Homesteading in a fantasy world

As I continued to explore, I started to notice more pathways that didn't seem completely natural. It almost looked as if someone had eaten or tunneled their way through the original tunnels that were here, widening and connecting them even further.

It took me a while to see that some sort of mole-like creature was responsible. I only saw a small one, the size of a normal cat, and it seemed to have some sort of eyes as it was able to watch me from its hiding hole.

It was quite a small one, but there are probably bigger ones deeper down that should be at least the size of a minivan. The tunnel network led away from the mountain and towards my own land, and I continued to follow, finding ever stranger bugs. Mostly, they stayed away, but I did have to fight a few who were rank one.

My exploration came to a pause when I saw a snail whose shell was taller than me. It was moving at about a human walking speed, which wasn't that impressive as it was chasing a larger centipede. It seemed that it had been chasing it for quite a while because the centipede was so tired it was waiting nearly to the last second before once again speeding off.

I moved closer to watch the slow hunt, but when I got close enough, the snail noticed me and changed its direction towards me. Was it going to try to chase me down? I tried to gauge how strong it was, but it was somehow able to camouflage itself.

Slowly, I was working through that, but to my surprise, it was able to put on a burst of speed and get to about 5 meters from me. Just before I took a step backwards, its mouth opened up, and it expanded so much that it could swallow me with one bite.

Even before I could move, something like a spear-like tongue shot out, and I had barely enough time to strengthen my armor enough so it wouldn't pierce me, but even then, it did quite a lot of damage to my armor.

It tried to pull me in, but it only got me one step closer as I started to increase my weight significantly. That, however, didn't seem to matter as it didn't care if I came to it or it came to me, and I soon found myself almost enveloped by the mouth. Whatever camouflage it was using was now useless as I was so close to being swallowed by it.

It was definitely rank 2, and the amount of energy and strength in its mouth made me unsure if I would be able to escape it. There was also a foul smell I had come to associate with toxins. Its inner mouth seemed to have been filled with needle-like teeth that were all about to attempt to deliver their deadly payloads.

I couldn’t move backwards as its stinger still had a firm hold on my chest plate. I pulled out my 2-handed sword from my tattoo storage and quickly channeled energy into it, while also strengthening my armor as much as possible, even using my core energy.

I made my energy armor especially thick in hopes that it would prevent the needle-like teeth from piercing into me. It all happened simultaneously: as I attacked its spear-like tongue, its mouth closed around me.

My energy armour fought against its bite, but the needles still pierced through. Thankfully, they didn't reach my skin, although its bite force was more than I expected and it started to crack my energy armor.

Fortunately, I had better luck with my sword, which was able to cut through the spear-like tongue. This action caused the creature to scream, making my entire body vibrate. There wasn't much room to get a proper swing here, and I wasn’t able to pierce through the mouth as I was awkwardly positioned and didn’t get any strength for my strike.

There was only one path left for me, and that was to go deeper in. I took two quick steps, which probably surprised the snail-like creature as it thought it had overpowered me. But instead, it soon got to taste the tip of my greatsword as I continued to drive it deeper in.

The creature opened its mouth and tried to push me out, but it was already too late as I pushed my sword even deeper in and then pulled it straight up, cutting most of the beast and its shell in half.

I stepped out of the corpse and leaned against the wall to calm my racing heart. That was actually a close one. It took me a few moments to recover, but after that, I quickly moved to the corpse and stuffed it into my adventurer's bag, as the smell of blood was already attracting attention.

Thanks to my energy armor, I wasn’t actually covered in gore. After hiding my presence as much as possible, I quickly moved away from this place as more and more creatures were showing up. It seems like I should be a bit more careful here.

The more careful approach to exploration slowed things down a bit, but I was able to move through the area without having to fight anything else that might prove a threat. The place here seemed to be incredibly large, and I was now about 100 metres below my own land.

It was weird to think about it, but around 100 metres above my head, a river flowed that headed towards the lake. As I continued to move, I figured out that I was actually slowly moving towards the lake, and I was quite interested in how it would feel to know that you are underneath a lake.

The caverns here were larger, and I now know why no one was eating the largest mushrooms. They literally had worse nutritional and calorie values than wood. Their spores, however, were quite large, and it seems that quite a lot of creatures down here would eat them. I wondered if I could use them to make any sort of bow or perhaps use them as building materials, but they just weren't sturdy enough. No matter how inedible, they were still mushrooms.

One thing that also changed is that the plants here weren't just meals for other creatures, but they also started to become carnivorous and indeed ate the creatures that consumed them. My favourites were plants that resembled tall grass, but whenever something got close, they would pierce it.

As the creature slowly rotted away, they sucked up all the nutrients from the blades of grass that pierced into the creature's body. It was like they were pierced by spears and then just left there until only bones were left.

It's also quite funny that the bones and the half-consumed bodies were the baits for new creatures, so other blades of grass that hadn’t been able to pierce or had already consumed their prey would have another chance.

I wasn’t able to figure out how they knew where the prey was, and for that, I will probably need to come here and visit this place another time. It didn’t take too long until I reached my desired location, but what I saw was beyond my wildest dreams.

Even before I reached this place, I could hear falling water that was quite loud and got even louder as I got closer. One of the tunnels led into a larger room, but the entire floor was full of thousands of holes, some only as large as my finger, while others were bigger than a house.

The place was huge, the biggest room I had seen underground, and it was constantly raining. The volume of water was impressive, but when I snapped out of this beautiful yet weird sight, I began to question my sanity as this didn't make any sense.

I was hesitant to move onto the floor as I could see that the water had burrowed its way through the floor in thousands of places. Obviously, the larger holes were caused by sections of the floor becoming so weak that they collapsed. That problem, however, was more focused on the centre of the room, and the edges looked quite solid, so to speak.

So, hesitantly, while making myself as light as possible without having to worry about the volume of water pushing me away, I walked onto the floor to look upwards. What I saw was a large hole that stretched quite far up, and thanks to my sight, I could see that the ceiling was made out of plant material of some sort, but water was constantly coming through it.

My brain short-circuited for a moment, and after a quick check from my map, I realized that I was directly underneath the lake. Wait a goddamn minute. My lake doesn’t have a bottom?

It seems the only reason it's a lake is because of the apparently thick bottom full of some sort of plant that's preventing a large portion of the water from just falling through. But it seems the two rivers that feed the lake are just enough to keep the water level stable. Now, that’s just a theory on my part, and I will admit it's not the best one, but currently, that was all I had to explain what I was seeing.

What I did next was look downwards to see the water continue to fall, but soon it seemed to start to divert towards the north where I couldn’t follow it any further with my eyes. There were multiple tunnels that led from this room into who knows where, but most likely it would just be a continuation of the cave network I was currently exploring.

Now, I kind of wished that it wasn’t winter so I could examine the lake's bottom from up top, but I think I will end this exploration here as this entire situation was a bit too big of a shock for me.