Elysium's Multiverse

Chapter 55

Riven regained his sanity an hour later, with the fuzzy details beginning to outline themselves now that he was in a right state of mind. He rapidly blinked and furrowed his brows, finding himself wrist-deep in Ben’s intestines. Once he realized what he was doing, he began to backpedal and scream. It was a scream not filled with the primal rage or hunger he’d experienced before, but now it was that of horror at what he’d done—a scream of disgust and revulsion. He began to hyperventilate and stumbled backward away from the corpse, not knowing how or why he’d come to do this until memories of his primal hunger flooded back into his mind as one memory after the other.

The pleading, crying last moments of the man Riven had known for less than half an hour came pouring in.

Riven gagged and vomited profusely, feeling sick with himself and incredibly confused. The notifications he’d received when his vampiric bloodline had been awakened had come so fast and the change had been so sudden that he’d had no time to really comprehend what it’d all meant up until now. He managed to calm down after that and remained staring at the floor between his knees in a hunched-over position amid a mountain of body parts while he took time to reflect upon the day’s events.

The two chests of Elysium coins were still there. Five of the torches had been blown out or extinguished during the fight, so the lighting in the room was far darker than it’d been when he’d first gotten there, but he could still see perfectly into the darkest crevices of the chamber. The sacrificial room was completely devoid of life, and there were even two more satyr corpses near the doorway that hadn’t been there before his change—ones he must have killed while in his crazed state of mind. The doorway was also devoid of any magical barrier that’d sealed him inside in the first place, so he was free to go whenever he pleased.

He felt a small amount of pride after having passed the tutorial dungeon and finding a way out now, but that feeling was utterly dwarfed by what he’d done to Ben. Riven had truly become a monster in every sense of the word.

He’d been right with his earlier suspicions after his encounter with the giant blood squid. Even in the beginning, the notifications he’d received talked to him about how his affinity for blood magic was incredibly high. Now Chalgathi was making bets on his behalf like one would gamble on a prized racing horse.

The thought of it made Riven go from sullen and guilty to incredibly angry in the course of a couple seconds. He gritted his teeth, spat, and hopped up to his feet with clenched fists. However, he went a little bit too fast and found himself jumping instead of just clambering up. He landed without much issue, though, and quickly realized just how thoroughly his body had changed after all—even its outward appearance. He had slightly thicker, broader shoulders and was toned all over. In the poor reflection of a pool of bodily fluids, he was barely able to see that his eyes had changed to a glowing crimson color and his facial features looked far more symmetrical than they had been in the past—though he was slightly paler, too.

Extending his right hand, he flexed his muscles and felt power there that’d never been present before. He felt good…though one glance down at the dead man at his feet made him cringe inwardly and outwardly.

No, this wasn’t his fault. He hadn’t known any of this would happen, and he hadn’t been in his right mind when he’d murdered Ben. Even as disgusting of an act as it was, Riven was not at fault here.

Or at least that’s what he was going to tell himself in order to allow himself to sleep at night for the foreseeable future.

He gritted his teeth, shook his head, and turned from the grisly sight while pushing the subject out of mind. He’d talk to Athela and Azmoth about this later and get their opinion on what to do, but in the meantime he first had to summon them back.

Gratefully eyeing the chests of money, he walked over and placed his hand on one of them. Then he resummoned the notifications concerning the deaths of his minions from his status page to reexamine just how much he’d have to pay for their returns.

Riven took a moment to go ahead with the transactions, noting how the original levels of his minions had shot up, and saw thousands of the coins from the two chests evaporate. However, he thankfully had a good amount left after that, and Riven was suddenly very worried about how he was even going to get this money to a safe place. There was no way he could carry it. Even one of those chests looked like it weighed a literal ton.

Riven shook his head and rubbed his eyes, and looking around again, he noticed a stark difference in the darker areas of the room and cells. The black recesses that’d once been hidden in the backs of the cells out of the torchlight were still dark in various shades of gray, but their details were outlined for him to make out anyway, with highlighted black or gray etchings that’d never been there before.

Well, at least it wasn’t entirely bad. He had survived, after all.

“Greetings.”

The voice was unfamiliar, alien, and raspy. It echoed through the room as light and heat bloomed from behind Riven’s back.

It was a smaller version of the flaming eye that illuminated the dungeon’s sky, though it was still four feet in circumference. Made of orange, yellow, and red flames, the lidless eye gazed at him as it hovered midair. Unblinking and staring directly at him, the visage curiously evaluated the vampire. “I must say…I’m rather impressed. An ascension into a pureblooded vampire was not expected… Perhaps knowing you were on the verge of an ascension is why the creature that calls itself Chalgathi accepted the bet in the first place. Such is the way of things, I suppose. I am Dungeon Negrada and am pleased to make your acquaintance.”

There was Chalgathi’s name again, and it was beginning to grate on Riven’s nerves. It appeared this Chalgathi character had a very keen interest in his life.

Riven’s scowl deepened, and he took a step forward to get a better look at what was apparently the representation of the dungeon itself. “I didn’t realize dungeons were living things.”

The entity chuckled, flames writhing along its conjured body as it focused solely on him. “Well, I’m pleased to inform you that we dungeons are indeed alive, though I’m a little less pleased that I lost my bet. That was a good number of Elysium coins to lose, and along with your gained levels and class upgrades, it appears this encounter has been quite the boon for you. Tell me…as the one who dealt the killing blow and received half of the fruits of my failed bet, would you be interested in a deal? Chalgathi seems uninterested in trading those coins back to me, and I cannot break the laws of Elysium and cheat you of your winnings without incurring the wrath of the system—at least not for a little while. But you… I think you may see things my way as a path to mutual benefit.”

Class upgrades? That caught Riven’s attention.

But this situation was getting weirder and weirder. Riven glanced over at the entrance to the room, which had just recently resealed itself with another wall of white mana, and then looked back to the floating eye.

It was very interesting to him that dungeons were actually living entities. Could dungeons use these coins, too? What would dungeons even use them for? Riven knew that they’d be valuable eventually, but he didn’t really know how to use them other than the brief description he’d gotten earlier about “system altars” that were like stores you could buy supplies from.

He also didn’t know why he’d acquired even half the coins instead of Chalgathi getting them all—as he was the one who’d made the bet, but he assumed this Chalgathi entity found them useful as well. Chalgathi had retained the other half of the prize money and was apparently refusing to trade them back to this dungeon, which was slightly amusing if not baffling to Riven.

But this dungeon, Negrada, was correct in its assumption that Riven was more than willing to strike a deal with this dungeon entity before he left this literal hellhole. Riven had no way to transport this massive amount of money. With the coins he’d accumulated throughout the time spent here in the dungeon, the two hundred thousand he’d just gotten, and then the twenty-six thousand he’d spent on reviving his minions, he had just over 174,000 left over. It was all just sitting there in front of him or in the bag he’d thrown to the wayside during his fight, and with no way to move it, why shouldn’t he trade with the dungeon?

No doubt Dungeon Negrada knew this. How could Riven carry two enormous, heavy chests of coins? Perhaps it’d be different if Azmoth was here, but he wasn’t.

The monetary system here was very straightforward, from what Athela had told him in her brief lecture of Elysium economics, and the system had done a good job of integrating the currency and making system altars the basis of most prices—sometimes even being on the higher end of things if people wanted to be competitive. It often was able to stabilize inflation this way. Of course, rarer items often didn’t appear in the Elysium altar shops, and one had to look elsewhere for them. Often the system altars were completely random or sometimes even had unique selections based on the specific altar, refreshing every month with a new set of inventory. He’d also gathered that one copper piece was worth slightly less than one US dollar when comparing altar prices on foodstuffs to those at a local grocery store back home… Ten copper pieces equaled a silver piece, ten silver pieces equaled a gold piece, and ten gold pieces equaled a platinum piece, meaning that one platinum coin was worth about nine hundred to one thousand US dollars in comparison to old-world money, and then there were a few other types of coins above that, which Riven likely wouldn’t see for a very, very long time, if ever.

But Riven wasn’t quite sure this was still the case, as Athela hadn’t gone into much detail during her brief overview, and he quickly decided that he was going to play dumb here and act like he simply didn’t know. He’d press the dungeon for information and see what he could find out.

So Riven nodded. “Sure. What’s your deal? Let’s hear it.”