Chapter 1 — Blue Core

There was a change. A ripple. A discontinuity. A singularity.

None of those words were exactly right, but there were no words for the profound sensation of

I blinked, and too many eyes blinked together. I tried to breathe, and found that I not only couldn’t, I didn’t need to. And strangest of all, superimposed on the confusing shatter of images, but completely independent of any of them, I could see

It was just too much. It wasn’t so much panic, or fear, as just too much

Eventually, slowly, I managed to put the absurd lot of visual input into good order. It seemed I had many eyes this time, not just the usual two, and I was able to puzzle out something of the situation I was in.

There was an outside. A wooded slope down, with details obscured by branches and leaves. A steep rock face up, reaching to towering, snow-capped peaks, immensely far away. And a rough cave entrance, to an inside.

The inside seemed to be worked, the walls smooth, and the floor clear. But this was not entirely accurate, because proprioception still functioned, to some extent, and some of those walls were

And there was a red crystal next to it, the pieces freshly broken where it had been

I spotted my eyes, eventually, camouflaged as whorls of stone. So that was one thing. But there was also the overlay, which was not from

I didn’t have any hands, or anything, and it was fortunate my new body didn’t seem to have panic hormones because

Well.

As did the shattered crystal next to me.

The far wall of the chamber I was in had been destroyed, the rubble attested to that much, so I could invent very easily a scenario where someone came looking, knocked in a wall, and broke the crystal. And now that the wall was destroyed, there was a clear path all the way to the outdoors if someone

I switched back to the overlay, examining it with mental pokes and prods. And a few bits of extra information revealed themselves.

Eyes provided vision, that much was clear. According to the overlay,

Okay.

The last one was so strange it seemed out of place, and I skipped to that one first. It only had one entry, a breeding station, costing a hundred biomass, and only stating that it was for breeding monsters.

First came a bunch of roots

Then, logically, there were bait, traps, and digesters. Bait itself came in fruit and meat varieties, fruit costing a single biomass and meat costing five times that. I eyed my corridor and decided that, what the hell, see if the logic worked. Placing bait was a matter of deciding where and then, of its own accord, a pitch-black tendril sprouted from the stone, growing fat before peeling away to reveal a pile of berries. The tendril itself vanished to nothing.

In front of the bait I put a sticky trap on the floor, and spike traps on the walls. Those, I was pleased to see, did not look like much. Faint softening of the floor’s stone, faint tracery of lines in the walls. And then I was down to all of three biomass, enough for a digester, and nothing to do with the stone I had. Nothing to do but wait.

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Author: As I keep getting asked about it, there is no day 1 chapter. This is the first.