But we didn't die.

Not all of us.

All of us got hurt.

A lot.

Star and I had this whole dramatic arc. There was a great bit with our game guide who had come from another planet than the one that they had entered the dungeon on and so the tech didn't mesh perfectly and they were right on the verge of pupating but they had all these questions about what that would mean for who they were and they figured it wouldn't hurt just to hang around for awhile. They weren't sure if there was anything better waiting anywhere.

I watched all my friends die. I made new friends. They died too.

Star left.

I don't know if he's still out there or not. I don't know if he got to keep his sentience or if the amulet's timer ran out before he could kill the fractal royalty of the geometron squagoon.

And I found a book.

Even more than Sam coughing their life blood onto my laser breastplate or that really great teacher I had when I was so vulnerable to the world, this book changed my life.

It wasn't because it was a good book. It was good enough, I guess. But it had a great impact on my life. It's the reason I'm still here today.

Because of a book full of bullshit.

It was called The Dungeon Alchemist's Cookbook.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Some really cool person who probably gives really good handjobs had written 'The Alchemist's Cookbook' in the now dissolved society that I grew up and could usually get a high D or low C in when we got our annual citizen's report card. The Asey was a book full of state changing explorations and ways of connecting with different parts of you and one another. It had information about drugs and philosophies and breathing. It had music and exercises. It was a way of traveling between states of being.

I never read it on Erf before it was mined and destroyed. I found a copy of it in the dungeon after I solved the sex problem of the whoring sphinx.

The Dungeon Alchemist's Cookbook had things like that but it was for the dungeon. It was disguised as microwave manual translated into pornography. But when I ate the first page, I didn't feel fondled, I felt like someone was speaking to me.

Welcome Crawler, this book is fine. It's off camera for everyone else but people will look at you weird if you spend too much time reading the manual and not masturbating.

No, don't start now, now is too soon, it will look suspicious. Whatever you do, relax.

Just kidding, it doesn't matter. This book only generates when there is a sufficiently small number of viewers for a crawler and my algorithms indicate that it's very unlikely they will get suspicious about much of anything. In fact, my algorithms is pretty sure that someone watching this is one of the authors.

Neat, huh!?

As you know, you're stuck in a hellish dungeon that you can't escape from. You've probably had several, prolonged periods of traumatic shutdown, uncontrollable rage, bouts of uncontrollable sobbing, and similar experiences. If you haven't been stabbed, you're probably about to be.

Well, guess what!? There's nothing you can do to change that.

But there are things you can do to change yourself and invite others to change with you.

This book has a million little ways that dying horrible deaths and witnessing the dismembering of those you love or wish you could love, wish you could feel anything because of how fried your overstimulated brain must be after we raked it over the carefully designed glass we arranged to be in the road we did the raking of the brain.

You can't choose a lot in this world that is working really hard to kill you; but you can choose how you respond to that world.