Blue Core

I still felt bad about the incident. Not for that idiot Harrison, who had clearly been the type with a vast ego and very little brain, but for Shayma. Fortunately she was already used to death, so my rather...energetic disposal of the man hadn’t scarred her. But, I had used her feet to reach out into the world, which had both pinned her in place and been more than a little rude to do without asking. I got the feeling other Powers kind of did as they liked, but I wasn’t about to treat Shayma as servant or property.

Worst of all, in some ways, she was horribly embarrassed by the whole scene. Which, yes, I was too but I wasn’t there. She was, and in bare feet. Even though she had [Temperature Resistance], wandering around rainy cobble streets in bare feet was unpleasant and humiliating. The inn had been nice enough to lend some shoes, since it was late enough at night that no cobbler would have been able to finish the boots before the wee hours anyway.

“I can’t promise I’ll never do something like that again,” I told her. “I mean, I wasn’t even thinking before, just reacting. But I do promise I’ll try not to treat you like spun glass. I mean, you totally destroyed those goblins, after all.”

“I absolutely did,” Shayma muttered.

“...but at the same time, you are my only link to the world. You really do represent me. I think Dyen was right, that we have to make it more official that you’re my, uh, representative. That way they’re provoking me as well, and it’s less awkward to deal with things like this. Hopefully you’ll be able to deal with it yourself, but if not, at least it will make sense?”

“I...suppose.” Shayma sighed. “I can’t say I’m happy about it.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to be. I really am sorry, Shayma.”

“I’m going to be grumpy for a bit,” she warned.

“Well, that’s fair. But, hey, if it helps it turns out we’re rich?”

“Don’t change the subject!” Shayma warned, but with a grin.

“Well it’s kind of important actually. If we’re going to take this Power thing seriously, we might as well take this opportunity of ‘a couple days’ or whatever Dyen needs to get you some new duds. Clothes, armor. New boots. Good boots. Make you look like you’re the representative of a Power.”

“Mmm. What did you have in mind?” She didn’t seem entirely on board with the idea still, but it seemed the best way to keep any more misadventures from occurring.

“I figured I’d leave that to you and the tailor or whatever? I’m not exactly experienced in the sartorial arts. You were mentioning black-colored armor before...I still don’t know how I could do that, but we can always buy it.”

“How many of those Source gems do you have, anyway?”

“Um. A lot. I can just grow them. What exactly are they used for, by the way?”

For a moment, Shayma was speechless. “...of course you can. They improve casting of the appropriate affinity, and are used in crafting somehow. I'm not sure exactly how, though.”

“Oh, nice! I definitely need to figure out how to make more types then.”

“You're saying Power-type things in the most un-Power way I can think of.” She shook her head. “Shopping it is, then.”

While she did that, I decided to fiddle with the Source gems I had. Fire, ice, earth, water, nature, healing. The coal flower fruited not a source gem but alchemical coal, which I could at least guess the use of.

It had been a while since I tried serious manipulation of material. Ever since I'd made Stonesteel, there hadn't seemed to be anything that would lend itself to it. Compressed dirt just gave me stone and I hand plenty of that. Plus, I just didn't have the same control over things like water or air, since they weren't connected to my organic parts. But the gems might work, and I had plenty to work with, even after sending Shayma two if each type. Smaller ones, marble sized or so.

I selected a nice ice gem for the task, reaching out with [Customization] to squeeze it down, pouring mana into it and using [Genius Loci] to watch the details, stabilizing the pressure before I cracked the thing. I didn't release it, though, because something was happening. Some sort of phase change? I put in more mana, and more again, burning through over two thousand points as the gem structure shimmered.

Then the entire thing crunched down to half its size, turning from opaque white to something more transparent, with streamers of white glowing inside, circling and flowing. I almost broke the thing, it was so sudden. Cold white light bloomed outward from the gem, flaring before settling into a steady glow.

Title acquired: Source Refiner. Upgrading with [Purifier]... Title evolves into Source Purifier.

[Source Purifier]: The Dungeon's Source creations evolve to Primal Sources.

[Primal Ice Gem] discovered.

[Primal Fire Gem] discovered.

…

[Primal Healing Gem] discovered.

My entire mana dynamo stuttered, almost stopping as mana rushed into all the Source gems. They drank it greedily, collapsing one after another into the transparent Primal forms before driving mana through the cycle far harder than before.

Well. Okay then. Actually I was glad I’d given Shayma those gems before trying this out because I had no idea if these brand-new shiny Primal gems were fungible. They could be far too valuable, which made them impossible to move, or they could be something only Powers could use. Or other such nonsense. They were quite pretty, though.

There were also two types of flowers I had which hadn’t actually made gems. The Crystalline and Latticework ones still refused to, but they both had the same description. Sensitive to light. It was one of the precious few times the descriptions actually hinted at what to do, so I went ahead and did it.

I used my experimental dynamo, since it was powerful enough to have some of the Green Chrystheniums fruit, and adjusted a room so half of it was entirely bordered by light panels and the other half was full of the Darkness field. Then it was just a matter of seeding some of the flowers there and waiting.

[Radiant Chrysthenium] discovered. Produces Light.

[Umbral Chrysthenium] discovered. Produces Shadow.

[Core Lattice Gem] discovered.

Honestly it was pretty fun making things grow properly, even if they did defy all logic. The Radiant and Umbral flowers looked entirely awesome, the former small and delicate, with tiny but brilliant petals, and the other like an orchid, swallowing light. But the best part was when I followed the un-logic and linked the two. First of all, just the two of them acted like a tiny dynamo, similar to just ice and magma, which implied a lot of future possibilities. But also…

[Illusory Chrysthenium] discovered. Invisible.

When I got a gem out of that, I’d have something pretty awesome for Shayma.

The Core Lattice Gem wasn’t too bad either. I wasn’t sure what it did, but it looked a lot like my Core - transparent with roiling blue within. Perhaps it would be a less practical gift, but it might work with the current mission. Which was to say, making Shayma look like someone of importance and not some random low-level adventurer.

I also needed to play with my spoils from fixing up the inn and the street. I had tried to be as delicate as possible about infiltrating my boring tendrils into the street and foundation, so I didn’t simply erase a chunk of building or make the damage worse. After managing, barely, to not topple the whole inn, I’d gotten my first new Dungeon Feature entry in a while. [Assimilation]. Which sounded sinister, but just let me claim things instead of eating them with [Boring Tendrils] and remaking them.

Watching it happen, it wasn’t very complicated, either. Very thin filaments of my organic body, or whatever exactly the dungeon-stuff was, slid into the stone or soil, and saturated the area with a mana-field. At least, that’s what it looked like to me. I was sure it was slightly more complicated than that, since even with [Genius Loci] the inner workings of most of myself were completely opaque.

Of course, it took mana to use, and not just a little of it either. Way more than it would even if I was empowering my boring tendrils and construction abilities, but the benefits were obvious. If I weren’t so concerned with safety at the moment I would even use it to see if I could claim the entire acreage of surface above me, but for the moment I was actually trying to dig away from the surface. Maybe if I ran into any lost ruins it’d be useful. I could make it mine without disturbing it overmuch, and who knows, maybe it’d work on super magical things I couldn’t reproduce.

I had more important things to deal with though, since repairing the inn’s glass windows had actually given me access to the stuff. Finally. I could replace the open-style shutter windows with the real deal! It was an exciting day for architecture, especially since glass just took some stone and mana and I had plenty of both.

I’d also been practicing [Relocate] because moving sucks. Moving giant mana dynamos created by hooking together chambers that had been spatially expanded was worse. So I’d been testing out moving whole rooms with [Relocate] rather than individual features.

The results were mixed.

I could move even spatially expanded rooms, but if I tried to hurry the process at all by empowering it with mana, anything inside those rooms would end up remaining behind. So by some quick calculations, trying to transfer the current setup to the places I was digging into, deep inside the mountain, would take...a week.

Honestly that wouldn’t be a problem if people didn’t mind being completely sealed in, but they needed the hunting and foraging from the surface. Even if they had the supplies, I wasn’t about to start without Shayma there. Sealing them up with no explanation might cause just a little bit of panic. Just a little.

So for the moment it was better to just set up a new area, and if it gave me more mana, so much the better. Although my mana income was truly obscene by the standards of someone with a Class, if I wanted to start supporting multiple types of Fields over immense areas, I needed it. Growth and Regeneration alone, if I filled the farming and living areas respectively, would suck up most of what I was generating. Well, less than before, with the Primal Gems, but I was still technically mana-poor. How did the other dungeons manage to get anything done?