by Dakota Krout
*Click* *Click*
As I became used to the process, I was able to accomplish the task faster, letting me make more connections, faster and faster, until with a jolt I found there were no more poorly formed areas. A good thing too, as my light had dimmed enough to nearly extinguish. My mind, losing the single track intensity that had propelled me to this stage, nearly broke under the exhaustion I now felt.
“Cal! Are you awake yet? Cal!” Dani desperately begged, voice hoarse and weak.
“You need to absorb...Essence. Please, hurry...” She pleaded, her light dimming as well.
Her words barely registered in my mind, my thoughts moving at a glacial speed. I was hungry. I reached for the moss, and as per usual it eagerly flowed toward me as well. I started eating, and as I did I only got hungrier, the input of Essence awakening my unquenchable gluttony. Greedily reaching for more moss, I pulled more and more energy from the entire patch of moss, until dying moss started to emit blasts of energy, which shot into me. I stopped pulling Essence, and looked nervously at where it came from.
As I suspected, a small patch of moss withered away, crumbling to dust as I watched. I finished refining what I had, and realized that while this amount of energy would have killed me before I fixed my facets, now it was barely satiating my hunger. I turned my attention to Dani, who was beginning to glow again.
“You nearly killed us both is what happened!!” Her glow flashing to a deep crimson with fury. “You altered your basic structure until completion - without even stopping to recover! I had to close our connection just to stop from draining the last bits of Essence from you and nearly starved to death myself before you gained enough energy for me to safely take some! Do you have any idea how horrible of a death dying from lack of Essence is?!”
I tried to defend my actions,
“I told you not to rush!” Her anger fading, her body slowly returned to her regular coloration. “Are you ok? Did you hurt yourself?”
“Good.” She blew out a breath. “Cal, you really need to have some self-preservation skills.”
“Don’t be sorry, be smart! If you die, so do I! We need you to be the smartest dungeon that exists, because we need each other!” She exploded, obviously still mad for some reason.
I promised her vigorously.
“Good. You’d better. Well, let’s take a look at you.” She flew closer to me examining me for any flaw or defect. After a short time, she pronounced her assessment, “Cal you are the most perfect diamond I have ever seen.”
“Well, you look like a flawless diamond. When you get full of energy, it’ll be nearly impossible to break you I bet.” Her abrupt reversal of attitude threw me off, but her words were really nice. A pink glow joined my normal blue as I “blushed” from her praise. Interesting, it seemed my emotions can alter my coloration for a moment or two.
She granted my desire, “A very good job.” Then my new favorite thing to hear, “Well, let’s get some food shall we?”
I felt a bit embarrassed about killing off my only good source of food.
She examined the withered moss and nodded, “True, but why didn’t you finish the rest of it off?”
She never ceased to surprise me.
“Well! I thought you were just a glutton, but you keep throwing me for a loop!” She flew to me and tested the energy flows I was emitting. “I think I was wrong earlier, you must have been a G-rank three Core, just with so many flaws your energy came out scattered and weak. You have the cultivation base of a G-rank four now, and this allows you to have forethought. It’s ok Cal, try and finish off the moss there and take in its life energy. It is the remaining cultivation base of the moss, the densest concentration, so it will give slightly more energy than it does normally.”
“We will grow more, just eat it already.” Yikes! I didn’t want to make her angry again.
I felt incredible, strong, and powerful. That is not how I responded to her next question though.
“How do you feel?” She was testing the waters, looking at my cultivation.
I responded as honestly as possible.
“Why am I not surprised, ya hog.” She admonished flatly. “I think it is time for you to try and use your Essence, I want you to move the entire stalagmite you are on as far toward that cave as you can go. You are too exposed here, your Core should be insanely difficult to get to. Right now anything could swoop in and grab you.”
“You reach into the area around you, and tell it to move. Only you can really know what it will take, so if I can do anything for you, let me know.” Well. That was rather unhelpful advice.
“That’s normal! If you left this area behind you would lose a lot of your power. Everything filled with your Essence is in reality your body, and you are the heart, the soul. You can never willingly move your heart from your body, but you can reposition it. That is how dungeons grow and evolve.” Dani explained courteously, then told me to hurry up.
Moving my form through the opening in the rock wall, I yanked my whole mass as far through the cave as I could, after hours I finally reached a wall and could go no further. I settled to the floor with great relief.
“How is your Essence doing? Did you use too much?” Queried Dani, fluttering about the cave, exploring its depths.
“Close!” She sounded off brightly, “We got about forty feet or so before you hit a wall.”
“I forgot that you can just barely see past your influence. How big do you think your body is?” She was leading the conversation somewhere.
She dashed my hopes immediately. “Your stalagmite is about two feet tall and the ground you have at the base is about five feet in diameter. A bit lopsided where the moss was, because I helped you grow there.”
I was flabbergasted.
“Well you were a bit larger when you were a flawed gem…” She paused,
dangling the information just out of reach, “but now you are the size of a one carat diamond. Soooo about six and a half millimeters.”
“Yup, that’s it. Stop being a narcissist! You can’t worry about things you can’t control, you have too much work to do if you want to become a big strong dungeon, and you can start by spreading your influence.” She was ignoring my questions again!
“Remember how I made all that Essence turn into a mist and spread it around?” She reminded me, “I need you to do the same thing, but with your accumulated Essence. Concentrate hard on making the surroundings… you.” Dani finished lamely.
Sure. Why not.
“Keep going until I tell you to stop or until you reach those mushrooms.” She directed, settling onto a grey stone outcropping to watch my progress.
Why was she being so unhelpful?
“You’ll know it when you find it.” She sing-sang in a know-it-all voice.
“Hey! Go up and down too.” Dani demanded, twitching up off her rock an inch to look at my apparently shoddy work.
“Those need to be permeated with your Essence most of all!”
I reached as high as I could go, and coated the ceiling and floor, then kept doing what I could to fill the chamber. Quickly I found that I had tripled my range of influence, and was just starting to get worried about the amount of Essence I had remaining, when I found mushrooms. As I learned everything about this type of mushroom, I tasted it for the first time. It was made of a mixture of plant and earth Essence, and both types of Essence were more abundant than either the rocks or the moss had been able to contain or give me. While it was more difficult to take the Essence from the mushrooms than the moss had been, it was still far easier than the stone, and so I began to eat. Cultivate. Whatever.
The flavor was reminiscent of sweet salad leaves dipped in the rich chocolate that is the earth. I ate much slower than ever before, the complexities of this Essence eluding my slavering “tongue” until I discovered the trick of it, breaking the complex Essence down to its elemental form, separating it into its basic Essence, finally absorbing it in a sweet and fulfilling rush. The flavor was so wonderfully potent that I was nearly unable to hear Dani when she started to talk to me. “You made it! That is surprising, it only took you a few days!”
“Well, that isn’t surprising now, is it? Time doesn’t have the same effect on us as it does other living things.” Dani explained. “By the way, how do you feel now with your Essence?”
Turning my attention inward, it was obvious that the energy in me was less than it had been, but not nearly the amount that I had feared it would be. The tiny amount of the mushrooms overall energy had replaced this much?! Surprised by this development, I told Dani.
“That is great! It means that although you are unique in many ways, my knowledge isn’t entirely useless!” She boasted with a ‘wink’ that consisted of her light dimming and shining in a strobe-like way. “As the range of your influence increases, the Essence of the world will passively flow to you, very slowly filling your Core to replace what you use. Obviously, it is far slower than actively pulling the energy to yourself, but as your range grows, so will the passive Essence influx. Eventually, you may not even need to pull Essence to increase in ranking.”
“I don’t need to eat! The energy you provide me with directly fulfills those needs.” She assured me. “How is that Essence by the way? You having any trouble with it?”
“Well, that is a more Complex Essence is all.” She told me carefully. “It is intrinsically combined earth and water Essence, right? That is known as ‘mud’ Essence, and is notoriously hard to cultivate from.”
“You are going to be the most amazing dungeon ever. I just know it!” Dani then looked at the quickly wilting stalks of the mushrooms I was pulling Essence from. “Hey, you want to learn how to grow more of those?”
She looked at me oddly, “I thought you would be more excited than this.” Zipping over to me she looked at my Essence. “G-rank five already?! This is wonderful! You are growing so well! And so fast.” She murmured, almost with concern.
The ones I was ‘gnawing’ on were going to die soon if I did nothing to spread out the drain on their resources.
Dani seemed to shake off her contemplative stupor. “Right, so, focus on the mushroom that you want to grow first, I’d suggest that reddish poisonous looking one. Got it? Ok, now focus on what it needs to survive, you should know all of that, look at what it needs to grow and reproduce.”
Growing and reproducing was almost its entire pattern after all. A pattern is the intricate design that comes together in a unique way to create everything in the universe. An inanimate object has a far less complex pattern that a living being, which explained why it was easier to absorb Essence from rocks than plants. Plants had really simple purposes in their life.
“Great, hold the pattern in your mind, exactly as it is. Got it? Good. Now pour a bit of Essence into the pattern, try and integrate it into the flow that is moving through it. When it feels mature, make it produce and release spores into the room. When those land, you can do one of two things.” She explained thoroughly, “Either infuse the spores with Essence directly, and grow those with your Essence, or slather that Essence-rich vapor onto the area they land, which will allow them to grow naturally but still way faster than they could otherwise. You can control how fast and where things grow by infusing different amounts of Essence into the area. Don’t want something to grow? Don’t give it any Essence! Really easy.”
“Stop, stop!” ordered Dani, dismayed. “It takes a moment to change into the Essence its own… type. Oh my.”
It was obvious that the mushroom absorbed the Essence, because it began to grow at a rapid, mutated pace. I could see how much energy this took, nearly what it would produce in its own natural lifespan, and it still was not close to the amount I had given it.
Continuing to grow, it suddenly shuddered and began to develop a crease in the stalk. As we watched, the crease grew, and the remaining Essence began to diffuse throughout the entire plant, focusing heavily for a bit on the crease. When the Essence was stable, Dani flew closer to get a better look at the finished product.
“Ahhh!” She screamed as the plant lunged at her, the crease revealing itself as a mouth filled with sharp thorns instead of teeth. Zipping back to a safe distance Dani stopped screaming. The mushroom exuded an air of disappointment until it settled back into its stationary state, looking just like a larger version of the others around it. “Too close! Ohmygosh that was scary!” Dani panted.
She came over to me, shivering, and continued in a brave voice, “Well, not what we were after, but congratulations! You made your first dungeon monster! There is an… issue though. It is a natural plant that gained cultivation ranks by absorbing Essence, not a monster you actually created. Because of this, it will not obey you completely, unless it swears loyalty to you. Since it can’t make that deal, as a plant, you need to drain away its Essence.”
“You didn’t though. Do you understand it?” She prodded knowingly. “Could you make another one with the same pattern?”
I refocused on the monster, I‘ll call it a shroomish, and tried to study it. I couldn’t, for some reason. Looking at the Essence in it I tried grab it, then to coax it away, but was met with severe resistance.
Dani grunted, a very unladylike sound. “Oh right! As a monster it won’t just happily give you its life force. It needs to be defeated. Make a chunk of rock fall off the ceiling above it, squashing it and releasing its Essence, which will then be automatically pulled to you because it is in your influence.” She verbosely directed.