The Underground Farm

Deep inside a forest of silence.

Under the foliage of trees with leaves glowing in an ethereal blue, where the varying shades of purple poisonous shrubberies competes to contrasts with the blackness of the forest's floor. There lies an object.

It is a curious little thing. No more larger than a common human's fist. It is bathed in the color of the blue of the leaves that surrounds it, and tinged with a touch of purple emerging across its round surface.

It lies there on the cold floor of the forest unmovingly, merely observing.

For as you may have guessed, this is a core.

A core to what you say? A core to a dungeon of course.

And as of this moment, it is perfectly content to lay there still. It still requires more mana to be something more than just a shiny rock that can absorbs mana after all.

And of course, with mana itself being the lifeblood of reality. An element that's not an element. A primordial force that's new and old at the same time. With it, bending the laws of physics, nature, and common sense can easily be achievable. Not to mention that with enough mana, even reality itself can be yours to toy around with... So long as you've got enough mana to sustain your control over it and not go insane from seeing what lies beneath reality of course. But that's besides the point, the point is that with mana, you can do anything you ever want and imagined.

And this little core here is absorbing the very same reality altering essence unto itself to be able to properly function as a dungeon. After all, a dungeon is a tool of creation. Though creating is overstating it abit. Sculpting and molding is a more apt term for the occasion. After all, the principle of nothing can be created from nothing still stands. With the exception for a few ridiculously powerful beings who governs the universe of course.

The forest of silence. True to its name, it is quite in this place. Very quiet. As in no sound can be heard at all in this forsaken domain.

It is quiet impossible for sound to be heard in an area such as these you see. Wether it be the smallest sounds of shifting bodies to the utterly pointless war howls of the sentient, the trees ate them all. It doesn't matter if it's the buzzing of insects or the steps of predators. All of them are delicacies to these ancient unmoving and ever present rulers of this forest. For the forest is as silent as always.

Though as with any place overflowing with mana, mutations are prone to occur. Though specifically mutations that adopts the noise phagia properties of the trees.

And in particular case, what we have here is a voiceless goblin. A bluish pale and gaunt humanoid being with a pair of long ears drooping down the side of its head.

It cuts for a strangely imposing figure camouflaged in a tree's foliage with only two purple pinpricks for its eyes visible. And as with any true goblin, It doesn't wear any scrap of clothing, as modesty is as alien to it as a centipedal i.n.t.e.r.c.o.u.r.s.e is to humans, the fact that it has no visible reproductive organs to hide may also factors into the growth of its sense of modesty.

Its sinously muscled body apprehensively approaches the core. Crawling delicately so as to not trigger the motion sensing ability of things that lurks inside this forest. It approaches the core with the intent to devour it as thought it to be a merakeet, a delicious tasting rodent that curls its body into a sphere that looks not unlike a pearl when it's asleep. In other words, the sleeping rodent delicacy looks exactly the same as the dungeon core.

It stalks down from the tree it was on in a steady gait, honed from years of stalking ambushing, and subsequently devouring its fellow forest inhabitants. It grips a curiously glowing knife of purple in one of its hand. Its most valuable and arguably its only possession it obtains from taking down a specimen from certain bipedal mammalian species and extracting the knife from the downed ans brutally gored sapient.

As it approaches, a whisper of some sort could be heard echoing from within the round object. The goblin stops its advance as it is startled by the whispers. Even if it's not the first sound it hears, it's still quite a surprise to from the absolute and oppressing silence to hearing a voice no matter how softly spoken it is.

Considering that it still has its trademark large goblin ear found in common goblins, which is completely redundant for this particular goblin, the few sound it could hear as a result have been more than quite a scare. Although it has its uses at times, like when the goblin are able to hear the whispers from idiotic dimwits that thought everything inside the forest is deaf and decided to halt the tree's auditory feast by deactivating the outflow of mana in a hundred meters radius. Ruffling the metaphorical feather of hungry beings at the vicinity, which is to say quite many, since most of the hungry inhabitants that are not stealthy or absurdly large and buffed beasts came in a pack of hundreds. Needless to say, chaos ensues. It is quite lucky indeed that the goblin notices the noise, arriving and waiting out the carnage that ensues afterwards. Swooping in for the loot and leaving the scene one glowing knife richer. A sequence of events that wouldn't have happened had it been deaf.

Yet the whispers of the core is different. The goblin thought. Not that it knows to call the glowing orb in front of it a core of course, merely a way to communicate how it recognize the nature of the situation.

At this point, the goblin has enough awareness to realize that what it is seeing is in fact, not a merakeet. Because if it is a merakeet, then it would already fled the moment the goblin's feet touches the ground. As prey specimens such as the merakeets, are able to sense vibration on the ground, as the trees are either unwilling or unable to consume vibrations that vibrates through solid objects.

As such, the goblin simply walks toward the core and picked it up.

The goblin, began to grow desperate. As the core started to greedily absorbs the goblin until the goblin's arm bellow its elbow has disappeared. In a fit of desperation, the goblin tries to cut off its own arm. It readies itself, gripping on to the knife and stab its arm.

*Clang*

And yet an oddly metallic sound rings from the goblin's stabbed arm, the sound not restricted by the trees. A stirring of something large could have caught the goblin's eye if it hadn't been so busy trying to not be devoured by the hungry core.

*Clang*

*Clang*

*Clang*

The goblin tries to stab its arm again and again. Yet the arm stays resilient, undamaged, as if it hadn't been stabbed at all. The goblin, in its fit of hysteria tries to stab at itself again. But suddenly, it could hear the whispers changes. No longer an indiscernible cacophony. It became a whisper of lullabies.

Soon, drowsiness overwhelms its sense. Closing its eyes, it yielded to the core's haunting chorus and fell into a slumber.

The goblin was absorbed by the core without any trace, curiously enough, the knife the goblin was tightly gripping is assimilated as well.

Until one special day, at what may be called a year later, two brightly shining objects clashed into one another above the forest. With their clash, something has finally awaken underneath a certain tree. Along with the slumbering behemoth coiled for so long that it's spines have turned into hills. A primordial consciousness awakes.

And once more the silence of the forest is once again... broken.