166.66666 hours, just shy of 7 days I've been frozen in a dreamlike stupor unable to move or act on my surroundings. Reminiscing on my past life in vivid not dreams, in the dim room of damnation I find myself in. Locked in syndrome was something I never had the displeasure of experiencing in my past life, but I'll need to be more cautious of my thoughts and decisions going forward, especially if a self imposed question is locked by the hellish expectation of standing, or floating as it were in place for the full duration. As the timer I had setup in my mind ticks down I feel the ability to move coming back to me slowly and a watched clock ticks slower. I sort my thoughts and decisions into the list I've decided to keep. The addition of my new eye and the fact I'm now a shiny pebble of a dungeon core has increased my mental capacity, I never was good at remembering things before but now I feel sharp, and I can recall everything down to the smallest speck. I find myself grateful for the American schooling systems wide-net approach to education. Chemistry, math, algebra, calculus, physics.... It's all back and clear as if I had learned it only yesterday. I doubt I'll have need for geography, and computer sciences might not help either depending on how advanced the world I find myself is in. I wiggle my fingers, it feels like moving through honey. A few seconds left, and I've already decided on what I plan to do.
The timer frees me from my own suffering and I get to work immediately, opening the hole above my gem slightly more with my hands, creating a few more holes in the ceiling above and removing a few layers from the floor around in the room. I've learned a few things while in my semi-comatose state and I intend to capitalize on them. The first is that anything from outside this room that is added to this room, is added to my Atomic Mass Index (AMI), by element. Second is that this also includes elements I wasn't aware of from my previous life, in a world without gods or magic. Third is that it takes a very, very small amount of energy to remove materials, and that I gain energy from light, life (including insects and plants) and ambient mana in the air.
There's a few changes I've put in place over my right eye, which displays similar to a purple computer screen with a layout of the room and various sources of ambient energy, and mana highlighted on the map of the room. I have a small army of ants in the corner of the room that I watched when I wasn't reliving the horrors of my past. They've contributed energy over the last few days and my first task is establishing a bigger ecosystem here. Ants are cool and all, but not quite as filling as I'd like for the energy bar. Unlike the books I've read in the past, I don't have a system, a menu, or any helpers to use so I just try to fumble my way through things and figure out what works and what doesn't. The first change I added to my dungeon view is the addition of three bars, which I suppose probably came from the computer sciences I had just internally badmouthed as useless.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Setting a variable for energy per second, mana per second and AMI per second was simple enough as thinking about how it would be nice to know the numbers. With energy being the equivalent of food supplies and mana being the water for my non-squishy, not alive body. It's kind of essential to know how much you have. The second addition to my dungeon view is a task list, to keep me focused on what I feel I should be doing. Just as an animal knows it needs to eat I have some basic instinct to bury my core deep below the earth and lure people into my walls in an attempt to..... Do something to them.... I'm not fully sure but most of the dungeon core stories I had read were really ummm.... "Friendly" at least when dealing with reincarnates.... Sometimes the goal was to purify the people of sin, other times it was to help them grow stronger. My goal for myself is to give people options, and then kill the ones that are bad whisking the good ones off to some other place. Righteous justice, like I only got to experience at the end of my last life, for only a few brief minutes.
Shaking myself out of my stupor I dig a few canals around my raised podium, then around the stone floor linking it all together before going to the corner of the room opposite the ants and making a large pit, hopefully it will fill with rainwater, which will in turn invite more bugs down, and in turn invite down things that eat the bugs. Those will bring down plant life in their feces most likely, or latched onto feathers or fur in the form of burrs. I focus my will more into my hands and start scooping chunks from what I assume to be the North wall. I'm grateful once more that I enjoyed digging when I was young and naive. Tunneling for hours and hours creating a winding circular tunnel spreading out encircling my core room. Hours became days, days became weeks and at the end of it when I finally breached the outside world almost a whole month had passed. I wish that time could have moved like that when I was trapped in my waking-nightmare but returning to my chamber I'm greeted with my own ecosystem.
A pond in the southwest corner houses lilly pads and frogs, reeds sticking out from the fairly deep water. A few lizards hide in the grass that surrounds the pond of stagnant water brimming with mosquitos and flies. Mice have made a burrow slightly North of the pond on the southwest wall and the ants have increased in population to just shy of fifty thousand drones. Looking towards myself I see that I've grown quite a bit as well, not just a little bit either. From what I had first mistakenly identified as a bug on a throne I've grown to a decent quarter dollar in size, and my pedestal has grown about five inches taller. My capacities have increased by a factor of 10 and upon inspecting myself with the dungeon eye view, a new occurrence happens, a prompt asking to evolve to the next stage.... I'm intrigued, but since evolution leads to better options for growth typically I decide to accept the prompt and then I'm enveloped in pain once more.