Another, and another. Shayma moaned once, twice, then whimpered as her body arched and shivered with the most powerful orgasm yet, squeezing so tight it almost hurt, and sagged into unconsciousness. At that, something more intense than any prior pleasure surged through me and I visibly throbbed as I pumped more seed inside her, a long, stretched moment of ecstacy.

  Then I was satisfied. The lust blew away like fog and I was suddenly aware of things other than sex. The overlay had been trying to tell me things for a while, but I was in no state to pay attention to them. I still wouldn’t be, if I focused too much on the sight in my room, which even without the lust was still stunning. So I closed all those eyes, ignored the feeling of soft, warm flesh, and went through everything.

  Breeding options:

  Moil (Consumes host) - 50 biomass.

  Imp - 50 biomass.

  Boring Beetle (4) - 50 biomass.

  I didn’t even look at the first option. "Consumes host" was just horrible.

  Imp (Gene Strength 0): A low-level monster.

  Boring Beetle: Capable of mining quickly.

  Of the two, I wasn’t much interested in generating monsters, and Roots were slow. Selecting the third option gave me a one-hour countdown, and, opening my eyes just slightly, Shayma’s belly actually started to swell. That...hopefully did not end up poorly, but there was nothing I could do at this point. I ran through the message log.

  Tek Ten killed, 450 experience gained.

  Ensen Grel killed, 600 experience gained.

  Hurn Llep killed, 300 experience gained.

  Tell Ten killed, 300 experience gained.

  Items gained.

  Items gained.

  With that enormous haul I now had an inventory. The armor and weaponry the hunters had been carrying, the tracking crystal, and the metal cube. Listed, but not described.

  Shayma Ell bred, 1000 experience gained.

  [Breeder] title gained: Breed a female of any species. Unlocks additional breeding options.

  [Blue Core] title gained: Breed a willing female. Unlocks additional breeding options.

  Even more benefits. There seemed to be incentive for killing people and breeding women, and I suddenly understood why someone might be looking for dungeon crystals. With a reason and a little bit of effort, one of these things, one of me, could spiral out of control into a true menace. Assuming they were near a population, anyway.

  [Insight] gained.

  [Knowledge] and [Insight] combined into [Wisdom]

  [Wisdom]: Combines Insight, Intuition, and Foresight. Allows appraisal of individuals and items. Unlocks magic use.

  A veritable bonanza. I didn’t know how I would use magic, but it had to be major.

  At this point, during the one-hour countdown, I had a lot of housekeeping to do. An enormous amount of experience, a number of skills, and, glancing at the items, I could reclaim the armor and weapons for materials. Which meant I could finally purchase some of the metal-locked things.

  Magnetoreception: Upgrades Dungeon Features. Provides compass feature. Detects metals.

  Immediately I spotted, in a weird, indefinite way, some ore deposits not particularly far away in the mountain. I also could spot the metal cube resting on its shelf with senses other than my eyes. Considering, I tried to detect the metal items that were in my inventory, seeing if I could localize it.

  [Treasure Detection] learned. Upgrades Magnetoreception. Detects all items nearby.

  Which showed me that the inventory items were nearby, but in a sideways manner. They were somewhere superimposed on my crystal, some sort of spatial or dimensional thing. I hesitated to use the term pocket dimension, but all that biomass and stone and metal had to be stored somewhere.

  I had sorting to do.

  Considering I couldn’t replace them just yet, I just put the remainder of the items on the shelves rather than reclaiming them. The sword and mail shirts clattered onto the wood haphazardly, which wouldn’t do. I tried again, with some Alteration tweaks, and got them arranged neatly. Better.

  The appraisal also showed them as basic, rank one, non-magical items. Fair enough.

  Tracking Crystal: Provides basic guidance to the target’s location. Hunter class only.

  Metal Cube: A metal cube of unknown provenance.

  Now that had me intrigued. But it wasn’t like I could ask Shayma what was going on there, even if she had been awake. I didn’t need [Wisdom] to tell me this was trouble, and so was Shayma too, probably. Maybe low-level trouble at the moment, but trouble always grew.

  Fortunately I could grow too. I wasn’t sure what agency I had outside my walls, but I could at least make my walls better, given time.

  The timer reached just a few minutes and I checked in on Shayma. She was still sleeping or unconscious, and by now looked very pregnant, skin tight over a swollen belly. I was also still buried deep inside her, fortunately without the insatiable lust that the breeding station usually provided, and I had no idea how this would work. Frankly at this point I was worried and not looking forward to whatever actually happened when the timer expired, and regretting doing this to Shayma no matter how I’d felt at the time.

  But when the timer ticked to zero, a brief blue glow came from the breeding station, enveloping Shayma’s swollen belly, and the entire thing sank into the floor, leaving Shayma as she had been before, thin and toned and entirely naked, on the floor.

  Blue Core skill used.

  Blue Core: The Dungeon Core takes direct possession of bred monsters.

  Boring Beetle (4) gained.

  Shayma Ell Depletion increases by 1

  Shayma Ell Depletion 16/23.

  I built a bed under Shayma, and was pleased to see it lifted her up off the cold stone as it formed, leaving her resting unharmed, albeit messy, on the sheets. I didn’t like the sound of "depletion" and didn’t know what to do about it, but if it was just a small increase and below the cap, probably it was okay.

  Probably.

  Day 21

  Day 21

  "Hmn…" Shayma’s eyes snapped open and she jerked upright. "...I’m alive?"

  She checked herself over, stretching and moving carefully to her feet. "And...just sore. And…" A grimace at the mess over her thighs. "Well, that was real enough."

  Shayma wiped herself off with the bedding and then, despite the fact that I was pretty sure she badly needed a shower, slipped her clothing back on, frowning at the twigs still tangled in her tail. "I don’t suppose you have a bath?" She said to the room at large, and by implication, to me.

  Unfortunately I didn’t. There were water sources outside, though. I could hear a brook, faintly, with one of my outside ears, so I opened the door to the outside. Which seemed to startle her again, the tail and ears flicking. "...I’ll be back for that thing later," she said, and padded out into the outside world. And soon enough, away from my sight.

  I was sad to see her go, and not just because she was gorgeous. She’d actually addressed me, though what she thought she was talking to I didn’t know, but it had been nice to have even intermittently conscious company. The sex was pretty great too.

  But I wasn’t going to keep her. I wasn’t that kind of person, or whatever I was, and given that she’d been toting an artifact for some reason she clearly had important things to do. And in fairness, I had somewhat less important things to do, like expanding in what ways I could, but I also wondered at Shayma’s request. Maybe I could do a bath.

  It took a while to tap into the brook. It was further than I thought, and I didn’t want to expose myself too much. But with the boring beetles, it was much quicker than it would have been with roots.

  I had to build a Monster Station to actually move the beetles out of my inventory into the real world, which sucked up half my biomass to make a large black cocoon in one of my spare rooms. The beetles themselves were exceedly simple to direct, since I could give them any point I could perceive and they’d go there, then dig how I wanted them. They did have to go back to the monster station now and again to, I assume, rest and to discharge what they’d accumulated from mining.

  The boring beetles cut small passages through which I could run little crawlways, now that I’d leveled Architecture more. I put a Maw underneath the breach where the brook was pouring down, which sent water into my inventory. Perfect. I sent the boring beetles after the ore deposits I’d found while I began to experiment with my new resource.

  A tub involved Altering stone enough that the skill raised itself, but filling it was another matter. I could export inventory contents into whatever room I wanted, but getting it to pour out of a spigot in a reasonable way took practice.

  [Fluid Handling] learned

  Fluid Handling Category unlocked.

  150 Experience gained.

  Ooh. That wasn’t as boring as it might have sounded. Pumps, inlets, outlets...you could do a lot with moving water around and, just glancing through the architecture list, there were versions that were heat or corrosion resistant. Where someone might get such a thing as a corrosive liquid was left as an exercise to the reader, apparently. I had no ideas.

  For heating the water, since a cold bath was just really underwhelming swimming, I put as many of my torches as I could cram into the space underneath, and Altered the stone there to be as thin as I could.

  [Temperature Control 1] learned: Modify temperature of dungeon features and items.

  150 Experience Gained.

  So I could give Shayma a hot bath now, if she ever came back. Or a shower.

  The boring beetles came back with their loads of ore, flooding my core with iron, copper, and magicite. The last one I could guess by the name alone, and sure enough I could reclaim it for mana. Fantastic. But...I still didn’t have anything I could do with any of that. Even my doorknobs were still stone or wood. But I could probably figure something out soon enough.

  Day 25

  I was worried about hunting out the local wildlife. There had been a definite drop in the intake of wild game and frankly that wasn’t sustainable anyway. Not considering the biomass requirements of stuff deeper in the categories. Moving parts like valves took far more than expected from the size of the things.

  But now that I had access to water, I had an idea. With the boring beetles and upgraded roots I had a nice chunk of underground cleared out, so I Altered the stone and added water to make mud. And then put grain bait all over the mud, hoping that the faux sun would result in something sprouting.

  [Dungeon Ecology] learned.

  Ecology Category unlocked.

  150 Experience gained.

  Apparently I had the right idea, and checking the category it included actual dirt so I didn’t have to try and grow things in rocky mud. But I could grow things in actual rock, apparently.

  There was tayan grass and tayantan trees for dirt, and chrysthenium variants that grew in rock, ice, and magma. I didn’t know what any of those things were, though it took me a moment to resolve the chrysthenium entry as not simply being a misspelling of a more familiar flower. They were also relatively expensive, though I wasn’t short on the materials for the rock version at least. In fact I’d capped out the actual storage for rock and had a couple rooms full of rock slabs so I didn’t waste any intake.

  So I would have a garden, then, at least to see what these things were. And that meant I actually had a reason for carving out more space. To start I could reuse the test room, and replace all the mud with something more useful, so I reclaimed everything there to seed it with grass. And it was just as well I’d started early, since a twelve-hour timer started, tiny pinpricks of green just starting to push their way out of the dirt. Well, it wasn’t like I was going anywhere.

  When it finally did mature, it looked like more or less normal grass to me, although more teal than properly green. But the overlay informed me I was getting a passive biomass income from the grass, which meant given proper investment I had an infinite source of the stuff. Investment I did promptly because that meant I didn’t need the trap corridors anymore. And that meant I could seal off my entrance entirely, disguising it as bare rock.

  Not that I wouldn’t open it if Shayma came back or some other fugitive came by, but it might give me protection from people like the knights.

  And in the meantime, I landscaped. It was easy enough to make a few low-ceilinged rooms for growing the grass, and grey chrystheniums grew on bare walls, taking four full days to mature, but providing stone and mana income when they were mature. The trees took a very large room to grow, and when I completed that room something unexpected happened.

  Size requirements for level increase met.

  Dungeon Level increases to 1.

  Skill base levels increase by 1.

  Hm. A quick glance showed that the only major development was that my core no longer had just one hit point. It had two, which wasn’t much better. Though free skill levels weren’t bad either. It applied to categories, the things inside the categories, which I could raise with experience, and actual skills, which I couldn’t. Well, some skills anyway. Others just seemed to be what they were, like [Dungeon Ecology].

  [Temperature Control] going up was fantastic, because a quick test showed that now I actually could get things cold enough to freeze water, though not hot enough to melt rock. [Alteration] and [Camouflage] upgrading made it even easier to customize my interior. But most importantly, [Wisdom] upgrading gave me something to do with magic.

  I didn’t get spells. Spells, most likely, were too active for a dungeon and that kind of made sense. But a new tab now gave me the ability to create regions of effect. Or rather, grow them. These regions could be seeded and would grow slowly, consuming mana as they did so until they reached their full size and effect, something I could modify a bit but was mostly determined by the room they were in. Doorways blocked the effect, open or closed.

  Fog and Darkness effects were straightforward enough. Depletion and Recovery though, were different. [Depletion]: Slowly increments depletion of individuals within the area of effect. [Recovery]: Slowly restores health and energy of individuals within the area of effect.

  So depletion was different from health and energy. That didn’t answer what it was, but it sounded pretty unpleasant. Not something I was planning to use. Recovery, on the other hand, seemed like it’d pair well with my newly developed hot bath technology. It was just too bad I couldn’t enjoy the fruits of my own labors.

  I went ahead and filled the little room with the effect, but mostly I spent time on expanding my borders. If I leveled up by size then there was a bonus to setting up farms for resource income.

  And that was when I had my first cave-in. One of the areas I was digging out creaked, groaned, and sagged as chunks of rock and dirt fell from the ceiling. Outside, a stand of trees leaned at precarious angles. Inside, one of my boring beetles was very thoroughly squished. Given that I couldn’t replenish them, that was a little scary.

  As disturbing as it was, the collapse didn’t cause any other damage, though it did ruin my attempts at stealth. It’d be pretty obvious something was going on if I left giant holes all over the landscape, not to mention the wasted effort. But all was not lost. I tooled around with constructing support underneath the cave-in, first to stop it from getting any worse and second to try and reconstruct the rock and dirt ceiling so the trees didn’t give away my position.

  It was tedious but it reminded of me of things like arches and triangles and other such support techniques. Plus it gave me good practice with [Alteration] and with dirt. Not that I really planned to build with dirt but it was worth figuring out how it acted before I caused a landslide or something.

  Day 42

  So it went. I ended up constructing a lake to hold water overflow and then having to dig tunnels when I accidentally flooded that, but after a lot of trial and error - mostly error - I had a nice large chamber with a grass-banked lake and flowing water. Landscaping had not been a hobby of mine previously, but now that I was the landscape it was a little more interesting. Especially since, after almost a whole month, I was sure Shayma wasn’t coming back.

  Unfortunately someone else did come.

  Out of a clear and quiet day there was a sudden flare of raging flames. The trees and shrubs that shrouded my door crisped and charred, scouring away everything but the bare earth. Even the door complained at the heat, though fortunately my external eyes survived so I could see a man descending from the sky on a pillar of flame. He was hard-featured and hard-eyed, dressed in crimson leathers and crimson boots.

  It also didn’t take him very long to find the door. He was consulting a crystal cube that looked very much like the hunter crystal I’d taken from the first set of four, and it seemed to point right at the camouflaged rock. The man didn’t take pains to verify that, simply lifting his hand and sending a lance of liquid flame at it. Which melted right through and hurt like hell as it did.

  I was still reeling from that as he stepped through and the overlay informed me who it was.

  Astair Gren. Level 22 Flame Knight.

  Skills: Fire Control Level 10

  Flame Lance level 8

  Fireflight level 7

  Flame knight. Check. And whether it was [Wisdom] or plain logic I knew exactly what he was looking for. The metal cube I had sitting on a shelf.

  Now, it would be easy to just let him have it. This Astair would just take it and be on his way...probably. Stone didn’t burn all that easily, even though clearly he could burn it. But I didn’t want to. He seemed kind of a jerk, and I had promised to hold onto it, at least by implication.

  So the first thing I did was pull it off the shelves and put it down in the furthest place away from the entrance I had. The metal clanged off the stone as I spat it out in the under-tunnels, but it was entirely unmarked.

  "I thought this was supposed to work, dammit!" Astair grumbled at his crystal as the arrow floating within it changed directions. He flicked his fingers and sparks of flame flew out into the tunnels ahead of him, illuminating, I knew, not much of anything. Long tunnels and large empty rooms. I’d kept the important stuff, the lake, the farms, and of course the crystal, all separated. If he knew exactly where things adjoined it wouldn’t be too hard to blast through into them, but if he followed the compass arrow he’d just have a long walk down.

 

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