After comparing notes with Mest Toreth, the dungeon specialist, asked if he could examine me. As he would know more about the growth of a dungeon than Mest does I agreed. From what he says the core inside of me is about the size a wild one would be when it is just starting to be able to manipulate its surroundings, but nowhere near the maturity of one at that stage.

According to him my core can’t be more than a year old, and its maturity level reflects that, but its size has grown much faster than even the fastest growing wild cores. He attributes that to three things, the first is the dungeon cores I absorbed a while back, the second is the fact that my territory is massive for such a young dungeon, giving my core significantly more resources to work with, and the third is my recent evolution, which Mest says more than doubled the size of my core. Though Toreth did say that the core would still be massive for its maturity level even if it was half its current size.

Toreth also said that my core is different from any other he’s observed, but it is too early to tell exactly how it is different, it will have to develop a bit more. He’s reasonably convinced about the cause of the change, however, a developing core being inside someone while they evolve hasn’t happened before, or, for that matter, has a core developed inside another creature at least not to the knowledge of anyone present.

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It’s pretty well known that many more powerful dungeons have lords instead of cores, basically what happens is the core gets powerful enough to forge itself a body, or it just wants one for some reason and it doesn’t actually take a lot of effort to make one, that part isn’t too clear. There is a lot of nuances there that I don’t really understand, but it’s their job to understand every detail of dungeons, not mine. Anyway, It’s completely unheard of for a creature to become a dungeon lord, but not for a dungeon lord to exist, so i’m special, but not that special.

The good news is I got a time frame for when I should be able to use my core in a meaningful way. In about a year I will be able to build great labyrinths with my mind, though a particularly traumatic event could speed that up. The logic behind that is wild dungeons would only really be traumatized after just barely fending off an intruder, or being forced to endure constant heavy assault for a long time, both would need the dungeon to grow stronger faster in order to compensate.

As to why it will take a year, barring extraneous circumstances, a core takes roughly two years to be developed enough to do anything, and while mine is getting bigger rapidly, it isn’t maturing faster than average, or at least not by a notable margin.

This is all pretty exciting, but it still doesn’t really feel real. I mean we are talking about something that is a year away, never in my life have I had to consider something that far away. except on my birthday when I was younger, back when I couldn’t wait for the next birthday, but that doesn’t really count.

Anyway, Good Night Diary