No Need For A Core?

Mordecai made himself ignore the mention of Moriko's patron deity, it led to thoughts about his own patron and that was not a good chain of thoughts at the moment.

Besides, he had a hell of a job in front of him to focus on. Sure, he’d made it sound relatively easy, and nothing he’d said was incorrect, but this also wasn’t the sort of thing usually done in a few days. However, time was short, for both of them. The illusory diagram grew and spread on the floor, lines and symbols shifting as he explored his options and began selecting possible base spells and rituals.

The first option he managed to eliminate was any sort of obfuscation of his own core. Transforming it; placing it in a pocket dimension; hell he’d even considered ways of hiding it inside of her body to be smuggled out; but he calculated and compared the potential results against the magical barriers around him, seeing which wards would block each of these methods.

So long as the wards existed, the core couldn’t leave, and if the core couldn’t leave, he would eventually die down here. The same went with his avatar. So in the end, he was going to have to give up both core and avatar to get his mind and soul out of here, which meant Moriko would have to be able to carry his essence out. But then what? He put that in the back of his mind for now, first he needed to work on the how.

There were thousands of ways to forge various bonds between different entities. Priests forged a certain type of connection with divine beings; wizards formed bonds with familiars; certain summoning specialists bound themselves to eidolons; patrons and witches formed contracts that included a familiar; and there were rituals to bind two mortals to each other, some as an oath of service, others a more personal bond such as a ceremony of matrimony with mystical empowerment, amongst others.

And of course, there were other magics that forced some sort of bond, such as various forms of possession or dominance. The control aspects were useless, but possession at least had a seed of getting his spirit into her body. Just, not in a way he had any intention of doing.

While Mordecai had been working on this problem, Moriko had been exploring the small room, eventually pausing to examine the large purple crystal that was his core sitting nestled on its pedestal before sitting down to begin meditating. He’d been aware of her the whole time of course, she was after all inside of his territory, which was effectively his body. But he hadn’t focused on her until shortly after she’d started meditating.

The flow of his energy changed slightly, a very small disturbance, but with so little activity in general it caught his attention, and he studied her for a moment before speaking. “Moriko,” he said, pausing as the half-elf twitched and then opened her eyes to look at him. “I have a, um, request. I’m still working on details, but one way or another this is going to require a lot of trust on your part. So, I think I should show a little trust in you.” He nodded at the crystal core that was the heart of his true self. “Please, hold my core in your lap as you meditate.”

This startled her, as it would anyone with even a child's knowledge of dungeons. “Um, are you sure about that? That seems kind of, er, intimate.” Her hesitation and slight blush made him smile. He’d seen reactions like that before, and she wasn’t exactly wrong. But he had few choices at this point.

“Yes, I am sure. And the intimacy is part of the point. My options for myself are rather drastic, and I want to make sure that I give us both every chance possible. To that end, I’m also planning on using my core to transmute a portion of my energy into chi while you meditate, channeling it into you. It’ll still be flavored by my essence, but it will strengthen you. Some of it will be temporary, some will be permanent. I won’t be shaping it so it won’t be creating any specific bonds, but it should make things go easier later.”

The look that she gave him was more than a little dubious, but after a moment Moriko nodded and rose to fetch his core. It was, well, both pleasant and slightly nerve-wracking. She was literally holding his true self, the equivalent of his heart, brain, and soul all wrapped up into one relatively vulnerable package. And Mordecai could feel it, the soft touch of her skin upon the surface of his crystal, and the rustling brush of silk when she settled down with him in her lap.

Despite the innate toughness of the core that had been reinforced over the course of his life, it left him feeling very vulnerable. For these purposes, that was a good thing, but there were very few people whom he’d ever let touch him this way. One in particular liked to make a game of it, but those were thoughts best left alone for now.

Once Moriko started meditating, Mordecai went back to his work and did his best to not think about the fact that he was basically feeding her his life energy. To him, things like mana, ki, and life force were interchangeable aspects of the same basic energy.

And if he couldn’t make this work, his last resort would be to just simply have her devour his energy completely, until his soul separated from his core. After all, if he couldn’t leave, he was dead anyway; and it would be the only way to make sure she, at least, could escape. He couldn't guarantee her escape with anything less than that. It wouldn't hurt his soul, he'd simply move on to his afterlife. Which, well, his patron deity might still be upset, so maybe it was best to not think about that too much.

Besides, that was very much a last resort. In the meantime, he still had a lot of possibilities to work out. And it was more than just binding their souls properly, he was going to have to restructure his own mind and potential avatar as well. A dungeon could over its lifetime form several avatars, both of the standard internal type and the slightly rarer invested avatar that could actually leave the dungeon, though only one could exist at a time.

It also took a year from retiring one invested avatar to form a new one, though they could operate an internal avatar during that time. But once retired, the old avatar’s skills and knowledge fully merged with the core again, and each invested avatar could learn a new set of martial or magical skills, living a whole new life different from the avatar before it. They also tended to have different variations of the core's base personality, with one being more aggressive while another was designed to be more introverted or shy, and so on.

The avatar he was wearing right now was the baseline template, and if it was an invested avatar outside of his territory, the avatar would have as close to the core's personality as possible, given one was made of flesh and the other of crystal. Which, as it turned out, was a very close match, if one knew how.

In his time, Mordecai had made his avatars into every sapient species that he knew of and that was in his power to duplicate. Naturally, this started with humans, elves, orcs, kitsune, and other such organic bipeds. As time went on he was able to adjust the base versions to also include supernatural resonances such a nephilim and similar otherworldly-touched bloodlines. He'd even made a few dhampirs and other 'cursed' bloodlines. Mordecai had never found dealing with the effects of such heritages as hard as most who had them naturally, but he'd also never had to deal with having them when only a child or having an actual ancestor who could possibly influence his avatar.

Beyond the mystically touched races of flesh and blood, Mordecai had even created avatars of various plant, fungus, and mineral based species. A couple of those latter ones had been living constructs, entities of forged metal granted life. Learning how to make one of those as an avatar instead of as an inhabitant had been tricky.

Still, for all of that, it was always the various sorts of dragon-touched heritages that had been his favorite. There were so many variations to play with and such avatars tended to be sturdier than the base species.

The most difficult avatars he'd ever created were a step beyond that; Mordecai had managed to create avatars that had been fully dragons, though admittedly their baseline power had been below that of most hatchling dragons. He'd traded off that baseline power and steady growth over age for the ability to grow in power the way shorter lived species usually did.

In addition to creating avatars of every species he could, Mordecai had also explored almost every possible path of power and practiced a wide variety of skills. Swordsman, knight, mage, priest, thief, bard, druid, and so much more. He'd even trained in the arts of assassination, though he had not studied under a freelance assassin. Kingdoms needed professionals sometimes, and he'd done his best to be selective. Still, he'd had to disappear from that position when it came to a disagreement about a target.

All of these weren’t going to be of any direct help here, and Mordecai doubted that he’d ever be able to reform these exact avatars again. If he managed to establish a new dungeon somehow, he wouldn't be able to even call upon them in an emergency the way he had before; at least, not until he was much more powerful. At which point they wouldn't be as useful, presuming he'd had the chance to explore other avatars.

So he began sacrificing his old avatars in order to merge all of their potential into one, reforging his existing internal avatar as he did so and copying that to be his eventual invested avatar as well.

It was messy and inefficient, gaining maybe a ten percent boost, at best, for the price of an entire avatar and about a year’s worth of energy to stay alive down here at minimal energy expenditure. Most avatars gave him less. But it gave him the capacity he was going to need very shortly and created a template that he was going to save to eventually be his first avatar.

He hoped.

Not that he knew how he’d get a new core. Well, he had one idea, but it was rather distasteful and he wasn’t even sure how he’d pull it off.

In all reality, he was most likely setting himself up for a life akin to a familiar or an eidolon, with his life span tied to Moriko's. How limited that existence would be dependent upon how apt Moriko turned out to be in channeling mana appropriately, though her experience in manipulating chi made him more hopeful. Plus her path in life could lead to immortality, which he might be able to help with.

Mordecai's work on his avatar and the ritual proceeded apace, though the rework of his avatar was completed first. It was, after all, an extension of his very self. The illusory design of symbols and their connecting lines had grown to several square meters on the ground and a good meter of connections was drawn upward into the air as well.

The most problematic part was going to be his memories. While the soul always retained a true copy of all memories, living flesh and spirit were more limited. He could encode all of them into a crystal matrix, but accessing more than a fraction of them would be difficult. Mordecai would be attached to Moriko's body and spirit, there was only so much extra capacity to process his memories. So Mordecai needed to make sure he could overwrite recalled memories with new ones.

His original memories would still be held in their compressed form, but it would take time and concentration to find any given memory and then copy it to his current memory in a usable form.

Mordecai was so focused on his work that he didn't notice at first when Moriko got restless, but he did notice when she lifted his core out of her lap and returned it to its resting place. "Moriko?" He asked, wondering what was on her mind.