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

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.”

I concentrated, and the pure Essence inside me began to flow into the mushrooms pattern. The tiny stalk on the ground rippled, and grew a little bit. Now, to make it get large and reproduce. I fed it a trickle of Essence. Nothing seemed to happen, so I increased the flow to a steady stream.

“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.”

I looked at the plant. It was just a plant before, now it was a monster.

“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.

How rude! Really, I was basically its creator.

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.

Concentrating on the roof of the cave, I carved a small rock away and let it fall. The shroomish splattered with a keening sound, and the Essence shot into me, far more Essence than I had ever taken in one go before, as I had not drained it somewhat beforehand. The Essence was entirely different than I had been expecting, a much more complex blend of earth, plant, and a cool refreshing feeling which revealed itself to be water Essence. It absorbed far easier than other Essence did, but tasted rather bland to me. After the last bit had filled me, I turned my attention to the pattern of its body.

I exclaimed in surprise. I was babbling, so I tried to stop talking.

“It is a natural evolution.” Dani informed me. When all I gave in return for this information was confusion, she decided to explain herself.

“As you get stronger, you can make creatures evolve by supplying them with the energy to do so, or they can absorb items or different elements to change themselves naturally.” Dani explained, looking at the splattered remains from a careful distance. “Usually, the Essence you supply would direct the changes, but since yours seems to be so pure, it must have allowed for it to become what it would have after decades of cultivating, or a ‘natural evolution’. You keep throwing me for a loop.”

At least the cultivation stuff made sense.

“It is a figure of speech. Not a literal statement. Stay with me here, this opens up a slew of options for us that I hadn’t considered.” Dani was getting excited again. Should I be nervous? “We’ll get to that, but first try to recreate the Mob. And before you attack my verbiage, my choice of words that is, a ‘Mob’ is a short way to say ‘dungeon monster’.”

du ngeon m onster’.> Where was she getting that abbreviation?

“It just… It just isn’t.” Dani sputtered, seemingly exasperated.

I looked at where the shroomish had originally been, and was startled to see the body was melting directly into the floor, it was mostly goo at this point. Must be an effect of my influence. I tried to pay attention to what Dani was telling me to do, so I began listening carefully. Dani explained that to create a Mob, all I had to do was make a ‘seed’ of energy infused with the pattern of the creature I wanted to make. Apparently this would even work if I wanted to make creatures that weren’t normally made from actual seeds, all the way up to the largest beasts in existence, although those big creatures would obviously take longer to mature. Or lots of Essence.

I focused and made the needed pattern on an Essence ‘seed’ and watched as it absorbed the ambient energy in the room to quickly grow to full size. I would never know the difference between the original and the current one, if it weren’t for the fact that I could feel a link to the creature in my mind. I imprinted on it that it should not attack Dani, but anything else was fair game. I could feel its assent as it ate a smaller mushroom right next to it, then moved into a near hibernating state, waiting for any inattentive prey.

Finally done with the Mob creation, I returned to infusing an area with enough Essence to quickly grow plants, and properly made the remaining regular mushrooms put spores out onto the Essence-rich stone. Following this, I resumed passively absorbing Essence and trying to increase my area of influence. After roughly ten days I was able to fill the entire cave with a light coating of Essence, and had reached the entrance of the cave.

“Good work!” congratulated a very bored Dani. The poor girl hadn’t been able to order me around for days, I think it was wearing on her. “What you need to do now is work on concentrating the Essence as densely as possible in this room, and we will expand our work from there.”