The core was surprised to see the humans’ reaction to its newest dungeon. It had half expected to see an expedition sent to destroy the dungeon after what had happened to its previous creation. It had watched as they had cleared out the town and set up a military base in short order, and was expecting to see a full assault sent in once it saw more and more soldiers arriving.

However, only a single group was sent in the first time, which was a relatively good sign. Things had proceeded well with those first twenty-five people, as they had clearly been taken by surprise, rather than overwhelmed or outmatched.

The only thing that really caught the core off guard was the fact that the soldiers failed to kill a single one of its plant monsters in the first area. They chopped off roots, flowers, and vines, yet never tried to actually kill the entire plant, which simply did not make any sense.

The core was satisfied to see the results of its new creatures and its various elementals that it had placed in the various different biomes. After all, those creations had led the core to learning far, far more than it had ever expected. They had shown the core how to gain further mastery of Concepts.

As it turned out, Concepts were a limited resource, which meant that the core had to seize control away from others who had already established themselves. It was able to feel every time that it wrested a bit more control away from those others, even if it had no idea who or what those individuals were.

What it had discovered was that every time that it pushed itself further with its use or understanding of a Concept, it ripped a bit more control to its own pool and away from the mysterious others. After creating so many new creatures and elementals, the core had pulled a large bit of the Concept to its own control. If it had started with a single percent of the Concept of life, it had managed to seize a full ten percent after its efforts to prepare its latest dungeon.

However, the core had also realized that there was one individual that had a much stronger grasp of the Concepts of life and growth, and instead, the core had seized everything from others. That one individual felt like an invincible wall, and the core had no idea how to even try to proceed. That meant that it was time to set that matter aside and focus on others for a time.

Back to its newest dungeon, the core was amazed to see how the humans proceeded after the first group returned. Or rather, most of the first group returned. Two of them stayed with the core in the dungeon.

One of the core’s oddest creations was a plant that released a pollen that caused creatures to see and hear things that were not real. The core had only discovered this after assuming the senses of its creatures which had been behaving oddly around the plants.

The soldier had wandered through a bit of the pollen on the soldiers’ way out of the dungeon, and had then continued off on his own. Even if the core did not allow its creatures to attack people on their way out of the dungeon, its plants were a bit different, as they seemed to act purely on instinct or reflex; it was hard to tell which was the case. The primary issue was that the core could not give the plants orders without taking direct control of them, which was something it had found itself more and more reluctant to do. It was much better to set things up, and then let them play out without any interference.

The soldier had walked right into one of the pitfall-plants, which had opened up beneath the man and swallowed him whole. The soldiers had not actually been lucky to not encounter one of those plants, as the core had placed them off of the path it had left to be used.

The first regions of a dungeon were intended solely to strengthen humans for the core’s later consumption, as stronger humans provided much greater gains for the core. In fact, none of the regions of any of the dungeons currently used or visited were ones that the core intended for harvesting. It was trying desperately to strengthen the humans to a level where they would be able to challenge its more powerful creatures.

The only reason the humans and their mana users had been able to destroy the core’s undead dungeon was because that dungeon had not been strong enough. The core had been over-eager, and had assumed that a dungeon roughly equal to the one in Guilone’s sewers would be powerful enough. It had not realized that there were humans who were already powerful enough to challenge some of its more powerful creatures, but that they had simply not bothered challenging the dungeons.

For this reason, the core had made sure that there were powerful creatures in its new dungeon that would prove a challenge to any human who entered. In addition to the various elementals that were far more powerful than the ones the soldiers had faced, there were also the unicorns that were hidden further in the ancient forest, as well as far more powerful flying lizards in lower levels. Just those two alone should be powerful enough to protect the sub-core from being destroyed, though the core was curious to see how they perform.

Everything changed once the soldiers returned to their camp. They made a report, and almost immediately, the humans started to stir.

The entire camp started to move, and one squad after another entered the dungeon, with only about thirty minutes between them.

The core was shocked at how busy the humans were, but as it watched and maintained the dungeon on a more active basis, it saw that they were simply raiding the dungeon for the rewards the core offered. They ignored most of the mana-dense body parts that remained, and focused heavily on strengthening their soldiers, which was exactly what the core wanted to see.

The rotation continued for days, and then weeks, as more and more soldiers entered the dungeon. This allowed the core to test out various rewards, as it had a much larger test group to work with, and it eventually saw what the soldiers were trying to do; they wanted each of their soldiers to receive each of the physical boosts the core gave out, and if possible, a skill or spell.

So far, the core had worked out how to improve humans’ strength, nervous system, and senses, though it had also broken those things down a bit further. It had realized that raw strength and faster muscles were regarded as separate things by the humans, and so it had subdivided its rewards into strength, speed, dexterity, and perception. On top of those, it could also grant skills to humans with a limited mana pool, and spells to humans with larger mana pools.

The only issue with skills and spells was that the humans were limited by their own affinities, which the core had not yet found a way to bypass.

However, it had realized something after gaining its life and growth Concepts, which was that it was possible to grant healing skills and spells to humans with life affinitied mana, and even partial versions of those spells to humans with affinities that were closely related, such as water.

It had decided not to change any of its current dungeons in the section the humans visited. It did not want to be discovered or to rouse further suspicions after its undead dungeon had been destroyed. It had sensed a foreign power within the one mana user, and that power was still beyond anything the core could wield. It had to belong to a god, which were likely the same beings that the core was fighting with for control of its Concepts. Until it felt that it had control of the majority of a given Concept, it did not feel it would be ready to face the gods.

This meant that the core could only test things out in new dungeons, or new areas of existing dungeons, and it was clear which of the two was easier to accomplish.

It did not take long at all for a human with a life affinity to appear, and the core quickly gave that person a minor healing spell. All it allowed was for the caster of the spell to close small wounds on themselves or another, and to stop bleeding.

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All it did was accelerate natural healing, similar to the most basic spells that Yur’s priests had access to, but without the need for devotion to Yur.

This single spell would end up changing everything on the continent, though none were aware of it quite yet.

The Savaren Empire reacted with a frenzy with the discovery of a healing spell. Magic was the domain of the gods, but healing was reserved for Yur alone, and it was difficult to get her priests and priestesses to cooperate with any military when they were deployed. In general, Yur’s clergy would only help with healing recruits, civilians, and soldiers who returned from war. Unless Yur herself endorsed a war, her clergy would not step foot anywhere near a battlefield. She was the goddess of the earth, fertility, and prosperity. Such things were the antithesis of war and battle.

Gaining any sort of healing spell for the battlefield could potentially transform the entire dynamic of any war. If there was no need to worry about bleeding to death or having minor injuries grow infected and fester, that alone would help to eliminate a great number of the army’s logistics.

The upper echelons of the military started a project to try to find ways of determining whether or not soldiers had mana reserves, as well as what mana affinity they might have. While the temples were capable of doing that already, they would never cooperate with the empire in its attempt to continue to wrest magic away from the gods.

Seeing the frantic reaction to new magic, the core’s newest dungeon was almost overwhelmed by sheer numbers, and it had to divert some attention to manually ensuring that the dungeon was fully capable of handling the endless assault from the soldiers.

At the same time, the core started to experiment with the possibility of greater rewards for the humans when they reached lower levels. It was clear that they could only handle so much of a change at a given time, and all attempts to surpass that had proven fruitless, so instead, the core started to explore other options.

High on the list of possibilities it wanted to explore was expanding the humans’ mana reserves so that more of them would be capable of using spells and skills. Another priority was the possibility of an alternate power for skills so that humans who were completely without mana could also be given skills.

Other options were knowledge and mana perception. The core had started trying to find what was different between creatures that could sense mana and those that could not, as the difference could appear within the exact same species, which led the core to believe that it was an ability that simply needed to be triggered or activated somehow. If it could find that trigger, it could make the human mana users far more capable as a whole.

Knowledge was relatively easy, as the core was already doing exactly that when it gave humans skills or spells, but what it wanted to try to do was use the memories it had received to grant the humans greater skill with their weapons or spells. By offering guides that could correct mistakes that were being made in movements or actions, the core believed that the humans could make much better use of the strength.

This idea had been triggered by its observations of the abysmal mana techniques that the humans used. The waste and inefficiencies the core had observed when humans used mana had been infuriating, as those were two things that the core truly hated, as it meant loss, and the core refused to allow itself to lose anything without gaining more in return.

Interestingly enough, the rewards that the humans valued the most—spells and skills—were nothing more than knowledge, which made them the lowest cost rewards the core could give out. The beasts that were slaughtered so that the humans could receive the rewards were far more of an investment on the core’s part than the rewards that the humans received, and even then, the core regained the majority of the mana it put in the creatures, and only suffered any loss when the humans took back the most mana-dense parts that took longer to absorb after the creatures died.

When the two busiest dungeons were compared, the one in Farun focused on using everything they could from the dungeon, whereas the Savaren Empire was entirely devoted to strengthening their soldiers as much as possible, even at the cost of missing out on everything else from the dungeon.

In fact, the empire did not even try to push deeper into the dungeon once they found the tunnel to the next level. They had what they wanted, and that was enough for them, much to the core’s frustration. If not for the fact that at least one or two soldiers fell every day, the core would have felt that the dungeon was a failure. Even then, when hundreds of soldiers entered every day, and yet the core only managed to harvest one or two, it was a much lower harvest rate than the dungeon up north.

Things continued apace for several months. Few knew of the movements happening in the shadows, and even those who did know of them were ignorant of the implications. The temples were moving, as was the Savaren Empire. Priests were moving between temples and starting to gather together, while the empire’s soldiers were slowly cycling through the dungeon before returning to various borders, though the majority of the enhanced soldiers were being stationed near the northern border.

The core saw some of these movements, but for the most part, it ignored them. After all, so long as its dungeons were working and not threatened, the core really did not care very much what the humans did.

However, what the core did pay attention to was the movements of the mana user who had once carried the power of a god to destroy a sub-core. She had left the core’s range of perception for months, but when she had returned, she had been with others who possessed similar powers, and they all remained close together as they moved around. They visited the various large temples, constantly moving in and out of the core’s perception.

All that was clear was that they were steadily, though indirectly, moving closer to the dungeon near Sercen.

***

Evelyn had been Yur’s Saintess for decades. In fact, she had held the position longer than anyone alive even realized. Yur was the goddess of the earth, fertility, and bounty, and along with bounty came longevity. It was a secret within Yur’s clergy that they were granted slightly longer lives than other people, but only Yur’s Saintesses ever learned that by occasionally hosting the goddess, they were granted life expectancies of double or even triple the average expectancy of even other priests within Yur’s temples.

During these many years, Evelyn felt that she had come to understand her goddess quite well. Yur could be both caring and indifferent, just like the earth itself that was her body. She could be cold or warm, like the frigid polar regions or a blazing volcanic eruption. She could offer people shelter and food and bounty, but could also withhold sustenance with famine or drought. The earth was the goddess’s body, and Evelyn felt that it perfectly portrayed the goddess’s seemingly temperamental nature.

Yur was patient, as Evelyn was well aware that her goddess predated any of the human gods, as she was not technically a human god. She was the earth, and was above things like pantheons or races.

That was why when Evelyn felt Yur’s rage and fury, it had taken her so aback and terrified her so badly. Never had she ever even heard of the goddess losing her temper, yet soon after the newest dungeon had appeared in the Savaren Empire, Evelyn had both felt and experienced Yur’s rage.

It had not only been Evelyn, as every last priest and priestess who had ever been graced with Yur’s presence had felt themselves overcome with the goddess’s rage, though the intensity had varied depending on their connection. For Evelyn, she had temporarily become Yur’s avatar, and with the rage that was channeled through Evelyn, the Sanctuary of Yur had erupted for the first time in thousands of years.

The volcanic eruption had killed every human within dozens of miles, aside from Evelyn and the other temple leaders who were similarly capable of hosting their deity for a brief amount of time.

Evelyn had not been able to understand Yur’s thoughts, nor had she even processed the goddess’s actions, but she did know that Yur had directly addressed the other gods through their own avatars, which had led to the six of them visiting many of the major temples, gathering up the most powerful priests and priestesses from each one, and either adding them to their own numbers, or sending them on ahead.

It was only from this that Evelyn knew their destination: they were headed for Sercen and the newest dungeon.

Evelyn could not say what had happened to have so enraged her goddess, and she knew better than to ask. The simmering rage had not abated at all, and if anything, Yur’s composed fury was even more terrifying than anything Evelyn had felt before.

What had happened in that dungeon to so upset the goddess of the earth? Her actions felt more like those of Hidde, despite the fact that the god of battle was one of the gods that was most clearly counter to the goddess’s own Concepts.

The temples had declared war on this dungeon, just as Ixel had declared war on the undead dungeon before. Someone had crossed Yur, and Evelyn knew that things would not end well.