Chase lay back, spectral arm over his eyes as he just lay there, back pressed flat across the smoothed sandstone retaining wall of what would eventually be his dungeon’s ‘Core Room’.

A few hours of work had already been spent to build a base for whatever his dungeon was going to be. The baked solid and tightly packed clay he had uncovered under the dunes was harder to dig through than the sand, and took almost exponentially longer to consume, but there was way more potential in the material. Just from the faded and somewhat jumbled memories of Earth's history, he knew that terracotta and adobe had been useful building materials where clay was a main component. Clay itself could be used for waterproof clay pipes and tiles, temperature resistant walls and coatings, and general insulation. Things that he didn’t quite need, as a ghost, but that would allow him greater freedom to build around himself. Beyond that, clay could be used as a structural binding for earthwork structures. Something he desperately needed.

In those hours since he had learned he had a menu, he had spent most of the night working on figuring out the menu’s limits. After all, when he had ‘Inhabited’ the core, he had amazingly reflexive control of its functions. Mainly over how he assimilated, and built, material. The podium he had set the core on had been easy to build, after he had worked out the basics of compacting sand into a solid that wouldn’t crumble at the slightest touch.

First, speed and mass were correlated…. Or maybe it was more ‘speed and value’. Sand, despite shifting as the core consumed it, vanished with almost no issue. It took seconds to consume kilograms worth of sand.

But clay took dozens of times longer, consumed at a snail's pace in comparison. Once he had started digging at the clay he had uncovered, it took almost an hour just to have a square room that was only about three meters long on any one side, and that was only a half meter deep.

Thankfully, he could set build orders, planning out what he wanted to consume before triggering the effect, and then waiting for it to cycle through, which meant he could focus on something else while the clay around him was consumed… which led into the second limit of the menu. The fine control.

The Menu was… impersonal. Amounts of matter, defined by volume, were marked down. Each ‘unit’ also seemed to follow… something closer to Game logic. Roughly one meter cubed of a material was the base unit, and everything was defined around that. While the menu had the ability to delineate where he dug, the specifics left something to be desired. The menu was like a basic 3-D modeler. He could extrude and mark out spaces, select what areas to dig out and fill in, and even add some basic textures. But that was it. He didn’t have anything like the pillar, because to the menu, it had no points of reference.

And, he could only build what the core had already consumed.

Even the sandstone pillar the core was sitting on hadn’t been on the menu when he first opened it. It had taken half an hour of experimentation while in direct control of the core to build a basic box of the sandstone, and then consuming it with the menu to unlock the option. After that, the sandstone retaining wall to keep the sand from burying the core room (Half a unit wide, five units to a rooms wall, and the center unit left open for hallways and paths) was easy enough to design.

This was good… and bad.

Bad because that meant the menu was never going to be anywhere near as efficient as manually controlling the core, either for detail work or for experimentation.

Good, because that meant that he could make materials for the core to learn, like the sandstone block.

Which was actually pretty great, because clay was a commodity he couldn’t waste right now. The denser material was already marked down for building some basic structural supports, while the sand was being compressed through the building menu to make sandstone. Building the walls had also been a good move, considering sand was already piling back up around his pit, blown into the hole by the wind over the edges of the pit.

For now, with his core secured for the moment, Chase had moved onto his next step.

Four corridors were being carved in… what he was pretty sure were the cardinal directions, using where the sun had set as a reference. Each one was mapped to expand for five meters, before carving an identical 3 unit square room. While the design wasn’t the most creative, he was more focused on just getting resources. With another dozen or so units of clay, he could work on making a covered platform and internal walls around the core, and then use the outer rooms as foundations for a structure above them. After that, by moving foundations of clay and sandstone up, he could build above the sand and get a better view of his surroundings.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Of course, he also had another side project.

One of the outer rooms, what he was tentatively labeling as ‘South,’ was also going to continue to dig downwards, digging a straight shaft as low as he could in an attempt to get more diverse stone.

It was probably going to take days of digging to get through the hard-packed clay, but if he could hit a denser stone, possibly even granite or marble, he would be far more confident building higher structures. Metamorphic rock structures were made from compression, and if he was lucky that would make them superior for support structures.

But, since he was stuck waiting for the digging to finish up, that left him with far too much time to sit and think.

Particularly, thinking about his God.

The silhouetted figure had been hovering around the pit, slowly meandering around the clay of the floor, or standing on the sandstone walls and looking at the sand being slowly blown into piles around it.

The innocent cheer of his God had been… somewhat refreshing.

The weeks that it had spent with the figure in Limbo had been all business. There wasn’t time to get comfortable and talk to each other. From the moment Chase had made his first prayer to an Unnamed God and somehow became their champion, it had been a rush of planning and effort. From converting his body into the core to forming an exit from the featureless abyss that they had hung in, they had been frantic.

But now that he had a moment to unwind, to spend this slower time just sitting and existing without the constant threat of the void dragging his soul, his very essence, apart…

He could relax.

Of course, that’s when his God spoke up slightly.

“Uh… Chase.”

He took a slow breath. And closed his eyes tightly.

‘Please don’t be a problem. Please don’t be a problem. Please-’

“Chase, stop praying to me. Look.”

Right. ‘His’ God.

Levering himself up on his side, he looked towards where his God was currently hovering over the core.

“What?”

“We have a friend!”

Looking down from the smiling silhouette of his God, he looked at the core.

And found what looked like a little bone-white scorpion crawling up the side of the pedestal.

“Huh. That’s the first animal I've seen this entire time.”

Twisting, Chase hopped down and watched the scorpion crawl over the edge of the pedestal, onto the same flat area where the core was.

The God was now crouching, its ‘eyes’ level with the small arachnid. “Fascinating.”

Chase circled to the other side and glanced over the scorpion, taking in the consistent off-white color. “Can we do something with it?”

“I’m not sure. From what I know, from the control systems we took as our framework, ‘normal’ dungeons can’t flat out kill living creatures, you have to set up traps and kill them indirectly to consume their essence, but it’s fairly small…”

“I mean, I might be able to bury it in clay or something.”

“Perhaps we should not kill it? It’s the first creature we’ve found, and it may provide valuable insight to the local environment.”

Chase glanced from the small scorpion to his God. “And what are we supposed to do? Adopt it? Make it our pet?”

His God looked… The only term that came to mind was ‘contemplative’.

“I mean..”

“God, we don’t even have anything here that can take care of it. It’s not like we have monsters yet, or even enough mana to summon something-”

The sudden sensation of something popping up, some sort of innate sense of ‘Interaction’ with his core, made his eyes snap towards the core.

And the scorpion that had just touched it. While the two of them had been conversing, it had made its way to the core.

And a tiny white and black interface screen had just popped up.

Before Chase could even think of reading the screen, the tail of the scorpion shot forwards, likely in some sort of reflex to defend itself.

And clicked on the box.

With a flash of light, and a sudden sense of ‘loss’ that rang through his core, Chase blinked.

As he looked, trying to find out what had just happened, he paused.

There was now text above the scorpion.

He read it.

He paused.

Read it a second time.

And then threw his head back and swore.

"Bone-sand Scorpion" Contracted Boss Monster

Mundane Arachnid: Rank 0

“WHAT THE FUCK IS MY LUCK!?”

…

His God leaned over curiously, ignoring Chase's futile attempts to bury his head in the sand nearby. “Does this mean we get to keep him?”