I saw the necklace start to pulse a blue light, and then slowly, a blue-white gem started to form on top of the necklace. It almost looked like glass, but it wasn’t quite the same. Kind of empty but somehow still there. An overlay like in a game where you would put a building in place or connect something. It was there, but it wasn’t there, just almost there.

With the core in hand, I now needed to figure out how to use it. In some games I’d played, it was easy enough. I could just attach it to whatever I wanted, but in other games, I needed to attach a gem or core or jewel to something socketed. Since I’d a skill called socketing, I figured it was time to try that out.

This core took me a long time to make because of the Mana requirements, which meant that I needed to make sure I was putting this into something that would help me out long term. While I knew that armor or weapons were great, I also knew they were small. So if I could socket my lean-to and make it do more for me, that was still the first rule of survival, shelter.

I started to fumble around with the lean-to until I felt my skill start to guide me in what I needed to do. I spent the next hour with my knife cutting out a small divot in the cross beam. Then I started to cast a spell or use a skill. It was still hard for me to figure that out. It took a while, and the crude lines I’d cut smoothed out, and the shape of the divot took form. I then took the clear core and placed it in the socket.

Building core created

World first!

House Core!

As your house core is the first, it is uncapped in level

Normal House cores will be capped at level 15.

As your house levels, its helpfulness increases.

As I looked at my lean-to, I noticed some changes right away. First, the wood used to make it was no longer dead branches. Instead, I was looking at what appeared to be treated smooth cut 4x4 uprights, and my horizontal was also a 4x4.

Where it was lashed together with vine and set in a y in the branches, it was now connected with what looked like a pegged mortise and tenon joints, and the branches that I used to make the roof had been replaced with milled wood slats. I stood up and walked around and saw that my leaves were all gone as well, and there was a real roof with clay tiles on it.

The overall size of my house had grown as well as the outer edge of where the leaves were was now where the clay shingles were. My inside looked well done. My smooth dirt floor now looked like clay bricks, and where my supplies had been in a pile, they were now on little built-in wooden shelves.

My life just had a massive upgrade with this! If this was what it would do for a house at the start, I can’t imagine what it would do when it got up to level 15, the normal cap or higher. This was well worth the month of work and might even be worth me taking a day every so often to try to make two or 3 and see if I could get more stuff.

I put my hand on the house and saw if I could open it up like the necklace.

General

Showing up in all gold.

Arn’s house

Level 0

Type building core

Class Ultra Rare

Durability 500/500

This is Arn’s house. This house, like all houses, is a place to rest and live. Also, this house has a CORE! This core, as it feeds, will level the house and provide benefits befitting a house. Like all core buildings, when this one is fully leveled*, it will be able to create new house cores if provided the correct materials.

*This house is the first house core and so is uncapped in level. As such, the normal termination for leveling, which is 15, is when it can create new house cores.

>Growth

>Traits

>Creation

Well, this made it look like things were going to be nice. I could level up my house, which meant that I had more to work on. So I took a moment to open each tab to see what more I could get from it.

>Growth

To level your building core, you must provide items needed to move to the next level of the building type.

Leather 0%

Stone 0%

Other source materials 10%

The type of materials will guide the creation of the next level

>Traits

These are the abilities or traits that your house has.

Dry- your home keeps all things in it dry from the weather

Comfort- your home provides you with up to a 15-degree change in temperature toward your preferred level

I guessed that needing leather meant all my fur and leather I was bringing in would go into the home to upgrade. As I already had some in storage from the traps I’d been using this past month, I went ahead and fed the house core two unnt hides and about a dozen small game furs. That put me at 80%, which meant I needed to step on the unnt hides and other hides.

I quickly got the stone requirements to fill as I moved stones that I’d collected for the house into the lean-to. Unlike the necklace, the lean-to didn’t seem to eat what it was given. It only inventoried it and said where I was for the next level. This meant that the stones were stacked in and around my bed which became kind of cramped. It also meant that I didn’t have access to my shelves.

The next week I finished out the leather requirements for level one. I also found out that while it was true that being in all black looking in a corner could be bad, so could being in a mirror room with blinding bright light. I woke up from that nasty night with a green and blue after image of my own silhouette. I did learn that skill levels stop going up at 15 if they are just being practiced. I also learned that if I couldn’t get my class level to go up, level twenty was the cap for all of my skills. The sooner I learned to read, the better. I would have to find people so that I could learn so that I could level.

With my old racial skills locked out because I became a shaman, I figured this would start getting hard. I knew that I was hanging out in the newbie zone if this were a video game. I wanted to know what was going on with my life before I did too much in the way of traipsing through the woods. However, knowing that there was an enemy close by, I knew that I might be going through the woods to find them sooner than I’d like.

The last month had taught me that when I asked Sam questions, I got a poor night’s sleep. I’d thought as much, but I tested it out, and it seemed to be true. It seemed that the four hours or so that I was in his study not awake in my body still counted as being awake for my brain. So while I wasn’t physically tired, my brain just didn’t work right. This meant that I had to slow down my questions with him. I also learned that just because I wasn’t in Sam’s study, I didn’t get dreams or memories of my life every day. I wasn’t sure what triggered them, but they seemed to not pop up very often. So while Sam’s dreams answered questions, I asked the ones I got of being a wild human at least taught me something of the world, or at least I hope they did. It could be that these dreams were nothing more than dreams, but they felt like memories as I didn’t change scenes as dreams did.

My heart was hurt; I could feel the emptiness that was once there. The fire that I’d which in the past led me to be a hunter and a warrior was gone. I felt dead and upset. I’d run from the fight in which the woman I loved had died. My brothers had stepped in one after another to fight beside me as I went to sell my life to those green abominations. I’d wanted nothing more than to hurt those who took everything from me, but I was stopped.

Then the Shaman had told me to run because of my oath to Chaos. It seemed that after years of our worship and no interaction, she was once again taking a direct role in things. My life was her’s now. My coal had gone out, and so where once my passion was, I only had coldness. So I ran to the other caves to tell them of the monsters. Chaos had a message, and it was that the darkness had come. So I ran to all the caves to tell of the battle and give the message to the Shamans.

After the third cave, I felt inside me a calmness settle over, and I stopped my run. I didn’t hear as much as felt the command to return with this cave to mine. So we went; I wasn’t a leader there but respected as the one who brought the news and a known warrior. When we got back, we were too late for anyone.

My cave was gone. Where once my friends laughed, now was a field of death. The bodies of those I knew were ripped apart, and their heads were on spikes. The ground was covered in mud made red from the blood of those who had died. Of the green monsters, none were left; those that had died were all taken away. The armor and weapons of my brothers were lost to us as well, as the ones not broken on the battlefield were gone.

I made my way into the cave to see if there were any hiding in there in our deepest refuge. We had a spot that was high up in the back where a rope was needed to get to, and once there, you had to crawl for over a hundred feet before a room opened. It was used by the Shaman for his most secret rituals. When I made it there, I found hope.

Our Shaman was there with several of the women and their children. He looked half-dead from tiredness, but they were okay, if not scared and hungry. Our cave had lost all but two of the men, the Shaman and me. The cave would get absorbed by another, and we would be forgotten.

Once we got everyone out of the cave, my Shaman came to me. “It is time that you’re marked for Chaos. Our cave is dead but those who survived will be the ones who bear the seeds of the destruction of the darkness. We are all going to the Great Shaman.”

“Shaman,” I spoke quietly, “I have no life, I’m hollow my coal is gone I’m no more my love is dead, my brothers died without me. I’m no use to Chaos let me go. I’ll find those agents of darkness and root them out and kill as many as I can before they finish me.”

“No!” The Shaman firmly spoke to me; he had rock in his eyes, unmoving and solid. “Chaos has accepted you, she will not let you go and Order wants you as well. You will get to do as you wanted but not now. You must be changed. There is a path for you to do what must be done. A way forward to end the darkness here but you must bear it.”