Chapter 2. Homunculus, Homuncul-he. ~Disease Dungeon.

He thinks it may just be the power of suggestion, but after Thing respawned, they all started up a new journey to a place that Gnat projected ‘feels safe’. After they were out and about, he started getting phantom twinges. Nothing severe like pain or cramps, but more like memories of movement. Like picking up a cup of coffee that was empty without realizing it.

Most of his concentration has been on his Template Library. Though, can you really call something that has three books in it, and one of them is permanently checked out, a library. He feels like spawning a new gnat cluster would be doable, but also somewhat pointless. As he pokes around with Guided Evolution and gnats he has a bit of a breakthrough.

The blinding overload from looking too closely at the lymph node is because it seems to have been spawned in with every collection of disease his old body could remember. So, when he tried to use Guided Evolution every single disease had its own cluster of symptoms, immunities, and new paths to explore because of Mana. All of which is far too much to parse, even now that he has Mental Resistance. It no longer knocks him out, but he can’t actually focus on any of the variables to make real progress there.

But! Perhaps because of his specialization or maybe due to Gnat’s cooperation with Thing before they were Thing, gnats now have the evolution option to be spawned or converted into a plague variant. Most fortunately for his sanity and perhaps more importantly his sense of progress and purpose, said variants only need a single disease chosen for them to carry. There even seems to be a sort of point-buy limit on how many they can hold.

However, there are a few options that are certainly achievement based. So, getting the ability to not have to scale up himself enough to wade through the hyper complexity of the lymph node is great. The first interesting strain is appropriately named Thing-sight. Though rather than giving Thing a way to tap into the gnat’s vision like he can, it just makes the gnat into a little pollen factory. Nothing explicit about Thing being able to direct them around, but that feels like something that can be worked towards.

When he asks, Thing seems interested in having something like that available, so he tries to tell his interface, or his body, to make one. Nothing happened immediately, but even the respawn on Thing took some time, so both will be on the lookout for a new gnat hive to appear in their vision.

Gnat seems to take a special interest in the plague variants for her gnats, being stuck as the weaker transporter now that his heart has grown larger again. Yet after an in-depth conversation and exploration of the many disease types he has to offer, they conclude that the active disease tailoring of the organ spider must be unique to their evolution. So, while more mundane, the more viable option for her is to take a heat resistance path, so she can keep more eyes open for him. Fire being so prevalent in a phoenix’s lair.

Still, that frustration is shared by her dungeon core, i.e., the lack of defense or viable offensive options. Since waking back up, he’s had Thing work on luring in a few of the mice that once tried making a snack of the party. However Assimilate Territory is supposed to work though, just pinning a mouse down and saturating it with lymph slime hasn’t been working. Even when Thing reports feeling the insides of the mouse, in a way that the dungeon still struggles to experience, after the mouse dies and Thing’s vision continues to spread, nothing.

He thanks Authority again as he bashes that burnt goose in his mind. Sure, it would have been a great {Boon} to Assimilate Territory on a phoenix, even if all it gave was a spawning template. But it would seem that Aurora Hephaestus understands the dungeon’s abilities better than he does, and without the ability to try-try again, there was never a real chance to succeed, if even a mouse is beyond him.

Thankfully, Thing doesn’t seem to lose hope or motivation, and just keeps trying. The early memory of his with there being a bunch of dead gnats sitting in their old puddle by the time that Gnat was spawned could mean it’s just a volume thing.

Time passes strangely for him and his minions. The Thing-sight swarm appeared eventually, though it was Gnat that first noticed it. She’s somehow able to distinguish between which mobs are hers, which aren’t even mobs, and which belong to a different minion. Which is fantastic, because all the gnats, aside from her, look basically identical to him.

Another thing he learned though, is that it takes less time for a mob to be converted than for a new one to be spawned in. After his discussion and investigation of the plague gnats, she decided to convert hers into Thing-sight carriers too. The heat resistance applying to the gnats themselves comes from a different pool of resources than the plague aspect.

Though on closer inspection, it is the choices the plague aspect grants that are isolated from other gnat aspects, but the cost of being both heat resistant and a plague carrier do stack against themselves. That limit seems less defined. Perhaps because of the plethora of diseases, which Thing continues to expand, the hard limits are more well known with them because there’s so much overflow it would obviously capsize the pattern.

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Lymph nodes are a truly baffling initial mob to have. Totally immobile and senseless. Just constantly spewing out an endless fountain of dense yet somewhat random disease. He thinks about what sort of horror that could have been if he’d taken Leviathan and gotten the same mob. Just a blind, unthinking tide of death. And if it didn’t develop mobility or perception but just the adaptive effect from the spider as it grew…

“Authority. I would like to use my {Boon} to lock the lymph node from being allowed to exist on the {Monsterpedia}. Nothing with power should be allowed access to something that purely destructive.”

#Your concern has been noted. Your proposition has been reviewed and using a {Boon} to keep exclusive spawning rights to a creature is valid and thus accepted. Information about the {Lymph Node} as an encounter may still be investigated after certain conditions have been met, but no others will be permitted its use.

#To ensure you maintain sole access, any {Lymph Node} variant that does not have an active, willful connection with your core will self-terminate.

#For some things: Less is more.

Days pass before Gnat finally states they’ve reached their destination. Honestly, the dungeon has trouble seeing how this bit of woods is any different than the any of the others it has passed through. Sure, there’s a small pool with a trickle of water flowing through it, but there were others too. He gets the strangest sort of dreamlike sensation that there are plenty of other sites similar to this one all over, even if they didn’t encounter more than a few on their travels.

The journey wasn’t without any successes though. He still hasn’t gotten the mouse pattern, but fleas and mosquitoes have found their place. He created a swarm of fleas that has been travelling with them, rapidly growing their numbers and density. Thing has had to cull their population a few times because they end up getting too thick. When Thing has been making another attempt at assimilating a mouse, the fleas just mindless pounce on the disabled thing and eat it alive.

Dungeon empowered mobs can be scary, and synergies more so. Even working at cross purposes now, Thing infecting a target and weakening it, then the fleas latching on and biting it after burying it in bodies is horrifying. Because when it’s just the fleas by themselves, the mice just eat them right back, and it seems to make them all the stronger for having done so.

For whatever reason, Thing seems much more adept at working alongside the gnat swarm I made for them than the horde of fleas. Mostly they have taken to directing the fleas to throw themselves at mice they’ve spotted but not infected properly in the hopes that the strength the targets get from eating the fleas will allow them to survive long enough or meet some secret criteria so the dungeon can finally get their template.

But fleas are gluttons. Once they find a food source, they just multiply like crazy and feast uncontrollably. Because of the difficulty in perception, it took a long while to figure out that Gnat and Thing as scions work differently. The lymph-sight gnats and the fleas don’t have a brood mother that creates the rest of them as a single point of failure, the swarmhost is the swarm itself. The gnats with their connection with Thing seem to have stabilized their population based on how much Thing can see, but the fleas just seem to break off into new groups whenever enough of them have been spawned. Hence all the culling.

“Less is more,” he thinks aloud after rereading the system messages again, “That feels… important. Subtle. Poignant.”

He feels like he could somewhat solve the flea issue by making a scion for them to act like a general or something, but that seems dangerous in a way. Right now, the fleas can just keep splitting as they eat, but if they were under the effect of a scion, more fleas would only come from it.

He’s also worried about the {Name} problem. Thing got theirs from that group they encountered while he was unconscious, but it feels like there is a growing cost associated with making more of them personally. Even Authority apologized about names for Entities, so there has to be more to it, and he feels that intimately.

With the sun high in the sky, Aurora Hephaestus alights himself in their little clearing, finally answering the question of why this place in particular. It’s apparently just the right size for a bird bath to a big smoking chicken.

The bird looks at him pointedly for a moment before turning his attention to Thing, “{Well then. Here I am. I’ve even been so generous as to dampen my flames so you may approach.}”

Even after dunking himself in the spring, the heat he radiates is so intense that Thing has to be guided towards him with Gnat’s direction. Even as the air is pulled towards his feet, the heat from his feathers just burns away all of Thing’s vision.

The whole process takes several minutes, with Aurora Hephaestus occasionally permitting breaks and additional attempts while he bathes. But finally, Thing manages to get a strain with enough heat tolerance to survive him igniting his flame cloak. Now, the strain basically doesn’t really impact him at all, as so much of its budget is just on surviving the heat, but its connection to Thing remains present if tenuous.

For now, just having something functional is a good first step, and thanks to the wording on the {Contract} Thing will get other chances in the future. The infuriating smirk of the sunbaked raptor’s posture as it flies off once the first stage is complete almost distracts the dungeon from his epiphany. He had it when the first partially successful infection was able to sink in, but then died out when the flame cloak burned it away. He just didn’t want to share in front of bad company.

“Thing! All your work on that gave me an idea. On the next mouse, try to tailor something as ineffective but invasive as possible. Try to blend your slime sight with your adaptive infection but prioritize Not impairing them. Your infection is very adept at killing or weakening them at this point, but now try to do as little to them as possible while diving as deep into them as you can. Sometimes, less is more!”