“No,” Ulbert held up his hands placatingly, “I appreciate the thought, but that thought alone is plenty. I won’t say I don’t want anything. Everybody has something they want—you’ll be able to see what I want too in my memories. But if you really want to give it to me, then you should focus on improving yourself first.”

The dungeon researcher directed a polite smile at the mounted speaker Archimedes had been speaking through. “So instead of giving me a present, would you mind letting me tour the other floors while I’m here?”

“…”

A faint breeze blew through the dungeon as Archimedes sighed. Honestly, keeping the researcher on the first floor had long since stopped being a matter of security: it had simply slipped Archimedes’ mind with all that was going on. The core commanded all the doors in the dungeon to open, except for the exit.

“You’re free to move around as you please. But is there a trick to using speakers more efficiently?”

Ulbert stood up and dusted himself off. “You’re asking someone who doesn’t have a single speck of mana himself,” he chuckled. “I don’t know. I haven’t had any dungeons volunteer that information to me. In general, speakers are tools made with larger dungeons in mind though.”

Larger dungeons with more mana, he means? Archimedes thought. No, there must be a trick to it. The more they expand, the more monsters, traps, construction, and treasure generation will demand mana from them.

The efficiency of a dungeon’s production tended to stay relatively proportional to their needs. Or rather, a dungeon wouldn’t build beyond what they could accommodate, and they wouldn’t sit around and let too much mana go to waste either.

For having two of his three floors be Fertile Cave biomes, Archimedes was—proportionally to his size—almost the most efficient that a dungeon could be, to his knowledge. Not to mention, he had the mandrakes.

And he had it from the world’s most reliable source that he was the first to discover the Fertile Cave biome in this world.

Sure it was possible that other dungeons had found ways to produce obscene amounts of mana or had budgeted explicitly for speaking… but there had to be a trick to it.

He glanced at the blueprint he had learned from the Etherium sample he was gifted. That’s not the only technique I have to catch up on.

Frankly, there were too many projects on Archimedes’ plate, so he reprioritized the most time-sensitive issue first: scouring Ulbert’s memories.

For now, the dungeon core followed the oldest and deepest neural pathways in Ulbert’s copied brain data. He wanted to know what it was the demon wanted and if it really wasn’t achievable.

“Hey, freak!” In an old memory, degraded but with a surprisingly strong neural pathway leading to it, Archimedes witnessed an unknown demon child shove a much younger version of Ulbert.

“Where are your horns, huh?”

“Stop pushing me!” The young Ulbert protested while the young bully’s friend laughed. The friend’s face was a blur, but the bully’s face was clear.

“Why? What’re you going to do? Shoot magic at me?” The bully shoved him again.

“I said stop it!” Ulbert threw his tiny fist out and decked the bully in the mouth. Blood splattered as his lip tore, and several baby teeth went flying. The young bully fell onto his back and started to cry loudly.

“Children!” The foggy image of an old childhood teacher, their appearance and gender long forgotten, noticed what was happening and ran up to separate them, attending to the bully who was in much worse condition.

“Waaa!” The bully cried furiously, and the teacher tried over and over to calm him.

“Deep breaths, Yidoric. In and out. Focus on calming down.”

But the bully refused to calm down, and the forgotten teacher shouted at the other children to get away. They started casting a spell. Archimedes wasn’t an expert on this world’s magic, but it resembled hypnosis of some variety. Before the casting was complete, however, the bully child lit up in black light… and exploded.

Corrupted demon mana ravaged the air and ground across a radius larger than the child was. Both his little body and the instructor’s were reduced to splattered blood and viscera on the pavement. Young Ulbert stared at the scene in paralyzed horror, wondering if it was his fault.

There were an abundance more memories like that, it turned out. No, not all of them filled with exploding children, but memories of being mocked for being hornless; memories of being relieved that he didn’t have mana like other demons; memories of wishing he could use magic like his peers.

Archimedes peered at another deeply carved memory. In this one, Ulbert witnessed the birth of his little sister. He was an adult in this memory, but he was still immature compared to his current self. The memory was tinged with anxiety and anticipation, but when the demon saw his little sister for the first time and saw the little black horns on her head, disappointment settled in.

Holding the little bundle, though, and feeling her tiny, warm hand wrap around his pinky finger, turned disappointment into affection and worry.

I forgive you for having horns like everyone else, sister. So please, please live.

There were also plenty of unimportant memories that the demon’s brain had nevertheless marked as essential. Like the time that he spilled water on himself in front of a girl he liked, or the time he had to give a presentation in front of his peers and stumbled over his words. Or that time that his school hosted a play that almost nobody attended, and he had to act in front of an empty room.

It was common for people to hyperfixate on embarrassing moments and mistakes in order to avoid repeating them, but it was also frustrating since those memories had nothing to do with Archimedes yet looked identical to the important memories from the outside.

The dungeon decided to pull away from Ulbert’s more personal memories. It was uncomfortable to watch the emotional highs and lows of someone else like this, and the longer he did it, the more Ulbert’s personality would influence him. He was far from the worst person to be influenced by, but there could be consequences regardless.

Archimedes had met more than one dungeon core in his last life who seemed to have multiple different personalities fighting for control. He preferred not to be in that situation himself, so although he was willing to change, he wanted to do so gradually.

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From the memories he had seen, however, Archimedes thought to have understood what it was Ulbert wanted. First, he wanted natural horns, though he was terrified of the consequences and really just wanted to have them cosmetically; second, he wanted the ability to use magic, but with normal mana instead of dangerous demon mana; third, he wanted a way to prevent mana explosions in other demons: a more reliable way than regular calming exercises, strict lifestyle regulations, or having a third party use hypnosis magic to calm them down by force.

None of those wishes were easy to fulfill. For the first two, it would be easy if Ulbert was a dungeon monster, but dungeons couldn’t freely change the physical structure of outsiders. More creative ideas that came to mind required highly experimental surgery or the defiance of blacklisting regulations.

As for the last wish, Archimedes had already achieved it on his second floor: No demon’s magic could explode where magic itself was disallowed. But he didn’t even know if it was possible to make a portable version of a dungeon law. Even if it was possible, it would come with the caveat of sealing the demons’ magic, which might cause more harm than good to their daily lives.

In one shallow memory or another, Ulbert had probably already been told everything Archimedes had just concluded.

But I had to see it for myself and make my own judgement.

It was a little frustrating, but Archimedes accepted that he would do better to focus on himself for now and return to repaying his personal debts once his own needs were met.

He returned to his search, this time with information about other dungeons as his target. Archimedes caught memories of several dungeons talking to Ulbert ad nauseum through speakers, which stoked his desire to figure out whatever trick they used to do such a thing. Sadly—or rather, thankfully—Ulbert lacked a dungeon’s finer senses, so his memories lacked specific details on how other dungeons’ various exploits actually worked.

He also saw that, at least from Ulbert’s perspective, the DRI operated with integrity. Their rules were more than just fair: they were biased in the dungeons’ favor.

But all of that was an aside. What hit Archimedes the hardest were the other dungeons themselves.

Most of the dungeons Ulbert visited were intelligent dungeons between fifty and a hundred floors deep, but some were much, much deeper. He saw three that were almost as big as he had gotten in his last life: their names were Babel, Tartarus, and Hell. All three had banned outsiders from entering except for DRI and Guild employees and other rare exceptions. Hell was even blacklisted for offenses she refused to amend.

Of the three, Tartarus reminded Archimedes the most of his former self: full to the brim with massive titans ready to crush any unwelcome explorers in a heartbeat.

In Archimedes’ eyes, those ancient dungeons were applause-worthy artists. The firey and icy wastes of Hell were like another world where beings that appeared to be outsiders in spirit form wandered. Babel had somehow constructed itself upside down, like a tower rising into the sky. A bottomless pit seemingly comprised the whole central core of Tartarus. Archimedes desperately wanted to know how they had bent the natural laws of dungeons so completely, or if it was all an illusion.

As he dug around in Ulbert’s memories of those three ancient dungeons, Archimedes found something buried, hidden, barely registered by the demon’s dull senses. They were flickers of pure mana, ether, tremors, lights, and temperatures. Archimedes recognized it instantly as none other than a binary expression of language—a dungeon’s native tongue.

“To whoever is finding this now, hello. It’s nice to meet you. I am Babel.” Babel spoke in an ever changing cipher that posed no barrier to his fellow dungeons whatsoever.

“What a wonderful idea, Babel.” Hell’s deep but feminine voice reverberated calmly across the cracked and firey terrain. “Greetings, kin. My name is Hell. You are not alone, and we are glad to meet you.”

“As if anybody else will ever find this.” Tartarus growled like a beast, and it echoed all the way to the bottom of the pit. “Whatever. Call me Tartarus. If you’re getting this, then you’re a paranoid, traumatized bastard, but so are we.”

“It’s not impossible,” Hell steamed and crackled. “Our kindred who were born elsewhere in the world would be dealing with hostiles even now during this era of peace. Maybe someday, the demons will expand into those territories and meet them.”

The message wasn’t created all at once, but little by little, over months and years. Each time there was an update, every time a new demon paid one of them a visit, the dungeons would recompile everything and send the whole transcript again so it appeared in the demon’s most recent memory of visiting them.

The conversation went on for centuries. Eventually a fourth dungeon joined.

“I found your message. My name is Pandora. The demons took me from Troll lands after the plague I unleashed spread across their ‘border’. The outside spaces don’t make much sense to me. Still, I appreciate the shelter, and I doubly appreciate the secret nature of this conversation. I am glad to realize I have kin.”

Pandora was a dungeon built with a new horror on every floor, all designed to overflow into the world above. Her deepest floor, however, now that she had been given shelter and peace, was a beautiful, idyllic garden.

“Welcome, Pandora,” Babel was the first to have a chance to reply. “We have all experienced loneliness before. You didn’t contract with any gods in your solitude, did you?”

“The god of Trolls wants me dead. I didn’t know a contract was possible. What would have happened to me if I did?”

“Look around you,” Hell cracked as it underwent a periodic freezing. “How many dungeons do you see grow past a thousand floors? You would have been stunted and made into a tool for their benefit. Some outsiders are trustworthy, but never any gods.”

Tartarus’s many titans chittered deeply. “We three were too proud or paranoid. It took centuries before we knew the peril we’d dodged.”

“We were also fortunate,” Babel creaked in the wind. “After deciding to trust the demons, I may have contracted with Bath, but he’s utterly mad and never contacted me except to send unintelligible gibberish.”

Archimedes became lost in the conversation between the four ancient dungeons, almost feeling like he was a part of it. When he finally reached the end, he decided to make that a reality.

He found Ulbert on the second floor, entertaining Helios, Merina, and Alphio. Carefully, subtly, he crafted a response for the other ancient dungeons out of swaying grass and dancing insects.

“Hello, everyone, my name is Archimedes. I’ve found your message. ###” Archimedes added a densely compressed blurb that future dungeons could extract to find the basics about him: he was three floors deep, but reincarnated, and he was born with his previous memories intact. He threw in images of what his old dungeon was like, as well as the details about his death and time in limbo. If Ulbert was there, they could learn more from him, but that wouldn’t always be the case.

“In my previous world other dungeons would be in a state worse than death when I finally got to meet them. I’m glad you’re all doing well.”

That was enough for a greeting, he figured. The next time he got a chance, he could pass along a few questions.

“Ulbert,” Archimedes mounted a speaker on the nearest wall and called out to the demon. “I’ve finished copying everything, so I can browse through it at my own pace. You can leave anytime.”

Ulbert nodded and let Helios climb down from his arms. “Do you have any questions before I go?”

“More of a request.” Archimedes pondered, “Can you help the treatment proposal I sent to the Guild go through?”

“All I saw was a few images of a brain scan,” the dungeon researcher said. “Tell me about the procedure in detail.”

Rather than waste mana explaining the whole thing out loud, Archimedes manifested a stack of papers and waited while the demon thumbed through them. Eventually, he nodded.

“Honestly, it would be good news for me if something like this passed, since it would normalize bringing mind stones into dungeons for medical reasons. Which is exactly why my input probably won’t be valued: I’ll appear biased—which I am. I also have to admit there are faint notes of insurance fraud in this plan.”

Archimedes’ spirits sank, and his voice came across colder than before. “If they reject my treatment and he dies because of it, tell them that I know all of their names, and they will live to regret it.”

“For your sake, I think I’ll just keep that ultimatum to myself,” Ulbert shrugged. “Unless they really make a mess of things.”