Ever since my creation, I had an instinctive understanding of what a Core felt like, even if that feeling was something completely different for every Core. It could be ash and heat pressing against my tongue, like the Flame Core. It could be the sensation of nature itself, of glowcaps and darkwood, like the Nature Core had been. It could be the comfort of infinity that the Great Core had brought me. It could be anything.

But it didn’t matter; whatever it was, I just knew.

Even if I didn’t know what it was.

The strange scent-taste of the distant Core stayed with me as I slithered down the tunnel, a mysterious and ever-present companion. It was difficult to understand, more complex than something like the Flame Core. It was the lack of consistency, more than anything; the scent-taste changed, warping every so often. One moment it tasted like the Nature Core, like glow-caps and darkwood and more. Then it turned cloying, and disappeared. Changed again, this time to something closer to the ore-flesh scent of blood, before it changed yet another time.

I couldn’t quite understand it, in the end; it didn’t help that I was feeling tired. It made thinking harder than normal. I had been moving a lot recently. Fighting a lot. It made sense to be tired, even if it wasn’t a good time for it. But my scale-flesh was feeling heavier by the moment. Weaker.

I paused, biting down on my scale-flesh and letting [Life - Invigorating Bite] jolt me back into wakefulness. Not for the first time. The tunnel was long, and the Lesser Core was far. I was thankful that I could move so much faster, at least.

I kept going, bidding my Darkweavers to follow with a lazy thought-hiss. Their legs wobbled with every step. I hadn’t been feeding them well. A few of them fell, and I commanded the fallen Darkweavers to get back up. To move on.

Forever loyal, they did as I commanded, pulling themselves up again and trudging behind me on far too many legs. I hoped that they would make it to the Lesser Core with me, though their bodies could still be useful even if they didn’t. [Ambusher’s Vision] was hard to level now, but every Darkweaver I consumed mattered. The enhanced sight it gave me was important; I wouldn’t even be able to see in the tunnel without it.

All of the glow-caps had died off many slithers ago - either that or they were taken away by light-hating bad-things similar to the Darkweavers. I hadn’t seen any yet, but I was keeping an eye out. As much as I could, anyway. There wasn’t any light to see by, besides the little bit that I could pull from my own stores of [Illusion Spark]. And that would eventually run out - though not any time soon, with how carefully I was using it. My increased size let me store a lot more light than before.

I hissed, catching the scent-taste of the Lesser Core on my tongue again, assuring myself that I was moving in the right direction. [Razorflesh]-sharpened scales scraped against stone with every slither, edges catching ever-so-slightly on raised ridges in the rock to form an undulating hiss.

My Darkweavers followed the sound, trailing behind on failing legs.

Lesser Core Skill: [Life - Invigorating Bite XI] Increased.

[Life - Invigorating Bite XII] Acquired.

I pulled backwards, fangs slipping free from flesh. An errant [Sting] sparked at the tips of my fangs as I pulled free, catching itself on the healing edges of my newest self-inflicted wound, small as it might have been. [Life - Invigorating Bite] closed the fang-shaped holes in moments, while the secondary effects of the ability jolted me back into wakefulness once again. Lent a little strength to my flesh. It wasn’t as helpful as before, even when I put more life essence into it.

Something was wrong. I knew that. I had known that for a while, thought about it for the brief moments of clarity that each new [Life - Invigorating Bite] brought to me. Something was terribly wrong.

But at least I had finally found enemy bad-things. Not the Core itself - that had been more elusive, despite the way its scent-taste continued to grow more powerful on my tongue - but something. It was better than nothing.

An outlet for my frustrations.

I let out an involuntary hiss, eyes fixed on the group of bad-things in the distance. Without [Ambusher’s Vision], I wouldn’t have noticed them at all; they were entirely motionless, closer to stone than living things. It had been the scent that had warned me, not sight, and even that had been hard to notice beneath my exhaustion and the growing scent-taste of the Lesser Core itself.

The bad-things tasted like rotting flesh, fetid and decaying - or close enough that the possibility of something alive waiting for me hadn’t been the first thing that I expected. I had been expecting the remnants of a battle, with blood and limbs and decaying flesh, but not…whatever they were.

Luckily, the possibility of a somewhat recent fight had made me more cautious; even if I was confident in my newfound strength, and even if I knew that I could simply try again if I died, I didn’t want to be forced into a new life before I was ready.

I needed to find out more about the Lesser Core’s defenses first. There was always something, and the scent of rotten flesh had been among the first of my clues. That, and my ever-growing exhaustion.

The strange bad-things were gathered near where the tunnel I was traveling along met a new cavern. It wasn’t the first time that it happened; more than once since I had set out, I had been forced to choose one of many branching paths after encountering a new cavern, letting the Lesser Core’s scent-taste guide me in the right direction. Each time, they had been empty. Almost disturbingly so, with even plant-flesh life nowhere to be found, let alone actual enemy bad-things. [Verdure Parasite] was enough to confirm the missing plant-flesh; there was nothing but my own spore-roots within range.

The newest of the caverns was like many of the others; filled with stone-spikes and outcroppings that spanned an otherwise-open expanse, the entire thing near pitch-black in the absence of the luminescent plant-flesh that provided light in other areas of the World Dungeon, and only nearly because [Ambusher’s Vision] let small bits of light cast by [Illusion Spark] be enough to let me see something - and even that wasn’t particularly clear, creating a world formed in shades of gray and black.

The reflective glow of the bad-things’ eyes when [Illusion Spark]’s meager light bounced off of them, however, had been unmistakable. It was enough to make me jerk back in surprise, beating down an involuntary hiss. Not that I was afraid or anything. It was just unexpected. I hadn’t expected to see anything alive. Not anymore.

I set my Darkweavers to work at the cavern’s entrance, a new thread-trap forming. It wasn’t the best; my Darkweavers, even with spore-roots to spur them onwards, moved with an uncharacteristic lethargy, and the threads they formed were oddly frayed and tattered. Still, with about a dozen still at my command, it didn’t take too long for something manageable to be formed.

A thread-trap that near-perfectly blended into the darkness of the tunnel, its edges anchored inside various wall-cracks or secured around stone-spikes, with an opening at the bottom small enough for me to squeeze under and one at the top large enough for my Darkweavers to clamber through. Unfortunately, my growing size meant the lower opening was larger than I’d have liked, but I couldn’t risk getting caught within my own spore-puppets’ thread-trap midfight.

That would just be embarrassing.

My preparations complete, I sent out another thought-hiss. The weakest of my remaining Darkweavers started forward on trembling legs, climbing over the thread-trap and setting down on the other side. I doubted that it would make it back to me; it couldn’t seem to move very fast anymore, afflicted by the same exhaustion that was affecting us all. The same weakness that had forced me to jolt myself back into liveliness with [Life - Invigorating Bite] again and again.

A weakness and exhaustion caused by the Lesser Core itself; in the end, that was the only explanation. It had been growing over time, getting stronger as I followed the Core’s tantalizing scent-taste. An invisible defense, or at least as close as something could get; like the heat given off by a Flame Core, or the fast-spots and slow-spots of the Great Core itself.

The Core’s aspect made manifest. One that I was beginning to make guesses at. Ones that I didn’t like.

My Darkweaver set itself down on the other side of the thread-trap, and I sent it in the direction of the waiting bad-things. It wasn’t long before the bad-things noticed, a sudden clamor filling the empty cavern. I commanded the Darkweaver to turn back, forcing it to rush in the direction of the waiting thread-trap. Between the presence of the threads between us, and my desire to get a better glimpse of what the enemy looked like before they reached me, I used [Illusion Spark] to let another bit of my remaining stores of light flare outwards in a narrow beam.

The beam fell on the incoming bad-things. They each walked on four tattered and broken limbs, a spiked tail trailing in their wake. Their legs ended in sharp-tipped claws, dried blood and bile caught between the gaps. Their eyes glowed with a mindless hunger, and their teeth were broken and jagged. Most notable, however, were the other things about them.

The rot. The decay. The exposed bits of bone that should have left them crippled.

The fact that I knew what death looked like, and these bad-things…should have been dead.

Ignoring that fact, they fell upon my weakened Darkweaver in a near-mindless fury, shredding its flesh with fang and claw and overwhelming numbers, leaving a corpse in their wake.

By the time they reached the thread-trap where I and the rest of my spore-puppets waited, my Darkweaver had pulled itself to its feet behind them. It limped after them, walking on broken limbs like a shambling corpse.

Its eyes glowed ever-so-slightly in the light, reflecting an unending hunger.

And I found a full understanding of the Lesser Core’s nature at last.