Chương 3: Roots and Snares

ARE FAIRIES BAD LUCK?! PROTECT YOURSELF AND YOUR FAMILY! The Grave Report: An Exclusive Investigation ARE YOU SAFE? That is the question every human parent in the city should be asking themselves TONIGHT, as shocking new evidence obtained exclusively by The Grave Report reveals that "harmless" fairy neighbors may be responsible for up to 90%, yes, NINETY PERCENT, of this season's mysterious household misfortunes, according to a source who insisted on anonymity for fear of glamoured retaliation!

That pie that fell off the windowsill? Fairies. The cabinet that moved to make you stub your toe? Fairies! Your cat that was running around in the middle of the night and woke you up? Surely fairies are provoking it!

"People don't want to admit it, but where do you think that run of bad luck started? Right after the Accord brought them into our cities," warned one distraught mother of three, who claims her prize-winning begonias wilted OVERNIGHT because of the fae. City officials remain SUSPICIOUSLY silent on the fairy question, and one has to ask WHY? The official government narrative is that fairies are 'exactly the same as humans, elves, or even orcs and are full, respected citizens of the nation.'

But could that possibly be true? With a documented increase in rumors this year alone, can you really trust the smiling, glitter-dusted face next door or the 'helpful' sprite who guides your children to school, while they could be whispering secrets into their little ears? The Grave Report says NO! Carry cold iron, ring your doorbells with silver, and above all, KEEP WATCHING, because the fairies certainly are! Want more vital safety tips?

Pick up next week's Grave Report: "ELVEN EARS: What They're REALLY Hearing Through Your Walls." The guild clerk of the remote village, Dunkelhollow, read the article, shaking his head. ENVIRONMENT Dunkelhollow Dunkelhollow is a remote frontier community found situated in the distant southeast of the nation in the heart of the [Kerzenwachs Forest]. It has no notable infrastructure of any kind to make it worth placing on any regional maps. There is a small, local, adventures' guild outpost.

Roughly one-thousand people live in the township and immediate region around it.

"Good thing we don't have any of them out here," he said to himself, flipping the page. Southeast, outside of the goblin warren. The spear was a poor thing, little more than a stick with a short sword tied to it, but it fit his hand well enough. Matthew moved through the undergrowth outside with a silence that surprised him, his new body navigating the forest floor with an instinct his mind couldn't have supplied. His feet found the quiet paths between dry leaves and snapping twigs without conscious effort.

ENVIRONMENT Kerzenwachs Forest A remote, deep forest found in the distant southeast of the nation. It is a dense, pine-growth woodland filled with old growth. There is an ominous, magical energy in the air that makes travelers uneasy. Given its remote location and low traffic, it is rich in wildlife and unique flora, such as the waxy-sap-producing thin-needle trees found only here. The forest was alive with sound. Birds called from the canopy.

Something small rustled in the brush to his left, and something larger moved through the deeper growth ahead, judging by how the ferns swayed. He tracked the sound, circling downwind, and had just begun closing the distance when he hit the barrier. It wasn't a wall. There was nothing to see, nothing to touch. His body simply refused to move forward at some point. He leaned into it and his muscles locked, his joints seizing at the threshold as though an invisible hand pressed flat against his sternum.

He could step back. He couldn't step forward. System text bloomed across his vision. [SYSTEM NOTICE] As a dungeon core, you and your people cannot leave your claimed territory. Current Territory Radius: 200m from the [Dryad Tree] Two hundred meters, in every direction, from a tree buried in a cave. His territory was just slightly larger than the warehouse he'd used to manage. That was the whole of his world.

He could feel the boundary now that he was aware of it, a faint tension in his chest that tightened as he approached the edge and loosened as he retreated. His body was the core's vessel, and the core was anchored to the warren. He couldn't leave. The realization settled over him. He was a prisoner in his own home. Every resource, every scrap of food, every threat and opportunity had to come to him or exist within this radius.

His hunting grounds were whatever fit inside a circle he could walk across in a few minutes. Then: a presence. Something was watching him, holding itself perfectly motionless. He sniffed the air, smelling sulfur, confusingly. Something cracked in the underbrush to his right. He froze, the spear coming up, and his eyes found the source. He returned to the warren carrying two deer. One was dead, slung across his shoulders, its weight nothing for this body.

The other was alive and struggling, its legs bound with fiber cord, its flank bleeding from a spear wound that'd slowed it enough to catch. The goblins saw him coming and the reaction was immediate. A sound went through them, not a word but a collective exhalation, and then several of them began stamping their feet against the stone floor.

The stamping found a rhythm, and before he'd fully entered the chamber, the goblins were stomping in unison, a crude, percussive celebration that shook dust from the ceiling in a way that actually made him quite nervous. This place was not up to code.

"Tandaradei!" they chanted on his approach. He dropped the dead deer in the center of the chamber, and the stamping intensified. Gary let out a high, yipping sound that might've been a cheer. Sarah was already moving toward the carcass with the knife. They were going to butcher and cook it all by themselves already. The other, living, deer was for the dungeon. Matthew carried it to the fungal patch near the far wall, where the pale roots still glistened with the residue of their last meal.

He set the animal down on the stone, and it thrashed against its bindings, eyes rolling white, hooves scraping against the rock. The roots responded before he stepped back. They crept outward in slow, deliberate tendrils, tasting the air, finding the deer's warmth. The first one touched the animal's flank, and the deer screamed, a raw, guttural sound, and then more roots were coiling, layering, and pulling the animal down against the stone. It felt a little cruel. But this was about survival.

His people needed to eat, and so did their home.

"Sorry, bud," he said, as the animal was cocooned. DUNGEON STATUS Mana: 48. 42 / 1, 000 INCOME / EXPENSES (PER HOUR) Passive: +1 Parasitic Drain: +3 Upkeep: -0. 5 Goblins: -2. 4 Net Result: +1. 1 Mana per Hour The dungeon core in his chest pulsed, and he felt the mana begin to tick upward. A grim transaction. The tribe would eat the dead deer. The dungeon would eat the live one. Both needed to be fed, and there was no sentiment to spare for either more than what he had already given.

The human from yesterday was already gone. The fungus ate him entirely within twenty-four hours. There wasn't even a husk left. In his old life, 'feeding the pipeline' meant sending spreadsheets. Here it was something quite literal. The problem was scalability. Two hundred meters of forest contained enough game to keep twenty-four goblins, including him, alive, if barely. But being alive wasn't the goal. That was the baseline. The species survival rating was horrific, and Matthew understood what that meant.

It meant that the current approach, the current scale of operations, led to extinction in the majority of scenarios. Scavenged kills could sustain a population. They couldn't sustain growth. They couldn't fund expansion. He needed a repeatable food source. He needed agriculture. The little stream right in the middle of his home gave him the first answer, but the goblins nearly took his arm off over it.

He'd been scouting the territory, following the water that ran through a shallow cut in the hillside before disappearing into the warren. The water was clear and cold, and in the dappled light he could see shadows moving beneath the surface. Fish. Several of them, darting between rocks in the current. Matthew waded in, the cold water hitting his knees, and waited. His new reflexes were faster than his old ones by a factor he hadn't yet fully measured.

When a shadow passed close enough, his hand shot into the water and came out gripping a fish the length of his forearm, thrashing and silver. He held it up, pleased with himself, and turned to show the goblins he'd brought along. But they weren't celebrating. They were pressed against the far bank, rigid, their eyes wide with something that looked less like fear and more like horror.

"What?" Matthew asked. Nicole moved. She lunged from behind and bit down on his forearm, her sharp teeth punching through the skin, and she just clung there. Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Matthew stared at her, like looking at a tiny animal that had decided to bite an adult man. He was more impressed by her bravery than hurt by her attack. The fish was still thrashing in his other hand. His arm was bleeding freely around her embedded teeth.

She was making no move to attack him further. She was just holding on, her jaw locked, like a dog that had finally caught its own tail and didn't know what to do now that it had. He could've pulled her off. He could've crushed her with one hand. Instead, he stood in the stream and let her hang from his arm and tried to understand what was happening. After a long moment, she released him. She dropped to the ground, snatched the fish from his grip, and shoved it back into the water.

Then she stood, pointed at the stream, and pointed at the cave. She did this a few times, jabbing her finger, her face twisted with an intensity that left no room for misunderstanding. The stream fed the tree, so the stream was sacred. Taking from it was taboo. Matthew looked at the fish swimming away in the current, then at the blood running down his forearm from the neat row of puncture wounds she'd left, then at Nicole.

"Biting your boss is against company policy." She spat his blood onto the ground, looked at him with an expression that communicated absolute indifference to his policies, and stalked back toward the warren. He made a mental note. The stream was off limits. Although he did consider drafting a workplace violence policy. He also noted that the goblins had a religion and that it was older and more deeply held than anything he could enforce. Even if he was their king, they seemed to have an innate culture of their own.

He would have to work around it, not through it. There were other ways to feed people. He hated fish anyway. The following days collapsed into a rhythm of labor. Teams went out and came back. Wood was gathered. Plant fiber was stripped and bundled. Crude cots were assembled from bent branches and woven reeds, elevated off the cold stone floor on stone legs, a design Matthew sketched in ash on the wall and let Sarah's team figure out. The first few collapsed.

But by the end of the second day of trial and error, every goblin had a sleeping bunk of some kind and not on the floor. A tight fit, but goblins had few issues regarding personal space. They were quite touchy. They rested better, so they worked better. He noted a slight increase in efficiency after that. DUNGEON UPGRADED [Empty Small Chamber] → [Sleeping Chamber] A central sleeping barracks, filled with primitive wooden cots pressed into stone-carved nooks. There are thirty beds currently available in total.

The campfire was rebuilt into an actual, central hearth, larger and better contained, ringed with flat stones that kept the fire from spreading. A ventilation channel was carved from the ceiling using his Territorial Manipulation ability. It was just a thin shaft that carried smoke up through the rock and out of sight. Remembering a few survival videos he binged once, he had the chimney exit through a few smaller channels apart from each other rather than one large hole.

This would diffuse the smoke and make it less obvious that something was living here. That single improvement cost him five mana, but the difference in air quality was immediate, resulting in a positive cost-benefit analysis. DUNGEON UPGRADED Constructed: [Stone Hearth] Materials were sorted and stored with an efficiency that would've made any logistician proud. Wood by size and type. Fiber coiled. Stone stacked. Bones cleaned and separated by shape. Goblins weren't so useless after all.

They just needed some guidance. The more he fed them, the stronger they got. It happened fast, too. FOLLOWER LEVEL UP! Through proper nutrition, all present goblins have gained +01 levels of experience! GOBLINS PER LEVEL By the time a week had passed, the goblins under his care had all risen to level five, apart from the newborn, which was growing rapidly in physical size. Their skeletal, haggard frames filled in with remarkable speed. Their skin and eyes brightened.

They responded quicker and acted quicker, and he had the feeling they were more engaged. They seemed to have an easier time understanding him now, as if they were growing more intelligent. The palisade went up at the cave mouth. Logs were cut from the surrounding forest with crude, low-quality axes made out of sharpened rock and bone.

The logs were sharpened at the top and driven into the soil in a tight row, then backed with rubble and covered in brush and dirt until the entrance looked like nothing more than a mossy embankment on a rocky hillside. The stream was still an obvious clue as to the entrance being there. But it was a large improvement in defensibility nonetheless. From the outside, it looked like the hill the warren was inside of had collapsed in on itself.

DUNGEON UPGRADED Constructed: [Palisade] The first defensive fortification of the goblin warren. It is a concealing, tightly bound wall of logs, creating a barrier to the outside world that keeps intruders out and heat inside. He reworked his previous hearth concept. Why waste good smoke? Everything was a resource. Matthew carved a small side chamber from the tunnel wall, spent eight mana on it, and rigged together a smokehouse. Green wood, a slow burn, a rack of stripped branches.

The surplus meat from the deer hunt went up on the rack, and the thin smoke worked into it. From there, it would then trickle out into the diffusing ventilation shaft. DUNGEON UPGRADED Constructed: [Smokehouse] A small, sealed, interior room that is designed to fill with hot smoke. The smoke dries and preserves anything stored inside of it. When he pulled the first strip of venison down and tore it with his teeth, the texture was right. Dry, dense, and preserved.

It would last for weeks, unlike raw or fire-cooked meat. He put Gary in charge of smoking things. It didn't take long before he figured it out and could handle the operation in cooperation with the butcher, Sarah. He had a resource allocation team who would scavenge for berries and roots, but an actual hunting party was the next step. Matthew selected his four most capable goblins for physical work: Rick, Steve, Kevin, and a wiry female he'd named Janet.

He brought them to the forest floor outside the palisade and spent an afternoon teaching them to build snares. Fiber cord, a bent branch, a trigger stick. Simple engineering, easily recalled from that phase back in his old life when he got really intensely into survival topics and dreamt about quitting his job to walk across the continent, living off of the land. Rick understood it fastest. By the second day, the snares were producing results. The forest was abundant and rich. Rabbits, mostly. A few birds.

And then, inexplicably, a chicken. The goblins plucked it, cooked it, and ate it, and morale was the highest it'd been since the massacre. Matthew looked at the chicken bones after the meal and considered the question of origin, then decided that some mysteries weren't worth solving. A window appeared. GOBLINS UPGRADED The [Hunter] evolution path has been unlocked. You may now evolve any goblins with level 05 or higher in this skill set. Unlock Condition: Provide 5 unique types of meat for the warren!

Hunters are specialized goblin gatherers who are proficient in outdoor survival, stalking, and ambush combat. Promotion Cost: 20 Mana Upkeep/hour: 0. 2 Note: In exchange for their better proficiency, specialists cost more upkeep. This was good. Wanting to try it out, he put his hand on Rick's head, accidentally smearing it with ash. A glow left Matthew and sank onto the goblin. Rick's body responded, shifting and changing. The others watched, murmuring and making noises amongst themselves as Rick transformed.

GOBLIN SPECIALIZED Rick has been promoted to [Hunter]! -20 Mana Mana: 210. 26/1, 000 When the process was over moments later, Rick was different than the rest, as if he'd become a separate breed of goblin entirely. In stature, he was neither quite a goblin nor a king like Matthew. He was somewhere in between. Rick grew upward slightly, becoming leaner and denser, a more agile and capable predator. His ears elongated, and his eyes widened but became thinner.

In the coming days, it proved worth the capital investment. The Hunter goblin was twice as efficient as his counterparts when it came to gathering meat. He was fast and could chase down a small deer with a spear. By the time the week was over, Matthew found it worthwhile to upgrade the entire hunting team. They provided food. Food fueled everything. The smokehouse was full and so were his people, causing them to level up more. He'd scratched a rough map on the cave wall in ash and charcoal.

The stream, the treeline, the hillside, and the boundaries of his territory were drawn as a circle that encompassed less than he wanted. Scouting trips filled in detail. Dense forest to the north and west. A rocky slope to the south. A faint clearing to the east, visible through the trees, too far to reach. The smell of strangers was that way, eastward, so he told everyone to stay clear for now until he knew more. A week later. The warren had changed. The chamber floor was clean.

The fire burned steadily in its hearth. Cots lined the walls in neat rows inside of the sleeping area. The smokehouse was stocked. Weapons were organized by the entrance. The goblins moved with purpose now, going to their tasks without being told, returning with results instead of empty hands. They were fully self-sufficient. It was remarkable. In his old life, he had onboarded humans who didn't learn as quickly as these guys did.

Matthew stood in the main chamber and looked at what they'd built in such a short time, and he allowed himself something he hadn't felt since waking up in this body. Pride. It was small and cautious, but it was certainly very real. The skills that'd made him effective in a warehouse in one world were making him effective in a cave in another. The problems were different. The principles were the same. But then one of the foraging team came back beyond troubled.

They were supposed to be gathering anything they could from the forest. It was routine by now. Go out, gather, and come back. What came back was Helen alone, sprinting through the palisade gap, shrieking, clutching an armful of long-stalked tubers against her chest so hard that half of them scattered behind her as she ran. Tubers dropped everywhere, rolling across the floor. Matthew caught her by the shoulders.

"Helen? What happened? Where is everyone?" Helen was shaking so hard she couldn't stand still. She pointed back toward the east, her hand trembling, and the sound that came out of her mouth was a thin, keening wail. Matthew released her and moved toward the entrance. His dungeon sense was reaching outward before he got there, scanning the territory, feeling for the familiar presences of his goblins within the radius. He sensed most of them, but not all of them. Grabbing his spear, he went out.

Just when he was confident everything was going great. He had warned them to stay away from the east. He found the site just at the border of his territory. The ground had been disturbed, tubers uprooted from a neat, deliberate row that ran along the edge of a cleared patch of soil. The rows were too straight, too evenly spaced to be wild. Someone had planted these. These were not wild plants. This was a farm. And someone had defended it. John was on the ground at the edge of the row.

He was face down in the dirt, his bark nametag still tied around his neck, and the back of his head was gone. A crossbow bolt had entered through the base of his skull and exited through his forehead, and the force had nearly separated it from his body. He'd been killed instantly, running away from whoever fired it. Armfuls of tubers lay scattered around, soaked in his blood. A second bolt was embedded in a tree trunk six feet past the body, buried deep in the wood.

The field was just at the outer edge of his territory, which meant it had either been here before the warren became his or someone had been bold enough to plant crops within two hundred meters of a goblin den. He thought, distantly, of a chicken that'd wandered into a snare in the middle of nowhere. It made a grim kind of sense now. Quietly, Matthew picked up John's body. The bark tag with his name on it was smeared with dirt, and the ash lettering was already fading.

John had been one of the first three Matthew had noticed leading without being told, back on the first day, one of maybe three goblins in the whole warren who didn't need to be micromanaged. That kind of talent didn't spawn every day. He yanked the bolt out of the tree, taking it with him too, to study. Matthew carried the corpse back to the warren, gathering the other two from their hiding spots on the way. At the warren, the goblins saw the body and went silent as h e laid John down into the stream.

The water took him. The current pulled the body gently toward the dark mouth of the tunnel, toward the tree buried in the cave, and the other goblins stood at the bank and watched him go without a sound. Matthew stood up and stared at the crossbow bolt as he thought about the farm. Something like that, a farm, was exactly what he needed. But there was no way he could risk staging an all-out assault on a surface-level human settlement. His people weren't ready for that level of warfare yet.

Sooner or later, they would meet the owner. But for now, he needed his people to stay away from it. Maybe they could plant their own crops in the forest. Or grow some kind of fungus in the caves alongside the indigenous species. Something scratched nearby. He looked down. A rat, thin and quick, had wriggled through a gap in the palisade brush and found the scattered tubers Helen had dropped in her panic.

Matthew watched it, and the operations problem in his head began, very quietly, to rearrange itself into something that looked almost like a solution. On his way to continue his work, he took John's name tag and hung it on one of the dryad tree's branches. It would be the first of many.