Rooted

Chapter 144

The Marrowane swamp, from a bird's eye view, served as a natural choke point between Stromholt and the more southern country of Dreadmar. Dr. Satan had landed near it after his recruitment and moved deep within to establish his core. It had been a wise choice in his opinion.

Brigands hiding from the law and poor fishermen had been easy to lure to their deaths. Dr. Satan had met his quota and surpassed it in a mere three days. He doubted any of the others had been able to do that. Weak creatures who hadn’t had the right kind of mind for the task at hand had reached out for help across the message system.

Deep within his dungeon, Dr. Satan curled around his core, content with the world at large. His form was a shadowy replica of his former body, gangly from a recent growth spurt and scrawny. He’d despised it and hadn’t been too pleased his initial form had been a blend of the pathetic flesh with shadow.

In the higher reaches of Dr. Satan’s dungeon, a chorus of moans issued from throats hoarse from screaming. A timer sounded in his head, but he didn’t move. With a thought, he harvested the new batch of diseases he’d been cultivating.

The pods were his pride and joy, each a part of the root system of a plant with a particularly useful trait. The roots would work their way into the body of any living thing placed within the pods and form a symbiotic exchange. The specimens within were kept fed and hydrated while the plant harvested the waste from the pods for its own nutrients in return.

It was an arrangement that freed Dr. Satan from having to micromanage mundane tasks like feeding. That had taken up most of his day initially, as he 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.

With the implementation of the caretaking system, Dr. Satan only needed to check up on them when adding a new specimen or when incubation periods ended. He loved the way it had freed up his day and didn’t regret the rather hefty point investment it had taken to establish. In his mind, the dungeon existed only to serve him, not take up his precious time.

Going through the results of the current incubation, it became apparent a third of the specimens had died. Not an usual turnout, given how Dr. Satan dealt in disease cultivation. The pods would absorb the bodies. It was less than ideal that two of the specimens in question had been human.

Dr. Satan didn’t know why, but he couldn’t buy humans through the interface for his experiments. Only animals and monsters were available, so he’d been forced to work out methods of live capture early on. It was nonsensical in his mind that the system bothered making such an annoying distinction.

Opening his pathogen editor, Dr. Satan looked over the results. He had ten projects going in the current round of cultivation. Eight of them were in the research phase and would have to be reintroduced to clean hosts for further development. Of the remaining two one was an outright failure while the final was a bit lackluster.

Dr. Satan had, in the simplest terms, wanted to cultivate something along the lines of a super soldier enhancement. One that would rob the host of the ability to do anything but follow commands, while increasing their physical attributes. What he got was close but off the mark, it would cause something like a berserker state, but not quite.

The successful virus would enhance physical attributes, but not induce an expressly violent state, despite causing delusions. Since Dr. Satan had wanted to use it to create more robust guardians for his dungeon, it wasn’t a pleasant turn of events by any means. Ignoring his disappointment, he opened the upgrades tab for the editor.

The options were the usual ones. Alter the incubation periods, exposure method, and difficulty to heal. The exposure method was blood transmission, which wasn’t terribly useful. Dr. Satan changed it to include bodily fluids, water, and contaminated insects as per usual. That cost a solid hundred points, but he had three hundred left even after he did.

Cultivating diseases was a time-consuming gamble, but one that paid handsomely. Rather than being confined to those who wandered into the swamp, Dr. Satan was able to reap points from anyone who died of one of the pathogens he had created.

Thinking of the struggle of his early days reminded Dr. Satan of the others once more. The dungeon cores who’d arrived around the same time as him. They’d tried to reach out and share tips and brainstorm together. He chuckled softly thinking about that. Only losers couldn’t handle single-player and relied on co-op.

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

“Shut up, you don’t even know what a virus is,” Dr. Satan 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,” Jerica shot back. With brown hair and eyes, she reminded Dr. Satan of his sister. As far as he was concerned, she’d been a judgmental bitch too. She’d also been the person he’d killed when his invitation to become a dungeon core came through.

Muttering curses under his breath, Dr. Satan got back to work. The available upgrades wouldn’t bring the madness virus in line with his plans. Checking the research panel it would take at least three to four additional rounds of mutation, but it wasn’t guaranteed to work.

Looking at the store, Dr. Satan checked the core upgrade option for the thousandth time. He had more than enough points to buy it, but could only sigh. It was still grayed out as unavailable due to a missing prerequisite.

Dr. Satan had made early investments and maxed the other available upgrades on his core quickly. It was why his F grade one put out fifty mana a day instead of the original ten as well as being as tough as possible. He wasn’t sure upgrading it further would improve his research tools or not, but it would give him more mana to work with which would be welcomed.

The plants Dr. Satan used had an upkeep cost and he was nearly at his daily limit as things stood. An expansion in the specimen wing wasn’t possible. Not if he wanted to be able to buy specimens and occasionally expand his layout and defenses.

Dr. Satan was annoyed, but didn’t feel any great sense of urgency about the old problem. He’d essentially given up after bashing his head against the issue of the missing upgrade prerequisite for nearly three years.

Instead of dwelling, he turned his attention back to his project again. Though it wasn’t useful for its original purpose, the new disease was still potentially useful as a source of points at the very least. He took the distilled remains of the original and placed it into an unfired clay bottle. It was only the size of a fist, but contained enough of the pathogen to wipe out a city if it were evenly distributed.

Using the small slingshot near the entrance of his dungeon, Dr. Satan sent it hurtling outside. Every action carried out with a thought, never leaving his core. Gone were the days when he’d have to make a special trip to do it by hand.

The bottle flew a short distance into a shadowy pool in the Marrowane swamp where biting insects spawned year-round. The stagnant water there was a perfect breeding ground for both the insects and Dr. Satan’s creations as they were shaded from the cleansing rays of the sun.

The insects were naturally occurring, but Dr. Satan had introduced a mutation to them early on. It shortened their life cycle, but made them more durable, so they’d breed even in winter. They were also largely immune to his creations, their contaminated habitat leaving them as carriers without them suffering themselves.

“Seriously Scott? You can't even get up to use the slingshot yourself?” Jerrica asked, judgment ringing clear in her voice.

“It's Dr. Satan now, Jerrica,” Dr. Satan snarled.

“Fucking seriously, Scott? Why not just call yourself Lord Edge and get it over with?” Jerrica countered.

“Keep it up and I won’t feed you,” Dr. Satan replied coldly. Jerrica didn’t say anything back, resorting to the silent treatment like usual. He didn’t even bother looking over at her where she was chained to the wall.

Jerrica sounded so much like Dr. Satan’s sister it was sickening to him. A thought he couldn’t banish quickly enough to prevent the ones that followed. He hadn’t had access to any real weapons and had been in a hurry when his system invitation occurred. He’d resorted to strangling her in her bed, hoping she wouldn’t put up much of a fight if she was asleep when it started.

It had taken far more strength and struggle than Dr. Satan had ever expected, and time. The struggle had seemed to go on forever. That part of the memory was frustrating and a little scary, he’d come close to failure, but it wasn’t what nagged at him. No, that was what had come after.

Her expression, the smell, nothing had registered at the time. It was the weird feeling he’d felt seeing her like that which got under his skin. That he’d wanted her to wake up, to shake it off like it was a joke. She didn’t though, and he was soon gone, whisked away to meet his destiny.

“I have everything I ever wanted,” Dr. Satan muttered to himself. It still lingered; a feeling like she’d come walking in to bitch at him about not getting out more. Asking him about his day. Laughing at his jokes sometimes when she got them.

He didn’t understand why he still felt like that and pushed it down like he always did. His sister was dead.

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

“Working on my research,” Dr. Satan answered halfheartedly.

The time before he’d become a dungeon master was fuzzy for Dr. Satan, everything but his final few hours. He knew he’d wanted to be a virologist, but not to cure people. He’d wanted to be at the forefront of biological warfare.

Only he was vaguely aware it hadn’t worked out. He was terrible at math and hadn’t yet graduated high school. The dream had seemed too far off to take seriously. The system's invitation had changed that, had given him what he wanted.

A snide little noise issued from Jerrica, but Dr. Satan didn’t look over at her. Not that he could have if he had wanted to. It was another thing he didn’t think about, the way he hadn’t left his core even for a moment in over a year. The way his shadowy pseudo flesh had begun to merge with the crystal of it at some point.

It was a thing to be ignored, one of an increasingly lengthy list of such things. Like how Jerica was already long dead, just a skeleton in tattered rags chained to the wall. How the food he gave her piled up around her remains and rotted. That he’d never known the chained girl’s name. Jerrica had been his sister’s name.