Dungeon life Ch5

James

[Boon Granted: Blessing of the Wanderer. A strange blessing from a strange creature, will assist the bearer in a number of ways]

James nearly stumbled as he climbed out into the light, a boon? The words had seemed important but he wasn’t entirely sure how, he supposed he was wandering maybe that’s how he got a boon? In any case he needed to keep moving, while he didn’t know where he was going staying here wouldn’t work so moving was the best plan. He started forward away from the rock but only got a few feet before he was drawn up short by something very much not expected.

Leaning back against a bolder in the clearing not twenty feet ahead sat an old woman, leaning on the rock beside her was a gnarled walking stick and her cloths were worn grey and well repaired many times. The woman was still and had her head thrown back and mouth hanging open, for a moment James thought that he might have found a dead body when a sawing noise revealed that the old lady was instead sleeping soundly.

He had been hoping to find people to help him find his father and the others but now that he was faced with a person he was hesitant. At least they were old and probably not a bandit he reasoned and so walked over towards the woman, stopping ten feet away or so. “Excuse me … Excuse me ma’am” ready to bolt should the woman turn out to be dangerous.

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That done I turned my attention to the situation I’m in, having used most of my remaining anima helping the kid I am now in the unpleasant situation of having almost none remaining while desperately needing to expand my small terrarium. The trickle of anima that I produced from the small chambers would eventually let me expand and the exponential growth from that would help but there was nothing right now I could do to make that happen faster.

Well at least being a dungeon has made waiting around less painfully boring, it was at this moment that a number of vibrant lights dropped down into the chamber and bounced around the floor of it. The lights were a handful of golf ball sized orbs that were absolutely packed with vitality, it was a bit hard to judge from the size of them but they provided easily twice the total amount of anima that I had started out with. I looked in shock at my entrance and found the kid waving down saying something before he turned in response to something outside of my range of hearing. He waved once more gave a little smile and then was gone.

Well … that, that was a win for team human.

OK then lets see what we can do with this anima! I dove into the strange orbs and found them similar to my own core, though much less refined and powerful, they were probably from some other creature. I was fairly certain that they were a gift, which meant that there were people that knew what I was in all likelihood and that did not want me dead. This was a relief and while it was no guarantee it felt good to have done something good and have it not come and bite me in the ass.

I began to think about how I wanted to spend my new riches. I could absorb energy from things that fell into me so why not make that a main tool in my belt. I smoothed the walls of the tunnel leaving only the handholds that I had made to let the kid climb out. Then I added a bit more of an overhang to the top and placed a sticky bundle of sugar just bellow ground level underneath the overhang. Hopefully the smell would attract things that would reach for it and then fall in, if a person fell for such an obvious trap at least they would have a way out.

The edges of the pit were rounded out and smoothed and with that I left the trap to sit, hopefully it would work but if not then I would at least have something to work on improving. I began to expand the terrarium now adding more pancake shaped chambers connected by vertical tunnels, easy for the bugs that lived there to navigate, I was mostly focused on increasing floor space here so the chambers were all about five centimeters tall and a meter wide, the new spaces soon swarmed with creatures and the first of my dimly glowing LEDs were placed in the largest spaces to add light for those creatures that depend on it.

Now that I was being efficient with the anima I was able to fit a much larger area for growth in and the ecosystem began to really flourish, I added the last few species that I had available and even added a few ferns around the edge of the entrance to conceal how deep it was. After spending all my remaining anima I had easily four times the total floor space than I had had previously and could feel a slow drip of anima from the creatures that were living and dying in the chambers.

The days flowed into one another and once again I was surprised at how the ability to be patient came so naturally to me now. The hours were spent adding new chambers and subtlety shifting how I fed mana into the ecosystem, I focused the energy on the lowest order of life, the strata that could create biomass out of nothing but air and water and that required mostly just the restructuring of used sugar into more fuel to see them grow. There was a definite sense of vitality to the chambers now, the burgeoning life had begun to fill the carrying capacity and now there was real competition between the various forms of life. The new bustle also meant an increase to the supply of anima that I could spend and I was eager to get that sweet sweet drip of growth that this represented. I added on a few new chambers every day and soon I had a steady growth managed.

The problem was that I was running out of mana, while the chambers I had created were great for producing anima they did very little to create that other key substance. The small chambers seemed to only generate a trickle of the stuff and the small holes connecting them were not enough to let the stuff flow easily, the new chambers had actually begun to require more than they were producing and even my boon which allowed the life in me to use the ambient mana that I had not yet claimed was not enough to feed the growing demand.

I needed to find a solution to the problem soon or I would be unable to sustain the growth chambers that were so effectively producing anima for me. The answer ended up being troubling, I had previously noticed that the upper chamber that I had claimed was pooling with mana that could not fit down into the smaller tube connecting my core room to the outside world. It seemed likely that larger spaces could create more mana and if I could create a larger tube connecting me to the outside then I would be able to sustain a larger number of growth chambers.

I wanted to keep my current tube the same size since it lead strait down to me I would only be able to create so much flow by enlarging it. Instead I would make a wide spiral path from the bottom of my pit to my core chamber that would produce and transport a much larger flow of mana than the old tube ever could.

I started with a small pipe a few centimeters wide, the limited anima that I had available being the primary barrier I faced. As soon as I connected the tube I felt the rush of new mana and knew I was onto something, the small pipe was transporting very little but just that improvement was a huge relief. I spent the next few months simply expanding that tunnel until it was a meter around. The mana I got through it was a river beside the stream that I had been using before, now my every chamber and tunnel practically hummed with mana and I was able to supply the growth chambers easily and more fully than I ever had before. The growth chambers were not my only source of food though, the trap I had set was able to draw all sorts of insects to me, some of them ate and left and others stayed too long and were dissolved by the hungry mana that filled me. There was very little I could do during these times and I found that I was more asleep than awake when there was nothing to keep me interested.

One of the only really exciting things that happened was that the kid came back, this time I got a good look at who was with him and was pleasantly surprised to see the leathery face of an old woman standing next to and slightly behind him when he visited. What impressed me about the woman was not her face but the thick anima and spirit that seemed to hang about her, it was large and potent enough that my dungeon instincts did not even consider her to be food and instead insisted that I be silent and still in the hopes that she went away. Thankfully there was no need for such fear as before they left the woman handed the kid a leather pouch and he emptied it out into me again. Another batch of cores fell into me and I devoured them as they watched from above, the kid seemed to get a kick out of that.

A wave and then gone, I felt a surge of warmth, that had definitely been a thank you.

Time began to pass in a strange lull after that, the little information about my surroundings I got told me that it was winter as drifts piled up around me. the addition of the cores let me greatly expand myself and I doubled the size of my growth chambers increasing the flow of anima bit by bit, that was the main work of that entire winter. As the snow came down I spent all my time adding new chambers to farm anima and add new creatures to my menagerie. Making modifications to creatures was fiendishly difficult but it kept me from slipping into the strange stupor that sometimes took over me and that was to be encouraged. I had collected many types so insect over the summer months and I made it my mission to experiment with every one of them, I was going to depend on these things to protect me one day so I needed to learn how to make the most of them now.

A few non insects had fallen into me and I was able to reproduce them but I didn’t have anything to do with them yet so I held off, besides it was difficult enough to modify arthropods. The winter months ending was announced by the arrival of the kid, now dressed in a set of new cloths. he once again dropped a bag of cores into me which I quickly devoured. Then he did something very different, instead of walking away once again he carefully placed his foot on the first of the handholds that I had carved for him to get out a year prior and began to climb down into the hole that he had almost died in the year before.

I have to say the kid had guts, I’m not sure I would have been able to make myself climb down into a dark hole even if I had not been in a near death experience in that very hole just a year before. It was weird having the kid down there again, unlike everything else that fell into me he had no effect on the mana around him other than to absorb a bit of it to feed him. Unlike everything else from outside it was like he belonged here and didn’t trigger the natural defenses of my body, I assumed it was because he had already been overwhelmed once and then inoculated, now he was a part of me as far as my immune system was concerned. There was a suspicious and untrusting part of me that didn’t trust any thing and warned that I needed to be carful, but trusting that part of me would only end in me being forever lonely in a hole.

I wished I had a way to communicate with the kid, instead I watched as he sat and closed his eyes the old lady saw this and moved away from the entrance and then the kid tried to meditate I think. It didn’t go very well, like most kids he was full of energy when not half dead and he could not manage to resist the impulse to explore for long. After five minutes he was crawling down the dark tunnel that lead to my core room, he made it only about five meters before turning around the first time but before long was heading down again. The next few hours passes with the kid poking around every corner of the dungeon before finally climbing out and walking away. It was only after he left that I realized just how much I missed having someone around, I might not be able to talk but the kid had been chattering away the entire time he was here and the human interaction had done wonders for my sanity. It didn’t hurt that it was a cheerful kid who’s very presence oozed comfort and security to my flighty and fearful new instincts.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

I set in to spend the new anima that I had gotten and try to lure a few larger creatures into my reach for the summer. I wanted to add about twice the anima production that I had now and then create a few extra tunnels leading to my core room with a couple of chambers along the path to create a small maze to reduce the likelihood of something dangerous just walking into my core chamber. As it was now I could add a cubic meter to my volume every day and I wanted to at least double that before I started adding the new chambers and tunnels or this would take forever. I also wanted to add a lot of slits and pockets to the tunnel walls that I had so that I could use them to generate extra anima as well as provide the base for any biome I put there. I made the exposed edges more like natural rock and broke up the edges though so it would look more real.

I modified the lure I had put out to smell faintly of meat, though I wasn’t sure how effective it would be. Hopefully I could lure in a few predatory creatures to modify into guardians for my deeper levels, I just needed to make sure that there was no risk to the kid if he visited again.

I spent the majority of the new anima on making new growth chambers around the first tube that I had made. Now the entire length was perforated by tiny chambers and tunnels that practically seethed with life. The larger main tunnel remained smooth for now but I intended to build a network of similar chambers. This upper level of my domain would remain safe for visitors for now but I would be adding some teeth at some deeper point.

Before I could start in on any of those changes though, the kid returned, just a week after his last visit. There were no cores this time but once again he climbed down and tried to meditate. This time it seemed he was a bit more worn out because he fell asleep after a few minutes and took a good hour-long nap. When he woke up he looked guiltily upward saw that he was unobserved and once again began exploring, he ranged up and down the main tunnel once again making it slightly more than half way before chickening out again and heading back, when his stomach started to growl he climbed out and after waving goodbye disappeared from my awareness.

As pleased as I was by the visits, I couldn’t help but wonder why they were happening. Clearly the old woman knew what I was or at least had a good idea, but what I knew of dungeons suggested that my behavior was very out of the norm. So why was she sending this kid down into what would normally be a dangerous place? Was it because of what I had done to the kid? Did he need to get the anima topped off? I made a note to check that the healing I had done had not left any problems behind. Was it because she wanted me to do more of what I had done? That at least made some sense, if what I could do was unusual, and I had no reason to think otherwise, then perhaps the anima that I had put into the kid was something to be desired? Perhaps she was trying to secure more benefits for her grandson or something? Time would tell and in any case I wanted visitors more than I wanted the scraps of anima it would take to add a few things to the kid.

The next week dragged and I discovered that the infinite patience that I had only applied when I was not waiting for something. On the seventh morning though there was the now welcome sense of the burgeoning lifeforce of the kid and the ominous presence of the old woman. Once again the kid clambered down the handholds into the dark and the lady wandered away to do whatever it was she did when her charge was in my depths. The kid was once again sitting in at the bottom of the chamber trying to meditate. I decided to take the time to look over my previous work and was surprised at what I saw. Before the kid’s anima had been like that of the other animals that had fallen into me over the year I had been here, when he had left it had been mostly my anima with his own slowly recovering and filling in the gaps mine had left. Now though his own anima pulsed and flowed through him powerfully, it spun and thrummed around the tight constructs that I had placed in him and I cringed at the waste that I saw.

I realized now that what I had done had been necessary and had indeed saved his life but had also been very crude and sloppy, it was only good luck that had prevented him form avoiding complications at the hands of my slapdash attempts to save him. Now with the clarity of my boon helping me I could see how the natural flow of his anima was disrupted by my work.

Overall he was probably more healthy than he would have been without my intervention but there was no denying that my work was subpar. I got to work reshaping my additions, the portion that fed his cells was functioning fine as was but it was separated from his own anima so I tied it into his own structures which would let it grow and shape itself to his needs over time. I did the same thing to the other constructs as well, where the flow was blocked I let it move unhindered and shaped the anima constructs I had placed so that they would merge with his own energy and not conflict.

Finally before I finished I added just a touch more of my own energy to his and was surprised when it put up resistance. It was like the energy already inside him was pushing back against me as I tried to add this new sliver to the mix, after a brief struggle though the energy settled into place with its intended purpose, it was the most ambitious of my additions but my new skill with anima shaping made it much easier. Essentially it would look for damage to the body and if it detected an open wound it would pinch off any open blood vessels that it found, this too was tied into his own anima and it would not really be that effective until it had built a good image of his body and activated a few times. Still once it had activated a few times it would be much harder for him to bleed out and that was all I could really hope to do for now. I would have to work on making anima constructs in the other creatures in my domain.

The simple fact of the matter was that I was flying blind right now, the more I grew the more I could experiment. The bottleneck right now was still anima so I set about fixing that, a cubic meter of volume could make many of the thin disks of space that I used as terrariums so I wound the new chambers around the larger tunnel. This way I would be able to expand the tunnel down without restructuring the anima generating chambers.

The work was relaxing, it took about a day to line a meter of the tunnel with the chambers so I had only extended the work a short way before the kid returned. Again he climbed down and sat for a while in concentration, I took the time to look over the changes that I had made and was surprised when I saw that his total anima had once again grown. The removal of the blockages last week had had a bigger impact than I would have guessed and the integrated parts were now seamlessly merged with his own anima.

No wonder the old lady kept bringing him back here, she was probably hoping I would undo the crippling damage. If this was how much it grew back just after a few days of my mistakes being fixed I needed to make sure that there was nothing else problematic with my additions. I looked more closely at the changes I had made and smoothed out a few of the smaller problems that I had noticed, then I studied the ebb and flow of the energy as it moved around his body. The stuff seemed to move in strange waves flowing out of his heart with his blood and then back up to his chest along his bones, nerves, and muscles. There were no more obvious problems with what I had done but I was unsatisfied. I didn’t know how any of this worked and I needed to in order to do anything more. I committed to practicing on the dungeon creatures over the next week in order to test some theories.

Once again the meditation practice ended when the kid got bored and this time I saw that he had a plan. From pockets he began to furtively draw a number of strange things that my dungeon senses helped me to identify as wax, string, and cloth. Making a small torch out of the pilfered supplies he lit them with a flint and began to make his way down the dark tunnel towards my core.

I was not sure how to feel about this, on the one hand it was frightening to have anything near my core chamber but on the other the kid hardly screamed threat to me. I watched as he made his way down the wide spiral of the tunnel using his tiny torch to light the way. I have to give this kid credit he was showing a lot more wit than I would have been able to when I was his age. He was able to put together a torch and light it so he could explore the tunnel in the cave where he had almost died. If I had been in his place I probably would have just cried.

He was making good time and I could see that it was because his torch was limited, the small bundle of cloth and wax was burning quite well but I jugged that it would be used up after about ten minutes, enough time to crawl down to my core chamber and back up but not to dawdle.

Unlike the earlier attempts that were stymied by the lack of light this attempt was encouraged by the time limit placed by the torches’ life. The kid, I really needed a name for him, was hunched over in the sloping tunnel holding the torch in front of him and looking like he was thoroughly enjoying his spelunking endeavor. It was only a few minutes until the glow of my core room was visible to him and after a brief pause he hurried along the tunnel to the goal.

My core room had changed, it was about a meter and a half tall now and three wide and in the center there was my core held between a stalagmite and stalactite. The gem glowed with a soft inner light that was not bright to look at and yet filled the room with an easy radiance. The first tube I had built was still connected to the chamber by the far wall.

The mana here was thicker than anywhere else in the dungeon and I could see how it flowed in thick eddies around my core a whirlpool with me at its center. When the kid entered the chamber the mana moving around him took on a different tone to the stuff that normally pooled here and as the streamers of energy flowed to me I could taste the faint whiff of anima on it. It wasn’t that the kid was being drained more like he was converting the raw energy in the air into a more potent blend. I could feel an uptick in the mana I was receiving, and I suspect that having foreign organisms inside me has some positive effect much like a breath of fresh air would.

The kid looked around in awe for a minute before settling in to meditate down here. I was happy to wait around and see just what he would do. He put out the small torch and sat with his back to the wall between the two entrances to my core chamber. Closing his eyes I he began to breath in slow deep breaths. It was strange to watch him meditate like this because I could see the beat of his heart just as easily as I could see his nose. I watched as his breaths became slower and slower as did his heartbeat and other body functions. I was somewhat concerned but his anima continued to flow unhindered and the mana that he absorbed from the chamber provided for all the remaining needs of his body letting him slow down safely.

I watched in silent admiration as this kid, who could not be more than 9 at this point, slowed his body functions and began to interact with the mana in the air. With each breath he drew mana into his body and compressed it in his core, as he did so a dense ball of energy began to form just below his diaphragm. After an hour of this the kid broke out of his trance and wiped the sweat that had built up on his brow while he worked. I was impressed, it hadn’t been immediately obvious but the kid was doing more than just storing mana. He was subtly altering the mana into another form that rested there more easily than the ephemeral mana that he had absorbed.

Before leaving he reached out and casually touched my core before turning and moving away like it had been an idle fancy. I was unable to follow his progress out of my depths though because of the rush of information that passed into me when he did so.

I understood the importance of that gesture even as I knew that the kid did not, by making his way to the heart of a dungeon the kid had the right to demand a prize from the dungeon that he had ostensibly conquered. However because he had not stayed for his demand, out of ignorance I assumed, an interesting situation had occurred. I was left in an interesting position. The prize that was expected of me had to fulfill certain rules designed to prevent people from abusing dungeons and stop dungeons from abusing people back. I would have been expected to provide a reward to the kid, but I had nothing to give him but anima. And the anima that he could receive at this time was very limited and not sufficient as a reward. I had nothing else to award him with and so was provided with the right to bestow a boon on the kid from the system. But he had not allowed the boon to be granted. This did not remove the right to award a boon that had been granted to me and with the absence of the kid I could award it to any creature that I chose.

criteria met, select boon

[Chiton Domain]: arthropods and arthropod monsters are granted the [tough hide] boon automatically.

[Spatial Compression]: the ability to compress your interior to allow for more space while growing. Starting compression factor is 1.5 in the three cardinal directions. Later floors compression will increase with mana density.

[Metabolic Enhancement]: The living rate of dungeon creatures is enhanced, creatures grow and live faster in all regards. This increase comes at the price of mana that is used to fuel the greater energy requirements.

Now that right there is what I call some sweet sweet karma.