The Physical Essence circled inside my refractive scarlet faces alongside the Infernal Essence I’d purloined from the corpses of the imps. The two substances never merged or collided but simply pursued the other as though they were playing a game of tag. I then perceived a third substance inside my core. It was very similar to the Infernal Essence, which is why I hadn’t noticed it at first. It seemed incredibly familiar, and upon closer inspection, I saw a hint of silver. It was a familiar color, one I had seen marking Von Dominus’ irises.
Was this form of Infernal Essence my avatar?
I banked the question for later as my hunger to consume the mountain returned, and I gave into the desire anew.
I already had a blueprint for my dungeon’s first room in my mind, and I set about carving it out of the mountaintop. As I moved, the more I consumed, the further my senses expanded. My range of mind-sense seemed to grow the further I burrowed down into the mountain’s peak. I could perceive the obsidian—the firmer, less igneous stone—and how it crossed in and around itself. It was like some kind of massed, knotted fist of minerals jutting out from the earth itself.
I carved out a forty-five-degree incline into the top of the mountain, but just as I was starting on the antechamber to Zagorath, my consciousness restricted. My shining gem dulled, and I tried to push out further. My mental tendrils found nothing there but fog, and my jewel clouded further.
I couldn’t consume any more Physical Essence now; as much as I tried to reach out for the delicious rocks that contained it, my jewel drew a blank.
It took me a moment to realize I was full. Whatever I’d thought I could do, even my Infernal Dungeon core had limits. I couldn’t just eat the entire mountain in twenty seconds.
Fuck. Something else to add to the list: make my core able to eat more.
The tunnel I’d eked out of the ground was completely a part of me, and I could feel it as easily as it if were an arm. It dropped 20 feet to a rectangular room 30 feet high, almost 100 feet long, and 50 feet wide. It was a relatively small room, but it was my very first dungeon floor.
My jewel was still submerged in the rock at the top of the tunnel, hidden from watchful eyes—well, hidden from everything except my two champions. I’d been too busy excavating to notice whether they’d followed my core’s progress, but they were now standing in the darkness of my dungeon’s floor. From their current startled expressions, I knew they’d seen everything. What would it have looked like through their eyes? A mountain fading away, its dust absorbed by a single jewel small enough to fit in a half-troll’s palm?
The questions rattled through my mind as I gazed upon them, and I realized I was seeing them completely for the first time from within my jewel. My senses as a dungeon core were clearer than they’d ever been. Even in core form and surrounded in practical pitch darkness, I could see Bertha and Puck as clearly—if not more clearly—than I could with Von Dominus’ elf-eyes.
Puck hovered around her head, and from the snappish comments she was exchanging with his constant stream of blabber, I could tell he’d been doing nothing but irritating her. Imps and trolls didn’t seem to have a lot of love for each other.
I reached out with my mind to talk with them, and I no longer had to screen out the dull and distant white noise that came with the thoughts of the creatures outside of my jewel’s constricted senses.
“Master,” Puck said aloud, “So, you’ve returned to us.”
“I was absorbed in my work.”
“This creature hasn’t stopped talking since you started to expand your dungeon,” Bertha said as she nodded at the imp.
“Puck…”
“Forgive my impertinence, Master.” The imp flapped up the tunnel toward my core, “This troll is simply intolerable. She has no appreciation for wit, banter, or bartering. What’s an imp to do while you carry out your destiny? Sit still? Wait?”
“Sleep?” I suggested. “Not irritate the troll that can tear you in half?”
Puck muttered something uncomplimentary about Bertha, and I had neither the will nor the patience to decipher it.
“I want a safer place for my core. Puck, bring me to the bottom of the tunnel.”
The imp gripped my sides in his claws and peeled me from the earth. The stone released me, and Puck took me to the room beneath the tunnel. I would probably have to carve out a separate room to hide me from adventurers entering my depths, but I couldn’t consume any more Physical Essence for the moment. I wondered whether it would take time for my jewel to digest the substance or whether it functioned according to a 24-hour timer like my avatar?
I didn’t want to simply wait around to find out, so I took the time to examine Puck’s essence like I’d done with Bertha. I had been in the half-troll’s palm when I’d studied the substance inside her, but Puck was inside my dungeon now, and my consciousness was amplified by the space I’d carved out. I could see every individual essence inside him. They totaled 150, the same amount I’d gained from killing the other Infernal Imps. I turned to Bertha and counted the microscopic spheres of essence inside her. She possessed 180 of them, twenty fewer than her brother, Jeff.
The essence inside their forms was far more familiar than the raw Infernal Essence fighting for room among my core’s own Physical Essence. It was identical to the essence of Von Dominus lingering inside my jewel.
I suddenly got an idea,
