The cave is serene, the soft trickling of water flowing through the dungeon mixing with the quiet rustling of my two Fennice, both of them settling down for the night as the sun sets outside. Well, I assume it’s setting outside, the only indicators I have to suggest that is the slow decrease in heat and light at the mouth of the cave, along with the small space just outside of it.
Despite the calming scene inside of me, I could only sigh, dissolving the quartz crystal veined with glittering tin I’d been playing with. I’d been hemming and hawing since I’d finished transforming the cave, despite the gnawing instinct in the back of my mind, like a particularly insistent intrusive thought. It was time to start experimenting with the living matter within my walls.
There were logical reasons for doing so besides my instincts of course. For one, the more organisms I had in my dungeon, the more mana they would produce, which meant I would gain a higher net level of mana to work with. There’s also the fact that I could potentially create new, modified creatures, designed to defend my relatively exposed Core, the mere thought of which sent intoxicatingly pleasant feelings through me.
That’s the problem though, creating them. Absorbing plants wasn’t all that ethically damning to me, especially something as simple as moss, but something much more complex, like the Fennice’s? I wasn’t really comfortable with that. There’s also the issue that, if I had to model them like my inanimate creations, it would take an exponentially longer time to create anything, simply from making sure all the little veins and nerves and glands would work-likely with very gruesome failures along the way-just to make basic changes to size or muscle density, let alone anything else.
Still, there were enough incentives to get going on it that I could ignore it no longer. Concentrating on a single patch of moss, I command it to deconstruct, a small swell of power reaching down infinitely recursive roots to turn it into light and information. I brace, readying for a mental barrage of complexities far beyond that of mere crystal or stone...
And nothing happens? No, wait, there’s something...It’s like another mental space, seperate from the one holding all the iterations of the materials I’ve absorbed or self-modeled. How many mental spaces are there hidden inside me?! I grumble for a bit, but mentally sigh and move back to being productive, exploring this new mindspace.
There’s a bundle of light inside, presumably the moss, and when I focus in on it many lines seem to branch away from the central sphere. As I watch, various tidbits of information write themselves out above each line, germination rates, moisture retention, rate of natural mutation, natural lifespan. It feels more like the reams of analytical data plug directly into my thoughts more than me taking in the information visually, which I assume means that I already ‘know’ all this, and this is just a way for my conscious self to actually make sense of everything.
Well, as fun as learning the photosynthetic efficiency of the average moss strand is, my true goal here is to modify them. Following my instincts, I subsume the train of thought in the mindspace within the sphere of moss-light. It’s like diving into a sea of ordered, kaleidoscopic processes and sensations, waves of green and bubbles of structure.
After a brief adjustment, I find myself before the true structure of the simple plant. It’s...not quite the same as DNA, at least as I remember it. There’s a similar structure to it, a winding chain of hydrocarbons, both an immense expanse and a minute thread in this space of fluid perspective, but the inherent magic of this world means that even the building blocks of life have had to adjust.
Rather than a two-sided helical spiral, the DNA is made up of three sides, sometimes making three-way connections in each segment, sometimes two-way connections, other times multiple two-way connections that seem superimposed over each other. Each atom is Aspected, working in an intricate symphony of elemental networking, minute branches of meaning working across the triple helix with just as much sway over the power of life as the physical material.
With a prod of intent (and with a few extra trains of thought dedicated to the process), the mosses entire genome is displayed before me, paradoxically giving me a detailed look at every atom and its connections, while also letting me see the entire strand from an eagle-eye view. Some of the kaleidoscopic light surrounding me resolves into a universal view of the moss, as if I were looking at the real thing in the real world, starting at its germination and growing all the way through its natural life cycle before starting again like a very detailed gif.
Different segments of its DNA light up at different points, showing what activates and deactivates during every moment of its life. I slowly learn the patterns, the full brunt of my consciousness focused on the process now, learning the genetic blueprint of such a simple life form with a fervor I’ve rarely seen in myself before.
Once I felt familiar enough with my mossy experiment, I started to try out modifications, replacing a nucleotide here, cutting a segment out there, focusing on the sections of code that modified its already extant biology and anatomy, rather than the bits that govern its more fundamental processes, mentally tossing any failed products. Each change would be shown visually, the altered processes popping up as explanations for why the aging cycle changes in the ways it does. I managed to make two different variants, though I stopped before I did anything too crazy, I didn’t want to end up spending days on this.
I float back into real-space, trains of thought branching away from the concerted focus I was using with something similar to a mental stretch. Apparently doing that actually takes effort now, despite my years of practice with it. Already I’ve started seeding the new moss types throughout my little terraced gardens, sending small flows of mana into them to jumpstart their growth.
There’s obviously the original moss in abundance, which I’ve decided to call Cavern Carpet Moss for the sake of discerning it from the others. It grows in thick mats when conditions are right-which they always are in my dungeon-bound together mostly with their longer than normal rhizoids. The rest of it grows as stout little puffs of green, adding a nice contrast of color to the rest of the cave.
The first modded plant I made actually borrows from its evolutionary origins as algae, making a waterborne moss. With the spore floating on top of the water, it quickly sprouts and grows a single sprout, new ones branching from it to create a spiralling pattern, held together by a single rhizome tangled up beneath the green. The surface area keeps it from sinking, and it completely ignores the water below it, relying entirely on absorbing moisture and minerals from the air rather than risk over-watering. I seed a good handful of the now named Pond Lily Moss into the waters below my main core.
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The Pond Lily Moss was mostly just for aesthetic affect, but this new one, the Honeysuckle Moss, is for a purpose. The green sprouts of the plant have shifted, forming wide, shallow bowls rather than stout stems, though it looks more like tiny little green scales from a cursory glance. This moss is much more mana and material intensive, turning it into a mana sink in fact, but as I watch the patches quickly growing all around the cave mouth, they get to work making that investment worth it. All of that energy goes into its hyper-functioning photosynthetic processes, the excess water and sugars collecting in the miniature bowl sprouts. The water slowly evaporates, leaving behind a slowly thickening, lightly sweet-smelling pseudo-sap, perfect for attracting other small creatures for me to collect.
With the new plants settling in, forming their own spheres in my species mindscape, I have to say I get pretty giddy. If I had the vocal cords for it I’d whoop and holler and just, celebrate! Dungeon instincts are probably amplifying the feeling, but I made life. Like, there’s all the issues with having some weird semi-organic magic body, and the wonder of being able to control the very building blocks of matter, but creating living things just hits different, you know? It’s every biologist's dream!
Filled with the giddy energy, I start taking samples of all the other plants and fungi in my little slice of the world, and get to work diversifying. The lichens threw me for a loop for a little bit, since they looked like multiple species spheres overlapped on top of each other, but I remembered that they’re composite organisms which cleared things up for me. The idea of having multiple organisms bound together like that did intrigue me though, and gave me an idea.
After a lot of fiddling and making sure that it would have a decent expected lifespan, I ended up making a mycelium composite, each strain losing their fruiting bodies and specializing in breaking down specific materials and making different organic molecules, a high-efficiency sediment converter. Naming it the Converter Myceliate, I seed it all through the sand and pebbles under the moss gardens, speeding up their growth until they’re practically universal, already starting to turn it into a very basic soil.
Next come more traditional mushrooms, a mix of the natural Tan, Brown, and Teal colored varieties that were already growing, named as such since they weren’t particularly visually impressive. Along with them are the stubborn weeds found just outside, quickly sprouting small red flower bulbs, some ferns that curl in spirals, and two stubborn, woody plants from the twigs I’d collected. One of them grows mostly underground with a spiky topside, collecting water in thick, tuberous roots, while the other seems more like a bramble, spindly branches quickly covering themselves in waxy, dark red leaves.
At this point, I feel something close to exhaustion, less an actual mental fatigue and more an inability to drive my actions, a kind of laziness coming over me. Over the next few minutes my thoughts collect enough for me to come to the conclusion that this must be the ‘low thaum levels’ those odd screens had mentioned when I first came too. Where are those screens, anyways? I would have thought there’d be a whole system thing here, but so far I’ve been pretty much left on my own.
My attention drifts and swirls, idly taking note of my quickly flourishing ecosystem, however simplistic it might be. Ideas slowly tick through my mind like the teeth of crystal gears, both ephemeral and clear as day. I note with a distant glee that I’ve gotten some new visitors during the night, the tiny creatures crawl or fly into my dungeon, attracted to the Honeysuckle Moss and the energies swirling inside.
The critters range from vaguely familiar to completely strange, the only commonality between them being how low they are in the food chain. Ponderously slow worm-like creatures burrow through my basalt walls, working hard to get through the reinforced material, chitinous rings of armor protecting them when they breach for air. Tiny crab-shaped animals the size of a pinhead swim up my small stream, or walk along its shores, filtering stray organic bits and minerals from the water. Possibly the oddest to arrive is a single winged wisp, dragonfly-like wing frames filled with solid Air mana, its main body transparent and brittle. Rather than settling on any of the gardens, it drifts along the currents of my roots, drawing tiny amounts from them to feed on.
As my mana returns to me, more available now with the larger number of plants and the new arrivals, I get to work once more. Woody red-leaf brambles are joined by a vine-like cousin, each grasping bramble-vine reaching its tendrils up along the walls. The tuber-like plant gains a watery variant, the roots burying deep into the sands of the pond and the stone below, spikey top leaves extending into long strands, like a thick, rubbery form of seaweed. The curling ferns are joined by a three-way hybrid between the red-bulbed weed, the fern, and the Honeysuckle Moss, creating a spherical bulb of tightly-packed, curling stems and tiny leaves, dotted with tiny pink flowers dripping a blood-colored nectar.
From there, I begin doing the same with the little critters, absorbing and replicating them en masse to populate my verdant cave garden. The only one I didn’t absorb was the dragonfly air wisp, since I wasn’t actually sure I could replicate a not entirely organic creature. I mostly left them alone, since I wanted to see how they would settle into ecological niches before I started making new, mobile species. I did, however, summon a nice pile of the armored stone-eater worms up as a present, to congratulate the new family. The Fennice couple had moved into the largest and thickest of my red-leaf brambles, the female just recently having given birth to her litter.
She tiredly munched on each worm her mate nosed over to her, the six kits whining and snuffling at her belly in search of warmth and milk. If I could have, I would have squealed. They were so dang cute! Their eyes and ears were still closed off, fur soft as downy feathers against my dirt and moss, a pale grey color that would fill in with color and fullness as they grew. I’d have pampered them all some more, but before I could I felt a shiver run through my form, as if someone had thrown an ice cube down the back of my shirt.
Almost like a gravitational pull, I felt all of my focuses drawn to the border of my world view, the edge of my vision warping and bulging as a foreign field of energy passed through, followed by two more. My mana swiftly intermingled with these auras now that they were completely subsumed in my own, and the mysterious intruders resolved into people. I...wasn’t quite sure how to feel about seeing them.
On the one hand, it was people! Real, living people! Even though it had only been two(ish?) days since I was dropped in this body, knowing that I wasn’t alone in the world soothed a burried panic in me, now knowing that I’m not alone in this odd place. On the other hand, my instincts were screaming at me. I had no traps or dangers to ward them off, no creatures to protect my Core! Holy hell, they could probably spot my Core from a few dozen feet away with the way it was just on display. The closest thing I had to an able fighter was the male Fennice, and there’s no way it could do more than scratch up their boots! On the third hand, the people I saw weren’t all human, which was surprising. I mean, yeah, new universe and everything, so I guess it’s more surprising that any of them look human, but it was still a bit jarring.
The two in the back of the group are probably the closest to human I could hope for, a man and a woman in a mix of leather armor and hemp clothing, only the bare necessities on their persons. A backpack with a sleeping bag and canteen on each of their backs, The man holding a hatchet while the woman had two stiletto daggers at her hips. The man was short and stout, thick bones bound in bulky muscle and tough skin, a golden tooth and a long scar along his cheek adding character to an already gritty, smirking face. The woman was almost the complete opposite, lithe and tall, looking like a wary tomcat in human form. Her eyes roved over every inch of my cave, looking for threats.
The one in front though, they were almost alien, looking like if you mixed a generic elf with a bird, maybe a bat too. It was taller than the human woman by at least two feet, rail-thin with smaller shoulders and hips than they probably should be. Their legs were digitigrade, covered by cloth wrappings up until their knees, loose, long shorts and a long-sleeved shirt made of wooden vine and leaf material hiding its skin. Their hands are large with long, four-digit fingers tipped in thick, claw-like fingernails. Their face was mostly human, though their ears were long and large like my Fennice’s, and their eyes were a bit bigger than a humans in proportion to its face. Instead of hair, it had a mane of brown feathers, paired with a plume of similar feathers around each wrist and their porus, bird-like bones to hint at their potential ancestry.
It wasn’t immediately apparent if they were male or female-if they even had distinctions like that-and I wasn’t really willing to peak into someone’s organs just to see what reproductive parts they have. There’s also the problem of their aura, which would prevent me doing so either way. Just as my mana mixed into their aura, their mana mixed with mine, the three flavors of mana quickly making my control over the dungeon murky and ephemeral, my roots acting drugged. I could feel the influx of mana circulating through me, but the process of assimilating it all seemed to keep me from actually interacting with them. Or maybe it’s something specific about humanoids? I’d have to figure that out later. For now though, the important thing is that I can’t really do anything except watch as they walk further into my body, metaphorically sweating at what they might do.