water is caught by the fur. I lower the hide and look at the result. Lola is floating belly-up in the water. She is breathing even faster than usual and looks pissed off. She flops around and I pull the hide up just in time to catch another wave of water.

  “Push your qi out slowly, you dumb piece of fluff. Don’t head-butt the water with your feet. Use your damn feet to push on more water than what is directly below them.”

  Saying something in a confident matter is usually more important than getting the message across when talking to animals. The result speaks for itself. The first attempt after my little speech has Lola shooting out of the water and into the ceiling. She makes another splash as she falls down, I can’t help but burst out in laughter again.

  Walking on, I remake the mapping spell, this time with half a metre spokes. These floors are getting too big for a grid resolution of ten centimetres. Now exponentially faster, the entire floorplan grows into completion.

  “Exit is this way, follow me when you can, sucker!”

  With a crooked grin on my face, I wave to the swimming bunny and stride out of the room. I pull out my spear, ignoring the splashing and whining behind me. Shouting ‘SHARP THINGS’ at some qi I create small pellets just in front of the spear tip. My detection net picked up flying enemies the moment I send it out so I’m preparing for ranged combat.

  A metre-wide pigeon with a blue beak flies towards my chest with wild abandon. I point my spear and flick my wrist, giving it a shake forward. A single qi packet cuts through the feathered beast, slicing into its body just between its eyes. A few more blue-streaked bats fly low over the surface, causing big ripples to follow them.

  I think some panicked thoughts and watch the blue flow of mana materialise before my eyes. The bats are brimming with the stuff. Fearless thinking shows a fainter, lighter blue. The positive side of water seems to have nothing to do with the bats. I let some dread creep into my heart. Thinking about how small you are in this massive magical universe usually works. Shoving my hand forward I project all the panic through my palm. A blast of blue sends the water into a frenzy.