Core evolution complete. Welcome back.

Slowly, sensation returned. Sound came first. The wind whistling through cracks in the stone, the chatter of a pair of bird’s nesting high above in the dome. Then touch. I could touch the stone, feel where my influence passed over it, study the tiny imperfections in its structure. Vision was last.

I dismissed the System message and checked my surroundings. I was still at the bottom of the crater, that hadn’t changed. However, my core was no longer cracked. The ugly jagged edge remained where part of my core had been splintered off, but the cracks - they had healed. It didn't hurt anymore. It was a sweet relief to simply exist free of pain. I took a moment to bask in the feeling. Both to appreciate it for a moment and because I didn’t want to check my System menu. I dreaded what I’d see when I opened it.

A message appeared to interrupt my peace.

Welcome to being a Dungeon Core. It has been [data not found] years since the last awakening on [world: Esiliur]. As a result System may be unstable while recalibration takes place.

Please begin class selection urgently. Continue? Y/N

I stared it with a low simmer of anger. It wasn’t the message I was angry at. It was Tamyris. However, she seemed to have disappeared for now, so I couldn’t glare at her. The System message was all I had to take my anger out on, except for inanimate stone.

I ignored the request to continue for now and pulled my vision up and away from my core. Maybe it was immature, but I was tens of thousands of years old, and I’d earned the right to be immature sometimes. Mortals sulked all the time. If I’d had a physical body, I could’ve punched something to let out the pent up aggression. I’d seen mortals do that. It didn’t seem very productive, mostly it looked like it hurt, but they kept doing it, so maybe it worked.

I turned my eye to the temple. It seemed just the same as before.

Actually, perhaps I was too hasty to say the temple was exactly the same. The air was now filled with motes of mana. Or perhaps they’d always been there and I’d not been able to see them before. They drifted lightly, buffeted by invisible breezes, sometimes colliding, afterwards two motes spinning away from each other in opposite directions. Sometimes, they met with enough momentum that instead of repelling each other, they merged into one larger mote. As I watched the mana play out its dance, I allowed myself a moment to imagine that, right now, I was back in the heavens safe from the calamity coming for Esiliur. Talking to my kin, meditating on fond memories. At peace.

Tamyris had taken that from me.

Then I released it. I couldn’t get back to the heavens, not yet at least, and I was going to die if I didn’t do something about it. I could only make myself do nothing for a short while before common sense overrode denial. I had no doubt that people would’ve noticed my fall. Some time had passed since I’d passed out, because the sun was now high in the sky, but whether that meant it had been hours or days, I didn’t know. They could be on their way already. There were very few living dungeons left on Esiliur, but when I’d been young, I’d watched mortals flock to each newborn dungeon. Many only wished to test their mettle against the dungeon, to receive loot and soul power, but there were also mortals who would be happy to tear my core apart to steal the magic that animated me.

With that unhappy thought in the front of my mind, I opened the System prompt again and selected Y. A new menu flooded my vision.

Available Classes:

Class Name

Affinity

Class Description

Catacombs

Affinity: Undead / Skeleton

Raise resilient undead minions that respawn quickly and overwhelm your enemy with numbers.

Ancient Ruins

Affinity: Undead / Lich

Specialise into powerful undead champions and stack unholy buffs to empower them to destroy heavy targets.

Hellscape

Affinity: Fire / Demon

Make use of hard hitting but fragile demonic minions and sygnerise with deadly environmental effects.

Cursed Temple

Affinity: Abyss / Hive

Summon abyssal minions that are devastating in hordes and complemented by powerful debuffs.

Miasmic Pit

Affinity: Poison / Slime

Toxic, poisonous and venomous minions are able to inflict debilitating status effects, and inflict fear with special miasmic environmental effects.

Faerie Garden

Affinity: Nature / Plant

Grow magical plants with a range of utilities and unparalleled adaptability.

I read over the options with growing dread.

I still didn’t want to be a Dungeon Core, and the class list was fast reminding me why. Working with the abyss, or demons, or the undead… nothing could be further from a star’s nature. We were creatures of light, beauty, and life. The undead were bad enough, but demons? The abyss? They were by their very nature destructive. I’d seen what abyss hives did. They consumed everything and left a blight on the world, slowly corrupting the landscape to be more like their own dimension. Demons, at least, only destroyed out of greed and the desire to conquer. The abyss destroyed things simply because it could. I dismissed the first four options off hand.

That only left Miasmic Pit and Faerie Garden. I didn’t know much about slimes - they lived beneath the surface of the world, and so were rarely visible from my normal point of view high in the heavens. That just helped reinforce my choice. I couldn’t imagine wanting to hide from the heavens. The only option that didn’t seem totally repulsive was Faerie Garden. Gardens… I didn’t hate the idea. I didn’t know very much about how plants worked, but they couldn’t be too hard. Could they? Plus, adaptable sounded useful.

Reluctantly, I selected Faerie Garden.

New skill gained

Uncreate: Absorbing plant matter grants you knowledge of the species of plant it came from and the ability to spawn the plant, provided you meet its prerequisites.

New skill gained

Overgrowth (2 mana): Encourages plant life in an area to grow [2 * core level] times faster for twenty four hours.

New skill gained

Shape Matter: Destroy, create and reshape solid matter within your sphere of influence.

Stat bonus: ARC 2+, FTR +1, LCK +1

New boon gained

Green Thumbs: Nature naturally prospers in your area of influence. Plants grow 100% faster. 1% increased mutation chance for natural flora.

New minions available: View now Y/N?

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

I ignored the minions for now and opened my System menu.

Name:

Mizar

Species:

Dungeon Core

Subspecies:

Starseed

Class:

Faerie Garden

Level:

1

Core Integrity:

100%

Mana:

40/40

Mana Growth (daily):

13

Soul Power:

0

Next Level Cost:

250 SP

Stats:

Arcana

3

Fortitude

2

Luck

2

Skills:

Uncreate, Overgrowth, Shape Matter

Spells:

Boons:

Green Thumbs

Artifacts:

The low rate of mana growth concerned me, but perhaps there was a way to improve it in the long term. Or perhaps 40 mana was a lot and I wouldn’t need to worry about it. That seemed unlikely, but I didn’t have a frame of reference for costs.

I turned my attention to my abilities. Uncreate sounded fascinating. I cast around for a nearby plant, hoping to test it, but my crater had obliterated everything living nearby. My area of influence seemed unchanged, a cube twenty feet across, which meant I couldn’t actually reach any of the weeds that grew up through cracks in the stones or the vines that climbed the edges of the chamber.

I almost despaired, and then I re-read the ability. Plant matter didn’t have to mean living plants. Inspired, I found a large splinter of wood from a broken chair, or perhaps it had been a pew, which had been crushed when I landed.

How did I absorb it, exactly? I stared hard at the splinter. Nothing happened.

Uncreate, I tried saying. The wood remained resolutely solid. Absorb. Consume. Nothing.

I stared at the wood with mounting frustration for a long time. No matter what word I tried, or how hard I tried to push my will down upon the wood, it remained solid and inert. The sun rose to its zenith and started to fall again while I tried my best to absorb the wood.

I returned to the System menu and glared at it. There didn’t appear to be any sort of way to ask for more clarification or help. It wouldn’t have hurt Tamyris to leave instructions, would it?

Very well, I was on my own.

If willing the wood to absorb didn’t work, perhaps I had to do something else. I returned to studying the wood, pushing my vision as close as I could. Mortals often pulled things apart to understand them. I imagined gripping the wood and slowly unraveling it like a mortal unraveling a ball of yarn.

Slowly, the wood grew fuzzy, and at last, fell apart, dissolving into pale, almost transparent mana.

New plant available: Ancient Ebony Tree (Hebenus senex)

Success!

It was probably the easiest thing a dungeon could do, but it felt good. I’d figured it out with no no instructions. I let myself have that small victory. I just wished I had someone to tell about my success.

Experimentally, I summoned the tree at the edge of my crater. It appeared slowly, condensing out of mana, growing more real as the mana grew closer and closer together to form solid matter.

The Ancient Ebony Tree was about twenty feet tall. The trunk was a brilliant, shiny grey-black colour, with smooth bark, and branches that grew almost parallel to the trunk, making the tree slender for its height. The leaves were a pale green, large and triangular. I could picture the effect that an avenue of these trees would have.

It was beautiful, but it didn’t help me right now. I tried the same thing as I’d done to the splinter of wood, and the tree unraveled and disappeared again, returning to floating mana.

I checked my mana. It still sat at 40, so either the tree had been free, or it had cost a small increment that hadn’t been reflected in the menu.

I tested it, summoning more of the same tree. When I summoned the fourth, my mana ticked down to 39. Accounting for the first one I’d already dismissed, that meant each tree cost me about 0.2 mana, but the system rounded up. Interesting. I dismissed the trees again, but it didn’t change, so it didn’t look like I could regain mana that way.

My little experiment concluded, I turned my attention to my cube of influence. When I got close to the edge, I could see it was very slowly growing. At the present rate, it would take a full day, or maybe longer, for it to reach the edges of the room. I tested by pressing my influence outwards. At first, the whole cube expanded, which caused my mana to rapidly drop, but gained me about ten feet on every side. I stopped. I didn’t need to expand up or down right now. I just wanted to reach the doors and see what was outside, and mana seemed precious. At least I had one answer, 40 mana wasn’t a lot.

I experimented by expanding my influence in just one direction. It took a moment to get a hang of it, but it worked. Slowly, only one side of the cube began to move outwards. I let it expand about five feet, and then stopped again. What if I could be even more precise about it?

I carefully pictured just a shaft, three feet by three feet, and pressed mana into it. It worked. My influence began to creep along just the shaft. Now I could make much more rapid progress towards the door.

It took an hour or so, and half my mana, but I reached the door. Or more correctly, the empty door frame where it had once stood. I was now able to move my consciousness right up to the edge and peak out of the door of the temple. The sun was just starting to set on the horizon, turning the sky vivid colours.

The temple stood on the top of a sharply rising hill, the land sloping away until it reached a much flatter plain below. Stairs, built of huge flat flagstones worn smooth with age and the passage of many feet, wound up the side of the hill in a zigzag. At the bottom of the stairs, there was a cleared area with a circular shrine in the center. The structure was little more than a roof supported by a colonnade and to the elements. It was illuminated by a soft orange from a fire burning in a large bronze bowl in the center. I’d seen similar structures from my vantage point in the skies. There was no mistaking it for anything but one of Tamyris’ sacred hearths.

For one tempestuous movement, I was tempted to push my influence all the way to the hearth, just so I could tear it down in the hopes of gaining Tamyris’ attention. However, I needed to conserve my mana and I was supposed to be working on defense of my core.

I returned to my core, happy I’d been able to see the sky, but frustrated by my slow progress and how quickly my mana was disappearing. I decided to finally check the list of minions the System message had mentioned.

I could sort using various filters, but right now my opinions were limited enough I didn’t need to.

Plant Name

Climate

Properties

Growing Time

Mana Cost

Damage Type

Bleeding Bloom

Temperate

Wields long, thorny vines which can strike to inflict bleed status.

1 hr

1

Mundane

Ancient Ebony Tree (Hebenus senex)

Temperate

Not discovered.

Instant

0.2

N/A

Mana Bloom

All

Once fully grown, produces 1 mana every 24 hours.

24 hrs

5

N/A

This was more interesting. I immediately summoned one of the Bleeding Blooms in front of the temple door. It appeared as a seed, about the size of an apple, covered in blunted thorns. I focused on a patch of stone and reshaped it into dirt, and then pressed the seed gently into the dirt.

Satisfied with that, and excited to see it grow, I returned to my core and cleared debris away from a flat area on the edge of my impact crater, absorbing the fallen stone and dirt, rotting fabric and shards of wood.

New plant available: Queen’s Robes (Molluscus regina)

New plant available: Goldfruit (Aureus edulis)

I hadn’t expected that, but absorbing the plant fragments mixed into the fabric had gained me two more plants. I put those aside to look at later. For now, I set to work transforming a square twenty feet by twenty feet into soil, and summoned up three Mana Blooms with my remaining mana. I planted them carefully in three five foot quadrants of the square, setting aside one for later planting.

Now I just had to wait for things to grow.

Which was easier said than done. Waiting was hard.