With a plan in hand, Prime returned her focus from her Mental Office back the reality around her. She did have a vague awareness of her physical situation while using the Perk, but there was always that bit of time needed to adjust to a new body.
It was late in the day and they were still docked. Sails had been fitted to her masts and bowsprit, and the ship’s stores were starting fill with food for the trip. She could also feel the wharf rats and a pair of terriers among the humans and handful of sea folk moving about her decks. There weren’t just matu, either. A sludu had hired on, it would see. They were often rudely called squid backs as they were very much visually like a crab on their bottom half and an octopus on their top half. While there were some who were prejudiced against the nearly monstrously formed sludu, most sailors hailed their presence among a crew as a good luck charm.
When Prime felt settled back into her new self, she asked, «You already hid the door to our new stuff, right?»
«No,» Aide said with a touch of exaggerated patience. «I do have a disinterest sigil over it, but the sailor setting up the ward room found it while we were picking out our options. Right now, it’s just a door that leads to the wall behind it.»
Prime wanted to growl, but it was more self directed. Regardless of how muddleheaded she was during the embodying process — and cultivating did not help with settling into her new skin — she was the one who dealt in physicalities. Aide might have caught her goof at failing to make sure their new door was hidden, but it was her responsibility. Also, she knew how loopy her partner got when they were that deep into the meta-mana. Aide probably hadn’t even noticed the major problem looming over them yet.
But, maybe it wasn’t a problem? «Do we need to physically move into the pocket while we build it out? I get that the core had to be in the core room, and that the core room has to be the last room of the dungeon, but does that apply right away? Do we have time to build things out?»
Aide paused, then mumbled, «Let me check ….» A moment later, in a clearer voice, they answered, «Not until you make a room. The System here defines that as a space of at least three meters wide on its shortest dimension.»
The skill gnosis granted by the Class System for the Layout skill was enough for Prime to know that she could widen out a room from her tunnels, which meant, «Change of plans, then. I’ll Layout the tunnel version of our new floor, but I won’t complete it until we have some defenders sorted out. Let’s get to work on getting our ratlings figured out, maybe appropriate some of the weapons from the armory to equip them, too. After we have our defenders sorted, then we expand the rooms and move in. That way, the Soul Tracker won’t warn Muscle-Head that we’ve moved to a location he can find.»
«Oh. That. Right,» Aide muttered with a hint of embarrassed heat.
The process of spawning anything, really, required that they first Absorb mana. A normal dungeon core in this story world would get that mana by using the Absorb skill to break apart a physical structure. That process caused a lot of waste that the dungeon cores couldn’t Absorb, but that a lot of other creatures could.
The Cosmic Order Agents (even Prime) were significantly more well versed in mana manipulations. A change in cultivation methods to fill their crystal body’s mana reservoirs took a little bit to figure out, and the body itself imposed some hard and soft limits. The soft limit would allow Prime to Construct-spawn five kraits before she needed to refill her mana tank. The hard limit risked damaging her crystal body to hold enough mana for eight krait spawns.
The first krait spawned with some accompanying sparklely effects and inside the same room as the agents’ core body.
Aide grumped, «Wasteful! I’mma go poke at those sigils!»
«Hey, now!» Prime called out. «This Storyteller has done a decent job of setting up an ecosystem. Let’s do things their way for the most part while I’m learning stuff. Not saying don’t tinker. In fact, go ahead and do that, but don’t push through any changes just yet. Better to have and not need than need and not have, yeah?»
She felt Aide’s reassessment before they agreed. «Point well taken.» They turned their attention away with less of a sense of righteous indignation and more of curiosity.
Prime then fiddled about with the Construct skill until she figured out how to pick where she wanted to spawn the things she Constructed. She ended up with a krait in the ship’s bilge, one hunting around the ballast cavities, and two more stalking the ship’s store room.
Those snakes were all connected to the core, like tied off sigils. Holding the tied off ends took a negligible bit of her awareness, so she expected that she would have a maximum number of connected defenders. Five, though, was no where near that limit. The connections gave her an easy way to issue simple commands like “hide”, “hunt”, and “defend”. She could even provide some simple targets, but she had difficulties with trying to convey conditional or multi-part commands like, “hide from sapients while hunting rats”. She shelved that worry for later.
Another benefit to having the snekkies out and about was that Prime picked up echoes of their senses. Hearing was a secondary sense for them compared to an acute tremor sense. It gave her a muffled kind of hearing. Their shadow affinity also gave the shadow kraits a near tactile sense of the things they pushed light away from, tot he point that they mostly only had thermal vision.
The snek in the bilge got lucky before the others, and Prime found out that when her defenders ate something, they triggered her Absorb skill on their own. The snake in the bilge also grew more of a personality as it consumed the smaller fish, and the seaweed and snails, barnacles, and even some finger sized jellyfish that had been caught in the part of the hull meant to protect the rest of the ship from getting too wet.
With each bite Absorbed, Prime could feel something passing through their core body via the skill, so she asked Aide, «Are we getting Construct patterns?»
«Something’s going on. The System actually has the whole patterns recorded already, but the mana feels like there’s a random collection element to unlocking a pattern. I’m trying to figure out the mechanic, but — oh, now we can spawn “Gold Veined Kelp” … and kelp snails …Yeah, I don’t think the Absorb skill is actually recording the deconstruction of the mana farms, just triggering a luck mechanic.»
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The voracious hunter in the bilge was doing a good job of topping off their core’s mana reservoir, so Prime spawned another snek down there. Partly, that was for the purpose of freeing space for new incoming mana and partly to hurry up cleaning out the bilge. She felt a bit gross realizing all those sea creatures had found their way into her hull, though not as much as when she considered having rats trying to gnaw at her innards.
And soon enough, her snakes in the Stores caught the first wharf rat. It took three kills to get that pattern, but only two kills to get a pattern for fingerlings (a type of fish), one for a salt minnow (a very tiny type of fish), and even after clearing the six jellyfish out of the bilge, they had not got that pattern.
Once they got the pattern for the wharf rats, Prime had the snakes in Stores and the ballast cavities hide.
Full up on mana for the time being, Prime turned her attention to sculpting the tunnels in their pocket realm. The echoes of mathematics that accompanied the use of the Layout skill wore her out, even without her having to consciously focus on the formulas, though. It left her with a kind of tunnel vision, but the sooner the floor was done, the sooner they could move on to the life of a dungeon core. With that in mind, she pushed on through the mental fog, pausing only to make sure that she was building according to their plan. She left out the center pieces of the rooms, making the perimeters of them as tunnels so that when the time came, she could quickly expand those perimeter tunnels into the planned encounter rooms. She sheathed the surfaces with her planks of dungeon wood, and also placed all the doors, traps, and the hidden reward chests.
When she placed the first chest, Aide passed along the System notice.
| Treasure chest unlocked! Designate a place for treasure chests to spawn within a cleared room.
She mentally filed that away for later and kept working. The prototypes of the magic traps did not get a System response, or at least none that Aide thought worth sharing to her.
By the time Prime finished and turned her attention to the world around them once more, they were back under sail. «Hey, Aide? How long was I distracted?» she asked.
«Eh? What? Oh, hi! Yeah, we’re not going to have ratlings before we move in,» Aide said. Though obviously distracted, they sounded to be enjoying what they were so engrossed in.
«Aide.» Prime put patient seriousness into her voice. She got the sense of Aide dragging their focus onto her. Once certain she had enough of that focus, she asked again, «How long have we been under sail?»
The pause before Aide answered told Prime he was checking the recordings. «Two days. Today and most of yesterday. We were in port for almost three weeks before that, all told. You’ve been building for … sixteen days now.»
«Alright. Well. You said no ratlings? What do we have for defenders?»
Aide had not been slacking while Prime did her tunnel sculpting. The meta-mana-finesser of their duo worked on manipulating the wharf rat pattern into their advancements. They had had to reverse the advancement down to a simple rat when they found that wharf rats advanced into aquatic rats and basically stalled out down that path. However, the simple rat pattern yielded advancements into dire rats and rat kings, and some mana infusions had netted them jump rats and spiked rats. The last was kind of like a porcupine, but with a long, prehensile tail that could launch stone-mana formed spikes. If the spike rats were bigger than a human’s fist, they might have been dangerous, but the spikes were mostly of use against the smaller raptors, like gull hawks. The jump rats had a minor physical boost that let them make incredibly fast leaps, covering up to four meters in the blink of an eye. They did need a moment after landing to recover and orient themselves, but the movement was just that fast.
At the end of catching Prime up on their work, Aide commented, «Dire rats should be useful in the rooms, and put the others into swarms under a rat king’s command and we have the start of a low level training zone. Muscle-Head will definitely get through that, but I’ll get started on improving the snakes. He’s a bit weird about snakes so maybe he’ll pause at least long enough to get Side Kick Girly to help charm them out of the way, and we might end up with ratlings by then.»
«You said we’re free of any sort of Halo right now, right? With A’Ferun still marked as the Male Lead, if he comes for us, he is going to get through somehow. We don’t want to get saddled with a Villain Halo in a world with such an insanely strong PLOT. I think we may need to reveal that we’re now this dungeon core thing. Maybe we could pretend that we’re the dominate personality of a soul-merged artifact? I’m not sure on that, but without a proper love interest body and with the change in personality he’ll see now that the Female Lead Halo isn’t requiring we act a certain way, we should be able to convince him to shift to treating us an ally. He will still be an annoying Muscle-Head, but he’ll stop trying to get all kissy face with us, I hope.»
Aide hummed as they thought before adding, «We could even suggest that he go after Side Kick Girly, get her into the Female Lead Role. She won’t mind some sister-wives if the PLOT still wants Muscle-Head to be married into the Idahl’s intrigues.»
«Oh! And Y’lida always did have a lust-on for him! Yes! We can inflict a Harem Curse upon him! He’ll have so many wives telling him what to do that he won’t have time to trouble us!»
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A’Ferun felt a chill run down his spine, and then he sneezed. He absently flicked his fingers in a ward against evil and went back to his training routine. The only way he slept lately was by exhausting himself first.
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Prime made sure there were at least four rooms worth of defenders in the pocket domain tunnels — a process that took most of the next day — before she expanded the final room that would be their new home until the second floor was ready to be built. The very first defender she had spawned had to server as their hands and feet to make the move to the new core room, despite the snekky lacking either.
It climbed up the supports in the little room above the ballast cavities, and down the chain supporting the filigree cage still holding their core aloft. Prime had a moment of terror spiking through her when the cage collapsed on them, but then Aide’s smug, «Gold, bismuth, and quartz are now resources!» made her realize that Aide had just triggered their Absorb skill on the cage.
«Warn me next time!» she grouched, to Aide’s bemused amusement.
The snek had to unhinge its jaw to hold the dungeon core, but it had little trouble safely getting back to the floor. The door, like the ship’s hull, was as much an extension of their will as the defenders. A bit of concentration was needed to unlatch the door, and then to close it after their snek exited the room.
The same was true for the rest of the doors in their path. The Cosmic Order agents had waited until the middle of a night time watch to move, and that made avoiding being seen much easier.
When they reached the final door in the ward room and unlatched it, a portal into their pocket domain had replaced the wall. To their snake’s senses, it gave off a pleasing hum in the floorboards, and appeared to the snake’s limited vision to be a shiny, reflective black surface with hints of rainbow colors at the periphery of the snake’s gaze. To the agents’ mana senses, it was the start of a fibrous tunnel extending out of this world’s main layer of reality.
Prime closed this last door behind them, too, and Aide made sure the disinterest sigil was fresh and covered them.
As soon as their snake deposited them in the hidden pocket in the corner of their new core room, Prime set to work expanding the rooms, with frequent breaks from Layout’s maths-mania to spawn more defenders. By the time dawn broke upon the Hip Shot’s decks, she had opened up half of the standard rooms. She was working on the fifth when the portal door opened and her skill locked up on her.