Unknown point of view:

I woke up in a dark, foggy place, but could somehow still see as if it were late afternoon. Feeling chill, I looked down to see that I was stark naked. “I hope you’re not planning on doing anything perverted. I’ll bite your throat out if I have to.” Waking up in a creepy place naked was never a good thing when you were a woman. Especially when you were an Elf woman, which all of the human men seemed to like even more than their own women. Disgusting pigs.

“Oh I don’t plan on doing anything to you unless you want me to.” said a creepy voice, and I looked around. A few seconds later a giant gray face came out of the darkness, smiling at me with a mouth full of pointed teeth.

“Who are you?” I said, taking a step back, even though I doubted there was anywhere I could go.

“Me? I’m just the god of dungeons.” he said, as if I should have known that.

“Never heard of you.” I said. I had heard that the world used to not have dungeons, but one day they showed up, thousands of years ago, but I didn’t know some god was the reason they showed up.

“Well, the temple certainly isn’t going to tell you about me. They only worship the good gods and neutral gods. Gods like me only get mentioned when they want to make you angry or scared, or they want you to kill our followers.”

“So you’re an evil god?”

“According to them, sure. But evil is really in the eye of the beholder. Sometimes literally, if one of my children get strong enough to make a beholder with an evil eye.”

“So, you aren’t evil?”

“I help balance the planet’s energy while bringing entertainment to myself and the other gods. Is that really evil?”

“You balance energy? You mean that there should be Development Points in the air, just like mana?”

“Of course. You see, for us gods, DP actually has another meaning. Divinity Points. The energy you call DP is the divine energy which all souls channel from outside the universe. Mortals can use it too, but the soul is the only source of this energy they ever have, so they never have enough to use it. The problem with letting it just leak out from people like mana is that the gods like to convert it into mana so they can stretch it further, like watering down ale. Sure your soul normally converts a bit, to help refill your body, but the gods make sure that there’s never any in the air for you to use by using it all themselves.”

“And they shouldn’t?”

“Sweety, they are monopolizing a resource that mortals should also have access to. It’s no different than a noble claiming a stretch of river, and all nobles owning every stream, river, and lake. The commoners would either have to beg them for it, like the priests do, or they would have to get it slowly from wells, like souls do. So, to combat this injustice, I made dungeons, which convert mana into divine energy. That way the people can use it by gathering the crystallized form of it from the monsters they kill in dungeons.”

“Why not just crystallize it and give it to them? Why make them risk their lives?”

“Because it’s a scarce resource. If you don’t make them put in effort, people will just take all of it for themselves. If they have to fight, then it requires hard work to get it, and no one person can claim it for themselves.”

I nodded. “So, what does this have to do with me?”

“You were a very bad person in life. You were part of the assassin’s guild and killed how many people? Twenty three? How much punishment do you think you’ll receive if you go to hell?”

“According to that priest I killed, I’ll have to serve for the remainder of the life of all of my victims.”

The giant head nodded. “What I’m offering is a way to not have to do that. You see, long ago the gods came to an agreement. No soul can be punished for more than a thousand years before it has to be offered reincarnation. And the interesting thing is that, as long as you don’t get put in a real body, like a homunculus, you can spend the next thousand years in the mortal world and it won’t count as you being alive, which means your thousand year countdown is still happening.”

“I can live in the mortal world when I’m dead? Like as a ghost?”

“That, or as a power source for an enchanted object. Or as the controlling intelligence for a golem. For some reason golem engineers really like using the souls of sapient beings. I’ll just be placing you in a magical device called a Dungeon Core that I made to control dungeons, and you’ll work for me until the core is destroyed. And if you want, and do well enough, you might even get a second chance. So, what do you say?”

I only had to think about it for a few seconds. Avoiding the punishment I would get in hell while getting to control an entire dungeon? Yes please. It wasn’t that I liked killing people, but it was a good way to make money, and I was good at it. Maybe this time they’ll leave me alone and I won’t have to do it again.

After agreeing I felt a rush of knowledge flowing into my head. Or where ever souls stored memories, as I was pretty sure I was dead. The giant head said that was easier than lecturing me for several weeks. I then felt dizzy and my body started to waver, like an illusion was breaking down.

When I woke up my body was a glass-like sphere. Or maybe it was some sort of crystal. ‘Status?’ I thought.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Name: Core Number 34580132

Race: Dungeon Core (Construct)

Age: 0 days

DP: 0

Common Talents

Strength: None

Endurance: None

Dexterity: None

Intelligence: Average

Willpower: Average

Wisdom: Average

Charisma: Minor

Personality: Average

Perception: Major

Stats

Strength: 0

Endurance: 0

Dexterity: 0

Intelligence: 0

Willpower: 0

Wisdom: 0

Charisma: 0

Personality: 0

Perception: 1

Talents

Perfect DP Conversion

Petty Spacial Magic

Yeah, that sounded about right for a new dungeon core. I looked around. Well, I tried to. From what I could tell I was buried around a hundred meters underground inside solid rock. I had no idea how I got here. Maybe that god teleported out a sphere of rock and teleported me into its former location? Maybe he transmuted the stone into a body for me? Not that it mattered. What mattered was that I was still alive. Or, at least not entirely dead.

Time to get started, I guess. If I did well enough, but still died, that god had promised to give me a replacement body as long as a thousand years hadn’t yet passed, so I needed to do my best. The first step in the process was to start digging. I willed a sphere of stone around me to go away, and it did so, dropping me by one meter. A feeling like hitting a nerve in my elbow went through me. Ouch. I might not have nerves any more, but that doesn’t mean I can’t feel pain, and I’m pretty sure I just got the equivalent of a bruise. Maybe I can grow a shell around myself to protect against that, like a mortal wearing armor. Or wearing anything I guess. I just realized I was technically naked, not that anyone would see me if I didn’t do something stupid.

For dissolving a sphere of rock about two meters in diameter, I got seven DP. Great. I just needed tens of thousands more to make a descent dungeon, then open it to the surface when I was ready. The DP Conversion talent might let me convert objects into DP and DP into objects as long as I knew enough about the object, but the best way to make DP was to open yourself to the surface so the ambient mana flowed down here and you could convert it. Doing that too early was just asking to be killed, however, so for now I would have to stick to digging out stone and the petty amount of regeneration my soul gave me.

After digging a long corridor with ten large rooms off to each side I had around five thousand DP saved up. That should be enough for what I wanted. I opened up my Dungeon Shop, like the DP menu mortals would get but exclusively for Dungeon Cores, and started buying lifeforms. I was able to buy packages for things like soil bacteria, worms, ants, spiders, etc, as they were just background creatures. Anything that would actually be absorbing DP had to be purchased separately because they had to be modified separately to be able to absorb it from the air. For that I purchased squirrels, horned rabbits, jackalopes, and deer as herbivores and boars, wolves, and bears as carnivores or omnivores. That should be enough variation. I was from a forest region, and was most familiar with forest biomes, so that’s where I would start.

I put soil into all of the rooms I built along with grass and put a few clones of each of the herbivores in them. They didn’t look like they were growing quickly, and actually started starving as the grass wasn’t large enough to support them, then I remembered that they had to have DP to absorb to not get hungry. I released a hundred points worth, the energy rushing down the corridor into each room, then started leaking it out at a rate of ten per day. They grew and bred quickly, and within a month I had too many in each room and had to split them up. A month after that I split them again, digging more rooms, and soon I had four rooms each of four different herbivores.

I guess I needed to build them a place to live. As that place would be the actual dungeon, though, I didn’t want that area to be connected to me. So, I stretched out my perception to its outer limit and dissolved some stone there. I had been watching the animals every day, even the ones that couldn’t absorb DP like the ants and spiders, so my Perception had gotten quite the workout, which meant that I could stretch my perception almost a kilometer away. With an empty spot, I opened my menu and bought the knowledge of how to make a fake core. This would be needed to spread DP into the new area.

Once all of the knowledge was inside my mind, I created one in the middle of the empty space. It cost over ten thousand DP to do that, though, so I wouldn’t be able to make that many. Once it was there, I followed the instructions in my brain to connect it to myself. My senses weren’t quite as good if I used it to sense the area around it, but it was better than if I was trying to sense things without it. I released a hundred points of DP from it, but it dripped out of the surface instead of becoming a gas like it was supposed to. Right, the area was only a one meter sphere. It couldn’t spread out enough to become a gas.

I dug out the room a bit more, being sure to leave the fake core on a pedestal so I wouldn’t feel pain again, then dug a tunnel and a bigger room in front of it. I wouldn’t die if that core was damaged or even destroyed, but it would still hurt me, so I wanted to hide it. I planted a bit of ivy near the entrance to the room to try and hide it, then spread a bit around the cave so that it wouldn’t look out of place. I then dug out of the large room, sculpting around it to make it look like a natural cave, if only to keep up appearances, and started expanding the room. I wanted it to be at least a few kilometers across.

I spread plants and trees to the new massive cave and went back to my animals. All of the herbivores were at maximum population again, but I should have more than enough, so I didn’t bother splitting them. I started my omnivore/carnivore species down another corridor and flooded their area with DP as well. They were meat eaters, though, so I sometimes willed one of the herbivores to be sent into their pens so that they could have a snack. Not that they needed the food. DP could just become the nutrients they needed if they needed any. They were just carnivores, and I wanted them to act like it. Especially the wolves. They were so cute.

That’s how I got my first skill, Teleport, which let me move objects or lifeforms from one location to another. Strangely, though, the description said that it would only work on willing beings, so I guess I couldn’t just dump adventures into spike pits.

A few months later, I had forced the plants in the dungeon to grow enough by pushing mana into them that I could move animals into it. Realizing that I should name it, but being really bad with names, I hit the ‘auto-name’ button on the dungeon’s interface. ‘Tranquil Forest’. It could be worse. Most dungeons were named that way anyway, based on their theme, so it would be fine. It’s not like the Adventurers would care, as long as they could kill my pets and loot the place.

I let everything develop for a little while before stretching out my senses one more time. By this point I could see over five kilometers from my proper core and four from the fake one. Up on the surface I found a small cave where a bear lived. That would work. As soon as I connected to the cave, though, the DP level of the air started to decrease. I forgot that it would spread outside. I quickly put a barrier over the cave entrance and the leak stopped. I released a few hundred more DP to make up for the loss and waited. I was already releasing over a hundred per day just to keep my pets alive, so that wasn’t a big deal. The bear might not be a great source of mana, as it didn’t have a soul, but its body still produced a bit through its metabolism. It would be worth a dozen trees or a thousand ferns if it would just live in the dungeon.

The rush of DP had awakened it from hybernation, and it took a week to wonder down into the proper dungeon. Once it was down there, I built the special Dungeon Tunnel that would act as a portal, connecting the first floor of my new dungeon to the barrier at the mouth of the cave. I didn’t see any people nearby when I was on the surface, but I’m sure they’ll find me eventually. Until then, I would instruct my pets on how to use DP to be what they wanted to be and let them decide how to get stronger.

A few weeks later one of my boars, one that had figured out how to breath fire, disappeared. I don’t know what happened to it, but that didn’t matter. It was getting pretty crowded down here, and my pets were free to leave if they wanted. A week later, though, five humans entered my dungeon. I sent a few pets out to play with them, but I didn’t take them too seriously. After all, they were my first guests, and I didn’t want them to think I was a mean dungeon. After killing many of my pets, though, they wiped out all of the bears I had guarding my fake core. I thought that would be all they did, but the next day they went out and hunted in the area, killing almost all of the pets I had left. Why would they do that? I was trying to be nice and they just killed off all of my pets. I tried to send what wolves I had left in my pens to attack them, but I couldn’t teleport any of them too close to the humans, so I gave up. Maybe if I stopped attacking them, they would go away.

That’s when they went to the back of my boss room, went through the ivy curtain, and walked into my fake core room. That close to a fake core I could actually hear, but they just spoke gibberish. Great. I had to be in another country. Or was this another world? I think some of the memories the God of Dungeons gave me said he had dungeons on many worlds. The humans, though, didn’t like that I couldn’t understand them, so one of the men walked over to it and started tapping the core with the pommel of his sword. Ouch. I wish he wouldn’t do that. I dumped some random small amount of DP crystals out, having figured out how to keep them in crystal form while playing with the levels in a small room, and he seemed happy with the amount.

I made a few rude comments about his mother and lineage, not that I could speak or he would understand me if I did, and the stupid humans left, packing up their stuff and heading out. Once they were outside I decided that some changes were needed around here. If they were just going to mug me, then I wasn’t going to keep being nice. The first thing I did was purchase the ability to make fog, then filled the place with it. ‘If they are going to hurt me, then I’ll hurt them back.’ I thought as I taught the animals I had left the concept of guerrilla warfare.