One really easy way to prevent anyone stumbling upon my dungeon core, I realized, would be to just…bury myself. Go fully underground. It wasn’t like I needed to breathe, as far as I could tell, and I knew that I didn’t need to eat or drink. Who said a “dungeon” should be designed for the convenience of the adventurers, after all?
When I grabbed a wave of earth to bury the entrance to my cave, however, it slid through my ethereal grasp. INVALID LAYOUT: NO VIABLE PATH TO CORE flashed across my vision in irritated red glyphs.
Oh, okay. I see how it is. That must have been the “certain restrictions” mentioned in [Dungeon Domain]’s description. You stick me in a fragile, helpless monster body that’s worth a lot of money dead, and then you wanna tell me how I can and can’t protect myself. Man, I’ve been in this world for like an hour and a half, tops, and I’m already sick of it.
Alright. Fine. Viable path to core it is, but that didn’t mean it had to be a visible path to my core. Carefully, I tugged at the soil, trying to scoot the underbrush along without uprooting it. After a few minutes, a short berm of earth rose in front of the entrance to my cave. With the bushes growing along it, the ridge was just tall enough that you couldn’t see the cave if you were standing level with it, and the foliage I’d relocated was dense enough, even brown and leafless as it was with winter on the horizon, that it was hard to see the hole from above or from the side. The system didn’t seem to mind that, and I felt rather clever about it. Still, it wasn’t enough.
With a series of loud cracks and grinding sounds, I sank claws of azoth into the stone beneath my body, digging straight down. As my awareness suffused the cave, I suddenly saw its interior from every possible vantage point. This was briefly disorienting, but it also gave me my first glimpse of my new body.
As a dungeon core, I’d expected to be some sort of crystal orb or something, maybe glowing a nice blue or an ominous red. Instead, it seemed that when the system had described me as the “heart of a dungeon,” it was being literal. This monstrous body looked like nothing so much as a human heart, made of metal and larger than a man’s torso. It was almost molluscoid: ridged, knobby plates of gunmetal keratin wrapped asymmetrically around scaled, twitching flesh in a sickly shade of black-green. Spiky growths of iron-shavings gristle bloomed here and there across its surface, like ugly tufts of hair. A cluster of puckered orifices twitched unsettlingly at the top end, where the aorta and vena cava would have emerged from a human heart.
Overall, I was pretty gross.
Thankfully, I had a lot of experience being a disgusting abomination trapped in a monstrous body. I’d gotten pretty good, over the years, at loving and caring for the body I was in on any given day: even if I didn’t like it, and even if I needed to change it, it was still me.
A particularly forceful yank widened the crack beneath me enough that my body tumbled into it, bouncing end-over-end several times before landing with a noise that was somehow both a clank and a splat.
You have taken damage from falling!
Ah. Well. It turned out that loving something despite its flaws didn’t protect it from fall damage. I resolved to be a little more careful.
It took me several more cycles of [Dungeon Domain], working for hours past sunset, but I managed to dig out a more-or-less vertical shaft a solid sixty feet deep, and maybe ten feet wide. Any adventurers that wanted to slay me better have brought rope and climbing gear. I didn’t have any monstrous minions at my disposal (yet), but this was real life. I wasn’t designing an adventurer’s playground full of flat, spacious corridors and regularly-timed enemy spawns: I was designing a fortress, and it was going to keep people out. I intended to take full advantage of three-dimensionality in a way that your average dungeon-crawler RPG simply could not.
This wasn’t the end of my still-pretty-basic plans for the dungeon, not by a long shot, but it would be a temporary stopping point for now. Why, you ask?
[????]
Lv. 0 Dungeon Core [Boss]
[Fragile] [Immobile]
Health:
█████
?/?
Azoth:
███░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
?/? XP:
████████████████████
10/? The living heart of a dungeon. Powerful but sessile monsters with an innate ability to magically twist and corrupt their surroundings, dungeon cores lurk at the heart of dungeons – perilous labyrinths, at once spider’s web and snail’s shell, from which monsters emerge to prey upon the innocent. Slay it, and destroy the dungeon. [Skills] [Inventory] [Quests]
Because I’d accumulated enough xp to hit level 1!
Level Up!
Dungeon Core Lv. 0 -> Dungeon Core Lv.1
Base stats increased
Some secondary stats increased
+1 skill point
Achievement Unlocked!
First Steps
Condition: Reach lv. 1
+1 skill point
Tiny increase to some basic stats
Stolen story; please report.
An achievement just for reaching level 1? That was kind of generous. Made me wonder about the attrition curve at lower levels in this world. All the more reason to spend those skill points as soon as possible, I supposed.
When I tabbed back over to the skills page, a second list had appeared next to the first, this one containing the new skills I had the option to learn. SP: 2 floated in the upper right-hand corner of the window, its letters sparkling in cheerful gold. I’d need to take some time to look through my options. Ordinarily, if this were a game, my focus would be on acquiring skills that would speed up my progression - the earlier you picked up the efficiency-boosters, the greater the cumulative effect, after all. That decision was based on the low price of failure, though - if I lost, I could just start again. Here, I couldn’t assume that to be the case. My focus would need to be on securing the biggest immediate boosts to my power, in order to maximize my chances of survival. With that in mind, I started reading down the list.
A lot of the skills seemed pretty niche - stuff that might be nice to have eventually, but that wouldn’t increase my immediate survivability. [Architect], [Monster Lore]... [Durability] seemed promising at first, increasing my HP and natural armor, but I concluded that if any adventurers made it to the core, I’d already lost, so there was no point in picking that up. Eventually, I settled on [Bind Minion] and [Fast Shaping].
[Bind Minion] did exactly what it sounded like - I could now magically link creatures to the dungeon. There were various restrictions, of course - for example, I couldn’t have monsters with a level higher than my own - but from the skill description it seemed like this was a necessary prerequisite for things like tagging my minions to not set off traps and to be able to open magically-locked dungeon doors, eventually promoting some of them to boss monsters, and so on. It also gave me a cut of my minions’ xp gains, in return for allowing them to earn xp for various dungeon-related activities. From the skill’s description, I couldn’t tell whether or not binding a minion to the dungeon actually gave me any authority over them, or even the ability to communicate with them. If it did give me some way to order them around, I hoped it wasn’t like a mind control situation. That would be a solid ethical no-go, in my opinion. I’d have to experiment with it on some animals first, see if that clarified anything.
[Fast Shaping] was maybe the more immediately impactful of the two skills I picked up. Compared to [Bind Minion], its effect was very simple: it let me increase the speed at which [Dungeon Domain] reshaped my surroundings by pouring more azoth into it. It had taken me hours to dig out this extremely rudimentary layout: I’d need to move much faster if I wanted to stay ahead of the inevitable adventurers showing up to delve me.
That done, I got right back to work. I began digging out another chamber at the bottom of my shaft. I say “digging,” but [Dungeon Domain] didn’t seem to work quite like that. It wasn’t telekinesis, I wasn’t grabbing chunks of material and hurling them around. It wasn’t like I could simply mold the stone like clay either. My azoth, infused into it, let me move and reshape it, but some of its essential stone-ness remained, hard and solid - hence the earthquakes, and the splitting into crevasses, and the fact that the shaft I’d dug was rough and uneven rather than a perfectly cylindrical borehole. Still, I didn’t need to haul away loads of rubble as though I was hacking this shit open with a pickaxe. It was like I was pulling on the whole landscape, tearing the cave open.
The new cave was another cylinder, about half the height of the main shaft and set so that its midpoint was level with the main shaft’s floor. By tugging on the cave floor beneath myself, I was able to scoot my body to the center of the second chamber. Having done so, I raised a wide pillar beneath myself, rising almost to the cavern roof. I then took the time to smooth the sides of the pillar and the walls of the cave as much as I could, eliminating handholds and all irregularities. I even beveled the edges of the pillar-top, to make it harder for anyone to snag them with a grappling hook or the like and climb up to me. Then, I began to scoop away the walls of the lower half of the chamber, widening it into a bell-shape. The only place to stand in the room was a small ledge at the threshold.
The next step was going to be a little more finicky. A stream ran through the forest near the edge of my domain. I began to dig a tunnel, leading from the roof of the second chamber to the bank of the stream. The idea was that I would flood the second chamber up to the ledge, and then a foot or two more. Anyone who climbed down the shaft would have to wade through knee-deep water into the second chamber. With any luck, they’d walk right off the ledge and drown, but even if they didn’t they’d still somehow have to climb up the pillar to get to me. It was far from an insurmountable obstacle, but it would hopefully buy me enough time to figure something else out.
The tunnel finally connected to the stream, and the water began to flow down to me. It was shallow, and slow-flowing, so to save time I widened the tunnel’s mouth enough to swallow the whole stream. This was definitely still going to take a while, though. I set Dungeon Domain back to passive mode and pondered my next steps.
I didn’t have any more ideas for how to expand the dungeon’s layout yet - nothing concrete, at least. Eventually I’d want monsters, and traps, and all of that, but I couldn’t plan the facilities for them in advance without knowing more about the tools I’d be working with. I needed to bind a minion.
I turned my attention to the forest on the surface. A night breeze rustled through the leafless branches. The moon, a bare crescent, lit the darkness only faintly. My domain allowed me to see (and hear) from every point in the forest simultaneously, but I didn’t appear to have any enhanced night vision, so mostly I just had a panopticon view of Complete Fucking Darkness™. However, [Domain Awareness] allowed me to extend my senses through any area or thing affected by [Dungeon Domain] - including my sense of proprioception. I was aware of the woods like they were my own body, and everything in them as well. Every isopod scuttling through the leaf rubbish, every squirrel dray and bird nest, every inch of tree-roots webbed through the soil - I was present in them all.
At least, I assumed that’s what all that stuff was. Like I said, I couldn’t actually see any of it, and my awareness was kind of nebulous - just because you know where your hand is, doesn’t mean you could map out the position of every hair on it.
Man, hopefully I’d be able to pick up some more sensory enhancements as I leveled. This early-game shit was kind of a pain in the ass.
An eerie trill sounded in the quiet of the night, startling me. I’m sure my heart rate would have spiked if I’d still had a heart rather than being a heart: my dungeon core body’s unsettling, arrhythmic twitches didn’t seem to change their tempo at all, however. Oh, hey, though, that was an owl! I was like 90% sure. There was something sitting on a branch right where the noise had come from, a little less than a foot tall. An owl seemed like an okay experimental subject for minionization.
I pulled up my status window, noticing a new submenu next to the unavailable [Quests] tab that said [Dungeon]. Sure enough, the Dungeon menu had a variety of subfields, one of which said [Minions] and had a button with a quill pen and plus sign on it. One tap later, and the owl was highlighted in my vision.
Owl - Lv. 1
Bind Owl as a minion?
[No] [Yes]
With no fuss or fanfare, the formerly-empty minion list now had a single entry: Owl - Lv. 1.
“Hey,” I thought at the owl. “Hey, owl. This is your dungeon speaking.” It didn’t respond. I concentrated really hard in case that would let me establish a telepathic connection with it or something. Similarly, no dice.
Bruh. For real? Did [Bind Minion] do literally nothing?
The owl leapt from the branch, gliding in eerily silent flight off into the shadows. A moment later, a notification appeared in my feed.
Owl (Minion) killed Mouse! You gained xp from xp sharing.
My experience meter tracked upwards by the barest interval. Well, it wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. Over time, even little gains could add up into something big. I didn’t have time, though, so I’d need to finesse the math here a little bit.
It was time to minionize one million animals.