Wet, rough, and agitating. Those were the thoughts crossing through Merrick’s mind as he attempted to swat away whatever force was trying to rip him out of his rightfully gained resting time. Without opening his eyes, mostly due to the pounding headache driving needles into his brain behind his eye, he swept his arm in a wide swath to scare away the pestering force.
He was so tired that the effort did very little to wake him up, his head still resting on his left arm as he slouched onto the desk in front of him. Some part of him wondered if he’d be waking up with terrible muscle aches because of his posture, but his posterior was so comfortable in its purple throne that he felt that resting poorly would be impossible.
‘Purple throne?’ Merrick’s higher brain function began to slowly spin up processes, against his wishes to keep resting, as it tried to dissect the thought. Something about a purple throne was foreign to his subconscious and his dreaming mind decided to latch onto that bone and start gnawing away at it.
Ever the stubborn one, Merrick tried to leverage his lucid sleeping abilities to pivot away from the purple throne thought in an attempt to prevent himself from thinking himself awake. He’d done it many times before, when his mind decided it needed to solve a complex math problem that cropped up in his dream, and he was familiar with the process. He just needed to give it a ‘close enough’ answer that passed inspection so his mind would let go of the thought.
Before he could even begin to spin up a fairytale about purple thrones to distract himself, the sensation of sandpaper scraping away at his forehead returned. With a viciousness, Merrick whipped his right arm back toward his face to catch whatever bug or rodent was harassing him.
In transit, however, his arm made contact with a solid chunk of metal that decided to hitch a ride on the errant arm express, smacking into his forehead and causing him to lean straight back, wide awake.
For several seconds nothing processed even though his eyes were open. He sat there, light-headed staring forward at a tree of some sort. The gears in his mind finally kicked into full gear, and he realized it was a mulberry tree. A dungeon mulberry tree, to be specific. Looking down slightly, Merrick saw a shimmering berry that appeared to be shifting colors sporadically. It looked no larger than any of the other mulberries he’d collected but the kaleidoscope of shifting whites, silvers, and blues told him that it was different.
Right, he’d been in the dungeon. Attempting to [[Merge]] something far outside of his capabilities. Apparently, he’d succeeded.
“[Skill Log],” he intoned.
[Merge Successful. One Tier 4 Dungeon Groveberry merged. See More…]
[Critical Success! Merge successful. One T5* Dungeon Groveberry merged. See More…]
[Warning! Abort Merge! User lacks sufficient resources for attempt.]
[Warning! Abort Merge! User lacks sufficient resources for attempt.]
[Warning! Abort Merge! User lacks sufficient resources for attempt.]
[Warning ignored. Attempting to divert alternate resources for energy allocation]
[Grave Danger! User lacks sufficient alternate resources to complete attempt. Abort or death is likely!]
[Grave Danger! User lacks sufficient alternate resources to complete attempt. Abort or death is likely!]
[Alert: New resources allocated. Unknown contaminant detected. Error report sent.]
[Merge attempt complete.]
[Catastrophic Fail- error- Unknown contaminant detected. Unknown energy source injected. Unknown process. Error report sent.]
[Admin Remote Access Granted… Booting user offline for investigation]
[Error identified. System update scheduled for next long rest. Insufficient permission to view patch notes.]
[Rebooting system…]
“What the hell does any of that mean?” Merrick scowled at the [Skill Log]’s nonsensical rambling. While he was attempting to parse through the information, a new entry popped up.
[Chaos Roll! Catastrophic Failure diverted. Critical Success! Polymorphic Ferreofolium Groveberry merged. See More…]
Upon prompting to ‘See More…’ Merrick’s vision was covered in nonsensical symbols that strained his mind to process. After a few moments the symbols faded away and the ‘See More…’ option removed itself from the newest entry.
“Lots of new words to figure out, just when I was catching up too…” Merrick lamented to himself as he observed the strange metal mulberry in front of him.
“Wait a second, how did I manage to get a ‘Critical Success’ if all of my modifiers reset themselves? [[Merging]] three critical successes together shouldn’t have any extra percentages to roll into a new critical success… Unless there are actually hidden positive modifiers to go along with the negative ones I’ve just about proven.”
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
“Mew.”
Merrick stopped pondering his skill as his eyes snapped up to the first living creature he’d seen since slaying the bramblekin hours earlier.
Sitting on top on the nearby keg of distilled water was what appeared to be a cat. Except, Merrick knew that it couldn’t be a cat for several reasons.
Ignoring the fact that he’d never even heard of the dungeon having cats, the small creature was almost entirely green. Its fur looked like it was made of long and thin pine needles and several large mulberry leaves ran down its spine. Its eyes were a piercing yellow that seemed to dimly glow, which matched the color radiating from its horn.
Curiously, the creature didn’t seem aggressive at all, simply staring at Merrick as he stared back at it. With another ‘mew’ it hopped off the keg and onto the desk in front of Merrick, where it slowly walked over to him and licked his hands. The sandpapery texture that he’d woken up from finally identified itself as the creatures strangely abrasive tongue, and a sappy residue was left behind on the back of Merrick’s hand.
Slowly, he lifted his hand up and scratched the cat behind it’s ears, pleasantly surprised at how soft the needles felt. They were almost indistinguishable from fur apart from their coloration. Slowly, out of a sort of morbid curiosity, Merrick slowly moved his scratching fingers up the feline’s scalp toward the horn.
Thankfully, the creature didn’t turn aggressive and seemed to enjoy him scratching at the base of the horn. Merrick peered a little closer and was surprised to realize that he recognized the horn. It appeared identical to ‘Critical Success’ he’d merged when trying to get through the first puzzle door.
That all but confirmed to him that his skill was capable of providing the dungeon with new flora and fauna that it didn’t have access to. He’d figured as much since there was little other reason for the apparently non-hostile entity to kidnap him.
* DING DING DING DING DING DING*
Both Merrick and his new feline friend jumped back at the shrill alarm that began ringing through the cavern.
“Oh shit! The puzzle!” Merrick scooped up the metallic berry and sprinted toward the entrance to the cornucopia.
Although it appeared that his innate skill had caused him to pass out, he managed to awake in time to finish the puzzle, if only just. For that, he was thankful for the cat. He didn’t know if the alarm, loud as it was, would have been loud enough to rouse him from his sleep without the same persistence that the cat had showed. What a shame it would have been to create the final puzzle piece only to sleep through his opportunity to turn it in for credit.
Merrick sprinted through the wide hallway of the bone white cornucopia, pausing only to throw a glance at the area he thought may have been where he’d turned in the horn. It was hard to be sure exactly where the alcove had been considering the structure’s habit of smoothing out its walls the moment he finished a segment, but he also didn’t see any obvious blemishes anywhere in the structure. The cat hadn’t burst through the walls, then.
Will little time to lose, Merrick didn’t spent too much investigating and just made a note that the dungeon seemed to be able to retrieve his submissions in a non-destructive manner.
Getting to the sixth segment, his run slowed and he had to crouch down to proceed, eventually needing to sink down onto his stomach and begin his crawl to the finish line.
Finally, and with only five or so minutes left on his internal clock, Merrick placed the newly merged metallic berry into the alcove located in the tip of the cornucopia.
Unlike the previous occurrences, this time the light didn’t suddenly come into existence all at once. The alcove began to slowly glow and the light spread out from there, starting low and warm before brightening as more distance was covered.
Before long, the entire seventh segment was lit up the rest of the interior of the cornucopia. Merrick’s plan to go above and beyond with his final submission may not have been required, but he was happy to know that it paid off regardless.
Slowly, Merrick began to feel himself sliding backwards. At first, he was confused by the development then he realized that the horn seemed to be shifting, as if the entrance was sinking into some sort of sinkhole.
In a panic, Merrick realized there was nowhere for his hands to find purchase as he began rapidly descending an incline for a second time that day. Panic shot through him as he realized he didn’t even have his backpack to use as a sled this time.
By the time he was ready to start having a full blown panic attack, however, his feet had touched the ground and he belatedly realized that the entire structure had only been around fifty feet long. Though the incline had gotten steeper over time, there wasn’t enough distance or speed for any sort of terminal damage.
As he signed to himself and patted down his clothes, he realized that the entrance hadn’t been sinking after all, the floor had just gone from flat to a curved shape like the rest of the horn. It now looked more like a conical cylinder than a horn. The tip had risen into the air as the floor of the horn had begun making itself symmetrical with the ceiling.
“How is it suspending itself in the air like that, though? Surely the tip should have started falling back to the ground by now… Oh shit.”
As if it were waiting for Merrick to begin critiquing it, gravity elected to reassert its existence in an extremely bizarre way. The cone began tipping, but not in the way it should have. The tip began rising into the air, causing the top of the entrance to the once-cornucopia shaped monument to begin descending toward the earth, almost as if it were a box lid being closed.
Merrick scrambled out of the way, glad that he’d not been injured and was therefore able to prevent himself from being trapped like a mouse in a jar.
A massive thud shook the cavern enough to destabilize Merrick as he was backing away toward his workstation and for a moment, the cavern was silent once more. The light that had been shining out of the cornucopia since he’d started solving the puzzle was now sealed with its closure, and the entire glade felt much darker for it.
Merrick then heard a small cracking noise. It reminded him greatly of the creaking the door-puzzle in the previous cave had made and, sure enough, he began to see runes appearing on the surface of the cone in front of him.
The fifty-foot tall structure’s tip began glowing like the northern star, with faint shimmering symbols appearing in the depths of the light. Rings of runes crawled down the entire structure, looking like vines growing at a speed visible to the human eye.
By the time the cone was completely covered in glowing runes, the top segment had begun to spin clockwise. Below it, the sixth segment spun counter to that, and the fifth spun in tune with the seventh. So on and so forth, the cone’s seven segments turned at rapid speeds, ever increasing, as the glow intensified.
Defying all laws of physics he thought would apply, the bottom segment of the cylindrical structure slowly started to flatten itself. He’d thought it was melting or drilling into the ground at first, then he realized that as the structure got shorter, and therefore less wide, there was a white platform left in its place covered in compressed and glowing runes. It almost looked like horn was somehow losing a dimension in real-time, like an eldritch monster was consuming its z-axis.
When the first segment finished melting down to a seven foot-long ring-shaped plate, it started spinning once more as the second segment started its turn. Each ring left behind by a segment was seven feet wide, he noticed, and spun in alternating directions. It wasn’t until the last segment, the tip of the cone, that something changed.
Instead of melting all the way down to join the marble plaza that had begun to appear before his eyes, parts of the walls remained standing. At appeared, to Merrick’s eyes at least, that an archway was left behind while the areas around it sank down to form the final plate, a white circle with a diameter of seven feet. At the base of said archway appeared to be an ivory chest, carved with intricate designs, waiting to be opened.
At this point, Merrick bad backed all the way up to his workstation and had been watching from his comfortable purple chair, petting the green cat in his lap absently. Cautiously, Merrick stood up while ignoring protests from his feline friend, and made his way over to the chest.
Before taking more than five steps, however, his [Status] appeared before his eyes without being willed to do so.
