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

My plan had worked! I had guessed that the essence of the crystal was its ability for two-way communication over vast distances. Broken down, it would retain that ability while losing its bulky crystal structure.

By having my leech eat it, I had imbued the leech with its power.

Relief washed through me. This hadn’t been a waste. And what’s more, I now had a way to eavesdrop on the Wrotun general meeting Godwin said he was going to hold.

I wished that I could create an army of 10 leeches and send them out as spies, but I had reached my dungeon monster capacity. I would have to level up to be able to create more.

Using my core voice, I ordered the leech to slither out of the dungeon and to the Wrotun cavern, where it would find the cavern meeting and listen in for me.

“Maginhart, could you take this crystal essence and put it safely in the inventory room?”

“Yesss, Dark Lord.”

While I waited for the leech to reach the caverns and Godwin’s meeting to begin, I had a boss monster to meet. I had even more traps to make. The last thing I needed was to get caught in a Seeker invasion right now, so I couldn’t let this stop my preparations.

CHAPTER 21

I had combined an angry elemental jelly cube, some hivemind shrooms, and a bone guy. The melding room had worked its magic, and now there was a new boss monster waiting to serve me. As a core, I don’t get to open many presents, but I guess this was the closest thing. I couldn’t wait to meet him.

I kept my excitement in check as much as possible. When it came to the melding room, I had learned that it was fine to hope the monster would turn out one way, but it was sensible to expect something completely different.

I hoped to get something that had a bone guy’s ability to take a battering, combined with the flexibility and elemental damage of a jelly cube.

What I was equally likely to get was a kind of bone-hard blob that refused to die, but barely moved. Impossible to tell. I mean, the last time I’d used the melding room I had ended up with a giant troll-spider with leeches for legs.

So it was with this knowledge that I calmed my thoughts, telling myself that I would accept the result no matter what it was. I hopped away from my core pedestal and into my melding room.

It took me a second to focus. With my senses on, I smelled spent essence. I looked around, but I couldn’t see a boss monster anywhere.

Huh?

Had the room failed, or something?

Another thought hit me, this one a punch to my non-existent stomach.

Had my new boss monster killed the goatief boy? Was he lurking elsewhere in my dungeon?

I had gotten the melding complete message while I was with the First-Leaf and the Rushdens. What if my monster had left the melding room and explored the dungeon, passing his time by slaughtering the first person he came across?

I mean, I have nothing against my monsters picking up a hobby. But this had caused me a lot of trouble.

It was a hard thing to have to swallow, but it was the best explanation for what had happened, given the monster’s absence. I had created a monstrosity in my melding room. A mix of creatures that came together to form an abomination that had no right to exist.

Normally that would have been a good thing. But today? Something had gone very, very wrong.

I was glad when a voice distracted me from my thoughts.

I was very, very confused when I didn’t recognize it.

“There he is.”

“He’s here! He’s here!”

“We’d like food. Hero meat, please.”

“It could be darker in here, y’know. This place needs more darkness!”

I heard them then. A single voice at first, before more joined in, then even more, until dozens of voices were talking to me.

Looking up, I saw them. The melding room ceiling was covered in a growth of black fungi. They looked like rotten mushrooms, but with tiny eyes and mouths. Some of them were pure black and some were speckled red, white, and gold.

“Silence!” boomed one of them.

Well, I say boomed, but it was more of a squeak, to be honest. Just a louder squeak than the rest. At any rate, it shut them up.

“We will think as a hive, not as single minds,” it said. “There is too much individuality on display here! In the presence of his Dark Magnificence, your voices will silence themselves and the hive will prevail.”

“Hive prevail.”

“Hive prevail!”

“Hive prevail.”

“Rid your minds of these notions of the self. Embrace the tides of collective consciousness. Do you not understand the concept of silence? Or of the hive?”

“Sure! It means a notional entity consisting of a large number of people who share their knowledge or opinions with one another, regarded as producing either uncritical conformity or collective intelligence.”

“Yeah, you pompous arseface! It doesn’t mean we all speak as one; we just share our knowledge and opinions with each other.”

I felt dizzy trying to tell which mushrooms were talking at any one time. The only thing I could work out was that one of them was trying to quieten the rest, but was having a tough time of it. As a master of nearly a dozen kobolds, I could sympathize.

When they descended into a babble of arguments, I began to lose my patience with them all.

“Enough!” I said.

They stopped talking now. All their strange little faces turned toward me. It was disconcerting, having more than fifty eyeballs looking at me. Even worse was when they seemed to slip into their hivemind, and they all blinked at once.

“I am Beno, the