Chapter --(To be determined): No More Dreams (Patreon)

Hello again, all, I've got another chapter ready, one that I've been meaning to post much, much sooner, but also not quite this early in the story. Unfortunately, I sort of lost a couple of chapters I'd had planned, and I didn't want to have you all waiting even longer just to get them back. That said, I would like input, on whether or not you think I should adjust some earlier chapters to make this one mesh a bit more seamlessly, or get those old chapters back up before full release
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Dreaming was a sensation that Aby was both very aware of, while simultaneously clueless as to what it felt like. The distinction was small, but very meaningful; Aby had acquired countless memories, both fragmentary and full, from the many invaders, and experienced the strange and worryingly inconsistent feelings that its own creations had when they dreamt. But it was one thing to know that there was some strange state that so many fleshy creatures shared, where they were defenseless and practically assaulted by their own minds with information that could be terrifying or marvelous, oftentimes being utterly incongruous with reality and yet feeling for all of Vol like the truth. 

It was another thing entirely for Aby, as far from flesh as any living being could be, to experience it, or the closest analogue to dreaming that the crystalline entity could have. There was nothing at first, a featureless void completely free of any information for Aby to reach out and understand, almost like it was trying to look outside of its domain in every direction at once without any way of claiming anything. It was disconcerting at first, then downright uncomfortable when it realized that, despite still having all its memories and experience readily available, it was being fed new information, entirely involuntarily. 

Even worse, none of this new knowledge made sense. It wasn’t like the jumbled bundles of awareness waiting to be sorted through and organized that it got any time an invader died, but thousands of steady streams of emotions and contradictory thought being woven into one cohesive, illogical thread. Aby didn’t like it, knowing that none of it made sense, couldn’t be rectified with reality as it knew it, but was inescapable and still felt real. It took it long moments to realize that it hadn’t suddenly become a dragon, screaming through the sea uncontested, nor a titanic snake ruling an empire of millions, nor a hundred tons of flesh writhing at the bottom of a crushing abyss, nor anything else that its own mind was trying to tell it that it was.

But even the realization that it was all a dream did little to actually break that spell, the sudden memory of what had happened immediately before falling unconscious didn’t undo the dormancy, and trying to push its way out of its own mind revealed that it was simply too exhausted to do so. So, it did the next best thing: trying to shunt aside the nonsense that it was being continually subjected to so that it could review what had happened before its impromptu torpor, now that there didn’t seem to be anything too urgent.

Lapsing into unconsciousness had been exceedingly unpleasant, especially since it realized why it had. The core had always known it was inundated with mana, so much it had long ago stopped caring about efficiency or management or conservation of any sort. Instead, it created mana crystals regularly just so that the non-water elements didn’t become too overwhelming, and from there, outright painful. It had known this, objectively, but it wasn’t until it felt the strain of trying to force just a fraction of its entire structure’s mana into one place that it realized that maybe it wasn’t quite natural for it to be dealing in so much raw potential so soon.

Of course, just because Aby finally realized how abnormal its mana supply was, didn’t mean it would cut back. In fact, the gemstone had no way to truly do such a thing at all, even if it dissolved its mana coral the mana it had would still linger. This was especially so in the lower levels where there was no easy route to the surface outside. It had also grown used to, or perhaps dependent on, the massive amounts of mana present, and getting rid of it would serve no purpose other than handicapping the core as far as Aby could tell.

So long as it didn’t try to handle massive amounts of mana, under suspiciously stressful circumstances no less, then Aby felt it would be fine. There were always elemental crystals to fall back onto and feed any excess it might have, and they could then be disposed of… somehow. Aby decided it needed to experiment more with the solidified mana, no longer limiting its tests to how the crystals affected living creatures but trying to find out anything more about them. It knew they were outrageously mana dense but beyond that it hardly knew whether it could influence their growth, their element, nor how they reacted when various things were done to it outside of smashing them. It wasn’t even properly sure whether the mana they were made of could be controlled once it solidified; Aby had always treated them as junk, despite the invaders thinking it anything but.

Maybe there was some spite towards the fleshy interlopers, some immature desire to figure things out on its own even after learning everything they had. It could also have been the forced introspection Aby was placed under, alone with no projects to toil on and no way of knowing what was happening outside of its gem, as anxious as that thought made it. It could also be the influence of its eminently annoying dream, and that one persistent idea that Aby was some banal reptile wanting nothing more than to pile high a hoard of the biggest, most outrageous and rare elemental crystals it could find so it could then laze about atop the mass.

It shook away the nagging thought once it became aware of it, but was unable to fully shunt off the torrent of unconscious thought streaming into its mind. It needed to occupy itself, somehow, but dreams were insidious and they kept drawing the young gemstone back in any time it tried to struggle free from its own mind. The core could not deny the insights they offered it, the glimpses into minds that were very clearly not its own to figure out what it could do to optimize them, or at least bring them to what they themselves considered optimal was a unique experience, and it was doing its best to make note of all that it could.

As it fought against the current of minds, it realized how much better it could have managed its affairs. Always beginning experiments, going just long enough to see results, however small, then moving on to the next as soon as it did. It was… odd, that the thought hadn’t even occurred until now, needing to see just how many minor tests spun off and did their own thing, once Aby was satisfied with whatever they may have become. 

Still, the few revelations it was having, trapped in this introspective state, were not worth the trouble and frustration of not having the control it knew it should. It continued to struggle in the confines of its own core, trying to return to its place at the center of them all, rather than being buried underneath them. It saw some measure of progress, as the deluge of simple, completely mundane reactions that it knew to be of the simple things gave way to some of its more exotic creations, but that meant that their own connections made the dreams all the more vivid.

A flash of deep blue scale, from a figure coiled within a great midnight cavern, muddled and replaced by legions of serpents acting in concert to spread that darkness throughout its halls signaled that the wyrm was still wonderfully ambitious. The kelpie, and his twisted fantasies always confused the core, why he seemed to delight in allowing invaders to exist within the halls for even a moment longer all so that he could play with them seemed inefficient, but he was effective, so Aby allowed it.

The drake’s mind was a symphony of pain and greed, shining crystals glorious and perfect, but also wrapped in skin and muscle they ripped right out of his own body to grow ever more lustrous. There was the inexplicable and borderline uncomfortable cacophony coming through its bond with the doppelganger; somehow even its mind seemed slick and soft, and the core didn’t quite like that.

The wyvern, always excitable, was both simple and impossible for Aby to track, like this. He wanted for nothing more than the freedom to burn his existence into the water around him, but his focus was almost nonexistent. There were more, hundreds more, creatures that were entirely, beautifully unique that Aby was watching, more intimately than it ever had while it was awake but it still thoroughly despised the feeling, the idea that it didn’t even have the ability to take control of its own mind back. 

Finally, after what felt like days and seconds both, the core pushed all but the most clear images to the back of its mind, that of a concerned little nereid, hovering by the core for a truly guilt-inducing amount of time, and that of water, sheer, total water. Not long after, it felt the shackles of exhaustion finally give way, and with tentative, prodding reaches, then a huge surge of force, its consciousness broke free of its core, ballooning throughout the dungeon, taking hold of the links it had with all life in its halls and flooding them with joy and delight and health and information, all as it soaked in even the most minute changes to its halls.

“Sela,” it said, moments after awakening, “I’m back.” The Fae was, as it already knew, centimeters from the core, floating loosely above it while her three spirits danced around gleefully at the cores return. There was another, stranger thing joining them in their revelry, but it could pay more attention to it in a moment, as it could with the tide of information coming from the System. Sela came first.

“Hi Aby,” She grinned, “welcome back.”

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As you can see, Aby's awake, finally. Like I said, I wanted a couple more chapters about the life within the halls, how some creatures handled it, and one more on Sela's perspective, before this came out. I also wanted to have the confrontation with Petra start prior to this, maybe even link it with the awakening in some fashion, but I could also go back and make some edits to earlier chapters to make Aby's nap seem less important so that this chapter fits better. Please let me know what you think, and thanks for sticking with me!