The smile was still on the child’s face as they spotted the violet, green, and blue stone that they felt an immense connection to. It was like a band connecting the stone and the child together. The band, more like a bond, seemed to pulse, sending information to the child from the stone.

The child’s eyes furrowed in concentration as the information was sent through the bond.

They were informed that they were something called a dungeon core? That they were the representation of the dungeon itself, as such that they would age as the dungeon grew bigger, and they gained their name when they were older. And that the feeling that they had since they woke up about the area that they were born in, the area that their mana circulated around, that was their territory. They had control of this territory and would eventually be able to manipulate their territory in whatever way they wanted to. Though it did seem that that type of control would be way in the future. The band also told them what their territory was made of, ice, a type of frozen water in the shape of a solid crystalline structure.

With all of this information flooding through the bond, the child, with a tilt of their head, strangely had the desire to explore the ice that was theirs.

This feeling threw the child for a loop. They knew that the ice and all of the very tiny organisms living within it was theirs, but it pulled up something within them. Something that they couldn’t name. Something that the mere thought of letting anything in made them feel queasy.

As the child thought about it for a bit, the feeling that was once oh so prominent in their mind started to sink back into the recess of their mind. With that feeling gone, for now, the child decided that it was time to see all of their territory close up.

They could see through the ice very well and could feel the ice teeming with extremely small beings, so small that they knew they were there but could not see them. So the child put those beings out of mind, and turned their attention to the pull they had to explore every inch of their territory.

First, they had to figure out how to get up and walk. They took a while to gain control of their limbs and to even sit up, but they knew that they would figure it out eventually.

So they decided to try the way they managed to sit up, by leveraging their limbs to push themselves up.

The child then slowly dragged their feet, so their knees were off the ground and started rocking. As they rocked faster and faster, they managed to gain enough momentum off the floor that they ended up in a crouched position.

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

Very slowly, they started straightening their legs and started pulling their hands from where they steadied themselves. The child started straightening their back, and very soon, the child was standing up straight.

With them standing, they started trying to walk.

One step and they had almost lost all of the hard work of actually getting up. But little by little, stumbling with every step, the child became more and more comfortable and confident. After a bit of practice, the child could walk normally, and walk, they did.

With a mission in their steps, the child walked further away from their stone and towards the very edge of their territory.

Each step they walked that got them closer and closer to the edge made the bond stretch and pull. It wasn’t uncomfortable, but it made its existence known to the child.

As the child concentrated on the bond, they still continued walking.

Whack!

Suddenly a pulsing sensation bloomed around their nose, and their attention snapped to what caused this new sensation.

In front of them was a view of the area that was not theirs.

In front of the core was a never-ending expanse of dark navy blue water that calmly lapped against its territory and what they could only assume were other pieces of ice in various ways, just like their own territory. The water slapped gently against the ice as it pushed their territory and its brethren further away from wherever they originally started.

The child stared out at the water. It was almost hypnotizing watching the waves calmly lull around them.

Carefully, as if somewhat afraid to encounter the barrier that originally stopped them, they placed their hand on the barrier, and with some of the circulating mana, they pushed their hand out of their territory.

As soon as their hand breached past the border of their territory, it plunged into the vast expanse of dark navy blue water, and within a second, they pulled their hand and their mana back behind the barrier.

When they stuck their hand through the barrier, they were assaulted with sensations that they have never felt before.

Their hand started tingling, and they, for some reason, had a slightly acidic feeling in their mouth with some bitterness to it. It was different from what they thought of their ice. But they could sense many more tiny organisms within the water than there was within their ice. Their ice though, was neutral and really did not bring any sensation to their mouth. But this expanse of water did.

With more wariness than last time, the child gathered their mana, placed their hand along the barrier that accessed part of the watery blue expanse, and pushed.

The same sensations occurred, but after a couple of seconds, with nothing new happening, the child decided to try to push their boundary out further away from the ice.

The child pushed just like how they expanded to make the ice their territory, theirs. They wanted to do the same, just past the ice.

With that idea cemented into the child’s mind, it felt so, so good. Like they were fulfilling a need they did not know they had. They knew that they had to do this.

So, the child started working with their mana, gathering it, pushing it, and directing it as far as they could sustain before letting it settle into its pattern of circulation. Once this pattern was not changing, the child closed their eyes, took a deep breath and focused on any differences that may have changed their territory in hopes that their efforts worked.

And there were differences.

The territory that the child once owned stopped where the ice stopped. But their new territory ended one metre away from the ice.

And this changed the child’s perspective greatly.