I needed to work out some way to speak with my neighbor. I always had this slight urge to just smash the core for some reason, and I knew that if I did I would 'become'. It wasn't clear what that was or if that was preferable to the course I had set myself on but here we were. I contemplated talking through the vitapygmy but I was really lacking in the vocabulary department and the magical translation feature didn't seem to work that well in the open air. There was simply a lack of context to the sounds the vitapygmy were making. Combining that with distortion from echoes and not knowing whether they were calling each other by names or complaining about a stubbed toe there wasn't much I could do to fix that problem passively.
I decided my best shot was to go with another mist cloaked stealth mission. The only big change was that there were four guards in the crossroad this time and a sturdier looking fence. The fence however didn't block off the whole tunnel and my volpertinger being a smart cookie played a little trick on the awaiting guards. A surge of mist flowed up the tunnel much like it had the first time and then through the fence which the guards responded to by standing shoulder to shoulder and thrusting their quarterstaffs into it and shouting an alarm. More vitapygmy joined their ranks from all three connecting tunnels weapons swinging and mostly catching empty air although occasionally landing a blow on one of their compatriots. With how hard they were swining it was unlikely to do any real damage to them given their regenerative abilities and was likely more intended to find your hidden monster then to actually deal a significant wound.
To add to the chaos the mist itself would shift on its own in places where there was nothing to disturb it. While looking closely I wound up unlocking another spell, the Mistform Decoy. I had seen it in the fight with the behemoth and it seemed like a purely deffensive spell and needed cloud, fog, or some sort of vapor to be present to function and would cause said mist to move as if something was displacing it. With that in play the volpertinger simply leapt over the fence close to the ceiling and glided over the scuffle beneath them wrapped in spellworked mist to scamper down the tunnel leading to Luciantsss' Core.
The Core room was much the same. The priestess was here but this time was standing as if ready for a fight in front of the gnarled tree. She was on edge which was likely because these encounters were probably usually a 'to the death' kind of thing. I didn't know exactly how the delvers went about harvesting the dungeon but I'm sure that a dozen or so armed individuals storming your home on a monthly basis wasn't the nicest experience. The chamber itself was only slightly changed as it seemed that, much like my Trove, the Garden caused a number of its plants to mature that the vitapygmy seemed to then harvest and then stored the product in the Habitation chamber.
Mist was thin on the ground in this room likely due to an interaction with the local Domain but it wasn't absent and with a modicum of caution and a bit of spellwork my agent made its way behind the tree unnoticed in order to enact phase one of the plan. Climbing into the tree my volpertinger placed a single Cloud Mana Pearl within the Cores' bowl. From this vantage point I could see that the Core was less a bowl and more a hemisphere or more like a dense cracked green geode with only a slight depression in its surface coated with the green syrupy substance that continued to leak out through the many fissures that seemed to run through the entirety of the crystalline hemisphere. There was no noticeable reaction to the introduction of my Mana Pearl or even a real change in the Cores constant droning which wasn't that much of a surprise since, beyond my ability to directly interact with the energy contained inside the pearls, they seemed to be just stone marbles in the purely physical sense.
Step two was going to be a bit risky since I didn't know what was about to happen. I took hold of my Cloud Mana Pearl for support in hopes that if something went wrong I could use it like when I accidently fell into the Mana Sea. I slid my Domain down my monsters paw and just like when entering my own inner space I attempted to 'enter' Luciantisss.
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I was struck with a momentary sensation of vertigo and then I was in a room much like my cloudscape. The ground was twisting roots and mosses the walls were curtains of dense hanging vines. the whole place was run through with vibrating fissures of green energy. Something told me that those fissures were not standard not just the angry energetic way the shifted and tried to pull away from each other but also the yawning shattered gap that made up the upper reaches of the domed interior that simply opened up into the howling twisting Mana Sea over my not-head.
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You have entered a Core Domain! Flee or Die! Live and don't Die!
Defend yourself to become
Kill to become
My not-hand was holding firm to the Mana Pearl outside this place and the rest of me felt like it was being suspended by threads of Domain tethered to my monsters paw and into this place. Beyond that fragile life line I had no power here. If Luciantisss desired it they could drive me out or worse with a simple thought. From what I could see however, they had bigger problems then my snooping around. This was made most evident when I got to the center of the room and found the only non living object in this space. A stone stele and a ghost.
it was a little enheartening that the messages that seemed to really want me to kill, either didn't have the ability or the desire to take away my agency to force the issue. The stele was a replica to the one that made up the head of the hammer outside and the ghost was that of a short man dressed vaguely in robes clinging for dear life to the piece of stone as the howling of the shattered sky above tried to suck him out into its swirling infinity. it would be a simple matter to dislodge him from his perch. His body was made up of green light much like the blue man I had encountered earlier except where that one had felt disconcerting and paranormal this one just felt like a tired old man.
"hey buddy? Are you Lucian?" I shouted
He looked in my direction his faceless green head seemed to only vaguely take notice of me.
"Do you know if there is some way I could help you?"
He shook his head and then suddenly in a disconcerting 'not-movement' he was clinging to a nearby root. Slowly it was pulled free from the ground and just before the man would have been flung out into the swirling void above him he shifted back to his position clinging to the stele. On closer inspection of the object I got a minor feedback from the systems translation feature. it was incomplete and maybe inaccurate but the fact that I got anything at all no knowing a speck of Chinese was astonishing. It said something along the lines of the fastest route, or the quickest way. It didn't turn the letters into English like with the prayer so I felt like I wasn't getting the whole picture but the unreliability of the translation tool was probably also why so many of the notes from the system weren't the easiest to read.
"Do you want anything in exchange for the Mana Pearls under your core? Maybe a way to talk with the vitapygmy?" Kind of at a loss as to what to say next. his only response was a defeated shrug.
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On that note I pulled myself back out and took a moment to reorient myself. I directed my volpertinger to grab up what pearls it could and make its way out. Down under the water, through the roots that were twisted around fragments of Core, they grabbed nearly all the pearls that remained re emerged carefully and after shaking off the thick layer of water sprinted out of their cheeks bulging with green glowing marbles.
The guards were sitting in a loose circle in the crossroads clearly disheartened at their inability to stop your variant monsters entry to their domain. So much so that two of them didn't even bother standing up once they leapt past. You prepared to call up your whole host in case they pursued you but it seemed that they were, if not content, at least reasonably resigned to the current status quo.
You grinned as your winged antlered hare escaped into your territory as another Victory report popped up this time along with a note that your volpertinger had hit level three. upon reaching your core it dropped out a whopping eighteen Life Mana Pearls. No unexpected hitchhikers this time but with nearly the entire pot here and the likelihood that Luciantisss didn't seem to generate them at any faster rate then you made yours so it would take quite some time to reach the hundred I was aiming for.
I was fairly certain I didn't have that long to wait. The delvers were bound to come at the end of the month at the latest and the system itself was getting awfully insistent on the whole kill to become. That was striking me more and more as a hollow threat then an actual imperative.