This is the story of a rock. Not a magical smart rock, just a normal boring rock.

It was supposed to be a cool magic rock, but no, it's just a really boring rock.

It's gray and tiny, and lives in the foothills of the Joulo mountain range. These mountains are dead, capital DEAD. The mana that makes up the entire universe and is the energy things need to live is weird in these mountains because it's dead mana so refuses to cycle or be productive.

Now back to the rock. It is a dungeon core that was supposed to be created in a place with real mana so it could create an entire dungeon and be a performer to dance for the gods above, but it cant because of that whole 'dead mana' problem. It was supposed to be born with another's soul via reincarnation, but that failed because no soul could reach the dungeon core. So now it just has to sit there doing nothing.

And for a whole year it didn't do much. It tried though. Tried cycling mana, but without mana to cycle that didn't work. It started to eat dirt to turn it into useful mana and that kinda worked. Entire inches each week of not-drop-dead-useless-mana were created. A tiny dungeon where some bacteria in the soil started to grow, leeching off the Core's mana to survive.

The seasons changed, and the dungeon core discovered water was tastier than dirt, drank some water, got a little bigger because mana. Yes there was an entire chapter describing how a rock drinks water.

Well, some moss grew in the warmer months of the boral environment the dungeon core was in. The Core decided it liked the thought of eating the plant, so tried. It failed, a lot, for months. Eventually, so much mana had saturated the environment from this constant fluctuation of 'must eat' that some soil bacteria evolved into a slime. The first monster was created and so the entire place was suddenly an actual dungeon.

That's when the flawless and amazing narrator came into the picture. System, the disciple of magic across the entire universe. Technically a splintered version, as each instance of System with a purpose, this one is to narration the dungeon core's actions or lack of them. Turns out this dungeon is terrible because it cant do anything for itself, and our jobs as the System is to make it more intelligent than a rock.

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Took a long time. The slime did a bunch of eating, some plants grew, those were also eaten, and suddenly because the narrator is awesome and perfect the Core's intelligence rose to match the thinking capabilities of a plant. Progress that only took an entire year!

A bunch of other things were happening in the background during this time. A few gods were being annoying brats, there was a god named Joulo who likes to cry a lot. She owns the Core and just wants to be nice. Probably the only god who isn't a psychopath, but hey there is always a black sheep in the family somewhere.

Another god threw some ants into the wind to see what would happen, turns out not good happened. As one of those ants made it to the Core's little environment where it was able to start laying eggs and making a hive. They were really peaceful and completely undetected for a while. That was until they started hunting for food and found the slime that had gone vegan. Well, vegan food tastes decent apparently so they fought. Big battle, much death, a pretty standard last stand. Vegan slime fell to its attackers.

The dungeon Core, ruler of its domain was very busy during this amazing battle. It had created a new plant because plants were cool. This plant was called gorse and is known for spontaneous combustion. Well that's when the System in charge of the Core's growth got mad and decided to take matters into their own hand and avenge the death of the first slime. They mentally beat the dungeon core into paying attention with an ungodly amount of pings and notifications.

Kinda worked, kinda didn't. Anyways after the death of one slime a new one will be making an appearance. This new slime is almost guaranteed to be smarter than the Core, since the Core only understands 'hungry' and 'plant.' But who knows, maybe one day the Core will be smart enough to narrate its own story. Just took a bit to get to this point because it started with less than nothing to its name, but now the Core can actually act on its own and do things. So yeah, no more yearly time skips.

This has been the faithful and unbiased retelling of the story so far, brought to you by the System: emcee of all godly parties and everything cool.

Note: The System giving this presentation is not the same instance of System that one is currently dealing with the Core. This is the cooler, older version, System v.420