Blue Core

I ended up punching a hole into the wood downslope and a hundred meters or so to the side of the starting cave. Not far, but maybe far enough for something that theoretically couldn’t move. It looked a bit more natural, especially since a tree fell over in the process, though I had no idea if it really fit. The hole sloped into a three-way intersection, each with one of the sliding doors, for traffic control. I didn’t know if I’d need it, but it’d at least give me three options for traps and luring in the local wildlife.

I left my crystal buried deep. Several floors deep, in fact, and figured out a way to fill the old cave up with rubble where it connected to my new area: ejecting my stone stockpiles. It wasn’t perfect - I would have loved to have had solid walls - but maybe a bunch of collapsed stone would lend credence to the idea that whatever had been there was gone forever.

The only thing I left were some sensory organs on the other side of the rubble fill and a rock wall I’d spent so much time on I advanced Camouflage to level two. But for all that work, the flow of animals seemed to have ebbed. The bait worked well, extremely well, but there were only so many large animals nearby. At least I didn’t need that income to live. Or exist, anyhow. I never caught my stocks depleting on their own, so a lack of income was just a lack of expansion. I still had roots chewing away at the rock, slowly expanding my usable space, but it wasn’t space I needed to use.

I’d set up various traps - a pit trap with a maw at the bottom was a lot faster and simpler for getting small game than my previous setup, and a few levels into the stone spikes had made them pretty potent - but under the limited circumstances I’d exhausted my needs pretty quickly.

So I set up a room on the left interior of the intersection, just before it split into the trap corridors, with a table, a chair, a bed, and some light. Not torches, though I could make those, but a ‘false daylight’ feature. I didn’t have any particular reason. I couldn’t use it, and it wasn’t even connected to my trap setup. But it made me feel like there was some piece of normalcy there, even if all I could do was look.

My ears caught horse’s hooves, somewhere out of sight, headed up toward the mountain. Then later, them leaving again, without coming into view.

[Foresight] gained.

[Foresight] and [Intuition] become [Knowledge]

Foresight: Improved prediction of future events.

Knowledge: Combines [Foresight] and [Intuition] Required for magic use.

New skills aside, I was pretty sure I knew what that was about, and was glad to be quit of my prior residence. If for no other reason than not having to suffer my walls being broken again.