Blue Core

The lower room was ready, but I realized I had no idea how to relocate the crystal. I couldn’t build a new one, or reclaim the existing one. I couldn’t Alter it.

But I could Alter the floor under it, so I did. I lowered the floor, pushing it down. Down again. Down again. There were diminishing returns, and each alteration did take materials, but at this point I was capped on stone despite my playing around. And I altered the floor of the bottom room, upward. Frankly I wasn’t sure I could make the two meet, despite all the resources I was pouring into it, but just before I emptied the reserves, they did. At which point I reclaimed the upper floor and rebuilt it to cover the room with a hill topped with a crystal in the middle. Done. One hitpoint wonder hidden.

[Relocate 1] learned.

That could be useful, if I had any major rearranging to do.

And now I was at a loss for anything of value. Despite the overlay having one suggestion of monsters, the only things I’d seen were rabbits and deer and trees out in front of the mountain. The occasional bird, bear or fox. Certainly no people. If this was a heaven or a hell, it was a particularly placid one. If it was a game, it was an uneventful one.

So I dithered, fiddling with what I had, building what new things I could afford - surprisingly few, since leveling up the categories very quickly required way more experience than I had. Not to mention some purchases required things I’d never seen, like iron. The default building categories were okay, but, I would have also divided things into furnishings, to make things appear like a normal dwelling, traps, to kill things, and biology, the weird bits that bridged the stone and wood (synthesized from biomass, it seemed) with the living structure.

I hadn't touched the fourth category, the monster breeding, but since I was missing resources, I decided I’d have to experiment. In the now-empty hidden room, I built a breeding station. I was expecting a cocoon, or maybe some vaguely organ-looking monstrosity, but what I got was neither. The black tendrils sprouted from the floor, forming themselves into something that looked like a bowl chair...with restraints. And appendages. And along with it came an incredible surge of lust.

It was actually terrifying, since the only input so far had been intellectual, and things like hormones and gut feelings had been entirely absent, along with any sort of tactile sensory input. But the station was directly connected to me, and I could feel it, twitching eagerly.

I reclaimed it instantly. If I had hands they’d be trembling, especially since the lust didn’t go away entirely. It was sealed off, vaguely there behind smoked glass, but still present. Which came with the uncomfortable implication that pieces of my mind were locked behind, or maybe wholly controlled by, things I could build. Shaken, I focused on the mundane aspects of building and expanding.