[Sun-Quest]

Create 3 new flora Schema (1/3) and 3 new fauna Schema (0/3).

Reward – 1 of 4 Common Schema.

[Moon-Quest]

Mine 300 meters under the earth and establish a biome there. (8/300)

Reward – Lesser Mana Pool (Earth).

The dreams of a dungeon core…

Strange things. The closest a human could understand would be something akin to swimming in a sea of music, being surrounded on all sides by beautiful harmony. We do not sleep– we sink into the remnants of creation and feel the remnant will of the creator around us. The comforting knowledge that everything, from the waves of the sea to the suns in the sky, were gifts to us.

The knowledge that we must protect these things.

The Void is always waiting, waiting to creep into the world and consume everything that is good.

And humans…

Humans are troublesome. The thought of humanity made unease ripple through my being. Humans were far away, for now, but they would arrive eventually. The creation of a core was too grand an event to be concealed. No doubt, on distant islands, instruments designed to monitor mana flow would be ticking dramatically, compass-points spinning towards me.

I only had so long before they arrived.

And when they did, they would seek to enslave me, to destroy my soul and turn me into nothing more than a mana-source.

This is what humans did.

That uneasy, itching sense of time slipping past while I slept made me awaken, drifting back into conscious state.

The garden had grown. Massive gourd plants spilled across the clearing, tangling the fields with their corkscrew stalks. None had developed into independent slimes yet, thankfully– I could estimate I’d only been asleep for ten days or so.

Birds chirruped in the rooftop of the little hut. A passing boar snuffled among my crops, chewing up a slime gourd with its massive jaws.

I frowned internally.

This greedy loafer was devouring what I’d put so much effort into. Worse, he was getting closer and closer to my prime specimen, the perfectly created gourd I intended to copy.

I conjured mana-sparks in the air around the boar, trying to frighten it away. It grunted, wet nose snuffling, and then went back to eating.

Damn.

It was too stupid to be properly frightened by my presence. That overconfidence would be suicidal, once I’d properly built defenses around myself.

But for now it was infuriatingly accurate to my actual ability to drive the invader away.

This… Did not bode well for me, once the humans arrived.

But I was clever. I was resourceful. I was not about to be defeated by some fattened island hog.

All around the little farm, the human had tried to erect a crude fence of driftwood. That had obviously not done its job. But more interesting to me were the thick, woody stalks of bamboo that grew alongside the fenceline, and the creeping spiderweb-like vines that covered the beams.

I could work with this.

The boar continued to chomp and chew as I began to consume the specimens I would need.

It was closing in on the prize, my perfect seedling, when a wall of bamboo exploded up from the ground in front of it. The hog squealed and stumbled back, briefly managing to overcome its own immense stupidity and process that something was amiss.

But it wasn’t quite smart enough to notice me lifting another bamboo wall behind it.

The bamboo was extremely hardy and fast growing, two properties that made it an immensely better fence than the shoddy driftwood barrier. Better yet, I could weave it together using the kudzu vines, tying the stalks to one another so animals couldn’t simply wriggle through.

The boar huffed, lowered its head, and snorted menacingly.

I threw a puff of mana-sparks in its face. Petty, but it got my point across.

The boar charged, its hooves kicking up sprays of dirt as it slammed its tusks and thick skull into the bamboo wall. A half-dozen stalks cracked open, but I simply grew more behind them, like an army pushing forward in waves as the soldiers to the front fell.

By now, the walls had fully enclosed the pig. I had it surrounded on all sides and there was no intention of letting it go.

Come into my farm?

Eat my crops?

I’ll domesticate you and feed off of generations of your children, piggie.

It snorted and let out a bleating warcry, going wild. Its fat body slammed against the walls and its tusks ripped and tore in all directions, bucking about wildly to try and get free.

But this only last for a dozen or so minutes. Soon, the beast was worn down– its heavy frame and massive musculature meant it wore out quickly. It sagged onto its side, waiting for death as its breath heaved through its chest and out its dripping nose, drool hanging off its jaw.

A warrior defeated.

But I had no intention of simply killing it.

Although learning the boar’s Schema was a priority, I had been born in the hollow eye of the farmer who had tended this island.

Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

He had always wanted to capture a pig and domesticate it.

I took it as a small honor to his memory to leave this old warrior alive, and keep it as a trophy. If I could trap a wild sow I might even have a breeding stock to work with.

All in all, the expedition had cost me a mere 11 iota. The bamboo was remarkably cheap, as was the kudzu. I spent a little more to seed some gourd plants within the enclosure.

– Schema Absorbed (Common) –

H’kleti Bamboo

A fast-growing species of hardy grass, endemic to the island climates. Said to be the spears of fallen warriors who worshiped H’Kleti, the war-god.

Level 0.

Relevant Traits:

Rapid Growth: Level 1.

Resilience: Level 1.

—

Cost: 0.3 iota

– Schema Absorbed (Common) –

Strangler-Flower Kudzu

A parasitic plant that grows on trees and slowly saps them of nutrients, fueling a rapid growth.

Level 0.

Relevant Traits:

Rapid Growth: Level 1.

Parasitism: Level 1.

—

Cost: 0.2 iota.

Breeding them into a better material for trapping and containing was definitely a thought. They already grew with amazing speed, at very little mana cost. With a little work I could have them explode from the ground and seal in enemies.

But I was cautious of spending all my mana on simple plants, even one with broad-reaching versatility.

I needed defenders.

So I closed myself off to my more direct senses, the kind of ‘sight’ and ‘taste’ that surrounded a 200 meter area around my physical body.

I reached into the leylines of the island, and felt the whole of its creation.

The island was small, only a few kilometers across. It was shaped like a crescent– along the inner curve was a volcanic lagoon formed by a now-dead underwater caldera. A ring of stony outcropping ran from the points of the crescent to enclose a shallow area of sticky, mud-drenched water, where numerous rocky pools gave host to small sea-dwelling lifeforms too delicate for the open ocean. The outer edge of the crescent, its belly, rose up into a steep cliffside.

The lowest point of the island was to the south, where the sea crept in and made a saltwater swamp. Underneath the canopy of mangroves was cloying, muggy air disturbed by countless insects buzzing, a voracious biosphere where the small were prey for the large, and the large prey for countless parasites.

As the island climbed higher towards its northern edge, the swamp became a misty forest, many of the trees nothing more than pillars of green-handed leaves as parasitic vines consumed them down to rotten stumps. The remnants of the island’s civilization lingered here…

Hmm?

I felt something. Something the man had not been aware of.

A ghostly presence in the old ruins…

Interesting.

I would attend to that later. Spirits were useful companions for dungeon-cores. We could contract with them, bind them to our service, and they in return would be grateful for the mana we provided in payment. Unlike humans, they posed very little threat– only a remarkably powerful spirit could seize a dungeon core and shatter its soul, and the spirits I sensed in the ruins were far from that level.

No, what I was searching for was…

In the trees, tropical birds sung and pecked for worms. In the swamp, ugly gharials with saw-toothed long noses snapped up sluggish fish that tried to hide among the mangrove roots. Massive centipedes scuttled through the green expanse of the jungle. Boars rooted and chewed. Small lemurs and monkeys swung through the canopies. In the lagoon, octopi cracked oysters from their shells, and sea-urchins bristled, crabs nesting among the bones of the massacre victims who’d been cast into the waters.

These were my building blocks. All that I created, I would have to build from these living things.

My mind returned to its immediate vicinity. I had decided the insects held the most promise, however, the only kinds on the farm were extremely small and unimpressive. A few dew-sucking aphids, a praying mantis perched on a fencepost, moths in the attic.

Developing these to full strength would be a lengthy endeavor.

But not one I’d shrink from.

The farmer had made some progress on building a beehive, an artificial nest. I thought the idea was clever, even if the execution was shoddy.

I dug into the earth with my mana sparks, creating a similar structure below. A series of rising caverns connected by small tunnels. I filled the lowest layers with an immense amount of mana, at least for the petty insects I intended to populate this nest.

Dungeons were known as such for a reason. While I had appeared close to the surface, where mana quickly dispersed into the air, underground, the walls of magically-dead earth would constrict and retain any mana given. The air would quickly become rich with energies, causing rapid growth, mutation, and evolution within the occupants.

This little nest was a dungeon in miniature. A breeding ground. The insects that fought their way to the lowest levels would evolve quickest, and the scent of mana would drive them to fight for those lowest apartments. From each layer I segmented off little crevasses and nooks that could become individual nests, allowing for a limited number to live at each junction. The highest apartments received the most living space, while at the bottom, there was a singular den.

I seeded the miniature dungeon with soft mosses, little sprigs of grass, and luminescent mushrooms, enough to sustain a healthy population.

Next, I consumed numerous insects from the farm. In a heartbeat their tiny soulless lives ended, and I learned the making of bees, wasps, moths, spiders, centipedes, and mantis.

The flood of information entering my mind was dizzying. Humans could hope to mimic a fraction of what I knew over generations, raising and dissecting and studying– I simply learned in an instant, by eating.

There was a reason humans would always fear me.

I recreated the more carnivorous and interesting insects within the area I was beginning to refer to as ‘the apartments’. In time, they would likely evolve on their own– the high mana density and the fact they were created from my ethereal mana meant they had a small, innate chance of absorbing traits from those that they consumed.

The mere presence of a dungeon caused the world to surge forward and evolve.

I finished the apartments by lifting a tall mound, like the towers certain ants created to live in. This would be the exterior of the underground den, where the occupants could hunt less dangerous game. I wrapped the tower in kudzu and encouraged flowering grasses to sprout, creating a miniature jungle that I then seeded with aphids and others among the less dangerous insects I’d absorbed. A feeding ground for the ones within.

It was good to be a dungeon core.

The man who had lived here had struggled hard to build his shoddy fence, and labored endlessly on the beehive, only to fail to ever raise a single bee or harvest a drop of honey.

In only an hour I had exceeded him.

His life was fully of weariness, small cuts and bruises adding up on his fingers, the humidity of coming storms sending twinges of pain down his scar-laden back.

I was a creature of the mind, cold and relentless. It cost me nothing more than thought to do what he had given days of his life for, and his days were far more precious than my own.

Hmm.

I had a great deal of knowledge about the world, but having been born only a short span ago, and having spent most of that time asleep regenerating mana…

I had yet to form any judgements.

But now I wondered…

Why was the world such a cruel place for humans?

I supposed the gods must hate them.