POV Aleessia Fariwik

Aleessia shuffled the report she wrote about the dungeon she was about to present to the temporary guild master, Leonos Vasir.

“First of all, the reported sighting of a portal is true. It’s a variation of commonly found portals that, instead of leading to another place within the dungeon and/or continent, leads to an alternate sub-dimension controlled by a dungeon.”

“Is that a problem?” Interrupted Leonos, who seemed to not really know the difference and what that entailed.

“When dungeons get old enough, they sometimes gain the ability to create portals between floors which replace tunnels between floors. The sub-dimension portal is an ability that is very rare with recorded dungeons and usually only shows up in dungeons located in unusual places. Though no one knows where the sub-dimensions are located, it’s an area that is completely controlled by the dungeon core. Usually, once a dungeon obtains this, any later floors tend to be built in this area.”

“So, w-” Started Leonos before Aleessia interrupted him.

“Hold it. I’m not done explaining,” said Aleessia. “The dungeon having a portal to a sub-dimension is not a problem. It just means that a dungeon can be much more powerful or have many more floors than expected. But from what I observed from the dungeon’s mana circulation, the dungeon in the iceberg has probably three to four floors.”

As Aleessia was saying this, Leonos was jotting down notes.

“From what I can tell, the dungeon core is young, and just from experiencing the first floor, I can tell you that the core is sentient and not an instinct-following core. You can see the mana adaptations that it created through its plants and animals, and it seems to be learning from its experiences. From what the Blue Suns told me about their last dive, what we experienced now was very different from what they saw. Even the dimensions of the first floor changed. There was also a lack of a floor boss, which also shows that the dungeon core is young. Overall, I say that this dungeon is in the rank-E category, but this will most likely change quickly as the dungeon adapts.”

“So everything is okay, and there is no immediate danger for us outside of the dungeon? And that it is safe for groups to delve again?”

“Yep, there is nothing pressing that makes this dungeon any more unsafe than normal dungeons are. Just put out a reminder to any delvers to be careful about what you say in the dungeon. Who knows how they will take it and how the dungeon will react to things people may say.”

POV Dungeon Core

As the child started to imagine what their fourth floor would be, they felt their territory be breached.

They turned to look and saw it was a group of three people, two males and a female, rowing on a small boat to the entrance.

They watched as the adventuring group crawled through the entrance into the first room of the first floor. It seemed that the group was prepared for the room to be mostly in water, as from their view, it didn’t look like the cold water affected them.

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The group slowly made their way into the middle of the room before their first fighting encounter. A swift pinfish swimming through the room eyed the group before swimming quickly toward the closest male. With its sharp teeth, the fish ripped into the back of the man’s heel, tearing out the tendon.

“Arghhhhhh!” Screamed out the man as he used his sword to skewer the swift pinfish.

As the blood from the wound leaked into the water, it started to attract one of the large ice krill monster swarms. But before the man could down a mana potion, they attacked.

Throwing ice pellets at the group, but most at the already injured man, they managed to knock him off of his feet before his teammates could react. That was the beginning of the end for him.

As soon as the man fell into the water, the krill swarmed him, throwing ice at his face, which grew and covered his mouth and nose. Then, the ice started covering his fingers when the man tried to rip the chunks off his face with his bare hands.

His teammates, too absorbed in trying to kill off the swarm, didn’t realize his situation before it was too late.

Within a couple seconds, the ice had travelled into his mouth and nose, burning his flesh and blocking his airway, and in a minute, the man had died.

It was strange for the child to watch this happen, they didn’t feel any emotion from his death, but they did receive something from it. The second that he died, the dead man’s mana left his body and merged into their own mana strings.

It wasn’t much mana, but they had never received mana from a death. It posed an interesting point of whether they should actively try to start killing more to gain more mana or stay neutral to those coming into their dungeon as they have been so far?

The child pondered this as the dead man’s teammates collected his body and dragged him out of the dungeon.

They continued pondering until they felt the group exited their territory when they looked over the first floor.

The other creatures had already consumed the dead swift fish, but the dead man left a few things in the room. A leather bag and the container with what the child assumed was a healing potion.

They took one of their mana strings and wrapped it around the potential healing potion container so that they could place it somewhere safe. But as soon as they did that, a blue screen popped up in front of them.

You have absorbed the material “low-level health potion” into your dungeon.

This material is now able to be reproduced with your dungeon.

As the blue screen popped up, the child felt a small area, 50 centimetres by 50 centimetres, open within their sub-dimension. The health potion disappeared from its container and appeared within the room.

The health potion only filled the container a couple of centimetres, but then the liquid started replicating itself. They watched as their mana strings moved by themselves, copying and duplicating the fluid within the room that they deemed to call the health-potion room.

This unexpected turn of events pleased the child. They already had ideas about what they wanted to do with the liquid, like seeing if they could somehow insert enough of the potion into their creatures or monsters to allow a level of self-healing.

Eager to find out what else they could find, they looked through the discarded backpack.

The backpack maintained a book that they quickly moved out of the water to preserve what was on the pages. They went through the pages and saw it was filled with symbols and strange writing they couldn’t understand. They began to understand the writing as they continued to read the book. They found that it was a journal of some type written by Egil, an avid traveller and a well-known biologist. It contained drawings and writings of the animals, plants, monsters, and environments they encountered.

The book was much bigger than what initially appeared, and it covered information about a single continent, Togiak. When they looked at the book’s title, it cemented that the continent was Togiak, as the name was “The Adventurer’s Guide to Togiak’s Environment.”

And from what they could gather from the information, they are most likely located within a couple of locations around this continent. They knew they were on or around this continent because why would someone bring an environmental guidebook into a dungeon if they were not from that continent?

They created a small room right off the core room where they placed the book before returning to looking through the backpack.

They found a couple of seeds, a knife made out of a material that they found out was steel and some oat bar rations.

As they finished going through the backpack, they turned their attention to building their fourth floor. Unfortunately, just as they started working on their floor, their territory was breached again.