Neophyte World Builder

Chapter 140: Dungeon of Infinities

CAYLA

The [Dream Walker] class was rare, but not unknown. It had so many stories built up around it that the true capabilities of the class were shrouded in mystery. So many thought that a person with the class could glide through dreams with impunity, or communicate into someone’s dreams.

In reality, the class was much more fragile than that.

Even finding someone in the dream realm was difficult, and entering their dreams required both power and great skill, if it were possible at all. The [Dream Walker] shaped their own personal dreams, and invited others to see them, allowing for a kind of communication… though one that the target often had difficulty remembering in the morning.

To actually enter another’s dreams was difficult. Even keeping someone inside a dream after inviting them could be a struggle, if the target wanted to leave. More often than not, all a [Dream Walker] could feel and see were fragments of dreamers, glimpses without context or association.

It was a rare and powerful class that could provide incredible insights and foster understanding, used well, but the limitations of most who carried the class kept it from being more than a curiosity. This in turn made it difficult to level, so gaining more useful abilities was even more unknown.

Cayla was several centuries old by now, and had been using her [Dream Walker] class for most of that time to visit her beloved when he slept, between sessions of the Great Game. In their shared dreams they had explored fantastical landscapes and even flown together as dragons, or lived lives as another species.

It was how she had met him in her first life, and even in that one she had taken the class to heights that the most learned sages would never grasp.

And now… she could call upon allies she never knew about in her previous life.

“We can’t follow you in,” Akasha had said. “Father can make the dungeon, but him being there would… complicate things. Orpheus does not belong there and wouldn’t understand. And I… can only go where the System exists. The System can get you to where you need to be, but you and I both know it doesn’t exist in dreams. I can dream with you, but I couldn’t help.”

The girl hadn’t said it, but Cayla had put it together. Akasha controlled the System. Akasha was the System. That powerful revelation would have destroyed her when she was younger… but now she accepted it. And her memories told her that there were beings like these watching over the world, to guide it and assist it.

But that in the end, it was the people of the world who had to solve the problems.

Her gathering was small yet potent. She had stretched the limits of her power to draw others into the dream. Others who could navigate the Dungeon of Dreams with her.

A being from another place, like Orpheus but sturdier, more rough. He carried the weight of memory with him, and a confidence that Cayla hoped was earned.

A woman of the same type, lithe and agile, small and blue. Her dream self was steady and coherent, yet something about her felt off. The complete control she had made Cayla believe she might have been a [Dream Walker] herself.

A stocky man of stone, slow to move but powerful. Unstoppable. His sheer stubbornness and drive made his dream self a rock of stability in a world of fluid imagination.

A member of the Deep Watch, deadly and devoted. Cayla had run across them enough to know that they would do anything to preserve the stability of the dungeons, and that was the offer her dream-self had made.

Finally, the last one. A vaskan wanderer that had been oh so hard to find, and oh so hard to speak to. Slippery and impossible to grasp, only their shared connection from ages past had let her speak to him. The soul that was impossible to bind, the being who cannot be held.

Her old friend, Culling Hive.

She understood now that the soul could change bodies. She suspected some of those with her had physical forms far different from how they were pictured in dreams… and she wondered how much those who watched over the world knew that. Her interactions with them had been… strange.

[PRIVATE CHAT] ​

| DUCK (ADMINISTRATOR): Looks like the boss will owe you one again. ​

| CITY OF SOUND: I already have everything I asked for, don’t I? ​

| DUCK (ADMINISTRATOR): If the world had more like you, it would be… pretty boring, actually. ​

| DUCK (ADMINISTRATOR): A lot nicer, though. ​

| DUCK (ADMINISTRATOR): Good luck. It’s the first time I’ve really talked to a mortal. I want you out of this alive.

Cayla wasn’t sure what to think of that, but she hadn’t been given much time to consider it.

Moving about in the dream wasn’t like walking in the world. She had to keep careful watch on her companions, several of whom did not seem entirely aware that they were entering a dungeon. Only the female blue one – the elf – seemed coherent enough to speak to, but she was quiet and her body language unfamiliar.

To some degree, the experiences of those dreaming shaped the very challenges they would face. Cayla had made her own dungeon a complex multi-level maze with hunter-seeker monsters in it. She knew Culling Hive’s had contained shifting walls and pungent aromas that would baffle the creatures sent from the nearby hives, allowing him to have a much smaller dungeon than he’d normally require to challenge the organized insects.

Now she saw that some of the dungeons got very… creative.

She flinched when she heard some of the secrets divulged for this challenge. The floating patch of earth had a single rope bridge to the next section. For some reason, nobody could cross until they had stated some embarrassing fact about themselves or someone they knew.

Most of these were meaningless to her, but it was the principle of the thing!

| CITY OF SOUND: Do some of you really ask people riddles and things to let them progress? ​

| LABYRINTH OF FANGS: None currently, but there aren’t a lot of talking dungeons around these days. I heard stories about one in my childhood that did something like that. ​

| DUNGEON OF SLUMBERING VINES: I have a puzzle on the floor they have to solve. Riddles seem like too much work. Also childhood? How old were you? ​

| LABYRINTH OF FANGS: A little over two hundred years, but I’m pretty sure my people are the longest-lived. ​

| INKBLOOM REEF: Twisting *DANCE* forwards the swim. ​

| DUNGEON OF SLUMBERING VINES: … what? ​

| LABYRINTH OF FANGS: It’s saying that it makes them dance or something to progress. That one was a haptix, they take a little while to learn how to talk to us.

It was baffling how much she could have done when she was a dungeon, but this one was stranger still. Akasha had claimed it would be an ‘unsouled’ dungeon… that it wouldn’t have a true intelligence guiding it. She almost wished it did have one. The complete incoherence of their progression was starting to wear on her, and her ability to stabilize a dream was much more limited in here.

“I once had to spank one of the Deep Watch,” Cayla sighed, stepping on the bridge. The Deep Watch member gave her a strange look, but she doubted he would remember or care about it upon waking up. She just needed to cross the bridge.

As was normal, she didn’t really need to cross the bridge in a physical sense. One moment she was stepping onto the narrow rope, and the next she had the vague memory of a careful crossing, but she knew no actual time had passed. Dreams were like that. They put you where you needed to be and filled in the gaps behind them to justify it. She’d gotten so used to it she could identify the real and fake memories without even trying.

The Deep Watch arrived behind her, claws clicking over the stone floor of the vast hallway. She didn’t recognize the architecture, and reasoned it was something from Upside. The whole idea of having another half of the world they couldn’t see explained so much, though. The strange architecture of some dungeons had felt alien because it truly was. The natural result of an elf or dwarf soul placed in a dungeon on Downside.

Another thing she’d learned as a dungeon, and forgotten when she was reborn. Another secret to keep as a Sage of the Dragons.

She wished she could properly talk to these heroes who were battling in the Dream itself, but holding so many here was already stressful. If she brought out their thoughts and conscious minds too much, they might begin to struggle… and she could not hold such a powerful will here against their will.

The power to see and speak to everyone was somehow so isolating.

They were in a vast jungle, now. She didn’t remember the transition from the hallway, but that, too, was normal. Sometimes the dream didn’t make excuses, it simply was, and left the individual to rationalize it in the morning.

Or not. Many did not.

She smiled faintly as Culling Hive threw himself into battle against a large, armored creature. His sword staggered it, allowing the male elf to dart in with a crystal-headed spear to strike. Hive’s gift, she had learned, was to never be bound or subject to another being… but he was still one to work with others by his nature. He didn’t leap for glory or recognition, he simply acted.

There was purity in that.

“Friend of yours?”

Cayla blinked, but the surprise she may have felt in the waking world was not there. It was natural, here, to find yourself mid-conversation with another. In this case it was the female elf, speaking to her in a curious tone as she watched Hive.

She also saw the same elf in battle, flying above with great wings of rich azure feathers.

“Yes, he was once. He doesn’t remember now. But once upon a time, we were close.”

Cayla had no reason to hide it. Either the person would dismiss the dream and forget it, or they already knew enough about the world that the answer wouldn’t surprise them. Dual bodies in a dream was not strange either, though the other’s amount of control was startling. The evidence for being another [Dream Walker] mounted… or perhaps something else.

“Memory is a funny thing, isn’t it?” The elf stranger spoke clearly, without any of the confusion of the sleeping mind. “This has been an adventure. Thank you for bringing us here. You might want to call them now, it’s nearing the end.”

A look beside her revealed to Cayla that the elf was gone once more… or at least, that doubled vision of her. She still fought the battle against the massive, round-shelled creature in the forest. Was this the dungeon’s Anchor Beast already?

A vague questing feel with her senses told her that yes, it was.

She should have known that. Had she grown that complacent? The timing of this was supposed to be very precise – she couldn’t afford to be sloppy.

| CITY OF SOUND: The Dungeon of Infinities is about to be resolved. ​

[ENTERING PRIVATE CHAT] ​

| AKASHA (SYSTEM): That was cutting it close. Father only just said he was ready. ​

| DUCK (ADMINISTRATOR): He had to fudge things a little but I double-checked his work. It’s going to be a world-spanning change. I hope everyone is ready. ​

| AKASHA (SYSTEM): Sorry, Cayla. You’re going to be legendary. They’re going to need to have someone to credit, for this to work. ​

| CITY OF SOUND: Such is life.

Cayla sighed.

This had truly been a grand adventure. For the first time, a shared dream between the two halves of the world. The start of myths that would later prove true, once the physical world caught up to the fantastical.

She watched the monster roar and draw a shuddering last breath. A rejection of the breach in the barrier between dreams.

But people believed in their dreams, even the glimpses of a strange new world, and that wanted acceptance.

The dream collapsed, as the laws of the world changed.

It was time to wake up.