《Dungeon Life》


 Ch1

    I slammed back to awareness, I say back because I was sure that I had been aware before but as far as I could remember there was no before. I had not been and now I was. The knowledge I had said that I must have a before, a past, and that I couldn¡¯t just pop into existence because ¡­ the information slipped away even as I reached for it. This was different than the nothingness of my memory though, I had known something and then it had slipped away.


    Had I forgotten? No forgetting wasn¡¯t like that, wait! How did I know that? I chased the thought down and felt the thread of information pulling away.


    NO! I won¡¯t let you! If I wasn¡¯t doing this something else was, and If something was messing with my head ¡­ I didn¡¯t know what I would do actually my spotty memories didn¡¯t leap to provide anything for this but fear and anger.


    I yanked on the thread of thought and felt give, I pulled the memory towards me, or perhaps pulled myself along it? And found the thief, it felt like a flow of water moving along webs of memory and I crashed into it violently, our minds clashed and thoughts traded between us. Its mind felt alien and strange all numbers and weird connections, it also had an unfortunate advantage over me it seemed to know what it was doing.


    Scattered though my memories were I was fairly sure that I had never battled mind to mind with another creature like this. I did however have a significant size and strength advantage, so even as it struck at me with sharp searing spikes of thought that erupted from its liquid form I was able to retaliate. I tried first to simply bludgeon the little parasite with my form but that just resulted in it slicing into me with its mental blades. Focusing on its next attack I realized that what the ¡°blades¡± actually were was a clear mathematical formula that was impossibly complex held firm as an idea and projected into an attack. While I didn¡¯t know why that would be so I felt that I could copy it and tried, I focused on the relationship between a circle''s area and its radius squared and slashed out with that.


    My Pi blade was tiny and barely reached my foe, who had continued to harry me, poking and slashing at my edges and leaving me feeling queasy and dizzy. When it hit though the reaction was instantaneous, the enemy reeled back in shock before redoubling its efforts, the small scratch on its seemingly liquid form oozed the same stuff that it had been stealing from me with its scratches and stabs, I didn¡¯t know what it was or why it was still bleeding after the attack but I suspected I needed to consume that stuff. I moved forward menacing the Other with a tiny mathematical blade and scooped up the stuff that it was oozing.


    Immediately I was hit by a more potent sense of the fear that this thing had been projecting the entire fight, what¡¯s more I felt that I understood more about the thing. It was young and small but more than that what it was, a fundamental part of its nature was to be afraid, it consumed me not from malice but because instinct told it that I would provide nourishment and strength that it craved.


    I chased it now eating the trail of spectral soup that it left behind and learned more, felt my mind sharpen even as I knew that it¡¯s would be dulling. It was less than an infant, barely more than a zygote in its lifecycle, I was meant to be the yolk of its egg for lack of a better analogy. I don¡¯t think I was supposed to be in the egg at all actually, from what I can tell it should be ready to hatch, or something.


    I kind of feel bad about this now but I know that there is no other choice, this thing, whatever it is will not stop trying to consume me it just isn¡¯t complex enough to reason with.


    The Other lashes out at me this time throwing a chunk of itself laced with rage and fear, the primal emotions slam into me and then fade away, I¡¯m sure that to an undeveloped mind like it that attack is devastating but to me it takes no more than a slight effort to shake off the effects and see that the Other has fallen still that last attack took a lot out of it I imagine.


    I move forward and begin pulling it apart digging into it and restoring the shards of myself that it had already consumed, the ¡°strings¡± of memory that I saw at first are now easy to see as the eviscerated remains of my memories that it had been picking through trying to understand and consume things that were foreign to it. If it hadn¡¯t taken so long I might never have woken up.This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    I can feel my mind grow as I consume the Other, it may have been smaller than me and less cohesive but that did not stop it from being far better than me in a number of areas. Its ability to focus and calculate far exceeded my own and I can feel those skills and others flow into me as I search for the last fragments of information that it took from me.


    I pull the scattered memories in as well and try to piece together what I was/am. There is damage but I¡¯m mostly confident that I was human, lived somewhere nice, had a name. wow that¡¯s vague, so memories are not quite there yet. Was there damage? Is it repairable?


    I look inwards for a time trying to sort out what I am now and was and where I begin and the other¡¯s parts begin but it all seems to be me now and I¡¯m lonely. And lost. And scared.


    Wait, the other was always scared, that was a big part of it right? I look inwards again and find that part of me, shrieking in terror at everything, the base part of me that was always there but sleeping in my human self, it didn¡¯t need to wake up and i¡¯m not sure how to deal with it now that it¡¯s awake and inside me. I don¡¯t want to be afraid all the time, without really knowing how I reach down and into the part of me that was the lizard brain of the other and I press on it. Slowly it moves and I push it into the part of me that was my original lizard brain, feeding this other¡¯s thing to myself. The fear stays but it is changed, a more familiar tremor and quake, wrapped up in the other primal parts of me and controlled by my reason and consciousness.


    I start poking at the others bits and pieces, finding parts that are redundant and feeding them into my own parts.


    --


    I¡¯m not sure how much time has passed, it feels like a long time but there is no way to be sure in this place. I carefully combed through my mind and integrated the parts of the other, taking its best aspects and adding them to my own, the rest I simply consumed and fed to my consciousness. It is weird how my mind feels bigger now, I can almost think in two places at once now and remembering has gotten easier.


    I still don¡¯t know my own name but I can remember my home, an apartment, and a job. I know I had a family but I can only remember my sisters face.


    Well it¡¯s a start, and it doesn¡¯t look like I will be doing anything else for a while. Other than a few pieces of the others mind that I can¡¯t quite understand enough to merge I have nothing to interact with. The space I¡¯m in, if you can call it a space, is a perfect sphere with an opaque shell I can make no mark on.


    --


    Time has passed, once there was nothing to do it just started passing, every once in a while I roused from a sort of torpor and fed on a pool of essence that gathered in the sphere before resting again. Conscious action was not so much restrained as irrelevant, when there was nothing to do I simply rested and waited with infinite patience bored but not suffering in that strange timeless place.


    The essence always went to those parts of me that I couldn¡¯t understand and strange links to them formed with other areas of my mind, to my conscious and memory mostly.


    --


    I snapped out of the haze as something changed, a shiver passed through the shell and then I was aware of my mind no longer.


    I had floated in that space for so long that I was at first surprised that I was no longer a disembodied mind.


    My awareness had not returned to something that was familiar though, the shell that had once contained me was now my outer limit and I felt weight crushing in on me with a feeling that was half claustrophobia and half hunger mixed with the urge to stretch. I pushed out somehow and was shocked when the material all around and above me retreated leaving me in a hollow of rock. I felt the sensation of weight still but it was more bearable now and the feeling of hunger came to the fore and I expanded.


    Expansion was weird, before I had been the sphere and looked out into the space, now I was that space and I knew that I was aware of it in a way I had never been aware of anything before. Information about the composition of the walls and air came to me, though I had no idea where the air could have come from, but then I did know, I had made it instinctively when I created this space to avoid making it a vacuum.


    [Dungeon core birth detected, welcome new one, to the system]


    what

 Ch 2

    A massive wash of information hit me then, a rush of images and numbers appearing and disappearing as fast as I noticed them. None of it seemed to stick and it all served to confuse me. When the rush ended I was left with a strange new connection to what the new parts of my mind recognized as [System]. How did I use this new connection you ask. I have no idea! It sat inert and dead in my mind resisting all efforts to force it to reveal its secrets.


    It was strange to have new instincts, I knew that this new connection was a source of information, and I desperately needed information, but every other part of me was very suspicious of this [System]. The last thing that had been interacting with me mentally had tried to eat me.


    I took stock, I was a crystal ball, in a hole, somewhere underground. The [System] had called me a dungeon core and it had said birth. I was either tripping like crazy, unlikely unless I was totally wrong about what my memories were telling me, or this was real and I needed to take it seriously.


    Not much else for it, if I can¡¯t tell the difference I need to assume that this is real and that my life depends on being successful here.


    My instincts are telling me that I need to expand but I have no idea what I can do beyond that and I remember the instinctive fear of the Other. I¡¯m pretty sure that it was supposed to be the dungeon and not me but that I took its place when I killed it. If that is the case, then the fear it felt was probably a useful level of fear and I need to be very careful about how I proceed.


    I reached out and tried to carve out a bit more of the rock around me and this time paid attention to how it happened, now that I was focusing on it the process made a lot more sense. A sort of energy was stored in my core and I felt one of the new parts of my mind twist it and pull a thin thread out from my core and into the rock around me. When it touched the rock, it split into a thousand fine hairs and began dissolving the rock away. The threads reached into the rock and touched the tiny crystals that made it up, shrinking them and shifting them into new positions, the wall appeared to melt away from me. First a divot then a tube formed as the thread of energy shaped the rock.


    As it was pushed back there was another part of me that reached out with a different sort of energy and pushed it into the new space that I had made, sinking into the walls of the short tunnel and making it a part of me.


    The act of consciously using this energy woke some of my new instincts and I felt a trickle of information rise to the surface. The first type of energy was mana, it could shape stuff make things happen and was generally the way I could interact with the world. The second was anima and it was basically life force, when I expanded I used anima to make the rock and tunnels a part of myself, any tunnel that I made with mana or connected to I could use anima to make a part of myself.


    The more I had connected to myself the more mana I would make, however in order to expand I needed anima and that I could only get by connecting to the surface. I was not sure how that would help, but one of the urges that was nagging at me was to quickly make a tunnel to the surface first.


    Having no reason to doubt that instinct I continued to use my thread of mana to dig a hole, first at an angle, and then strait in a direction that I instinctively knew to be up.


    I pushed into the rock and felt my reserves of mana dropping quickly, my anima was dropping as well but more slowly, the mana was nearly half gone already.


    Finally I sensed a void in the rock near my tunnel after rising 28 meters and curved the path to intersect with it. I broke out into a hollow space and felt a rush of energy that I couldn¡¯t explain but felt like a breath of fresh air surging into me. I sensed a trickle of mana start to gather along the narrow tunnel and felt the thin stream flow towards me and begin to slowly refill my reserves. The anima that I had expended did not seem to be refilling but I still had reserves of that and I would just have to be carful with what I had until I found a way to replace it.


    It was only minutes later when I realized that I could feel something near the entrance, I could not ¡°see¡± more than a few feet from the tunnels end but I could feel tiny particles of something floating into the tunnel and breaking down as it entered my domain. Information began to seep into my mind on what these particles were and what was happening.


    As things entered my domain they began to absorb my mana, if they had too little life force, anima, they would be overwhelmed by the mana and I would break them down and absorb them. Sure enough information on the particles revealed them to be mold spores, as more drifted in I began to get a picture of them in my mind, a dozen different spores had drifted in and I felt that I could spawn my own copies if I wanted. There should also have been a trickle of anima with the absorption but I imagined that a few drifting spores would produce virtually no anima at all, certainly not enough to be felt by me.


    I wanted to test my ability to make things, it still seemed impossible to my rational mind but that new part of me that was a dungeon core told me that of course I could, a tiny spark of anima a dash of mana to construct and I would have some mold. Sure enough with a slight effort my core once again spat out a bit of anima, this time an almost imperceptible amount, and a larger piece of mana, first the mana built the structure of the mold, the cells appeared and multiplied till a 3 inch patch of the ground near my core was covered in a misty white mass of hairs. I was carefully watching the process now and eagerly saw the mold take form and grow out from a spec into a tiny carpet over a few seconds.


    The new patch of mold stayed still once the mana was expended and the spark of anima split still further and settled among the thin filaments and brought them that special spark that made things truly alive in this world.


    I was captivated by my creation, the small patch of life that I had made from nothing.


    In solemn tones I thought ¡°Look out world for I name to be remembered at a later date do claim this place as my own¡± Lightning failed to dramatically crash at my pronouncement.


    --


    Lightning dramatically crashed, Jorson considered this excellent. Not because it was suitable for the moment, though it certainly was, but because it made his job of organizing an ambush much easier. The job was shaping up to be a difficult one and if there was one thing that Jorson disliked it was working for his money. Not that he was bad at his job, he quite fairly considered himself one of the best, but he had long held the opinion that if an assassin was working hard they were doing something wrong.


    This job had all the hallmarks of a hard one but the reward was sufficient to fund a number of retirements to somewhere warm and sunny and he had been unable to resist. The target was the core household of the young lord and lady of the new province of Westrin.


    Westrin was a mostly uninhabited territory that the kingdom of Veld had ceded to their neighbor to the north, the Kishigs, after a costly war fought some 30 years ago. The Kishigs had no use for the land, which would be nearly indefensible to Veld and had no resource that was particularly needed by the Kishigs, and so the land was left leaderless and free. Thirty years later the Kishigs finally found a way to get rid of that land in a sale to their and Veld¡¯s eastern neighbor the kingdom of Durance. Durance was dearly eager to claim a foothold on the other side of the blackthorn mountains and use it as both a foothold for military action and to avoid costly trade routes through the mountains into Vled. Veld could not allow this and had covertly hired Jorson to deal with the lord and lady to nip the budding threat neatly.


    None of this was known to Jorson and would not have mattered if he did know, his task was to kill the group of people moving down out of the pass and the thunderstorm would provide cover that would make this much easier.The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.


    James was seven, he was the son of one of the lord and lady¡¯s scouts and he was tired. Any boy of seven would be tired if he had been through the journey that he had. The long days had worn on him but he kept his chin up and smiled because he was a good boy and mom had told him to. Dad had said she had gone away before they left and James was hoping that she would be waiting when they got to their new home.


    James was a bit afraid of the thunder that was getting closer and hoped that his father would find a place to camp soon, his feet were tired and he wanted to eat, but he would not be complaining, the lady had let him ride in the carriage earlier, and being good meant not complaining and he was going to be good. He saw something on the ground, a coin on a string that Dad always wore around his neck, he must have dropped it when he scouted ahead, James would give it to him when he saw him next.


    Jennifer Du¡¯mon Hethings looked across the carriage at her new husband shyly, the whole affair had been so sudden that she was still getting used to that new name. Jennifer was not a fool, she knew that the life she had left behind was undoubtedly more comfortable than the one that she had before her, and that the years ahead would be hard and trying, but the man across from her was both kind, and intelligent and they had spent the many hours of the journey talking endlessly of plans for taming the lands that they were traveling to and how they would build in this new place a house that would stand with the greatest of their land. Fairy tales and true love, it would seem, might just be real after all she decided.


    Finny quick-shot was not a good man, he said it himself often enough. He was a bandit, thief, and murderer ten times over, he was also cold and moody. The boss had signed them up with a bigshot sasin from the city and seemed completely blinded by the coin he was throwing around. This Jorson seemed very concerned about secrecy and Finny wondered just how many of them were intended to survive to be collecting on that coin.


    The signal to get ready came and he unlimbered his bow and slipped behind the trunk of the pine that he had taken his position behind. Not only would it provide good cover it was doing wonders to keep the rain off, a boon that Finny was grateful for considering the effect of rain on a bowstring.


    The targets came around the bend in the rough road and trudged into the ambush oblivious to the danger, they had had a scout but Finny had spotted him and put an arrow through his back when he tried to warn the caravan, a few of the toughs had dragged the body off the road and they had settled in to wait for the rest of the group.


    He drew back an arrow and felt the goose feather tickle his ear.


    --


    Lichen are awesome, after making a sample of each of the fungi I was left waiting around for something to happen, more mana trickled in but I could tell it would take a long while to fill my reserves, I had about half of my total right now, I was not entirely sure how I knew that but I felt sure about it. A few hours later, I was definitely more resistant to boredom in this form, water had started trickling down the tunnel into my domain, with it there was a bounty of dead leaves, more spores, a few small insects, and finally a bit of moss and lichen. With this new bounty I crafted a new bubble of cave a few feet wide and one tall around the central tube and began to fill it with examples of my new bounty.


    I found making the new area and filling it with my plants, a centipede, and a few beetles very satisfying. Some basic instinct from my dungeon nature was fulfilled by this. I had been thinking about how these dungeons likely interacted with the world I was in. The way they consumed and replicated things made me think that they would basically serve as massive Venus Fly Traps. Luring creatures in and killing them with traps and powerful creatures, I wasn¡¯t sure exactly how that would work yet but the system that had spoken that one time implied that there was some form of intelligent design directly interacting with the world. This would likely provide a shaping guidance to help as time progressed, but I would need to be careful that I didn¡¯t get swept away and lose control.


    I shifted my focus from the small chamber below my entrance to my core chamber, the patch of mold there was wilting away and a close look revealed why, there was nothing to support or feed the mold on the bare rock and I could see the individual cells running out of resources and weakening. I could see what was wrong, the minute reserves of sugars in each cell had run out and the lack of moisture in the air was causing them to wilt.


    I willed a strand of mana out of my core and directed it with the new parts of my mind, carefully materializing new reserves of sugars and water in the various sections of the cells. I backed up and saw the strands of the fungi had inflated again and were now using the sugars to grow some more. It had taken about a minute to do and I realized that there was no way I could maintain this over even my tiny dungeon.


    [criteria met: dungeon core has acquired boon, nurture. Dungeon life will use ambient mana to help sustain themselves.]


    Hello. Criteria? Does it mean what I did with the fungus? I look closely at the fungus once again and see that sure enough tiny sparks of mana are being condensed and directed into the fungus where they supply a slow trickle of the moisture, sugar and other resources that they need.


    The sparks of mana are being directed by the anima in the floor beneath the fungus, the supply looks like it will just barely be enough to sustain the life, and probably not even that in anything more complex or active but that just means that there will be a lot more wiggle room in my ecosystem when I get around to it. The plants will probably be totally satisfied by this and basic insects will probably have a good portion of their needs met.


    I had noticed that most of the mana had been going to replacing water that the fungus was losing to the air and a quick look showed that the anima was actively keeping the air at a low level of humidity, all it took was an effort and the environment shifted, the walls started beading with moisture and the air became damp. It was still pitch black and I had no idea how to go about changing that at the moment and it didn¡¯t bother me, the algae, or the lichen that were now going to form the base of my ecosystem.


    I would have to experiment with semiconductors until I found one that worked as an LED. Then I would have an even more efficient ecosystem, with actual photosynthesis backed by the new [nurture] boon.


    The feeling of water steadily trickling in had increased and a number of unfortunate creatures had fallen down into my clutches, I began expanding the circular chamber I had made a few feet below the entrance to my dungeon making the donut shape into more of a pancake shape around the central shaft, doing this took another chunk out of my anima but gave me some space to work with.


    I made a few smaller chambers off of the main one and added a handful of pillars to give the creatures that would be calling this place home some terrain. First I scattered a number of mosses and lichens around the space, starting them small and scattered and intermixing a number of fungal spores with them, a few divots in the ground were filled with shallow water and instructed to stay filled to that level while a number of insects were scattered in to hopefully get a breeding population up and running.


    Now I settled in to wait, the tiny sparks of energy that were falling in from above were basically nothing, the last few hours had provided enough energy to expand perhaps a 2 cm cube and fill it with a bit of life. As the next few hours passed I watched the insects scuttle around in search of food and shelter, centipedes are predators and the one that I had created was a tad voracious, killing a small beetle and worm in the first two hours before entering a sort of torpor in one of the smaller side room. I noticed that when it killed the other two creatures a tiny spark of anima was released, unfortunately not even half of what I had put into them, but I did think a tiny piece of it was absorbed by their killer before I reclaimed it.


    A few more hours passed, and I was pleased by the growth of the fungus and moss, the algae in the small pools was also doing well and the beetles and grasshoppers are starting to go to town on the plants and fungi. The scattered patches are spreading even as they are being consumed, the plants growing quickly as they have no competition and a constant supply of processed resources to work with.


    I was shocked out of my restful observation when a giant strode into my domain, eight hairy legs slowly dragged the tarantula past the entrance of my abode and down the shaft. The creature did not simply dissolve as it entered, apparently it was big enough to resist the affect that had claimed the other smaller prey. My instincts woke up at this intrusion and the sensation of its progress felt like a prickling wrongness and a tantalizing morsel at the same time. My new senses could feel the anima in this thing, tiny beside my potential capacity perhaps but non the less far larger than anything that had entered so far. The mana in my domain was already straining against this intruder, seeking to overwhelm it and claim it as a meal, the lifeforce of the tarantula was resisting the efforts though.


    It crawled upside down under the lip of the new area and began to hunt, far larger than any of the creatures present it stalked about looking for a meal, I watched helpless as it pounced on one beetle after another devouring my precious experiments as I looked on. After what felt like hours but was probably only a few minutes I felt the defenses of the creature falter and my own mana started to seep in. Before the creature could be dissolved though it retreated back up the shaft to safety, disappearing from my view.


    Well then, our battle has begun Mr. Tarantula, and you shall be crushed beneath the might of my cunning plan! To be thought up as soon as possible!

 Ch 3

    That spider would not be the last, even as I fed mana into the various creatures in my little cave I thought about my new existence. I was the pitcher plant and more would come, I could not afford to be weak, I suspected that my core would be a eagerly sought prize and if not that then the mana and anima that served as my lifeblood would be. I fed on those that I lured to their doom, and when this was animals this did not bother me but the thought of killing people sickened me. If I was going to survive without compromising my morals, I would need to find another way to grow. I had noticed something that had given me some hope though, when I had fed mana into my centipede I had felt its anima and noticed that it was larger than it was when I created it. Some of this was from its meals but at least a part of it was due to the mana that it had been absorbing and converting into food for itself. If creatures in my dungeon could breed and grow without costing anima from me then they would eventually serve as a source of that precious resource.


    The progress on that front was encouraging, while the spider and centipede had both eaten a number of the beetles I had around the rest of the beetles and grasshoppers had survived and were growing incredibly quickly. It made sense considering they were eating a lot and having a constant trickle of energy and nutrients pumped into them at a cellular level. I had underestimated just how fast they would be growing though as already a few of the beetles had mated and laid eggs which were developing quickly and would hopefully hatch soon.


    My ability to effect such dramatic change in the lifecycle of my creatures lead me to wonder how else I might be able to interact with them. I started to create another centipede but this time halted the process before the mana could begin to construct the body instead holding the image in my mind. After a few moments it stabilized and I was able to visualize the creature in question, a centipede about 4 cm long. Slowly so as not to break the image or my concentration I began to poke at it, gently prodding the image with my mind, thickening the carapace, enlarging the legs and spacing them out a bit more, enhancing the jaws so that it would be stronger and thicker. The image was a far more fearsome sight to be sure, jaws easily able to crunch anything in the dungeon.


    I released the energy and watched as the creature was grown into existence from nothing. The anima, slightly more than originally as befitting the larger form, settled into the creature. Immediately I sensed that something was wrong. Firstly the movement that should have been fast and smooth was jerky and stiff the joints unable to function as they should with the changes to the carapace. The new creatures jaws were indeed much stronger but they also couldn¡¯t close all the way and the front claws were permanently raised and useless for gabbing and crawling.


    I suppose I shouldn¡¯t be too surprised that designing a living creature is difficult, but I had just assumed that it would be as easy as all the other dungeon abilities had been. Looking at the pitiful creature I had made I started going over how it could be improved, reshaping the joints would be tricky but not impossible, but restructuring the head and jaw to allow the larger size to work would be much worse.


    Keeping my first experiment in mind I pulled the needed energies from my core and began reshaping the image to fix the problems in the first design, a thinning of the shell around joints and expanding said joints slightly reached a good middle ground in durability and strength. Shifting the jaws down so the new bulges of muscle were lower and could be fully developed gave the thing what looked like a weird buggy underbite but let the jaws function correctly, finally I toughened the very tips of the two front claws and shifted them fully into combat duty.


    The mana swept outwards and constructed my newest creation, the anima soon following to bring life to the hopefully functional creature. The second creature looked off to my eyes, it lacked the menace of the first one or the natural elegance of natural selection, but I hoped it would be effective. Unlike its predecessor this creature moved with all the speed of the original model but with greater attack and defense options, and while likely not an optimal design for a wild creature I hoped this would serve both it and me well in the violent world of my dungeon.


    The process for creating both of these creatures had taken a bit over an hour and even in that time the first centipede had not managed to move out of the small chamber I had made them in. This just served as a chance to see the new creature in action as I had no doubt the voracious killer would descend on its weaker fellow.


    Sure enough after moving around for a short while the new centipede detects the arthritic progress of the botched one and after feeling it with its antenna it pounces and rips into the other. The tough shell slows it down impressively even with the improved jaws and the other centipede even gets a bite of its own in on its attacker. But the equally tough shell of its opponent and its own flawed jaws stop it from doing any real damage and after a brief scuffle it is torn apart by my newest creation. The anima of the creature flows back into me and a drop of it into its killer, I am still not sure exactly what the anima the winners of these contests are getting will do but I imagine it will be beneficial.


    The newest addition to the dungeon begins to consume its victim and I leave it to its work as I survey my creation. The dungeon now consist of the core chamber and a tunnel that curves up and shoots strait for the surface, four feet below where it breaks out into another cave it suddenly widens into a pancake shaped cavern 6 feet wide surrounding the shaft. There are a number of smaller chambers shooting off the main one here and a few divots in the floor are full of algae and water. The wettest sections of the space are covered in a mossy carpet that is spreading rapidly but much of the space is also covered in a number of lichen species. Among all the growth there is of course a scattering of fungus, molds and even mushrooms are starting to appear and give a diversity to the space.


    Through this tiny jungle roam a small population of beetles and grasshoppers, it is this that I want to expand upon, there needs to be a stable population of food both to attract predators so that I can add them to my collection and to feed the predator populations.


    It felt like it had been an enormous amount of time but I somehow knew that it had been less than a day since I had arrived here. The work I had accomplished filled me with a sense of accomplishment but I needed to fill out the life in this terrarium of mine, a number of small species had fallen into me over the last few hours as the trickle of water continued, I imagined that there was a storm going on overhear and that I was benefiting from that. I began scattering a population of mites and other tiny creatures thorough the mosses and fungi and followed them with pill bugs, and a number of new species that I hoped would form the base of the ecosystem. Finally I made a few very small centipedes that would grow into the ecosystem when it could support them.


    I really wanted to get a spider or something but other than the tarantula there had been no arachnids so far. The only thing that I did have that I hadn¡¯t made yet were a few ferns and a woody plants that would grow too slowly without light.


    Light was something that I wanted to figure out, eventually I wanted to be able take advantage of photosynthesis and vision in more complex organisms, so far darkness was acceptable but if people were going to be the threat to me that I feared they would be then they would be able to bring their own light to the party and my creatures would be at a disadvantage if they were not able to use sight as well.


    I desperately wanted to know just how the [system] interacted with people, it seemed like I could expect there to be some weird shit in this world and the fact that I was able to make almost arbitrary changes to the form of a living creature implied that there would be other sources of such alteration. The boon that I had received was also something that I could probably expect to have a hand in how this world worked. As much as I did not want to jump to conclusions it seemed like this world had some mechanics more suited to a tabletop game.Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    For now though my path was simple, grow and stay under the radar and figure out exactly what my abilities were.


    I began to shift through the elements that I was able to create and was pleasantly surprised to find that the upper half of the elemental table was already filled in nicely, either the trace minerals in the rock had provided enough to duplicate or I had always known these as a part of my dungeon nature. I began to make mixes of elements that I remembered as being components of LEDs and using mana to run electrical currents through them. Making electrical currents had turned out to be very easy but getting them to make light was anything but, the only thing That kept me going was that I knew it was possible and that if I could get it working then I would be able to speed the growth of my dungeon significantly.


    I was fully captivated in my work and focused on a small sample of lightly glowing mettle imbedded on the ceiling of my core chamber.


    A sudden burst of energy at the entrance, ten, no a hundred times bigger than the tarantula. ¡°what the hell?¡± I instantly directed my attention to the entrance of my tiny dungeon and found that a large form was draped over the entrance. An arm was reaching down into the passage and for a moment I thought that whoever it was had intentions on my core. When seconds passed and nothing happened, I began to process what my senses were telling me.


    I could feel a heartbeat and lifeforce in the form that I was realizing was actually quite small, a child at least. Beyond that I could tell very little, that same lifeforce was disrupting my ability to see in that area, like it was a kind of interference in the already murky outer reaches of my control. My new ability to determine distance and size was helping here and I was certain that I sensed something here that was entirely absent from the creatures that I had consumed before. Some new type of essence like anima but more ephemeral and sweet, I had an uncomfortable craving for that stuff that was making me want to forget that there was a person attached to this meal.


    And the person had been still for about a minute now and was concerning me, I had been afraid that I was going to be found and killed as a threat or used as a crafting material. I had not been mentally prepared for there to be a kid literally falling into me.


    What the hell do I do?


    There was nothing I could do immediately the anima that was inside this child was about a quarter of what I had in total so far. Just trying to stir a bit of mana in his direction was impossible.


    It took about ten more minutes before I noticed the mana near the arm start to twist and push against the anima in the child.


    No no no no!


    Visions of the other things that had fallen into my reach flashed before me and I was confronted with the mental image of the arm that was currently inside my tunnel dissolving.


    There was a part of me that started to make justifications that it wasn¡¯t my fault and that it was nothing to feel guilty over, I politely told that part of me precisely where it could put that and started to try and pull my  mana back from where it was pushing and swirling up against the kid.


    Unfortunately much like when I had tried to send a thread up near him it proved impossible to control anything near him, I imagined this was some sort of cosmic joke that the limitations of a dungeon that normally kept people safe from them was in this case dooming someone. It was also possible that the ambient mana that was trying to consume the kid was totally out of my conscious control just like my old immune system.


    There was a wavering in the anima of the kid! He had been still all this time and now it looked like the life that had been hanging on was leaving. I could feel as the anima started to leave his body, but as it weakened I had an idea. The thing interfering with my control was the anima, if that was true then there should be a moment when I could interact with the kid before he died and maybe, just maybe save him.


    I watched in agony as the image of the kid, a young boy, became clearer as the lifeforce in him quickly faded, I would only have a small window to do something that I had never done before and had no real idea how to go about doing.


    The last of the anima drained away and I gathered a large chunk of anima and mana and prepared as best as I could.


    The moment came and I struck. The anima had guttered out to a tiny spark and the ambient mana started to seep through the boys skin to overwhelm and dissolve him. I surged up from my core on a wave of power and slammed into the kid, simultaneously expanding into the cavern around him and diving into him. I sent a ball of anima strait at the last remnant of his own programed with my will to aid him in the best ways I know how. To protect him from external mana and to allow him to absorb it and use it himself converting it like my creatures do, healing and energizing him.


    The mana I spread throughout his body and searched for whatever was killing him. I found far too many things. Other than the massive number of scrapes and bruises there was dehydration, extreme fatigue, a host of fractured bones, internal bleeding and a nasty gash on his ribs that looked like it had been put there by a blade of some sort. Whatever had happened to the kid it was not just a mater of him falling down here, I was shocked that he was even alive.


    I got to work with my mana first stopping the bleeding external and in and starting to replace his blood plasma. I didn¡¯t want to risk rejection of blood that I had made but there was no real challenge in adding saline. I pulled up another chunk of anima from my dwindling reserves and spun it into his bones as I worked on repairing them. Working my will again I instructed it to feed mana into his stem cells and provide them with the needed materials to produce new cells when needed.


    Next was the gash in his side, I had already stopped the bleeding but there was still a lot of damaged tissue that needed to be stitched together. I split my focus and the threads of mana danced through the wound sealing it up. All the while mana that had been trying to consume him began to get pulled into his core and be used to refill his reserves of energy, slowly replacing the basic nutrients that he had depleted.


    It was working, the body was healing and that tiny spark of lifeforce remained, as did the strange essence that I had sensed earlier. When I had first dived in it had just begun to fray slightly around the edges but once I poured my own anima into the child it had stabilized, holding on even at the end. I had my suspicions as to what it was but was too focused now to humor them.


    The major wounds had been repaired the bleeding in his torso and skull stopped and the damage to bone and flesh repaired, a large number of bruises and scrapes remained but I wanted to see if the kid would remain stable if I allowed him to sit for a minute.


    I withdrew slowly and waited to see what would happen, the whole process had taken only a few minutes and even with my ability to be incredibly gentile I was worried that the body might go into shock. Nothing happened, the arm still hung and breath continued to be pulled into the boy¡¯s lungs. Now though the mana in the air passes into the boy and was drawn to every part of the body replenishing reserves. The anima in the bones however seemed to be creating mana instead of using the ambient stuff which was interesting and unexpected. The result was his bone marrow was getting all the resources it could handle and producing blood cells both white and red to deal with all the remaining problems in his system. I still know so little about how this world works and every moment I spend not knowing something is a moment that I am in danger.


    The patter of rain on my patient made me take note of the new space I had claimed. I took a moment to take stock of my unplanned acquisition. It was a vertical shaft that was about 15 feet deep and partially covered at the top an overhang and a bush covered most of the entrance where a steady stream of water fell over the edge. And down the shaft onto the kid. This would not help his hypothermia, so I directed my mana to reshape the lip of the entrance to prevent the stream of water. Consuming the water on his body and instructing the walls to heat themselves to something more livable than a wet rock crevice.


    While a dungeon can¡¯t feel physical exhaustion I was mentally drained, I fervently hoped the kid would remain stable and safe because I didn¡¯t know if I had the focus to dive in and start healing again.


    [Criteria met: Dungeon core has acquired boon, Lifeweaver. Dungeon can now interact with and modify its creature¡¯s anima]


    [Criteria met: Dungeon core has acquired boon, Manasurgeon. Dungeon can now shape and modify creatures physically]


    Well those are dumb. I could already do that! I want a refund [system]!


    ¡­


    Well at least the kid I alive for now.

 Ch 4

    Perhaps I had misjudged those boons, much like the nurture boon it wasn¡¯t that they gave me something that I couldn¡¯t do already, rather they made trivial an otherwise difficult task. While I waited for the kid to stir I played around with the anima and physical forms of a number of creatures in the dungeon and discovered what the boons had done. Before it had been a task of serious focus to create a new creature. Now the image of what would be created formed easily and could be manipulated and reshaped without constant effort to hold it together. Anima was also changed, what I had done with the kid to sustain his life with anima was possible with all of my creatures, my experiments had produced a pill bug 5 times the size of a normal one which laid eggs far more quickly.


    Supplying cells and bodies with resources got easier after I got the boon as well though I hadn¡¯t noticed. Sorry [System] I guess you are alright after all.


    The practice was mostly to distract me from my patient, I knew that I needed to give him time to rest and recover and that by any sense that I had he was well on the way to recovery physically. Even the small spark of anima that was all that remained of his lifeforce was slowly recovering, I tried to understand how he was seemingly generating anima from nothing but all I could detect was a slow expansion of his reserves.


    Watching the anima flow through him as it recovered I was entranced by the way that thin filaments of anima would leave the core and trace their way through the body. I noticed that where the filaments moved the cells were stirred to greater function, the improvement was very broad and the effect small, but I suspected that if his reserves were full the kid would be able to recover from injury faster and preform at a higher level than would be physically possible. This was probably a part of what let people survive in a world of magic and monsters.


    The kid continued to sleep and I descended into my core room to distract myself by examining the flow of mana through my dungeon. The claiming of the upper cave and healing the child had drained my anima to a dreg of what it had been while my mana had continued to replenish quickly. I noticed that the mana seemed to be generated anywhere that was claimed, leaking from the walls of the chambers and tunnels. The newly claimed area was quite large however and the mana was pooling at the narrow entrance to the lower chambers and rushing down in a waterfall into the core room. The mana flowed into my core where it became directly usable. The bottleneck around the entrance to my lower tunnel was not a huge issue as I was hardly using most of my mana but I was bothered by the thought that there was waste in my system, if mana was going to be an important resource for me then I wanted to make sure that it was generated efficiently.


    I watched the mana pool down into my core as time passed, idly working on my LEDs and failing to get them to work, I had a vague memory of how they were supposed to work but I was beginning to suspect that there was some crucial trick that I was forgetting. I tried to construct a fluorescent bulb out of quarts crystal and some noble gases and got that to work after a few minutes so I could not imagine what I was missing. But the task was calming and didn¡¯t require anima so I served to pass the time.


    It is often overlooked just how impressive a creature man is when an accounting of such things is made. For it is a sad truth that mere endurance in the face of trials great and many is not an impressive sounding thing when compared to the strength of beast or magic of elder beings. Yet that resilience is uncommon in life, for there are few great dragons who, being beaten, bruised, starving, and chased through the night would have continued on quite so long as young James.


    Still as James awoke in the dark after the exhaustion and fear of the previous day he had hit the end of the endurance that his spirit could muster and fell back on that last and final resort of the human child, a strategy that could only be employed by a few of the worlds creatures.


    His cries rang out in the enclosed space as he vented the grief and fear in call to any of his species that might hear, a gamble of evolution betting that aid would come before predators. If he had been anywhere else in the wilds of this unclaimed land he might well have died, but while no human was near to hear his cries there was one who remembered being such and who was also programed by ancient instinct to respond to those cries. And who in this new and strange form was uniquely suited to provide it.


    Mab was in a foul temper, she always was when the forgotten was driving her to do something unpleasant. The fact that it was spring was not helping, spring meant that her peaceful winter solitude was coming to an end. She had spent the last few days preparing for a Seeing, one of her more common rituals and one that she actually understood fairly well. The noxious potion had finished brewing in the last few hours, a mix of powerful hallucinogens poison and regenerative power that would expose her mind to visions of the future and heal her of the damage that the brew would do as it worked through her. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    The bag of knuckle bones lay beside her as she prepared the last of the tools for the ritual. A circle of white sand lay around her laid on top of a stripe of black charcoal that stood out from the brown dirt sharply. Around her were six bowls of fat and herbs each with a wick ready to burn for the duration of the ritual, what irritated her most about this was how she forgot the recipe for this almost as soon as she finished making it. She hated the feeling of helplessness that came of being the puppet of something bigger than herself but instinctively knew that she had to continue even if she did not know why.


    The preparations done, the old woman lit the wicks and began to chant a spell known only to a few practitioners of the truly ancient magics of the world, though Mab did not know this even as she worked the spell it. The mana, to those that could see such things, began to writhe and twist within the circle sending ripples that were caught by the double circle around the old woman the brunt of the mana was stopped there but such was the power of the working that all around the hut where the old witch lived totems of subtle make began to glow as they dispersed and muted the emanations from the ritual.


    Inside the circle the witch Mab was fading, the magic of the ritual far too much for the weak and frail human to bear. Shaking hands griped the bowl of green-brown liquid and brought it to her lips. As the potent brew disappeared a change was triggered in the magic of the circle as the mana that had begun to flag and weaken was redoubled even as it became more stable and controlled. Now steady hands reached for the bag of bones and emptied them onto the ground before the form of the old witch and something far older than human years looked out from those cold dark orbs and Saw.


    A cackling laugh that was cold and harsh as the crackle and roar of glacial ice and deep as cold black winter nights shook the clearing. Lips pealed back from iron teeth and a savage grin crinkled a weathered face.


    The kid was crying, This should not have been so surprising but it was non the less making it difficult to do much of anything. Even though I could do nothing to calm him down I felt terrible just letting him cry like this. The kid was clearly on the mend as I could see from his anima which had already begun to recover significantly. But he was also not healthy enough to let go yet either, it was night time and he still needed rest, the mana in the air here was giving him energy but once outside I suspected that he would start suffering. I had to assume that we were in the middle of nowhere and give the kid the best chance of survival he could get and to do that I would need to fuel him up and send him to the surface in top shape.


    The rain had stopped in the last hour and I was hopeful that there would be people out searching for the missing kid, if I sent him out in the morning he would have the best chance of getting out and finding them.


    Planning on sending the still weak kid out into the wild felt wrong but getting him back among people was the best plan and anything else would be a terrible risk to his life, one that I refused to take.


    Dawn broke over the trees and the light drove back the creatures of the night even as those of the day began to stir. It was through this wood that an old woman walked, driven by a certainty of purpose that she could not understand and yet trusted. Mab was not in a foul mood this day, she could not say why this would be, the walking was tiring and difficult and the ritual had left her sore as it always did. Yet as she walked along she felt a lightness to her bones that she had not felt in many a long year. She was doing her best in fact to remain in a foul temper as was her practice but was having trouble quite managing.


    ¡°Right proper nasty business making a old woman walk all up and down a mountain like this.¡± the grumbling was a consistent drone as the lady walked.


    A novice woodsman would likely taken her for inexperienced in the wild with the noise she made complaining. An experienced one might notice that her feet were always steady and soft making her voice the only noise she produced. A truly worldly and wise individual though would have noticed something far more important. In a world of magic and creatures of legend where skills could grow to grant legendary strength, when a grey haired person walks with confidence in a place of danger it is wise to leave them be.


    At last though the woman came to a clearing with a few jumbled rocks strewn about and felt the instinct that has driven her loosen its hold and instruct her to wait here and rest until the appointed time had come.


    Alright, it was time, with the jamming effect of the kids anima no longer affecting me since my surgery I was able to carve ladderlike handholds in the shaft to let him out. All he had to do was find them, something I was sure he would do in the growing light.


    The kid had gone back to sleep after a few hours of crying and honestly I couldn¡¯t blame him, I doubt I would have been much better in his place. The anima that he had was still low, but I knew I couldn¡¯t keep him supplied forever. There might not be a limit with what I could do with magic but there was certainly one on my skill. The kid needed to go and find his people who would be far more capable of taking care of him.


    I waited as the sun rose higher and light began to brighten the shaft, I covered the upper level of the shaft in a white quarts coating that reflected light and brightened the chamber. It was still a few minutes until the kid stirred and even then he did not immediately notice the hand and foot holds I had made for him. There was a certain anxious panic that flashed through me when he finally noticed, and with a brave look and a wipe of his nose on his sleeve the kid started to climb up and out of my domain.


    With a final scramble once he reached the top he disappeared from my vision.


    As he did so I felt an urge that I couldn''t repress


    Good luck to you kid, I don¡¯t know who you are or what your story is but I wish you the best.

 Ch 5

    Dungeon life Ch5


    James


    [Boon Granted: Blessing of the Wanderer. A strange blessing from a strange creature, will assist the bearer in a number of ways]


    James nearly stumbled as he climbed out into the light, a boon? The words had seemed important but he wasn¡¯t entirely sure how, he supposed he was wandering maybe that¡¯s how he got a boon? In any case he needed to keep moving, while he didn¡¯t know where he was going staying here wouldn¡¯t work so moving was the best plan. He started forward away from the rock but only got a few feet before he was drawn up short by something very much not expected.


    Leaning back against a bolder in the clearing not twenty feet ahead sat an old woman, leaning on the rock beside her was a gnarled walking stick and her cloths were worn grey and well repaired many times. The woman was still and had her head thrown back and mouth hanging open, for a moment James thought that he might have found a dead body when a sawing noise revealed that the old lady was instead sleeping soundly.


    He had been hoping to find people to help him find his father and the others but now that he was faced with a person he was hesitant. At least they were old and probably not a bandit he reasoned and so walked over towards the woman, stopping ten feet away or so. ¡°Excuse me ¡­ Excuse me ma¡¯am¡± ready to bolt should the woman turn out to be dangerous.


    -----


    That done I turned my attention to the situation I¡¯m in, having used most of my remaining anima helping the kid I am now in the unpleasant situation of having almost none remaining while desperately needing to expand my small terrarium. The trickle of anima that I produced from the small chambers would eventually let me expand and the exponential growth from that would help but there was nothing right now I could do to make that happen faster.


    Well at least being a dungeon has made waiting around less painfully boring, it was at this moment that a number of vibrant lights dropped down into the chamber and bounced around the floor of it. The lights were a handful of golf ball sized orbs that were absolutely packed with vitality, it was a bit hard to judge from the size of them but they provided easily twice the total amount of anima that I had started out with. I looked in shock at my entrance and found the kid waving down saying something before he turned in response to something outside of my range of hearing. He waved once more gave a little smile and then was gone.


    Well ¡­ that, that was a win for team human.


    OK then lets see what we can do with this anima! I dove into the strange orbs and found them similar to my own core, though much less refined and powerful, they were probably from some other creature. I was fairly certain that they were a gift, which meant that there were people that knew what I was in all likelihood and that did not want me dead. This was a relief and while it was no guarantee it felt good to have done something good and have it not come and bite me in the ass.


    I began to think about how I wanted to spend my new riches. I could absorb energy from things that fell into me so why not make that a main tool in my belt. I smoothed the walls of the tunnel leaving only the handholds that I had made to let the kid climb out. Then I added a bit more of an overhang to the top and placed a sticky bundle of sugar just bellow ground level underneath the overhang. Hopefully the smell would attract things that would reach for it and then fall in, if a person fell for such an obvious trap at least they would have a way out.


    The edges of the pit were rounded out and smoothed and with that I left the trap to sit, hopefully it would work but if not then I would at least have something to work on improving. I began to expand the terrarium now adding more pancake shaped chambers connected by vertical tunnels, easy for the bugs that lived there to navigate, I was mostly focused on increasing floor space here so the chambers were all about five centimeters tall and a meter wide, the new spaces soon swarmed with creatures and the first of my dimly glowing LEDs were placed in the largest spaces to add light for those creatures that depend on it.


    Now that I was being efficient with the anima I was able to fit a much larger area for growth in  and the ecosystem began to really flourish, I added the last few species that I had available and even added a few ferns around the edge of the entrance to conceal how deep it was. After spending all my remaining anima I had easily four times the total floor space than I had had previously and could feel a slow drip of anima from the creatures that were living and dying in the chambers.


    The days flowed into one another and once again I was surprised at how the ability to be patient came so naturally to me now. The hours were spent adding new chambers and subtlety shifting how I fed mana into the ecosystem, I focused the energy on the lowest order of life, the strata that could create biomass out of nothing but air and water and that required mostly just the restructuring of used sugar into more fuel to see them grow. There was a definite sense of vitality to the chambers now, the burgeoning life had begun to fill the carrying capacity and now there was real competition between the various forms of life. The new bustle also meant an increase to the supply of anima that I could spend and I was eager to get that sweet sweet drip of growth that this represented. I added on a few new chambers every day and soon I had a steady growth managed.


    The problem was that I was running out of mana, while the chambers I had created were great for producing anima they did very little to create that other key substance. The small chambers seemed to only generate a trickle of the stuff and the small holes connecting them were not enough to let the stuff flow easily, the new chambers had actually begun to require more than they were producing and even my boon which allowed the life in me to use the ambient mana that I had not yet claimed was not enough to feed the growing demand.


    I needed to find a solution to the problem soon or I would be unable to sustain the growth chambers that were so effectively producing anima for me. The answer ended up being troubling, I had previously noticed that the upper chamber that I had claimed was pooling with mana that could not fit down into the smaller tube connecting my core room to the outside world. It seemed likely that larger spaces could create more mana and if I could create a larger tube connecting me to the outside then I would be able to sustain a larger number of growth chambers.


    I wanted to keep my current tube the same size since it lead strait down to me I would only be able to create so much flow by enlarging it. Instead I would make a wide spiral path from the bottom of my pit to my core chamber that would produce and transport a much larger flow of mana than the old tube ever could.


    I started with a small pipe a few centimeters wide, the limited anima that I had available being the primary barrier I faced. As soon as I connected the tube I felt the rush of new mana and knew I was onto something, the small pipe was transporting very little but just that improvement was a huge relief. I spent the next few months simply expanding that tunnel until it was a meter around. The mana I got through it was a river beside the stream that I had been using before, now my every chamber and tunnel practically hummed with mana and I was able to supply the growth chambers easily and more fully than I ever had before. The growth chambers were not my only source of food though, the trap I had set was able to draw all sorts of insects to me, some of them ate and left and others stayed too long and were dissolved by the hungry mana that filled me. There was very little I could do during these times and I found that I was more asleep than awake when there was nothing to keep me interested.


    One of the only really exciting things that happened was that the kid came back, this time I got a good look at who was with him and was pleasantly surprised to see the leathery face of an old woman standing next to and slightly behind him when he visited. What impressed me about the woman was not her face but the thick anima and spirit that seemed to hang about her, it was large and potent enough that my dungeon instincts did not even consider her to be food and instead insisted that I be silent and still in the hopes that she went away. Thankfully there was no need for such fear as before they left the woman handed the kid a leather pouch and he emptied it out into me again. Another batch of cores fell into me and I devoured them as they watched from above, the kid seemed to get a kick out of that.


    A wave and then gone, I felt a surge of warmth, that had definitely been a thank you.


    Time began to pass in a strange lull after that, the little information about my surroundings I got told me that it was winter as drifts piled up around me. the addition of the cores let me greatly expand myself and I doubled the size of my growth chambers increasing the flow of anima bit by bit, that was the main work of that entire winter. As the snow came down I spent all my time adding new chambers to farm anima and add new creatures to my menagerie. Making modifications to creatures was fiendishly difficult but it kept me from slipping into the strange stupor that sometimes took over me and that was to be encouraged. I had collected many types so insect over the summer months and I made it my mission to experiment with every one of them, I was going to depend on these things to protect me one day so I needed to learn how to make the most of them now.


    A few non insects had fallen into me and I was able to reproduce them but I didn¡¯t have anything to do with them yet so I held off, besides it was difficult enough to modify arthropods. The winter months ending was announced by the arrival of the kid, now dressed in a set of new cloths. he once again dropped a bag of cores into me which I quickly devoured. Then he did something very different, instead of walking away once again he carefully placed his foot on the first of the handholds that I had carved for him to get out a year prior and began to climb down into the hole that he had almost died in the year before.


    I have to say the kid had guts, I¡¯m not sure I would have been able to make myself climb down into a dark hole even if I had not been in a near death experience in that very hole just a year before. It was weird having the kid down there again, unlike everything else that fell into me he had no effect on the mana around him other than to absorb a bit of it to feed him. Unlike everything else from outside it was like he belonged here and didn¡¯t trigger the natural defenses of my body, I assumed it was because he had already been overwhelmed once and then inoculated, now he was a part of me as far as my immune system was concerned. There was a suspicious and untrusting part of me that didn¡¯t trust any thing and warned that I needed to be carful, but trusting that part of me would only end in me being forever lonely in a hole.


    I wished I had a way to communicate with the kid, instead I watched as he sat and closed his eyes the old lady saw this and moved away from the entrance and then the kid tried to meditate I think. It didn¡¯t go very well, like most kids he was full of energy when not half dead and he could not manage to resist the impulse to explore for long. After five minutes he was crawling down the dark tunnel that lead to my core room, he made it only about five meters before turning around the first time but before long was heading down again. The next few hours passes with the kid poking around every corner of the dungeon before finally climbing out and walking away. It was only after he left that I realized just how much I missed having someone around, I might not be able to talk but the kid had been chattering away the entire time he was here and the human interaction had done wonders for my sanity. It didn¡¯t hurt that it was a cheerful kid who¡¯s very presence oozed comfort and security to my flighty and fearful new instincts.This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.


    I set in to spend the new anima that I had gotten and try to lure a few larger creatures into my reach for the summer. I wanted to add about twice the anima production that I had now and then create a few extra tunnels leading to my core room with a couple of chambers along the path to create a small maze to reduce the likelihood of something dangerous just walking into my core chamber. As it was now I could add a cubic meter to my volume every day and I wanted to at least double that before I started adding the new chambers and tunnels or this would take forever. I also wanted to add a lot of slits and pockets to the tunnel walls that I had so that I could use them to generate extra anima as well as provide the base for any biome I put there. I made the exposed edges more like natural rock and broke up the edges though so it would look more real.


    I modified the lure I had put out to smell faintly of meat, though I wasn¡¯t sure how effective it would be. Hopefully I could lure in a few predatory creatures to modify into guardians for my deeper levels, I just needed to make sure that there was no risk to the kid if he visited again.


    I spent the majority of the new anima on making new growth chambers around the first tube that I had made. Now the entire length was perforated by tiny chambers and tunnels that practically seethed with life. The larger main tunnel remained smooth for now but I intended to build a network of similar chambers. This upper level of my domain would remain safe for visitors for now but I would be adding some teeth at some deeper point.


    Before I could start in on any of those changes though, the kid returned, just a week after his last visit. There were no cores this time but once again he climbed down and tried to meditate. This time it seemed he was a bit more worn out because he fell asleep after a few minutes and took a good hour-long nap. When he woke up he looked guiltily upward saw that he was unobserved and once again began exploring, he ranged up and down the main tunnel once again making it slightly more than half way before chickening out again and heading back, when his stomach started to growl he climbed out and after waving goodbye disappeared from my awareness.


    As pleased as I was by the visits, I couldn¡¯t help but wonder why they were happening. Clearly the old woman knew what I was or at least had a good idea, but what I knew of dungeons suggested that my behavior was very out of the norm. So why was she sending this kid down into what would normally be a dangerous place? Was it because of what I had done to the kid? Did he need to get the anima topped off? I made a note to check that the healing I had done had not left any problems behind. Was it because she wanted me to do more of what I had done? That at least made some sense, if what I could do was unusual, and I had no reason to think otherwise, then perhaps the anima that I had put into the kid was something to be desired? Perhaps she was trying to secure more benefits for her grandson or something? Time would tell and in any case I wanted visitors more than I wanted the scraps of anima it would take to add a few things to the kid.


    The next week dragged and I discovered that the infinite patience that I had only applied when I was not waiting for something. On the seventh morning though there was the now welcome sense of the burgeoning lifeforce of the kid and the ominous presence of the old woman. Once again the kid clambered down the handholds into the dark and the lady wandered away to do whatever it was she did when her charge was in my depths. The kid was once again sitting in at the bottom of the chamber trying to meditate. I decided to take the time to look over my previous work and was surprised at what I saw. Before the kid¡¯s anima had been like that of the other animals that had fallen into me over the year I had been here, when he had left it had been mostly my anima with his own slowly recovering and filling in the gaps mine had left. Now though his own anima pulsed and flowed through him powerfully, it spun and thrummed around the tight constructs that I had placed in him and I cringed at the waste that I saw.


    I realized now that what I had done had been necessary and had indeed saved his life but had also been very crude and sloppy, it was only good luck that had prevented him form avoiding complications at the hands of my slapdash attempts to save him. Now with the clarity of my boon helping me I could see how the natural flow of his anima was disrupted by my work.


    Overall he was probably more healthy than he would have been without my intervention but there was no denying that my work was subpar. I got to work reshaping my additions, the portion that fed his cells was functioning fine as was but it was separated from his own anima so I tied it into his own structures which would let it grow and shape itself to his needs over time. I did the same thing to the other constructs as well, where the flow was blocked I let it move unhindered and shaped the anima constructs I had placed so that they would merge with his own energy and not conflict.


    Finally before I finished I added just a touch more of my own energy to his and was surprised when it put up resistance. It was like the energy already inside him was pushing back against me as I tried to add this new sliver to the mix, after a brief struggle though the energy settled into place with its intended purpose, it was the most ambitious of my additions but my new skill with anima shaping made it much easier. Essentially it would look for damage to the body and if it detected an open wound it would pinch off any open blood vessels that it found, this too was tied into his own anima and it would not really be that effective until it had built a good image of his body and activated a few times. Still once it had activated a few times it would be much harder for him to bleed out and that was all I could really hope to do for now. I would have to work on making anima constructs in the other creatures in my domain.


    The simple fact of the matter was that I was flying blind right now, the more I grew the more I could experiment. The bottleneck right now was still anima so I set about fixing that, a cubic meter of volume could make many of the thin disks of space that I used as terrariums so I wound the new chambers around the larger tunnel. This way I would be able to expand the tunnel down without restructuring the anima generating chambers.


    The work was relaxing, it took about a day to line a meter of the tunnel with the chambers so I had only extended the work a short way before the kid returned. Again he climbed down and sat for a while in concentration, I took the time to look over the changes that I had made and was surprised when I saw that his total anima had once again grown. The removal of the blockages last week had had a bigger impact than I would have guessed and the integrated parts were now seamlessly merged with his own anima.


    No wonder the old lady kept bringing him back here, she was probably hoping I would undo the crippling damage. If this was how much it grew back just after a few days of my mistakes being fixed I needed to make sure that there was nothing else problematic with my additions. I looked more closely at the changes I had made and smoothed out a few of the smaller problems that I had noticed, then I studied the ebb and flow of the energy as it moved around his body. The stuff seemed to move in strange waves flowing out of his heart with his blood and then back up to his chest along his bones, nerves, and muscles. There were no more obvious problems with what I had done but I was unsatisfied. I didn¡¯t know how any of this worked and I needed to in order to do anything more. I committed to practicing on the dungeon creatures over the next week in order to test some theories.


    Once again the meditation practice ended when the kid got bored and this time I saw that he had a plan. From pockets he began to furtively draw a number of strange things that my dungeon senses helped me to identify as wax, string, and cloth. Making a small torch out of the pilfered supplies he lit them with a flint and began to make his way down the dark tunnel towards my core.


    I was not sure how to feel about this, on the one hand it was frightening to have anything near my core chamber but on the other the kid hardly screamed threat to me. I watched as he made his way down the wide spiral of the tunnel using his tiny torch to light the way. I have to give this kid credit he was showing a lot more wit than I would have been able to when I was his age. He was able to put together a torch and light it so he could explore the tunnel in the cave where he had almost died. If I had been in his place I probably would have just cried.


    He was making good time and I could see that it was because his torch was limited, the small bundle of cloth and wax was burning quite well but I jugged that it would be used up after about ten minutes, enough time to crawl down to my core chamber and back up but not to dawdle.


    Unlike the earlier attempts that were stymied by the lack of light this attempt was encouraged by the time limit placed by the torches¡¯ life. The kid, I really needed a name for him, was hunched over in the sloping tunnel holding the torch in front of him and looking like he was thoroughly enjoying his spelunking endeavor. It was only a few minutes until the glow of my core room was visible to him and after a brief pause he hurried along the tunnel to the goal.


    My core room had changed, it was about a meter and a half tall now and three wide and in the center there was my core held between a stalagmite and stalactite. The gem glowed with a soft inner light that was not bright to look at and yet filled the room with an easy radiance. The first tube I had built was still connected to the chamber by the far wall.


    The mana here was thicker than anywhere else in the dungeon and I could see how it flowed in thick eddies around my core a whirlpool with me at its center. When the kid entered the chamber the mana moving around him took on a different tone to the stuff that normally pooled here and as the streamers of energy flowed to me I could taste the faint whiff of anima on it. It wasn¡¯t that the kid was being drained more like he was converting the raw energy in the air into a more potent blend. I could feel an uptick in the mana I was receiving, and I suspect that having foreign organisms inside me has some positive effect much like a breath of fresh air would.


    The kid looked around in awe for a minute before settling in to meditate down here. I was happy to wait around and see just what he would do. He put out the small torch and sat with his back to the wall between the two entrances to my core chamber. Closing his eyes I he began to breath in slow deep breaths. It was strange to watch him meditate like this because I could see the beat of his heart just as easily as I could see his nose. I watched as his breaths became slower and slower as did his heartbeat and other body functions. I was somewhat concerned but his anima continued to flow unhindered and the mana that he absorbed from the chamber provided for all the remaining needs of his body letting him slow down safely.


    I watched in silent admiration as this kid, who could not be more than 9 at this point, slowed his body functions and began to interact with the mana in the air. With each breath he drew mana into his body and compressed it in his core, as he did so a dense ball of energy began to form just below his diaphragm. After an hour of this the kid broke out of his trance and wiped the sweat that had built up on his brow while he worked. I was impressed, it hadn¡¯t been immediately obvious but the kid was doing more than just storing mana. He was subtly altering the mana into another form that rested there more easily than the ephemeral mana that he had absorbed.


    Before leaving he reached out and casually touched my core before turning and moving away like it had been an idle fancy. I was unable to follow his progress out of my depths though because of the rush of information that passed into me when he did so.


    I understood the importance of that gesture even as I knew that the kid did not, by making his way to the heart of a dungeon the kid had the right to demand a prize from the dungeon that he had ostensibly conquered. However because he had not stayed for his demand, out of ignorance I assumed, an interesting situation had occurred. I was left in an interesting position. The prize that was expected of me had to fulfill certain rules designed to prevent people from abusing dungeons and stop dungeons from abusing people back. I would have been expected to provide a reward to the kid, but I had nothing to give him but anima. And the anima that he could receive at this time was very limited and not sufficient as a reward. I had nothing else to award him with and so was provided with the right to bestow a boon on the kid from the system. But he had not allowed the boon to be granted. This did not remove the right to award a boon that had been granted to me and with the absence of the kid I could award it to any creature that I chose.


    criteria met, select boon


    [Chiton Domain]: arthropods and arthropod monsters are granted the [tough hide] boon automatically.


    [Spatial Compression]: the ability to compress your interior to allow for more space while growing. Starting compression factor is 1.5 in the three cardinal directions. Later floors compression will increase with mana density.


    [Metabolic Enhancement]: The living rate of dungeon creatures is enhanced, creatures grow and live faster in all regards. This increase comes at the price of mana that is used to fuel the greater energy requirements.


    Now that right there is what I call some sweet sweet karma.

 Ch 6

    [Chiton Domain]: arthropods and arthropod monsters are granted the [tough hide] boon automatically.


    [Spatial Compression]: the ability to compress your interior to allow for more space while growing. Starting compression factor is 1.5 in the three cardinal directions. Later floors compression will increase with mana density.


    [Metabolic Enhancement]: The living rate of dungeon creatures is enhanced, creatures grow and live faster in all regards. This increase comes at the price of mana that is used to fuel the greater energy requirements.


    Oh ho ho! Now this is what I¡¯m talking about! Some real juicy stuff here. The three options hung there in my mind, each a tempting and delectable treat of its own, though one clearly standing out.


    The [Chiton Domain] was the simplest of the choices and if my understanding of boons was correct it was a big deal. Every single arthropod would get a boon in my dungeon, if I wanted to make big scary spiders to guard my core this would be huge. It would also lock me in on making arthropods which seemed like it might be unwise. There is a very good reason that bugs only get so big, they are very basic lifeforms and unless I wanted to totally rework them they would be fairly poor guardians. What I was worried about was that if I started to change them too much they might not count as arthropods any more. There was also the arthropod monsters to consider though, that was a promising name but there was no guarantee that it would be useful or available to me any time soon. Right now all I had were mental images of giant ferocious bugs and a handful of oversized centipedes.


    Next of course was the most interesting, [Spatial Compression], and I was desperate to know more about how that would work. If I understood it correctly it would allow me to make things that were bigger on the inside which was all sorts of awesome in so so many ways. 150% might not sound like a lot but if you carried it out into three dimensions then if my new mental math skills were serving me well I would have 3.375 times the total volume to work with. And it sounded like that would grow as I did! If I could get to 3 times compression it would be a massive 27 times more volume to work with. Cubic growth was insane. The unknown for this one lay in how to trigger this change, the boon said that it would increase on later floors but I had no idea that there had been such a thing and had no clue how to make a new one. The second was that there was no guarantee that the mana I generated would be increased with the greater volume of the space. I hoped it would but there was also the possibility that there would only be the same amount of mana generated in that space as there would have been in the ordinary tunnels. Still the pure cool factor of warping space itself was putting this at the top of my list.


    [Metabolic Enhancement] was the obvious choice for an increase in upkeep the growth of life, and therefore anima, would be enhanced in the dungeon, this would let me further speed up my anima production in what sounded like a big way. Never the less this appealed to me less than the others. While more immediately useful and providing a needed bonus this seemed to have less room for growth down the line.


    In the end I felt fairly confident that [Spatial Compression] was the way to go and I selected it with only slight anxiety. When it settled in I understood slightly more about how it would work, essentially magnifying the volume of spaces that I claimed on lower floors but it would not kick in until I made another floor. And I still had no idea how to do that.


    Well nothing to do but keep on building for now, I had a lot of growth chambers to add around the spiral and I needed to get those going. Once those were built I could start in on adding a small maze with obstacles to limit the ease with which my core chamber could be reached. As much as I liked being visited by the kid I really couldn¡¯t allow such vulnerability to continue. Part of the knowledge that I had absorbed when I received the right to bestow a boon from him was that the same person could not duplicate their attempt and receive another boon. I hoped he would not mind the trade for medical care but I desperately needed a leg up.


    I spent the week extending the small chambers along the tunnel, it was boring work but satisfying in its own way. Watching the countless bugs scurry through the tunnels was endlessly fascinating as one species would take over an area and multiply excessively only for their predators to sweep in and cull the herd.


    My pledge to experiment with anima constructs began to pay off as well, the few modified creatures almost instantly beginning to dominate the field. Simply adding anima to them in raw form seemed to improve them in every way, making them slightly larger, stronger, stronger and faster than others of their species. This could be seen in the most successful of the hunters even without my intervention, a couple of the spiders and centipedes had grown to the point where they were trapped in the larger sections now. The growth from the minute wisps of anima that they were consuming with each kill making them too big to fit into the smaller connecting tunnels.This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    The anima constructs that I built into creatures worked differently, these only affected one aspect of the creature rather than all of them but the changes were much more impressive. I placed a construct into a pill bug designed to let it grip surfaces more easily and toughen its hide significantly, the additions added only ten percent to the total anima that the bug had but made it all but invulnerable to any attack from the other creatures, I suspected that the only threats to the bug were the highly stacked creatures that had begun to hunt in the larger growth chambers.


    Then there was the matter of tying the anima constructs into the anima of the creature in question. This was actually more difficult to do though it was more efficient than laying the anima directly on top of the creatures anima. By binding my anima into the native anima the effect would grow with the creature, the intent that I had imbued into the energy would shift and change as the creature did. For example, as the pill bug I made grew I noticed that both its total anima had grown as well as the anima that I had placed into it. The intent that I had put into the anima was that it would harden and toughen the shell of the creature as well as improve the grip of its feet. As it¡¯s anima grew and its physicality followed the anima constructs that I had placed in it grew as well stretching over the larger shell and limbs. I also noticed that there was more growth in creatures that I had improved with anima, though I wasn¡¯t sure if that was just a product of them simply having an easier time surviving and eating or if there was a natural tendency to grow into anima constructs that are placed into a creature, more time will reveal how this will work.


    I can¡¯t help waiting for the return of my visitor, the weekly visits go a long way toward cheering me up in between the long bouts of inactivity. I have dozens of meters of tunnel to line and very little to do other than that. Yet on the seventh day there is nothing, the kid doesn¡¯t show up and I try to restrain my disappointment. A few short visits and I was already expecting them to become regular but for all I knew that was the last time I would ever see the little squirt. The realities of being sessile were infuriating the inability to move was painful to contemplate for a creature that had been born to wander.


    Still though no use weeping over something unchangeable, I would just have to make good use of my time and hope that next week my visitor would return. The one good thing to the week was that I was finally getting to the point where I could expand myself at a reasonable pace. Every day I lined my main tunnel with chambers meters at a time, the growth giving me something to do as I obsessed over little details in my interior. I had a surplus of mana to work with so anything I could do with mana became my focus. I added detail and tiny mosses to the tunnel turning it from a smooth perfect spiral into a more natural looking passage. It was still too strait and even to be natural but that was something to fix when I had more anima to work with for shifting the tunnel.


    I was driven now to add growth chambers to the entire length of my spiral passage and that goal was coming into view quickly. About 5o meters remained before I reached my core chamber and then I would let myself expand a bit and spruce up the place. At the current rate that would take me a bit under ten days.


    The time passed in relatively quickly, I was finding more and more to do with just mana, my LEDs were now able to produce white light quite well and could run off tiny amounts of ambient mana, I placed them in the walls recessed in cracks and pockmarks and lit them with low blues to give the tunnel enough light to see with but not to see well. Perhaps not the most strategically sound idea but I had seen nothing larger than a fox so much as peek it¡¯s nose into me and was beginning to wonder just how likely invasion was. If I did feel threatened I could always turn the lights out before my invader got very far and my mana control faded.


    Once again the kid didn¡¯t show and I was having a hard time not worrying about him. In the interest of maintaining sanity I tried not to obsess about it and keep my focus on other things. Three more days and I had finished my work on the tunnel and could start on making myself into something more complex. Now that I had the chambers built I was able to make about 10 cubic meters of volume a day something that I was very thankful for. My first order of business was to start adding a few chambers to my main spiral, that I could branch off of in the future. I wanted the spaces to feel more like natural caves so as I shifted the growth chambers out away from the growing bulbs I made sure to leave texture and topography on the walls. The irritating thing about volume is that cubic growth is impressive and to make a 3 by 3 by 3 meter room I would need 27 cubic meters of space only 3 of those would be covered by the tunnel that I had already made. Three days to build a small room is quite a bit and even if it was faster than the growth I had to deal with earlier I probably spent more time than is reasonable placing the various rocks throughout the spaces. After four days I had the first of the rooms finished and began to make a branch horizontal and outward from the spiral to add the first of the alternate paths down, eventually only one of a number of paths would lead downwards. After about 15 meters expanding started to require more anima the farther out I went. At the moment I was 35 meters out from the core and twenty above it, the last meter of expansion had been far more costly than the ones before, I had hit a wall in my growth and I could only hope it was directional and not an absolute volume limit.


    I did not get a chance to test this though because I had a visitor, after two weeks the kid is once again climbing down the entrance into my first chamber.