I awoke in this field... or rather, a hole in the ground. Calling my new home a cave would be generous at best seeing how the thing is a shallow-ish concave bowl dug into the base of, at least what I think is, either a large hill or small mountain almost like the site of a fresh meteor impact, just smaller. Getting a rough guess is all I can do given the lip of my bowl does a surprisingly good job at obscuring my view outside.

I guess I left out some important tidbits of info, lemme backtrack for you a bit. For starters I'm leaving these notes carved into stone tablets mostly for my own sanity at this point, but I keep telling myself it's for posterity sake, I have been here for two weeks now and it doesn't look like anyone is ever going to read these but me. provided there is even anyone out here. Second, I'm not in my own body. I was a specimen of fine physique and stature, enlisted in the UNAF; that is the United North American Federation, marine corps, more specifically I used to belong to MARSOC. I'll skip the history lesson and even though I'm pretty sure by the fact the sky is green I'm no longer bound to my non-disclosure of OpSec materials and information, I don't particularly feel like reminiscing over the good ol' days of being a field engineer setting up rows of landmines and stringing up so much concertina wire it'd make an armor regiment cry.

What I do feel like discussing is how I went from 6'4'' brown haired, thick bearded and blue eyes to this... crystal. I'm now just an octagonal cylinder, orange in color with white globs lazily drifting to and fro my ends. like a lava lamp just more expensive looking, and I'm about the size of a twinkie, god I miss snacks. I don't know how I know I'm this glowing rock but I have an intense feeling of self when I look into it similar to staring into a mirror. I’m not sure how I'm conscious either, let alone able to see, think and feel, I can feel everything inside my little pit from the slightest vibration of a gnat entering my bubble all the way up to a small tree that fell over recently into my home after a pair of wild animals uprooted it. I have no idea what they were but it sounded like a mix between a horse and a large cat.

I've found over the last few days I can manipulate the stone and gravel around me, able to make it disappear and reappear and shape it like clay. I spent my entire second day making a chess set out of large pebbles and playing against myself so I wouldn't have to think about my current situation. Games were always a good way to relieve stress after a long day, then again so was shooting a few hundred rounds down at the range on base. Cleaning the firearm was enjoyable too, I have, or at least had, a couple bachelors degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering and I was taking general classes on things like chemistry so seeing the inner working of anything mechanical was always interesting, I don't see that being of much use right here though, now that I'm dead. At least I think I died, I'm not exactly sure but if I am still alive then this is one wild dream.

I was setting up a tank trap in a moderate wooded bottleneck between two steep rocky cliffs, only way in and out of the area short of a heli, and then all I can remember is the familiar crack of being downrange of gunfire, and just nothingness. it's hard to explain the absence of color and light but I wasn't seeing just black, it was like every imaginable color and no color all at once, complicated. Anyway the marksman must have been a hell of a shot given that I didn't feel a thing, Kevlar helmets just don't cut it anymore against high powered rifles but I digress.

I haven't been able to absorb the tree yet, mainly because it's still alive, fading slowly, but alive, weird that I can feel its life draining away and it tastes like a watered down wheatgrass smoothie, yes, its life energy or whatever it is called tastes like wheatgrass but only like a wisp of it. Like someone yelled “WHEATGRASS” from inside the latrine across the barracks from you while there was something loud outside, ya know? I've also found that if I focus hard enough on a subject that I’m confused about or lack information on the knowledge just illuminates In my brain like when you can't remember a word then out of nowhere it hits you, kinda reminds me of a light bulb blinking on above my head like in an old cartoon. I know how to do all these things, amazing things that feel like they would be more at home in a fantasy story or some web novel I used to read as a kid, and they feel natural like breathing, I just have to remember that I apparently know how to do them. Well now I'm just rambling and this tablet is almost out of space, I guess I should finish up. This almost feels like playing a very realistic, extremely complicated VR simulation similar to what we had for training just without an instruction manual, no orders, and no pause button.

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Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

It's been a week since my last stone tablet. I've been up to a lot lately and I figured I might as well write it down, even though since coming here my memory seems to be perfect providing I can remember to remember the thing I want to remember. I can recall everything down to the most minute detail like how that fly over there with a chip out of its left wing and flies with a slight curve to the right from overcompensation, and is now dying close to the edge of my bowl, has entered and exited my little field of influence 37 times over the last 13 minutes. It's just been zipping back and forth seemingly aimless as fly's often do; but it’s now slowly beginning to ebb and wane. It tastes like chewing on a dry sponge, no volume but it fills up your mouth and there's nothing else of real value to note, thankfully it doesn't taste the way I'd imagine a fly would actually taste.

In other news I got bored with my mundane surroundings and decided to spruce my home up a fair bit. I am now sitting upon a stone pedestal made of a tightly twisting Celtic lattices in the center of a room that I connected to the surface with a shallow angled staircase that goes for almost thirty feet and then dug into the wall towards the mountain opening a hallway into an ok sized room maybe fifteen feet wide and long with eight foot ceilings I know its a mountain because I finally found out how to move my point of view, all I needed to do was focus on feeling like I’m floating and imagine there is a breeze pushing my view around whatever direction I need to go in, and the stronger the wind the faster I move. I can’t quite get close enough to the lip to see over into the surrounding area, however I can see the tall stuff like a few trees and the mountain.

Other than the obvious perks of building a bunker under a mountain, I had a very deep instinctual pull to build towards it. The mountain makes me feel safe, so very much more safe than laying among the pebbles with open sky above me. I decorated the walls and ceiling with Celtic knots and accents wrapping up from the smooth rock floor weaving and flowing seamlessly together then back apart until they reach a column in the center of the ceiling where they spiral downward in a double helix and wrap around meeting the edges of my pedestal forming a loose cage around me. I don't really know why I decorated with Celtic designs, maybe it's because I had a sleeve tattoo full of em’ and I enjoy the way they look.

The knots, basically all of them that aren’t my pedestal, are an inlay of common Lowland Oak, and it gives a very pleasant contrast between the polished gray-white-black of the granite. Don’t ask me how I know what kind of tree it is, I just knew its name and general composition after I consumed it. It seemed kind of cliché at first but who am I to argue with the magic matter manipulation powers, not to mention I'm a glowing talking rock. Suddenly knowing and understanding the general makeup of a tree after eating it is hardly the strangest thing that’s come to light for me this month.

Speaking of wood, since I've learned how to make and manipulate it I don't have any real limit as far as amount goes and I'm assuming that's the same with stone. I've easily used ten times the amount of wood in the ceiling alone compared to what I got from the actual tree. the only thing slowing me down is that after materializing a fair amount of materials or just manipulating the matter around me in general, even writing on this tablet, after a while I just hit a hard stop and all at once I felt like I had just done a twelve mile ruck in full battle rattle at the time, and then promptly black out for a short time. After which I feel right as rain. I'm not sure if this is good or bad, probably not a good thing if I have to hazard a guess. This has happened a few times but each time when I wake up my crystal glows with a glossy look and the lava lamp globs are vigorously galumphing between my two ends, compared to when I'm on the verge of passing out it's almost a completely matt orange with no glow and the white lava lamp globes virtually stop moving.

I wistfully asked myself what exactly I am while staring intently at my gemstone, and to my surprise a little line of words popped up, so now I have a Hud I guess, there's not much to it other than putting a word or three above things I focus on. it's not so much a group of text as it is an orange mist that I can read I guess? It's almost like I'm looking at words but if I focus on the mist it disperses and when I return attention to the thing I'm trying to examine it reappears almost like subtitles where you don't have to focus on them but you can still read them but it's all in my head. Yeah, I'm terrible at explaining things. Above me the mist says I'm a level 2 Unnamed rare dungeon Core, which is odd for a number of reasons. primarily for me, maybe not the most important, I'm level 2 which in itself raises lots of questions like how do I gain levels, is it XP based like most games I played in my past life or is it just a time based thing? When did I hit level 2, I never got a notification or any innate feeling of growth, and what the hell even is a dungeon core? it says rare so does that mean there's common and uncommon dungeons? What makes me rare? Ugh, I just had to open this can of worms without a pole to fish with. Also I think I might stop writing these tablets, it's just wasting energy and I should probably keep myself in tip top shape from now on, knowing me I'll probably start doing it again out of sheer boredom eventually.