—Luneil—
When the soul inside the Core awoke, it was alone. Embedded in its own personal crater of earth at the foot of a gentle hill.
It wondered how it got there. And why it felt so... hungry.
It looked around. There was nothing but its crater, the grass at the top, and the glimmering of faint blue motes of light dancing in the air.
The last part seemed odd, but the soul didn't dwell on it for too long. It was so hungry, and its facets ached.
Its facets!?
The soul looked itself over. Why was it... cracked?
Spiderweb fractures radiated all over the surface of its body, deep ravines in its otherwise smooth exterior.
The soul felt oddly displeased about that. But it sensed there was nothing it could do about it at the moment. It was so hungry.
The blue motes of light hanging in the air looked more appealing now.
An instinct from an almost forgotten life kicked in. The soul tried to reach out to grab the dancing light, however, the attempt was met was with failure.
The soul decided to wait. Maybe, if it pretended to be a rock, the dancing motes would come closer to investigate. Then it could see if they tasted good.
Rocks were interesting after all. Right? The soul was inside a rock, after all. However, its rock was clear and shiny, and that made it suspicious. The soul peeked out at the lights again, were they coming closer? Then it rebuked itself for almost breaking it's cover by staring at the blue particles of light that it almost certainly wasn't going to eat. Because it was just an average rock. Nope, nothing special about him.
The soul didn't want to alert the blue lights that it wanted to eat them, so it went back to doing its best impersonation of an average rock. Which was hard, because it was shiny. However, it was a true master at rock impersonation. The pebbles scattered around it didn't have half of the soul's talent at pure rockishness.
Rockishness? Was that a word?
It sounded like a title, such as Your Highness.
It was definitely a title. They both ended in ‘ness’.
The soul congratulated itself on its deductive reasoning skills and then summarily anointed itself as Its Royal Rockishness III of Dirty Crater.
The soul risked a quick glance around, if it had legs what it saw would have made it jump back in horror .
Regicide!
A blue mote had snuck up behind it while it was pretending to be a rock.
Before it could realize it didn't have lungs, the soul drew in a deep breath, intending to blow the mote of light away from its royal person.
The mote was sucked into his body and disappeared. The soul did a double take as its mind expanded. Then, it marvelled at how delicious the mana was.
What was it doing? No... what was he doing?
The blue motes were mana. Who in their right mind was scared of mana? He was smarter than that.
The soul went back to doing his best impression of a rock. A shiny rock, of course. Unlike those stupid pebbles around him. They were doing it all wrong. They would never catch mana that way.
To entice the mana you had to adopt an aura of mystery. Nothing screamed mystery and excitement like a shiny rock.
Oh well... more mana for him. He wasn't giving away trade secrets, no way.
He leaned back whistling, or at least tried to. He wasn't certain but he thought it made him as least twice as mysterious.
He waited for a while, however, no new mana approached him.
Something wasn't working. The dancing blue motes made no moves towards him.
This called for drastic action. He tried to breathe in again. This time he was aware he didn't have lungs, but there was just something right about the certain impossible action that allowed him to absorb mana.
Sure enough, the nearest mote of mana accelerated towards him. He luxuriated in the delectable texture, savoring the taste and feel of it as it was absorbed into his body. It was so good. But he was still hungry and he was only eating them one by one, so far.
He began to suck in more mana, all his hesitation vanishing as he pulled in more and more mana, he even manage to reach some at the very top of his crater. It was an effort, but he managed it.
Then, he basked in the sublime feeling of satiation. He no longer felt hungry, for the first time since he had awakened in the crater that was his home.
No longer fixated solely on finding something to satisfy his hunger, he began to examine himself more thoroughly.
His 'body' was a smooth orb about six inches in diameter. Rather than being a 'shiny rock' as he had initially deemed himself, or, more embarrassingly, 'Its Royal Rockishness III', he now realized that he was in fact a crystal. The cracks radiating his surface penetrated about an inch deep, obscuring much of his vision in the area. They obviously weren't normal, judging from the fine bluish mist that leaked out of them into the surrounding area.
He was bleeding mana!
The thought terrified him and he began trying to staunch the flow of mana, however, nothing he tried worked. The best he could do was reabsorb it as soon as it leaked out, but there were so many cracks that it was difficult to sense the mana in the area.
He needed to find a way to stop himself leaking mana. It was an impossible task. He couldn't even see over the crater he was in, how could he even begin to understand the complexities of his magnificent form.
He lashed out around him in frustration, his mind had expanded, only for his body to betray him. The feeling of helplessness overwhelmed him gnawing at him like...
Hunger, sharp and painful.
Where had all his mana gone? The feeling was actual hunger.
He shifted his perspective back outside the crystal and gasped at what he saw.
His crater was pocked with new holes, and one side had collapsed in on itself, exposing a frantically wriggling worm. And what's more he knew.
He knew how to make dirt. It wasn't much, but the implications of it were breathtaking. Anything that he destroyed, he could subsequently remake. All he needed was mana.
He looked around him, sucking in all the mana that drifted within range of him, feeling the sharp pangs of hunger recede ever so slightly.
The worm was still struggling to burrow back into the moist loamy soil. He had half a mind to watch it depart, at least until he noticed the faint goldish blue glow leaking out of it, it looked similar to mana. He instantly decided that its mana was his, and for that, it had to die.
He sent a burst of his own mana at the worm, waiting for it to die. The glow around the worm dimmed, then surged back again. What a disappointment.
He would have tried the same thing again, but he was wary of wasting more mana than he could afford. Instead, he tried pulling mana from the worm’s outer aura.
He found that if he concentrated, he could steal a small amount of mana from the worm’s surface aura, but that was it. It was better than nothing, though.
Unhappy at his inability to kill it, he stopped looking at the worm.
Anyway, there were more living things around here than just one measly worm.
He turned his attention to a blade of grass that had been displaced when one side of his small crater collapsed. The plant also had a small aura of mana as well that could be harvested, although it barely had any effect given the sparsity of mana and the small size of the plant. Dejected at the lackluster results, he carefully destroyed the soil around its roots, depriving the small plant of nutrients and water.
Then he waited.
This time he didn't do a rock impression.
He got bored of waiting, instead, he slowly harvested mana from the air, occasionally destroying pebbles made of different types of rock to obtain their pattern. He learned early on that he needed to destroy the entirety of a small object, or a significant part of a large object if he had any hope of gaining knowledge of how to replicate it. When that was done, he practiced reproducing certain objects, although they all turned out to be miserable failures as he didn't want to make them too large, otherwise they would cost too much of his precious mana.
He had been harvesting the aura of mana leaking out of the dying grass for a while now, noticing how, as the plant's condition deteriorated, the time it took to recover its external aura increased.
He suspected that in the absence of water and soil, the blade of grass was forced to use its mana supply to stave off its imminent demise and that once the mana drain reached a critical threshold, it would die.
That critical threshold was rapidly approaching.
At the moment of its death, a small golden spark was ejected from the grass into his crystal body, within seconds the blade of grass dissolved into a gentle turquoise cloud of mana. It was more mana than he had ever seen. He absorbed it greedily, wondering what that golden spark was and where it had gone.
He began a focused systematic search inside his body. Beyond the inch deep cracks on his surface, his center was unblemished crystal. Within it was the same small dancing spark that he had seen, and something else.
It felt foreign, like something that was not part of him. On edge, he probed it with a strand of mana. Nothing happened. It seemed relatively benign. It was a sphere of peculiarly arranged crystal that was so small it was barely detectable to him.
It seemed familiar, beautiful even. Circles within circles arranged in a mind-bending spiral into the infinitesimal. It reminded him of something, something from before. He wanted to know what it was and was half tempted to destroy it in an attempt to discern its pattern. But an unquantifiable feeling warned him against it. It was too small anyway, his chances of getting any useful information from it were close to zero.
So, he left it alone and shifted his focus towards the spark.
It was so vibrant, so vital. It reminded him of everything alive. Of blades of grass and its roots, and of creatures in the dirt, so small he could barely sense their mana as they died. Most of all it reminded him of a hidden form and fluttering wings, always nearby, always waiting for a long dead friend.
It was a compelling feeling, his mana gathered around him unconsciously, recreating a form he didn't recognize, but thought he knew.
A creature made of distorted air fluttered into focus, flitting mindlessly around his core for a single moment before dissolving back into mana and the golden spark from which it had been formed.
He knew immediately it wasn't enough. He needed more. More mana, more vital sparks.
He began eyeing the grass around the lip of the crater. Hoping it would be enough.
The young Dungeon Core began harvesting mana, straining for every single mote of airborne mana, further than he had ever reached before.
All around the Core, dirt vanished from existence and grass began to die.
The earth was dead and barren all around him. The deepest roots had not escaped him and the earth had been gouged out in a radius of at least twenty inches. Within that circle, not a single blade of grass survived.
A pulsing cloud of gentle blue mana and whizzing golden sparks had rushed into the Dungeon Core, leaving him mentally drooling at the sudden heady influx of mana.
Eventually, however, the intoxicating feeling of mana swirling within him subsided and he set to work in earnest.
Rather than letting the pattern of that familiar winged creature be formed by some unconscious process, he slowly started to sculpt it into being. Pumping mana and a single golden spark into it, his excitement quickening as a winged form resolved, blurry and indistinct.
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He added more mana and its body solidified slightly. Excited, he added more and more until he had the same distorted entity as had been created previously. However, it had not survived. So he added even more mana and almost lost concentration as the body began to shift and blur between a thousand forms. A cloud, an iridescent hummingbird, a set of beating wings, a fairy, a gust of wind. Another thousand forms flashed by in a rush of motion, each form unique and changing too fast to see.
The creature was the wind in all its forms, life breathed into it beyond the simple Dungeon Core's ability to comprehend. Fortunately, its ignorance was irrelevant. It could make this creature, it had its pattern, even if it didn't know where it had obtained it from.
He added some more mana, just to be safe. He didn't want the creature to dissolve back into mana after all the effort he put into it.
Then he released his concentration, finalizing the creature. Mana flowed into the framework he had constructed.
He observed it fondly as its mindless flutterings began, tentatively at first, he knew this creature, somehow. It felt like an echo of a real thing, an image of an ocean with no thought given to its depth. Still, it was alive. It was real, its shifting outline pulsing with a faint aura of mana.
The creature... he searched for its name. It felt so familiar. Sylph. That was it. It was a Sylph.
After watching the Sylph for a few minutes, he noticed something odd. The Sylph's aura of mana had completely faded and the creature was beginning to look weak and sickly, its myriad airy transformations growing hazy and sluggish. Frantic, he pumped more mana into it and the creature's aura resurged in a glorious aquamarine glow.
Something was strange, he had more mana than he expected. Paying attention to his mana reserves he noticed that they were creeping upwards, ever so slowly. He was confused. He was still leaking energy from his numerous cracks. So why was he...
The golden sparks. It had to be them. They must be producing mana in order to sustain living creatures. A word hovered at the back of his mind.
Lifeforce.
It made sense. Too little Lifeforce resulted in insufficient mana recovery to sustain life. The creature could survive for a short time, however, if its inherent mana capacity depleted too far it would gradually sicken and die.
The Dungeon Core focused on the Sylph as it repeatedly bumped its head into the dirt walls with enough force to make him wince in sympathy. It was a good thing its form was so malleable.
He tried to give it a small glimmer of Lifeforce, but the damn creature kept on moving too fast and being a general nuisance.
Exasperated, he tried grabbing it with mana.
Be still damn you!
His attempt to forcefully immobilize the Sylph with mana was forgotten the moment he accidentally transmitted the thought.
The seemingly mindless creature stopped in mid air, fluttering in place, its normally shifting form solidified into that of a winged girl made of blowing smoke.
As if suddenly realizing that it was still moving, it stopped flapping its wings, falling to the ground with a dull thud.
He sighed at the brainless creature's antics, mentally shaking his head as he sent a few sparks of Lifeforce into its body.
He watched the Sylph's aura closely, noticing that while it was still decreasing, it was doing so at a much slower rate.
That wasn't good enough, he needed to at least match the mana recovery imparted by his Lifeforce to the amount of mana used to sustain the small creature. Preferably more, if the creature became injured then a lack of free mana would impair its healing process, maybe even halt it completely.
He looked at the Sylph, however annoying its sheer brainlessness was, there was still an endearing quality to it. It was cute in a pint-sized sort of way. He felt a warm surge of affection go out towards it.
He had intended to slowly add Lifeforce to it, until it was just about able to survive.
Oh well. Plans change. He didn't have much left, but he still gave all the Lifeforce he had accumulated from his grass destroying rampage.
The Sylph sat up blinking, then stopped, realizing that it still hadn't been allowed to move.
The Dungeon Core projected a scowl to the small creature, but inside he was smiling. The creature was adorably stupid.
You can move now, he thought.
The small Sylph zoomed up into the air, doing loops around the Core so quickly that it made his head spin. It was babbling something at the top of its voice, speaking so quickly it was impossible to make out the sounds.
Slow down, will you? I can't hear you. He remonstrated the creature gently.
The Sylph did as instructed.
"Luneil! Luneil! Luneil!" The Sylph's voice was distinctly feminine, bubbling with excitement as she repeated the same word over and over again in so many different pitches and intonations that you could have made a language out of the single statement.
Luneil? The word sounded familiar. Was that... him?
It was. He could feel it. Luneil was his name, in another place, in another body, but it was as much his as the earth and the sky and all the mana in the air between.
Luneil whooped with unreserved joy, then quieted down, feeling self conscious about the outburst.
The Sylph's one word melody changed, "Alive! Alive! Alive!". The single word song was a statement of joy, a giddy exaltation of life and a profession of gratitude deeper that all the dirty craters in the world combined.
It was infectious. He couldn't help it. Luneil whooped again, joining his song to hers.
Luneil continued on like that for a while. Eventually, however, reality started to reassert itself.
He was still leaking mana. He needed to fix his outer shell. And while he had an idea of what to do, he didn't know whether it would work. Either way, he wasn't going to like it.
He set about gathering mana. Unlike his supply of Lifeforce, he still had some left over. That being said, he wanted as much as possible and spent a while absorbing mana from the air.
It was boring work, prompting him to make small talk with the Sylph. That was a mistake.
So... You knew me from before all this?
"Yes," Sylph's form underwent a series of changes, shifting into and out of an approximation of a nod.
Just yes? Nothing else?
The Sylph looked puzzled, then nodded again. "No?" she answered.
Luneil huffed and absorbed another mote of mana from his surroundings.
What do you mean? Are you nodding or saying yes?
The Sylph paused and shifted her form into a flying shaking head, "Yes?"
Urggh. Talking to the idiotic creature was exasperating. She was worse than stupid.
Luneil decided to change tacks. Open ended questions were obviously too much for the creature.
Luneil is my name, isn't it?
She nodded, "Luneil! Luneil!"
Was I a crystal back then?
She shook her head, "No."
Did I die?
"Yes," she stated it in a somber tone.
What happened?
"Dead," she nodded her head sagely, as if explaining to a child.
Luneil gave up and went back to gathering mana.
It was slow going and his desire for conversation was growing again. He just needed an easy subject without any complexity.
What's your name?
That should be easy. No ambiguity there.
"No." She shook her head.
Luneil groaned mentally.
No, you don't have a name? Or, No, you don't want to tell me?
"No," she paused. "Yes."
This was like talking to a rock. Actually it was harder.
Do you have a name?
"No."
Finally, a simple answer. They were getting somewhere.
Do you want one?
The Sylph nodded.
Gust?
"No."
Breeze? Gale? Wind?
"No."
Zephyr?
He waited for a long time, but no response was forthcoming. Was that good? He tried something similar.
Zeph?
"Zeph! Zeph!" she trilled, exuberant, repeating her name like she had done with his.
Luneil tutted in resignation and went back to work. Zeph wouldn't stop repeating her name. But that was okay. He ignored her.
Annihilating small rocks also provided excellent stress relief.
After an hour of Zeph repeating her name, Luneil was satisfied with the amount of mana he had accumulated. Or, rather, he was tired of trying to concentrate with a talkative Sylph inanely babbling the same word over and over again.
Just celebrate silently, will you.
Zeph glared at him but shut her mouth anyway and stormed off in a sulk.
Luneil ignored that. He was too busy preparing himself for what was about to come.
It was best to do it quickly.
He destroyed a small portion of his surface that remained unblemished by cracks, leaving a small divot in his surface about half an inch in radius which slowly began oozing mana into the air.
He waited for what was certain to come.
Heh. Maybe not, that was surprisingly painle—
Gaaaaaaaahhh!!!
Motherfucker! That was horrible. As his mind had finished being overloaded with the last bits of information on his structure, the pain had caught up with him. The agony was nearly indescribable, like he was being dissected with a thousand blades of grass. It hurt like a Sylph flying headfirst into a jagged stone wall at three hundred kilometers an hour.
At least it was over. He knew his own pattern now, although he was hardly relieved. Sure, that part was horrifically painful, but he wasn't sure what he was trying to do would even work.
He prepared his mana and prayed he hadn't made some hideously awful decision.
He started by filling in the part which he had recently annihilated. The pattern was meant to fit the hole perfectly after all.
With his internal structure mapped out in his head, it was relatively easy to smooth out any irregularities where he had replaced the crystal inaccurately. After a little bit of tinkering, the region was once again unblemished.
Then, Luneil moved on to fixing the rest of the cracks, working on smoothing out the fractures that penetrated deepest into his shell first, since they leaked the most mana. He worked from the bottom up, ensuring the cracks closest to his center were fixed first, before dealing with the more extensive surface damage.
There were several areas that were particularly difficult to repair, especially the sites where multiple cracks intersected.
Luneil persevered and finally even the smallest irregularity on his surface had been dealt with and he was once again smooth and shiny. Whole and good as new.
At least, he assumed he was as good as new. He had never actually seen himself before in a state that wasn't riddled with cracks and fractures.
A loud knocking on the surface of his crystal drew his attention outwards. It was Zeph, and, from the particularly sharp and irritated ways her form shifted from jagged edge to jagged edge, she had been doing it for hours.
What? He snapped.
Luneil looked at the new shoots of grass, poking up through the earth around him. He revised his previous estimate. Not hours. Days. Maybe even weeks.
Zeph pointed at her mouth.
Oh. Right... He had told her to be quiet.
Okay. You can speak.
"Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!"
Somehow, Luneil didn't think she was talking about herself. He was forced to agree, especially when Zeph planted a firm kick on his shiny new surface.
I missed you too. He muttered.
Zeph's expression softened. Then she kicked him again. "Stupid," she declared for all the world to hear.
I'm sorry, it was silly of me, I lost track of time trying to fix myself.
"Stupid."
Yes, I know. I should have checked up on you from time to time. But I was so involved in it all that—
"Stupid! Luneil! Stupid!"
Yes, dear. He admitted, slightly surprised at the increased dimensionality to her speech. He suspected she had probably been thinking about what she was going to say while he had been occupied. He felt bad about that. Thinking was so hard for her.
Zeph hadn't said anything since, so Luneil left her to her own self-righteousness and began replenishing his energy by killing more plant life.
As he started to unearth the vulnerable roots, Luneil noticed the increased ease and accuracy of his ability to manipulate mana. What else had changed? He immediately stopped what he was doing and tested the limits of his influence through his favorite pastime. Gathering mana. Well... that and murdering grass.
Slowly sucking mana into his core, he increased the distance from which he absorbed mana.
Within seconds he had passed the twenty inch mark, the previous hard limit on his range of influence.
And his reach kept on expanding, the repairs to his cores had paid dividends and he was now reaping the rewards for the time spent, pain suffered and Sylphs irritated.
He was now harvesting mana from ten feet away, although it was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain, requiring additional focus.
Still, he pushed further and further, edging past approximately fourteen feet in distance, until he could collect no more.
Luneil was filled with more mana than he had ever experienced during his entire short life. Sure, the air contained less mana than the grass, and none of the Lifeforce. However, he had expanded his range by over one hundred and forty inches in every direction. Almost four meters. From his current capacity of mana, he estimated that fixing his core had allowed him to harvest sixty times more mana from the air, at least.
He felt like celebrating, then he realized that the mana concentration in the air surrounding him had to replenish, he couldn’t drain it indefinitely. Mana didn't just spring into existence out of nowhere.
Except it did. Lifeforce seemed to generate it naturally and he now had access to a glut of Lifeforce, simply begging to be liberated from the tyranny of life.
The only issue was that, submerged inside his small crater, he could not see all of the delicious energy containing grass that he knew was out there.
He started by creating dry dirt and packing it beneath him as tight as he could manage. This was his first time creating something on a large scale. Apart from Zeph, of course. It was an extremely odd experience. He knew the composition of the dirt, down to its smallest fraction of dirt, sand and clay, there was even a little gold. However, the actual act of creation seemed as if it were an almost automatic process, only require conscious initiation and the intent to maintain it. Furthermore, while he could alter the amounts of various minerals and organic compounds to a minor degree, he found himself totally unable to isolate the trace materials that helped form it in any significant or usable way. Sure, he could make top quality fertile soil, just as he could make a barren and ashen wasteland to rival Zeph's mental faculties. But, try as he might, he was unable to turn dirt into gold.
Actually, now that he thought about it. What was the obsession with turning base materials into gold? Luneil shrugged, must have been something to do with his past life. The gold inside the dirt was worse than useless. It was soft, heavy, too easy to deform, and above all else, it was scarce as well. Why would someone want more of a useless thing? It was like wanting more politicians.
Hmmm. Luneil didn't know what politicians were. But he didn't like them. They sounded like warriors who would only attack shiny defenseless crystals. What was the point of that? Crystals were awesome, and totally not useless. Unlike gold...
...or politicians.
He switched his focus back the dry dirt, packed tightly beneath him. He checked it had a decent amount of clay and created a crude stone barrier around the cylinder of packed dirt. Then he added water to it.
The clay expanded, pushing him upwards on an improvised plinth of wet soil. As he rose, he added more stone to the sides of his elevating construction, only allowing the upwards expansion of dirt.
After he had risen by an inch or so, he added a small stone platform to the cylinder, providing a place for his body to rest on and destroyed the wet dirt beneath him.
Mana poured into him, completely unexpectedly.
Well... That was interesting. It wasn't exactly the same amount of mana as he had put into creating the soil, but it was close.
Luneil was thrilled with the discovery. He could regain some of the mana used in creating objects. He supposed it made sense. The same thing had happened with Zeph when she had first disintegrated, although he hadn't noticed it at the time.
Furthermore, it gave him a plan. One that he would test out as soon as he could see out of the crater.