Man, I’d rather not have to think about it.
Then again, I had no choice. I needed to think about it so I could avoid disaster.
This was a quandary. I was reliant on the vines growing on my core room walls. To me, as a core, they were like my only sources of oxygen. If the vines died, and I used up my essence, I would have no means of regenerating more.
I wouldn’t die like a person would without oxygen, but a core without essence is just a big, useless gem. No guessing what the overseers would do to me if I let that happen. Surely no core would be stupid enough to leave themselves no way of regenerating essence? And if I did that…
Condemnation? Nah. They’d have me destroyed.
I needed to make a life preserver for myself. Something to fall back on if the worst happened and my essence vines were destroyed.
For a few hours that afternoon – I had no idea if it actually was afternoon or not, but it helped me to pretend that I knew what time it was – I thought about it. I thought about it until the imaginary veins in my imaginary temples throbbed.
My first thought was to just snip a few vines away and keep them separate from the others, and store them somewhere. Then I realized that if you snip a vine and don’t plant it somewhere else, it’ll just die.
So, why didn’t I just plant some vines in one of my other rooms?
Hmm. It was a risk.
Essence vines, as important as they are, are incredibly fragile. Seriously, new-born puppies have nothing on an essence vine’s fragility. Not even a puppy who has three legs, is blind, and has no sense of smell. That’s how bloody fragile essence vines are.
Planting them in my loot room would be a waste of time because I would one day have a big boss monster in my loot room. It’d be the setting of glorious battles, where parties of soon-to-be-dead heroes would fight whatever leviathan I had spawned to guard the loot chest.
Assuming I had a monster better than Tomlin, of course.
In the mayhem, with hero mages casting fireballs and stuff like that, my essence vines would die, and my cultivation time would be wasted.
So, why not use one of my as-yet unassigned rooms?
Well, I had set those aside as puzzle and trap rooms that the heroes would have to beat before they got to the loot. That made them a poor place for essence growing, for two reasons.
One, there was a chance of the aforementioned stupid mage fireballs and stuff.
Two, essence vines had the annoying property of sending out healing energy. If I put them in rooms where heroes might walk through, my vines would heal them.
Why, in the name of all the demon lords of the underworld, would I want to do that?
No, planting more of them in my dungeon rooms wasn’t an option. Nor could I use another wall in my core room, because I’d need to create defenses and traps to protect my core. I had to leave some wall space free for that.
So I pondered, and I whistled, and I lost focus and started thinking about my Soul Bard story, and then I got my focus back and thought some more.
Another solution hit me like a slap from an angry ogre.
A solution that had made Overseer Bolton get his undies in a twist the last time I did it.
Yep, one way to keep some emergency essence vines would be to snip them away from the others. Then, I’d split some of my core, and use the resulting liquid to keep the vines alive even when they were separated from the others. Then I’d be able to dig a little hole in my core room, store the vines inside, then fill the hole.
Just like that, one emergency stockpile of essence vines, hidden and preserved.
The thing was, I had already likened splitting my core to losing a finger. No matter what the motivation for it, would a man who cut off one of his own fingers be advised to cut off another?
Nope. The book I had found in the library said that with the core splitting process, came the chance your overall essence could decrease. Not only that, but the lower my core purity, the more chance a hero could kill me if he reached my core room.
A nonstarter. A blunt sword. An arrow with a broken point. A mage spell with no mana behind it. That’s what my idea was.
The only safe way of keeping my essence vines protected was to dig out a dedicated growing room, and then somehow get some spell-resistant protection inside it. The problem was, being a level one core meant I was limited to having four rooms in my dungeon, and Tomlin had already dug my fourth.
Damn it all to the underworlds. I’d have to wait until I leveled up.
Lacking a way to keep emergency essence, I decided I had better take care of the essence vines currently flourishing in my core room.
To do this, I wielded my spectral arms again. I painstakingly checked each vine, each leaf of essence, and I made sure they were all healthy and free from the dreaded black spots. I clipped a couple of leaves that I was unsure about.
Not only that, but I gently moved certain leaves where it looked like they were growing too close to the others, and I massaged all the vines with my spectral fingers. That might have sounded stupid, but plants love that. They enjoy a little affection from time to time.
I was halfway through the first wall of vines when Tomlin shouted something. As I was his creator, he really
