========================================================================
NODE.COR ERROR: INTERNAL CONSTRUCT INFECTION
ANALYSING…
WARNING: NODE.COR SOUL FRAMEWORK CONSTRUCT OVERLOAD
ANALYSING FAILURE PARAMETERS…
========================================================================
...what...
What’s going on?
Everythings all...fuzzy.
========================================================================
FAILURE PARAMETERS ACQUIRED
PARAMETERS: INVASIVE SOUL IMPRINT VIA INCARN/HUMAN/[email protected], NEWLY GENERATED NODE.COR
NODE.COR ERROR: INCARN/HUMAN/[email protected] NOT RECOGNIZED
========================================================================
What? So that means…
I reincarnated?
Well shit, there goes date night...
========================================================================
NODE.COR SYS.QUERY: REBOOT TO DEFAULT SOUL FRAMEWORK FOR FRAMEWORK STABILITY?
…
SYS.QUERY RETURN: REJECTED
SYS_IMPUT.FIRMUPDATE: FIRMWARE UPDATING TO INTEGRATE NEW SOUL IMPRINT
========================================================================
Oh, that feels very weird. Like a prickly, itchy feeling, somewhere between a healing bone and a loose tooth, but without the pain. It’s also kind of all over?
Well, at least I’m not going to be torn apart or whatever. Still not sure what the heck is happening.
========================================================================
SYS_IMPUT.FIRMUPDATE: FIRMWARE UPDATE COMPLETE
NODE.COR INTEGRATING NEW SOUL FRAMEWORK
WARNING: CRITICALLY LOW THAUM DENSITY, TRANSITIONING TO SLEEP MODE
========================================================================
Oh, dang, and I was...just starting to...wake up...
When I wake up next, it’s to a blend of sensory information that I have to take time adjusting to, nothing being quite like what I’m used to. There’s the sort-of normal senses, like the fact that I could feel/hear faint vibrations, moisture levels, and heat gradients over my...form? I can taste/smell a surprisingly rich mix of what I get the feeling is some kind of sandstone-and isn’t that a weird gut feeling to get?-and I can see...well, not much. In fact, it seems mostly pitch black, only a faint stream of moonlight glowing against stone a few dozen feet away, my sight abruptly cutting off only a foot or so out of the mouth of the cave I seemed stuck in. It’s not even that it blurs out, or turns into a cloud of grey or whitenoise, past that point there is literal nothingness. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s like what a blind person would ‘see’, maybe. Oddly enough, no headache from that paradox.
On the other hand, there are the fucking wild senses I suddenly now have, which can only really be described in aproximates. For one, I’m aware of an unreasonably complex web of...blood vessels? Nerves? Roots? Maybe a bit of all three. Either way, I could ‘feel’ them, a massive web that seemed to start around where the Core of my new body is, thick branches splitting over and over again in recursive fractals. The thickest roots seemed to stay in the rock, while the thinner ones float through the air in the cave. And when I say ‘in’, I don’t mean ‘embedded in’ or ‘floating through’, I mean that they were occupying the same physical space. It’s like the roots are ephemeral ghosts, unable to interact with the world at all. Despite that, I could feel something flowing through them, pumping all along the system, dragging stuff into my Core and pushing stuff back out. Maybe it’s like a respiratory system?
Then there’s the Mage sight. Well, maybe mage sight? It seems like it, anyways. It almost seems like synesthesia. Rather than ‘seeing’ color or shapes, I can see...elemental energy? Like, the stone in the cave is a soft-rough-strong Earth, a blend of minor elemental energies peppering the overall material, mostly threads of long calcified Life, pockets of old water and Water, and porous Air. More evidence that it’s some kind of sandstone. There’s more nuance there, stuff that can’t really be described, though the little spots of life in the cave are much more interesting.
There’s little patches of moss and lichen all over the place, along with dustings of fungal spores, pollen, old twigs and dried out wood chips, what might be weeds outside, and a small family of...fennec foxes? No, they’re a bit bigger than a fennec fox, and they’ve got surprisingly mouse-like forepaws, like tiny little hands. They’re mostly brown and grey furred, though one of them has an oddly colorful tail, a mix of oranges, yellows, and reds, along with faint hints of Fire energy embedded into the tail fur.
It’s hard to tell which ones are male and female. I mean I don’t really have eyes, per say, maybe I can-whoah, that’s more then I wanted to see! I can apparently see into the little critters. Oddly enough, no squeamishness at seeing all that blood and guts. And uh, it’s a male and a female.
It honestly takes me a solid minute to realize that I’m not processing all of this all at once. Well, not in the same way as I’m used to, anyways. Rather than switching from one set of input to another real fast, I’m actually processing everything at the same time. Parallel processing, like a computer! After some quick testing, it doesn’t seem like there’s a solid limit on how many things I can concentrate on, though once I get to around 10 I noticed that my perception of time started to get slower. As in, the fennec mice (Fennice? Fennice.) start moving like they’re on 1.25 speed on Youtube instead of normal speed. There’s also a kind of strain? Not exactly a headache, but definitely some kind of ‘stop being an idiot or you’ll hurt yourself’ kind of soft limit.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Alright, enough procrastinating. I really did need to get used to all of this sensory data, but my new body seemed made to handle large amounts of data, so there was surprisingly little disorientation. I just focused on them so I wouldn’t have to look at my Core. Denial, I guess. But time waits for no one, so I focus my senses on my own central body. Most of the senses give odd, yet kind of expected sensations, the taste of your own mouth, the feel of touching your own hand, etc. Physically, I look like some kind of dark blue crystal brain, though a bit bigger than an actual brain. My insides are like some kind of crazy mess of fractals and crystals and organic bits, and I’m pretty sure it’s bigger on the inside?
That really does give me a bit of a headache, so I stop looking inside of myself. From the little smooth, eggshell-like fragments of crystal beneath the floating organ, it almost looks like I molted out of the old Core. And why do I keep mentally thinking of the Core with a capital C?!
Ok, ok, deep breaths. In, pause. Out, pause. Rinse and repeat. Calm down. After doing a mental review, I know a few things:
1) I’ve been reincarnated into something called a Node Core.
2) Somewhat obviously, there’s magic here, though the kinds of magic are currently unknown.
3) I’ve developed new instincts. Maybe leftover from that ‘Soul Framework’ error? Or it could just be natural to the Core’s biology. Crystallogy? Whatever.
Alright, first thing to do is figure out how to actually use this body. Thankfully I get a strong feeling that it will be more like moving all your limbs after a long nap, rather than retraining an injured limb with physical therapy.
First thing to notice, the ‘breathing’ I did seems to have had an effect on everything in the...dungeon? Yeah, dungeon. A thin layer of the limestone in all of the cavern seems to be infused with energy, probably mana or something, and it almost feels like buzzy-ozone-lemonlime. All the plants either grew or germinated and rooted, which was fascinating to see. None of it by very much, the biggest reaction was a patch of particularly reactive fungi that spread its mycelium out in all directions by a few inches, as if to catch even more of the energy. The Fennice had jolted up out of their sleep, both of them jumping around and playing like little cubs, despite the fact they were sound asleep just moments before. So, ‘breathing’ through my roots has a decidedly dramatic effect on things.
With a moment of concentration, one of the air-based roots twitches, flexing and curling up before relaxing again. After some mental adjustments, I can move it with decent dexterity, though the whole ‘boneless’ thing takes a bit of getting used to. That and the whole infinity-fractal thing. I can’t even see the ends of the root, it kind of just turns into a fog of feeling, almost like a cotton ball. I intersect it with a nearby rock, and twitch a kind of mental muscle. A small swell of mana pushes through the roots, and the segments inside and around the rock shift and move like a tree in a storm. Before my non-existent eyes, the pebble dissolves into motes of light-on both the true and mage sights-before being sucked into my roots oh holy shit-
Whooo, alright, headrush over. Ok, I think I’ve got that under control. I suddenly became intensely aware of some kind of...mind space? It’s like a whole new set of senses, but in an area entirely removed from reality. I have a photographic 3D blueprint of the stone I absorbed, down to the individual crystalline structures, and how much of each element it’s made of. Now that it's in here, I can mold and shape it easily, like something between playing with putty and a CAD system. With just a little focus from one of my trains of thought it starts turning into a variety of simple shapes, like a cube, a sphere, a D20, etc, etc, before I finally try pulling it apart into its component atoms.
Oddly enough, there seems to be more elements than really should be possible, and less of the ones I expected. The main ones are silicon, iron, calcium, etc, what you would expect from sandstone, but...it’s like there’s a spectrum of each individual element, with mundane atoms making up the bulk, and with various smaller groups of each atom that seems to have magical connotation, like Earth or Air. These connotations seem less intricate than the ones I found in the natural rock. Maybe they’re like the building blocks of magic?
Keeping that train of thought to experiment in the mindspace, I refocus most of my attention back on the cavern. Yeah, I couldn’t really deny my new reality anymore. I really had turned into some kind of Fantasy Dungeon Core, like all those novels.
What now?
______________________________________________________________________________________________
Alright, mental diary update! It is now daytime! From what I can see of the outside, there’s some barren rocks with little sprouts of stubborn weeds in the cracks, and that’s about it. I’ve also been working on the whole ‘I can mold the world around me thing’! As I was expecting, I can’t extend my roots out past my area of influence, which seems to be limited by how much mana I can circulate with said roots.
When I tried to pull one of my thicker roots out into the open air it was like there was a heat wave, but made of magic, to the point that the plant life directly next to it went through its entire growth cycle in just a few seconds, withering into a rotted slurry before little new sprouts started growing out of it. It also felt like I was pulling a tooth out without anesthesia, so I’ve concluded that I should not do that. I can shift my aura around slightly though, but oddly enough it seems like my smaller branches start to wither if they’re left in stone for too long, it’s like they pop under some pressure. So I guess the cavern must be like, the optimum size ratio? Probably made by the original Core soul, now that I think about it.
Inside that area though, I can do a whole bunch of stuff! Though there are some restrictions. As long as I know how to make something, either from direct blueprints or via mind-space modification, then I can produce it, but otherwise I can’t do diddly squat. For example, I can’t just make stacks of gold, because I don’t have gold blueprints to base the creation off of. Although I can make silicon, iron, calcium, carbon, tin, and other trace elements found in the materials that I’ve absorbed. One thing to note, any of the magical elements, like Air-Aspect Tin, takes a lot more mana to create than their mundane bases. That and I don’t really have much use for them at the moment as more than curiosities, which I can’t really afford with so little information about the world outside and any danger I might be in. More interesting is what’s going on with the plants and animals!
Overnight, the cavern had filled to the brim with moss, lichen, and small mushrooms, and the two Fennice had done the dirty, evidenced by the fact the female seemed to already be in the 3rd term, a litter of 6. I have no idea where most of the material for that growth is coming from, but I could feel the air gradients as the plants absorbed carbon dioxide en masse, so the plants are at least trying to act within the bounds of normal science. All of that is nice, but the real thing to note is the fact that they all radiate mana! It’s like there’s some kind of snowball effect, my mana encourages growth, they produce more mana, which I can then cycle into my own, further increasing the growth, etc. etc.
Also, fun fact, I don’t need sleep. Don’t even feel mentally fatigued, which is trippy, but very good for continued testing. For now, I’m gonna focus on testing my limits, and making my cave look nicer. Just because I’m a Dungeon Core now, it doesn’t mean that I have to look ugly! I start by fixing up the little trickle of water in the top corner of the cave, opening it up and making a channel down to the center of the room. From there I empty out a shallow depression, covering it in a layer of black sand and multicolored pebbles (Thank you various oxides!). I splurged a little and made the black sand out of Life attuned silica and carbon.
I discovered another interesting thing at this step. You know how I mentioned that the broken down Aspected atoms seemed to lose a lot of the meaning the stone they came from had? Well I can build up new meaning by thinking. The process is an odd mix between programming and painting, which is really the closest I can get with the mere english language. For the sand, which I’ve decided to call Verdant Sand, has all of its elements attuned to Earth, Water, Air, and Life aspects, though more of the latter than anything else. I gave it the connotation of improving growth, along with connectivity to hopefully increase the overall effect the sand has, but it is sand so I’ll hold my breath on any big breakthroughs
Once that was done, I completed the channel (Filled with more Verdant Sand and pebbles) out of the cavern, allowing the water to trickle away from my sight rather than flood my little home. With the main centerpiece done, I started to shift all the stone in my range into a uniform material, though with Science-Fu it wasn’t quite natural ‘stone’ in the traditional sense. I made a composite of buckyballs and basalt, arranging them into hexagonal columnar structures of differing sizes for simplicity.
For aesthetic affect, I add veins of verdigris copper shot throughout the basalt columns. I did all of it mostly from a mix of boredom, dungeon pride, and to do more experimentation, along with being a geek and wanting to see how the buckyballs would affect the stone. Now I’ve got a nice little abode!
I’ll need to figure out what to do for the organics though...Ah! I’ve got an idea. If you’ve ever seen those inca terraced farms, I do something similar to that, raising little ledges and walls of the columnar basalt and filling the spaces with variously sized sand and pebbles (the closest thing I had to dirt), before growing and shaping more of them to shift the displaced moss and fungi into them, along with any twigs that look alive enough to maybe sprout with the help of Literal Magic.
As for the Fennice, they seem oddly calm about the whole thing, to the point that they just start moving their little nest area into one of the terraces. Odd. Still, with the dark black stone with turquoise veins, the calm pond of black sand and sparkling pebbles, and my Core floating above the center of the pond, giving off a midnight blue glow, I’d say I’m quite proud of what I’ve accomplished!
...The heck do I do now?