Time felt like it had truly begun to flow again, being by her side made him feel his existence becoming more whole and more polished.
Time didn't rush or rage like it had on the surface; it flowed slow, measured, and like it was alive. The cycles of light and shadow from the mana-crystals above shifted with purpose now, each dawn a soft gold that rippled like sunlight through water, each dusk a deep amber that painted the cavern in warmth. Only some of the great stalactites shone at once, mimicking the tilt of a sunless sky.
And in that rhythm, life began to take root.
The dungeon, their home no longer felt like stone and silence. It was changing, growing in tandem with them.
The six-mile cavern that had once been a hollow sanctuary had become the heart of something vast. John and Tessa had expanded its borders through countless days of labor, carving tunnels that led to new, open spaces which only bioluminescent fungi that had grown transformed into towering groves. The mana veins that ran through the rock burst outward, feeding entire ecosystems of light and motion.
It had taken years — the kind that slip by softly, marked not by wars or calamities but by laughter, warmth, and the quiet moments between two previously lost souls.
John stood one morning at the threshold of a new chamber, watching as the crystalline ceiling brightened. He no longer had to channel mana to make it happen — the light responded to the natural flow of the dungeon now, alive in its own rhythm.
Tessa was already awake, kneeling near the river that wound through the heart of their domain. Her reflection shimmered in the current — her silver hair cascading down her back, the soft glow of her aura dancing in the ripples.
He leaned against the stone and simply watched her for a while. Forty years ago, she had been broken and fading. Now, the divinity in her blood had stabilized, balanced perfectly with the dungeon's energy. She looked whole — radiant in a way no god or mortal could ever claim.
"You're watching again," she said without turning, her voice carrying that familiar lilt of amusement.
He smiled faintly and winked. "Maybe I just like seeing what I built shine."
She glanced over her shoulder. "I thought you said I wasn't something to fix."
He shrugged, stepping closer. "I said you weren't broken. Didn't say I wouldn't admire the masterpiece."
She laughed softly — a sound that still made the cavern's mana hum in harmony.
Their days had fallen into a rhythm that felt more human than divine. They worked, they rested, they argued about meaningless things — how deep to cut a tunnel, whether the vines should be blue or green — and they always found their way back to each other.
Tessa spent much of her time nurturing the dungeon's new flora. Her touch could coax blossoms from stone and make mana bloom like sunlight through leaves. John often joined her, expanding the borders of their sanctuary. Each new floor of the dungeon became something unique — the lower chambers transformed into dense caverns filled with glowing trees and flowing rivers, and the upper ones into misty groves where the air shimmered with pale gold dust.
It was in these wild places that they began to feel alive again.
Monsters roamed the further reaches — old remnants of forgotten depths, warped by the dungeon's growth. Together, they hunted and harvested the mana cores of these creatures, using their essence to expand the ecosystem. The fights were rarely desperate — more a dance than a battle, an old rhythm that reminded them both who they once were and who they were becoming.
After one such hunt, Tessa sat beside him in the hollow of a glowing root, her hand still warm from the fight. The carcass of a mana-beast lay behind them, its essence already fading into the air.
"Do you ever miss it?" she asked quietly.
"Fighting?" he questioned looking up from the fading scene of the battlefield, being fixed and recovered by their combined authorities.
She nodded. "The rush. The clarity. The way it felt like the world made sense when your life was on the line."
He thought for a long time before answering. "Sometimes. But I think it's because I didn't understand peace back then. I mistook stillness for stagnation. And the struggle of survival often consumed my thoughts."
She smiled faintly. "And now?"
He looked at her — really looked — and realized that everything about her had changed and yet stayed the same. The woman who once carried divine light like a curse now wielded it like breath.
"Now I think I'd rather build than destroy," he said softly. "I will fight to protect you and continue to grow my power, but I will not let any more harm come to you even if it takes a lifetime."
Her fingers brushed his. "Then let's make sure it's a long lifetime filled with happiness."
Years turned quietly.
The dungeon expanded, evolving across the vastness of the floor they reside on. It began to mimic the surface world — or rather, John's memory of it. He crafted weather patterns through mana cycling: drifting mists in the mornings, soft rain that condensed from vapor clouds mid-cycle, even a gentle wind that whispered through the false forest canopy. The ceiling crystals dimmed and flared like sun and moonlight.
The Sky Below, he called it.
The first time the "rain" fell, Tessa had laughed like a child, running barefoot across the moss as droplets shimmered gold in the air. He had stood in the center of it all, arms crossed, smiling despite himself as she pulled him into the downpour.
"You did it," she said, her eyes bright.
He blinked water from his lashes. "It's just controlled condensation and light refraction—"
She pressed a finger to his lips. "It's a sky. Our sky." Then planted a kiss squarely on his lips, her excitement and love for him growing by the day, her world had been one of the many consumed by the dungeon happening before she was born. The dungeon did the same as it was on earth, it mysteriously appeared one day and wiped out most of the population then after a while it disappeared before people could explore it too much, before reappearing and claiming more lives a vicious cycle that consumed everything in its path. Once it had claimed enough of the lives of the residence, it consumed the world and added it to the lower levels of the dungeon.
He didn't argue after that, he felt the sadness in her voice and saw it in her eyes. The artificial sun of the layer she had been born on did not much more than rise and fall, the mana provided everything, there were no seasons, no weather and one continuous plain as the scenery.
They built everything together — gardens, terraces, even a quiet lake surrounded by crystal trees that glowed with their combined mana. He taught her new techniques to stabilize her foundation, and she, in turn, showed him how to shape energy into growth rather than power. It was through her touch that his cultivation finally stopped feeling like hunger and started to feel like creation.
Sometimes, during long nights, they would sit beside the mana-river and talk about things neither had dared before — the lives they might have lived, the homes they'd left behind, the versions of themselves they'd fought to kill.
Once, after a particularly silent evening, she spoke softly:
"Do you ever wonder what would've happened if we'd met before all this?"
He looked up at the ceiling — at the stars they'd made together. "No," he said finally. "Because if we had, I don't think I'd have been able to love you like this."
She turned toward him, her expression unreadable. "Like what?"
"Completely," he said as he pulled her tight into his embrace, as if saying he wouldn't let go of her no matter what.
That night, the dungeon pulsed brighter than usual — as if acknowledging the truth of it.
By the seventh year, they had reached a rhythm that bordered on divine artistry. John's control over mana had deepened — no longer raw, but fluid, shaped by intention rather than instinct. He forged martial techniques based on balance rather than dominance, movements that mirrored the cycle of light and shadow in their world.
Tessa sparred with him often. Their fights were graceful — less about victory, more about rhythm. She'd laugh whenever he disarmed her, and he'd grin when she outmaneuvered him, both of them ending breathless and laughing, collapsing into the moss like children.
"You're getting predictable," she teased one day after pinning him.
"I'm getting old," he countered, smiling up at her with a soft chuckle. Even though his appearance hadn't changed a bit, he had been in the dungeon over twice the time he had live in the surface. He often made these stupid jokes because he knew his age was a mere speck on the map of time compared to hers.
She brushed her fingers along his jaw. "Then it's a good thing I like old men."
"I'm not just baby, I'm timeless."
"Timelessly stubborn," she said, and kissed him before he could argue.
The dungeon's glow brightened in waves when they did — the mana harmonizing with their bond, with their laughter, their closeness, their quiet unity.
By the tenth year, The Sky Below had become a world.
The forests glowed softly under their false sun, rivers carved through new valleys, and distant caverns echoed with life. The golems had become caretakers rather than laborers, tending to the moss fields and rivers. Their foxes had multiplied he previously had less than a dozen, but with how much their domain was expanding he needed much more of them to properly maintain it. After all it was no longer just a floor in the dungeon — it was their home.
And still, they continued to refine it.
But that thought wouldn't leave him.Even as the cycles of false dawn and darkness drifted on, it grew roots — gentle but persistent — until it filled the quiet between their breaths.
He'd never feared battle. He'd never hesitated to face gods or demons. But this feeling — this calm, domestic eternity — terrified him in a way nothing else ever had.
One night, he woke before the crystals brightened to dawn. Tessa slept beside him, her silver hair spilling across the stone like liquid light, her breathing soft and even. For a while, he just watched her — not as a goddess, or a companion, but as something far rarer: the first thing he'd ever wanted that didn't demand he destroy something to have it.
He reached out, brushed a thumb along her jaw, and spoke softly, barely louder than the hum of the cavern around them.
"I fought gods. I devoured the darkness inside me. But none of it made me strong — it just stripped away what was weak. You're the only thing that's ever made me want to build instead of destroy."
He exhaled slowly, words catching in his throat. "You're the only reason I still remember what it means to want anything at all."
The crystals above shimmered faintly, reacting to his breath. He smiled to himself, a small, helpless thing.
"If there's still a heaven somewhere out there," he murmured, "I hope it looks at us and weeps. Because I don't want eternity without you in it."
He leaned down, pressed a quiet kiss to her temple, and let the silence close around them once more. But the vow was already forming, the weight in his chest lessened as he realized that the true beauty of their underground world wasn't in the details and time spent making it, but in the time making it with her and the time they spent together in this world that had become only theirs.
Through much exploration and work on expanding the cavern John found a deep chamber at the far edge of the expansion — an old, forgotten hollow choked with overgrown vines and ancient mana beasts. He cleared it over the span of months, shaping it into something open and filled with light.
He wanted it to feel like a dawn that never ended.
When he finished, he decided he wanted to called Tessa there.
The morning after he finished it, he rose with a kind of certainty that frightened even him.
When Tessa woke, he was already waiting — that quiet, almost boyish light in his eyes that she hadn't seen since before the trials. He didn't tell her where they were going, only took her hand and led her deeper into the heart of the cavern.
She arrived barefoot, her hair glinting gold beneath the ceiling light.
"What is this place?" she asked, her eyes wide as she looked around the blooming grove.
He smiled faintly. "The heart of the Sky Below. I wanted it to feel like the first sunrise."
Her voice softened. "It does."
He took her hand and led her toward the center, where the moss had been replaced with smooth crystal glass that reflected the glowing canopy above.
"I told you once," he said quietly, "that I'd never seek eternity again unless you were there to share it."
She smiled, recognizing the words. "You did."
But even as he spoke, more words pressed against his chest, unspoken too long.
"Tessa," he said, stepping closer. "I've spent decades chasing power, chasing meaning. Every time I thought I'd found it, it turned to ash in my hands. I thought divinity was the answer — the perfect stillness beyond all need."
He swallowed, his voice trembling for the first time in ages.
"But then you touched my hand, and I realized I never wanted stillness. I wanted you. The sound of your laughter in the rain. The way your light bends when you're angry. The silence between your breaths that feels more like home than any world I could create."
His hand trembled slightly as he reached into his coat, drawing out something small and luminous a ring with a jewel carved from the heart of a mana crystal and mounted beautifully on a band made of wood radiating an immense aura of life, dedication, love, and all the emotions he had for her. Its surface glowing faintly with shifting light.
"You once said I couldn't rewrite what's carved into time," he murmured. "Maybe not. But I can carve something new onto it."
"I've built, slayed fallen gods, destroyed realms, and defeated my inner demons," he whispered. "But I only ever wanted a morning that doesn't end. And a morning without you Tessa, is one i never want again."
He dropped to one knee, not as a believer before his goddess — but as a man before the only person who had ever truly seen him.
"Be my dawn. Be the reason I wake up in this sky we made. Be my wife."
Her eyes shimmered. "John…"
For a long moment, she didn't speak. Her eyes glistened, her aura trembling faintly like a song too full to contain. Then she laughed softly, tears spilling down her cheeks.
"You're asking me to be your wife in a cave."
He smiled. "In a world we built with our hands."
Tessa's breath hitched. The light from the mana-runes painted her tears gold as she knelt with him, pressing his trembling hand against her heart.
Her voice softened to a tremor.
"And this is my answer — not as a goddess, not as a creator. But as a woman who finally found someone who made forever feel loved and needed."
She leaned in and kissed him — slow, certain, eternal. "Yes," she whispered. "A thousand times, yes."
When their lips met, the cavern responded — the crystals above flaring with a brilliance that outshone everything before. For a brief, eternal moment, the Sky Below looked indistinguishable from the heavens above.
And in that golden light, the dungeon — their world — sang.
He slid the ring on her finger and as he did so she pulled a box out herself. "You didn't make yourself a ring did you", he shook his head and realized his blunder.
Opening the box, she pulled out an ornate ring, with turquoise and dark wood flowing together and outlined by a shining black metal band. "I was waiting for you, but didn't want to rush anything and have help onto this since you came back from the realm of earth"
She took his hand and slid it on to his ring finger. "I love you John, lets live forever in this bliss".
They stayed there long after the light dimmed, her head resting against his shoulder, his hand tracing circles against her back.
For the first time in countless years, John didn't feel like he was beneath the world.
He felt like he was returning to his homeland, as a new man not burdened by the glares of other and not cased aside for his birth.
Above them, the crystals glowed in their quiet cycle — dawn to dusk, dusk to night, then to dawn again.
The Sky Below breathed, alive and whole.
Their home had become their eternity.