Monster Mansion 2 by Dante King (best way to read ebooks .txt) 📗

“Thanks!” I said, smiling at her. She smiled back, and then I was no longer in any doubt. She did still have feelings for me. Well, I could get used to that, I thought. “Come on,” I said, taking her by the hand. “I’m parched. Let’s get back to the mansion.”

We pressed our hands on the symbol on the enchantment table, standing close to each other, our free hands clasped. The space around us wavered and then vanished, and we both felt like we were flying upward through the air, with the enchanting table rising between us.

We stopped, not abruptly, but smoothly, like an automatic door slipping into place. There was a satisfying click, and the workroom in the mansion appeared around us all at once. Bright light shone in over a green landscape from the big window, and there was a clean smell of fresh air in the room.

“Hey, we made it,” I said happily, and Selena took her hand from the enchanting table and hugged me.

Kyrine was sitting in the chair by the window, reading one of the old Eosorean books that populated the bookshelf. She snapped it shut and laid it on the floor beside her before standing up.

“You were gone a long time!” she said. “Almost thirty minutes in this world’s time.”

“We did a lot of work,” I replied. I reached forward and picked up the green gemstone from the center of the enchanting table. Where it had been perfectly clear before, it was now opaque, clouded as if it was full of something. I gazed at it, then walked over to the window and looked at it closely in the bright sunlight.

“It was such an amazing experience,” Selena was saying to Kyrine. “You should have seen Jeremy create the dungeon. He did great! There were new monsters, and traps, and all kinds of cool things.”

“Selena helped too,” I said distractedly, still looking at the stone in my hand. It felt really heavy, as if it had a great deal of mass for such a small object. Which, I supposed, was true.

“Oh, I didn’t do that much,” said Selena modestly, blushing. “I just provided a few pointers!”

“Hey, don’t do yourself down!” I said. “If it weren’t for your vast experience as a gamer, I wouldn’t have known where to start!”

She laughed. “Thanks! I guess I did make quite a few suggestions. I’m glad all that game time finally came in useful!”

I was pleased to see that we were both returned to our normal clothes—I was wearing a green linen shirt and my favorite jeans and sneakers, and Selena was dressed in a white t-shirt and hotpants that showed off her elegant legs and her petite shoulders and shapely chest. Her feline tail swished thoughtfully as she told Kyrine all the details of what we’d done.

When she was finished, she sat down on the bed, a bit breathless. She had a cat-like habit of grooming her hair and cat’s ears when she was thinking, and she began to do it now, running her silky ears between her fingers and toying with her black hair.

Kyrine smiled. “I’m glad you have discovered this new element to your dungeon Keeper’s skills, Jeremy. The creation of the dungeons within dungeons is such a critical part of the Keeper’s work. It’s one of the many things that a dungeon cannot do on her own. She needs a Keeper for this kind of work.”

“Dungeons within dungeons,” I mused, looking at the little stone. “A portal dungeon, maybe?”

Selena and Kyrine both laughed, and Kyrine nodded. “That sounds good, Jeremy, and as the Keeper, you can name them whatever you want!”

“We’ll need to return and place some healing potions within the portal dungeon,” I told Kyrine. “Also, I wanted to ask you about something.”

“What’s that?”

“The process of creating the dungeon in the first place. What was all that creepy shit with the blank window and the glowing hot enchanter’s table? And the black robes we were wearing once we were inside? It was almost like necromancy!”

Kyrine tilted her head to one side questioningly. “It’s not ‘like’ necromancy, Jeremy, it is necromancy!”

I was too surprised to speak. “What do you mean?” I said, once I had managed to catch my breath. We had been doing necromancy? What the hell?

Kyrine shrugged and spread her hands wide. “The raw material for magic has to come from somewhere, you know. When we create dungeons, we use the base magical material that comes from the souls of the countless dead from across the universes. When a being dies, the stuff that makes their corporeal soul disperses into the space between worlds. It’s an almost limitless source of energy and material. That’s what we use when we summon creatures or manifest new items.”

“And that’s why the ghost jade works for creating portal dungeons,” I breathed. It was all coming together.

“Exactly. There’s nothing cruel about it, though, not like the Technomancer’s magic. He had captured the basic elements of a ghost’s consciousness in the stone. That’s evil. All we’re doing is harvesting the raw material that makes up souls. The consciousness and individuality of the ghosts is long gone.”

I looked around me and couldn’t help shivering. “So everything here, all the furniture, everything we’re wearing, the very fabric of the mansion itself—it’s all made of recycled ghosts?”

“You could say that, yes,” said Kyrine with a serene smile. “Pretty neat, don’t you think?”

I thought it over. “I guess it is pretty neat, now you mention it,” I laughed.

I brought up my Personal Cultivation System and flipped to a new view that had appeared, marked Dungeons (overview). Here, I found three square places, like slots. Only one of them was full. Next to them were another two slots, but these had little lock symbols over them, and they were