Blue core, p.5
Blue Core, page 5
part #1 of Blue Core Series
Ooh. That was what I wanted. I still didn’t know what depletion did but I was sure it was bad, and hey, I had [Wisdom] so it had to be true. And I didn’t need the other things, even if I was down to three beetles, so I selected that option.
"What? Mmm…" Shayma murmured as she started to glow blue from the inside. Since she was still held in the embrace of the breeding station I could tell what it was like for her, and it was rather like a warm shower. It also had a one-hour countdown, so I literally couldn’t let her go, but from what I could tell the glow was coming from the seed I’d spent within her. No wonder it was a breeding option.
About halfway through she had recovered enough to look down at the glow, licking her lips. "Um. What is going on here? Dammit, I know you can’t answer me but, I don’t trust this at all."
Unfortunately for her, I wasn’t able to stop this possibly unique opportunity on her say-so. So far as I could tell, I couldn’t actually release her while the timer was going. But I did understand that seeing yourself glow was not the most soothing thing. Nor was the fact that I could feel her slowly kindling panic.
I really felt sorry as she started tugging at the bonds, and while I would bet a higher-skill individual could have broken them, she had no chance. She struggled for maybe ten minutes and then fell limp again, closing her eyes. "...I hope…" she said, but didn’t specify what for.
And as the timer ended, the light faded, the breeding station vanished into the floor, and Shayma grunted in surprise as she was unceremoniously deposited on the wood.
Shayma Ell Purified
50,000 Experience gained.
[Purifier] Title available. Obtain?
[Purifier]:
Severely restricts breeding options.
Unlocks breeding options.
Unlocks Companion advancement path.
Companion advancement path: The dungeon may induct Purified individuals as representatives of the core.
Oh, yes, and also yes. Maybe with this I could actually communicate.
If most dungeons were held by the mage-kings or were just classically murderous and monster-filled, it was a good bet they got most of their experience from rape and murder, to judge from the idea of feeding them slaves. And it was an equally a good bet that, given how I’d nearly lost my mind by building one of the breeding station, whatever minds controlled them quickly degraded into gibberish.
But I had gone a different route. Mostly by luck and happenstance, true, but it looked like the path I was heading for did something different. Purification and companions seemed much more my speed than rapine and death. And to judge from the experience gain from one purification, I’d match my growth against anything consuming hapless low-level sacrifices.
[Wisdom] advances to level 3.
I didn’t think that chain of logic was particularly obscure, but maybe it was just a cumulative thing. I just wished I knew what depletion actually meant. The overlay still stubbornly refused to fill me in, as did [Wisdom].
Shayma stared at her hands. "How did...I didn’t…" She took a breath and ran her hands over her naked skin, as if checking all of her was still there. "I didn’t know you could get these things back."
I had no idea what she was talking about, but if depletion did something prior to being capped out then I could guess whatever was depleted had been returned to her. She didn’t look different, but…
Shayma Ell
Level 9 [Purified] Seeker
Health: 120/120
Stamina: 129/960
Skills: [Seeker] (Greater) (Reclaimed), [Endurance] 4 (2 levels reclaimed), [Longstrider] 2 (1 level reclaimed), [Agility] 7 (4 levels reclaimed), [Suppress Presence] 4 (2 levels reclaimed), [Luck] (Reclaimed)
A massive improvement. I didn’t know what it felt like subjectively, since that link was gone, but it had to be pretty great. But I wasn’t done yet. I had a new tab on my overlay, for Companions.
Induct Shayma Ell as a Companion?
Very yes.
Shayma Ell gains [Core Touched].
Suddenly I had another set of eyes and ears. Shayma’s. But nothing else - no sense of smell or taste, so the only time I actually had access to those senses was when we were intimate. No internal emotions or thoughts, which was probably for the best, actually. And sadly, she couldn’t hear mine.
I tried all the ways I could think of, in the Overlay and in my mind and what passed for muscle and nerve, but nothing yet. And in fact, according to my Overlay, [Core Touched] only included [Sight Link] and [Sound Link], and there wasn’t anything I could think to easily create or unlock a new skill to go along with it.
Not that it gave me much since Shayma simply cried into her hands for a while. The good kind of cry, I thought, though there were probably better places for it than on a bare wooden floor. I thought about giving her a chair or a bed or something, but at the same time didn’t know that disturbing her would be a good idea.
"Okay," she said, before I finished dithering on my choices. "It’s settled. We’re moving in. This is ridiculous."
I was encouraged, but she didn’t elaborate on that or explain. Instead she stood on wobbly legs and traipsed back to the tub. Throughout the whole bath she didn’t speak, just had a set, thoughtful expression, and then she curled up on a brand-new bed that I’d regrown and slept until morning.
Day 56
[Longstrider] seemed to blur the landscape as Shayma walked toward the river. Between that and [Endurance] she could probably make it there in one trip, since her Longstrider walk was a bit faster than normal running as far as I could tell. She’d taken the knight’s leathers, though it didn’t seem too magical to me since it didn’t resize to fit her and was a bit large.
Her visit had reminded me how lax I’d grown in trying to break the system. Or maybe that was another way cores tended to go off the rails. Without human contact, did they just blur into vagueness?
[Wisdom] advances to 4.
If I were to play host to however-many refugees from whatever was going on, little cottages and falling rocks weren’t going to be enough. I didn’t have a list of things to investigate, exactly, but I had some ideas and I had something else to watch than the grass growing on my farms. One of which I really should have thought of earlier.
[Relocate] didn’t absorb what it moved. That was obvious because it could move the core. A black cocoon surrounded what I was trying to move and another grew where it would go, and at some point they both withered away to reveal the change. So I tested it by Relocating some sensory organs to see if I could spot and, most importantly, control how it worked. I was hoping that I could use it to move things more quickly, since it could take minutes or even hours, if I wanted to shift something large. I hadn’t tried whole rooms, but that could be days. Not very useful for surprising people.
I watched, waited, caught the faint flicker as a sensor organ flicked from one point to another. Then back again. Back, forth, and then I tried to pull the organ back to the first spot before the cocoons opened, pushing it back along whatever link there was. Then I was surprised.
[Spatial Manipulation] unlocked.
Oh wow. That was quite nearly as fantastic as the Companion branch. Nearly.
As with a lot of skills, all it did was unlock a new category for me to put experience into. It didn’t start out with much - [Compression], [Expansion], and [Link]. But the mana costs were an order of magnitude greater than what I could sustain right now. I had been prepared to pour some portion of the enormous pool of stockpiled experience I had into that, because, damn, Spatial Manipulation. But I wasn’t anywhere near being able to do anything with it.
Well, I had to expand anyway. I put some of the spare experience into my Roots and started digging space.
Day 56 - Shayma
She felt better than she had in a long time. Maybe ever. Never before had [Endurance] buoyed her so much or [Longstrider] been so quick. Even Luck was back, that sense of twisting probabilities just outside of control.
[Seeker], which had fallen to an intuitive murmur she could barely grasp, and had been on the verge of going out completely, now shone like a beacon, telling her distance and direction. Her personal compass had two great blazing pyres of her Queen and that dungeon.
If dungeon it was.
She knew a little, very little about them. There were the Twelve Great Dungeons, of course, the wild ones whose roots burrowed down into the heart of the world and which nobody had found the bottom of. Or even gotten close. Not even the mage-kings. Then there were the pet cores the mage-kings did have.
The Great Dungeons were wild, full of things hideous and fantastic, larger on the inside than seemed possible, but entirely self-contained and secluded from the outside world. The mage-kings cores gave them half their power, with an insatiable appetite for living flesh and tendrils that reached out into the world. Neither of them were exactly hospitable, although she’d personally rate the latter as far worse than the former.
But none of them had black flesh. Great Dungeons, in the few areas the dungeon walls had been found and damaged - not as easy as one might think - bled grey. The mage-kings cores were all brown and red, an unpleasant color to her eyes. So this one was an oddity.
Seeing the house, she might have thought it was some rogue mage’s lair but for the fact there was nothing that was not dungeon-stuff but the items on the shelves. And all those were accounted for, given the flame knight badge.
And quite aside from being empty, it had never offered her harm.
Clearly it was capable of it. She wasn’t going to mourn the death of one of her tormentors or pursuers, but the question had to be asked how something with no monsters and a few traps could kill a flame knight in such a way that their very expensive armor remained intact. There was also the feeling of being watched that was far more intense than any other place she’d been.
It persisted even now, though...it wasn’t exactly being watched. It was being watched over. Even stranger.
She felt [Luck] rising and humming, a sensation she’d nearly forgotten about, and gave it a push to go off and do whatever it intended. Probabilities twisted and changed and something out in the world went one way instead of another. It was a big one, exhausting like running a mile, but not as bad as it once had been.
Shayma stepped out of the trees onto the riverbank to find an empty fishing boat. The fisherman was nowhere in sight, so she could guess what exactly [Luck] had been doing. She felt a little guilty about taking the boat, but only a little. The sooner she got back to the city, the sooner she could convince them to leave.
If it wasn’t already too late.
Day 59
It turned out that at the tenth level of a skill, it evolved into something better. [Root] had become [Boring Tendril] and had vastly simplified the process of clearing space. What it had not simplified was where to put all the stone that generated, since I couldn’t clear out more until I had room in my internal capacity, and at this point I had multiple rooms filled floor to ceiling with stone slabs. I needed something better.
Since I couldn’t find any way to increase my internal storage without leveling up, I went with [Alteration]. The stone I was digging through seemed to vary in density, so surely the stone I produced could vary too. Each percent would translate directly into extra storage space, so even a small amount would be useful.
Hardened stone unlocked.
Temperature Resistance
Physical Resistance
Magic Resistance
That sounded great. Especially since a quick look showed I could convert to it, at a two to one ratio. Not as efficient as alteration, but a lot faster. But I kept going, to see if I could get it better. Like I said, I had a lot of stone. The Hardened stone didn’t compress as easily as regular stone, but it did, just a little bit. A little bit more. Returns diminishing as I focused [Alteration].
Focused enough that it started depleting mana. I didn’t realize that was possible, but if I could feed power into skills...well, maybe I’d been operating on the most basic level until now.
Stonesteel unlocked
Temperature Immunity
Physical Resistance
Magic Resistance
Five to one from Hardened stone. Ten to one from regular stone, as well as a chunk of mana. Pouring half my tank of mana into Altering the Stonesteel got me nowhere, but Stonesteel was good enough for now. Worlds better than simple stone for my dungeon walls. But that’d also pretty well mark they were unnatural, so I clad them with natural stone as I converted.
I wasn’t sure why I didn’t want to stand out, but [Wisdom] said it’d be a bad idea.
Converting all my walls emptied my reserves and freed up an enormous amount of space. I hadn’t realized I had that much volume already. Without the grey chrystheniums, converting everything to stonesteel wouldn’t be possible, but with, it would simply take time.
In the meantime I’d actually broken into a cave system, deep under the mountain. Not the sort of caves carved by water with stalactites and drippy stone, but just big empty pitch-black gaps in the bedrock. Really big. And easy enough to expand into, so long as I kept to ordinary walls.
Size requirements for level increase met.
Dungeon Level increases by 1.
Skill base levels increase by 1.
The size requirements were really absurd. I’d have to eat away half the mountain to get to a significant level. Although that might be why the spatial magic existed, so I wasn’t forced to consume the planet. At the rate I was going though, I’d be chewing up a small chunk of the mountain range, especially the ore veins I could see embedded deep in, like enormous frozen rivers.
I spent the time it took to grow and hollow out new spaces watching things from Shayma’s perspective. It was just river, a relaxing enough boat trip downstream, occasionally passing something going the other way and nibbling on the excess food I’d supplied and she’d taken. Mostly small fishing boats, but occasionally there was something larger and more mechanical and, so far as I could see, magic-powered. They didn’t have sails, but did have fins that water roiled away from, lending them a silent grace as they sliced through the water.
It was the first I’d seen of what might be called civilization. Oh, trained horses and armor and weapons didn’t come out of nowhere, but everything I could see from my location was wilderness and a touch of river. I didn’t know if there were forges and foundries or factories and assembly-lines. For all the faux-medieval trappings, magic could make up for a number of gaps. I had all the makings of a modern building with plumbing and artificial light all by myself.
The sun cycled down and back up, while Shayma did little more than steer the boat, attend basic needs, and pull supplies from her backpack until a city came into view. Walls, spires, and an array of towers that didn’t quite match any historical precedent. It also had a weird, patchwork character, with some parts of the wall being a sort of rusty brown and other parts being sandy and tan. Once Shayma ditched the boat and hiked up to one of the entrances in the wall, I saw why.
A dungeon was eating the city.
Day 61 - Shayma
Meil was worse off than when she’d left, but it hadn’t been fully converted yet. It was only a matter of time, but even a mage-king couldn’t simply swallow an entire city overnight. There was the tower, of course, that she’d seen rise over the course of a week or so. From there it seemed the mage-king had focused mostly on the noble quarter, but much of the merchant quarter was dungeon-stone too. The atmosphere was tense, but not as strained as when the tower first went up. The fact that they kept people fed, despite what fields had been burned and farmers killed, was probably why.
People lined up at a shop where the core’s brown cauls created raw meat and vegetables, which the vendors turned into something edible. Neither of those things looked as good as the stuff her dungeon made, and she knew from experience the stuff wasn’t entirely healthy. In fact she was pretty certain it was one of the many ways the mage-kings siphoned off the health and skills of the people under their rule.
In fact she felt a little odd stepping onto the dungeon-stone as she made her way carefully through the crowd. Like something was splashing off her, a little bit like elemental protection did when it was active. Admittedly she’d only felt that in the first escape, when her Queen cast protections on them all.
She kept [Suppress Presence] as strong as she could make it, and not just for the visible agents of the mage-king. The red leathers were not, themselves, Flame Knight specific. Anyone who was serious about fire protection might have them. But they were of a quality enough to possibly draw unwanted attention, and even though she had Luck back finally she knew better to rely on it.
Past the merchant quarter and into the small priestly enclave, her ears twitched at the clipped sounds of the invader’s language. The core itself may not have been present, but the mage-king’s agents were. She actually wasn’t sure if they realized the Queen had escaped, was still trying to work against their control, to subvert their designs. Maybe they didn’t care.
Even if they didn’t, she made sure none of the human-like monsters, or actual humans, saw her walk past the servant sweeping the steps of the cathedral and give him a sign with three fingers. Nor did she let them notice when, not much later, she went to one of the plainer, smaller buildings for those seeking blessings. The priest there escorted her past both the inner door into the quarts and under a hidden slab in the rock. It was a passage concealed not by magic but by craftsmanship, created by some truly paranoid and prescient ancestor of the royal house.
"By the gods Shayma, it’s good to see you!" Tulk abandoned his role as ascetic confessor to envelop her in a hug, the big man making her spine creak with the force of it. The feeling of being watched over flickered for a moment, more intense, then faded again. "What happened? How’d you get out?"
