Chapter Thirty-Four

Dueling Cores

Toot hit the ground with a grunt. Dev had to give the man credit, the simultaneous creation of six cultivation stones in his body had to have hurt like hell. Toot had barely made a sound. The only reason he’d grunted was because he’d doubled over and dropped to his knees. Dev noticed that his friend was sweating, but it was just a light sheen that covered him.

“I think there’s some internal bleeding,” Toot joked as he rose to his feet. He gently rubbed his forehead with his middle finger, making small circles in the approximate area the crown stone rested in. Dev didn’t want to tell Toot that he had made stone twice the size of a ring’s diamond and placed it in his head. He’d made all the stones larger than normal, and had increased the size of the fear and blood gems as well.

Dev’s eyes could see the stones searching for energy, wanting to fill up with power, and radiating a dim glow of what he would consider disappointment if he didn’t know that each pulse that they emitted was how they searched for raw emotions. He could see where the channels would form in Toot’s body. If his companion really learned how to cultivate, channel, and cycle the numerous emotions he could absorb then he was going to be a force to reckon with all on his own, and the man was already formidable. By Dev’s estimate Toot could probably handle two duck’s all on his own. Once those stones were feeding him then he would probably be able to handle a whole flock of those monsters. He’d seen a duck in action, and those bastiches were vicious. Dev was glad that he was a creature made of mineral and not flesh or he’d be more concerned about the fowl that was currently haunting Goulcrest’s back streets.

“I can feel them searching,” Toot said as he ran his hand up and down the medial line of his body, “It makes me feel hungry.”

“Technically, you are now going to be feeding on emotions, so I suppose that fits. If we get the collectors up and running, I won’t need to drain the power from you, and you get quite the power boost. Most people can only cycle one type of energy, mostly mana. I’m kind of curious to see what you can do once you get the hang of cultivating.” Dev could see that Toot was coming to the same realization that he was.

“Do you realize that my being loaded with pure emotions will do to Nix? She’ll lose her mind,” Toot said with a gleam in his eye.

Ok, so maybe they weren’t thinking the same thing, but he was sure Toot come to the same understanding as him later. After he got the book dealer out of his mind, of course. That left Dev with a handful of things to accomplish now that there was a countdown on the town being attacked.

He couldn’t wait for that! It would provide him with numerous new body and racial templates, weapon designs, magic, mana, and plenty of blood. He needed that more than anything. Dev had considered having Toot purchase a lot of stock animals and draining them, but that wasn’t something that he could do. The blood had to come from something that could pose a threat to another life form. Yes, cattle could be deadly but cows were not predators, and the blood could only come from predator species for it to be effective. So any humanoid blood would be usable because under the right circumstances even a child could be a cold-hearted killer.

Dev didn’t want the townsfolk to die or even suffer, and he was going to do everything he could to protect them and ensure that the only blood he reaped came from the bandits and raiders. He still planned on having fun when they entered his dungeonized zone. Toot could lead the townspeople in their defense while he designed some traps and warriors of his own.

“Toot,” Dev said, “I’m going to remake Chozen and send him to the mayor in the morning. Can you take him there?”

“Sure, I’d love to see the look on his face when he sees his dead aide report for work.” Toot chuckled evilly, “I think the mayor deserves a good scare.”

“He did conspire against the town with the raiders. He wants to kill as many people as he can to get funds from the empire to rebuild, which he plans to divert to his other nefarious enterprises, and bring in his own people to replace the dead townsfolk to make it easier for him to do his suspicious activities out in the open.” Dev made certain to let Toot know that his contempt for the mayor was complete and utter.

“So, what do you plan on doing next? I’m going to start opening up my channels unless you need me to do something?” Toot raised his brows expectantly.

“I’m going to take care of this issue with my soul once and for all,” Dev said resolutely. “We can’t have this keep happening, if I don’t get a reign on it now, it will lead us to ruin. We’ll be exposed and then the overseers will discover us.”

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“Weeelll, I’ll just be over in the corner trying to get a grip on this cultivation thing once and for all,” Toot said with a wince as he was obviously considering what Dev was going to have to do to prevent such things from happening again.

The core focused its attention inward. What he needed to do had to be done internally. Darkness surrounded him and he felt like he was falling. It was a familiar sensation. He had done this before, but he couldn’t recall when that would have been.

He fell for an eternity, and Dev hoped that he hadn’t been overtaken by his aberrant personality traits. Finally, he saw a light that looked like the glow of magma; Dev could hear the cracking of stone and the sizzle of stone melting. Dev came to rest in a rhombohedral lattice system that he perceived to be the size of mountains. This was what he had come to study. The crystalline structure that made him up was powerful and he knew now why Moe had rated him so strong on his hardness scale. The design was impressive if he did think so himself.

Dev turned his vision microscopic and he examined the latticework that made him up. He could see the design clearly and knew that he could replicate it easily. Making himself grow larger was easy. He could have done that at any time. What he had come to do was examine the power that was contained by that crystalline structure. His soul.

He needed to see his soul. The core switched his sight to Kirlian Vision, and almost went blind. If he’d had eyes they would have been burned from his head. The energy’s luminance was all-consuming, and the core was forced to tone his vision down until the power simply shimmered before him. Dev knew that he was missing a lot of detail, but this was one case in which he didn’t need to see everything.

Dev concentrated on the crystal and coaxed it to grow into an exact duplicate of himself that was connected by a bridge of stone a half-inch-thick and a quarter-inch long. It had taken him no time to replicate his stone body in a perfect copy. He was amazed at how simple it had been to make it happen.

With his second body completed he returned his attention to his soul. It was a roiling mass of raw power, churning over and over upon itself like two angry oceans struggling for dominance. Even with his vision’s strength reduced Dev could see the parts of him that were draconic and the parts that had been purified by the core making process. It was like they were immiscible liquids. Fluids that would not mix together; oil and water were a prime example. The difference was that while they were separate there wasn’t a clear delineation of the two energies. They were not completely separate from one another.

The way it looked was that some parts of his soul transitioned from being one or the other. He was not going to be able to simply divide the powers apart. He was going to have to sever his soul, and he had no idea of what that would do to him. There was no guarantee that he could even survive such an event but he had little choice. Either he made the attempt or he devolved into a state of madness dominated by archaic urges from a forgotten life. He had no choice. He and Toot had come too far in a short period of time to let himself fall to his baser instincts.

He had to fight for Toot as much as he did himself. No one deserved life more than his companion. That man had lived an unknowable amount of time in a box, being rewritten and erased on a regular basis. The only thing that he’d had to let him know that there was more to him than the moment he was in was the statistics that the Overseers had kept on his interactions. He knew he had spoken to every core that existed but did not recall an instance of their conversation. Toot deserved to live more than anyone Dev knew, and he was willing to sacrifice his sanity to make that happen.

If he failed then he would never know it. If he died then Toot would be well and truly free, and he could try to run and hide. If anyone could hide from the overseers Toot could. That man had skills and a hundred millennia of knowledge. Dev had faith that his friend would survive.

That certainty obliged the core to move. He couldn’t wait. Dev forced his soul towards the duplicate core he had designed. He had duplicated it down to the molecular level, and he did not doubt that it would be able to contain the power of his soul.

The hard part was coaxing his draconic portions into the second core. It was as if the ephemeral film knew what he planned and resisted. A tug of war came into being between his two soul parts. He could shove almost all of the draconic parts of himself but a small bit of his core-soul went with it, and a trickle of dragon power remained with him.

He came to the conclusion that no matter how hard he struggled to force all of the dragon into the cloned core he was going to lose a bit of his dungeon self and still have a touch of the dragon left in his core. He would always be a little bit dragon, and the other would have a trace of dungeon inside. There was no getting around it.

The two powers pushed and pulled inside the bridge neither gaining nor giving ground. Dev could sense the stone corridor was beginning to fracture, so much energy was not meant to be compressed into one spot, and in spite of the core’s design to contain such power it was failing. There was only one thing to do. He had to snap the bridge in half and hope that there wasn’t a resulting implosion.

The corridor began to glow and hum, and for the first time since he had become a core, Dev knew pain. Actual pain, just as he would have felt if he had a body and something had been trying to cut him in half. The core couldn’t help himself and he began to scream.

He embarrassed himself; Toot had just had something similar happen to him and he’d hardly made a sound. Now the core was wailing like a babe who had lost its mother. Dev didn’t think he simply reacted and the bridge connecting the two cores vanished in a wisp of grey.

The pain stopped instantly, although Dev ached all over. The core sighed in relief and was about to say something to Toot when the world exploded.