Blue core, p.48
Blue Core, page 48
part #1 of Blue Core Series
They touched down smoothly on the rampart near where the monster stood, and even though she wasn’t intending to move from her palanquin, Iniri molded [Shield of Tarnil] over herself. She had no idea what this monster was capable of, and wasn’t intending to find out by becoming a target. Harold slipped out of the palanquin, calling orders before shouting down at the messenger. "Speak your piece, monster! Our queen is listening."
For her part, Iniri fashioned some basic wind Affinity constructs with [Royal Mana], so she could hear and speak without having to shout herself. She didn’t expect that she’d have much to say, but she’d be a fool not to listen. Nobody she knew of actually had diplomatic dealings with the mage-kings, so anything she could learn would be valuable.
"You’re the one who took the Meil core?" The monster’s voice sounded like bubbles rising through thick tar, a bass growl with sharp pops cutting the syllables part.
Without even thinking about it, Iniri felt a sudden, burning need to keep Blue’s nature a secret. It was strange to have such an emotional decision arrive when she didn’t feel she liked Blue that much, but she’d always trusted her instincts. Besides, this was still her country, not Blue’s, whether the mage-kings recognized it or not.
"I am not, but I can speak for the one who has."
"That’s fine with me." The shadow didn’t sound particularly worried by the Classers surrounding it. "First, Tor Kot is going to want to check to make sure the core isn’t damaged. It isn’t, is it?"
"I couldn’t tell you. I didn’t see anything that looked like damage." It wasn’t entirely a lie. Before it sank through the floor, the now-blue dungeon core seemed to be a single chunk of intact crystal. Not that she had any idea what to look for. "Nobody attacked it, though." She was pretty sure Shayma’s contribution wasn’t exactly an attack, and Blue’s takeover was beyond her ken.
"Good. Tor Kot’s in enough trouble letting someone take one of his spare Cores without adding damaged Cores into it. You do know how much trouble he’s in, right?"
"I don’t. The master of the Cores doesn’t share much of his personal business with me."
"Does this master have a name?"
"I don’t know his name, but I call him Blue." The one thing she couldn’t do was give away what Blue actually was. The rest of his secrets she didn’t actually know, so she couldn’t betray them. It was easy enough to imagine herself as some subordinate noble under Blue, though, and act accordingly.
"Typical. Probably knows how much trouble he’s going to be in once Vok Lim figures him out. How is Vok Nal, anyway? Recovering from the transfer process?"
"...so far as I have heard, he has not recovered." She would be surprised if mage-kings recovered from death. Vok Nal’s death was something else she didn’t want to reveal, and fortunately none of the Classers blurted it out, but she had no way of making sure it stayed that way. If someone like Duke Lehrem was willing to oppose a Power for the death of his son, what would a mage-king do?
"First time losing a Core, I suppose that’s not surprising." The shadow monster waved a hand dismissively. "Serves him right. Losing a whole army and then his Core? What an idiot. Lim always coddled him. Anyway, not official but Tor Kot really wants Blue’s monster information. He can’t just be using humans and I haven’t seen a monster yet, even under stealth, so it must be something pretty exotic."
"What is Tor Kot offering, not officially, for such information?"
"Forgiveness for stealing one of his experimental cores, for one. Keeping Vok Lim from locking your master in a siphon chamber for the next decade, for two," the monster said dryly. Iniri’s eyes widened. Of course Blue was a refugee from the mage-kings. It was obvious in retrospect; where else would a dungeon core have come from? It didn’t explain anything else about him, because if Tor Kot and his ilk had even the slightest intimation he was independent they wouldn’t be assuming someone was controlling him.
"He is not the queen’s master, monster," Harold said coldly, which made Iniri wince but there was no help for it. Even if they’d agreed on a story before they came, which in hindsight they should have, it’d be awful difficult for Harold to reign in his tongue.
"My mistake." He didn’t sound at all apologetic.
"Do you have an actual message or just gossip? I am quite busy." She didn’t actually want to cut the conversation short, but sooner or later someone would say something stupid and give away something they shouldn’t. Adventurers weren’t known for their diplomatic prowess.
"Aside from ensuring the Meil core is intact and undamaged, the summons by Tor Kot still stands. The time limit, however, has changed to one month from now."
"I’ll pass that on," Iniri said, though she winced. Not much time, but at least it implied they’d have a month without being bothered by anyone which was nice to know. Even that much breathing room was a gift. "Anything else?"
"Just really curious what monsters he uses. I would have thought I’d spot any stealth types, but so far I haven’t seen a single one. With the city so intact, neither did Vok Nal."
"You’ll understand that I can’t make any comment about that."
"I suppose not. I suppose you won’t let me in, either."
"No," she said, flat as she could make it. She was quite tempted to order her Classers to kill it, but that would be a bad idea. Even if they could, which she doubted given its obvious shadow Affinity and utter lack of concern, it’d probably get them into all kinds of trouble. It clearly was not the usual sort of monster.
"Well, then I will be seeing you – and your master – later." He repeated the phrase that had made Harold fume with a little more emphasis this time, and then the Classers made various noises.
"He’s gone," Harold reported, poking his head back inside the palanquin. "Some sort of shadow teleport."
"That...doesn’t surprise me." Iniri sighed. "Keep an eye out for him, but for now, let’s just go back to the manor." She should be more worried about it infiltrating the city, but she was pretty sure Blue would object, and he was far more equipped to deal with a shadow-teleporting monster than she was.
She’d have to talk to him about the conversation though. Especially if he hadn’t been paying attention, though she was confident that he couldn’t miss something that drastic. Maybe she’d see about going back to the core room before bed. She could really use a soak in that hot spring.
Day 117 - Blue
The bandages came off after a few hours, peeling away from pale but whole skin of their own accord, after which I put a bed underneath Shayma to lift her out of the water. Even with [Restful Night] active I was pretty sure soaking in hot water for hours on end wasn’t the best thing for someone to do. Once I spun blankets over her, using [Temperature Finesse] to take most of the heat out of the surrounding air, she made a sleepy noise and rolled over, snuggling into the bed. It was adorable, and a side of her I hadn’t gotten to see for a while. Not with all the fighting and stress.
I didn’t let Iniri wake her up when she arrived just before midnight, so the conversation was one-sided. Embarrassingly, I hadn’t caught the conversation with the shadow monster, so maybe it was better that I couldn’t talk to her. It was weird to think she’d heard, and figured out, something about me before I had. Though I doubted that, whatever Tor Kot’s experiments had been, I was the intended result.
At least Iniri had given them my name, and in such a way that they still thought I was a mage-king. Hopefully that meant my level-five benefit would kick in and I’d get to see Tor Kot and maybe whoever else was talking about me among my enemies when the Shadow guy reported in. Until then, I had a lot of work to do.
Something I’d somehow failed to notice earlier was that all of my Sources were gone. I hadn’t stockpiled any, but kept them on the vine, as it were, letting them slowly grow from the chrystheniums. Either when the ecology had died the Sources had evaporated, or my dungeon-self had done something with them, but either way I’d have to wait a couple days for them to start appearing again. Unfortunately that meant I didn’t have much to distract me from rebuilding Meil.
There wasn’t any shortcut or background way for me to do it. I didn’t have any sort of process I could hand it off to. No, I had to remake each building manually. It wasn’t like it was exactly difficult, but it was tedious and I found that I had a lot more work to do than I’d originally thought. Partly because I’d underestimated the size of Meil despite it being part of me, and partly because I wasn’t just making things from scratch. There were partly-collapsed walls, some belonging to me, some not, debris, furnishings, and even the occasional corpse that had escaped either the Red Core’s or my dungeon-self’s notice. On rare occasion there were even survivors trapped under the rubble who needed to be delivered to the clinic. Keri and Annit were still working there, both of them half-exhausted.
I was a one-dungeon search and rescue and repair crew, and while I had a lot of advantages that made it possible, it was still enormously intensive. I kind of regretted agreeing to it, but I was stuck now. Besides, I really did want to see how normal Affinity and Source crafting was done. I had my [Fabricator] and my [Metallurgy] stuff, but that was pretty limited. I still couldn’t do cloth and leather and even much with wood, and there was probably stuff I was forgetting. Or stuff I hadn’t even seen yet, since my perspective had been pretty limited.
While sorting through one of the collapsed areas and using [Assimilation] to remove a particularly precarious section of wall, I ran across something I was tempted to steal for myself. A map. And not just of Iniri’s kingdom, but of the entire continent! Finally, some context for where I was. I decided to make a graven, symbol-free copy inside my core room just so I could have something to reference at will.
The continent itself was labeled Orn, and it was a roughly trilobe-shaped affair, with three enormous peninsulas sticking out from a central heartland to the northeast, northwest, and south. I didn’t realize how big until I located Tarnil, on the eastern coast of the northeast lobe, looking very tiny against the backdrop of the enormous area claimed by the Empire of Ir in the center of the continent. Not that size and power were the same, but it pretty well confirmed that Tarnil was a minor player.
Actually the entire northeast lobe seemed to be that way. According to the map it was heavily mountainous, in a way that defied what I knew of geology, but considering magic and, frankly, the shallowness of my knowledge it was believable. Multiple distinct ranges crossed each other at various angles, chopping most of the land up into little pocket valleys, each one holding its own kingdom. Calling them ‘little’ might be a bit of a misnomer, though, as Nivir was over twice the size of Tarnil but was still slightly below the average.
The Great Northern Waste was on the map too, and if it had previously been part of Tarnil, they’d lost an enormous amount. The blotch sitting north of Tarnil, and very close to where I was, seemed to be on the same scale of Nivir’s valley. I could well imagine the current Tarnil was a minor portion of the original kingdom, the survivors of whatever awful conflict had needed the Adamant Fortress.
So far I’d only heard of Nivir as Tarnil’s neighbor, and that wasn’t too far wrong. With the Waste to the north and Nivir to the west, along with the curve of the shore, Tarnil only barely touched one other kingdom, to the southwest beyond Wildwood. Well, I assumed it was a kingdom but the map only labeled it as Orrelin, one of the big geographical winners of the lobe, a roughly crescent shaped pleateau running from the eastern shore to nearly the western. The other power bordering the Waste and presumably Tarnil’s former neighbor was Haerlish, who had a shallow wedge of mostly coast.
That made it very similar to the current Tarnil, which was a sort of bracket-shaped piece of land with Meil near the very top and the other four cities clustered around a river delta further south and east. Wildwood was south and west, and I suspected it constituted as much of a border as the mountains. Though considering that there were earth mages and wind mages I wasn’t sure how much of a barrier mountains really were.
Considering that I’d found Ansae in a mountain and that this was a world chock-full of mana and magic, digging a tunnel straight through might actually be a terrible idea. Or even flying over. I could well believe that people would stick to normal passes rather than risk disturbing something that might decide to eat their kingdom.
For example, the entire northwestern lobe was blank, with a label that just said Wilderness of Tarkelion. Presumably it was uninhabited, or at least, not inhabited by anyone with a political presence. The only hint of what might lie there was a stylized snake with wings. It took up almost a full third of the landmass, and was bigger than any of the countries, even Ir.
It wasn’t just kingdoms and principalities on the map, either. Nivir’s Great Dungeon was labeled, and after some searching I found a second one on Ir’s coastline, in one of the massive bays formed by the continent’s shape. The third was smack in the middle of the southern lobe, in whatever country Larch was.
Mana springs were more common, with at least one per country. I wasn’t sure how Wildwood compared to them, but it really drove home that my low-mana location was rather unusual. Maybe Tarnil itself was fairly unusual, but then, Ir’s capital was a long way from both its Great Dungeon and any of the eight mana springs within its borders.
With some reluctance I left the map to its original owners, whoever they were, and went back to fixing the buildings. There wasn’t much that the map really did for me, aside from satisfying my curiosity, especially since it didn’t tell me where the mage-kings came from. I knew that they’d arrived on the coast, and they weren’t from the continent, but that left basically the whole wide world beyond Orn.
It wasn’t until later that I found more. In a different and far more intact building someone had a small globe. It was an expensive-looking thing made of gemstones, and while it lacked any sort of labeling I could at least identify Orn on it. Which led me to a problem, because according to the globe, Orn was just one of seven continents, all of a similar size, not to mention a broad scattering of islands and things halfway between. If everything was to scale, this world was enormous.
I did some quick estimations, based on the scale of the continent map I’d found. While it was possible that some things were grossly exaggerated, if everything was correct the planet was something like thirty thousand kilometers in diameter, which should have resulted in crushing gravity and atmospheric pressure. That clearly wasn’t the case, so all I could guess was magic was involved somehow. Maybe I should feel lucky though, if things were magic I could have ended up on a planet that was actually flat, or a cube or something. Unfortunately, nobody had an orrery so I could take the next step and assure myself that the solar system was at least marginally normal as well.
I dispersed the [Restful Night] field around morning, partly because Shayma had already slept for over twelve hours and partly because I wasn’t sure she could wake up with it going. I was pretty sure that as a beneficial field, it wouldn’t have so deleterious an effect, but then again, the only difference between medicine and poison was amount. Only a few minutes later she yawned and pushed herself up, sheets sliding off bare skin. It was a sight I enjoyed no matter how often I got to see it.
Despite being a third of the way through the gestation time on the Dungeon Seed, I couldn’t see any noticeable bump to her belly. Not that I knew what to expect. I’d only used a breeding option that produced something all of one time before, and that was a sort-of monster. With the Purifier line of options being almost definitionally opposed to monsters, it would be a mistake to take that as precedent.
"Feeling better?"
"I feel amazing! Everything’s healed, and I don’t think I’ve slept that well in years."
"I have a new magic field and it’s called [Restful Night], so I would certainly hope so." Her hit points were full and she no longer had any had any status effects other than [Well Rested]. Aside from being paler, her arms looked fully restored, even the muscle mass replenished.
"It definitely was restful," she agreed. "Thank you, Blue! But now I’m starving. Is there anything around?" It was not an idle question. The refugees had been running on scraps and fumes since I was still sure that feeding them dungeon-made meat was a bad idea, courtesy of [Tempered Wisdom], which made the introduction of the tayantan fruits quite the relief. Since those actually properly grew rather than were made directly, they seemed far safer as a food source. Too bad all mine had died off.
All the crops in the experimental rooms were dead as well, withered along with my chrystheniums and grasses and trees. Apparently it had been a really good idea for me to not plug the farming room crops into my mana, given how everything had ended up dying. I didn’t even have basic potatoes for Shayma.
Fortunately, Iniri was starting to have her own breakfast over in Meil, and as queen she of course had first call on the remaining stocks. It wasn’t overly elaborate, just bread and jam and eggs, but more than I could provide. All I had was a couple of leftover pies, now cooled, and a bushel or two of the tayantan fruits. "Looks like Iniri has food. How about I send you over there with some of my fruit? I’m afraid I don’t have much breakfast-worthy fare at the moment."
I hadn’t much thought about it until Iniri mentioned pulling everyone out of the living places I’d made, but I needed some way to feed Shayma and Keri and Annit once everyone else was gone. I could imitate a refrigerator with [Temperature Finesse] but the rest of it was beyond me.
"Great! Is there anything you need to discuss with her?" Shayma dressed herself again, and I added laundry to the mental list of things I needed to provide, or get someone else to provide, to my people.
"You can tell her to go ahead and fill you in on the meeting she had with one of Tor Kot’s monsters. Or I guess it was one of his monsters. Either way, she did a great job but I’d rather have her tell it in case I forgot something."
