dIt was a dungeon. Blisters upon the surface of the world they said. Or beneath it. Either way what I saw could be nothing else. Honestly its amazing I hadn’t realized it sooner, it explained so much.

There was little light down here, but that was more than enough to identify this place for what it was, however damaged my vision might be. The light poked its way in through the countless tiny holes in the ‘forest floor’ above, invisible under the blinding light of the sun, but all but impossible to miss from down here.

It was beautiful. The blanket of intertwining roots and vines that I’d mistaken for solid ground looked like a starry night sky from down here, and produced almost as little light. The jungle didn’t end when the surface did, but it did thin a bit, enough that I could see the massive pillars that held this edifice of nature above the true ground, wherever that was down there.

They were trees, the titans of the forest that I’d seen from the surface. They were far larger than I would have ever guessed, stretching far beneath what my blurry eyes could make out.

Oh, this was a dungeon all right. Why the humans had let it remain somewhere I could only assume was quite close to their territory I didn’t know. Maybe it was one of the indestructible ones. Maybe it was too useful to be done away with. Maybe no one had ever made it to the bottom.

That would be a sight, if you could see anything down there. Not really worth thinking about for me, cause the only way I was making it down there was in something’s belly, and I hadn’t spent so much effort escaping the tentacled creature to let myself get eaten now.

I forced my bruised and broken body to move, bending upwards with a pained groan. I scrambled on the tangled mess of roots I’d slammed into to help my abdominal muscles along and managed to get high enough to unhook my right foot from the mess that had caught me, saved me, and, from the feeling, nearly broken my ankle.

I flipped myself back around to a position less likely to make me lose the foot and tried to remember what I knew of dungeons. They were unpredictable places, full of powerful and dangerous creatures.

The hobs craved them, always gossiping like old housewives about this or that clan claiming a new one. I’d never taken their greed all that seriously, they’d never had the balls to seek one for themselves, and nine times out of ten they were gossiping about that very same clan getting wiped out not a week later.

My mother’s stories supplied some more relevant information, giving me a clue about the human perspective. They called them cursed blisters on the world, because they were where mana came up from the depths. The most dangerous things beneath the earth followed the mana upwards even as the preexisting creatures mutated and suffered from the early stages of mana madness.

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This drove them to hunt and kill, eventually expanding outwards in destructive beast hordes, hence the human superstitious hatred of them. They were the number one reason that humans had adventurers alongside their standard military. After all you had to pay your military full time wages for their service, but when you put a bounty on something you only had to fork over the cash if the would-be heroes won.

When they died you didn’t have to give up a dime. Humans really were brilliant, in an evil sort of way.

It did a lot to explain why the old priest had sent me here, of all places, to die. The extreme levels of mana in the air enhanced many forms of growth, likely including the charmingly murder focused human method. I didn’t really understand the underlying mechanics of divine soul enhancement well enough to know for sure how mana level would affect it, but it certainly had a pronounced effect on the proportion of hobs in any tribe successful enough to actually hold a dungeon.

A dungeon was, indeed, the best choice for a place to train, assuming you could survive the danger. But the joke was on the priest this time, cause they were also the best place in the world to hide. Dark as sin, plenty of cover to eliminate whatever visibility was left, and best of all, mana-rich as an archmage’s tower.

I was no master of magic, but even I knew that picking out a greenskin lurking in a jungle was harder than spotting one loitering around on an empty plain. The overwhelming magical pressure of the depths would do just that, overwhelm whatever signals the priest’s spell sent back to him.. All I had to do was reach the bottom of a dungeon where even the surface predators made want to piss myself.

So, you know, no trouble.

No sense in wasting time. Of my original three priorities I had more or less solved two. The blood and meat of that wannabe murder-chicken was quite filling, and I knew I could live for a few days without another meal.

However, the primary goal of not getting my ass murdered and eaten was, if anything, worse off than it had been at the beginning. Not only had I drastically underestimated how nasty the beasties here would be, but I’d lost what little progress I’d made in my flight from the tentacled creature.

Speaking of which...I looked upwards, and found no sign of it. I might be able to go back upwards safely, even find my way back to where I’d abandoned my weapons.

So I did just that. Slowly. So. Fucking. Slowly. Blood-eyed stars, I was seriously reevaluating the practicality of going any deeper with all the wounds piling up. I was collecting them them like a magpie hoarding shinies, and quite frankly I was far less happy about it. It was only a matter of time until this bullshit ended with me dead, and I needed an answer to the problem.

I spent the entire trip back thrashing out a rough idea of what that answer might be, and I got something halfway serviceable by the time I’d finished retracing my steps. The place was a mess. The creature looked to have come back here to claw up the place and strip vast swathes of bark from the trees seemingly at random. After a second I realized the truth of it: they were all the places where blood had fallen. Someone was desperate for food, and it wasn’t me for once.

It light of that, I was more than happy to collect what remained of my ‘weapons’ and scram. I was seriously reconsidering my plans. Again. A hacked up branch club and some makeshift javelins were fine to ward off the odd leopard or murder-chicken (I still couldn’t believe I’d almost died to that), but a dungeon required more serious hardware.

So, hobbling through the thorn filled jungle with an armful of pointy sticks, I came up with the third iteration of my patented Threefold Not-Dying Plan.