Bugs and small vermin caught in the jaws of my carnivorous plants. Birds falling from the sky as the candied foolchoke in their belly spread its poison influence. Invertebrates fighting mandible and claw in the lower apartments.
With every second, death accumulated in my domain like sand falling through an hourglass. I ate all, consuming the mana released with every passing through the mortal veil.
But fundamentally, it wasn’t enough. The creatures I consumed were too small and unimportant to produce any large amount of mana towards my goal– storing up 300 iota to receive my phenotype.
Until I did that, I had no way of leveling, no way of advancing my domain’s size and exploring further into the island.
I was trapped.
And as a trapped creature, I began to pick and fuss at my options. The slime gourds were a good first attempt to create my own self-sufficient mana source, and had served me well. But now I realized a flaw. I could only collect the ones that grew within my own territory, meaning they were limited in scope. Worse they took significant time to grow.
The bees, my second attempt, served better. They were capable of roaming the island and bringing back resources. They could also serve as scouts, and in an emergency, bring their poison to bear. Even their miniscule body mass gave them an advantage; they stored more mana for the investment required to make them than the overfat gourds.
Clearly what I had learned was that roaming out and bringing back mana was a preferable strategy to trying to exist solely within my own sphere of influence. Perhaps I had erred in not choosing the mossback spider to hunt for me… Currently, the deadliest specimen in my domain was actually the foolchoke, the sweet-scented flower that brought death.
I examined my new sun-quest. Several had passed while I slept, but this one looked promising.
[Sun-Quest]
Consume 5 new piscine Schema (0/5).
Reward – Water Core.
[Moon-Quest]
Mine 300 meters under the earth and establish a biome there. (8/300)
Reward – Lesser Mana Pool (Earth).
In truth I had considered discarding any focus on quests and moving purely towards advancing myself, but this one seemed doable alongside that goal– albeit requiring a small investment.
There was a small and sluggish river that ran underneath the foot of the hill where the farm sat above the canopy. For 39 iota I made two flinthead vipers, sturdy amphibious hunters, and sent them that way. I was confident I could recoup the cost within a few days of their fishing.
But as for faster ways of gaining mana, I was still considering. I spent several hours tending to the farm, planting new slime gourds and releasing grass sprites into the air to tend to them. The tiny, dim-minded elementals fluttered through the sky like motes of greenish light, and everywhere they roamed they brought health to the plants beneath them. I was confident I hadn’t erred– they truly would advance the growth of my native flora by a significant fraction.
It was when I examined the apartments again that I found my solution. I had no large hunters that could go out and seize sizable prey for me to absorb– but I could bring the prey to me.
A kind of aggressive parasitic fungus had infected a large portion of the upper chambers, brought in by a foreign insect that had come seeking the taste of mana. It had spread from the soon-killed outsider to its killer, and from there, begun to thrive. The apartments were riddled with husks that sprouted up with rainbow-colored fungal antenna as their braindead bodies twitched.
The incredible thing about this fungus was that it could actually control the brain of its host, at least in a very simple way. It would drive its enslaved body to climb to the highest heights available and begin a death dance, trying to attract attention from predators in the sky above.
Once eaten, it would reproduce within the birds digestive system, and its spores would fall to the earth.
In a sense it was much akin to my candied foolchoke, but I saw now the cleverness of using a moving host. This fungus could roam far beyond my reaches.
I casually harvested one of the zombies, absorbing both the fat red leafcutter ant and its far more interesting passenger.
– Schema Absorbed (Uncommon) –
Scintillating Cordyceps
A violating parasitcordycepse that eats portions of the host’s brain to control it from within. This particular offshoot has vivid colors that begin to pulse with light to attract predators when the current host has outlived its usefulness.
Level 1.
Relevant Traits:
Acid Resistance: Level 1
Parasitism: Level 1
Host Control: Level 1
—
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Cost: 0.7 iota.
The trait of Host Control was delightful to me. As grim as the process was, it gave me a whole new world of options. Assuming I could change the instincts embedded into the fungus– and I could– to see me as the end goal of its reproductive cycle, it would bring prey to me. In return I would grant it the mana to spawn more spores.
The question was how to distribute the spores.
If I used the exploding weephorn mushrooms as a base, I’d enjoy the benefits of a high compatibility. But the progress across the island would be slow. An animal would be more expensive but far quicker…
And again, the apartments provided an answer.
There was a wonderful species of wasp that reproduced by sting, injecting its young into the host with a paralytic venom. With their natural defenses disabled the larvae would eat the host from inside.
I suppose most creatures would find that spine-chilling. I appreciated the raw viciousness of the strategy.
Working a few prototypes, I quickly found the traits I wanted. One thing about working with insects was the low mana cost let you run through experiments until you had the perfect result.
– Schema –
Precursors
Deathmother Wasp x Scintillating Cordyceps
Level 0.
“Vibrant Deathwing”
A beautiful and deadly predator, the deathwing injects its larvae into a host with a sting. As the newborn grubs tunnel their way into the host’s brainstem, they seize control of the host body. In this way they can move from small animals to larger ones, forming thriving colonies.
Relevant Traits:
Quad-Wings: Level 1
Ovipositor Sting: Level 3
Parasitism: Level 3
Host Control: Level 5
—
Cost: 4.3 iota
I had expended a truly fantastic amount of mana into the creature. The Host Control trait was the strongest I had ever created, but I had guessed it would be necessary to transition from puppeteering simple insects to mammals, birds, and reptiles. Overall the mana cost of the finished Schema was astounding for the size of the creature produced, I felt a deep satisfaction with my creation.
Seven in all, the wasps had scintillating orange-green shells that shone with pearly lusters, and wings of a deep pink-red that shone like the setting of the sun.
“Go.” I willed them. “Find prey and bring them to me.”
They took flight, bright-winged angels of death. I couldn’t count on all seven surviving and finding prey, but I could gamble that at least one would sink its children into a brainstem before dying.
But I had exhausted much of my mana already. I could only hope I’d made wise investments.
For now, I began to replenish myself. Long-dead matter was not as good as fresh meat, and inorganic matter worse than anything, but I began to send my mana-sparks down into the earth. The farmer had dug a crude root cellar to his shack. From that foundation beneath the earth, I began to eat downwards…
Soil was a strange thing. The uppermost layers were nothing more than rotted leaves, shed skin, a motley of different organic matters melting into one another under the decaying force of rain and sunshine. As the years passed this rich soil would slowly lose its nutrients, getting processed over and over again by the roots of plants, passing worms, and fungal molds.
Sooner or later more soil would cover it over, and the replenishment would cease. The deeper buried into the earth it was, the more pressure and heat would conspire to press it from loose packed dirt into harder and harder forms, creating different types of earth depending on the core elements.
As I ate, I unearthed all this information. Much of the ‘memory’ contained within the soil was already gone. Below the uppermost layers, I could no longer extract enough information to form Schemas. But there were treasures still.
I burrowed into the network of a mole. As my mana sparks filled its tunnels with light, I quickly summoned another flinthead and set it on the task of hunting down the little burrower. I would need allies to help me reach my goal of 300 meters– my own ability to dig was too limited.
As the serpent disappeared into the network, I dug deeper and deeper, feeling the hours slide by. The serpents dispatched to the pond returned with fish in their coils. I briefly pulled my focus away, having dug some 70 meters down already. It was slow work to dissolve solid earth, and unrewarding in terms of mana, but the small amount of magic harvested gave me some reserves again.
The serpents had dragged up the best they could catch. One presented a red-scaled and goggle-eyed fish with a bulging sack of inflated air atop its head, and long trailing fins that were more for decoration than mobility. It was no surprise such an ungainly thing had been caught; I guessed that there were few enough predators on the island that many species had begun evolving towards ornamentation rather than practical needs.
The next catch was barely more than an adolescent, but more interesting in the traits it presented. A vibrant green fish with spiny blue fins running above and below its body, it had a beak meant for cracking the shells of water-dwelling snails. Most interestingly it was a descendant of a far larger species, with a bite force that could have cracked through steel.
The last one had returned empty-handed, having eaten all that it caught. I very much considered incinerating it on the spot– what a dungeon core made, it could unmake, and there was still enough remnants of the fish inside its belly that I could recoup what I’d lost.
However, I stayed my hand– instead sending a wave of terror to frighten its sluggish and greedy mind.
“Next time, if you return with a full belly and nothing to show for it, I will create a nightmare to eat you in turn.”
That warning sent it slinking back to the river to hunt, its two comrades receiving more affectionate and praising messages before being sent on their way. Hunger wasn’t a true issue for my creations; if needed, I could reward them with enough mana to sate any biological needs.
In all, the traits I had gained access to were:
Anadromous Gills: Level 1
Ornamentation (Head Sac): Level 1
Echolocation: Level 1
Hydrodynamic Streamlining: Level 1
Beaked Jaws: Level 1
Useful, but not immediately. I had no access to the water to use the gills, no need for flumphy head ornamentations– I doubted I’d ever find one– and while a beak could add armor crushing potential, or streamlining add speed to a water-dwelling predator, neither was a standout. But Echolocation? Now that had potential.
Equally was the 16 iotas of mana harvested. That put me a not-insignificant fraction towards my end goal…
But it struck me as strange that a dungeon core, a creator-god on a small scale, would profit so highly from death. We consumed as much as we created– what then was our end purpose? Did we simply change the shape of the universe, without ever adding anything or subtracting, but simply stripping all down to its fundamental manas and rebuilding from that starstuff a new order?
What was that but mindless consumption?
Some people prayed to the Cosmic Alignment. I knew that far above, those glittering asteroids were no more than sleepers.
Perhaps if I could have spoken to them, woken them to ask what our meaning was, I would have known some answer to give me peace.
But I didn’t linger too long on this question.
Ahe had returned.