Dungeons were a very simple thing according to scholarly definition.

It was a persistent contained magical environment that did not fit in with its surroundings.

It was a weird definition and one with a lot of caveats and qualifiers, but it was fairly accurate.

I walked through the streets of [[District 87]] leisurely, taking a look at all the strange creatures around me. I was still always shocked by the sheer diversity of this place. The amount of species baffled me at every turn. There was your classic bunch, humans, elves, dwarfs, and all the variants of the beastfolk.

But that was only the basic stuff. Trolls, goblins, mudfolk, elementals, goliaths, gnolls, kobolds, dragonkin, zombies, vampires, and some weird construct that seemed to be sentient and self-governing.

Now that my main concern of citizenship was done with, I could gaggle and stare all I wanted to, that was as long at I didn’t offend the people I looked at.

I watched a gargoyle take flight into a flock of bats, catching a few and biting the head off of them. The flock of bats then proceeded to transform into a vampire with a missing thumb, who viciously beat the gargoyle and screamed for the watch to come through and arrest him.

Then the watch came and talked with the both of them.

It turned out the vampire was a scammer, commonly baiting gargoyles into attacking him and suing them once they took the bait or the bat in this case. Apparently, vampires made their bats glow red just for this sort of thing and this guy’s bats did not have red glowing eyes. This was the fourth time this month the vampire had done this and the gnome guardsmen had chained him in silver cuffs, while a halfling shoved him in the direction of the guard house.

The gargoyle got away with a fine for ‘illegal feasting of protected wildlife.’

And all that happened within the first hour of me wandering the city. I then saw a centaur wandering about, which was a first for me. I rarely saw centaurs and more than that, I had never seen them in clothes. They were always depicted as wild naked beast folk galloping across the prairie.

This one wore a suit, one that draped all the way down to his hooves. The guy had cufflinks and shiny hooves. I guess you couldn’t believe in the stereotypes. But that made me wonder about the bathroom situation. After all, when you had species this different in size body, and anatomy, how do you let them defecate?

I walked into a random store and asked to use the bathroom, at which the minotaur shopkeeper laughed and handed me a clench potion. After getting laughed at for a bit and asking him what exactly it does, he told me it turns most of your fecal matter into gas.

There was one for urine as well, but it would just concentrate your urine into a sloppy oozy substance that you could release at home.

Interesting. Disgusting, but interesting nonetheless. The potions came at a cost of a dollar each, but most stores would give you one for free if you were in a pinch.

Better a dollar lost than shit in the streets I supposed.

I then accidentally witnessed a shapeshifter prostitute.

I was gifted stealth by Archina, similar to Grunder’s blessing of the earth, and that made me go unnoticed when I wanted to be. I hadn’t meant to sneak up on them but once I got a glimpse of the conversation, well, I really couldn’t help but listen in.

“Come on, how hard could it be?” The fat old satyr asked the woman. “Four hundred start, then a hundred more for every hour, I promise you.”

“Like you’ll last that long anyway Jant. Besides, you know I can’t take her image. No shifter can,” the woman responded.

“Why not?”

“Because I’ll be cursed! All the models put a hex of their features, particularly for shit like this Jant! Last time I did something like this, I couldn’t change my legs for a week! A week! You know how fucking horrible that was?”

I peeked at the picture the man was holding up and recognized the person on it from the billboard earlier, the one about vampire fashion.

What was it called? Gothic Fashion or whatever?

“So you’re afraid you’ll look good for a week then?” The fat man questioned.

“Fuck you Jant! You know the hexes aren’t the same. It’ll be some fucked up shit all the way around and even if it was just a shape-holding hex, I have customers other than you!”

“Fuck 'em. I’ll be here all week, babe.”

“No.”

“I promise I’ll-”

“I said no!!”

Then the satyr scowled and started to get a little too close to the shifter. He raised his hands in anger and just when I was about to intervene, the shifter grew and turned into a very muscular… thing.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

Its skin thinned and its muscles bulged and where there had been fat before suddenly turned into muscle. The form had nothing but muscle. No mouth, one nose, and long muscular limbs. It looked like a monster in truth. And it swung, smacking the man back into the wall before retaking its original form.

The satyr fell into the wall and crumbled. The shifter, now taking the form of the woman it had earlier walked up to him and whispered.

“Don’t ever come to me or my people ever again Jant.”

The woman then walked away and started strolling out of the alley.

“I’ll report you!” The dumb satyr yelled.

The shifter snorted and looked back at him, this time wearing a completely different face and body.

“Try it!” They yelled back. “You don’t even know my real name!”

I then walked away before they could spot me.

“Wow,” I mumbled after a bit of walking.

The mushrooms on the ceiling glowed bright. They couldn’t compare to the sun but it was fairly bright regardless. It had the same level of light as sunset but this was the brightest thing got down here from what I understand. That meant it was about high noon.

Alright, enough touring for today.

I started towards the adventuring guild, guiding myself by memory from a map I had bought. I’d memorized it yesterday and had easily gotten the hang of navigation, especially down here. There were landmarks everywhere, and even if I didn’t have the map, I could always look at the roots and remember where my hotel was relative to them.

That’s how I’d gotten around in the Woven Forest. That place was endless. Literally. It would go on and on forever, continuing eternally. So getting lost was as much of a risk as getting killed by monsters or attacked by people.

I didn’t miss it.

I found myself in front of a very large and very square-shaped building a bit later. It was at the edge of the district, placed directly in front of the cavern I’d come out of. Come to think of it, hadn’t I seen some guy dragging a wyvern’s head by here?

Yeah, this was the place. And the square building at the center was huge. All in all the thing was about five times the size of my hotel. Actually, I think it had a hotel in the back and the magic.

By the Lords the magic, I hadn’t noticed it earlier because of the Asrin Tree but this thing was practically a pillar of magical energy. I could sense enchantments, wards, and countless spells on the building.

I could stare at it all day. All the buildings had some enchantments in the city. Heating and cooling enchantments, mana drawing enchantments, water creating enchantments.

Most buildings were enchanted with magic in one form or another to provide utilities for their residents.

But this… this was something else entirely.

I walked slowly toward the building and stood slowly in front of the entrance. I promptly got yelled at by some dragonkin and dark elves and shuffled to the side before I could get yelled at again.

And then I stared.

“Wooooow.”

I had seen enchanted buildings before, but very few were this level of complicated. And more than the amount of enchantment, the positioning of them was just amazing to witness.

Magic can interfere with magic, and one of the jobs of enchanters was to make sure there were no unforeseen side effects from such enchantments. Whatever enchanted had engineered this building must have studied enchanting for hundreds of years before making this, or even thousands.

It was an amazing piece of magical engineering. The building was probably worth over a trillion dollars, and that was just in construction material alone. The design and labor put into it would almost double its value.

I had seen structures like this before, but they were generally old and ancient, not so new and alive. I watched adventurers of all races walk in and out of the buildings, some of them carrying monster parts or bags of holding in their hands. There was a small horde of goblins that walked in carrying a giant furry cat-like beast over themselves. One of them tripped and got back up.

I walked into the building, still mostly in awe but now reeling in my mind to the issue at hand.

I was here to register with the guild and to become an adventurer.

I steadied myself and walked through the huge open doors. They were more like gates rather than doors. And by the gods, the enchantments on them, they could probably withstand a tier 25 attack spell by themselves alone.

I shook my head and stopped looking at them. No. I couldn’t just stare around all day. That wouldn’t get me anywhere. And besides, that level of magic was far beyond my understanding.

After one last forlonging look at the doors and the surrounding building, I walked through and shifted my attention to the matters at hand.

Registration.

I had read up on the guild beforehand and knew somewhat about how it was divided. This specific guild functioned as one of five main guild centers in Asrin City, with the true guild hall being top-side next to the Asrin Tree itself. Which made me immediately want to go up there and see it myself, but I was a little too broke to be making travel plans like that.

The Adventurer’s Guild had settled in this realm a while back, mainly due to the Asrin Tree’s influence. Everyone knew the Asrin Tree wasn’t a real Yiggdrasil, not truly, but even a false Yiggdrasil was amazing in its own way.

The Asrin Tree like all trees, needed nourishment. Its roots dug deep into the earth and occasionally, deep into other realms. Each realm had its own flavor of mana, whether it was the elemental realms, the heavenly realms, or even the demonic ones, each had different types of mana and they all had a high mana density.

The Asrin Tree would leave this realm and create a small subspace that would connect to whatever realm it desired. There were fifty-three known subspaces that the Asrin tree had dug into and each subspace had blossomed into a mini realm, a dungeon all its own.

That was actually how I’d gotten here. I’d traveled through the Woven Forest till I found the connecting subspace between that realm and this one and then had promptly fallen into the dungeon. Then I navigated my way back into the city and popped out down-side right in front of the dungeon gates.

That used to be considered a bad thing up until a few thousand years ago from what I understood. The subspaces could serve as an entrance to the city and were considered a weakness in its defense, particularly during the attack of the Dark Lord. But then Asrin City suddenly changed its policies, and instead of sealing off these subspaces, started using them as a way to move their armies to attack instead.

And the more familiar the city grew with the subspace, the easier it became to wage war. They used the dungeons as killing zones at times, trapping the whole subspace with elementals or powerful monsters and luring their opponents into them.

The city had managed to close off its side of the dungeon by then and was especially capable of sealing the dungeons off from this realm, trapping their opponents with all the horrors they had unleashed.

But that was in ages past, now the dungeons served as resource hubs, constantly spawning monsters and materials that could be gathered and sold into the mass market.

Sometimes you’d find artifacts from the wars of ages past, but mostly you’d find monsters. Monsters and magic.

And death. You’d find a whole lot of death