by Dakota Krout
“Well, would you look at that?” The swarthy man breathed. He held up his torch, the light reflecting off something on the wall. “Well men, I’d say we are going to become very rich. Unless I miss my guess, that is native iron. We’re looking at the future site of an iron mine!”
With exclamations of joy, the other men whooped and shouted! This wasn’t for nothing! Their livelihoods were saved, and they were going to become rich, influential men. Hearts much lighter, they followed Tim deeper in, almost throwing caution to the wind. This time the swarthy man took the lead, testing the floor, keeping balance against the wall, and saved them twice, when the floor gave way and when a large rock suddenly fell from the ceiling.
Entering the third room, they saw no metals, so went directly toward the adjacent tunnel. One of the men lost his boot when it got stuck in a clump of weeds and moss that must have hidden a hole. Testing their weight each step, they made it through the last tunnel without any major issues.
“What in the world is that?”
“What?”
“It’s a big-ass mushroom! Look at the size of that thing! It must come up to my hip!”
“I don’t see any more metal, but at least we're gonna eat well tonight.” The fourth man laughingly walked toward the giant red capped mushroom, intent on carving off a sizable chunk, when the young man gave an exclamation of horror.
“What?” Turning toward them, the man next to the mushroom never saw the mouth that closed around his torso, ripping him in half with a single bite.
Jumping back in terror saved the young man from the thorn that shot from the stalk of the mushroom, which instead embedded in the wall with a *twang*. Immediately shouting and vacating the room, they peeked back in, to see if it were able to chase them. A glance at its stationary position convinced them that it wouldn’t follow, and a thorn the size of a hand whistling past his ear convinced the swarthy man that it was time to leave. The room was also becoming very bright, which they took to mean bad things were about to happen.
The remaining three moved quickly down the tunnels, retracing their steps and were in the second tunnel when a puff of something was inhaled by the swarthy man, reducing him to a coughing mess. Blinded by the tears streaming from his eyes, something caught his foot as they were crossing the second room.
The young man looked back to check on the swarthy man just as his head fell onto a light yellow mushroom and a spike suddenly protruded from the back of his head with an organic tearing sound. Knowing that the fallen group member was already dead, the young man sped up to get behind Tim, who was leaving him behind without a glance. They raced to the entrance to the first room, and stopped, breathing heavily as they tried to make their minds stop spinning from the trauma they had witnessed.
“This… This is for sure a dungeon.” Tim rasped, half laughing, half gasping. “I’m going to be so… So rich.”
The young man’s head snapped up at Tim’s comment. “What? What about me?”
Shaking his head, Tim angrily turned away from the lad and viewed the room. “Boy, do I have to tell you again to shut your mouth when your betters is talkin? Do you even understand how much this is going to change my life? What would you be going to do with the money anyway? Better to let me take care of this, you stupid-“
With fire in his eyes, the young man watched the mushrooms devour the man he had just shoved into them. “You were never my better, just older than me. Much older. Also, my name is Dale, you jerk.” He left the cave, and started home quickly, preparing to become a very, very rich man.
~Six~
Cal watched with great excitement, as his first explorers walked in to him. He watched them stop, and was horrified when he thought they were about to turn back. Then, they turned and walked right into the garden!! Each step was almost close enough for attack, but they somehow didn’t ever reach. A man stepping quickly never even saw a Shroomish miss its bite at an ankle. His disappointment kept ramping up, as each trap was just... walked around! Not one plant got an attack off, no traps were working… Until suddenly one did. A man shrieked and fell onto the spikes! The others exploded into motion, trying to see what had happened to him. When they lit a torch, somehow they missed seeing the reflective spikes in their haste to find a way to save the man. Suddenly, their concerns didn’t matter to me anymore.
The dead man's’ Essence blasted into me, more varied and elaborate than any I had ever had the pleasure of enjoying before. The power was so vast that it was simply impossible for me to contain it. The Essence of fire, water, air, earth, celestial, and infernal; all of the basic Essences, were pouring into me and processing themselves, releasing raw, unstable, pure Essence into my Core and the world around me as it overflowed.
Dani tried to help, “Cal! Try and collect it in a shell around you! Make a larger body for yourself!”
Through the pain of my vibrating body, I listened to her words, forming perfect facets of pure energy around me. Nearly doubling in size, my new body had barely solidified into a perfect, comparatively empty gem, when I felt the second man die. His life force flamed into me, filling my newly improved Core to the brim with energy. I was able to look out into my dungeon and see Bane chewing on something, when the third rush filled my Core. I tried to solidify the outpouring energy into a larger crystalline system, but it wasn’t working!
“Push it out! Release the Essence out into your body, the dungeon!” Dani shouted back.
Nearly smacking myself for not thinking of it, I sprayed the condensed Essence out of me, allowing it to accumulate in the air as my vaporous, Essence-rich influence.
“They made it to the entrance, you should be ok, Cal.” Dani stated with obvious relief. I felt the fourth man die at that moment, and as the Essence ripped through me, I focused on pushing the overflow out as hard as possible. The thick energy already pouring out of me condensed further, forming a beam that shot directly upward and out of me. The beam continued for several seconds, until returning to a more mist-like form as I stopped having energies dumped into me.
“Well, congratulations my F-rank eight Cal. You survived your first dungeon dive.” Dani tiredly informed me. “See how lots of people dying around you can affect your rank?”
I was carefully monitoring the Essence I had gained.
“Yeah they do. Good work. Um. How do you feel right now?” Dani inquired, oddly nervous for some reason.
Dani looked at me then did her version of a shrug, bobbing up and down a bit. “Well, I was just worried, people did just die in here, and I thought that you might be scared, or horrified, or just plain upset.”
I considered this for a moment.
Dani agreed. “It is what you are, you’re right. Always remember, the people that come here are risking their lives to get stronger, and to get rich. It is a risk that many will not survive, but it is their own choices - and greed - that will drive them here.”
“Good,” she stated firmly, “and by the way…”
“The Silverwood tree sprouted!” She shouted, unable to contain herself any more.
grily. Growing at a pace I was surprised at, the roots expanded outward, drinking the Essence that filled my puddle.
“I’ll bring you more water, you whiner.” Dani grumbled at him. The roots quickly reached to bottom, and were waving around looking for something. “Cal! Make dirt and open holes in the rock that the roots can go through! Hurry!”
I did as she asked; making strong, healthy black soil under the rock of the small hill surrounding me, and little holes that the roots shot toward like intelligent beings. I could always make the holes larger, so I decided not to let dirt get in and muddy up what was left of my poor puddle. The roots sank into the rich dirt and quickly burrowed in, seemingly finding their new home to their liking.
I was impressed by how many roots had grown, there had to be hundreds of tendrils extending from the tiny plant. If I were not in the midst of the root jungle, I would have mistakenly believed that the sapling above me were a regular plant, and no one looking at it from an angle would ever be able to see the advanced root system it had created in just a few minutes. Finally slowing, the miniscule sprout stood proudly, a full three inches tall. The roots must have been a few feet long each, therefore this was very misleading.
Dani chuckled at my understatement. “You aren’t kidding! Are you getting any information from it?”
“Don’t worry about it too much, you have a lot of growing to do after all. Things have been going really easily for you thus far, it is not overly surprising that you will be plateauing as you get older,” she explained cautiously, “also we need to talk about what happened during that fight!”
“Well, not what I wanted to start with, but increasing in rank is not always just a matter of raw power. It requires forethought and insight into the world around you. As you grow in power, what you do can reshape the world. To achieve these insights, you need to fully understand what you are changing, how it will affect the world around you, and if you should do it.”
“True though. When Mages use Essence to warp the universe, they are saying the true name of what they want, and infusing it with their power. This is called an incantation, and is the way they cast spells without objects. Now, words without power mean nothing, and power without knowledge is dangerous. All you knew to do was make your own body larger, you don’t know how to make power automatically direct itself, or how to refine Essence further.” Dani wisely stated.
“Yeah, Essence is only the most basic form of energy provided by the heavens and the earth. To break into the ‘B’ rank, you will need to learn to further refine Essence into Mana, to get into the ‘S’ rank you will need to learn about spiritual energy, and when we finally escape the ‘SSS’ rank and move into heavenly, you will need to find a ‘fundamental’ energy.” Dani started a lecture as I silently groaned.
“To progress into the ‘E’ rank you have to start the process that will activate your refinement. What is your energy doing right now, for instance?” She prompted leadingly.
“Bwa-ha-ha!” She mockingly laughed, “This is why I, your dungeon wisp, am here for you, young one!”
She chuckled evilly as she began, “Oh, you are gonna learn today. Start by releasing about half the energy you collected back into the air. You need to start less full than you are or it won’t work.” Apparently, what I needed to do next was to focus on my exact center, easy for me since I was perfectly symmetrical, thank you very much, and start spinning my Essence along the outer edge of my Core. After a few hours, I was able to get it swirling to Dani’s liking.
Next, I had to pull the absolute smallest thread I possibly could from the large swirl, and pull it to my “Center”. According to Dani, the Center of a being was actually the Center of their soul, where Essence would feed into their life-force. Therefore, the better the quality of the Essence, the stronger the life-force and more robust the soul. Needless to say, I had to work for quite a while before Dani reluctantly allowed me to use the thread I had stretched. Everything before that quality was quickly rejected by her.
Connecting the incredibly fine strip of Essence to my center, I began to spin it in the opposite direction from the large swirl. As these competing swirls continued to spin, the fine inner center started to accumulate, apparently this process was called a ‘Chi spiral’. Pronounced ‘Key spiral’, Dani told me haughtily.
The Chi spiral had several functions that helped to further process Essence. A person’s Chi spiral is a vast amount of intricately knotted Essence, the more complex and complete the pattern woven into it, the more Essence it can hold and the finer the Essence would be refined. Dani compared this to packing clothes in a bag by stuffing them in versus neatly folding them and carefully placing for maximum storage capacity. The downside is that it took a long time for the Essence to be refined, but I was assured that as I became more practiced it would become faster. On a positive note, the swirling light was absolutely gorgeous. The light moved and played along my facets, sending shimmering fluorescence across the ceiling above me. While beautiful, I hoped the tree above me would grow fast enough to soon hide the emanating light.
It took a lot of focus to keep swirling the Essence incongruently, but I was again assured that it would eventually become automatic to me. While my goal was to create a very complex Chi spiral, at this level it was exhausting just to keep it moving at all. The important process started, we had some free time to discuss what had happened during the incursion by humans.
“The monsters in here need to be stronger, ranged, or able to move around. That group made it into the Boss room without having to fight a single time!”
I was a bit distracted by my need to keep my Essence swirling properly.
“I have a thought,” Dani gleefully chuckled, “You jumped all the way to the eighth rank in ‘F’, while your Boss stayed down at G-rank nine. I’m betting that you will be able to absorb him and make him a common monster at this point, though much smaller if you want several. Then we can start on a new Boss!”
I slowly acquiesced, ‘nodding’,
“Oh nasty, I had forgotten the smell.” She sneezed and shuddered.
“Lucky you. Just study them. As soon as you know how their bodies work they will automatically dissolve into your influence. Easy-peasy cleanup. Oh! Let's see if they had any gear with them!”
Now armed with the knowledge of how to make humans, I could easily have made skeletons or zombies to fight for me, but I just could not get over how upset a constant reminder of Necromancers would make me. Looking at the items they had with them, I learned how to make several new things. Poor quality wool shirt, wool pants, rope, bone dagger, wool boots, wool belt, water skin, and a leather bag.
There were also a few copper coins in the bag, which is when Dani explained how currency worked, and had me make copper coins with the exact same imprint these had on them. I made them out of pure copper though, not the low grade, shoddy copper alloy these were made of. I needed to have pride in my work after all.
Dani went quiet for a moment, like she always did before having something interesting to say.
“Let’s talk about loot.”
Surprising me, she jumped right in. “Loot is a payment system for defeating monsters. It helps distract adventures from taking everything they see, and will guarantee that people will come back if they survive. Escalating the reward to more elaborate items for coming deeper in the dungeon increases the odds that you will have more opportunities to kill them off, and become stronger.”
How would that work?
“No, and this is kinda cool, you know how you grow creatures with a ‘seed and pattern’?” She was amused by something. I nodded my assent, and she continued, “Well the concept is the same, but you attach the ‘loot’ seed to the monster, and when it dies it triggers the ‘seed’ to grow. It is really funny to see, because if you don’t know how it works, it makes no sense! Imagine someone accidentally squishing a patch of moss, and out pops a helmet! I bet they would scream! Haha!”
That sounded hilarious, and I could not wait to get started. She cautioned me not to make it too obvious to start though, and to try to make things properly. No dagger handles that had a boot instead of a blade for instance, and to eventually try to make enchantments on items that made things worth the effort to obtain. Don’t put a dancing enchantment on a wand, put it on shoes for example.
The smaller mushrooms could be used in potion-making and for food already, so I only attached coin loot seeds to them. Really, even my ‘Bane’ could be mostly used as potion material, if they knew what they were doing, so I just gave him a larger coin value, and sometimes he would drop sets of clothes or a dagger. I made the dagger better than what I had found, substituting iron for the bone blade. It was heavy and brittle, but far more effective.
Next, it was time to absorb Bane and make more of him. Resisting a bit at first, he eventually gave up his energy and I was able to study his pattern. Easily able to replicate it, I made several “Dire Shroomish: Bane” Monsters in each room but the last. They were smaller, and would only come up to the knee of the last group, but were now the ranged attackers of my dungeon.