Dakota Krout - Dungeon Born (The Divine Dungeon Book 1)

I promised myself that I would try not to put my life on the line for greed.

“Good,” she stated firmly, “and by the way…”

I prodded her to continue.

“The Silverwood tree sprouted!” She shouted, unable to contain herself any more.

The tiny seed had fragmented away from the plant, like an egg releasing a creature, only for the roots to absorb the solid Essence the shell had been composed of. The tiny roots glowed, and started moving hungrily. Growing at a pace I was surprised at, the roots expanded outward, drinking the Essence that filled my puddle.

I pouted sadly, trying not to let on how much I was actually worried.

“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?”

I grumbled,

“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.”

I teased.

“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.

Wasn’t my Essence really pure though?

“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.

Even as I uttered the words I knew it was the wrong answer, but the one she wanted to hear.

“Bwa-ha-ha!” She mockingly laughed, “This is why I, your dungeon wisp, am here for you, young one!”

I dryly replied,

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.