As the wall receded, seemingly into nothing, I began to feel fuller and fuller, until I was almost painfully bloated. Just as I started to think that I couldn't take anymore, a popup appeared.
Upgrade Dungeon Core to expand Contaminant Storage?
For the love of God yes.
Select impurities.
A full list of my collected impurities appeared. There were twenty-five slots, and all of them had a decimal number somewhere between zero and one. Most of them were under one, and some of them were... unpleasant. Will the impurities I use to expand storage have an effect on me? Show me some documentation here!
...several nauseating hours later, I was reasonably confident that I understood the document that popped up enough to be confident that, no matter what I spent on growing my core, it was going to be completely denatured.
Select "dung" impurities.
0.5 Units of impurities selected. 1 Unit minimum required for upgrade. Select more impurities?
Yeah, throw in a half unit of "granite". That one seems to build up pretty fast.
1 Unit of impurities selected. Upgrade dungeon core?
Yes!
Upgrading...
The sense of relief was incredible. The bloating faded almost instantly. It didn't go away entirely, but it felt like something had gone away, or been used, or - wait. I was a filter. That must be what it felt like when the filter filled up. And then, by upgrading, I was cleaning some of the crud out of myself.
Upgrade complete. Maximum Impurity Storage increased to: 25.1.
That wasn't a very big upgrade. Can I even use storage under one unit? And what's mana capacity for? Isn't that the stuff I'm supposed to release into the environment?
I opened the dungeon core documentation again. I had questions, and that was where the answers were most likely to be.
It took long enough to find the answers to my questions that I had to use three more units of impurities to make room for more while I was reading. The information I wanted was spread across five different sections, and I ended up having to open something like a text document to take notes in while I worked it out.
I learned that dungeons automatically take in impure mana and collect the impurities, that those impurities are used for construction and summoning within the dungeon, and that pure mana is released when the dungeon core uses mana. As for what I'm supposed to use mana for, it was really vague, but it seemed to mostly be maintenance related.
Another queasy feeling overtook me. I rechecked my notes.
It should be possible for me to refine impurities as I use them, essentially producing tainted mana then quickly reabsorbing it, to make my resources last longer and go farther.
Open core upgrade panel. Open advanced options.
I quickly scanned through my options. "Light Morning Snow" impurities didn't look like they were going to happen very often, so those could go, but I wanted them refined, so I ticked the "refine" box. The other 97% of a unit can come from Earth impurities. Execute.
Upgrading core...
Refining impurities...
Impurity storage increased by 1/10 unit. Storage is now 25.5 units of impurities.
Light Morning Snow impurities refined to Snow impurities.
Alright. I could work with that. That's not bad at all. Maybe I could refine impurities enough that I could get double or triple duty out of most of them. I'd have to find out what refined how, which wasn't in any of the stuff I'd read so far, but I could take notes on my own. So far, I've learned that "light morning snow" turned into "snow" when I refined it.
I reviewed my surroundings. I had a room about the size of a broom closet, with my "core" on a pedestal in the center. Both room and pedestal were made of stone, maybe granite. I checked my memories for mentions of types of stone and determined that, yes, it was granite. One of the walls had a slowly growing concave dip in its center. As I "watched", a paper thin layer of stone evaporated into seemingly nothing and returned to me in a pulse that tasted strongly of "earth" and "stone" and "granite".
Review impurity log. What did I just pull in?
Earth Impurities: 0.10
Stone Impurities: 0.10
Granite Impurities: 0.10
Soil Impurities: 0.02
Ice Impurities: 0.02
Dung Impurities: 0.01
Hm. I didn't need to know that last ingredient. I didn't read nutrition facts too closely when I was alive (but I'm alive again) when I was human, and I concluded that I didn't need to change that habit, now that I was a dungeon core. How many granite impurities do I have?
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Granite Impurities: 2.4
Use two granite impurities to expand dungeon core. Refine the impurities used to expand dungeon core.
Upgrading core...
Refining impurities...
Impurity storage upgraded by 2/10 units. Storage is now 25.7 units of impurities.
Granite impurities refined to Stone impurities, Quartz Impurities, Feldspar Impurities, and Mica Impurities.
A sensation not unlike acid reflux washed over me. Either refining something into that many different things didn't agree with me, or I somehow had too many impurities gumming me up.
Use dung impurities to upgrade dungeon core. Pull from stone impurities to bring impurities used to a full unit. Refine impurities. Change default to refine impurities.
Upgrading ore...
Refining Impurities...
Impurity storage upgraded by 1/10 units. Storage is now 25.8 units of impurities.
Dung impurities refined to Life and Soil impurities. Stone impurities refined to Earth impurities.
That was better. The pressure, and reflux, faded away, leaving me merely uncomfortably full.
I spent another two units of impurities and brought storage up to twenty-six. Then, I opened the Dungeon folder again, and started looking for whatever process had me digging like this without thinking about it, or really wanting to. It took some searching, and I had to stop a few times to turn impurities into core upgrades, but I eventually found it.
Whoever programmed basic dungeon core behavior did a hack job and never patched it. Ugh. There were so many things I could be doing, automatically, that would make me so much more comfortable! I'd never been the best artist, but I was willing to give it a shot if it made my life better (and it never hurt to look nice). What did comfort and art have in common? Simple: I could store impurities outside of my core, if I turned them into something solid. Even better, I could automate core expansions.
Open S://Dungeon/
S://Dungeon/
Make new folder: Custom. Open Custom.
S://Dungeon/Custom/
It took a while, once I had a place to work, to build up the programs I wanted. They were quick and dirty, but they'd do the job, at least in the short term. The first program automatically turned units of granite impurity into core upgrades (while refining the impurities into quartz, feldspar, and mica). The second program took units of quartz impurities and turned each one into a decorative band around my pedestal. Each band would hold a single impurity and the program would leave a space the size of a single band between bands, repeating until the pedestal filled up. It wasn't a scalable solution, but it bought me time.
Next, I pulled the dungeon construction algorithm back up. It was set up to efficiently dig out of the ground, and then branch out and build defenses. There was even a process for moving the dungeon core, pedestal and all, to ensure that my most vulnerable part was always at the back of the dungeon. The way it was set to branch out was, to put it simply, awful. Indefensible. I'd played a few dungeon builders and tower defense games in my life, and I knew full well that the worst thing to do was make a single straight path to your weak point. A route that wiggled around was so much better for defense, and while I hadn't looked at what kind of traps I could make yet, bends and twists had to be better for setting traps than straight lines that led right to the core. I put a pin in that thought and opened up my selection of traps.
It wasn't a very robust selection. I had sticky traps, which didn't look like they'd hold anything bigger than a mouse, pitfall traps, which looked like they wouldn't trigger for anything under about fifty pounds, and rockfall traps, which didn't have a trigger. If I wanted to drop rocks on something, I'd have to set it up ahead of time, and then set it off myself. Forget that nonsense. I'd have to work out how to hook rock fall traps to some kind of trigger before I built any.
I pulled up the projected map of what the dungeon will look like in the future. It was very stiff. I set the automatic algorithm to turn off once the dungeon breached the outside world and tweaked things until the map displayed the direction and strength of nearby sources of tainted mana. Unsurprisingly, things like "life" and "sunlight" and "snow" were coming from the direction the algorithm was digging, but I got more information about what to expect from labels like "evergreen tree" and "snow spider" and "bumblebee".
I started making changes to where to dig and how to expand. Straight, uniform lines became curves and twists and pinches. I set the flat floor of the projected corridors to rise and fall unevenly, the better to trip the unwary without a trap. Not that I expected people to come in with swords and magic and clanking armor and try to shatter my dungeon core, killing me and leaving my soul to go who-knows-where after who-knows-who changed it so drastically, no, not at all. It's just what always happened in tower defense games is all.
I considered pre-loading traps into the design, but a series of error messages eventually convinced me that I actually couldn't do that without making some changes on a deeper level. I could toggle auto-trap placement on and let the "dungeon" part of me handle it, but I had a feeling that that would result in poorly placed traps. Worse, in predictably placed traps, which would be no good in protecting me from people who, I don't know, made a living smashing dungeon cores? What was that saying - hope for the best, prepare for the worst?
The best case scenario would be that dungeon cores have legal protections and all the rights of a citizen in whatever country they show up in. The worst case scenario would be, um... a legal and robust trade in pieces of broken dungeon cores, incentivizing people to come in here and try to kill me.
I threw myself into designing twists and turns and ups and downs and false paths leading to dead-end rooms. At some point, I began to feel uncomfortably bloated again and added another instruction to my automated impurity storage: rings of feldspar in between the rings of quartz on my pedestal. The pressure eased off immediately, and I went back to designing a twisting labyrinth full of crossing paths. A dozen dead ends planned later, I zoomed the map out and considered the dense squiggle of tangled paths. It looked awful, and I deleted the whole thing.
There was a reason I hadn't worked in graphic design.
I pulled up the default again, and planned out two rooms, circular, increasing in size, behind my current core room. A gently curved corridor leading from one to the other to the other. With the core moving algorithm active, I should be moved back as each room was completed, ultimately leaving two rooms between my dungeon core and the dungeon entrance. Satisfied, I closed the map planner and inspected the dungeon around me. Or, the dungeon that was me, however that worked.
The tunnel leading toward the outside had grown a lot longer while I was working. I'd always been prone to loosing track of time when I was busy, but now that I didn't have any biological functions to interrupt me with hunger or thirst or exhaustion - or the need to use the restroom - I could just go until I finished or something interrupted me. If I'd had a face, I would have grinned with it.
Before I could find another project to work on, the tunnel finished and sunlight flooded into my dungeon. I couldn't see it, exactly, but I could feel the light and taste the impurities it brought with it. I couldn't sense anything past the entrance to my dungeon, which was annoying, but I might be able to sense potential invaders coming by the tainted mana they'd put out as they approached me.
A snowflake drifted into my dungeon on the icy breeze, landed on the floor, and melted.
Decoration template acquired: Snow.