Rooted

Dr. Satan

Chapter 43

I lie coiled around my core, content with the world. In the higher reaches of my dungeon, a chorus of moans issued from throats hoarse with screaming as a timer sounded in my head. I didn’t get up. I had a body, a blend of shadow and my scrawny former corporal physique, but it wasn’t necessary. With a thought, I harvest my new batch of diseases from the cultivation chambers.

They were my pride and joy. Each had the roots of a giant plant dangling within it. Among the roots hung what looked like pods and in each pod was a specimen. The roots would work their way into the specimens’ body and form a symbiotic exchange. The specimen was fed, and the plant harvested its waste to gain nutrients in return.

It was an arrangement that freed my mind of having to micromanage mundane tasks like feeding. That had taken up most of my day at one point, as I struggled to figure out what food and how much to give. Not to mention dealing with injuries from struggling hosts. Now they would cry out from the pain of their afflictions but couldn’t move otherwise.

I was able to only check in on them when incubation periods were up, and I loved it. It had been worth investing in the plant’s development despite the point cost. I really couldn’t imagine anyone enjoying spending even a quarter of the time I had on something as worthless as building up living conditions. The dungeon existed to serve me, not steal my precious time.

Several of the hosts had died, but I wasn’t concerned, they were animals I’d bought through the interface. I could get more easily. It was my human hosts I paid special attention to, as they were more difficult to replace. A fact which I still found nonsensical. I should have been able to buy specimens from any species, instead of only animals and monsters.

Annoyed like I always was when I thought about it, I opened my pathogen editor. I had ten projects going, but eight of them were still in the research phase. I’d have to reintroduce them to clean hosts and wait for them to mutate and acquire the traits I wanted. Of the remaining two, one was a failure and the final one was ready to go.

Relatively speaking at least. I’d been hoping to create something like a super soldier enhancement. What I’d managed to make was more of a berserker virus, though not quite. The victim would be afflicted with delusions, but not expressly violent ones. My original plan was to enhance my dungeon’s guardians with it, but it wasn’t what I’d hoped for.

Disappointed, I opened the upgrades tab to see if I could spend some points to make it more useful. Like always, there were the options to alter the incubation periods, exposure method, and difficulty to heal. Right now, the exposure method was blood transmission which wasn’t useful. I changed it to include bodily fluids, water, and contaminated insects as per usual. That cost me a solid hundred points, but I had three hundred left.

Thanks to diseases I’d already released, I had plenty to spend on my research. Like profitable investments, they paid out routinely as they spread through the land and took lives. Seeing my points always left me feeling content. In my early days, I’d had other dungeons reach out and try to share tips or brainstorm strategies. Knowing most of them had perished improved my mood to the point I chuckled.

Only losers couldn’t handle single-player and relied on co-op.

In better spirits, I continued reviewing the disease, but the available upgrades wouldn’t bring it in line with my plan. Checking the research panel, it looked like it would need three to four additional mutation phases. That wasn’t ideal, but I decided to initiate it anyway. My grade F core put out fifty mana a day, which was enough to cover my ongoing expenses with excess.

Looking at the store, I checked the core upgrade option for the thousandth time. I had more than enough points to buy it, but could only sigh. It was still grayed out as unavailable due to a missing prerequisite. What that was, I didn’t know, but I still felt annoyed. My specimen management plants cost me ten mana to maintain by themselves while my other expenses added up to another ten. That left me thirty mana each day to expand my layout and buy more specimens.

I’d already maxed out its mana output through minor upgrades. The return on investment had been annoyingly low and I wasn’t sure they would carry over once I finally increased my core’s rating. My annoyance didn’t last long, though. It was an old problem and I didn’t truthfully feel much urgency on the point.

Things were going well. Getting anxious about something I couldn’t do anything about wouldn’t be productive. To distract myself, I took out a portion of my new disease and put it in a thin, unfired clay bottle. It was only the size of a fist, but it contained enough of the pathogen to wipe out a city, were it distributed evenly. Using the small slingshot near the entrance of my dungeon, I sent it hurtling outside. Just like I’d loaded and fired it, I reset it with a thought. Gone were the days where I’d have to make a special trip to do it by hand.

Just beyond the small cave entry leading to my dungeon was a swamp. The bottle landed in water on the rocks used to build up the bed of the nearby road. Shaded by trees all day long, the stagnant water there was a perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes and sheltered my creation from the cleansing rays of the sun.

The mosquitos were naturally occurring, but I’d introduced a mutation to them through a retrovirus. It shortened their life cycle, but made them more durable so they would breed all year, even in winter. Now I just needed them to become contaminated with my new virus and spread it to travelers on the road. Once that happened, I’d get a chance to see how my virus affected the local population.

With my first few tries in the old days, I’d thought I needed to control everything. Every disease had to be crafted to perfection to reap real rewards. Yet those hot house strains hadn’t made much of an impact, while a throw-away like Super Leet Magic Cholera had spread like wildfire. I’d learned from that mistake and taken to introducing anything even semi-workable and just seeing how the chips fell.

The world I was dealing with had little in the way of medical science. They treated everything with magic and did little, if anything, to investigate how someone contracted a sickness. If they couldn’t find a means to treat it through magic, they felt it was incurable and gave up. A set of circumstances I found immensely useful.

“God you’re such a nerd,” Jerica muttered from where she was chained. She’d been there from the early days, always on my right. It had been her misfortune to wander into my dungeon looking for mushrooms.

“Shut up, you don’t even know what a virus is,” I snapped back. She was kind of pretty but nothing special, just a swamp rat girl the local village gave odd jobs.

“I know this dank hole you live in is garbage,” She shot back. With brown hair and eyes, she reminded me of my sister. She’d been a judgmental bitch too and the person I’d killed when my invitation to become a dungeon core came through.

I tried to shake the thought off, but it was too late. I hadn’t had anything sophisticated to use as the method and had resorted to strangling her. A process which had taken far more strength and time than I’d ever expected. That part of the memory didn’t bother me though. It was looking at her laying on the floor afterward that still sent a chill through me.

Her expression, the smell, nothing had registered at the time. It was the weird feeling I’d felt seeing her like that. I’d wanted her to wake up, to shake it off like it was a joke. She didn’t though, and I was soon gone, whisked away to meet my destiny. It still lingered; a feeling like she’d come walking in to bitch at me about not getting out more. Asking me about my day. Laughing at my jokes sometimes when she got them.

I didn’t know what to do with the feeling and pushed it down. My sister was dead, and I had what I wanted.

“To be alone in a hole surrounded by your victims?” Jerica asked condescendingly.

“Working on my research,” I answered halfheartedly. I’d wanted to be a virologist, but not to cure people. I wanted to be at the forefront of biological warfare. Only I was terrible at math and hadn’t yet graduated high school. The dream had seemed too far off to take seriously. Now I was living it. I shouldn’t let some worthless bitch get inside my head and make me doubt that.

“Keep it up and I won’t feed you,” I muttered. Jerica didn’t say anything back, resorting to the silent treatment like usual. I didn’t even bother looking over at her where she was chained to the wall. It would have involved shifting my position on my core and I was loath to do that. That I couldn’t have if I wanted to didn’t occur to me. My actual and pseudo shadow flesh had begun to merge with it at some point, but I only felt a deep sense of comfort.

It was part of a lengthy list of things I didn’t think about. Like how Jerica was already long dead, just a skeleton in tattered rags chained to the wall. How the food I gave her piled up around her remains and rotted. That I’d never known the chained girl’s name. Jerica had been my sister’s name.