The Crafter's Dungeon: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 1) Jonathan Brooks (sites to read books for free .TXT) 📖

form made her visually memorize the different patterns the light made over the surface of the blade.  She was momentarily confused when he left a void in the enchantment on the hilt of the sword, but her confusion was short-lived as she saw another magical essence emit from Dramien and concentrate on the void.

To her astonishment, instead of more Nether energy, Holy energy flowed out from his hand and pooled near the hilt.  Sandra could only stare open-mouthed as the two energies naturally fought each other, pushing each other out of the way and causing sparks of magical residue to snap off.

“As you may know, Nether energy isn’t usually very good at healing.  Adding the Holy energy to the Vampiric Siphon, however, turns the blood coating the sword from your enemies into healing energy.  Of course, these two elemental energies are quite resistant to working with each other, so sometimes a catalyst is needed to…bond them together.”

Quicker that she could blink, the knife was at her throat again – but this time it continued its journey and sliced completely through her neck.  Blood poured out from her open neck, cascading down into the “bath” below; a few droplets splashed outside the worktable, but the majority of it stayed inside.  As soon as her lifeblood spilled over the sword and the fighting opposite energies, she could see that it was slowly calming the volatile nature of the enchantment.

That was about all she saw, though, as her vision started to fade from the lack of blood and oxygen to her brain.  The pain in her shoulders and hip started to fade as well, as most of her injuries weren’t even noticeable anymore from the rapid draining of blood from her body.

“Thanks for your help.  It’s so hard finding good subjects to power this enchantment.  Usually I have to find vagrant travelers or whores shipped in from elsewhere, but it was my good fortune that you came to me instead.  It’s a good thing you weren’t a virgin, otherwise the reaction with the Holy energy would be quite severe—”

A bright flash managed to pierce through her closed eyelids and she barely felt the intense heat that flared up beneath her.  Her last thought before her body turned to ash was, I guess nobody wanting to touch me came in “handy” after all…

Chapter 3

Sandra thought about what her father would do when he found out that she died; he made it no secret that his sole purpose in life and everything he worked for was to make his daughter safe and secure.  While he hadn’t exactly said that out loud, it was obvious from the way he protected her and was paranoid about the smallest things that he was more concerned with her well-being than even his own.  Now that he had lost not only his wife, but his daughter—

Wait a minute…how am I thinking these thoughts at all?  Aren’t I dead?  Is this the Afterlife?

A dark blankness enfolded around her, which cutoff all types of visual stimulation.  Not only could she not see anything, but she couldn’t hear nor feel anything; she tried to move something, but she didn’t seem to possess anything that indicated she even had a body.  Am I just a mind floating around in a featureless expanse?  Or am I now a spirit of some kind? 

She didn’t know what was going on; the only thing she knew was that this was completely unlike anything she had heard about the Afterlife.  Then again, no one had ever actually been to the Afterlife and come back, so it was unlikely that the descriptions of an endless paradise were accurate or truthful.  If this was indeed the Afterlife, it was going to be a mind-numbingly boring existence if all she had were her thoughts for eternity.

Sandra…“floated”…in the featureless void of nothing for an indeterminate amount of time.  Since there was no external stimulation, it was hard to tell how long it had been since she had been killed; it could’ve been a day or 100 years – and she had no way of knowing if the passage of time even occurred at the same pace.

Regardless of how long she was there, Sandra knew she had to do something to stave off both boredom and possible insanity.  She was starting to feel the hopelessness at her situation start to set in quickly; knowing that she had a possible eternity alone with her thoughts, she started to review her life in the hopes that it would keep her mind intact.

Regret, remorse, and guilt were the prevalent emotions she felt over her recent actions.  Even though she was the one that had died, Sandra knew that her father would take the news of her death hard.  While Ardling was still a robust, driven older man, with her out of the picture she didn’t know if he had it in him to continue his business.  In her travels, she had seen countless people over the years succumb to the ravages of family tragedy, and she was afraid that her father would be one of them.  She could almost picture him giving up his merchant life, settling down somewhere and wasting away in despair.  As such, Sandra believed that she had essentially killed her father.

She beat herself up about it for a good hour or century (she still couldn’t tell time very well) and thought about the mistakes she made that led to her current predicament.  If I had only been more cautious in my questioning of the whereabouts of Dramien, if I hadn’t convinced my father to travel to Shardenvale, if I hadn’t been obsessed with completing my quest to learn everything I could about crafting, if I hadn’t started down that path in the first place – my father and I would probably still be alive.

Even though she didn’t know for sure her father was going to