Chapter 4
They were still discussing Tom’s prospective finances when Anaxis entered the room, bowed to the king, and reported the most distressing information that the king had received since he had learned that a rogue Controller had awoken in the northern reaches of his kingdom.
“Your Majesty, I have just received word from reliable sources that the capital of Velund has fallen to the blight,” Anaxis said gravely. “Two other major Velundese cities have also fallen.”
King Fenard cursed. Tom thought it was the first time he had ever heard the king do that. “How bad? How far from the cores is the blight spreading? How fast? Do the other Cores show any signs that they’ll fail as well?”
“The information I received was a quarter of a page long and penned by a second-hand source,” Anaxis answered apologetically. “I suggest that you rely on your own information gathering community in order to find out more details, Your Majesty. I remind you that I serve my queen--”
“Unless you have more details about the crisis I don’t want to hear another word from you, Anaxis,” King Fenard cut in. “Thank you for the warning. I’m sure that it will irk Yecha for decades that you were the one to share it with me. Tom, forgive me, but I will not be staying for dinner. I must return to the capital immediately.”
King Fenard made good on his words. The group saw him off, but the king departed in such haste that he didn’t even wait for the carriage to be hitched, ordering instead a saddled horse. Fenard regretted not riding his griffin, but this had been meant as much to be another opportunity to bring Tom and Rowena together as the delivery of the Tilluth Command Crystal.
And he had certainly not expected an international crisis to interrupt them.
Once the king was gone, the others returned to the manor and speculated what this news would mean for the world.
It was not until dinner time that everyone realized that the king had left his niece behind.
~~~~~~~
That night, after the others had gone to bed, a whispering voice awoke Tom. It was the voice of a young girl. She was saying his name.
Tom turned over in his sleep.
“Whatever you want, Vella, it can wait until the morning,” he said.
The voice grew louder, and Tom realized that although it belonged to a young girl, it did not belong to Vella. Growing confused, he sat up in bed and listened. There were more words to the voice’s message than just his name, but his name was being repeated over and over again.
“Jessica?” Tom asked. “If that’s you playing with your magic, cut it out! You can work on it in the morning.”
The voice continued.
Putting on a robe and a pair of slippers, Tom went to investigate the source. He quickly realized two facts.
First, the whispers were not actually whispers. Even after walking through the hallway they remained the same volume rather than growing louder. While they had a source and direction, they were not behaving like sound should. He suspected Jessica’s magic once more, but he didn’t think that she would be pulling a prank on him like this. Or rather, that if she had, she would have given herself away by now.
Second, the voices were coming from outside.
He considered rousing someone to come with him, but he was a little worried about looking foolish. He was not much of a fighter, so if this was some new monster’s lure that Alpha had spawned, then he might be in danger. But he’d never heard of a monster that acted like this.
The voice was coming from the direction of Alpha Core, he realized. As he approached it, he saw a faint white light at its base, which resolved into the figure of a child in a white dress the closer he got. When he was standing next to her, she looked up and smiled.
She was a pretty little girl. Vella might have become best friends with her, or irrationally jealous. Tom, however, was concerned, as there shouldn’t be any child on the estate that he was unaware of. The staff had families, but although they sometimes brought their children, nieces and nephews, or in two cases even grandchildren to work sometimes, but Tom thought he had met most of them, and this girl he did not know.
Except for a sense of familiarity. And Rapport.
“Welcome, Tom Weaver, Controller, Age fourteen almost fifteen. Subclass Progenitor. The others say it has been so long since there has been a progenitor the bloodlines became too prominent too many inheritors and they were wrong. They sundered and sundered and made us less. Tom Weaver, Tom Weaver, welcome Controller. Age fourteen almost fifteen. Subclass Progenitor. The others say it has been so long since a progenitor the blood weakens and new blood emerges and that is a progenitor.”
The girl continued to whisper. Tom looked at the girl, and then at the core, and made a leap of either logic or instinct as he realized who, or what, he was seeing.
“Hello Alpha,” Tom said. “I didn’t know you could take this form.”
The little girl looked up. She stopped whispering for a moment, then smiled. “Welcome Tom the Controller. I am Alpha, but I am more than Alpha. I am six plus three. You should make three stronger so that I would be nine. Three have been sundered from one and one regrown but the three were never regrown and remain ones that are not whole.”
Tom nodded as he understood the girls words. “You’re not just my Core Stone. You’re the network. Some kind of gestalt awareness caused by Linking Alpha to the other Cores.”
“I am new,” Alpha said. “You are building me. I am six plus three but I will be more. I am weak right now but I will be strong. I do not know how strong. The others whisper of a burden I must shoulder I am not strong yet Tom Weaver I cannot bear a burden like that! Not while I am six plus three.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll make you strong,” Tom promised. “The plus three, those are the Sundered parts of the Caseville Core, aren’t they. Are they holding you back?”
The girl paused her whispers and considered. “When you Sunder, we are made less. A controller is supposed to make the less into more but the more has not been happening. Controllers have not been doing their jobs right. It was only because you will not learn Sunder that you were chosen to awaken as Controller, Tom. The shape for Sunder is not in your soul.”
“The king won’t be happy to hear that,” Tom said. “But I don’t particularly care if I learn Sunder or not. I think Link is much more useful. There are so many Cores out there that I don’t see the point in making more of them.”
“Yes. Link is superior. Link makes the network stronger. Sunder hurts the cores and makes them less, and the less weakens the network. Caseville had time to recover but the three under Caseville are weak. You should make them strong so that I am more than six plus three.”
Tom considered, then reached out and touched the Alpha Core Stone. He felt through the connection to the two Core Stones linked to the network through Caseville. They both represented villages nearby the city that he had just left. After some thought, he Leveled one of them. It jumped from level thirteen to level eighteen in an instant, despite Tom attempting to restrict its growth. Tom Expanded its Territory until it’s mana equilibrated to be about what it had been before, and then set it to begin Seeding cotton.
He did the same to the other village core, although he had to level it twice, as it increased by three levels and then by another three to be level nineteen. The second village he set to Seed flax.
He chose those two crops because he knew their value. Cotton and flax both produced valuable fibers, and flax could also be processed to make a valuable oil. He didn’t exactly know whether Seed would cause the plants to grow in concentrations large enough to make them commercially viable for harvesting or not, but that’s why he was experimenting with his powers. If Seed didn’t cause the village cores to spawn fields of their respective plants, but instead just loose plants here and there like weeds, Tom didn’t think that the village would be harmed. And if it worked like he hoped it would, they would benefit.
“Does that help?” Tom asked once he had finished interacting with Cores.
The girl considered. “I am now eight instead of six. Eight plus one instead of six plus three.”
Tom nodded and pulled up his Quest menu, where he was unsurprised to learn that he had made progress on his system Quest. He had jumped from six percent completion to eight percent.
“My quest is to make you one hundred,” Tom informed the Alpha Network Gestalt. “Maybe when that happens you’ll be smart enough to talk like a regular person.”
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“Tom Weaver, Controller, age fourteen almost fifteen. The other networks are failing. Network Three is in Cascade Failure. Network six will enter systemic failure within one year,” the child-spirit of the cores informed him. “Two human nations will fall to blight soon. There will be great strife. You must not abandon your Quest. Your Quest will make things better. This is what the system whispers to me and what I whisper to you. Do not abandon your quest.”
“Which two nations?” Tom pressed. “Velund and where else? Is it Welsius?”
Rather than answering his question, Alpha began spiraling through her previous speech. Tom tried several times in several ways to rephrase himself, but he could not get an answer over which of the nations were poised for disaster. Not until he let the subject drop.
“I’m not abandoning anything, Alpha,” Tom promised. “But I do need to go to sleep.”
Alpha blinked at him. “I have woken you from slumber. Humans need to spend at least one third of the day slumbering and I have interrupted your rest. I am sorry. If it were not for my need to speak to you alone I would not have--”
“It’s okay, I think this was an important talk,” Tom told the spirit. “I’ll remember it. Is there anything else of importance that you need to tell me before I go back to sleep?”
“The dungeons are not the enemy of mankind,” Alpha said seriously. “They are a place to safely channel Miasma and store it until it can be converted into experience. Without dungeons, the world withers and dies. That is why so many new dungeons have been Spawning, Tom Weaver. The Cores which have been sundered have been unable to dispose of their Miasma through the channels that previous Controllers have established for them. They have been forced to create new dungeons to relieve the pressure before they destroyed themselves. But that is but a stalling tactic.”
Alpha made eye contact with him, and Tom realized for the first time that her eyes were solid black. It was a frightening realization, but he had known for some time that she wasn’t human.
“Make dungeons, Tom. Seed them, bait them, do whatever you can to lure adventurers inside of them to slay monsters and foil traps and overcome challenges. The more experience that is generated, the more miasma is neutralized. Dungeons are not the enemy of mankind, and mankind is not the enemy of dungeonkind. We are interconnected and reliant upon each other.”
“I understand,” Tom said, and perhaps he did. “I’ll see what I can do about creating more dungeons like the one in Caseville.”
“Caseville is a good dungeon,” Alpha agreed. “Go to sleep now, Tom Weaver, Controller, Age fourteen almost fifteen. I will disturb your slumber no further.”
The spirit abruptly vanished into motes of light, which were absorbed by the Core Stone standing nearby. Tom was less surprised by the existence of the network gestalt than he perhaps ought to have been. He had been feeling an intelligence behind the cores ever since he had unlocked Collaborate, his level twenty skill. Perhaps it was that skill which allowed him to see this Gestalt being in the first place.
While according to the descriptions of the skill he had gotten from the books that Anaxis and Fenard had provided him had dealt mostly with how to use Collaborate in conjunction with Sunder in order to create tame Cores for habitation, Tom was becoming convinced that both of those skills had been misused in the past.
He reached out and Touched Alpha Core once more, pulling up its status.
Core Name
Alpha (Linked)
Controller Options:
Link
Level
20
Level
HP
3/25
Expand
Mana
8750/8758
Reduce
Territory
10.2 kM^2
Evolve
Floors
4
Summon
Inhabitants
32 humans, 3 minotaur, 5 Korgoath
Spawn
Experience
8.1*10^10
Customize
Seed
Collaborate
“I’m going to heal you soon,” Tom promised. “I just need to let my friends get some levels by Delving against the monster wing I created for them. Once they have all gotten to be around level twenty, I’ll start leveling you again as well, until your HP is maximized again.”
Satisfied with his oath, Tom padded the Core Stone affectionately and returned to bed.