She focused on the objects in her home. Several lit up green to show they were eligible to become mimics - the wrought iron candelabra in her general living room, the chest in her closet, the chair in the kitchen, the water jug, and the food crate.

The crate was her first pick. Zaria focused her attention on that. It was about three feet long and half that wide and tall.

Now, the Dungeon Instructions told her that she needed to create a mob heart, and a pylon, but not how to do that. She did know that if she didn’t create some means of Command first - which was still calculating - she would lose control of the Mimic once it was created.

Completely at a loss, Zaria just tested her powers over her home and see what she could do. She could open and close drawers and doors, lifting lids and rattling about furniture. She could move her dessicated corpse about like it was a puppet, which provided some horrific amusement. Zaria did use its jerky motions to sweep away the remains of her entrails, just to tidy up a bit while she thought. Both the texts she’d seen and the instructions in the manual indicated she should be able to create objects herself, but she couldn’t see how to make that work. Some other tests revealed she could move the sheets of her bed, and flicker flames on the candle wicks. That gave her the idea to light the stove, and the moment she had words flashed in her vision.

New Feature Discovered! Oven. As long as they are lit, ovens provide command and mana regeneration. They can also be used to cook naughty children who wandered too far into the woods - or anyone you dislike. Cooking a living creature has a chance to unlock new features. You just have to get them inside. Maximum: 1 per Room. Provides 20 Command per Oven.

Well. Feeding children to an oven seemed pointlessly cruel, no matter how naughty, but Zaria would keep that use in mind. And trying to get the Wyrdhound inside would be more difficult than it was worth. The important thing was she had Command now, which meant she could turn her attention back to the food crate and just… start putting mana into it.

The crate shuddered as she focused her attention on it, rocking back and forth. She pushed mana at it, and it began to twitch violently. For a moment, Zaria feared it would shatter under the weight.

Words flashed across her vision:

New Mimic Unlocked: Crate Mimic. The most basic type of mimic, crate mimics serve as versatile traps, but have no special abilities distinct from any other type of mimic. Cost: 5 Command.

The crate stabilized, and there was a sickening retching sound. One side of the crate - part that hadn’t been able to open a moment ago - split open to reveal a gaping maw full of razor-sharp teeth. It vomited noisily, spewing cans onto the floor. A disturbingly purple tongue the length of the crate’s full body lashed out, licking hungrily at the air. Then it began to slide across the floor like a slug, gently moving towards Zaria’s corpse.

Zaria said to it.

The mimic whined.

The mimic made more pitiful whimpers. It didn’t make any more moves towards her body - the creature was complying with her commands - but it was still expressing its wants and needs. Zaria had a feeling she could command it to be silent and sit still and it would, but after so long, she wanted some motion in here. It was nice to have some signs of life.

she said, putting her attention to her porch. From here, she could see out, just like she was sitting on a chair and looking outwards.

As she’d hoped, the sounds of the mimic had drawn then attention of the Wyrdhound. The creature was padding towards her house - her dungeon, she supposed - its tongue flopping out the side of its mouth. she said to the mimic.

The mimic slid towards the door. To provide bait, Zaria gave it a quick command. Its tongue flicked out, wrapping around a can of corned beef, before constricting and splashing itself with the contents.

Then it went inert. Now that it wasn’t moving and had closed its mouth, there was nothing to indicate it was anything other than just a normal crate that had been covered with meat.

Zaria took quick stock of her surroundings. She’d need to move her body, she didn’t want the Wyrdhound eating that. She’d also need to move… oh. Yes. Her core sat in the open, waiting for the Wrydhound to get curious and bite down. The Instructions hadn't mentioned that it would be vulnerable, but it felt wrong to leave her core lying around. Surely the hungry beast wouldn’t be interested in a shiny rock, right?

Zaria took one more look at the creature. Although it wasn’t much larger than the crate, it was still massive in comparison to her. It also had a ravenous look to those beady, horn shrouded eyes, and Zaria decided she didn’t want to find out the hard way that it was willing to eat shiny rocks.

Still unsure how to create something protective for herself, Zaria decided to go for the next best option. It would take too long to spawn a new mimic, so she focused her attention on her corpse. The headless torso lifted off the ground, propelled by invisible marionette strings Zaria controlled, and floated over to her. She used her own hands to gently scoop up the crystal that was her true self now, then moved the body as quickly as she could back to the bedroom. There, she tucked herself in under the sheets, safely out of sight.

And not a moment too soon. The Wyrdhound was on her porch, sniffing at the air. It had caught the scent of the spilled beef and was clearly curious about fresher meat. However, the creature hesitated. When it reached up to the porch, it didn’t put its paw down on the wood. Instead, it waved the limb in the air, as if feeling something it couldn’t see. At first it looked like the motion was just wild fumbling, but then Zaria realized it was more of a scooping motion - it was trying to bring whatever it was sensing closer to the horns on its face.

she said to the mimic.

At her command, the mimic’s tongue lashed out like a whip. If she’d thought it was long before, Zaria was about to learn she’d been mistaken - the appendage narrowed as it extended, gaining length. The Wyrdhound had time to yelp in shock, and then the mimic’s tongue was around its throat, pulling it onto the porch and closer to the mimic.

The demonic hound was not going to go that easily, however. It dug its claws into the wood, trying to pull itself backwards, and slashed at the mimic’s tongue with its claws. Blood flowed from the mimic, and it pulled harder on the Wyrdhound.

Zaria feared she’d been mistaken. The Wyrdhound was too strong. But then, just as she’d been ready to start creating another mimic in desperation, the one in the doorway made its move.

It had been holding itself to the ground via an adhesive. The moment the Wyrdhoud was fully on the porch, the mimic released its grip. Now, all the Wyrdhound's efforts to pull away from the mimic had no resistance. The Wyrdhound rocked back as the mimic reeled in its tongue like a slimy fishing line.

It was perfectly positioned to snap its jaws shut around the Wyrdhound’s skull. It decapitated the creature in a single bite.

Zaria said to the creature, which paused in its meal to coo happily at the praise. Then it resumed devouring its prey, and words flashed across her vision once again.

Congratulations! You have slain your first creature. Slay more to advance your power further, although be careful not to exceed the limits of your core! You still might explode. Better hurry and find a Striga!

Reward: New Feature! Limited External Mob Control. Give your mobs commands that can be carried out in 30 minutes or less before they return to you. If the mob is unable to return, it’ll become free willed.

Reward: New Feature! Bipedal Locomotion. Walk it off, you’ve earned it.

Zaria said, but at the same time she could feel something happening. Some instinct was forcing her to action, as involuntary as a flinch. She didn’t fight it, instead watching. New flooring was growing from her walls inwards to the center of the room. It was predominantly wood, but the moment the wood flooring touched her discarded entrails and legs, flesh began to form between the planks, creating a living seal to the structure. That mass of skin creeped along the cracks in the whole structure, growing to fill the walls, stretching membranous tissue among the thatch of the roof. Her discarded legs were carried by the motion towards the center of the door and sunk through the floor. Zaria could feel them now, growing beneath her.

Moments later, Zaria felt a twinge in her thigh that escalated quickly to a red hot sensation. Before it could get worse, she unfurled them, forcing herself to stand. The process was much slower than a human standing up, because there was so much more leg to work with. The entire house was lifted along with the motion until Zaria was standing fully upright. The legs were three times the height of a man before even reaching the house, and her patio now stretched fully around her entire body.

These weren’t her legs, though. She could see them by putting her vision in the floor of home. Although they felt like they belonged to her, and certainly incorporated elements of her body, there was no doubting their appearance.

These were the legs of a chicken, grown to massive proportions.

Zaria knew she should be terrified, but instead, she was elated. She was not trapped to a single place. She could walk! She could move! She was free.

Warning: Core Stability 73%.

She was… going to need to act quickly if she didn’t want to die.

Zaria kept an eye on her stability levels as she experimented with her new legs. Thankfully, it was nothing drastic - walking around seemed to not take up enough mana to trigger much a core stability reduction. However, using her newfound abilities did. By focusing on the Core Stability Logs option on her stats screen, she could see the reductions:

Expand Area of Influence: -1% per 100 square feet.

Command Mobs: -0.2% per use.

Discover New Mobs: -7%

Summon Mob: -1%

Influence Dungeon Interior: -0.05% per use.

Activate/Deactivate Oven: -1% per use.

Advancement: +5%

Material Creation: -.01% per square ft.

Walk: -.01% per mile

That big reduction for discovering new mobs convinced Zaria she didn’t want to experiment with the other eligible objects inside her dungeon right now. New mimic types would have to wait - especially because she needed more mimics. They'd just have to be crates for now. And she would need at least one more for her boss, but that could wait.

She at least had a better idea of what to do now. The automatic generation of new floors had given her a feel for how to create objects. She just needed to replicate that feeling while following the Dungeon Instructions guide on how to create mobs.

Mob creation is one of the most basic dungeon processes, so it is fairly easy! Just focus on the image of the mob you wish to summon, then create a mob heart. Keep the image stable in your mind until the mob forms around the heart. For a boss mob, you’ll want to first merge three hearts together!

The knowledge of how to create a mob heart was also in there - spinning up individual motes of mana until they collided was the swiftest way to do so. It was a bit tricky at first to hold an image of the mob steady while spinning up mana, but the process became easy to understand very quickly.

She had a maximum of twenty command, so she summoned three more of the crate mimics, taking the hit to stability put her at a nice, round seventy percent. She made sure to carve an image into the back of each mimic so she could tell them apart - a tree, a mountain, and a river. The drawings were crude and childish, but they’d serve her purposes.

Her new ability proved handy. Since she could idle and walk freely, Zaria wandered to where there were the most intact buildings. She scratched at the dirt with her powerful talons, marveling at how easily she was able to shred the hard, packed earth. Once she had dug a bit of a pit for her leg, Zaria settled into it to give her mimics a command.

One of the mimics - her first creation - whined.

Zaria sighed.

With that clarification, all four of them slid out her front door. The slow speed of the creatures was definitely going to be a limiter. She’d compared them to slugs earlier, and that comparison seemed especially apt as they moved out across the ruined village. It was almost painful to watch. A person crawling across the ground using only their arms while letting their legs dangle behind might be slower, but not by much.

To distract herself, Zaria went back to her Region Map to plan her next step.

Now that she’d advanced, the map had expanded how much of the world it showed. She could see three nearby villages. Each of them was labeled - Relonon, Zevilot, and Churnun. When Zaria tried to pull her vision in closer to see what was happening in those towns like she had for here, however, the houses and roads she could see from the aerial view just turned into sketches of structures as seen from overhead. There were icons on the map as well. There were spirals near Relonon and Zevilot, both with countdowns. The one near Relonon said 2d,10h, 21m, and the one near Zevilot said 1d, 6h, 54m.

Were those incoming Fissures? It was hard to tell. Zaria couldn’t think of what else they could be - nearby whirlpools? - but that would hardly make sense. The other icons were even less distinct in their meanings, save for the stylized houses near each town’s name.

Zaria looked back at her hometown. Drycnon. It didn’t have a stylized house, however. It had broken arches that Zaria could guess symbolized ruins.

she grumbled to herself. She’d had some mild hopes of that, but it seemed her powers were limited. A quick check of her Core Stability confirmed that using the map was a very light drain on her - only .01% per minute - so she dove back in. There were tests to run.

Had she been this methodical in life? Zaria honestly had no idea, but she suspected that it was the case. At the very least, the books were organized in neat, alphabetical rows on the shelves, and her clothes had been hung from their rack in neat sections based on both style and how heavily worn they were. That spoke to at least some degree of care to detail as a mortal.

Unlike trying to figure out how to activate the Oven for command points, the map proved fairly easy to test. She could see in detail about one mile out from her house’s current location, and the foggy details extended about twenty miles in all directions. There was an odd band at the edge of her vision, where she could see static objects - houses, trees, and roads - but the vision was cloudy. As she watched, a fox chased a rabbit into the clouded area, and both vanished from her perspective.

That gave her an idea, and Zaria turned her attention back to where she had came from. Sure enough, the area in that direction was foggy and static but still detailed in a bit wider area - the exact area that would have been exposed, if she’d checked her map before standing up and walking away.

she said, finding comfort in the ritual of speaking - or rather, thinking - out loud even with no one to hear.

As if trying to answer her question, words from the Dungeon Core Instructions rose in her mind:

Welcome, New Dungeon Core. If you are reading this, it is possible the worst has happened, and Wisphame has declared our world as off limits due to the ongoing crisis. This manual has been created to serve as a stopgap to aid new dungeon cores in their journey! This manual may also be presenting to mutant cores that achieve stability, so if that category includes you - don’t worry, you reading this is not proof our world is doomed! Probably!

The purpose of a Dungeon Core is to Contain various Entities that threaten our world. If you think the Demons are bad, these Entities are worse. They are beyond the concept of Mortality and thus, cannot be permanently slain should they escape. They’re also terribly powerful.

Zaria grimaced at that concept, and skimmed down a bit. She already knew she couldn’t contain entities, based on the words she’d received while trying to select her mob type, so as long as she knew the basics - Entities powerful and bad, do not release - there wasn’t much more she needed to know for now. She got to the next section.

In addition, there is the matter of the Fissureborn. If you’re newly spawned and lack your memories, you may not remember the detail.

A little over five years ago - Precisely Five Years, One month, Three Days, Two Hours, Twenty-Three Minutes, and Seventeen Seconds - the first Fissure appeared on our world as a result of an unknown event happening elsewhere in the universe. Demons began to invade, slipping through the cracks. The efforts of the Chosen Seven sealed the worst of these Fissures and stabilized them enough. Fissures will still appear. They have become permanent features of our world. Efforts to cease their appearance are strictly prohibited, because doing so could weaken the protections in place and cause them to become unstable and dangerous again. The same goes for efforts to suppress their appearance.

Some of you will be tempted to defy these edicts. Lidivah, this is for you in particular, but also to other Cores. You will think there is a path to power in this. Rest assured, that is not possible. You saw how unstable things got. If the portals are contained, or partially or fully suppressed, pressure will build up in the realm from which the Demons are spawning. It will, over the course of decades, finally push through - with catastrophic results. It is unlikely any current life on the world, mortal or immortal, will survive.

Instead, all efforts should be focused on destroying Fissures after they appear. They have become necessary pressure valves on our world, but if they are allowed to persist too long, they will become Hardened Fissures, which will become more difficult to destroy and continue to allow Demons to appear. Do not attempt a Fissure with Hardness 1 unless you are at least Silver tier. Hardness 2 requires Gold Tier for safe sealing. Hardness 3, Platinum. If a Fissure advances to Hardness 4, the surrounding region should be cordoned off and considered under the domain of demons, with efforts focused on preventing demonic Miasma from spreading. For more information, see Section 174 - Fissures and You.

Normal protocols would require the spawning of Citadel Cores, but the current instability with Core spawning has made that too dangerous to attempt. Any mutant cores seeing this that are not involved in Entity Containment, consider this your primary directive. To incentivise the destruction of Fissures, modifications have been made - when a Fissure is destroyed, the Core of the Fissure will not fall back through to the old reality, but remain here to be absorbed and utilized, unlocking new advancement options. If the Core is shattered, Fissure Shards may still be utilized by mortals to advance their Herocores in new ways. To prevent hoarding, such Shards will not be usable by Dungeons or their Servitors - but you will gain a boost to experience if you provide them to adventurers as loot.

Any newborn cores should prioritize reaching Bronze Tier as quickly as possible to unlock World Mobs and aid in Fissure destruction. Please proceed to section 243 B - New Features - to learn more.

Zaria hesitated before going on to the next section, wanting a moment to process what she’d just learned. It was a lot to take in. At least she knew what she was supposed to do - destroy Fissures, gather Fissure Cores, rank up, and destroy more. Once she was stronger, she could go after the Hardened Fissures.

Already, however, Zaria knew she had at least one advantage over other Dungeons. From some quick perusal of the information - something she’d need to delve into more later - it appeared cores below Bronze could help seal Fissures, if they appeared in an area where the core had mobs. The limitations of the Area of Influence were the only reason they wouldn’t be much use - they could only stop Fissures that spawned within their Area of Influence.

Zaria didn’t have that limitation. She could just go to the Fissure and send out her mobs. Right now four slow-moving mimics would not be enough to seal one, she was certain - if it was that easy, the Fissures would be a non-issue. But she could do more.

She just needed a striga. Then she’d be stable, and more importantly, she’d have someone to talk to.

That latter one seemed especially important. Already, the silence was getting to her. How long had she gone without speaking to something that could answer back in a meaningful way? However long it had been, it was too long.

The mimics were on the way back with their findings. One was dragging an anvil, another had stuck three children’s stuffed animals to its back, yet another had grabbed a barrel full of iron scraps, and the last - which had been her first creation - had found a leather mask. Stylized to look slightly like a bird, Zaria recognized it immediately - it was the mask of a Plague Doctor, specially enchanted to filter out demonic Miasma. What had a Plague Doctor been doing here? Miasma didn’t start spreading until a Fissure reached Hardness 2.

The doctor hadn’t been here long, most likely. By the way the mimic’s tongue explored the interior of the helmet, Zaria had a feeling the armor hadn’t been empty when the Mimic had found it. she said to the Mimic.

Rav cooed as if it took the name as praise.

Zaria said to the mimic. She double checked the information about Servitors to make sure she was right about them. They required she build more rooms - Zaria had no idea where she was going to put new rooms in this tiny home - and more importantly; the process involved cutting off a small bit of her core.

That idea terrified her, but still tempted her. A Servitor was a sapient, free-willed mob capable of speech. Making Rav into one would give her someone to talk to. The taunting words of the messages earlier lingered in her mind. “You are alone.” She pushed them down. She’d hoped the mimics would get up to antics, or something she’d find amusing. Unfortunately, however, “natural” for a mimic seemed to be going completely still and waiting for prey.

Zaria pushed the thought out of her mind and pulled her map back up into her vision. Relonon and Zevilot were the two towns where Fissures were opening soon, and they were in opposite directions. Zevilot’s Fissure was closer to opening, and it was a slightly larger town.

Zaria considered for a minute. Right now, she had four mimics. When she built a second Oven, that would get her up to eight. Given that her hometown had been completely overrun, Zaria didn’t like the thought of going up against a Fissure with just eight mimics. But if she could spend some time near the town, leveling up first, she might be able to hit Tin 3 or 4, and hopefully figure out how to make new rooms in the process.

Which meant she needed more time. Relonon it was, then.

Making sure her mimics were fully settled first, Zaria slowly stretched her legs, and headed towards the town with thunderous footsteps.