Dungeon Core Academy: Books 1-7 (A LitRPG Series) by Alex Oakchest (book suggestions txt) 📕

Finally, the leech gave a nod, the upper portion of its slug-like body forming into a bowing gesture.

“See?” I said. “He’s friendly and rather polite. Although he isn’t as clever as a fire beetle or kobold, so you won’t get much conversation from him. Put him in your artificed bag and take him everywhere with you.”

“This leaf wonders why?”

“Because I need you to walk through every single tunnel that sprouts from the core room. The leech is my creature, and he will populate my dungeon map when you take him on a tour around it. Now, what’s his name?”

“This leaf can name him anything?”

“That’s the way I like to run things. Every creature has a name, and you can choose. Within reason. If name this leech Beno, we’ll have a problem.”

Warrane stared at the leech, and he scratched his chin with his free hand. “This leaf names you Sixth-Leaf Webb.”

“Webb? That’s the name of your tree.”

“This leaf will not rise due to the corruption of his tree, as he told you. But if there is a Sixth-Leaf beneath him, it is as though he has advanced.”

“Very well,” I said. “I’ll refer to him as Six for short. Can you and Six explore all of the tunnels around us? I understand that you already know what is here, but this is for me. Six needs to visit every tunnel for it to complete my map.”

Warrane nodded. “Glad to serve,” he said. He pinched Six the Leech between his index finger and thumb and put him in his inventory bag. “How will you walk while this leaf is gone, Core Beno?”

“Watch.”

I focused on the center of the room.

Create pedestal point. 

Essence left me again, this time forming a stone pillar in the center of the room. I imagined the core room just down the tunnel and commanded another pedestal point to appear there, too.

Done. I was twenty-five essence points poorer, but now I had the means to travel between the core and essence rooms.

With that Warrane left, taking Six with him. I had some lovely dungeon building to do.

CHAPTER 7

Taking care of the purple essence was easy. As long as your name wasn’t Core Jahn, cultivating essence was the most basic action a core could take.

First, I cast out my core arms. These arms were like beams of light that spread out from me. They let me handle essence moss and vines, but they wouldn’t work on anything else. I couldn’t, for instance, take up watercolor painting using my core hands. I would never, ever get to play the piano.

Using my arms, I gathered all the purple essence from the wall, brought it toward me, and then I took it into my core.

Now came the temptation. I could taste the essence moss inside me. Nourishing, sweet, so delicious that my core begged me to fully absorb it.

But no, I wouldn’t do that. As I said, my name was not Core Jahn.

Instead, I twisted and turned the moss inside me, and I focused on it and commanded it to change until soon, I manipulated it so that it became not moss but vines. I placed these back on the wall.

Done! There was only a foot square patch of them, but given time they would spread over the wall. I’d then plant more on the other walls, giving myself a rapidly increasing essence supply.

I could already feel the tiny patch of vines nourishing me. At their present size, I was only getting .2 essence per minute, but that would soon change.

Now, I had to think about the red essence. I had a vague idea of what it would do, but the tricky part was cultivating it. I had to be careful because it might not work the same as the purple essence. I wish we had covered this more in the academy.

Using my core arms, I pulled just a tiny patch of red moss away, leaving seven-eighths of it on the wall.

I brought this toward my core. Even without absorbing it, it was like I could already taste it. This thing was potent as hell, much more so than purple essence. Rather than giving off a sweet smell, the red moss was spicy, like a hundred chili seeds mashed up into one fiery ball of throat-burning hell.

I let it absorb into my core, without fully digesting it. Already I could feel it burning me, but it was a rather pleasant warmth.

The temptation, though. Hells, it was strong. My desire to absorb this moss completely was so powerful that I thought it would break me. It was only by concentrating hard that I battled it, and I then tried to manipulate the moss just as I had with the purple kind.

Wait. No.

This wasn’t working! As I gently twisted and pulled on it, I felt the heat leave me in one big gust.

I felt it then, a horrible sensation inside me. The essence had died.

I let the moss fall out of my core, where it landed on the ground beneath my pedestal. It was completely black now. Dead.

Hmm. So the red essence wasn’t cultivated in the usual way. I’d have to think about this, but I only had a finite patch of moss. Better to leave it for now until I had a better idea.

More time must have passed than I realized, because when I pulled up my map, I saw that Warrane had traveled through most of the vast network, filling in the spaces that had once been black.

On the southern-most part of the map was the giant cavern of the Wrotun. North of that was the bunch of tunnels that Warren and I traveled through. Then there was my core room and my current location in the essence room.

Then,