So, this chapter is where the Dungeon Core content comes into play.

I...well, look. Dungeon Cores don't work in LOTR for a simple reason, and that's because they rely on using an overlay most of the time, with levels and perks and currency and all that. And...as much as I'd like to write this normally, halfway through this chapter I realized that I really am not skilled enough to pull that off, so what I'm saying is that 'she' is going to be getting an overlay.

I'm really, REALLY sorry if that annoys you, especially if you're coming here looking for content other than Akari's story with her game, but I need the crutch. I am going to try my absolute best to make sure that she also does her own unique thing, but she will be using the overlay to help her as well.

I hope you enjoy!

Chapter 2


In her room, she shifted a little of her focus onto the clock to her side and counted the seventh full rotation of the hands.

She etched another line onto the stone wall, then returned all her focus to the half-formed skeleton in front of her. So far, she was able to control about half of the bones when moving or doing any actions. She could now levitate all of them at once in their full form, but if she tried to then move them, a good half of the bones would drop to the floor with a clatter.

Having gotten a little bored over time, she had also managed to unlock her ability to hear, though she ignored her sense of smell and taste for now, no real need for them. The other times she got bored, she switched to reading, lapping up the bountiful information the books provided her, even if a large quantity of the books available in the other rooms were all duplicates and thus unnecessary.

Speaking of books, she could now lift not just two, not even three, but four of the heavy books at once, and was able to move three books at once. She had also expanded her area to include the corridor she found the skeleton within, and that led her to a whole new realization. As her area expanded, her head felt somehow even clearer than it did before, despite feeling like she was already...well, clear-headed.

She also noted an increased ability to use her mental ability, which she eventually named 'Gravmap', since it was almost like it manipulated gravity, so she just shortened them and put them together. There was possibly a more technical term, perhaps telekinesis would suit it better, but for now, Gravmap was her ability, and she had invented it herself, so it was staying for the moment. She had jumped from two books being liftable to three when she performed her expansion, as well as being able to form and move more of the skeleton.

That led her to decide that when she was able to effectively puppet the skeleton, she would start expanding out further and further, only stopping if she found a good reason to, like a treasure trove of pertinent information or a threat. So far, her main wants were simply to expand, get stronger and learn more about...well, everything. She wanted to know exactly what she was, but the books related to Soul Crystals baffled her, most of the terms used she just didn't understand, meaning she would need to simply work her way through other books until she had a high enough understanding to return and then learn exactly what had been done to her.

And, if needs be, find a way to fix what had happened.


With the rattle of exposed bones, her skeleton puppet walked in circles around the room whilst she watched.

She had perfectly formed the skeleton, but...when it had taken the first step and she had been relieved that her skeleton worked, something had happened. An indescribable force latched onto the skeleton, seemingly binding it together in its current form. Tugging on a single leg dragged the entire skeleton, meaning all the bones were somehow spatially locked together.

However, despite this, it could still bend its knees and arms, rotate its head, and when she tried to control the skeleton, she found that while she no longer could directly puppet the skeleton, it would respond to her will. Hence the walking in circles, she had ordered it to do so until she gave it another order, testing the duration of orders. She had passed an entire rotation of her clock reading before deciding that it was either unlimited, or long enough that regular orders would always control the construct.

This, however, raised many questions. What if she was to pile her books into the facsimile of a body, decide that it was also a completed form, then mentally try to make it walk? Would the same force bind that book golem together, or would it recognize the difference and not do so? It would warrant further testing, but for now, she wanted to expand herself, so sent her skeleton marching out of her room and down to the corridor she had seen it in, coming to a halt there.

She still retained the locket that had dropped those assorted items, each of them now piled in the room opposite hers, but had left the robes behind. With a quick order, the skeleton intelligently donned the robes, though they were obviously oversized owing to the lack of flesh. With that done, she was about to send the skeleton marching into the unknown, but stopped herself.

What if it ran into an enemy? She only had her Gravmap ability to protect herself, and that would amount to trying to hit them with a book. Thinking to herself, she turned to the floor, focusing on it and pulling upon the stone. The action began straining her mind as chips and cracks appeared in the stone, until a large chunk broke off with a cracking noise. She then began the slow process of separating specific points of the stone, finally leaving her with a very crude, stone-hewn sword, which she ordered the skeleton to wield, noting with satisfaction that it could do so without falling apart, even under the weight of the stone.

Now armed, she began expanding her area and following the skeleton as it marched down the corridor, noting that there were far fewer doors in this corridor than the last. They reached another T-junction, the skeleton standing in place and waiting for orders. She glanced one way and saw the same featureless walls and doors stretching onwards, but as she looked the other, she could see stairs leading up to a large wooden door.

Her curiosity stirred, and she sent the skeleton marching up that way immediately, expanding herself to the door as the puppet reached it. Staring at it a moment, she mentally reached out and pulled on the door, being rewarded with a cracking noise as the wood broke around the stone holding it in place, suddenly breaking open and revealing light.

This fact immediately made her aware of another fact she had entirely neglected, as she turned to look down the stairs at the corridors they had ventured through. There wasn't a single light, and yet she could still see just fine, being able to tell colours, spot minor differences, and generally possessed all the normal caveats of vision. She pondered it for a moment before putting it in the back of her mind and focusing on the light streaming in.

With a quick order, her skeleton stepped through the door, and she tentatively followed, peering around and then upwards, spotting white puffs of clouds and beyond them blue skies, the sun high in the sky. She peered back at the way they had just come, surprise flickering across her being as she saw the doorway they had used surrounded by natural-seeming stone. The door itself had stone coating the outer side, meaning this was a hidden entrance.

The question was...what were they hiding from?


Having discovered the outside, her curiosity then turned towards the rest of the hidden location.

With her skeleton leading the way, they went the other direction from the stairs, heading down that corridor and reaching the end, her area lagging a few feet behind her skeleton, just for safety. As they reached the next turn, she saw another two skeletons dead and empty on the floor, each with their own robes and pendants. She lifted the pendants carefully, and then sent them all the way back to her room onto her desk, for later perusal, then turning her attention towards the skeletons.

She lifted one up, forming it into the correct shape, dubbing it as complete and making it take a step, upon which the same strange force wrapped around the skeleton, locking the bones in place and semi-detaching it from her. She repeated the process for the final skeleton, then spent a good amount of time breaking two new swords from the stone for them to use. One of the skeletons she kept with her first, but she sent the other back to her room, and gave it very explicit and detailed orders for protecting her.

Since the skeletons stopped dead upon completing their orders, she gave it very clear orders for how it needed to protect her, then sent it on its way. Defence at least somewhat sorted, she kept exploring, the two skeletons infusing a small sense of confidence in their ability to fight off an odd attacker. She hadn't seen any signs of life, but there was no reason not to be cautious.

Finally, a room that broke up the monotony of corridors became visible, a much larger door embedded in the wall on the side of the corridor. her two skeletons stood either side as she broke the stone above the door and then opened it, revealing large benches covering the floor with a raised lecturn on a wooden stage. Presumably this was some kind of meeting hall for whoever inhabited this place, considering that on each bench there was at least three skeletons, and there were two more on the stage, one collapsed behind the lectern whilst the other was off to the side.

At a quick count, there were over fifty robed skeletons strewn around the room. Whatever had happened here, it had killed everyone present before they could even move, since she saw no reason why they'd have all died where they were seated, not willingly. She animated another pair of skeletons, created crude swords for them, and sent them off towards her Crystal with the same orders as she had given the other skeleton. The rest of the bones she could animate later, for now she was done staring at stone and slowly chipping pieces away to make swords, so she pressed onwards.

She and her skeletons explored the entire complex without a break, finding several distributed sets of staircases, as well as various rooms, some more interesting than others. They found what appeared to be a cafeteria, though there was no food to be seen, nor water, simply cooking apparatus. They found a storage room of sorts, with hundreds and thousands of different powders, liquids and other items all neatly shelved, labelled and organized.

But, while that was useful, what enraptured her the most was the discovery of a library. Colossal shelves, at least a dozen feet high, and running from one side of the large room to the other, and completely covered in books. Already she began making plans for getting the many skeletons she had available to her to begin organizing the books by defined categories, using her orders to rigidly define what they could do. Maybe if she went far enough she could make an entirely autonomous skeleton worker, giving it enough orders that it had a way to solve most general situations.

The rest of the hidden base was rather uninteresting, more of the same featureless corridors, and each room she went into was so utterly bland. She kept her eye out for anything interesting of course, but when she had finished spreading herself across every single square inch of the base, they began the slow process of searching each individual room, and before they cleared a single corridor she was already making plans to turn those skeletons into automated searchers.

And by the third, she had given up on going so slowly, and instead, using her improved strength from claiming so much space, she focused on every single door in her current corridor, then wrenched them all out of their frames, several buckling from the force. This let her drift down the corridor facing in one direction and peering at each room, then turn around and repeat the action on the other side.

Now, later on she would need to go through carefully for any rare items or books she hadn't seen in the brief glance, but with this method, she was able to easily and quickly search every single room. None had anything that immediately stood out, but it was more ensuring no hidden threats lurked within. She sent the two skeletons which were still with her to the front entrance, then reached out to feel the three guarding her crystal, overriding the orders of two and sending them to also defend the front entrance.

She had closed the door behind herself, so three would stand at the base of the stairs whilst the fourth would wait around the corner in ambush. She left one skeleton behind at her core of course, just in case. With that done, she returned to the meeting hall, sending all the pendants she could find back to her room, piling the robes up in a corner, then beginning the process of creating skeleton puppets one at a time, after which she would need to make them all swords just to be safe, which was going to take a rather arduous length of time.

But, better to do that than to not and be destroyed because of negligence.


Interspersed with reading breaks, it took her even longer than expected to finish animating and arming her skeletons, but with that done, she could turn her attention to the lockets she had found.

She started with the one she had already 'opened', examining it and checking it against the rest for any differences. Some had inlays and detailing which possibly dictated a difference in rank of the wielder. She took up one identical to the first, using her Gravmap to press against the clasp, and having an assortment of items fly out of the locket as before.

They were different items, this one had less vials and books, more...what looked like organic ingredients, a liver, a heart, three lungs and what appeared to be a bisected eyeball. All the items were being held inside of glass which hadn't broken upon impacting the floor, a curiosity for another time. So, these lockets were some kind of storage pocket, holding items within them and releasing them at will? But then how were items inserted?

Plus, it seemed bizarre that they all were released at once. Surely it'd be better to pick one single item. Then again, she was still rather inexperienced with whatever magic must have been occurring, so perhaps it was controlled like that with the clasp being a failsafe so you couldn't lose your items? It didn't matter too much to her right now, but warranted further study. As far as she could tell, however, the lockets weren't going to be useful to her until she could get through the innumerable books now available to her.

As she left the room, she felt a nagging pull, a want to expand herself, to exit the door her skeletons were guarding and grow bigger, but for now, just as before, she held herself back. Intel was critical, and rushing in headfirst was a good way to get herself destroyed. Considering how hidden this location was, undoubtedly somebody wanted to find it, and she didn't want that kind of attention to find her.

No, she decided that she would instead learn all that this place could teach her before leaving. She watched a skeleton pair march past her, satisfied at her achievement. The skeletons were...difficult to...well, to program was the best word. Since they were puppets, they could see what she saw, as well as feel what she felt, hear what she heard, and in time, perhaps smell what she smelt and taste what she tasted. But for now, they relied on her area and vision for their own vision. If someone was to stand outside of her area and she wasn't directly viewing them, her skeletons wouldn't be able to detect them.

But for her current need, they would suffice. She had assigned a dozen to guard the front entrance, but the patrols had a different duty. They were to move around the base, keeping at an equal distance to as many other patrolling groups as they could, maximizing coverage across the entire base and making their patterns rather unpredictable, since at any moment one pair could come up the staircase to maintain distance and thus nudge all the other groups around to compensate. And since her area inhabited the entire base, they all always knew exactly where every other pair was.

Their combat orders were rather simple, they were to attack any enemy they detected. Right now, that was as much as she could do, since she had absolutely no intel outside of her base, but since she had the aforementioned lack of intel, she couldn't really tell them who to and not to attack. She drifted across the base to her new favourite room, the library. She hadn't bothered trying to set a skeleton to be able to loot the room correctly, deciding that she would get it done faster by just doing it herself.

As she worked at the shelves, going through each and removing the books from their shelves into orderly piles of genre, she again felt the pull to leave the base and expand outwards. It seemed as though her instincts really wanted her to just keep expanding until they reached a point of satiation, even if she knew reckless expansion was not a good idea. Her skeletons were probably not...hm.

Floating another few books into their respective piles, she drifted out of the corridor, using her sense of touch to find the nearest group of skeletons. There, she ordered them to attack each other, and when they merely stared at their opponent with no response, she knew her sudden realization had been correct. Her skeletons didn't actually know how to fight. Their orders for fighting were too simple.

With a welled-up feeling of worry, she started brainstorming methods for teaching the skeletons how to fight, each one coming across her mind then being abandoned. Simply ordering them to swing their swords at each other wouldn't really be training them. Perhaps...there were some physical combat books in the library, and since the skeletons could use her vision, perhaps if she were to read those and somehow forward that information to the skeletons, they would be able to begin using it?

It was worth a shot, and while she read it gave her time to think about other issues, like defending herself. If she were in an emergency, she could probably raise up the stone in the floor and use it as a shield to block a corridor off entirely. She had no idea if that would be effective against an enemy, but she had to try. She also began lazily constructing a golem out of the trash books she had piled up, the books that had at least two other copies.

Crafting the golem was a slow process since most of her attention was on reading her book, but she steadily assembled a monster made entirely of books, making it as tall as her skeletons but wider and thicker, several layers of books in total. She had to turn all of her focus towards the golem for the last few books, but in the end, she assembled the final books, mentally deemed the golem as completed, and shifted the books in its leg to take a step.

The same magic that bound her skeletons seemed to come from nowhere once again, winding around the golem and binding it together, and as she ordered it to begin walking through the library, it did so, none of the books falling out of place. Several were positioned in an awkward way, something she would attempt to fix later, but for now, a very important theory had just been proven.

She could make her own golems.


If she had temples, she would be rubbing them right now.

The combat books she had been reading really didn't sit too well with her, apparently she wasn't very naturally inclined towards learning how many different ways there were to swing a sword in attack, or defence, or as a feint, it was just so many different ways. The magic books she had read so far were interesting, the information seeming to leap from the pages to her mind, whereas these direct combat books were more like the information was made of concrete and had to be chipped out slowly. Maybe it was because she was incorporeal?

But, as she flipped the page shut, she felt she knew enough now to attempt to have her skeletons learn from her knowledge...except for the fact she had no idea how to go about doing it. Sure, they used her senses, but that wasn't using her knowledge. She tried a few methods of 'opening her mind' to a skeletons and seeing iff it could learn anything, but in the end, she had to concede that this would take a lot longer than that.

So, after giving the skeleton orders to remember what it was doing and to practice doing each move she made it perform, she started going through various attacks, blocks, parries, dodges, feints, and all manner of sword techniques. After she had deemed that the skeleton had learned enough, she pulled back, watching as the skeleton began repeating the strings of attacks she had told it.

As it swung down for the fifth time, she noted that it was actually steadily refining the action. Only by a minor amount, but the swing was less exaggerated and more controlled, turning faster and faster into a rising swipe and from there a fold to bring the blade into a guard position. She left the skeleton there, repeating the action with the skeleton who was patrolling alongside that one, then decided another room needed her attention, the storage room.

She drifted across towards the large, spatially-collapsed room and headed inside. It was a colossal room, far larger than the library or the meeting hall, and stuffed to the brim with various items. Some she now recognized as alchemical ingredients, or magical items, including more of the pendants she had been experimenting with. Then, as she drifted past another shelf, she felt a pull not in the direction of the surface, but instead towards the end of the shelf she had just ventured past.

Curious, she headed back, and then down that aisle, the feeling getting stronger and stronger until it peaked when she came face-to-face with a metal box, a sturdy pair of clasps holding it shut. She pulled them open and nudged the lid off, immediately spying the item inside as another Soul Crystal. This one was obviously not herself, yet she felt inexplicably drawn to it.

Lifting it up with her mind, she felt shock and fear run through her as the crystal melted from her view, and something entered her. After a brief moment of panic, she calmed herself down, since she wasn't hurt and it seemed to not have a negative effect. Of course, that shock returned immediately when she saw a blue bar suddenly pop into existence on the top-left side of her vision. She focused on it, and that moved the bar, bringing it in front of her.

Mana - 24/1000

So...that bar was her mana? None of the books spoke of something like this. They spoke of mana, defining it as an essence of the world, something that could be held within the body and used to invoke the casters will upon the world. And apparently, they had plenty of angry words to say about those who had shunned their use of mana, which had half-explained why the place was hidden. Evidently wherever she was, using mana as these casters did was heavily frowned upon, leading them to hide.

She checked her mana again, noting that it had gone up by another ten points. She stared at it for a moment, but with no answer forthcoming, she drifted back out of the room, and down the corridor, deep in thought. Those thoughts meant that when she passed by another pair of skeletons she almost didn't notice the text above their heads...almost. Her view snapped around as she ordered them to stop, staring at the lettering.

Skeleton Warrior - Level 0

Skeleton Warrior - Level 0

(Note - Level 0 monsters will not gather experience)

Experience? Levels? What...the fuck was all that? She hovered there a few moments longer before shakily starting to move back towards her crystal, her mind reeling. None of the books mentioned anything of this, this was all new. She then remembered the two skeletons she had training, zipping over towards them. Surely if it was improving, that skeletons must have had become level 1 somehow, perhaps because of her imparting enough knowledge on it to raise its level? She rounded the corner, spotting them and, more importantly, their levels.

Skeleton Warrior - Level 2

Skeleton Warrior - Level 1

The one who had begun training earlier was already level 2? Presumably the higher level they got the better they were then? This...this all warranted much more study. She set them to work training again, and started going around to all the different skeletons, making them perform the same training actions and then setting them off training. When she finished with the fifth pair, she stopped, and realized two facts.

First, she could get one of the trained skeletons to go around doing the same thing and thus she didn't need to spend ages making sure the skeletons moved correctly. Secondly, surely she could equip the skeletons with different weapons, like spears or daggers? Right now they were all using one-handed stone swords, so maybe she could also make shields for them out of the wooden benches in the meeting hall? Expanding upon that, how would they handle stone armour, and if they could take the weight of that, could she just make a stone shield as well?

So many avenues to explore.


With a sense of satisfaction, she finished off her book, closing the cover with a thud.

That book had been about Runic Circles, and within it had told her that many Runic Circles would also incorporate concealment measures, hiding them from view. It then explained how to detect them, which amounted to pushing a small portion of mana into her eyes. Of course, the book didn't have numerical amounts, and it said that she had to use an equivalent amount of mana as a candle-extinguisher spell.

She hadn't yet tried to cast any spells, and as such her mana was now maxed out, plus she had completed most of the basic magical books and even an intermediary book. With that done, she recalled the theory of mana manipulation, how she had to control the energy within herself. She was doing this away from her crystal, no point risking herself, and hadn't brought her clock along, so she didn't know how long was passing.

But, while it felt like a very long time, her persistence paid off when she saw her mana dip, and at the same time she felt something appear inside of her area, right in front of her view, before disappearing again. Mana of course would be assimilated by the world when ejected from the body, it was why perpetual spells were fairly impossible, mana would always naturally be drained if not inside of something living or a dedicated storage container like a Soul Cry...stal.

That was probably what had happened to unlock her mana. The Soul Crystal she had absorbed had given her the ability to store mana, which unlocked that. But why it had a dedicated bar and why her skeletons now had levels and restrictions and things when the books made no mention of those things confused her. Perhaps it was something about her existence?

Whatever the case was, she continued to practice manipulating her mana, eventually beginning to change the nature of her mana in the way the book had said. The gust of wind it produced when she ejected her mana was rather underwhelming, but that was the point, it was supposed to only be enough to blow a candle out. She practiced the exact same act several dozen times over, counting a loss of ten mana each time she used the spell, and when text appeared in front of her vision, she wasn't too surprised.

Candleblower - 10 mana

Perhaps this...this system was also somehow able to register what she observed and add it to this text-based system she possessed. it seemed based quite heavily on what she observed and proved, like forming a skeleton into the correct shape and making it move, which automatically bound it to the form she saw as correct. And it was rather free to interpretation considering her book golem was at that very moment roaming the library.

With the spell completed, she used her newfound mana manipulation to push the equivalent of ten mana towards her view-point, slightly overwhelmed as the corridor lit up with glowing blue light. The walls, the ceiling and floor were all glowing, but more than that, at certain points there were Runic Circles written onto them, invisible to her regular vision but visible to her..her mana-vision.

Mana-vision - 10 mana

She spent some time looking around, peering closely at the Runic Circles, before drifting back to her room. She passed by a pair of training skeletons, noting that their very bones were awash with the blue light, probably owing to the fact they were magic users before they died. As she thought about that, she made a detour towards the meeting hall, lifting one of the robes up and observing it, confirming her suspicion that they would also be coated in magic.

Fascinatingly enough, they also had Runic Circles woven into them, which appeared to offer protection, comfort and various other benefits. Then again, there was no reason why they wouldn't make their clothing as comfortable and protective as they could. She made a note of it, reminding herself to get all hr skeletons bound in robes, just for the potential benefit of protection, then headed back to her room.

She immediately peered at the floor, shocked at the immense Runic Circle surrounding her. It stretched to the walls and even up them in places, the writer having evidently run entirely out of room, and was filled to the brim with an uncountable quantity of individual runes and even circles within the circle. She peered closely at one, seeing that the circle itself had to have been compressed, there was no way that those runes could have been written like that, it was far too small for it.

That meant someone could have written an entire room-sized circle, just to compress it into this far smaller circle and incorporated it into an even larger Runic Circle. The sheer complexity forced her to shut her mana-vision off, lest she get lost staring at it any longer. She pulled the Runic Circles book to her with her Gravmap, ignoring the text that appeared as she did so, and flipped through to the pages that listed what each rune could do.

A vast quantity of the runes were based entirely on absorbing ambient mana, with a halved quantity of that being storage of the gathered mana. Evidently whoever made this needed a huge amount of mana, but why? As far as she could tell, there was no purpose for the Runic Circle. There were, however, a few runes she couldn't recognize, the book didn't display them. Maybe forbidden runes of some sort, a secret experiment? The note she had read did say that this was an experiment and presumably the one who experimented had already lost or broken one Soul Crystal.

Maybe it was meant to be a soul reliquary, one designed to make the user immortal? As far as she could tell she didn't seem to age or need any form of sustenance, so perhaps it was someone seeking immortality? But then, how did she end up being the one inside of the Crystal, trapped by the void? She still retained the faint memory of running through a forest, so perhaps she didn't remember that she was being chased and then forced into this experiment? Or maybe she was the experimenter herself, and...no, it didn't sound as plausible, not if running in a forest was the last thing she recalled before this.

Before she could keep continuing it, she had another pang, a desperate feeling of needing to expand, and knew she couldn't just ignore it. Evidently there was something about her that wasn't comfortable as confined as it was, and she couldn't simply ignore it. That wave of need was far stronger than the last, and she felt that refusing herself again was not a good idea.

Even if she did want to take things slower, it seemed something was forcing her hand.


So, that was fun.

I've written this entire thing before Chapter 1 goes out, so I have no idea how this story was met. I'll probably write an absolute minimum of three chapters, depending on how this story is being received, but I hope you all are enjoying it!