Dimensional Summoner: Infinite Growth in a Leveling Apocalypse

I did not test anything for two and a half hours.

Instead, I circled the perimeter on dry ground and the remains of old service paths, moving at the pace of a man who had been told exactly once what happened to people who hurried here. Predator’s Veil remained active. It did its job and no one else’s.

The concrete paths were slick with algae above the waterline. I stayed off them where possible because Feline Senses let me hear my own weight travelling through the hollow slabs. In that place, every structure eventually touched the water.

I logged two observation points. The first was the raised bund at the southern corner, three metres above the field with a hedge behind it and a clean view along two crop lanes. The second was better: the collapsed end of the third greenhouse, where the twisted frame gave me an elevated angle into the water beside the fourth.

Elevation mattered in silty water. Learning that took an hour and changed everything that followed.

From ground level, the water gave me reflections and brown glare. From the folded greenhouse frame, I could distinguish darker beds beneath the crop rows, the pale edges of submerged concrete, and places where silt had settled differently. None of that let me see a hidden Lurker. It gave me enough structure to notice when something changed.

I marked the depth at every route I might later need. One metre ten at the southern edge became one metre forty beside the third greenhouse and close to one metre eighty at the fourth greenhouse’s old doorway. The apron and western walkway were the only approaches that did not require crossing an open flooded lane.

The fourth greenhouse had an old steel service walkway running from a concrete apron to its western door frame. Two middle supports had corroded around the waterline. When I put one hand on the third stanchion, the entire span flexed.

Someone with a bar and a doubled rope could drop the middle section into the channel without standing near it.

Not today. Note it.

I found signs of the failed expedition twice: a snapped guide line still knotted to a fence post, and an anchor plate bolted to the concrete apron with its shackle in place. Five people had entered according to the report. Two had walked out.

I touched neither remnant.

The first test went into the water at half past ten.

I used the simplest device I had: one weighted sealed pipe, a cord, and a throw. It landed forty metres out at the mouth of the second crop lane. From the top of the southern bund, I dragged it back at roughly walking speed.

Nothing happened.

I kept dragging, then stopped with the pipe fifteen metres from shore and waited. Four minutes and eleven seconds passed before the water changed sixty metres to the northeast.

Four minutes is long enough for a bad idea to start feeling harmless. I had already checked the cord twice, considered whether the throw had been too shallow, and reminded myself that the failed expedition’s recorder had waited nearly seven minutes during one test. The urge to move the pipe again became almost physical.

I left it still.

A long bulge travelled beneath the surface, leaving a wake on both sides. It followed the crop lane with the directness of something using a road.

It came to the route the pipe had travelled before finding the object itself.

It followed the displacement, not the target.

The creature rose far enough for me to see what the water had hidden. It was long-bodied, flat-headed, and silt-coloured, with two forward limbs splayed against the bottom. Four metres at least. It nosed the pipe, turned it over, then settled on top of it and became motionless again.

It remained there for eleven minutes before sinking back into the silt.

For those eleven minutes, it looked like part of the field. No breathing movement reached the surface. Its colouring matched the bottom closely enough that whenever my attention slipped to the notes and returned, I had to find the outline again from the pipe beneath its jaw.

That was how the failed harvesters had entered water they believed was empty.

They wait to see if a dead signal moves again.

The second test went in from another angle two hours later. It drew a different Lurker out of a bed north of the first. The animal approached along its own lane and never crossed the path taken by the earlier one.

Territories, perhaps. At least separate resting beds.

I did not promote the guess into a rule. Two animals using separate beds could mean territories, habitual hunting lanes, or nothing more than where they had happened to settle that morning. I marked both beds and wrote a question beside them. Certainty was what got people into water with incomplete maps.

The third test used three signals: the pipe in the second crop lane, a weighted bladder frame in the fourth, and a rope with a heavy knot that I could jerk from the bund. The points sat thirty metres apart.

Two Lurkers responded. Both initially followed the pipe. When the bladder moved, they turned toward it. I jerked the knotted rope, and one peeled away while the other continued toward the bladder. For close to a minute, two Level 18-something predators divided their attention between two separate pieces of rubbish.

The strongest recent signal mattered more than the nearest one.

They did not behave like animals hypnotised by noise. The first investigated the bladder from below and stopped when its movement became too regular. The second followed the knotted rope only until I failed to produce another pulse. Both began circling back toward the earlier disturbances. A decoy could redirect them, but a dead or unconvincing signal would not hold them indefinitely.

I nearly ruined the test during retrieval.

The bladder’s cord scraped across the concrete apron, sending a short grinding vibration through the slab. The nearer Lurker turned and came toward shore fast, stopping six metres from the apron where the water was less than half a metre deep.

I froze with my hand on the cord.

Predator’s Veil remained active, but it could not suppress a vibration I had already put into a connected structure. The Lurker waited in the shallows for two minutes before slowly retreating.

I moved ten metres back along the frame and left the cord untouched for another quarter of an hour. That ended any temptation to congratulate myself over the three-point test.

The eastern greenhouse had felt different since my first circuit. By then, I knew why.

It had its own Lurker.

The creature was far larger than the others, almost the length of the drowned tractor, and heavier through the shoulders. Old scars crossed its back. It rested under the surviving foundation wall and reacted to every pressure signal I created. I watched it lift its head and track the divided disturbances.

It never left the greenhouse.

I considered the reasons without settling on one. Perhaps it was older and less willing to investigate uncertain prey. It might have been injured, or simply more territorial than the others.

I watched it through three more cycles of the crude bladder. Its head turned before the ordinary Lurkers reacted, so it was neither asleep nor unaware. Once, it shifted its weight toward the opening, then settled again without advancing. Whatever held it under the wall mattered more than food it could not verify.

I got the answer at four that afternoon.

One final strong signal drew an ordinary Lurker through the fourth crop lane. It overshot the decoy and came within fifteen metres of the greenhouse foundation.

The large guardian moved.

It surged out from beneath the wall, not toward my decoy but toward the other Lurker. It struck the smaller animal from the side, drove it back into the field, then turned and settled exactly where it had been.

The movement rolled silt away from the foundation.

From my elevated position on the collapsed frame, I could see into the shadow beneath the wall while the water cleared.

A clutch of pale eggs filled a shallow depression against the original crop-bed soil. There were forty or fifty of them, packed together on the last stable substrate beneath the greenhouse.

Pale interwoven roots ran through that same soil, curling beneath and around the clutch.

Marrowlace.

The guardian was not protecting the plant. The last surviving root bed and the safest nesting ground happened to be the same place.

That distinction mattered. It meant the guardian could not be lured by threatening the Marrowlace, and damaging the roots would accomplish nothing except ruining the reason I had come. The eggs were the centre of its behaviour. Any plan that ignored them was not a plan for this animal.

Every crude signal I owned might draw the ordinary Lurkers away, but none would move the animal that mattered. Killing a Level 20 guardian was not a plan, and fighting it in that water would destroy the clutch and the roots together.

The silt settled. The guardian disappeared over its eggs, and the pale Marrowlace vanished beneath it.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!