Chapter Twenty-Eight

City Planning

Dev was considering his options. He needed to get his shops up and running as soon as possible, but he also needed to level and he needed to amass more energy. He was too constricted in having to wait to build up his energies. Toot had done a fine job in acquiring the fear he needed, and blood had been rolling in thanks to a few deaths and animal attacks. He really wanted that feathered creature added to his slowly growing menagerie. So far it hadn’t shed so much as a single feather for him to work with. It was most irritating. Was it wrong of him to wish for a little mayhem so that he could get new templates to work with? He was a dungeon, and dungeons needed input and new things for them to create.

His creation efforts might be limited, but he still had to have some clay to mold, and he had bigger issues to consider. Power was a major one. His insane other half was another. No, that wasn’t accurate. He had several carryovers from his old life that were starting to rear their heads as well. He could feel a strong desire to sleep after every task he completed. He would tell himself that he would only rest for a day or so, but he knew that if he gave in it would take him weeks to months before he would have been able to have been roused. Another facet was pride. His vanity grew every time he achieved some goal. It was natural to take pride in one’s accomplishments, but he could hear the voice telling him how wonderful he was and how much better he was than everyone else. He was the greatest dungeon that had ever been.

He needed to shut those parts of himself down fast. He hadn’t said a word to Toot about it because he didn’t want to worry the man, but it was going to get to a point where those voices were just as loud as his avarice was, and they wouldn’t be soothed by something so mundane as a gold coin. So, that was another project he had to get to soon.

The most accessible task was the one at hand. Working on the city. He would be able to do a lot if he had the power, but he was stymied to that end. He was going to have to take baby steps until he could get more power.

His mind wandered over the coins that still littered his small cave. Dev was afraid to reabsorb them for fear that he suspected that their presence was helping to keep his Greed content. The problem with greed, he lamented, was that it was never satisfied and always wanted more. Eventually, it would reawaken.

Dev noticed that the coins had buried the fear crystals that Toot had been kind enough to fill for him. They hummed with power. Technically, they screamed with power. Cries of terror and howls of horror gave away their location. He would have known where they were even if he didn’t know where every single item in his dungeon was. The core mentally commanded the coins to move away from the gems until they were free of the aurelian avalanche that had covered them. They glowed, radiating their contained energy like a morning sun. They were a sight to behold. He was amazed at just how sly he was to have come up with something to store cultivated fear in. It was a sign of brilliance rarely seen in the wild.

Dev caught himself. His vanity had seen an opening and just slid in to fill it. He caught himself and dismissed the thoughts of how wonderful he was from his mind; but, he had to admit that the stones had been a good idea. Maybe it was something he could apply elsewhere.

Could he, Dev wondered, gather mana in a similar manner? Blood? Obviously not, but mana was everywhere. In fact, mana increased whenever people were in his dungeon areas; basically, anywhere in the town unless they went indoors. If they did that then he lost the extra mana production. Dev suspected that little nugget of knowledge was to entice dungeons to want humanoids to invade their little space. Intelligent races oozed the stuff. They also bled, prayed, and cast magic. Humanoids accounted for every single bit of power a dungeon needed except the verdant type; he discounted plant people from that observation. Plant people would provide verdant energies, but would not be able to provide blood. He began to consider that the thinking races could provide most types of energy, but would probably always fall short of all of them by one.

He had read that psionic powers interfered with magic, so a race that had mental abilities would not be able to provide magic. There was probably a race out there with no soul, demons mayhaps? Who knew? The point was that the relationship between a dungeon and its visitors was intimate. The relationship should have been a symbiotic one. Dev knew though, that most cores considered delvers as adversaries. He didn’t want to go that route. Goulcrest was now his home, and he intended to take care of it, and its people. He had returned most of the dead back to life. Sometimes the replicated individuals were a little better when he returned them back to the town than when they came to him, morally and ethically, anyway. He saw no point filling his dungeon with scoundrels.

Dev caught himself, his mind had wandered far afield from where he’d intended it to go. He was looking at how brightly the stones glowed and it all came together; just how he could improve the town and increase his mana collection ten-fold. In fact, it would encourage people to walk through the town at night. The longer they were outside the more mana he could collect. He had to place mana collecting stones throughout the town, but do so in a way that no one would suspect what they were, and he knew how to do that.

Dev then considered that he could also make stones to collect other types of power that he might be able to convert into usable energies for himself. His only limitation was that he needed to have some energy on hand to study or see it in the wild before he could make a gem to contain it. He had seen many people slain but had caught nary of a glimpse of life energy. He had also heard small prayers uttered by the townsfolks as they went their way, but he hadn’t seen any of it either. He suspected that those energies were too fleeting and that he didn’t know what to look for. The one thing he did have in town was verdant energy. Plants grew everywhere. Goulcrest even had a small park that was full of the green.

Dev shifted his perspective to the park. It wasn’t as scenic as he would have hoped, there wasn’t a great deal of variety among the flowers, but he only needed to observe one plant. He chose a rose, it had a chocolate color to its petals and he imagined that the people of the town found them attractive. He had absorbed one and replaced it when he’d taken over the town and gotten some fine thorns from it for his templates. He hadn’t seen any other energy when he’d absorbed it, but the flower had to have contained some verdant power. It was a plant. Plants produced verdant energy. It stood to reason it was there, and that as a mostly mana based dungeon, he could not see it. He wasn’t supposed to, he was supposed to only use one type of energy, as a deviant dungeon he was the exception.

Was he excluded from seeing it altogether just because he couldn’t use it? Or was it that he didn’t know what to look for? The core focused on the flower. It was a real one, and not a replicant. He didn’t know if replicants could create what he was looking for but he didn’t want to muddle up his results by using anything other than a real plant.

Dev also considered that he needed to open all of his senses. Verdant energy might not be something that was visible but was heard or smelled. Considering that he couldn’t taste, touch, or smell he hoped it had a noise or a wavelength that he could see.

Normal light revealed nothing to him so he began to look in the infrared wavelengths. Dev hadn’t known he could do this; he’d just wondered if there was more to what he could see and his vision expanded to that he could see above the visible light as well as below it. He opted to start at the bottom and work his way back up. The portion before infrared began was something called microwave energy. Dev could see a lot of potential there, but it would require time that he didn’t have to study, so he put that on the growing list of things to do. Infrared itself was interesting, but it did not help in his quest to find verdant power so he pushed ahead. The ultraviolet part of the spectrum was as interesting as the infrared but failed to provide him with what he sought. Then he found X-rays and after that something called gamma rays. Those, too, were put on the backburner.

He could not see it. He had gone through everything light had to offer him and come away wanting so Dev tried listening. He went from infrasound, noting that it had odd qualities, normal ranges of hearing for the humans he’d absorbed, and finally at ultrasound. As before, he came away empty. He had exhausted the avenues that were open to him. He wished that he had a mystic vision or another way of looking at the world.

As he finished those thoughts a screen popped up in front of him. He hadn’t expected that. When he’d been given the option of seeing above and below the normal spectrum of visible light it had been as if a curtain had been drawn back revealing what was already there. He hadn’t gotten a notification for it. Now though a red screen bobbed in front of him. It read:

You have been offered an option to obtain Kirlian Vision. Kirlian Vision is normally reserved for Overseers or their agents. As a deviant core, you are entitled to a trial run of Kirlian Vision. After an unspecified period of time established by the Overseers your case will be reviewed and a determination will be made as to whether or not you will be permitted to keep the ability or not. By accepting this offer you will be able to see existence as the Overseers do. Do you wish to accept? Yes/No

Gods, yes, He wanted whatever Kirlian Vision was! Dev didn’t hesitate to mentally hit the Yes option, and the instant that he did so, the world changed. Material things became shadows, indicating to him that they were no more real than the items he made from mana. They had no more substance than a puff of smoke, which was, he realized, the way his creations came into and left the world as. He didn’t know what this meant about the state of reality, but he had other tasks at hand to worry about.

The core could see the outline of the chocolate tinted rose, but no other details about its physicality revealed themselves to him. Instead, he could see a vibrant green aura radiating from the flower; from all the flowers. It was everywhere. Elsewhere in town, he saw a horse take notice of a snake, and as it recoiled it sprayed a grey mist into the air. Fear. He saw its fear. Mana swirled around him as embers and wisps of gold. Across town, a cat killed a rat, and Dev saw an explosion of white light that shot skyward and was gone in an instant. The various energies were everywhere, some in greater amounts than others. The only place he saw magic was on the constable’s sword which crackled like lightning in his visual sense. The world was held together by these various powers, but in his eyes, the world was just an ephemeral temporary thing.

Dev not only saw these energies but recalled their signatures. He noted that a piece of the signature of magic was etched into each enchantment in subtle ways. He also imagined that he would be able to harvest all emotions, not just fear. Dev suspected that love would not appear in very many dungeons, and so the overseers opted not to use it. Anger fueled dungeons would become filled with raging maniacs, and so forth until they realized that fear was something that could be safely employed by the dungeon.

This knowledge was priceless! Dev wondered if Toot had any idea of what he saw and immediately doubted it. He would never have needed it as a tutorial. The core was certain that he was the only non-overseer who could see what they saw. What else, he wondered, were they keeping from him? He was going to have to test the boundaries of reality to find out. He watched the green practically erupt from the small flower. Dev could see how a dungeon could live off of it alone once it had a large enough area of plants.

Given his new sight, it was a simple task to design a gem that could filter verdant energy from the area. He used a pre-existing gem design and set it to collect plant power rather than fear. Then, Dev enlarged the crystal so that it was the size of a wagon. To the design he added a circular base of bricks and a gold plaque that read:

Gifted to the town of Goulcrest by Mister Tooth in the hopes that it will be a boon to improve the park’s beauty. Beware, this stone is protected by a powerful curse that will kill any who try to take or break it.

Satisfied that his warning should be enough to protect his new artifact Dev materialized it in the center of the park. He had checked, there hadn’t been a soul about to see it, and after it appeared it looked like it had been there forever. It immediately began to fill with verdurous vibrancy. The core wasted no time building a storage container in his cavern for the verdant power.

He then designed a pole that housed a mana collecting gem at its top but was ringed by smaller jewels that would capture each of the other energies that he had seen. He would design stones to catch the other emotions as well, no point in letting them go to waste when people were just loosing them into the world every which way. The pole would light the town at night, making the streets safer for his citizens, and collect energy right out in the open. Prayer and blood were stones that eluded him. He hadn’t seen prayer in use yet, and blood essentially had to be spilled for him to benefit from it. Blood would be coming soon. He had no doubt of that, and prayer was just a matter of time. It wouldn’t be long before he would be able to draw on all the energies of the universe.

Dev yawned mentally. Seeing the world through the eyes of an Overseer was tiring. It wasn’t something that he could use for extended periods. He wondered if it was pulling energy from him and shut it down. The world came back into focus and no longer looked like shadows cast on a wall. It went from feeling like smoke to having a solidity and gravity that was missing before. As wonderful as it was to see the world like that it strained him to his …core. He would only use that ability sparingly. After he saw the energy signature of prayer, he would use it only in emergency situations. If he were honest with himself it was too alien to maintain and it scared him. It made him feel as if he were paper thin and made of mist.

He set the new stores to build themselves at three in the morning, adding the new streetlights to do the same. He didn’t care if anyone saw them come into existence, it would all happen so fast they wouldn’t know what they saw. Not really. If worse came to worst he could have Toot pose as a wizard, how would anyone refute it?

The core could barely keep his non-existent eyes open any longer. Toot would have to wake him when he returned from wherever he was. Dev knew the man was safe, they shared a bond that let him know if there were any problems with his companion. So, he wasn’t worried. Weary to his bones, the ones he envisioned having, Dev closed his eyes and drifted to sleep. He would see about leveling up in the morning, for now, he had only one thing on his mind.