Chapter Five

Let’s Get Down to Business

The world came into view in a blink. First, they were in the nothingness, and then the pair was in a cave. The cavern was dimly illuminated and there was the sound of dripping water echoing off the wall with a steady drip plop rhythm that told Dev that it stemmed from a singular source. The light didn’t seem to come from outside, but rather its ambiance was provided by a small grouping of mushrooms that grew on the periphery of his vision.

Dev noted that he saw in a spherical three-hundred-sixty-degree arc, the sphere itself was 100 yards at its widest points and included everything. This meant that nothing obstructed his vision, if it was within the sphere’s radiance he saw it. Dev could even see into the earth below him. He additionally knew that the location was chilly, but he felt no touch of the temperature at all. It was more of an internal observation; average temperatures might not bother him, but they might have an effect on the inhabitants of his dungeon.

The glowing items were intriguing, and without thinking about it he absorbed them. He hadn’t intended to, he had just mentally reached out and tried to pick the mushrooms up The process wasn’t instantaneous, it did take a few seconds as the mushrooms dissolved into a grey fog that dissipated into nothingness. As the last trace of arcane vapor left the air a prompt appeared directly in front of him.

Congratulations! You have successfully absorbed luminous cave fungus.

Dev was startled, he hadn’t expected to “absorb” anything. All he’d meant to do was examine the strange things. He then observed a pile of very small dark elongated pellets where the cave fungus had come from. He repeated the process, mentally reaching out to pick it up, and watched as pellets vanished in a puff of mist.

Congratulations! You have successfully absorbed bat guano.

Bat Guano? He didn’t know what that was and decided to see if he could snatch away a piece of the ground below him. He was finding the process of absorption fascinating. He focused on a small piece of stone nearby and marveled as it dissolved in a puff of smoke.

Congratulations! You have successfully absorbed a piece of granite.

Dev took stock of the fact that the area he took the stone from left a one inch by one-inch square depression in the ground. He wasn’t sure if he had only gotten that much material because that was what he was focused on or if it was his current limit of assimilation. This time he focused on a large swath of ground and tried to absorb it all at once. Rather than a huge chunk of the cave bottom vanishing, he saw another pit form in the cave floor. This depression was one square foot in size and a foot deep. He noted that he did not get a new notification. Apparently, he only received notices when he absorbed something new. Good to know.

He could still hear dripping, but could not see where the sound was coming from. Dev tried to move, but found that he was utterly immobile. He could not move from his position. That made sense since he had no means of locomotion. Stones tended to remain immobile until gravity acted upon them, and he had no power over gravity. It was something that he could live with, though. The atmosphere of the cave had a hint of familiarity, he felt safe where he was and had no desire to leave. He could stay right where he was and be utterly content.

Since he had absorbed several things, Dev decided to see what exactly he’d found, and started in the order of his discovery. He looked on his screen and saw the words Luminous Cave Fungus. He opened the menu on the item and several things happened.

As he read a wire framework of a columnar base and an ovaloid cap appeared beneath the text. It resembled the funglow but differed in several ways; the mesh was devoid of color and merely showed him the shape and basic design of the fungus. Dev noted that he could rotate the wire framework to see it from any vantage point he desired. Beside the outline was some basic information on the item.

Name: Luminous Cave Fungus

Common name: Funglows

Basic Information: Funglows are inedible by most sentient creatures and are highly toxic. Their caps contain high levels of amanitin. Amanitin damages both the kidneys and liver with the rapidity depending on the dosage. funglows contain inordinate amounts of amanitin and often results in fatalities within the span of half an hour. The onset of symptoms begins five to ten minutes after consumption and includes sweating, intense abdominal pain, uncontrollable diarrhea (Cha Cha Cha), vomiting, and crying.

Each individual funglow produces 50 lumens of light. Funglows will lose one lumen per hour after being picked. The amount of light produced is independent of a funglow’s size. This light is bioluminescent and is the result of the presence of both luciferin and luciferase, enzymes within the cell walls of the fungus. luciferase spurs the emission of light while luciferin is heat resistant; which results in a cold light. This means that light produced by a funglow will not be detected by heat-sensitive creatures.

You may recreate a funglow at the cost of one mana per fungus. You may simply reproduce the fungus as is, add a new skin to the mesh, or mix other properties with it before producing it.

You also have the option to modify the funglow by adding or subtracting traits from the modification list.

You may now produce the toxin Amanitin in a volume of one quart per mana, or allow other creatures that you create to use the toxin.

You may now produce luciferin and luciferase. It can be placed into creatures that you make or produced in a volume of one quart per mana.

Warning: The creation of Luciferine, luciferase, or Amanitin without a proper container to store them in will result in their immediate dispersal. Please locate suitable containment structures before producing such things in volume.

Do you wish to create a funglow now? Yes/No

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Dev had no idea of what the Cha cha cha after the word diarrhea meant and didn’t care. He saw several things of interest. First of all, it seemed as long as something was in his sphere of influence, he could absorb it. Absorption then provided him with information about what he’d just taken into himself. He heeded the warning against producing things without a way to contain it and opted to just try replicating the mushroom. Further, he had no interest in trying to modify the funglow at the moment. This exercise was meant simply to see if he could replicate it.

He had no idea what a new skin meant and felt that changing its physical make-up would defeat the purpose of what he was doing. He wanted to see if he could make the same thing. He could always make changes and populate the world with new types of fungi later if he could recreate the original fungus now. He selected the Yes button and watched as a glowing image of the mushroom came into his view.

Dev noted that he could rotate the image in any direction he wished for placement purposes. He could plant it on the surface or even the wall, he supposed but wasn’t positive. The mushrooms were on the ground when he found them and most likely that was the place best suited for their growth. Where should I put this, he wondered, and patches of red-lit up within his sphere of vision. Dev intuitively knew that the sporadically placed sanguine glowing areas indicated locations that the funglow would grow.

He selected a location very near where the originals had come from and placed the fungus in the red zone. The mushroom did not appear instantly. At first, a grey swirling mist coalesced in the air like a tiny angry storm, swirling around until it formed into a funglow. The process was the exact reverse of his absorption. The little mushroom glowed as soon as it came to life and looked like it had grown in the spot that it now rested. So far as Dev could tell it was as real and alive as the mushrooms that preceded it. The entire method from in-take to production fascinated him.

The process told him a lot. First, he saw three bars, two of which were empty and one was filling very slowly. The bars capped off with a five-hundred and started at zero. The one bar currently had ten points, and it was labeled Mana. The other bars were respectively labeled as Blood and Fear.

Second, he saw that the mana was filling at a rate of one point per three minutes. He attributed that to the way he had halved his mana usage. If he had opted to use mana one-hundred percent of the time he would get a point of mana in faster than he currently was. He wasn’t earning any blood or fear points because he had no one in the dungeon to draw those from. Technically, he didn’t even have a dungeon yet, and that was most likely the biggest factor.

Third, it took no mana for him to absorb the fungi. That was good, because if he had to expend mana just to learn about items then it was going to take a long time for him to get himself situated as a working dungeon. Neither had its absorption added to his mana pool. He wasn’t sure if that was because it did not provide him mana or because it was so small that its power was too small to even notice. For all, he knew he might have to absorb a million fungi for it to produce a single point of usable energy.

Fourth, he saw that he had categories appear after he had dissected the fungi. One was labeled Life Forms. The only thing in that category was the funglow. The next was listed as Poisons, Venoms, and Toxins; the sole item recorded there was the amanitin. The final classification was Biological Advantages/Disadvantages. There were two items listed there, the luciferin and luciferase. Dev noted that he could tap the name of the items listed and the descriptions he’d seen earlier would populate the screen before him.

Dev wondered at how amazing an ability it was. He could just absorb something and then replicate it for a small fee. Well, the costs would be low for trivial things. He was sure making complex items would be exorbitant in their pricing. That was a matter for the future. He also assumed that other categories would appear as he discovered more things.

On a hunch, Dev examined the amanitin and saw a slider bar that read potency. The strength ran from one to ten, and on the one level, he noted that it would cost him one point of mana for one quart. The strength of the toxin was listed as being weak and was able to cause intense abdominal pain, sweating and diarrhea for two hours during which time fighting and walking were impossible. At the tenth level, he could produce an ounce of amanitin for one-thousand mana that was lethal and nearly instant acting. He also saw that as he leveled mana costs would decrease for every five levels he attained.

That meant that even if he had a full bar of mana that he wouldn’t be able to create the level ten amanitin toxin since the mana bar only went to five-hundred, but he could add in either fear or blood points to compensate mixing and matching however he needed. Of course, he had neither of those at the moment anyway.

Dev took stock of his three power bars and noted that they would increase by twenty points when he leveled. That didn’t seem like a lot, but it was better than nothing. Finished with the fungus he looked at the guano.

Name: Bat Guano

Common name: Bat Poop

Basic Information: This is the excrement of the common cave bat. It holds no extraordinary properties but makes for an excellent fertilizer due to its high content of nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium.

The framework that came up for the guano was a very small pellet. Dev found that he could zoom in and out to change his view, but there really wasn’t much he could do, or even wanted to do, with poop.

Do you wish to create Bat Guano now? Yes/No

Dev hastily pushed the no and moved on from the poop. He assumed that meant that he could now produce nitrogen, potassium, and phosphate, but had no idea why he would. He could look up their properties later, for now, he wanted to see about the granite.

Name: Granite

Common name: Granite

Basic Information: Formed from magma, granite is a coarse-grained rock that is composed of quartz, plagioclase, and alkali feldspar. It is a 6.5 on Moe’s hardness scale. It is an excellent building material. Its melting point while dry is 1215–1260 °C, whereas it will melt at 650 °C when in water.

This time, the mesh appeared as a perfect cube, and he noted that there was a tab that read Shape. He opened it up and saw that he could do two kinds of shapes. The first was standard, and when he examined it he saw a list of numerous forms that ran the gamut from cubes and spheres to polygonal designs. If it was geometric he could replicate it in granite. There was also a sliding tab for size that went from a quarter-inch to an almost infinite list of measurements. As expected the mana cost started low and increased the larger the shapes became.

The other tab said sculptures. It was empty. Dev assumed that it meant that he needed to absorb a design before he could replicate it. Then he saw new options appear. One read Duplicate and the other said design. Duplicate was, as he expected, empty. If he absorbed a piece of art then he would have its framework and be able to recreate it, but he had none at the moment. The other tab might allow him to create works of art on his own. He tried to open the tab but a red flag came up indicating that he did not have the art skill. So, creating something was off the table until he got that skill.

He could have examined it more in-depth, but he had caught the absorption bug and was eager to discover everything he could about his new environment. He had nothing but time and could plunge the depths of everything about granite later.

Addicted to the process Dev now scoured his surrounding area for more things to absorb. He found a small spider nestled in a corner. He focused on taking its essence into himself, to break the creature down so that he could take in everything about it, but nothing happened. Flustered, he tried again and got the same non-result as before.

Instead of the spider he focused on the web and lo and behold, the web the spider rested on vanished in a silent puff of smoke.

Congratulations! You have successfully absorbed spider silk.

Dev saw the standard responses appear beneath the announcement, but he didn’t care about that. He could focus on the silk’s properties later. There was a question that was driving him crazy that he wanted to know.

“I wonder why I couldn’t absorb the spider,” Dev wondered out loud.

“It’s because it's alive, and you can’t just go around dematerializing life things,” came Toot’s voice in the distance.