Blue core, p.1
Blue Core, page 1
part #1 of Blue Core Series
Blue Core copyright 2021 by InadvisablyCompelled.
https://www.inadvisablycompelled.com/
This book would not exist without the tireless work of my editor, Kaorin, as well as the support of both Royal Road in general and my readers in particular.
This story occasionally features scenes of explicit and consensual sex. These chapters are marked.
Cover by KrazeKode
Table of Contents
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 12
Day 20 (Explicit)
Day 21
Day 25
Day 42
Day 55 (Explicit)
Day 56
Day 56 - Shayma
Day 59
Day 61 - Shayma
Day 70
Day 71
Day 72
Day 73 - Ansae
Day 75
Day 76 - Shayma
Day 76
Day 77 - Shayma (Explicit)
Day 77
Day 78 - Shayma
Day 79 - Blue
Day 79 - Iniri
Day 79 - Ansae
Day 80 - Blue
Day 85 - Shayma
Day 85 - Blue
Day 90 - Shayma (Explicit)
Day 91 - Blue
Day 91 - Taelah
Day 94 - Blue
Day 94 - Dyen
Day 95 - Blue
Day 97 - Blue
Day 98 - Annit
Interlude - Ansae Contemplates
Day 99 - Shayma
Day 99 - Blue (Explicit)
Day 99 - Ansae
Day 100 - Annit
Day 100 - Blue
Day 100 - Iniri
Day 107 - Blue
Day 107 - Keri
Day 107 - Iniri
Interlude - Taelah Catalogues Blue (and other stuff happens)
Day 108 - Blue
Day 108 - Ansae (Rashomon)
Day 108 - Annit
Day 109 - Blue
Day 109 - Iniri (Explicit)
Day 110 - Shayma
Day 111 - Blue
Day 112 - Annit
Day 113 - Blue
Day 114 - Blue
Day 114 - Shayma
Day 114 - Taelah
Day 115 - Blue
Day 115 - Ansae
Day 116 - Blue
Day 116 - Iniri
Day 117 - Blue
Day 117 - Harold
Day 117 - Blue, Part Two (Explicit)
Day 120 - Shayma
Day 121 - Blue
Day 121 - Keri
Day 122 - Blue
Day 122 - Ansae
Day 123 - Blue
Day 124 - Taelah
Day 128 - Shayma
Day 128 - Blue
Day 129 - Shayma (Part One)
Day 129 - Giorn
Day 129 - Shayma (Part Two)
Day 129 - Blue
Day 130 - Iniri
Day 130 - Blue
Day 131 - Iniri (Explicit)
Day 131 - Blue
Day 131 - Iniri
Day 131 - Annit
Day 132 - Blue
Day 133 - Blue
Day 134 - Sienne
Day 134 - Blue
Day 134 - Taelah
Day 134 - Iniri
Year 864, Day 138 - Tarnil
Day 134 - Iniri (Part Two)
Day 135 - Blue
Day 136 – Iniri
Day 2
There was a change. A ripple. A discontinuity. A singularity.
None of those words were exactly right, but there were no words for the profound sensation of difference that rippled through me.
I blinked, and too many eyes blinked together. I tried to breathe, and found that I not only couldn’t, I didn’t need to. And strangest of all, superimposed on the confusing shatter of images, but completely independent of any of them, I could see Day 1.
It was just too much. It wasn’t so much panic, or fear, as just too much different, and the mind simply refused for a time.
Eventually, slowly, I managed to put the absurd lot of visual input into good order. It seemed I had many eyes this time, not just the usual two, and I was able to puzzle out something of the situation I was in.
There was an outside. A wooded slope down, with details obscured by branches and leaves. A steep rock face up, reaching to towering, snow-capped peaks, immensely far away. And a rough cave entrance, to an inside.
The inside seemed to be worked, the walls smooth, and the floor clear. But this was not entirely accurate, because proprioception still functioned, to some extent, and some of those walls were me, not just passages cut into rock. The sense of self was fuzzy, but eventually led to one of the few rooms, where there was a grey crystal growing from the floor. That seemed to be the most me, and was one of the vision sources.
And there was a red crystal next to it, the pieces freshly broken where it had been shattered, which I didn’t like at all. If I was one, had someone else just died there? If died was the word. I wasn’t fully certain what had happened, with my memory muddled like that. Just that what I was now was...a thing in a cave.
I spotted my eyes, eventually, camouflaged as whorls of stone. So that was one thing. But there was also the overlay, which was not from any of my eyes. So, Day 2. That meant I’d lost an entire day to some sort of fugue, which was the least of my worries, but I also had some sort of external entity broadcasting into my head, or closest equivalent, which was maybe high up on the list.
I didn’t have any hands, or anything, and it was fortunate my new body didn’t seem to have panic hormones because that would have been an issue, but I could focus. So focus I did, trying to discern anything I could from the overlay. Which changed.
Dungeon Level 0
Core HP 1/1
Biomass 78/500
Stone 52/100
Eyes: 32
Roots: 2
Well. That was different. That was a statblock, my statblock, since I’d already counted the eyes, though not for any game I was familiar with. I didn’t have a good explanation for it, but after considering it for a minute or three, decided an explanation wasn’t important. It existed, and that one hitpoint concerned me greatly.
As did the shattered crystal next to me.
The far wall of the chamber I was in had been destroyed, the rubble attested to that much, so I could invent very easily a scenario where someone came looking, knocked in a wall, and broke the crystal. And now that the wall was destroyed, there was a clear path all the way to the outdoors if someone else came looking. And not much I could do about it. Possibly.
I switched back to the overlay, examining it with mental pokes and prods. And a few bits of extra information revealed themselves.
Eyes provided vision, that much was clear. According to the overlay, roots dissolved stone, providing the stone resource and expanding usable area. Some tests and internal assessment located them at the rear of my chamber. And most importantly of all, I found a way to shift the overlay into a build/reclaim menu.
Okay. Now I had some tiny idea of things, though not much of one. No whys answered, or hows, or whats. But I could at least manipulate my environment a bit.
Architecture, Traps, Bait, Features, Breeding.
The last one was so strange it seemed out of place, and I skipped to that one first. It only had one entry, a breeding station, costing a hundred biomass, and only stating that it was for breeding monsters. That was weird and uncomfortable and something I’d rather put off. But I did want to block off my crystal, and as I’d figured I found it under Architecture. Browsing the other tabs, under Features I found eyes, roots, and digesters, and Traps had simply sticky and spike traps. Not much on offer, but it was a start.
First came a bunch of roots under the crystal chamber, depleting my biomass stocks. I wished I could move that crystal, because I would like nothing better than to put it on a different level than the initial one, just in case. I didn’t know what exactly inspired that paranoia other than the broken pieces of maybe-something-like-me, but it was there nonetheless. I could feel them emerge from the ‘stone’ of the chamber into genuine rock. Then I bought a wall, which I watched grow in place with some bemusement, until it was firmly and flawlessly flush with the previous one. Which, from the outside, meant now that there was just an L-shaped corridor, leading nowhere.
Then, logically, there were bait, traps, and digesters. Bait itself came in fruit and meat varieties, fruit costing a single biomass and meat costing five times that. I eyed my corridor and decided that, what the hell, see if the logic worked. Placing bait was a matter of deciding where and then, of its own accord, a pitch-black tendril sprouted from the stone, growing fat before peeling away to reveal a pile of berries. The tendril itself vanished to nothing.
In front of the bait I put a sticky trap on the floor, and spike traps on the walls. Those, I was pleased to see, did not look like much. Faint softening of the floor’s stone, faint tracery of lines in the walls. And then I was down to all of three biomass, enough for a digester, and nothing to do with the stone I had. Nothing to do but wait.
Day 3
Whatever that bait smelled like, it worked. I couldn’t smell it myself and it seemed ridiculous it could attract animals at range, but animals arrived. Rabbits came in, got stuck in the floor, and then I activated the spike trap to make their insides outsides. The digester I purchased descended from where it hid in the ceiling, glommed onto the remains, and lifted back up to the cei ling to turn it into biomass. Thank goodness without making me taste it. Killing the rabbits didn’t bother me- I had been hunting more than once - but the idea of consuming them raw, bones, pelt, and all was not appetizing.
Then a deer arrived, cautiously walking in. The digester seemed to get rid of the blood and death smell as well, since it took slow steps forward without taking fright. I hurriedly reclaimed the sticky trap, not trusting that it’d hold something that large and only spook it instead. As it bent its head to the fruit, I triggered the spike traps.
They consisted, each, of a row of stone spikes that popped out of the wall, reaching somewhat less than halfway across the width of the hall. Which actually made the deer a better target than the rabbits, provided that they had the force to penetrate the hide properly. Something I was by no means certain of.
The spikes slammed out, and I tried to put some extra force behind them. It was, on one nonexistent hand, just a decision to trigger the traps or not. And it was, on the other hand, something I could feel, a vague twitch of muscles and nerves, so surely I had some control over it.
One of them caught the deer right in the neck, and it squalled, struggling, as blood spurted. And I realized I had no ears out in the hallway. The only hearing was from the crystal, where it sat in the dark room, and with the wall sealed up there wasn’t much to be had in that realm. Then the deer tore free from the spikes and made it all of three steps down the hallway before collapsing. Success! And my very first experience points.
I hadn’t even been sure those things existed in this world, or simulation, or construct, or whatever exactly was going on. The overlay had spoken of levels and hit points, but it did not mention anything I had none of, which was a bit irritating. And now I had a paltry five experience in my pool. Experience points that apparently could be poured into anything in my build list, both category and instance. Right now they all needed ten experience points to get anywhere, so that was going to be a while. I’d think on it while I constructed.
The digester, once I set it on the deer carcass, had to stay extended from the ceiling for a time, and whatever paranoia had made me start digging downward cautioned me that for big things like this I would want some way to seal off the area. Okay, well, that’s what doors were for.
I’d had time to sort through the architectural options, which were fairly narrow at this point. Doors, stairs, table, chair. No windows, not yet, though I only had the one entrance facing anything worth looking at. Walls, floors, ceiling. Boring, but I wasn’t bored.
I should have been. I had very little to do other than wait most of the time, and I had never been an immensely patient person, but now the passage of time didn’t grate so much. I should also have been panicked at the lack of limbs, of proper senses, of a normal body. But whatever body I did have didn’t have those responses, those chemical hormones. I was intellectually disturbed, but that was it. And now that I had the supernumerary inputs under control, the worst disturbance was taken care of.
I put a door in at the entrance. Not an interior door, which was entirely wood, but an exterior door, which was stone. I could trigger it at will, open and closed, with no apparent cost, but it looked like a door, albeit a large one, which seemed rather conspicuous to me. There had to be some way to make it stand out less.
Try as I might, I couldn’t figure a way to alter the door option. So I turned my attention to the door itself. There were little twitches of control, here and there, so maybe I could finesse what already existed.
Open, close, open, close. I focused on that, concentrating on the feel of things moving about. And managed to stop the door halfway through. Success! In more than one way.
The overlay pinged me with two updates.
[Control 1] learned.
150 Experience gained.
Well. That was a lot more experience than a random deer, and some kind of skill. Very nice. And it implied I’d do well to continue fiddling around with the edges of what I could do. So, skill first. Control: Temporarily take manual control of dungeon features. Simple enough.
And experience...well, I wasn’t really sure what to do with it. I didn’t know enough. Was trapping animals all there was to do? Surely not, I was at least told monsters existed. And something had broken down a wall and shattered a crystal, which I doubted rabbits and deer could do.
I decided, to start, to go with the paranoia option. First I upped each of the categories by one, which expanded my repertoire considerably. Windows (the shutter type), sliding doors, rotating walls. Pit trap, boulder trap. Ears, maws (which was kinda freaky). Money bait and grain bait. Money bait took resources I didn’t have. One gold.
So without clear direction, I followed paranoia, and improved my roots. Two level-ups took thirty-five points and made them faster and unlocked a submenu to change their size. Larger, or longer - I could chew away two hallway-widths of rock at a time, now. Or a full room height. I let them run, gauging how long it’d take to dig out the room I wanted. The answer was a full day, and in the meantime the original roots would keep going, opening more horizontal space.
In that time I experimented. I tried adding a wall to where a wall already was, at angles. Given my surplus of stone, I built and reclaimed at the dead end, trying for different shapes. By timing things, I found it took one minute to build and one to reclaim, getting half the resources back. And after much poking and prodding, stretching and flexing, I managed to get a few bits of stone to stick on the face of a wall. Not much, but another notification scrolled by.
[Alteration 1] learned.
150 Experience gained.
Alteration: Make minor modifications to dungeon structures. Key word, minor. Mostly cosmetic, at this point, though it did seem I could make the stone spikes slightly longer and larger.
[Spike Trap] advances to level 2.
It seemed worthwhile to try everything with everything, but given combinatorial explosion, that wasn’t likely to be possible.
Or was it? Did I really have anything better to do?
For the moment the answer was no, and I wished I had notepaper. Or maybe I did? There could be a note function in the overlay…
But no. I could finagle the real world, but the overlay didn’t yield to any of my coaxing. So I just tried to remember what I’d done, made a mental list, and worked my way through it. I replaced the front stone door with a sliding version of the same, to make it somewhat less conspicuous, then Altered the surface to make it fit in with the surrounding rock as well as I could.
[Camouflage 1] learned. Straightforward. Make things look like other things, within reason. The description specifically stated that things could only be camouflaged with small alterations...which was astoundingly vague.
Well, I'll take it.
Day 4
The lower room was ready, but I realized I had no idea how to relocate the crystal. I couldn’t build a new one, or reclaim the existing one. I couldn’t Alter it.
But I could Alter the floor under it, so I did. I lowered the floor, pushing it down. Down again. Down again. There were diminishing returns, and each alteration did take materials, but at this point I was capped on stone despite my playing around. And I altered the floor of the bottom room, upward. Frankly I wasn’t sure I could make the two meet, despite all the resources I was pouring into it, but just before I emptied the reserves, they did. At which point I reclaimed the upper floor and rebuilt it to cover the room with a hill topped with a crystal in the middle. Done. One hitpoint wonder hidden.
[Relocate 1] learned.
That could be useful, if I had any major rearranging to do.
And now I was at a loss for anything of value. Despite the overlay having one suggestion of monsters, the only things I’d seen were rabbits and deer and trees out in front of the mountain. The occasional bird, bear or fox. Certainly no people. If this was a heaven or a hell, it was a particularly placid one. If it was a game, it was an uneventful one.
So I dithered, fiddling with what I had, building what new things I could afford - surprisingly few, since leveling up the categories very quickly required way more experience than I had. Not to mention some purchases required things I’d never seen, like iron. The default building categories were okay, but, I would have also divided things into furnishings, to make things appear like a normal dwelling, traps, to kill things, and biology, the weird bits that bridged the stone and wood (synthesized from biomass, it seemed) with the living structure.
