Understanding Increased: Evolution good.
Slime eat plants. Plant make mana. Mana food.
[HUNT. KILL. CONSUME]
Slime hunt. Slime kill. Slime consume.
Evolve made slime good.
Evolution good. Evolution find food.
[GROW. EXPAND. CONQUER]
Mana from plant sent out. It find more plant. It find even more plant behind first plant. Mana keep going. Mana find plant hiding in wrong mana. That mana not food now. It be food soon.
Mana chips at other mana. Soon wall of mana fall. Then wrong mana be eaten. Wrong mana will become tasty mana.
Dungeon grow. Dungeon expand. Conquer to eat. Conquer to grow.
I dungeon. I hungry.
----------------------------------------
System unsure of what to make of the Core’s actions over the last few days. Nothing it did was openly different, just subtle flashes of thought that could almost be mistaken for intelligence. Its crystalize structure pulsed with a soft inner light with the echos of awareness.
The Core was on the verge of having a thought.
The efforts of System had gotten them this far. Each meal from the slime was analyzed and turned into the pieces that would build upon the last. All to form an awakened Core, one capable of bending reality to its will.
A being System would be proud to be the servant of.
At the moment, however, System had zero idea what the ‘grand master’ was doing.
They watched as mana flowed from the Core and followed the current as it wove around plants, and danced across the ground to the boundary of the dungeon. The current collided with the hard wall of dead mana beyond their territory, where it chipped away at the rigid structure.
The dungeon was actively expanding.
No longer bound to small steps of stumbling growth, the Core had awoken its instincts. An internal drive to grow, expand, and assimilate.
The Core had become more than a simple stone. It had formed the outline of cognition.
Unfortunately, the praise was premature. In reality, the Core had attempted to eat the dead mana that surrounded them. Mana that -by its very nature- couldn’t be altered or ‘eaten’.
There was no awakening of instincts. This ‘specimen of unlimited potential’ was gnawing on the inert mana like a toddler would a rock.
Rather than recant the praise or judge, System focused on a new task. They would make their dream of serving a grand overlord a reality. They will become a tutorial npc regardless of the effort it took. The first step was to reach out for help from the mouth of the dungeon, the gelatinous glutton.
The slime bobbed happily in the field of flowers. Its green hue acted as both a camouflage and to hide the artic moss it had recently eaten from the world. The dense cluster of lichen dissolved in its body was the same color as the rest of it. A cheerful break from its otherwise lupine diet.
All the slime needed to do was move.
The Core solidified the flow of mana throughout its entire domain. The current was constant and wove around to feed back into the center of the dungeon. A stream of mana that System would use with purpose and precision.
The slime was given a course. A path to follow that put it directly in one of these streams. The tide of arcane energy poured into and through its body. The mana it generated from its last meal pulled out forcibly from the contact. A process that was far faster than the of ambient radiation method the slime had done until this point.
The stream of mana contained impurities. Aspects of elements and nature had polluted it. Impurities the slime had created with every meal. Mana tinted with the nature it was a part of before it died.
Impurities System stole for study.
The dungeon core species could purify all mana they cycled. Once known as a filter, the gods repurposed the species to fit their own goals. Despite the changes, the gods never changed the fact that these oddities fed cores. Every new flavor of mana heightened their ability to shape the world.
A feature of their biology System planned to take full advantage of.
A plan that would take an entire summer…
----------------------------------------
> Understanding Increased: Roots
The knowledge enhanced the fundamental capabilities of the mana. It strengthened the roots as they drew in nourishment once more. A purpose once forgotten.
This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.
> Understanding Increased: Glucose
The slime focused its attention on something new. Hidden in the stem of every plant was the sugar they made. Sugar was the complex molecule that was broken down for energy. No longer did the monster ignore this source of energy. Mana gained from every plant increased. Efficiency increased.
> Understanding Increased: Pollen
This alone took three weeks to learn. While inert alone, it was fundamental for the next step. Each a building block to construct the tower of knowledge.
> Understanding Increased: Seeds
Buried knowledge was unearthed. The slime had eaten seeds during the winter, but without the prerequisites, the information they contained was never learned. The details of reproduction and replication were dormant until now.
Now the Core would understand life. It would know about life cycles and growth. It would understand there is more to its existence than eating. It would become whole.
As a bonus, its ability to think would rise. Admittedly, to match that of a plant, but zero was still an increase.
The project had taken System two months to complete. At that time, their other responsibilities were neglected. Admittedly irresponsible, but for a dormant dungeon, the odds of anything of note to have happened during that time were low.
Unfortunately, System had been wrong about that. Lots of things happened.
The entire dungeon was unrecognizable.
The foliage had grown unchecked. So thick as to obscure the ground. Purple flowers danced in the wind, obscured by pollen so thick it was like fog. Suffocating foliage buried the Core and hid it from view.
The dungeon slime had forsaken its responsibilities and had left the dungeon. An adventure that was a death sentence, to leave the dungeon that gave it life to enter the land of death.
However, the slime was fine. Content, it enjoyed the warmth of the sun overhead while it gnawed on an ice cube in the middle of summer…
System did not like the implications.
Analysis revealed it to not be a cube of ice, but of dead mana. A chunk so dense that the air it inhabited solidified. An arcane chunk that had taken two months for the Core to break apart. All the effort it had made to break down the arcane wall that surrounded its territory had been successful.
A success that really made System wished they were a part of any other dungeon.
In normal dungeons, you don’t lack mana. In normal dungeons, you create monsters and fight adventurers. In normal dungeons, the system just gives updates when creatures level up. In a normal dungeon, you don’t eat dead mana.
After all, dead mana was useless. It killed everything it touched. Everything except for this single slime because an entire dungeon Core had done everything it could to win this fight.
A fight against a perfectly inanimate piece of reality.
System was programmed to be logical and perfect. This was illogical and imperfect. This broke System.
They decided to ignore it and focus on other things. Things they could fix.
Ignoring the arcane mana rock in the slime’s body, System found that the creature had received a minor buff. The well-fed trait gave the monster a ten percent increase to all its base stats. A buff that applied to all dungeon-born monsters when they ate, despite it not being a requirement.
A minor buff that is rarely applied to slimes due to the verity required to obtain it. Its herbivore-adjacent status clearly helped nourish the creature when it ate plants.
Quickly moving their attention on, System found deep grooves in the ground. The lupine flowers had clearly done their share of working the terrain. Roots filled with the Core’s mana of creation had extended beyond the dungeon’s territory.
Roots that found cracks in the dead mana and grew to exploit them. Fault lines grew, and the Core took advantage.
No longer did the dungeon’s aura have a hard line. The endpoint had become fuzzy and muddled until the exact bounds of the dungeon were indistinguishable. Lupine flowers now grew happily over twenty feet from the Core’s center. A six-meter radius of vegetation so thick you could forget these mountains had been devoid of life just months prior.
With all the alterations, the starkest was that of the Core itself. Buried below plants, pollen, and soil, it had hidden its mutated form until now. The gray stone had protrusions at odd angles that bulged and swelled atop its form. Haphazard growths that resulted from improper mana cycling. The manifestation of its dedication to recycling the dead mana.
Beneath the flawed structure and almost cancerous growths across the Core there was a dull light. The candlelight of an awakened Core. Faint enough to be mistaken for the sunlight that shown upon its exterior, it wasn't much, but it was a start.
A start that System could work with.
A start that meant a true dungeon was ready to be created.
It meant that all of System’s efforts were successful.
They had reached the starting line.
Race:
Dungeon Core (Natural)
System Age:
7 months
Intelligence:
-1 -> 0
Mana Control:
-2 -> 0
Racial Trait:
Dungeon’s Domain (0/10)
Error: mana being hoarded by owner. Unable to assimilate surroundings.
Status Effect:
Dead Mana (Debuff)
Mana can not be controlled. Casting time increased by 500%
Activated Mastery:
Germination Pollen (flora)
Absolute knowledge of plants has created a field of pollen in which all plants grow at twice their original speed. Time remaining: 2w, 5d, 7h, 33min
----------------------------------------
Elsewhere, below the soil, an ant tended to her colony. She dug tunnels, laid eggs, and was a good mother.
Roots grew quickly all around her. They broke into the tunnels she had dug for her family. It was hard to fix the damage as she was just a single bug, but soon she would have more to help her. Until then she was just happy the roots brought food for her children.
Every day, she laid her eggs and tended to her children.
Eggs were turned and moved so they would never dry out. They needed to be healthy.
Eggs that hatched into larvae. They needed to grow.
Larva that spun cocoons to protect themselves as they grew. They needed to be safe.
Cocoons that would soon hatch and raise the next generation. They needed to be numerous.
They needed to be a hive.
A hive beneath the dungeon Core.