Manning

“We did it, Ash. We managed to repel the entire invasion, only six of them survived!” I was more excited than I thought that I could possibly be. With the combined efforts of Cara and myself, we managed to save all the villagers in the forest, capture all the female aggressors, and kill almost all of the invaders. We both suffered losses in terms of our creatures, but our gains were enormous.

Back when the small group tried to pry Cara’s core out of the dungeon, I’d managed to slay several humans in a fit of rage. I didn’t remember much about it, but what I did remember was the massive gains in terms of their dying mana, which I was going to start calling life essence, and the memories and skills that were attached to it. The best gain from it was the partial racial ability I absorbed and modified from the elf, allowing me to control the pathing in my forest at will. That was from only a few kills, compared to the gains this time it was like comparing the skies to the earth.

In order to not be overwhelmed with the torrential influx of memories, emotions, and endorphins from each death, I managed to cordon off an area inside of my core to store the life essence as it was gathered. The last thing I wanted was to be distracted from the first three or four kills during the ambush, it would have been extremely risky and would have led to more deaths than was necessary, including the elf I’d saved most likely.

Towards the end of the slaying, I decided I would pull in one of the life essences directly rather than save it later, I deserved a treat after all. As such, I eyed up the red-vested man as he finally passed away, him being the last man in his team to succumb to his injuries. On a related note, the ivy that Silver enhanced with her magic was far more potent than I expected it to be, leading me to wonder if she had some sort of affinity with delusions and illusions. It was something I’d have to ask when she learned to speak.

Either way, as the light left his eyes, I paid special attention to him. In attempting to absorb as much of the life essence as I could, I affirmed a previous theory. A very large amount of the essence dispersed and was impossible for me to interact with as it faded away. Well, impossible was the wrong word considering almost anything was possible for me within the confines of my domain. A portion of the essence shot directly toward my core, it being the portion that I naturally absorbed when I slayed a creature, while the vast majority of it dispersed into the air.

I locked the air around his corpse down with my presence to the best of my ability and started straining to gather more of the essence. I wasn’t the best with math, but I was fairly confident that I naturally absorbed less than one percent of what was produced and found that unacceptable. It cost me mana to try and dominate the essence and I found it almost as difficult, if not more, than claiming a sapient creature would be. I’d loosely probed a couple villagers in the past when I was curious about how difficult it would be.

After doing my best and straining my innate dungeon abilities to the maximum, I managed to actually capture a small amount that equated the amount I naturally absorbed. With some effort, I managed to absorb twice as much as I would have been able to! Unfortunately, it was extremely difficult and mentally taxing. I would probably equate it to attempting to drink a lake of partially solidified tree sap through a reed.

I’d have to practice and improve upon the methods, but I theorized it was possible to eventually absorb an entire human sapient. If I could do that, I could revive the residents of my forest, even if they didn’t bind a soul contract with my core. Or, with a lot of skill, I could recreate adventurers into new hosts, removing some memories and implanting others to make them loyal to the dungeon. I’d be able to create an army of experienced veterans!

Either way, it was a long way off. Even after doubling the life essence I absorbed from the red-vest, I was still below the one percent mark. I planned on sharing my discovery with Cara, maybe she could help expand upon it. Otherwise it would take far too long to experiment and improve, the method was too mentally taxing to attempt more than once per engagement. On top of that, we already had an agreement to exchange skills with each other, so her improving her absorption rate would only help me out in the end.

I started refining the sliver of the man’s life essence and learned many things. First and foremost, I learned that the man’s name was Phil. It was a very simple and unimposing name, considering how much trouble he managed to give me by rallying up the group behind his banner and leading them. I learned that he was a smuggler by trade, had spent time in a prison, and had a daughter with bright red hair and piercing eyes. All of these were the typical filler memories I got each time, so I didn’t pay much attention to them.

I started diving into the rest of them and realized how much of a treasure trove this man was. I’d already mentioned that he was a smuggler, but apparently, he had been doing it successfully since he was fourteen years of age. That was more than thirty years of buying illicit and legal goods and ferrying them back and forth across the river I was sat upon, selling to drug lords and black markets to turn a profit and avoid taxes and tariffs. In his many years, he had interacted with countless plants, herbs, minerals, and alchemical constituents.

From Phil, I learned that several of the herbs that I’d created through experimentation were near replicas, if not the exact same, as rare herbs that already existed in the world. This wasn’t entirely surprising if I was being honest. After becoming a dungeon, I realized that most beasts and plants were the product of countless evolutions and deviations. Given a pig, I could make a boar that then evolved again. From two pigs, you could eventually have Uniboars, Hedge-hogs, flying pigs, and countless other options. Dungeons were not the only entity capable of making this happen either, even a Sylva could enhance a plant. When you added in other dungeons, mana rich environments, and natural evolutions, then it would be strange if everything I created was unique after this planet had existed for so long.

However, knowing what was useful to sapients, what was sought after and valuable, made it much easier to spread the herbs out in my forest and lure more people deeper in. At my beck and call, I now had a numerical value I could attach to almost all of my creations, outliers being the metallic nuts, silver pears, and flaming peppers. Another perk was knowing the officially used names for the plants, something I appreciated considering I didn’t like the naming disparities between myself and the villagers. Phil hadn’t interacted with anything close to those before. He also didn’t handle livestock, so I wasn’t able to gauge the rarity or uniqueness of my beasts. That wasn’t something that was super important, but I was really curious about it anyways.

I was already on track to lure in countless merchants and herbalists to the area, the type of people who would maintain a garden of other extremely rare herbs that I could pilfer. From those different starting points, I could evolve the plants further and make something more unique to myself. The concept of creating and learning about other living creatures and plants was very addicting and fulfilling, so I was instant hooked on the idea.

Then again, maybe I didn’t have to steal from gardens anymore. Now that I had a church forming around the forest along with a sizeable congregation, I could interact with them under the guise of a nature god. Perhaps I could convince the herbalists to bring me new and unique plants of their own free will, offering them a reward. Maybe I’d exchange for good herbs, or a “blessing”, or maybe I’d just cause an explosive growth of the plant after learning the pattern for my own creation. If the trees that were constantly felled were any indication, sapients were suckers for boundless resources.

I learned other useless skills from Phil as well, such as rowing, sailing, nighttime navigation, wood carving, and some cooking strangely enough. The herbology was a really big find for me though because I didn’t see any herbalists dying to my creatures anytime in the future. When I considered how much I managed to gain from just one percent of the man’s life, I mourned the rest that I had faded into nothing. I looked forward to digesting the rest of my gains, exchanging with Cara, and improving upon my harvesting of sapients in the future.

Something told me that this wasn’t the last time I’d be dealing with an invasion, and it was nowhere near the hardest fight I’d ever encounter.