Dungeon Core Academy: Book 1
CHAPTER 1
Technically, I was still a student at the Dungeon Core Academy.
But that didn’t mean I couldn’t die during their exam.
That was worrying to think about early in the day, so I tried to calm myself. Just relax. This is my first dungeon, and they don’t expect me to work wonders, right? I’m a new dungeon core. I was only resurrected a year ago, and I only just graduated from the academy.
They can’t expect too much, can they?
Those thoughts rushed through my head as the overseers took me, a core gem, from the academy and to my first dungeon. My very own lair, one that I would be responsible for from here on out…or until they finished evaluating me.
They placed me on a pedestal in the middle of the room, and then started to leave without even saying goodbye. I would have been surprised, except that Dungeon Core Academy overseers are famous for their lack of manners. Not that I was much better.
“Wait,” I said.
Two of them left, but one remained standing in the archway of the tunnel that led out of the dungeon. He wore black robes and a black mask, purposefully hiding his identity. It was likely he had taught one of my classes over the past year, but the rules of the dungeon evaluation meant I wasn’t supposed to see which overseers had brought me down here. The academy prizes tradition over everything. Well, everything except killing heroes.
“What if no heroes come?” I asked him.
“That is down to you, Beno.”
“What if they do, but my traps are too easy? Or my monsters are weak and crummy, like blind, one-legged goblins?”
“It is down to you to make sure you do not create blind, one-legged goblins. Good luck, young core.”
“There’s something you aren’t telling me, isn’t there?”
The overseer smiled. “Would you expect anything less?”
If my dungeon sucked by the end of the evaluation, that was it. They’d smash me up and use my gem parts in the resurrection of a new core for the academy. As much as I tried staying calm, it was a hell of a weight to put on a poor gem’s shoulders.
Still, no point dwelling. It was time to get started. Time to put into practice everything I had trained for, the reason I had been brought back from death in the first place.
Looking around, I saw that I was alone in a 6x6 foot square room. I was in the middle, raised on a pedestal.
This must be my core room. Out of all the rooms in a dungeon, this was the most important, because if a hero ever reached here…if they got through all my traps and my puzzles…
No use thinking about that. Better to act.
I already knew the first step, because I had actually paid attention in class. Becoming a dungeon core meant resurrection, a second chance at life. I’d breezed through my old life and somehow gotten myself killed, and I refused to mess this new one up.
So, time to begin.
Initialize. Show core stats.
I felt myself start to glow. Light shot out from me, colored green when it was filtered by my gem surface. The light spiraled around me, finally presenting as words written in the air that only I could read.
Name: Beno
Dungeon Core
Level 1
Core Purity: 100%
Essence: 1/1
One measly essence point. There wasn’t a lot a core could build with that. A little like giving a baker one grain of flour, a speck of egg white, and then asking him to bake a four-tiered cake. Still, like the overseer said, this was all down to me, and I knew what do to.
I focused on the wall ahead of me.
Dig.
A chunk of mud dug out from the wall, splattering on the ground.
Skill gained! Digging – 1%
I checked my essence again.
Essence: 0.5/1
What was my regeneration rate? Hmm. At level 1, something like .4 per hour. Damn it. I’d need to dig out my own rooms in the dungeon, but at this rate, it’d take me a hundred years. And unless the overseers planned on evaluating me for that long, all I’d get was a big, fat fail.
Nope, that was too slow by any core’s standards, so I’d have to grow my essence a little. My total essence would increase when I leveled up, and I could only level up by killing things in my dungeon. Or by having a bunch of monsters do the killing for me, of course. But what about now, when I was monster-less?
Maybe I could…
Ah-ha!
I looked around. I knew that the overseers never put a new core in a room that had no resources, and I also knew that cores weren’t just pretty little gems. My body was useful for more than that! You’d never find a dungeon core gem sitting on a pretty lady’s ring finger, unless it was part of some diabolical scheme to murder a rich nobleman.
Swiveling around in my pedestal, I saw that on the mud wall behind me, there was a tiny patch of glowing green moss. Maybe an inch of it, so not much at all.
But, as was oft repeated in the Essence Use for Beginners class, it isn’t the size...it’s what you do with it. To me, that single patch of moss represented the difference between building a dungeon worthy of the underworld, or fading into nothing.
Draw, I commanded.
A tendril of light spun out from me, forming an arm and a hand. I guided it across the room, aiming for the glowing moss. My first attempt missed, and I hit the wall. There was no pain, and nothing happened to the wall.
That would have been too easy; if my core arms could actually lift things, I’d just dig a room without using essence. But that wouldn’t be very core-like of me.
My arms could, however, manipulate essence and all the things created from it, and this was why I needed them to help me with the moss.
The thing was, I’d practiced with an illusionary core arm back in the academy, but using the real thing was different. They just couldn’t get the weight right in the simulation.
So I tried again and again, finally grasping the moss on my fifth try.
Careful now. Don’t drop it.
I guided the hand back to me until the moss reached my body.
Absorb.
The moss seeped deep inside me. It tasted delicious, and it made me want to absorb it fully. Doing that would heal me if I were hurt, but it wouldn’t help now. It’d leave me with nothing, and then I’d truly be screwed.
So I resisted temptation. I fought really, really hard. I let the moss sit there, brewing in my core soul.
One hour.
Two hours.
Three.
I distracted myself by trying to remember things from my past life, but the memories wouldn’t come. The overseers said that would happen. Shame. There were some people who I felt like I missed, but I just couldn’t remember their faces.
After a fifth hour, I had almost dozed off. For a resurrected immortal core who doesn’t need human things like sleep, that was quite a feat.
Then a message appeared to me.
Dungeon moss converted into essence seeds!
Ah. Here we go. We’re in business!
I used my arms to remove the essence seeds from my core and place them back on the wall where the moss had been, but I was a little choosier this time. See, essence seeds grow best lower on the ground, because they only spread upwards, and placing them at the top would be a waste. I hate wasting things. The overseers said that preference would make me a good core.
Where there had only been one inch of moss, the converted seeds actually covered ten inches of wall space. Using my core arms, which were configured to let me handle things like essence but nothing more than that until I leveled up, I planted the s
eed back in the mud, at the bottom.
Now it was time to wait again. How long did it take essence seeds to grow, anyway?
My favorite overseer, Bolton, had taught me about that. He said they grew much quicker than plants and flowers. It felt good to replay his voice in my head. It was like having a friend here.
How long until I could create real friends?
First things first, Beno, I told myself.
Beno was my name now, but I’d had a different name in my first life. The overseers said we couldn’t keep our old names. We had to cut ourselves off from what we used to be. That was okay with me.
In the hours that it had taken for me to convert the seeds, my inner essence had replenished back to 1. As a level 1 core, there was little for me to spend it on yet, since I hadn’t earned any of the skills that the best cores had.
So I used the dig command again, taking another block of mud from the wall. This time, something very pleasing happened. Something that made me smile…and I really liked to smile.
Dig increased to 1.1%
Ah-ha! Self-improvement is the key to enrichment. Overseer Bolton taught me that.
Excited, I used dig again and drew another chunk of mud from the wall. Unfortunately, the effect of .1% improvement was barely noticeable. And…I’d used up all my essence. Sigh. Nothing to do but sit.
And wait.
And whistle.
The overseers, except Bolton, used to get a little annoyed by my whistling back in the academy, but there was nobody here but me. This was my dungeon.
“I hereby proclaim that whistling is forever allowed in Beno’s dungeon,” I said.
My voice sounded strange, using it in this little room. A first lifer would have said it sounded strange in any room. Most people have never heard a dungeon core talk, so they can’t really appreciate its strangeness.
I decided that Beno’s Dungeon was a crummy name for my lair. While I waited for the essence seeds to grow and my essence to replenish, I thought about different names.
The Spirit Tunnels?
Lair of the Vanquished Demon?
Bloodfall Caverns?
Nope, none of them sounded right. The trick as a new core was to choose something that didn’t sound too tough. See, I’d eventually need to attract heroes to my dungeon, but I didn’t want to entice ones that would breeze through all my traps and monsters, reach my core room, then pummel the hell out of me.
The best heroes would look for the dungeons with the meanest sounding names. I didn’t want those guys coming here. Not while I was a newbie core.
I also didn’t want to attract a bunch of chumps, either. I wouldn’t level up much from killing low-level sword schmucks.
There was so much to do before I could even think about getting heroes here. I’d have to create rooms. Spawn some friends. I mean, monsters. Create traps, find some loot.
Then I’d have to think about hiring a surface liaison who could handle stuff for me. See, I’d be able to learn crafting if I chose to, and I’d be able to create my own loot, but some cores found it easier just to buy it.
Then again, things are always better when a person makes them by themselves. It makes them feel like they’re worth more, somehow.
Anyway, I was way, way too weak for all that right now. I wouldn’t be weak for long…but I was right now.
Luckily, in my hours of whistling, pondering over dungeon names, and making plans, two things had happened.
Firstly, my essence replenished again, so I dug some more. I had now taken four decent-sized chunks of mud from the wall, forming a kind of archway that would one day become a tunnel.
Digging increased – 1.2%
Secondly, my lovely essence seeds had begun to spread!
On the wall opposite my tunnel, the seeds had sprouted moss-like vines that glowed a deep green, and they’d risen two feet up the wall.
The essence vines are flourishing!
Your essence now regenerates 5x faster.
That wasn’t all.
Oh no, that wasn’t everything. As well as all of that, something wondrous had happened!
There, affixed to one of the vines, was a little green bud.
The greatest bud I ever saw.
CHAPTER 2
As amazing as my new bud was, it presented me with quite a dilemma. A serious one.
Then again, was it really serious? Or did I have so little to do here, that any old dilemma took on more importance to me? Either way, I had to decide what to do.
This little green nub fixed to one of the vines was an essence bud. These things sprouted randomly from seeds, so not every network of vines would produce one. If they did, you were a very, very lucky core.
They were great. This one was only tiny, but if I ate it, it’d increase my total essence by 2 or 3 points. Thinking about how much more digging I could do with 3x the essence made me excited.
On the other hand, if I was greedy, I could risk splitting the bud. If I drew it into my core and split it into three or four pieces and then placed them back on the vine, there was a chance that all the split buds would all grow into fully formed ones. That would give me lots more essence.
Course, there was also a chance that the splitting process would kill the bud, leaving me with nothing.
Or, I could leave it a while, see if the bud grew any bigger on its own. Maybe big enough to give a real essence boost, like 8-10 points. That didn’t always happen.
“Sometimes,” Overseer Bolton had told me, “The buds die on their own if you leave them too long. If you haven’t used them before then, you’re outta luck.”
Decisions, decisions. It was almost as hard as trying to choose a new dungeon name.
The Tranquil Crypt?
The Scarlett Haunt?
Nope!
Back in the academy, whenever we were given an assignment and I was struggling with it, I’d always do something else to occupy my mind. It was like planting essence seeds; I would let the problem sit there in my brain, and then go and do something else. If I was lucky, my subconscious would water the seeds and they’d grow into an answer.
So, it was time to do something else to occupy myself. Trouble was, there were only a few things to do around here.
I could whistle. I could think up some more dungeon names.
Or…I could dig. I took two more chunks from the wall, keeping the arch shape that I’d formed, but this time digging deeper into the mud.
Phew. Lookin’ good. Only another century before I can carve out a new room, at this rate.
Digging increased – 1.3%
As I let my essence take a rest and replenish, I realized that my plan had worked, and I knew what to do with the essence bud now. There was a trick you could use to make the most of essence buds, and not many cores knew about it.
This was a trick that I’d read about in the academy library. Most cores, they were so desperate to graduate that they whizzed through all the set assignments and took their dungeon exam as soon as they could.
That was the thing; cores could graduate at different times. One core, Albin, had graduated after just a week. Word was that he was already running a mid-tier dungeon near a heroes’ guild out west. What a guy.
And what an idiot.
Running a dungeon near a heroes’ guild was insanely dangerous, but then again, it gave the greatest rewards. I guessed that the overseers hadn’t placed me anywhere near a guild. They’d probably put me somewhere really remote, maybe with a town or village nearby. They wouldn’t stick me anywhere risky until I’d proven myself.
But anyway, the average graduation time for a core was six months. I felt like I could pass the exams after two. Overseer Bolton agreed with me. Even so, I held back.
I wasn’t in a rush to leave the academy. The way I saw it, the academy is such a treasure trove of resources and knowledge, that it’d be stupid to just whizz through. Oh, I knew what the other cores were thinking. When someone is reborn as a core, the first thing they wanna kno
w is, ‘when do I get my own dungeon?’ The other cores didn’t get why I held back a little.
The answer was for the knowledge.
In the academy library, there were all sorts of books. Books on monsters, traps, essence, gems. Even fiction books. My favorite was a series called The Soul Bard.
In the academy library, I came across a book about core gem calitropics. For a human, this would be like a warrior finding a book on strength exercises. It was filled with all kinds of weird techniques and things a core could do to himself. Some of them were terrifying. In fact, I would go as far as to say they shocked me to my very…
I’ll stop.
In the gem calitropics book, I read about a technique concerning essence buds, and my brain must have squirreled the information away. Here I was now, a new core with barely any essence, and I was contemplating doing something risky.
The question I had to answer was, should I do it?
I mean, it’d help a lot.
Or it might put me in danger.
Hmm. Rewards, or danger. Which to choose?
Safe to say, with the way my mind works, the question was answered before I even thought about it.
Holding back my nerves, I stared at the little nub of essence nestled amongst the vines. Such a beautiful little bud.
So powerful, yet so fragile. A little like the Soul Bard. Man, I wished they’d let me bring books to the dungeon. I mean, I wouldn’t have been able to turn the pages, but I’d have worked something out. It would have helped with the boredom while my essence replenished.
I reached out with my core arms. Firming my resolve, I used them to pull the bud off the vine.
There – decision made!
I dragged the bud back to me, and I brought it into my core. I could taste it then, like the moss from earlier but so much sweeter. If I had saliva glands, they’d have been going crazy.
I forced myself not to absorb it. Instead, I did something else.
Hoping to all the demons of all the underworlds that the book I had read wasn’t written by some crackpot core who suffered an early second death, I split a shard from my core, and I attached it to the bud.
Dungeon Core Academy: Books 1-7 (A LitRPG Series) Page 1