Along with the characteristic blue box a wave of concepts SHOUT into my head. It's the same conceptual speech that Wash uses, but the mental voice behind it 'sounds' bigger than the world. As it says a bonfire springs forth in front of me, singing my shell. It HURTS. This is the first pain I've felt since I've arrived here- well, a tiny bit while I was drilling in my shell, but still. This is a naked threat.

I cannot seal off my essence flow because the gods themselves will kill me if I do. Also, a system exists and is monitoring my actions? Later. First: Unplug it. The fire goes out immediately. Oh, and my soulless little bird got extra crispy. Sorry Birdcore, you ain't’ goin home. I take the time to soothe him, he didn’t like the fire or the shouting.

Soon after I arrived I did try all the standard isekai things- thinking STATUS and MENU and any variant of that I could think of, but no dice. Not a flicker of blue. So what changed? Do dungeons only get warnings and no menus? Das racist, mang. I want to speak to the manager. The manager does not magically appear.

Well, I don’t know if it’s a system anyways. I haven’t heard anyone talking about their levels or xp yet.

But blue boxes.

It Is Implied.

And Mr. Crow DID mention Akasha...

...Fuck, I really wish I could experiment with this. It’s a big fat unknown hanging right outside my reach. So frustrating.

ANYWAYS.

Water. Waterrrrrr. It can be produced easily enough, but I need a method that I don’t have to concentrate on all the time and conceals my essence flow without blocking it, and I know that a method for that exists. Since multiple dungeons have come up with this, it should be an ability within my reach. Unless they learned it from some adventurer with an enchanted water flask or something. Hopefully not.

Hmm, I was on to something before I got distracted by the essence flow issue. Yeah, that’s it. My body makes water all the time via those magical organs and shit. Actually…

I shoot water out of my tentacles again, but this time focusing on my own internal organs. Several are activated. Hmm. Produce air. A slightly different selection. Can I make dirt? Yes, I can make dirt. How about stone? Well, it’s more like dust. Can I make a bigger rock? I have to sorta 3d print it using a matrix of tentacles, but yes, I can create the particles bound to each other. Distracted again. Water.

By trial and error I work out what activates when and therefor what each of my bits actually does. Maybe. Theoretically. Then I look closer at them. The magic organs are, uh, a 3d floating net that sort of looks like runes and sort of looks like circuitry. They’re immensely complex. I think I could spend lifetimes parsing exactly what’s going on here, but I’m working on a time limit. Impending murder and all. So I just copy a chunk down wholesale.

One thing about being a dungeon pearl is that my mind is, frankly, incredible. The amount of sheer data I’m processing is insane. I was pretty much mapping the entire bird genome earlier! Now I maneuver a countless number of tiny tendrils around each other to 3d print an organ out of stone. Two actually, linked. One, I think, is the one which directs essence when I want to do some magical shit while the other is the one that contains a massive number of… Blueprints? I only need a fragment of that one, three little paths. If I am correct they represent hydrogen, oxygen, and H2O.

Now I have a very fancy rock. Hm. How to activate? I think hard at it. Nothing. I pick it up and press it against my shell, then think hard at it. Nnnothing. Wait, it has no fuel. I put it next to my essence vent and try a third time. It explodes! Into water! And sharp shards of rock!

I am a genius but also a dumbass! Ow!

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It generated water inside the stone. When I make water it appears at the tips of my tentacles, but the rock has no tentacles, so it generated water in the middle of the false organ- the rune, so I dub thee- instead.

I remake my waterstone but this time add a tube at the point where the water will appear, then press it against myself and try again. This time it works better, shooting a jet of water out and splashing against the well. Success! One problem though- while I have externalized the process, I still have to think at it. Not ideal. Also, very boring. Fuck that. Bird can do it.

Bird core- Bird orb, borb? Borb is largely a miniature replica of me, but he does lack the magical organs inside, only having the physical ones. So I add one manually. Just whip up a tube of shell attached to his own lil essence port containing the entire rune. Now for the final piece, the masterstroke of my plan.

'Water.' If he thinks about water, presumably that will activate it?

The Borb shoots out a bit of water. Excellent.

'Good boy!'

'Keep making water.'

More water.

-GOOOOD BOY!!!!-

Uhm. Yeah, it did make a whistling sound. Hmm. Does he… Want to sing? Birds do that. Yea sure alright. I make several more tubes and a sliding mechanism, all out of shell, attached to the end of the water spout then show him how to slide it back and forth. A pan flute! It takes a little while- he never actually worked out how to move the tentacles on his own- but soon he is dooting away while broadcasting delight into my head.

I start teaching him songs- a couple of final fantasy battle themes to start. Bit disappointing, needs more instruments. I’ll work on it. Tetris theme, Ode to Joy, Hot Cross Buns, Fur Elise…

Hold up. This does not contribute to my longterm survival.

Well maybe they’ll want to preserve the musical dungeon? Nyeh. Shan’t count on it. Well, at least I have a hobby now. Finally I construct a vent to redirect my own essence flow through his flute. The volume of water jumps immediately and no blue box yells at me. Success! Also the dooting is considerably louder, which delights Borb. Unfortunately, not all the essence is being converted into water. Eh.

My cave is near the top of a hill or mountain, I think, and slanted down. The water just naturally streams down and out of the cave. There’s a fair amount of water and it’s, uh, kinda washing everything in my cave away, so first I carve a channel out for it. Carving rock is absurdly easy, my tentacles can just sorta poof it into mana- far more mana than it takes to create the amount of essence required to make that amount of stone. Then I automatically fuse that excess mana into essence and shoot out more essence out of my essencehole. Bluh. Ignore it.

Diggy time. It turns out I can move my body around by grabbing onto the walls and lifting myself up, but my range is limited by my root system connecting to the warp channel. So first I just carve my way down about 20 feet, following the path of the roots, then just roll down on top of them. This proves tangly, so I start bundling the roots like a computer tech bundling wires.

I’m getting a sense of discomfort though- the water is slowly filling the tunnel and the essence is infusing it. Too much essence. Not enough water. It’s… Tingly. So I start carving a chamber around me, widening it so that my core isn’t submerged. Much better. The essence infuses the water, then rises from the water like a mist. Without sufficient surface area the amount of essence in the water continues to mount. Still, there’s a certain pressure even in the air. I suspect a hole just large enough for me to drop through isn’t enough to vent all the essence we produce.

My original cave was about twenty feet in diameter and about ten feet tall, which seems… Good? Good nuff. I copy that and expand the chamber to that size, then begin extending it into a tunnel. For the tunnel I make a long spiral gently sloping upward till it reaches the end of the original cave. First I try clockwise but quickly breach the surface. That’s bad. I seal that back up and try the other direction, it turns out I have more room there, luckily. Soon as I connect the new tunnel and old cave I feel the pressure decrease- it feels like a sigh of relief.

I stop up the hole in the ceiling and relax. I’ll dig more later but first I want to let this whole place fill up with water. I grab a sample of moss and start to fiddle with it, trying to see if I can hack it into an aquatic moss. I think it might thrive underwater anyways- it does well enough without light, maybe it can work without air, but I’d prefer an ecosystem that doesn’t require essence to upkeep. It just feels lazy.

Mmm…

Wait shit. I need minions to defend me. As a backup at least, I can’t count on the humans to defend me.

Where the hell am I going to get fish?