《Bleeding Heart Dungeon》 Sure On This Bleeding Night Ba-thump. Have you ever heard of phantom limb syndrome? If you haven''t - it¡¯s where someone missing a limb will feel as if it¡¯s still there, still attached, as if they could still move it. Sometimes they¡¯ll feel sensation, like touch, temperature, or pain. Try to imagine that, but for not just an arm, or a leg. Ba-thump. Imagine if you knew you used to have not just limbs, but an entire body - and then imagine having it taken away. Think about how it might feel if the only thing left behind was a blood-soaked beating heart, surrounded by a dark and empty nothingness. It¡¯s a scary thought, isn¡¯t it? Ba-thump. Imagine having a conversation with an imaginary listener to try to cope with your new reality of being a ba-thumping piece of flesh, seemingly floating in an endless void. I didn¡¯t need to imagine - because it was me. It was my heart. Or, the heart was me. I was the heart? Ba-thump. Ba-thump. Ba-thump. It wasn¡¯t the kind of identity crisis I needed right then. Or ever needed, ever. I didn¡¯t know how it had happened. The memories I had of what came before were fragmented, sharded - I got bits and pieces, but nothing concrete. I could recall bodies being cut open and sewn back together. I faintly recognized that I might have participated in the process. But I couldn¡¯t remember my name, or much else - what my body had looked like, for instance. Had I been a girl, or a boy? Were all hearts gender neutral by default? Ba-thump. ...I didn''t have any masculine or feminine leanings, as far as I could tell - just bloody ones. One thing I could say I knew, with distinct clarity, was the anatomy of my remaining self. Had I always known what the bits and pieces of the heart were, or was this knowledge something connected to my new existence? I didn¡¯t know. The loud contractions of my heart faded into the background as I reviewed each part, glancing over the cardiac organ with a strange sort of awareness that wasn¡¯t anything like the five senses I''d known before. It was almost tactile, but not quite - and it seemed focused on the blood circulating my heart, not so much the heart itself. At the ¡®start¡¯ of the process I could feel blood fill the right atrium from the superior and inferior vena cava, which connected to air, which meant the blood was coming from nowhere. Good start. It then coursed through the tricuspid valve, compressed and flew through the pulmonary valve, traveled through the pulmonary arteries... and then somehow appeared in the left atrium. There was no physical connection evident. It just didn¡¯t make sense. The heart had no lungs attached. How was the blood getting oxygenated? And where was the blood coming from in the first place? The left atrium squeezed, in time with the right, and blood pushed through the mitral valve, then slammed up past the aortic valve, then through the aorta - and then I realized my awareness through the not-touch sensation was expanding. That it had been, ever since I¡¯d gained consciousness, as blood gushed out into the void and brightened wherever it splashed in spots and smears.The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement. With each cumulative beat of my heart, the descending and ascending aorta spurted blood - and everything the blood touched I could, for lack of a better term, see. I saw a lot of nothing, frankly. It seemed I wasn''t floating, at the least - I was flopped on a surface, but what that surface was I couldn''t tell. Not enough blood had spilled for any detailed analysis. I wondered about the math, there - how much blood was I pumping out? How long would it take for me to see all of my surroundings, through this strange blood sight? There didn¡¯t happen to be some kind of guide, or tutorial, for getting stuck as a disembodied heart, did there?
h???????e????l????p?????
¡­ what. Help?
h???????e????l????p?????h???????e????l????p?????
Further attempts proved equally fruitless at getting anything other than the strange corrupted text to appear in my mind¡¯s - no, "heart''s" eye. I resigned myself to the fact that, for the moment at least, I wouldn¡¯t be getting any assistance from whatever system might have been set up to do so. Over the course of what must have been a few minutes, my heart continued to beat, and blood continued to spill. It didn¡¯t take long for a rather sizable puddle to form, dense enough for me to stake the claim that I was on some kind of unworked stone, given the uneven but solid texture. Some specks of blood caught in the space above the puddle - on pebbles, I soon realized, as the puddle slowly rose to coat them and then subsume them entirely. The novelty wore off quickly. I couldn¡¯t remember ever watching paint dry, but in any case I was getting a sneak preview of the sequel without asking - watching blood coagulate. Then, my blood made it over a lip of stone, and spilled down, down, down¡­ Eventually it splashed against another flat surface, and that puddle too began to spread. The ground was about the same, but there were things moving too, that didn''t seem to appreciate being covered in blood. Insects. Small chitinous beings, with legs aplenty. Most of them started skittering away from what they must have thought to be a puddle of water - but a few stayed behind, either uncaring or just too dumb to move. Then I felt a prickling, as some of the bugs remaining in the blood began to¡­ disintegrate, for lack of a better term.
Level 0.1 Cave Beetle [Dead] absorbed - b???i???o???m???a???s???s??? added to c?o?r?e?. Level 0.1 Cave Beetle [Dead] absorbed - b????i????o????m????a????s?????s???? added to c???o???r???e???. Level 0.1 Cave Beetle [Dead] absorbed - b????i????o???m?????a???s???s????? added to c????o???r????e????.
I learned several things at that moment. One, that whatever these pop-up messages in my consciousness were, they weren''t completely broken - only partly. Two - things had ¡®levels,¡¯ apparently - and that felt new to me. Three - those bugs weren''t dumb, they were dead - and apparently putting my blood and dead things together made my heart bigger. I could actually feel my heart expanding, but not by much - after all, three bugs worth of biomass wasn''t a lot. As I felt small smears of blood drift away from my second puddle, I felt a small dragging on my consciousness. It took a hundred heartbeats to grasp what was happening, and at least another several hundred for it to come to fruition - as tiny fragments of my consciousness slipped into tiny insect bodies. By this point, my second puddle had expanded to about two meters from the wall leading up to my heart. A few more dead insects were absorbed, adding to my heart, and a few more living bugs were touched with blood. A small swarm, perhaps thirty strong, had fallen under my control. It wasn''t picturesque, though - controlling the bugs felt like swimming through honey - sluggish, unresponsive, lagging. I couldn''t give them detailed instructions, or control their individual limbs - all I could do was urge them to move. I did so, sending them out in a fan-shape away from the puddle. The cave - I guessed it was a cave, but I couldn''t know for sure until I figured out if there was a ceiling or not - was pretty big. The left side of the fan made it around ten meters, while the right side reached about fifteen. The few bugs going more or less straight just kept going, and going - I had them pull back once they passed forty meters or so, nervous that I might lose them, and worried about what I might find if I kept going. I had already subconsciously realized that I was vulnerable - but this delving forward into the unknown brought it to the forefront of my mind. I had nothing between me and anything that wanted to attack me - my heart was just sitting on a ledge above a cave, at any moment a bat could swing by and start taking bites out of me. I needed defenses - I could philosophize about the implications of my new bloody existence later, once I wasn''t at risk of being eaten. -- The First Few Bloody Steps I didn''t have a mind for tactics - I didn''t have a brain at all, actually - but a few ideas on how to improve my chances of survival came quickly. For all of them, I would need more bugs. The Lower Puddle - not to be confused with The Puddle Around My Heart - would continue expanding, as long as I was still pumping out blood. More of the small beetles would naturally stumble into it, and fall under my control. But that would take time that I wasn¡¯t sure I had. The bugs I¡¯d sent searching for the borders of the cavern returned at just as slow of a pace as they¡¯d departed, with new orders - feel around blindly for other beetles, and rub blood on them. It wasn¡¯t as simple as it sounded. Remember how I said I couldn¡¯t get any complex orders across? I very quickly had to translate ¡®explore for other bugs and get blood on them¡¯ to be not just idiot proof, but insect proof. The first attempts failed spectacularly. My bugs would bump into something on their journey back towards the puddle, and I would have them bump into it again and again, leaving little bits of blood on whatever they had stumbled into, but nothing would happen. It took me a few tries to realize that I was probably having them bump into a rock. The next few tries, I had beetles get together in groups of three, and had them move as a single unit together - stumbling into each other just as much as they¡¯d crawl into anything else. It was a simple way to get more blood in an area at once, to get a better image of whatever I was trying to see. I found a bug with this - I was sure I had, because it blood-sensed like a rock but it was moving away at about a beetle pace - but it still didn¡¯t work. Maybe there wasn¡¯t enough blood? I sent a few more beetles, completely surrounding this new bug in them, and I saw crusty dried blood smear onto it - but nothing happened. What about fresh blood? Moving as one unit, I had that small group of beetles herd their capture towards the Lower Puddle, but not into it. I then had another beetle under my control walk into the puddle, and then walk over the captured - sure enough, fresh blood did the trick. I felt the drag on my consciousness, and then I had another bug under my thrall. Having identified the precise process for gaining control of a new ¡®unit,¡¯ I wasted no time further with trying to smear blood onto bugs directly. Instead, I sent out small swarms that herded bugs back to the Lower Puddle, and then into it. This caused problems of its own, though. Several beetles I shoved into the puddle just stopped moving after a while, and died soon after, disintegrating into motes of nothing. Too much blood, I realized - coating them completely, they couldn¡¯t breathe. A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. Just the same, even if they weren¡¯t completely covered, too much blood in their little bug joints meant when it coagulated they¡¯d be unable to move. Several of my new troops experienced Locked In syndrome until I identified what was happening, and had mercy on them by shoving them into the Lower Puddle to end their suffering. In the end, it took several thousand heartbeats of trial and error, but I managed to double my forces, to reach sixty-odd bugs strong. I had also managed to grow my heart a bit from the biomass of the dead beetles from my mistakes - which I decided I¡¯d look at as a net positive, as I was pretty sure the quantity of blood spilling had increased because of it. For few hundred beats, I kept up the routine, until I realized something while absentmindedly watching the Lower Puddle spread. If it isn''t modified through medication, or disease, blood exposed to open air ought to coagulate within about two minutes. For me, that meant probably somewhere between every one-hundred-and-twenty to two-hundred heartbeats, if my heart beat within the normal range for humans. Yet, the puddles that had formed of my blood - both around my heart, and at the bottom of the drop, were still liquid. Well, technically speaking, blood isn''t actually a liquid - no, don''t get distracted, hold on. How was this possible? Why wasn''t my blood clotting the way it was ''supposed'' to? I took a closer look at each puddle, and found that there were actually a few clumps of clots her and there floating around, but they were actually dissolving and reforming constantly. They seemed to be outliers, exceptions - glitches, even. Additionally, the blood on the bottom of each puddle formed a contiguous clot, almost like a moss on the stone beneath. I widened my sight, and then focused on the smaller specks of blood I had spread around the cavern via my bugs, and on the bugs themselves. Compared to the puddles, this blood made more sense - it was all clotted and dried. I watched fresh blood be applied to a fresh recruit, and watched it clot within the expected time. Alright - so, clearly, when the blood left the puddle, it began to function like normal blood as far as clotting was concerned. That answered one question, but prompted another - all of the blood came from my heart, and pooled in the Puddle Around My Heart. Then, it left the puddle, and formed the Lower Puddle. So, shouldn''t the Lower Puddle be one big clot? What did the Puddle Around My Heart and the Lower Puddle have in common? Was it that I had named them? No - the lower puddle hadn''t clotted in the interim before I had named it. Also, the Puddle Around My Heart had never clotted from the start. What else did the puddles have in common? Well, they were puddles. Was it just basic quantity that activated this strange anti-clotting property? I took a group of twenty bugs, and had them get as much blood on themselves as they safely could from the Lower Puddle. Then, I had them trundle a foot away, and get as much blood off of themselves as possible in the same spot. Over time, a few of them died, but I would replace them to keep the process going. Progress was slow going, but I kept at it, and eventually my efforts were rewarded. After several thousand heartbeats, a critical mass was reached, and the small amount of blood - which had been clotting and drying out as expected - dissolved in the span of a few heartbeats. A thin layer of clot remained on the surface of the stone, underneath - and just like that, I understood. My blood was activating some sort of anti-clotting weirdness through a bastardized version of quorum sensing - when a certain density of blood was reached, it wouldn''t clot. Some small part of me almost expected that strange text box to appear, to give me some sort of message, maybe a congratulations, for figuring this out - but no, it was just me, my puddles of blood, and my bugs. I didn''t really even know what to do with this information, to be honest. At the moment, I couldn''t conceive of a benefit of making more puddles, not when the one I had was continuing to grow at a rate that far exceeded anything the bugs would be able to do. Huh. Well, maybe it''d come in handy later.