A massive wash of information hit me then, a rush of images and numbers appearing and disappearing as fast as I noticed them. None of it seemed to stick and it all served to confuse me. When the rush ended I was left with a strange new connection to what the new parts of my mind recognized as [System]. How did I use this new connection you ask. I have no idea! It sat inert and dead in my mind resisting all efforts to force it to reveal its secrets.

It was strange to have new instincts, I knew that this new connection was a source of information, and I desperately needed information, but every other part of me was very suspicious of this [System]. The last thing that had been interacting with me mentally had tried to eat me.

I took stock, I was a crystal ball, in a hole, somewhere underground. The [System] had called me a dungeon core and it had said birth. I was either tripping like crazy, unlikely unless I was totally wrong about what my memories were telling me, or this was real and I needed to take it seriously.

Not much else for it, if I can’t tell the difference I need to assume that this is real and that my life depends on being successful here.

My instincts are telling me that I need to expand but I have no idea what I can do beyond that and I remember the instinctive fear of the Other. I’m pretty sure that it was supposed to be the dungeon and not me but that I took its place when I killed it. If that is the case, then the fear it felt was probably a useful level of fear and I need to be very careful about how I proceed.

I reached out and tried to carve out a bit more of the rock around me and this time paid attention to how it happened, now that I was focusing on it the process made a lot more sense. A sort of energy was stored in my core and I felt one of the new parts of my mind twist it and pull a thin thread out from my core and into the rock around me. When it touched the rock, it split into a thousand fine hairs and began dissolving the rock away. The threads reached into the rock and touched the tiny crystals that made it up, shrinking them and shifting them into new positions, the wall appeared to melt away from me. First a divot then a tube formed as the thread of energy shaped the rock.

As it was pushed back there was another part of me that reached out with a different sort of energy and pushed it into the new space that I had made, sinking into the walls of the short tunnel and making it a part of me.

The act of consciously using this energy woke some of my new instincts and I felt a trickle of information rise to the surface. The first type of energy was mana, it could shape stuff make things happen and was generally the way I could interact with the world. The second was anima and it was basically life force, when I expanded I used anima to make the rock and tunnels a part of myself, any tunnel that I made with mana or connected to I could use anima to make a part of myself.

The more I had connected to myself the more mana I would make, however in order to expand I needed anima and that I could only get by connecting to the surface. I was not sure how that would help, but one of the urges that was nagging at me was to quickly make a tunnel to the surface first.

Having no reason to doubt that instinct I continued to use my thread of mana to dig a hole, first at an angle, and then strait in a direction that I instinctively knew to be up.

I pushed into the rock and felt my reserves of mana dropping quickly, my anima was dropping as well but more slowly, the mana was nearly half gone already.

Finally I sensed a void in the rock near my tunnel after rising 28 meters and curved the path to intersect with it. I broke out into a hollow space and felt a rush of energy that I couldn’t explain but felt like a breath of fresh air surging into me. I sensed a trickle of mana start to gather along the narrow tunnel and felt the thin stream flow towards me and begin to slowly refill my reserves. The anima that I had expended did not seem to be refilling but I still had reserves of that and I would just have to be carful with what I had until I found a way to replace it.

It was only minutes later when I realized that I could feel something near the entrance, I could not “see” more than a few feet from the tunnels end but I could feel tiny particles of something floating into the tunnel and breaking down as it entered my domain. Information began to seep into my mind on what these particles were and what was happening.

As things entered my domain they began to absorb my mana, if they had too little life force, anima, they would be overwhelmed by the mana and I would break them down and absorb them. Sure enough information on the particles revealed them to be mold spores, as more drifted in I began to get a picture of them in my mind, a dozen different spores had drifted in and I felt that I could spawn my own copies if I wanted. There should also have been a trickle of anima with the absorption but I imagined that a few drifting spores would produce virtually no anima at all, certainly not enough to be felt by me.

I wanted to test my ability to make things, it still seemed impossible to my rational mind but that new part of me that was a dungeon core told me that of course I could, a tiny spark of anima a dash of mana to construct and I would have some mold. Sure enough with a slight effort my core once again spat out a bit of anima, this time an almost imperceptible amount, and a larger piece of mana, first the mana built the structure of the mold, the cells appeared and multiplied till a 3 inch patch of the ground near my core was covered in a misty white mass of hairs. I was carefully watching the process now and eagerly saw the mold take form and grow out from a spec into a tiny carpet over a few seconds.

The new patch of mold stayed still once the mana was expended and the spark of anima split still further and settled among the thin filaments and brought them that special spark that made things truly alive in this world.

I was captivated by my creation, the small patch of life that I had made from nothing.

In solemn tones I thought “Look out world for I name to be remembered at a later date do claim this place as my own” Lightning failed to dramatically crash at my pronouncement.

--

Lightning dramatically crashed, Jorson considered this excellent. Not because it was suitable for the moment, though it certainly was, but because it made his job of organizing an ambush much easier. The job was shaping up to be a difficult one and if there was one thing that Jorson disliked it was working for his money. Not that he was bad at his job, he quite fairly considered himself one of the best, but he had long held the opinion that if an assassin was working hard they were doing something wrong.

This job had all the hallmarks of a hard one but the reward was sufficient to fund a number of retirements to somewhere warm and sunny and he had been unable to resist. The target was the core household of the young lord and lady of the new province of Westrin.

Westrin was a mostly uninhabited territory that the kingdom of Veld had ceded to their neighbor to the north, the Kishigs, after a costly war fought some 30 years ago. The Kishigs had no use for the land, which would be nearly indefensible to Veld and had no resource that was particularly needed by the Kishigs, and so the land was left leaderless and free. Thirty years later the Kishigs finally found a way to get rid of that land in a sale to their and Veld’s eastern neighbor the kingdom of Durance. Durance was dearly eager to claim a foothold on the other side of the blackthorn mountains and use it as both a foothold for military action and to avoid costly trade routes through the mountains into Vled. Veld could not allow this and had covertly hired Jorson to deal with the lord and lady to nip the budding threat neatly.

None of this was known to Jorson and would not have mattered if he did know, his task was to kill the group of people moving down out of the pass and the thunderstorm would provide cover that would make this much easier.

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James was seven, he was the son of one of the lord and lady’s scouts and he was tired. Any boy of seven would be tired if he had been through the journey that he had. The long days had worn on him but he kept his chin up and smiled because he was a good boy and mom had told him to. Dad had said she had gone away before they left and James was hoping that she would be waiting when they got to their new home.

James was a bit afraid of the thunder that was getting closer and hoped that his father would find a place to camp soon, his feet were tired and he wanted to eat, but he would not be complaining, the lady had let him ride in the carriage earlier, and being good meant not complaining and he was going to be good. He saw something on the ground, a coin on a string that Dad always wore around his neck, he must have dropped it when he scouted ahead, James would give it to him when he saw him next.

Jennifer Du’mon Hethings looked across the carriage at her new husband shyly, the whole affair had been so sudden that she was still getting used to that new name. Jennifer was not a fool, she knew that the life she had left behind was undoubtedly more comfortable than the one that she had before her, and that the years ahead would be hard and trying, but the man across from her was both kind, and intelligent and they had spent the many hours of the journey talking endlessly of plans for taming the lands that they were traveling to and how they would build in this new place a house that would stand with the greatest of their land. Fairy tales and true love, it would seem, might just be real after all she decided.

Finny quick-shot was not a good man, he said it himself often enough. He was a bandit, thief, and murderer ten times over, he was also cold and moody. The boss had signed them up with a bigshot sasin from the city and seemed completely blinded by the coin he was throwing around. This Jorson seemed very concerned about secrecy and Finny wondered just how many of them were intended to survive to be collecting on that coin.

The signal to get ready came and he unlimbered his bow and slipped behind the trunk of the pine that he had taken his position behind. Not only would it provide good cover it was doing wonders to keep the rain off, a boon that Finny was grateful for considering the effect of rain on a bowstring.

The targets came around the bend in the rough road and trudged into the ambush oblivious to the danger, they had had a scout but Finny had spotted him and put an arrow through his back when he tried to warn the caravan, a few of the toughs had dragged the body off the road and they had settled in to wait for the rest of the group.

He drew back an arrow and felt the goose feather tickle his ear.

--

Lichen are awesome, after making a sample of each of the fungi I was left waiting around for something to happen, more mana trickled in but I could tell it would take a long while to fill my reserves, I had about half of my total right now, I was not entirely sure how I knew that but I felt sure about it. A few hours later, I was definitely more resistant to boredom in this form, water had started trickling down the tunnel into my domain, with it there was a bounty of dead leaves, more spores, a few small insects, and finally a bit of moss and lichen. With this new bounty I crafted a new bubble of cave a few feet wide and one tall around the central tube and began to fill it with examples of my new bounty.

I found making the new area and filling it with my plants, a centipede, and a few beetles very satisfying. Some basic instinct from my dungeon nature was fulfilled by this. I had been thinking about how these dungeons likely interacted with the world I was in. The way they consumed and replicated things made me think that they would basically serve as massive Venus Fly Traps. Luring creatures in and killing them with traps and powerful creatures, I wasn’t sure exactly how that would work yet but the system that had spoken that one time implied that there was some form of intelligent design directly interacting with the world. This would likely provide a shaping guidance to help as time progressed, but I would need to be careful that I didn’t get swept away and lose control.

I shifted my focus from the small chamber below my entrance to my core chamber, the patch of mold there was wilting away and a close look revealed why, there was nothing to support or feed the mold on the bare rock and I could see the individual cells running out of resources and weakening. I could see what was wrong, the minute reserves of sugars in each cell had run out and the lack of moisture in the air was causing them to wilt.

I willed a strand of mana out of my core and directed it with the new parts of my mind, carefully materializing new reserves of sugars and water in the various sections of the cells. I backed up and saw the strands of the fungi had inflated again and were now using the sugars to grow some more. It had taken about a minute to do and I realized that there was no way I could maintain this over even my tiny dungeon.

[criteria met: dungeon core has acquired boon, nurture. Dungeon life will use ambient mana to help sustain themselves.]

Hello. Criteria? Does it mean what I did with the fungus? I look closely at the fungus once again and see that sure enough tiny sparks of mana are being condensed and directed into the fungus where they supply a slow trickle of the moisture, sugar and other resources that they need.

The sparks of mana are being directed by the anima in the floor beneath the fungus, the supply looks like it will just barely be enough to sustain the life, and probably not even that in anything more complex or active but that just means that there will be a lot more wiggle room in my ecosystem when I get around to it. The plants will probably be totally satisfied by this and basic insects will probably have a good portion of their needs met.

I had noticed that most of the mana had been going to replacing water that the fungus was losing to the air and a quick look showed that the anima was actively keeping the air at a low level of humidity, all it took was an effort and the environment shifted, the walls started beading with moisture and the air became damp. It was still pitch black and I had no idea how to go about changing that at the moment and it didn’t bother me, the algae, or the lichen that were now going to form the base of my ecosystem.

I would have to experiment with semiconductors until I found one that worked as an LED. Then I would have an even more efficient ecosystem, with actual photosynthesis backed by the new [nurture] boon.

The feeling of water steadily trickling in had increased and a number of unfortunate creatures had fallen down into my clutches, I began expanding the circular chamber I had made a few feet below the entrance to my dungeon making the donut shape into more of a pancake shape around the central shaft, doing this took another chunk out of my anima but gave me some space to work with.

I made a few smaller chambers off of the main one and added a handful of pillars to give the creatures that would be calling this place home some terrain. First I scattered a number of mosses and lichens around the space, starting them small and scattered and intermixing a number of fungal spores with them, a few divots in the ground were filled with shallow water and instructed to stay filled to that level while a number of insects were scattered in to hopefully get a breeding population up and running.

Now I settled in to wait, the tiny sparks of energy that were falling in from above were basically nothing, the last few hours had provided enough energy to expand perhaps a 2 cm cube and fill it with a bit of life. As the next few hours passed I watched the insects scuttle around in search of food and shelter, centipedes are predators and the one that I had created was a tad voracious, killing a small beetle and worm in the first two hours before entering a sort of torpor in one of the smaller side room. I noticed that when it killed the other two creatures a tiny spark of anima was released, unfortunately not even half of what I had put into them, but I did think a tiny piece of it was absorbed by their killer before I reclaimed it.

A few more hours passed, and I was pleased by the growth of the fungus and moss, the algae in the small pools was also doing well and the beetles and grasshoppers are starting to go to town on the plants and fungi. The scattered patches are spreading even as they are being consumed, the plants growing quickly as they have no competition and a constant supply of processed resources to work with.

I was shocked out of my restful observation when a giant strode into my domain, eight hairy legs slowly dragged the tarantula past the entrance of my abode and down the shaft. The creature did not simply dissolve as it entered, apparently it was big enough to resist the affect that had claimed the other smaller prey. My instincts woke up at this intrusion and the sensation of its progress felt like a prickling wrongness and a tantalizing morsel at the same time. My new senses could feel the anima in this thing, tiny beside my potential capacity perhaps but non the less far larger than anything that had entered so far. The mana in my domain was already straining against this intruder, seeking to overwhelm it and claim it as a meal, the lifeforce of the tarantula was resisting the efforts though.

It crawled upside down under the lip of the new area and began to hunt, far larger than any of the creatures present it stalked about looking for a meal, I watched helpless as it pounced on one beetle after another devouring my precious experiments as I looked on. After what felt like hours but was probably only a few minutes I felt the defenses of the creature falter and my own mana started to seep in. Before the creature could be dissolved though it retreated back up the shaft to safety, disappearing from my view.

Well then, our battle has begun Mr. Tarantula, and you shall be crushed beneath the might of my cunning plan! To be thought up as soon as possible!