The Ninth Core: A Dungeon Core Base-Building LitRPG (Deepwell, Book One): 1

They dug it out of a dead battlefield, sold it for scrap, and dropped it down a hole.The town of Ballast paid nine hundred marks for an unfired well-core - every coin the place had - and got a stone at the bottom of a shaft that did nothing at all for eleven weeks.Then it woke up. The first thing it did was fill a bucket.It has no name, no voice, and no memory of anything before the socket. What it has is a hand for stone that frightens the masons, a warden with a bad knee who invents a language out of one tap for yes and two for no, and thirty-one days to serve four hundred households before the alderman sells it on.It earns nothing by killing. It grows only when somebody who needed the water drinks it.And every time it grows, the shaft gets deeper - and below the fifth floor, the thing that made it starts building what it was built to build.Inside: - A non-human protagonist with a dry, patient, wholly inhuman voice - Progression you can draw - nine floors, and every one of them costs something - Competence and craft over combat: this core levels by being needed - A whole quarry town of people worth caring about - No harem, no tutorial dump, and a complete arc in one bookThe Ninth Core is Book One of Deepwell. Read free in Kindle Unlimited.