For the next week, I sent my kobolds to many towns in search of the book I needed. First, Wylie and Klok journeyed to Hogsfeate together. When the town’s library proved fruitless, I sent Tomlin and Shadow even further afield.
I sent them to Heaven’s Peak.
The journey in a mana-carriage would have taken a day. In a normal carriage, a week.
It took Tomlin and Shadow seconds to leave my dungeon and enter God’s Fist. From there, they made their way down the mountain and into Heaven’s Peak below.
The reason their trip was so quick was that I had never destroyed the link between the portdoor in God’s Fist mountain, and my dungeon. As such, monsters could cross from my dungeon and be in a mountain hundreds of miles away in just seconds.
The beauty of it was that the inner tunnels of God’s Fist were rarely visited in-between tournaments, and the next was a decade away. This gave me a way to travel across Xynnar without moving a mile.
Of course, I had to be careful. It was said that the mountain and its portdoors weren’t accessed between tournaments. Just in case they were, I had built a stone wall directly behind the portdoor. To a stranger who opened the door from the God’s Fist side, it would look as if it was blocked off, as it should. But on my side of the door was a hidden tile. My monsters merely had to stand on it, and a secret hatch would open for them.
It was after their trip to the book shops in Heaven’s Peak that Shadow and Tomlin returned with what I needed. A book big enough to knock an elephant out if you thumped it with it. Though, I don’t know why anyone would do that.
On the front, written in golden letters, was its title.
The Revered Trinkets of Xynnar and Their Uses
Tomlin turned the pages for me, stopping when we reached a chapter that made my inner core bubble with excitement.
Finally, I knew how to use the Ethereal Core Elixir.
The first step was that I had to empty all the essence out of my core. That wasn’t difficult. I merely created a dozen bone guy warriors. Using Essential Overload, I pulsed all my remaining essence into them.
Their skeletal forms took shape in my core chamber. I surveyed their starting levels, happy with the results. The lowest among them was level 12, the highest level 16. Before Essential Overload, the bone guys would have had to battle scores of heroes to level up so much.
I dismissed the bone guys. Alone in my chamber and empty of essence, I moved onto the second stage of the elixir.
Next, I had to use the ethereal core elixir like I would an essence plant.
Focusing on it, I absorbed the elixir and brought it deep into my core. It was easy to do, as natural to me as a person taking a breath.
No sooner had the elixir hit my empty core, then something didn’t feel right.
Pain tremored through me.
This was a shock enough. Ever since becoming a core, I had rarely felt pain. We just didn’t have that kind of sensation. Only core – destroying weapons were capable of making a dungeon core feel pain.
“Demons’ arses, they poisoned me!” I shouted.
The sound of my voice was enough for me to pull myself together and stop being so melodramatic. Even so, urgent thoughts flooded my mind.
Was the elixir a poison? Had Brenda subtly guided me to choosing it so that I would ingest it and be weakened?
But what did she gain from it?
The answer didn’t matter right now. All that mattered was the agony spreading through my inner core. It felt like someone had stuck a shard sword deep into me and used the mana infused weapon to burn through my inner core.
I felt like I was going to split apart into hundreds of pieces, and then there I would lie. A destroyed core resting on his own chamber floor. Tomlin or one of the other kobolds would eventually find me, and that would be that.
No. I wouldn’t let this be the end.
I had to get this stuff out of me. The only way was to try and pulse the elixir out of my core.
I was just about to begin when a voice spoke.
“Do not pulse the elixir out of you, Beno. Whatever you do, do not do that. An ethereal elixir evaporates if you pulse it out of you before it has worked through the channels of your core.”
It was Overseer Gill, standing in my core chamber. His belly was tanned, and he’d bought a new necklace from somewhere.
I wanted to ask him how he had gotten in. A core’s chamber is the most protected of all the rooms in his dungeon. How had Gill entered?
And then a new tremor of pain rampaged through me.
I got ready to pulse the elixir out.
“Whatever you do, do not expel the elixir. You must use the technique I taught you. Use Essence Pulse to circulate the elixir through your core.”
“Are you mad? You taught me that technique to make my essence stronger! Think about what it will do to the elixir.”
Gill nodded. “The agony will become more intense with each circulation. That’s no surprise, young one. The elixir is burning ethereal holes inside your core. This is like taking a flame to the naked skin of your spirit and burning it black. But without it, your Base core will not rise from its anchor.”
I tried adjusting my core senses to see if it would lessen the pain. Even when I muted them completely, the pain remained.
Fixing Gill’s words in my head, I tried to reassure myself. All
