He wakes to silence.
Not peaceful silence — but the heavy, crushing kind that sits on your chest and whispers that you're buried alive.
Only he wasn't breathing.
He wasn't suffocating.
He wasn't… ,atleast not in the old sense.
His consciousness drifted in a way no human awareness should.
Where… what am I?
He tried to move his fingers.
He had no fingers.
He tried to blink.
He had no eyelids.
He reached for a breath, a heartbeat, a pulse of blood—
Nothing.
Only cold.
And stone.
His awareness spread again, more desperately this time, reaching like tendrils across rough surfaces.
Walls. Ceiling. Floor.
A cavern.
And lodged within the stone wall… a crystal.
Black.
Pulsing faintly.
The pulse was him.
No way. No way. Come on—this is insane.
He focused on it, and the crystal responded with a slow, sluggish throb.
His voice quivered inside his own mind.
I'm the crystal. I'm actually the damn crystal.
The realization came with a writhing mixture of horror and fascination.
He tried to laugh. It came out as a strange tremor through the cavern wall.
He tried to panic, but even panic felt… distant.
Muted.
As if wrapped in cotton.
Maybe it was the body — or the lack of one.
Maybe a dungeon core couldn't panic the way a human could.
The thought hit him like a cold splash.
A dungeon core… like in novels? So this is my "second chance"?
He remembered that last moment of life:
The quiet, pathetic collapse.
His regrets gnawing at him.
The strange presence offering him another chance.
He'd said yes because he had nothing else.
No accomplishments.
No legacy.
Nothing.
And the universe had reincarnated him as…
A rock. A magical rock. Great.
But slowly, as his awareness settled, he began to sense more.
A faint hum beneath the earth.
Like ley-lines carrying mana.
Raw, untapped energy brushing against his mind.
And deeper still — something older. A primal instinct humming deep in the crystal.
Defend.
Consume.
Expand.
The instincts were quiet at first, like whispers through a thick wall.
He ignored them.
For now.