It was dark.

I wasn’t sure at what point I had become aware of that fact, or how long I had laid there in the dark completely oblivious to everything around me or to what I was even doing laying there in the first place, but the moment it occurred to me that it was dark? I couldn’t think about anything but that fact.

Dark. Darkness everywhere. Thick and black and pressing close on all sides in an oppressive sheet. The thought bounced and vibrated inside of me, forcing me to take notice of it. It wasn’t something that I could simply ignore. There was darkness, and I needed to pay attention to it. There was nothing that I could see in it, but I couldn’t stop myself from trying to see.

It was dark. So dark. Just an empty and all-consuming blackness that covered everything in a layer so dense and impermeable that I couldn’t imagine an existence that was anything other than just this endless darkness, stretching on forever.

Hadn’t I been content before? I wasn’t sure, but… I had to have been right? If it was always this awful and terrible then surely I would’ve wanted to escape from it before this moment. Right?

If I thought hard, very very hard, I could almost imagine a time before I realized just how suffocatingly heavy the darkness around me truly was. If I concentrated hard enough then I was sure that previously the darkness had felt safe and warm, cradling me in soft protection as I slept and…

Had I been asleep? Was that sleep? I wasn’t sure. What was the difference between being asleep and being awake? One moment I wasn’t, and then the next I was. Maybe it was less like waking up and more like being born?

But what was even being born? What did it mean to be born? To come into existence? And did that even really matter?

While I lay there in the darkness, centuries could have passed for all I knew. Time seemed to drag on forever without end as something seemed to grow inside of me, a sensation that I couldn’t quite explain. It was a feeling of desperation and need, like there was some strange thing inside that was clawing furiously to break free.

It wasn’t just that where I was now was too dark, no… It was too much everything, really. Too tight, too warm, too dark, too small, too cramped, too hot, and overall much too dark!

I found myself overcome with the need to escape, and before I could put too much more thought into it, I found myself straining against the soil that was confining me. I tried to throw myself side to side, wiggling about in an effort to see just how tightly I had been packed into the dirt that surrounded me on all sides.

Dirt! I was covered all over in dirt! Pushing against me so tightly that it was impossible to breathe, keeping me from making my escape! There was no way I was going to let anything stop me, though, not now that I had realized that I was trapped. Nothing could stop me from getting free.

I needed to reach the light, the air, food!

Light… That was the opposite of the darkness.

Imagining the light seemed to fill me with another vision, a vision of a world that was open and free, one where I would be able to do whatever I wanted to. A world where I wasn’t trapped and smothered, suffocating beneath the earth. I needed to make my way to that world, no matter what. If I could just claw my way out of the dirt I knew I would find what I was looking for on the other side of it.

If I got to the light then the air would come with it, rich with scents as it would blow across me, refreshing and cool compared to how stifled and claustrophobic I currently felt.

And what scents would blow in on the breeze? Only the smells of food, of course.

I wasn’t sure what food really was, but I knew I was hungry and that food was the only thing that could satisfy me. An image seemed to flash through me of just what food might be, a series of colours and textures that writhed and wriggled about, all in shades of pink and brown.

I wanted it.

I wanted it more than anything else. I wanted to stuff myself full of food until I was fit to burst, and then I wanted to just keep eating. Anything and everything was fit for me to eat. I was hungry enough that I could eat the entire world around me, and maybe even just keep going after that.

What came after the world if I ate the whole thing? I had no way of knowing, but just the thought of eating something no one else had ever eaten had me feeling desperate.

I reached out, sinking into the dirt and pulling away at it in my efforts to free myself from the darkness, heat, and heavy soil that had chained me down and buried me. I would dig myself free if I had to, eat my way out of the ground, and go on to devour the whole world next. Nothing could stop me.

I clawed and scraped at the dirt, loosening it up until it fell soft against me with nowhere else to go. I was desperate for my freedom, however, and starving on top of that. It only made sense for me to start to eat the dirt as I ripped into it and tore it away. I swallowed it down, but it didn’t seem to fill the empty void inside of me. If anything I was more hungry than ever, hungry and beginning to feel tired.

I refused to stop, however. I would get my freedom even if I had to eat a mountain of dirt and drag myself through it the whole way.

As I forced more and more dirt into myself, pulling it away to expand the area around myself, I became aware of a faint red light that seemed to radiate from within my body. It lit up the small space, but not enough to alleviate the darkness that was driving me to escape. All I could see was a red-tinged darkness that I could only assume was the earth I was digging into.

[Tunneling] automatically acquired.

Suddenly in the silence where only the sound of falling soil existed previously, there was a voice. It was my own voice and yet… somehow it also wasn’t. I wasn’t sure how to explain it other than that, only that it sounded exactly like my own inner voice when I was thinking, but at the same time, it was just ever so slightly off. It was me but it also wasn’t me in a way that made me feel oddly uneasy. Even the way the voice seemed to shoot through me, commanding that I give it my full attention, was entirely different from the very similar sounding voice that I had learned was my own.

It was a distracting and startling enough thing that I completely forgot everything else I was doing just a moment before. In fact, the voice was so shocking that I couldn’t even focus enough to understand what it had said. All there had been was sudden loudness, the words that had come along with it barely making sense to me due to how shocked I was. The only thing I could really make out was that I had acquired something. What had I acquired?

[Tunneling]. The Dungeon Core has acquired the skill [Tunneling].

I… What? [Tunneling]? Dungeon Core? Skill?

What was going on, and why did it make me feel weird and itchy? That was a pretty weird sensation in and of itself. Previously I had just felt the weight of the dirt pressing up tight against me, but that itchy feeling seemed to go somehow even deeper than that. I could feel it all the way right into the very heart of me, and I very much didn’t like it. Being itchy on the inside was just wrong on levels that I couldn’t even properly express.

I decided to take that statement from the weird voice one piece at a time so that I could process it.

Dungeon Core. I could only guess that was me, but I had no idea what it meant. What did it mean to be a Dungeon Core? Hopefully, I would learn soon. Moving on, I had an idea that skills were special things I could perform, but as for [Tunneling]…

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

That was like digging, wasn’t it? Did that mean I could use the [Tunneling] skill to get out of the darkness and into the light?

Would the Dungeon Core like to expand?

There came that voice again, like a shock right through my being. It felt ice cold in comparison to the world around me, forcing me to drop all thoughts and focus on it instead.

If expanding meant using my new skill to get out of here, then yes! Yes yes, a thousand times yes! I absolutely wanted to expand! I focused my entire being into that singular thought, wanting it more than I had ever wanted anything else.

[Tunneling].

There was a flash of red from the very center of my being, lighting up brightly enough that I could now very clearly see the texture of the soil around me, rich and dark as it crawled with thin roots. It registered to me slowly, as if pieces were fitting together to make a larger image, that this had to mean I was fairly close to the surface already, but I didn’t get much time to think on that.

There was a jerking sensation, and for a moment it was as if I were being controlled by an outside force. Every part of me snapped into action, grabbing the dirt just in front of me and funneling it back into myself as I began to furiously eat automatically, without a single thought behind the action. It was pure instinct.

Grab dirt, into self. Grab dirt, into self. Grab dirt…

It took me a moment, but I managed to gain control back over myself and the direction that I was digging. If I really were somewhere close to the surface, then the proper thing to do would be to dig upwards. I was already digging forward, of course, so rather than change direction suddenly and begin [Tunneling] straight up, I instead began to change the angle so that it would slope steadily upward.

It was strange, actually… How did I know which way was up and which way was down in all of this darkness and dirt? It had to be the subtle pull that I felt, the way the soil came loose and sank to the bottom of my tiny tunnel as I dug. Maybe it was just an innate instinct?

Things came loose in the soil, wriggling pink and white things that felt cold and squishy as they were funneled back and into my body. The dirt itself was almost tasteless, though the smell was rich with the scent of decay, and it left me feeling more empty than anything else, but those little squirming things I was finding in the dirt? Oh, those were absolutely delicious. The texture was horrid, of course, but they made me feel less like I wanted to eat everything around me without end. It would take a lot more of them to feed me, but I was fairly sure that I could be content if I could just eat enough of them.

And if eating through the dirt to my freedom also meant I would be eating those things as well? That seemed to be a fair trade-off.

As [Tunneling] ran automatically, letting me focus on things other than the motion of pulling the dirt into myself and swallowing it down, I was able to direct my attention to more important matters.

Namely, dragging myself along after the invisible tendrils that were doing all the work of digging. I didn’t want to be left alone in the darkness while the rest of my body managed to taste the sweet fresh air of freedom! So of course my only option was to devote myself to scooting along behind and into the newly cleared space.

Roots, larger than the thin and spindly ones that I had seen so far, were revealed by my digging along my right side. I had to be close to the surface now, right? I was starting to get really tired now. The little wiggling things in the dirt might have been helping somewhat, but digging through and then eating the dirt itself took up a lot of energy it seemed, and dragging myself along took even more energy than that.

It seemed as if no sooner had I thought that than I broke through to the surface.

Bright, brilliant, and shining light pierced through the darkness and into the small tunnel that I had made. Beautiful, sweet, and deliciously cold air rushed in after it.

I was too busy recoiling in horror, however, to really enjoy either of those things.

As it turned out? Sunlight hurt. Like, a lot. A hell of a lot. It felt like something had stabbed into my tendrils when they had reached into the open air, and as pain attacked my senses I found myself losing my grip. Due to the way I had been digging my way steadily upwards this entire time, I had been fighting against an incline to drag my body, and so now I was sent rolling backward and into the darkness that I had fought so hard to escape.

For a moment I felt myself falling into despair the same way I fell into that hole.

So it was hopeless… The light hurt, leaving the tunnel hurt… I was trapped then, locked here in this darkness for all eternity…

My body bounced against the roots and stones that were just slightly too big for me to shove into myself, sending even more shockwaves of pain through me. When I stopped rolling I could do little more than lay there for a moment, processing things.

Light hurt. That was… I wouldn’t exactly call it good, but I suppose it was good to know in a way. At least I had learned my lesson, and despite all of the pain I did seem to be alive, so that was good. I would have to figure out some other plan for my escape, apparently. At least the air still felt nice.

It filled the tunnel, cooling it off significantly, and leaving behind a fresh and pleasant scent that made me feel more relaxed. Relaxed, but also more hungry.

I was so tired I wanted to fall asleep right then and there. I felt sluggish and exhausted, and the relaxing smell of delicious food combined with the sound of the wind blowing was doing little to help that. My body demanded that I rest so that it could heal, but I was reluctant. I was hungrier than ever, and now that I knew I couldn’t leave my tunnel for whatever reason, I needed to focus on figuring out a new plan.

Though the little wiggly things were delicious, they were sparse and fairly small, and I ate through way too much dirt before I got to them. They were literally more trouble than they were worth. If I wanted to eat my fill then I would need to find something larger, and since I couldn’t leave then I would need to figure out a way to lure that thing down and into the tunnel to me.

As I shook myself more awake I realized that the faint red light that shone from inside had brightened again, glowing against the rough walls of my tunnel.

Well, that wasn’t good. I was pretty vulnerable at the moment, injured from the light and my fall. What if something came digging in after me while I tried to rest and heal? I tried to force myself to relax, the light slowly growing fainter as I did so.

Did that mean the light would go out when I slept? I sure hoped so. I was suddenly aware of how weak I actually was. Weak and pretty stupid, actually.

How come I didn’t know that leaving the tunnel would hurt me? How did I not know that the sun would hurt? It seemed as if there were a lot of things I didn’t know, actually. Who was I? How did I even get here? Where did I come from? What was that voice inside of me? I didn’t even know what my food was supposed to be. How was I supposed to take care of myself when it seemed as if I didn’t even know the least bit about myself?

I woke up and the first thing I did was drag myself into danger, and even though I was pretty sure a good rest could repair all of that… Well, what if things had gone differently? What if I had smashed myself against a rock while falling back down into the tunnel? I didn’t know anything, and knowing that I didn’t even know how much I didn’t know left me terrified. I needed to at least know the basics so I could stop myself from doing something stupid again.

Purchase [Appraisal]?

There was that voice again, lancing through me like ice, as sharp as the light had been and commanding my attention. The me that wasn’t me, that seemed to somehow know things I didn’t.

Would [Appraisal] help me learn more about myself and the world around me? I kind of knew what it meant to appraise things, so it seemed like it might, and the weird not-me voice seemed to know what it was doing…

I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to purchase something, but surely the voice wouldn’t ask if I didn’t have that ability, right? So I focused hard on the single thought of “yes”. I wanted to purchase [Appraisal]. If it could help me then I wanted it.

There was a sudden heavy sensation in my body, followed quickly by feeling almost unbearably light. Whatever I had done, it felt as if I had suddenly lost something, a draining sensation that left me feeling even more exhausted than I already did.

Purchase complete. Dungeon Core has acquired [Appraisal]. Points remaining: 10.

Well, whatever it was that had drained from my body when I purchased the skill seemed to be whatever points were, so at least I had managed to do that. At least I had done one thing right so far, unless…

Had I actually just made a huge mistake? Come to think of it, hadn’t that odd inner voice directed me to use [Tunneling]? Hadn’t that ended with me getting hurt? I didn’t even know what points were, how many I had, or whether or not [Appraisal] would tell me anything I needed to know. So far I seemed to be a complete and utter idiot, so it was probably a safe bet to guess that I had actually just made a horrible mistake. What if [Appraisal] just ended up telling me how many points things were worth?

Before I could even begin to continue to berate myself or test out my new skill to see if it worked the way I feared, I heard a strange noise echo down my tunnel from outside of it. It sounded like something heavy was walking about, shuffling and scraping up there on the surface. Even as exhausted as I was I turned back, away from the entrance, and tried to dig a bit further into the dirt. Maybe if I could cover myself up I could keep from being seen and survive?

My thoughts went blurry and fuzzy. I couldn’t focus on anything, my light growing dimmer rapidly as the world seemed to plunge into darkness again.

I had used the last of my energy. There was no escape from sleep. I could only hope that whatever was outside the tunnel would show me mercy.