It took 157 loops to find the right combination.
Middle, right, right, middle, left.
Now, I know what you're thinking, but all those loops gave me a lot of time to think. I prioritized speed in most of them, but I did try out basically every idea that came to my mind. I tried throwing monsters in, but the teleporters didn't activate. I tried having a Doppelganger step on it, but it didn't activate. I tried asking Duran for more details in case he knew anything, but he wouldn't budge. (Probably didn't want to unveil the state secret that they had marched 200+ stone dwarves to their death). I tried asking Medea in the church for help, even, and she naturally couldn't help. I tried hunting down the High Builder Derra, but in the morning at least, he was locked in his room with grief over the queen's abduction and nobody knew when he was coming out, so I gave up on that. It was unlikely a builder knew anything about a dungeon, anyway.
All in all, I had to come to one conclusion: The dungeon was evil, and it wanted pain.
Maybe I had just developed a sick kind of religious fascination with it after spending so many loops (albeit brief ones) suffering at its hand, but all the signs pointed to the teleporter rules focusing on ensuring that only living, sentient beings capable of suffering for long periods of time could teleport. It was absurd. It didn't seem to make sense. But why else would monsters not work? There was maybe a logical explanation, like "dungeon monsters aren't sentient because they are puppets of the dungeon core which powers the dungeon" or something, but I was leaning towards the dungeon being Evil, and it wanting me to suffer.
The combination was amusing to me as well. Maybe I was reading too deep into it, but it seemed slanted to ensure someone would take as much time as possible. The first step was the middle teleporter, so anyone starting on the left/right teleporter wouldn't get it immediately. From there it was almost as far right as possible, but with sudden veering to the left so you wouldn't get it first try if you went "middle right right right right." All in all, it seemed to be in a terrible position for someone starting from either the left or right; only starting in the exact middle and going right would get you to it quickly, really, outside of randomly starting at the 2/3rd point and going left.
On the bright side, this little incident also served to force me to grind against my will. Or well, maybe I could have ran past the monsters, but that seemed like wasting good EXP. No reason not to grind if I was stuck repeating loops anyway. 157 attempts times 18 encounters on floor one equals 2,826 encounters of up to 5 monsters. In a way, it felt like reality was punishing me for complaining about the lack of levels in elfland, because now I had been forced to grind against my will. My stats were, of course, pretty absurd now, but not as absurd as you might think. The EXP curve was a bitch and really started to cuck me the more time went on.
Sadly, I wasn't a complete uber-god despite the grinding. The enemies were weak enough that Heavy Armor started barely going up, magic obliterated them instantly so they barely went up after level 50, etc etc. Maybe my biggest boon was all the levels I got in Unarmed Combat, since I dropped One-Handed Blades at Level 85 when it stopped leveling up basically at all. I only got any full-on level ups at all due to the sheer absurdity of fighting almost 3,000 encounters. Even the EXP curve was balking at me.
I also discovered some new skills, basically just for the attribute points. I got Two-Handed Blades by borrowing a huge as shit dwarf battleaxe, and Archery by borrowing Sophia's bow (which she lent after a particularly passionate request + kiss x2 combo). They were both pretty low in level overall since I focused on One-Handed blades for so long and then focused on Unarmed Combat since it seemed more plausibly relevant, but I got them both to level 25 just for the stat buffs and milestones anyway.
Anyway, I could go on about this all day. I probably didn't min-max as well as I could. I honestly was more motivated by the urge to mix things up to kill boredom than anything. Behold the stat screen of life.
General Information Attributes Skills Name Malcador Name Value Name Level Species Human STR 3219 Sex 100 Sex Male DEX 2146 One-Handed Blades 85 Age 18 AGI 2849 Athletics 73 Class Hero (Level 22) END 2294 Elemental 68 HP 4588/4588 (+22.94/sec) INT 3885 Dodging 67 MP 6808/6808 (+34.04/sec) WIS 3404 (more...)
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Dodging Level 50 Milestone: Can violate the laws of physics slightly when moving in order to dodge otherwise undodgeable attacks.
Unarmed Combat Level 25 Milestone: Your hands and feet no longer get hurt when punching most things.
Unarmed Combat Level 50 Milestone: Your punches and kicks do more internal damage than before.
Two-Handed Blades Level 25 Milestone: You can now wield a two-handed blade in one hand for no penalty. Cannot use a shield or one-handed blade in your spare hand.
Archery Level 25 Milestone: Your arrows will be less disturbed by the wind and more accurate than before.
Mysticism Level 25 Milestone: Manipulation of objects will now be easier and last longer.
Mysticism Level 50 Milestone: Passive effects will now last twice as long. (<- I basically never used Mysticism out of Reverse in combat and random Telekinesis shit, but Life Detection, Lie Detection, and Soul Sight were passive effects. Also, the best part of being Proficient in Mysticism was unlocking Subspace for medium storage space anywhere I went.)
Cursed Level 50 Milestone: More efficient soul use in spells that require souls.
Elemental Level 25 Milestone: Fire spells burn more.
Elemental Level 50 Milestone: Water spells hurt more. (The Arcana had nothing but combat spells, okay?)
Restoration Level 25 Milestone: Wards now have fifty percent more strength. (Yay. Also, I didn't get Restoration to 50, but not by choice. Even healing the dying enemies was slow as shit to raise it. I was starting to get the impression level 100 Restoration was a bit overpowered and so the level scaling was utterly shot in order to prevent me from, well, looping 150 times to grind. It would probably have taken like 1000 loops to max it out at this place. Thank the Goddess I didn't try to max it out by genociding the elf village.)
Okay! Numbers. Wow. Jesus.
I was twice as strong as the last time I checked my stat screen, due to having gotten almost 7 level ups and a bunch of milestones. My magic was actually a bit more underpowered than it looked, since I had to go around and find the spells before I could use them, but the overall levels in all five Arcanas had finally boosted INT above STR. I had fulfilled my dream and become a mage just like I had initially planned.
But anyway. Let us shove these numbers under the bed and move onto more interesting topics: What I did outside of the dungeon.
A core guiding philosophy of mine was to not do anything special. If, for example, I engaged in an incredibly deep conversation with Rose on loop 20, then there was almost zero chance of me properly remembering it by loop 150, and an actual zero chance of her remembering it. She wasn't carrying anything but a few moments through the loop, and for me, everything just started to blur together through sheer repetition. I didn't want a bunch of half-remembered special moments, so to the absolute best of my ability, I did nothing special or anything that would stick out as like "wow cool in loop 115 I did an epic thing with Sophia that changed our relationship forever."
Naturally, though, there was no avoiding interacting with them at all. And I hadn't wanted to avoid them entirely, either. Sophia and Rose were my warmth and light throughout the misery. To be fair, I only spent like 300-400 hours in the dungeon total, but the repetition was still overwhelming. On many loops near the end I just laid in bed at the start for what felt like hours, feeling their body heat, basking in their presence. I kissed each of them over a hundred times. If I didn't love them enough before, I certainly did now.
I honestly felt a little bad for Hilda. Life cucked her as hard as it could have cucked basically anyone. She was now, as much as I hated to admit it, less of a presence in my heart and mind than Rose and Sophia. I barely even saw her in the loops except the times I dropped by the dining hall for brief, idle conversation before resuming my suffering. I didn't like her any less than before, it was just hard to deny the, what, weeks worth of time I had spent in bed with Rose and Sophia but not her.
The temptation to bang Rose and Sophia was certainly there, incidentally, but I was held back by the same thing that always held me back: I really did not want to have sex in a loop. It seemed so wrong on so many levels. Imagine me deflowering Rose and then her not ever remembering our actual first time together. Imagine me fucking Sophia 100 times across these loops and she didn't even remember any of it. All other things aside, that was my final wall. The good morning kisses were already making me feel just a bit guilty. I wondered if I was becoming a dramatically better kisser, and on the final loop they were just like, blown the fuck out and orgasming from kiss alone. If only I could see my Kissing skill level.
There were some other considerations too. I still, admittedly, felt out of place doing sex stuff. This muscular, hot as fuck body of mine did not actually feel like mine. My godlike sex skills did not feel like mine. I didn't feel like "me" during my brief list of sexual encounters so far. That was, of course, totally a dumb emotional hangup. This feeling of... having been created by the world to serve as a living dildo, for lack of a better word. It was an especially strange feeling, because it seemed so abnormal. Like the reverse of what was normally true. Wasn't it usually the harem girls who were living onaholes, while the harem protagonist was just some lame dude? An NPC, perhaps? I always felt like the protagonist was an accessory to a harem, the invisible glue to make the girls stick together in a convenient place for idle viewing, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I was the "main event" here. The whole world had its eyes on the Heir. Thoughts of Dakka more or less turning into a dog during sex and orgasming so hard her brain fried to the point of lapping up my cum like it was the best food in the world flashed through my mind. To her, I was probably the best thing that had ever happened to her. To her, it was like I had been made for her. To her, I was the best dildo in the world, and nothing more.
That was why I didn't like the slutty elves. That was why I kept yelling at them in my head. They made everything about sex. If Sophia had her way, we would still be in Koh'rin, with me "practicing" Create Water while she sucked my dick three times a day. She wanted to delay my training to maximize sex. If I let myself get carried away, and if I didn't fight that kind of thing, then I would only ever have sex, and only ever think about sex. I would morph into a chad as fuck sex-obsessed dildo and never return. It actually seemed like the biggest threat to my quest so far. Max level wouldn't save me from abandoning the prophecy to fuck Dakka's ginormous dark elf ass all day.
That said, all this was pretty much in my head. It was hard not to feel like a dildo when you went from not drawing any looks at all to being a hunk that babes of all species threw themselves at on sight, all desperate for sex. The gender chessboard had flipped, and now I was the one struggling with more suitors than I could deal with. Given enough time, I would surely get over my hang ups, and be better at dealing with slutty elves without letting them ruin my life or my quest. Fucking would just be a normal thing to do during brief asides, like a good morning kiss, except it would be my dick kissing the entrance to their womb, or something.
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I offered a silent prayer of gratitude for Rose. She was my rock amid all this. I didn't need to worry about descending into constant sex when I was with her. She loved me for me, and was not horny to the point of brain damage like an unnamed elf and necromancer. We could platonically sleep in bed together no problem. I could be myself with her, and not fear turning into a dildo that thought only of sex. All thanks to her normal, healthy love. If I ever forgot what normal romance was like in comparison to obsessive horny-fueled lust, she was there to remind me how nice it really was.
Okay enough monologuing. I had started talking to myself way too much while traversing the dungeon alone for so long.
All this was mostly stalling so I could avoid opening the door to the next floor. I didn't even want to know what Floor 3 was after a Floor 2 like this. To my understanding Floor 5 was just a boss fight, so I was halfway through the dungeon. Surely it couldn't go on for much longer. Eeeh.
I stood up from the bottom step of the staircase I had been sitting on and looked at the door in front of me. It was a fairly large door just like the door to Floor 2 had been. I opened it with trepidation, then stepped forward and... stopped, looking up.
"Aaaah shit. This is hard. I'm going to need Rose for this."
----------------------------------------
I quickloaded back for time reasons and so I didn't have to do any unnecessary encounters on the walk back. I was at the point that just seeing a group of goblins gave me traumatic flashbacks.
I was in my familiar bed, of course. Rose nestled against me, Sophia hugging me, back sinking slightly into the mattress and drawing them in towards me further... I was used to it by now.
This time I decided to wake Rose up by kissing her chest then working my way up to her lips. That felt more romantic to me, like "I love every part of you, not just your lips" or something. Malcador: master of romance. It helped that her smell was irresistible, and I wanted to spend as much time with my face close to her as possible. Not even 157 loops had dulled my love for her sweet scent, which made sense given that we really only spent like 5 minutes together in bed each loop, which was like 13 hours total. The trauma from the infinite looping was not my time in bed with Rose and Sophia. It was the weeks worth of hours spent in the dungeon getting through Floor 1 and spending some extra time grinding. (It would have been faster if I just ran through floor one without fighting anything, probably, but then I would have wasted my opportunity to grind with a moral justification).
Rose's eyes opened during the chest kissing, and she flashed me a smile before kissing me back when I reached her head. It said something about her quick thinking and pure love that even with my time advantage, she still always knew instantly what to do.
"I found the right combination," I said when we were done.
She lifted an eyebrow. "What loop is this?"
"You don't want to know. Hint: Three digits."
She frowned. No doubt she put together that it never would have taken three digits with two dwarf sacrifices, but she didn't mention it. "What now? We all go to Floor 3?"
"Yeah. I'll need your help especially."
"Why is that?"
"Because I love and need you the most."
Love Point Gained! Rosalyn +1
I heard Sophia growl in her sleep. Oh fuck, the USA was about to publicly announce that the Soviet Union moving nuclear warheads to Cuba was a declaration of war.
"Flattery aside, why do you really need my help?" Rose asked. It was really a sign of her iron control that she managed to keep an impassive look despite the love point, giving only the slightest of smiles. The fact she simultaneously pushed her crotch against me in what seemed to be an unconscious act was not worth reading into, in my opinion.
"The next floor seems to be a battle of brains rather than brawn, and you're the best out of all of us in that department, I think."
"Details?"
"You'll understand when you see."
"If it's a puzzle of some kind, I could think about it on the way."
"C'mon. Don't spoil the moment. It'll be more exciting if you see for yourself."
Rose's mouth bent into something of a pout, but she relented, and crawled over me to get out of bed for the 158th time. The fact I still hadn't gotten tired of it was a good sign. It always seemed to me that the happiest marriages were those where the couple never got tired of each other, both on a personal level and in the sense of fucking constantly. I had more or less undeniable evidence that Rose and I could live together for months without me ever getting tired of her being in bed with me.
Technically Sophia too, but that was less romantic and more concerning. Like, in Rose's case it felt like "see? she's wife material!" while in Sophia's it felt like "see? your secret lust for elves will never fade!" or something. It was true. The fact I was so afraid of fucking Dakka 24/7 and losing sight of my quest was a giant signpost pointing towards the fact my lust for elves was immensely strong. They say we hate that which reminds us of ourselves, and horny elves certainly reminded me of my debilitating fetish for elves.
Anyway, we got changed and left. It was fairly unremarkable since I had witnessed them change quite a few times by now. It remained a little unusual to me how Sophia was willing to be naked in front of Rose, womb tattoo and all, but she probably had her reasons. Maybe she considered my bedroom to be neutral territory where all women agreed they were horny and did not judge each other for that fact. Little did Sophia know that Rose was actually pure of heart, but projection was a powerful thing.
We met up with Hilda in the dining room and left for the dungeon. Hilda frowned at the sight of the three of us coming together, but she didn't know the half of it. Or maybe the 1/157th of it. I imagined an alternate reality where Hilda didn't have a deadly vagina and had snuck into my room with the other two instead of spending all night trying to master an impossibly difficult spell. Actually, now that I thought about it, wasn't I running out of bed space? There was theoretically room for one girl to rest on my chest, but that was it, as far as I could tell. That thought brought me some comfort. There was a "critical harem mass" of like 3-4 girls, at which point there simply was not enough surface area for everyone. (I didn't want to consider the possibility of me sleeping "on top" of someone.)
The first floor was uneventful, and the second floor was unchanged. Middle, right, right, middle, left. Honestly, despite how much I hated the dungeon, it was kind of like a second home to me at this point. I had been through the halls and teleporters so often it was like waking up groggily in the middle of the night to piss. We went down the stairs (while I internally frowned at none of them kneeling before me in awe of how difficult it had been to find that combination) and stood before the door to the third floor.
"Prepare yourselves," I said, and threw open the door.
We walked in, and everybody looked up.
"Ah," Rose said. "This might be hard."
Before us was a hallway that led directly to a towering silver gate that connected to the walls on either side of it, blocking the way further down. One had to open the gate to proceed, and the single sentence emblazoned on the gate's top made the method to open it more than clear. It was a riddle, a puzzle, and it went like this, in big silver letters:
What can change the nature of a man?
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"Regret," I suggested. Nothing.
Rose looked up thoughtfully at the door. "I imagine it is a more profound answer than that. Surely a dictionary attack of emotion-related nouns would not work."
"A beautiful woman!" Hilda declared, speaking about herself. Nothing. She wilted.
I shrugged at Rose. "It's probably not that complicated. The previous two floors were pure repetition. Why not this one?"
"Consider the intention between the prior two floors. They were clearly designed to waste time, or necessitate immense manpower to chew through. If we assume that holds true for this floor as well, then the answer will be something unintuitive and difficult to maximize time thinking about it. Perhaps this is the dungeon's answer to immense manpower: two hundred slaves sent to their death would not necessarily be able to quickly answer a problem of true philosophy, which this seems to be."
I sighed. "Nothing can," I said to the door. That sounded like something suitably despair-filled and hopeless for this dungeon, but alas, the gate remained still.
"Perhaps the answer is a hopeful one, to exploit the fact that few would reach this point in high spirits," Rose suggested.
Sophia, blushing slightly, walked up to the gate and whispered something I couldn't hear. Nothing happened. She walked back, looking equal parts annoyed and embarrassed.
Not really knowing what else to do, I started a dictionary attack while Rose continued to look up thoughtfully. Love. Hatred. Power. Greed. Betrayal. Death. Age. Suffering. Success. Life. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
This was starting to feel like an unfair question. Surely those things had changed the nature of a man before. Love certainly had. Did the gate just have one answer it arbitrarily considered correct while everything else was wrong? Were we just guessing to see what the maker of the gate thought was right?
"This is dumb," I finally said after running out of nouns to say. "Finding the right answer is impossible. We don't know what it wants."
Rose looked at me. "Not much of a philosopher, are we?"
"Huh?"
"The point of philosophy is not to find a right or wrong answer. That entire line of thinking is predicated on absolutes in a way that is simply incongruent with philosophy. To do philosophy, one must accept the world is absurd, and begin thinking in terms of transcendent concepts rather than absolutes."
"You lost me." The fuck is this babe saying? I quoted Kant once. I'm the best goddamn philosopher that exists.
Rose smirked, just a bit. I was struck with the realization she had probably determined the answer to the gate and was having a bit of fun before unveiling it. "The limits of our language are the limits of our world, they say, and this means that we limit the world to how we view it. If you believe that only regret can change the nature of man, then your perception of the world will shift such that regret is the source of all change. You can twist reality this way quite easily, for it is fundamentally absurd, as the stoics of history learned through their quest for self-mastery. They realized to master reality one had to look within and master one's perception, for change of the self reflected a change in the world, as unintuitive as that might seem."
"What's your point?"
"If you think that only love can change the nature of man, then only love can, and not regret. If you think that only hatred can change a man, then only hatred can, and not love or regret. There is no absolute answer. These are concepts, and reality does not bend to them. Reality bends to your application of the concepts upon it through your perception." She turned to the gate. "All things can change the nature of a man, as long as he wills it."
The gate creaked open.
"What the fuck?" I said. "Where did you learn that?"
"Bible study."
"OK."
So Floor 1 demanded you walk around for hours, Floor 2 demanded you murder like 200 dudes, and Floor 3 demanded you become a philosopher. Floor 3 was truly the biggest waste of time. If not for Rose's unusually involved bible study, this floor would have been the most tedious and difficult of them all. I would've had to actually read Kant instead of just quote him. What a nightmare.
Thankfully, that was all behind us. We stepped through the gate, and...
Is this question true or false: "This statement is false."
"The question only has meaning insofar as the words have meaning, and the question then becomes what the speaker meant with the statement, which is unknown to me."
How do you know that an external reality exists?
"My right hand exists, as per observation."
What happens when an unstoppable object hits an immovable object?
"Anything. When impossible objects or concepts are described by language, they are unmistakably in the realm of the absurd, and it is beyond me to decree what happens beyond the senses."
Rose strode through the opening gate.
Sophia, Hilda and I balked. What the fuck was Rose on? What was even happening?
I chased after her. "Rose, I'm pretty sure some of those answers were bullshit."
She raised an eyebrow. "Did you not recall what I said? In philosophy, one must abandon a binary concept of truth. The point of this floor is not to present proper riddles with real-world answers that one deduces through careful analysis. The point, indeed, is to answer with philosophical positions. I suspect that any answer based on absolutism will be rejected, while any answer that posits a philosophical position would be accepted."
I frowned. "Doesn't 'all things can change the nature of a man' exclude an answer like 'nothing can change the nature of a man'?"
"Note 'should he will it.' The philosophical position is that reality bends to our perception, and must be included in the answer. What philosophical position would 'nothing can change the nature of a man' be indicating on its own? As it stands, it is no different from any other flat, non-philosophical answer."
"This seems dumb. How is stating a flat absolutist answer any different from stating a flat philosophical answer?"
"One is what the gate wants."
I did my best imitation of Sophia's scowl. "I hate this dungeon so, so much."
Rose shrugged.
On the bright side, thanks to her pretentious gigabrain, we had more or less subverted the third floor's plans for us. It was far from the misery grinder that the second floor had been. Impossible riddles defeated by impossibly pretentious answers. After this there was just one more floor, then a boss, and then we could be free. God, there was nothing I wanted more than to get the fuck out of this dungeon. I could not believe what a drag it had been.
We passed through a series of silver gates, until eventually, we found a golden one, clearly different from the others. There was no riddle emblazoned on it, but as I approached, the metal on the top began to morph. It twisted and twisted until eventually there was a sentence in the same place all the previous riddles had been.
What is Medea's secret?