Time passes completely different when you are an abandoned mine. After my first incidents with the two humans, I was left to my own devices for most part. I do not know for how long. I had lost complete sense of time or rather the human aspect of it.
For me,I did not gauge it by days or nights. I gauged it by events, and there were few of those that interested me.
In one instant, the closest I came to interacting with a human was when a man who looked like a shepherd came in to do the most abhorrent thing inside me.
Dude came to take a dump.
I mean, I had extended my awareness thanks to my six energy stones. I could see there were enough bushes he could have helped himself, including the places his livestock were grazing. But the idiot chose to unload himself inside me.
But aside from the perceived abuse, there was nothing big about it. Just like everything else, it would decay into soil. Everything about humans did eventually. The next major instance was during a floody night. The flood water rushed into the cave, mixed with all kind of rubbish and almost filled the entire cave.
I really didn't care about it. In fact, it served me greatly because the dirt in my pond was intensified and even more layers of rocks were deposited above me, which added to my weak protection.
Other than this, the main interaction I had was with the nightly tenants of my crevices. Once in a while there were wolves that came in to pass the night inside, but mostly there were rats and tiny insects that really did not add or take anything from me.
In fact, I considered their presence protection, bearing in mind the weak state I was in.
In this time, with nothing else to do, I found myself trying to decipher the world I had been reborn. From my early interaction with the humans, I had observed their manner of talking, their way of dressing. Everything seems to insinuate that I was in a sort of mix between medieval and modern world.
Well, it may not exactly be quite medieval, but at least its technology had not reached the level of the world I was coming from. But their dressing in silk robes and the woman's hair style seemed to indicate some advancement in Civilization. Most Dungeon stories I had read, including RPG games, often took place in a setting where magic, cultivation and mana took the central stage instead of technological advancement.... I hoped this would be the same. It would buy me some time to get strong.
After a while, in my own perspective of time, I drained one of the energy stones.
Fuck! So I could just drain all of my power just by observing and doing nothing.
This made me consider falling back into some sort of sleep, maybe a cave equivalent of hibernation, until something interesting came by.
The problem is that I had not seen an option for that. Since being awakened and triggering the observation mode, I had no longer been prompted with means of conserving energy.
Maybe these four stones from the system that ran my perspective were not enough to revive me if I chose to enter hibernation. You sort of needed more energy, then again, that was my guess.
It didn't take long after that incident when I received, truly, my first group of adventurers.
Just like the first two, they came mumbling and screaming for all to hear. Well, maybe in their sense they were doing what humans call chatting. But to me, whom even the movement of tiny ants sounded loud and clear, their mumbling was loud enough.
"This has to be the spot". One of them said, reaching into his rucksack and pulling out a parchment. They both bent over it as if studying something. Then eventually they looked up excited....at least one of them was.
"It's the spot. The guild says it's supposed to be an abandoned mine. But we are supposed to gauge whether it displays some unique behaviors or anything that could mark it for a dungeon." the shorter of the two said
"This is bullshit. I say we mark it as just another cave and move on. Clearly, this is nothing but an abandoned mine" The taller guy objected.
I noticed he was more warrior looking between the two. I also noticed he seemed impatient. Judging by the way the two of them were dressed, I could tell they were adventurers or wannabe adventurers, but certainly not quite good at it.
Their weapons looked, well, poor and cheap, including their attires. And even by the way they carried themselves, body language and all , I could tell they were not coordinated.
For example, clearly, no trained adventurer would propose to just mark a place as weak having not explored it. Not that I was complaining. After all, he had
that right.
I was indeed weak, just like them.
if I was to say, I would gauge both of them to be untrained or at best weak, f ranked scouts.
" We can't, they will know. You know it. And then our chances of being recruited into quest teams will die forever. I don't know about you, but I don't want to be a scout my entire life."
"All this is bullshit and you know it. They just want some random place to send their weak quest teams. You've heard they are recruiting people into their guilds. Where do you think they will send all of those? They don't have enough dungeons in this town. So they are looking for anything that might resemble one. If you ask me, I would say we move to a different town and try our chances there."
The Shorter youth folded the map, but his eyes told me he seemed to agree with his friend.
" Still, we are here aren't we?, I say we explore it. And in any case, chances don't get any better there. Every guild in every town has their own politics and it's not easy to break through."
"let's make it fucking quick".the taller guy said, though to me it sounded like he was merely agreeing just to get done with him.
I liked their conversation. Slowly it was shedding light for me about the guild politics in this world. So I was located in a place where the local guild was recruiting more adventurers, but did not have enough dungeon territory to send them.
Something inside me bubbled with joy. I could definitely use that. I needed to get more information from these two.
True enough, when they approached the cave entrance, immediately my notification danced to work.
Alert intruders detected.
Rank. F-ranked scouts.
Affiliation. Gallant Guild.
Guild rank. Rock.
I almost laughed at that. Both the scouts and the guild itself were weak as fuck. The ranking system was in line with most of what I had read or seen in games.
F-rank was the weakest in adventurers and scouts. But a rock guild was the bottom of the bottom in guild politics. It would be followed by iron and then copper, and then bronze then silver. In some cases, gold and diamonds interchanged as being the highest level.
these ones were From a rock guild? Surely. If I scared them enough to just give me four energy points, I could spawn a monster that would make cheap work out of them.
I Felt a thrill pass through my core. Voila. I was in business.