Prologue
“So, what's it like being a dungeon?” Dorn'axial asked the blue, lightly glowing rock that was gently spinning a few inches in front of his face, hovering above a marble pedestal. Dorn had just finished a lengthy battle against a light blue water dragon, and now he was talking to a blue rock. It was quite ironic, as Dorn was himself a dragon, and he had plans to transfer his soul and consciousness into a rock in the future. Of course, he wouldn't use a light blue gem as a dungeon core, as the light blue color was associated with the weak water dragons. They're not even real dragons, thought Dorn, just large snakes with wings and claws. No, Dorn was a silver wyrm, a proud member of the Space magic dragon lineage. As such, he had decided to transfer himself into a diamond core. But that would come later.
Dorn had just finished conquering the most famous dungeon in the powerful Ilsan Empire. The final floor, floor 97, was merely an island floating within a giant sea, all contained in an enormous cavern. On the island laid the remains of the dragon, the final Boss of the dungeon. It was quickly melting into the island, as it was reabsorbed by the dungeon. Instead of taking the teleportation glyph back to the entrance of the dungeon or opening the chest to receive what was most likely legendary loot, Dorn had instead flown to the edge of the cavern, finding the small room that housed the dungeon core. The mana in the air was so thick here that it had condensed and liquified around the edges of the ceiling, where it dripped slowly onto the floor. This was the S-ranked dungeon famous for it's lush jungles and forests. A system of natural monster ecosystems, rather than the usual boring halls with traps and rooms of monsters. As such, it was one of the few dungeons that had earned Dorn's respect. It was also the main driver behind Ilsan's powerful economy and military. Incidentally, Dorn was also the first person to conquer the dungeon since the days of the dungeon's infancy, 300 years previous.
“Please don't kill me,” said the blue rock telepathically, projecting its voice into Dorn's head. A look of great shock passed across Dorn's face, before settling back into an arrogant visage. Dorn was currently in his human form. All dragons gained shape-shifting abilities upon becoming an adult at 1,000 years of age. Dorn was a tall human, at 6' 3”, with long silver hair and piercing blue eyes. He looked upon the core with a magnanimous air.
“I don't want to kill you, little dungeon core, I want to be just like you. I will become the greatest dungeon that Sorenia has ever seen. I've spent centuries mastering the necessary magics. Death and Soul magic for the transfer to a core, Earth magic to build the dungeon, Air magic to make the dungeon liveable, Nature, Water, and Life magic to populate it, and Light magic for displaying my glory. I've picked the perfect location. Deep in the weakling Khal kingdom is a mountain resting within endless plains, deserted for miles around. I wil-”
“Why?” interrupted the curious dungeon core.
“Why?” Dorn repeated, as if baffled. “For immortality, of course.” Dorn gave the lesser of his two life goals as explanation. Dragons had a lifespan measured in millennium, but it wasn't infinite.
“Why don't you just become a lich?” asked the core.
“And become an undead? Hated by everyone, hunted by the churches, never to know a moment of peace? I have no need of becoming a sickening, vile creature like that.”
“But that's the thing,” the core replied. “Dungeons are hated by everyone except the adventurers, frequently destroyed by the churches, and never have any peace whatsoever.”
Dorn frowned, annoyed that his 3,000-year life's goal was being dismissed by the dungeon. “That's not for you to worry about. I've already spent the last 1,000 years condensing mana crystals to jump-start building my dungeon, and now I just need to know the specifics of how to build and manage a dungeon.”
“Well, if that's true,” the dungeon core responded with a mental smirk, “you've wasted 1,000 years storing the only waste product dungeons produce; you would have been better off spending 1,000 years collecting animal shit, for at least you could have gotten a few Dungeon Points ou-”
A furious Dorn smashed the core into the wall, shattering the core and destroying the dungeon. After releasing a furious roar that shook the entire cavern, Dorn heaved a few deep breaths. “Gods-damned core, who the hell are you to talk to me like that?”
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Back in the Khal kingdom, residing in his lair, Dorn thought over his actions. He had spent his entire life, ever since childhood, making preparations for becoming a dungeon core. It had taken him 500 years just to find a large enough diamond to use as his future body. Carving the 6,000-carat diamond into a perfect regular dodecahedron had been difficult, but far worse was using Earth magic to enhance it, turning it into a single network of carbon atoms, becoming all but indestructible. He then would have enchanted it with durability and strengthening runes as well, but that would have interfered with the soul transfer process.
The diamond was resting within his throne room. Dorn turned his head and glanced at it, lying upon a simple crystal pedestal. It always calmed him to see his future body. Carved into the ground around the pedestal was an enormous and complex network of magical runes. The runes formed a large ellipse, with circles at the two focal points: one where the pedestal resided and a much larger circle where his 500-foot body would lie during the transfer. The space surrounding the pedestal was shielded by 11 layers of concentric, hollow, and translucent spheres, each lightly glowing a different color. Only the top half of the spheres were visible, the other half hidden underneath the ground. These were the magical shields Dorn had set up to protect his future, immobile body. The glyphs carved on the stone floor just inside of each sphere produced shields so strong that even Dorn would be unable to break through. It gave him a sense of security.
Dorn furrowed his brow in thought, what are Dungeon Points? It bothered him that there was something about dungeons that he didn't know. What are points anyways? Someone using a finger to indicate a direction? Dots in a graph? The topic of a discussion? A scoring system for games? Dorn was this world's fore-most expert on dungeons. Or at least, amongst the humans of Sorenia, he was the world's greatest expert. He was considered a pariah amongst the few of his fellow dragons that he knew, both for his obsession with dungeons (a life-form they considered lesser) and his integration with the humans (a life-form they considered much lesser). He had been consumed with desire to become a dungeon core ever since he was young, when the lessons of mortality were driven into his head through experience. Of course, his need for vengeance was the greater reason for his desire to become a dungeon.
As one of the humans of East Lucenia's few SS-ranked adventurers, Dorn was the only one who believed dungeons were sapient. He would be much happier about finally being proven correct with the nature dungeon, if he hadn't lost his temper and destroyed one of the few dungeons in the world that Dorn admired. He did not regret his actions, but he did feel some annoyance at being unable to get the answers to a couple of his last-minute questions.
The civil war erupting in Ilsan would almost certainly cause his future home of the Khal kingdom to become involved in a continent-wide war. Any loss of human life in the Khal kingdom would be a waste if it were to happen outside his future dungeon. If his guess, that only S-rank dungeon cores and above were sapient, was correct (it wasn't; A-class cores and below were just afraid of exposing their sapience), that meant he would have to go trudge his way through almost 100 more layers of a dungeon to get some answers to his questions. The only one in East Lucenia, that Dorn knew of, was a slime dungeon, and he was not going to go through the boring monotony of such a dungeon. I guess I'll just find out tomorrow, when I finally make the transition, Dorn thought.
Growling, Dorn decided to check his preparations for making the dungeon one last time. The circular throne room was the first room one could reach after entering Dorn's lair. Off to the right side was a tunnel which led to a series of rooms that would traditionally hold a dragon's treasure horde. And in many ways, they were treasure rooms.
The first room was a gigantic armory, and it contained far more wealth and knowledge than any ordinary treasure horde. Every kind of weapon imaginable was present, lying on velvet-lined racks. The enormous room contained a large variety of weapons, from swords, axes, and spears, to staves, maces, and bows. The quality of these weapons ranged from non-enchanted trash to dwarven-crafted and elven-enchanted masterpieces. Further, there were all kinds of accessories resting on shelves surrounding the weapons. In various sizes and styles, armors made from multiple kinds of leather and metal were placed next to bracelets, rings, amulets, earrings, cloaks, and boots. There was even a gigantic mound of clothes for men and women of all four sapient races, and in multiple fashions.
In one corner of the room was a rather large stack of parchments filled with all the enchantments and alchemy recipes Dorn knew or could find from around the world. In a second corner was a large spatial bag holding his enormous library, including cultivation style and application books for all races, levels, and fighting styles, as well as manuals for every conceivable (to Dorn) form of crafting. The third corner was filled with all the tools used in mining, smithing, enchanting, alchemy, tailoring, goldsmithing, jewellery making, tanning, leather working, dyeing, and the production or assembly of various textiles, like silk, satin, wool, cotton, and glass. The furnaces for smelting, smithing, and glassblowing were rather large. The chemicals used for dyeing and tanning were in containers kept airtight by Space magic.
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In the final corner was a five-chambered vault that contained his most prized possessions: samples of all his non-living crafting materials. Inside the first chamber was an ingot of every normal metal he could discover, and they were carefully stacked. He had the common metals and alloys: iron, steel, copper, brass, aluminum, tin, tungsten, titanium, silver, gold, and platinum. More importantly, in the second chamber, he had the rare magical metals as well, including high steel, black gold, moonstone, fire iron, frozen steel, orichalcum, mithril, and adamantium. Those last two were impossibly hard both to find and to shape into ingots. He had had to kill this generation's greatest dwarven crafter, after forcing him to make those two ingots, just to keep these two metals a secret.
The third compartment of his vault was a pile of both precious and semi-precious jewels. All were useful in enchanting, and each type of jewel generally corresponded to one or more of the magic fields. Rubies for Fire magic, Emeralds for Nature magic, Gray Star Sapphires for soul magic, and so on. In the fourth chamber was just a pile of samples of all the various textiles and leathers dyed in a rainbow of colors. The fifth and final compartment simply contained cubes of different types of stone, from ordinary limestone and basalt to granite, marble, and travertine.
After checking that everything was in place behind his Space magic shields, he strode into his nursery. An artificial sun, made of Light magic, shone down onto two glass greenhouses, one clouded and the other clear. His two elven slaves were tending to the mass of herbs and plants he kept in stock. They bowed deeply to Dorn, and Dorn swept by without even acknowledging their existence. He hadn't even needed to force them into his service, for when they heard about the numerous rare, unique, and legendary herbs he had, they were more than willing to come tend to them. A good thing too, as Dorn would never stoop to growing plants. And getting the elves to be slaves was almost impossible, considering their innate magic resistances. Dorn paused and took a deep breath, savoring the smell of precious herbs mixed with heavy amounts of mana produced by the mana crystals embedded all throughout the walls. The amount of mana required for the growth of some of the herbs was ridiculous.
In the other half of the nursery was a variety of all sorts of trees, bushes, flowers, grains, fruits, and vegetables. While Dorn planned on having some floors with large open ecosystems, he did not plan to simply copy the nature dungeon. That would be too simple, and Dorn's dungeon would be anything but simple. Tunnels and rooms had their place as well, as long as they were decorated well.
The second to last chamber stunk. Even with his Air magic enchantments, it stunk. Here, 30 beast-kin soul slaves were dutifully taking care of the ridiculous number of monsters and animals that Dorn kept in stock. A full half of the monsters were reptiles. In half-submerged pens were lizards, snakes, amphibians, and turtles. On land, weakling common kobolds and stronger kobold mages and warriors were housed in cages, and crocodiles were resting in the pond. Many birds of all different colors and sizes were flying around the giant tree that grew in the middle of the chamber. Most didn't realize how closely related birds were to the other reptiles. The other animals and monsters required for a healthy ecosystem were also present. From nutritious volcanic soil, to pollinator bees, decomposing worms, and prey animals such as rabbits and deer, all were present and ready to form a thriving ecosystem. As an apex predator himself, Dorn had a bit of fascination with other predators and had captured some large cats, bears, foxes, and wolves from the neighboring Kendra Empire as well as eagles and hawks from right here in the Khal kingdom.
Finally, he entered the chamber he had been most proud of, until recently. The mana crystal chamber. It was really just a giant pit, filled with tens of thousands of mana crystals, one of the largest deposits of wealth in all of Sorenia. 50 gold coins made one platinum coin, and 10 platinum coins were worth a standard mana crystal. Only S-rank and above cultivators could condense mana crystals. It took an S-ranker about two weeks, or an SS-ranker one week, to condense a single mana crystal. Mana crystals were crucial for alchemy and enchanting, or could be used to speed up cultivation without entering a dungeon.
Dorn considered destroying them all with his powerful breath attack, but couldn't bring himself to do it. He had spent an entire millennium condensing these crystals, and had become the greatest of experts in pure mana manipulation as a result. What a waste, he thought. In hind sight, it made so much sense that mana was useless to dungeons. Why else would they spew so much mana into the world? They must breathe out mana as plants breathe out clean air. But what do they use as an energy source? Is that what Dungeon Points are?
Confused, but deciding to temporarily give up his thoughts on Dungeon Points, Dorn returned to his throne room. Across from the treasure rooms were his chambers. He laid down on his bed and looked at the ceiling. Tomorrow… he thought. I'll finally become a dungeon tomorrow. I've prepared everything I can possibly prepare. His thoughts then turned towards the entire reason he was here. Mother, father, I wish you could see me now. I'll show the other dragons the power of a dungeon, and I'll train the humans to destroy as you were destroyed. Those things will pay for what they did. The humans' efforts are weak and misguided. I will shape them into a spear that I wield. They will be forever changed. Tomorrow…
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The transformation process wouldn't start.
“Ah, why won't it fucking work,” rumbled Dorn. He was sitting in his rune circle in his original dragon form, staring at the diamond, what should be his new body. He scratched his head with a wing while he looked over all the glyphs. Every Death and Soul magic glyph was correct and in place. The connecting and containing glyphs were aligned. The protection from outside magical interference was in place, and he had his energy source (a massive pile of mana crystals stacked to the ceiling) set up correctly. Even the magic capacitors were filled, waiting for an outlet. And even though the magical circuit was closed and should be activating, nothing was happening.
A bright silver line about three feet long appeared in the air near Dorn. His massive dragon head turned and looked at it. What the hell is that? Is the process working? Why is it over there, however?
As Dorn watched, the line rotated on itself and formed a small portal. Out of it flew a creature about 8 inches tall with two sets of white wings.
“So, this is where the new dungeon is about to appear. It looks decent enough for a beginning dungeon. I wonder where in Khal I am. I'd best take a look arou-” said Emelia the dungeon pixie before pausing. It was at this point that she noticed the giant eye of Dorn looking and blinking at her. Emelia just stared for a few seconds.
“Who the hell are you, and why are you in my lair?” Dorn rumbled.
Emelia took a deep breath and intelligently responded, “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh. It's a huge gods-damned dragon. Why is there a huge gods-damned dragon here?” She then took off like a pinball, bouncing around the room at high speeds and screeching. Dorn managed to cover his draconian ears with his wings.
“Stop yelling,” he shouted. This, ironically, did nothing to calm down the pixie. She actually managed to yell louder. Developing a migraine, Dorn gave an almighty dragon roar, before yelling, “Silence!”
Emelia finally calmed down somewhat; she at least stopped in place. She was, however, shaking like a vibrating drum skin. She looked down at the dragon from the air and pleaded, “Please don't kill me.”
Dorn chuckled and responded, “The last creature that asked me that, I shoved him into a wall and shattered him into pieces.”
Emelia looked like she was about to start screaming and flying around again, so Dorn quickly spoke up, “I'm not going to kill you; calm down. I swear on my honor as a dragon, as long as you do not attempt to harm me or hinder my plans, I won't harm you.”
With that out of the way, Dorn was very intent on asking about something Emelia had said before she saw his body and had her… episode.
“Why did you say that this is where a dungeon is about to be born?” Dorn asked.
“Because the pixie queen told me a new dungeon was about to be born in the Khal kingdom and sent me here through a portal. But there shouldn't be a dragon here. There must have been a mistake in the portal's destination; I'll just go and-”
It was at this point that Emelia finally noticed the diamond, the massive tower of mana crystals, and the complicated necromantic glyphs on the floor.
“Um, what are you doing?” she asked.
“I'm trying to transfer my soul and consciousness into that diamond over there to finally become a dungeon,” Dorn responded.
“You want to become a dungeon? Is that even possible? Most dungeons arise naturally. When a rock imbued with enough mana resides in a proper environment, it forms a rudimentary soul and becomes a dungeon,” she said.
“Trust me, I've studied Death and Soul magic, as well as dungeons, my entire life. I assure you that what I'm trying to do is possible. Now, while you're here, look at these glyphs and tell me what I'm doing wrong,” Dorn said.
“What? How the hell would I know what you're doing wrong? I'm supposed to assist beginning dungeons form a consciousness and start carving a dungeon. I bond with a dungeon core and become the dungeon's assistant for the future. How would I know why your ridiculously complicated magical ritual isn't working?”
Dorn was about to respond when Emelia continued on talking, “Although, why do you have no runes to offset the change in entropy?”
Dorn asked the relevant questions, “What is entropy and why does it have anything to do with becoming a dungeon?”
Emelia exclaimed, “Entropy is everything to a dungeon! Entropy is a measure of the universe's disorder and always tends to increase. Why do you have so many mana crystals there? Clearly, it's to release the bound mana into a free form of gaseous mana, thus powering your ritual with free mana while simultaneously increasing the entropy and coupling it to your magical reaction. This way, the net entropy change is still positive, despite the fact that the reaction by itself is energetically disfavored.
“So, as I said, going from a living breathing creature to a highly structured magical crystal is energetically disfavored, especially so if you're trying to enter that perfect diamond over there. You have enough mana crystals to power the reaction ten times over, but you have none of that energy going towards offsetting the entropy costs.”
At this point, Emelia hummed and said, “All you'd have to do is add an entropy rune here at one of the capacitors and-”
“Wait!” Dorn cried as Emelia started carving the rune into the ground. He was, however, too late. As soon as Emelia finished the rune, a bright white light lit up from where the mana crystals were powered. Both Emelia and Dorn were temporarily blinded as the light flared. The feeling of magic energy spreading in the air increased, emitting pressure to a level that made them feel as if they were choking. At this point, Dorn and Emelia both passed out.
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Dorn slowly blinked his eyes, trying to get rid of his blindness, and looked around. It was at this point that Dorn realized he didn't have eyes and could see in all directions simultaneously. He could also feel the throne room around himself as if it were a part of his body. Right in front of his crystalline body was a floating blue screen. As Dorn looked around, he realized that the blue screen moved to wherever he was focusing, and therefore must not exist in reality. He took a look at what was written on the screen.
Initializing…
Diagnostics running…
All systems normal
Congratulations on becoming a new dungeon!