Safe to say, with the way my mind works, the question was answered before I even thought about it.
Holding back my nerves, I stared at the little nub of essence nestled amongst the vines. Such a beautiful little bud.
So powerful, yet so fragile. A little like the Soul Bard. Man, I wished they’d let me bring books to the dungeon. I mean, I wouldn’t have been able to turn the pages, but I’d have worked something out. It would have helped with the boredom while my essence replenished.
I reached out with my core arms. Firming my resolve, I used them to pull the bud off the vine.
There – decision made!
I dragged the bud back to me, and I brought it into my core. I could taste it then, like the moss from earlier but so much sweeter. If I had saliva glands, they’d have been going crazy.
I forced myself not to absorb it. Instead, I did something else.
Hoping to all the demons of all the underworlds that the book I had read wasn’t written by some crackpot core who suffered an early second death, I split a shard from my core, and I attached it to the bud.
Then I felt really, really nervous about the whole thing.
CHAPTER 3
Overseer’s Log: Overseer Bolton
Core graduate Beno, tier 1, has begun his first dungeon. Initial progress was as to be expected; graduate has made slow headway into his first tunnel, and he has cultivated essence seeds. I felt neither alarmed nor hopeful at first.
However.
There has been a development. Beno has been lucky enough to find a bud. I expected him to absorb it immediately, given it would double or treble his essence capacity. He has surprised me.
Core Beno has applied a technique I did not expect him to know. Then again, perhaps it is my own failing that I didn’t expect this of him. We all know that Beno doesn’t like to do things the normal way, do we not? The technique brings rewards, but it is dangerous. Beno is showing the same blend of practicality and recklessness as a core, as he did in his first life.
Now…now I am both alarmed and hopeful.
It was hard to tell if it had worked.
I mean, at first, I wasn’t even thinking about whether it worked or not. I was more concerned with the tremendous, soul crunching pain that came with willingly separating a shard of my core. It’d be like a man cutting off his own finger.
When the sliver of my core broke away, it lost its form, and it became liquid. I mentally commanded this to wrap around the bud, coating it in that watery piece of myself.
“Hope this works, little bud,” I said.
Now, I split the bud. Not into two pieces. Not three. Hell, even four would have been pushing it for most buds. Five was just insane.
“Is that what I am?” I said. “A guy brought back from death, just so he could go insane?”
The answer was obviously yes, because I split the bud into ten pieces, each a centimeter wide.
If an overseer was watching me, and I guessed they had the means to do so, they too would have thought I was crazy. Splitting a bud into ten pieces was a sign of greed, and a sure way to kill the bud.
My hope that was by using the core split technique that I’d read about, my liquid core would give the bud extra vitality and toughness, allowing it to survive after being split so many times.
It’d be a while before I knew whether it had worked. I used my core arms to blend the ten pieces back amongst the essence vines on the wall – which had grown another foot taller – and then I waited.
The first signs of bud death would be them turning black. They’d stink to all heavens, and then they’d drop from the vines and fall uselessly on the ground. They’d lie there, reeking and reminding me that I’d just wasted a great opportunity to boost my essence total.
There was nothing I could do but be hopeful and keep my mind occupied. Even whistling wouldn’t help this time.
The first thing I did was to check my stats again. Sure enough, it was unpleasant reading.
Beno - Dungeon Core
Level: 1
Core Purity: 95%
Essence: 1/1
Skills:
Digging: 1.3%
I’d lost 5% of my core purity. That felt bad, but what could I expect? I’d willingly given a part of myself up. Secret technique or not, I sure as hell couldn’t make a habit of it. I just had to hope it was worth it.
So…now I needed to pass the time while I waited. Which of my plethora of time-wasting activities could I do?
For two long days, I got into a routine of digging away at the wall, then waiting for my essence to replenish. It came back a little quicker on account of the lovely essence vines spreading over the wall, but it was still slow.
All the while I tried with every fiber of my core to not check the buds every five minutes.
When I wasn’t digging, I whistled. That got old real fast.
I tried to remember some of the Soul Bard stories in my head, seeing them as pictures in my mind. I began making up my own stories, but I wasn’t a good writer. I was way too literal.
After a while, I had gone two foot deeper into my new tunnel, so that now it really started to resemble one, and I even leveled my digging skill to 1.5%.
Then, something happened to my buds.
As a core, my emotions were somewhat muted, and it was hard to describe even to myself how I felt about this.
The best way was to compare my
