The Dao of Magic

12 - 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 and 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 headbutted around a hundred dog monsters to death now. I hope that horned rabbits are not a thing on this planet. Headbutting 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 once 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.

I hum a tune from a distant past while walking on. I have the majority of this floor covered with my qi. Keeping it away from the walls was 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? The majority of this floor is now mapped out, painting a nice floorplan in my mind. I would describe the floorplan 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 a perfectly smooth floor with roughly hews 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 a slight difference in their bone structure, allowing them bipedal movement. The rest of the body seems to be left as doglike 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.

"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 force them into a standard 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 literal detection grid intact.

I hear another crunch and 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, 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 stand of ki, a control centre to pour qi 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 eliminated the creation part of the spell after five uses.