I open my eyes and look around. I appear to be in a cave, covered in dirt. I don't remember how I got here. The last thing I remember was falling. Wait, falling? But why? I was on a school trip with my friends. We had just gotten off the bus and walked into the hotel. It was a tall hotel overlooking a concrete graveyard filled with the mechanical bodies of parked cars. There was a balcony; if you leaned just far enough over it, you could see the city. I remember standing there, looking at the city.

"What the fuck!"

He was falling. A gust of wind. Maybe someone pushed him. But he was falling. He looks around and remembers his last couple thoughts.

It’s a beautiful day today. The wind is blowing, just slightly overcast enough to offset the heat but still bright and comfortable. What a beautiful day to die.

He hits the concrete and is dead instantly. His guts spread across the concrete, and his blood waters the weeds growing in the sidewalk.

Huh. But how did I get here? I look around and can’t really see anything. Then the hunger hits. A deep aching, it pulverizes me and burns; it’s not a physical hunger but a spiritual hunger. It burns and burns and burns. Movement. My eyes flicker across the cave like a wild man. They shake as they see a worm crawling across the dirt. I rush to the worm in a hurry and pin it down before sucking the life out of it, momentarily satiating my hunger. 

In my haste, I hadn’t realized I didn’t pin down the creature with my fingers. Nor did I eat the body of the worm. Instead, it seems I killed the worm, and something came out of it that I ate. In confusion, I assess my situation. I don’t appear to have a body. I don’t know if my consciousness is detached or if something in the cave is my body. I search more and find a small pale white crystal. It seems to be me. When I push on it with my consciousness, I feel like it is me.

I notice that there does seem to be more of the cave, but I can only see in the immediate vicinity around me. That’s weird. I should try to explore. As I push my consciousness to the edge of my sight, I feel the end of my domain. I need to apply conscious pressure to it for it to expand. I should be panicking about this whole situation, but for some reason, I’m not. I continue to push on the barrier, and it slowly stretches.

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Then all of a sudden, I realize this cave is tiny. It’s not even a cave; it’s a pocket of air underground. I try to keep pushing on my conscious barrier, but instead of showing me more space, it instead shows me that I can push into the walls. I can see everything in the walls. It seems to be loose dirt, so I must be near the surface. Maybe I can try digging. I try to pull away at the dirt.

I continue to pull on the dirt. I’ve barely made any progress, and I’m starving. I notice more worms in the walls, and I quickly pin them and eat them, giving me a boost of energy. As I panic about slowly starving, I begin to push, pushing harder and allocating as much energy as possible into digging until eventually, the dirt gives way with a heave, revealing sunlight dripping down into my cave.

Now what? I look around, and the very first thing I notice is a plant—a type of lichen growing on a rock near where I emerged. I spread just close enough to that plant, and as I get close, I grab it and eat it. So delicious! I devour, and devour, and devour until it is dead. I look around and see more. I need to be smart about this. Maybe I can take it into my cave. I use whatever energy I gained from eating—mana, I guess I can call it—to push this rock slowly towards my cave.

Oh, so slowly! I’m lost in my task. Multiple days and nights pass, and I have to stop to eat three times. But I keep working. Eventually, there’s the sound of dirt slipping, and it slides down into my cave. I smile and eat. Finally, my work pays off. But once again, I kill most of it. Only a small amount of lichen remains on the rock. Huh. I guess I should wait for it to grow.

So I wait. And wait. And wait. For seemingly forever, I wait, but it barely seems to grow a couple inches. Maybe if I added my mana into it, it would grow faster. So I try to push mana into this lichen. As I push more and more mana into it, the lichen starts to writhe and twist on the rock. Whoa. I push more mana into it and—C-rack! The rock splits. The lichen grew so much in strength it was able to break the brittle river stone. 

I now stand about eight inches tall, with three main components of its body: legs, arms, and a main body. The main body is a large rock; the arms are chunks of sharp river stone attached to the main body of the lichen golem by small strands of seemingly magically enhanced lichen. The legs are the same as the arms.

I stare in awe at this creature I made. Wait a second. I don't know why this never dawned on me before, but am I a dungeon? I've read dungeon core books before. Well, what do I do now?