The Cabin Is Always Hungry

DEAD PACIFICA

Part 17

More notifications cropped up my feed, but I ignored most of them since they had something to do with the other fifty thousand people that lived in or around Point Hope, which The System still considered them as dead meat for the harvest. Like clockwork, it would insist like a begging puppy to let those poor bastards delve in my dungeon, flooding me with suggestions and prompts at every scenario’s conclusion. I had my fill of essences tonight, though that growing sense of hunger still simmered deep within and would never go away.

But I was looking forward to one particular notification out of the bunch.

[ Congratulations! You have discovered Ritual Casting. When a Core gathers a strong following under a Pantheon and creates a deified Aspect of the Dungeon Core, the flock are able to cast complex ritual spells. You and your flock have discovered a unique spell called The Ritual of Torment and Purification. This is only awarded thrice in a world’s lifetime. You gained this ritual because you are a Death Core and the only Death Core of your world. Lucky you. ]

I frowned at the name of the ritual. It was too much on the nose, but The System had its moments to be campy, reveling in my dark, villainous nature. Usually, it would just give me the cold shoulder or a passive-aggressive response in its notification (probably because The System managed other Cores that performed better than I), but tonight, it liked that I finally learned ritual casting after a year being a Death Core. I imagined it must be relieved I actually figured it out, and probably thought I was the biggest idiot I hadn’t figured out every little thing about being a Dungeon Core.

Sorry it took me a while, dad, I mockingly thought. But why am I apologizing to it? I just didn’t bother to do it. Simple as that.

Anyway, I clicked on the ritual spell since it glowed in a light blue hue. A new bubble popped up that gave me more information about it. I had utilized simple ritual spells in the past, which took at least an hour and even up to a day to cast but had very simple ingredients.

This one only required five minutes to cast, but the complexity of it involved the whole scenario itself. The ritual could only be performed before a scenario started and must be done to at least three delvers from the delving party, and three delvers must die before the scenario ended. We managed to get three deaths tonight. It didn’t matter if there were twenty delvers in a party just as long as the ritual was performed on three people and three people died by the end, the spell would work. Sure, my followers did the strange ceremony of painting the delvers’ faces with ashen mud and the creepy prayer-chanting, but the manners of how the ritual was cast wasn’t really important. They could be wailing, dancing, torturing, swimming, singing, or quietly standing around a circle just as long as the intent of the ritual existed, it would activate.

Which made me think about the logistics. Over the ninety-one scenarios I had done, delving parties averaged around three to five people. Smaller delving parties meant less eyes on my good ol’ self when the law started sniffing around my dungeon. These rituals would spur my archetypes to work extra hard on whittling down their Resolve. I could only imagine the horrors they would unleash to achieve that.

Given the rewards, it was very tempting to perform the ritual every scenario.

[ Scenario 91 was performed with a ritual, The Ritual of Torment and Purification, on the delvers! ]

[ Reward: 3,000 Faith Points ]

[ Reward: 3,000 crystals ]

[ Hidden Quest complete: Perform a Complex Ritual. You have gained 1 Ability Slot to select a new Ability for your Pantheon Aspect ]

[ For successfully performing the complex ritual, you remain at D-Rank - unshackled Death Core ]

And there it was again.

I still had no idea about the rankings The System gave out to Dungeon Cores because the moment the notification appeared, I couldn’t pull it up again to interact with it. I couldn’t find it on my character sheet either. Over the past year it had increased from G-Rank to D-Rank. I asked Elvis before, but he didn’t give me a straight answer, just something The System did for “diagnostic and auditing purposes” to keep all the Cores functioning across the universe, which I knew was bullshit. Why rank it then? He insisted this had been done for thousands of years since the “ancient days of the blooming,” and so he couldn’t remember what it was for and neither did his Administrator brethren.

I called bullshit on that, but I wasn’t planning on pissing off an Administrator. I still had no gauge to the extent of their powers. Sure, they could give me traits and rewards with a snap of their fingers, but how far was the ceiling of their manipulation of The System?

I could tell Elvis felt uncomfortable telling me more about it. Or worse, he was given orders by his supervisors to put me in the dark. The System wouldn’t even tell me straight up what the rank system was for, but it hadn’t affected my ability to perform as an unshackled Dungeon Core. At least not that I noticed. So far, things remained the same. But it had been months since the last time I asked…maybe after the delve I could broach the subject again once Elvis dropped by for his monthly visits. Perhaps I could ask about it for the upcoming cosmic-con Elvis begged me to join. I just needed to find the perfect way to slip it into our conversation.

There was that one thing I noticed: the Administrators feared me. There. I finally admitted it. It took several months of careful observation, but I was sure now. To be more specific, they feared Death Cores. Elvis and his merry band of bodyguards couldn’t hide those feelings away from me, no matter the type of magic they used to mask it. Death Cores were excellent bloodhounds when it came to smelling fear, pain, and suffering. Sooner or later, my Dread would grasp their hidden emotions, thankful that I honed my nose for such things when sniffing out potential delvers.

And then I realized that the Administrators and humans had one thing in common:

They were meat.

The same type of meat that I fed on.

Putting Elvis out of my mind, I focused more on the rewards I got from the ritual. I was correct that working with my flock would reward me with Faith Points, and these points were not something to laugh about. I mean, three thousand FPs? That’s the largest haul I’d ever gotten since the Pantheon was created! It would usually take my followers days or even weeks of praying (and a couple of ritual killings per month) just to get to a thousand FPs, which then could be converted for one essence.

I earned all of that in one night and more.

I wondered what other activities my flock could do that generated more FPs.

But I held off on spending all of them for now. Once I reached five thousand Faith Points (which was not far off), I would be able to purchase another Aspect Ability slot. Together with the hidden quest reward, I gained two Aspect Abilities within a month!

I selected my second Pantheon Ability.