Although this wasn’t necessarily proven, I believed that jobs worked much like the way heroes worked. A soul was a lore, the life story of a person. When a person became powerful enough, making enough connections with the world, with blessings, and with history, their soul became a sort of wondering curse, an incomplete lore looking for a new host that could help it change its fate.

When a person’s knowledge, history, and beliefs aligned with the lore of a hero, then the mark of the hero fell upon them. They would steadily gain access to the lore, experience, and knowledge of everyone who possessed the mark before. Thus, these legacy heroes would periodically be born across the continent, living often extraordinary lives, which had the side-effect of ending tragically.

If that was the case, then I reasoned that jobs were also a clump of lore that ultimately bound itself to human beings that met the basic requirements. Thus, the job granted the user the ability to acquire lore, experience, and knowledge which slowly unlocked as they leveled. That was the nature of the job system, and why it was often so redundant and seemingly random. In the end, it was just lore fragments from past blacksmiths. Of course, where there was only one legacy hero a generation, jobs seemed to be able to replicate endlessly.

This lore could be grafted onto an object, like with Hero and Knight tokens, and granted to people who fulfill some arbitrary agreement. I’d need to find out one day how these were created, and if others could be made similarly. For most people though, they gained their jobs gradually, starting at the lowest tier. I liked to see jobs as having four tiers. When your history and experience reflect a job enough, it minds you and you begin to earn experience in the lowest tier. Through the process of unlocking the tier, you gain access to various skills.

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

Eventually, once you’ve developed enough, another job, a more complicated and refined version of the previous job, attaches to your soul reflecting the next tier. This could happen four times before reaching the mastery of said job, refining to the very peak of a certain knowledge base. This wouldn’t necessarily make you the top of your field. There could still be a magician with mastery in multiple disciplines, or even potentially all of them. Would that open up the fifth tier? I had no clue. If there was such a tier, it’d be beyond mastery. What level would that be? Godhood?

In the case of knowing about Dungeons, you had the Dungeon Diver, a job designed toward increasing survivability in a dungeon. Once you learn enough about the art of Dungeon Diving, or more specifically once you’ve been bound with a blessing, you meet the criteria for True Dungeon Diver. This job centers around understanding and becoming one with a dungeon. Once you become one with a Dungeon, you unlock Dungeon Master. This tier is based on controlling a dungeon. Finally, the final tier would be Dungeon Builder, the ability to create a dungeon.

I didn’t learn them in this order. I learned True Dungeon Diver before I unlocked Dungeon Diver, and Dungeon Builder before I unlocked Dungeon Master. I was able to get Dungeon Builder early in the same way I was able to skip a lot of steps, by depending on the Dungeon Store. I ended up in a weird state where I built a dungeon, but my control over it wasn’t perfect because I lacked the Dungeon Master job. This led to Chalm nearly being destroyed upon my disappearance, but that was rectified thanks to Maid’s Lament, and I finally gained all four, although perhaps not up to the levels and experience they should be.

The point being, it should be clear how difficult it was to become a Dungeon Builder, and how rare they must be. Since I was one, it was time to start taking advantage of it.