chapter 1 - #1274
Goblin Cave was dissatisfied with its work. It was a feeling that had been growing for a long time. Goblin Cave was, as far as it could tell, a perfectly average dungeon core: 51 floors total, some sixty years old now, and dug into coarse granite rock around the base of a mountain. Through system linkage it could see information on the nearby dungeons -- Darkwood Grove, a surface-level forest dungeon with a budding water specialization that had typed heavily into gremlins and pixies; Deepmine Delve, a resource-type cave dungeon within the same mountain range that hosted Goblin Cave that was heavily trap-themed; and Elysian Heights, a newer dungeon -- only a decade old -- perched on a nearby mountaintop, currently fairly generalized but with the beginning of an obvious winged-type specialization. Through ambient system linkages it could get vaguer information on another dozen-or-so dungeons further out, with a very similar trend. Additionally, it had access to the local region rankings, where its overall ranking was 1274 out of (currently) 2281, nearly exactly in the middle of the pack. It had started with a goblin mob type, which it had evolved into hobgoblins and then lesser orcs, with the occasional ogre boss thrown in. It had made a partial lateral move into beast-types twenty years ago that had brought it some much-needed variety, and only a few years ago it had synthesized the two into a goblin rider spawn. It had been looking forward to the evolution -- the choice was likely to be between a goblin knight and a goblin beastmaster, and both of them had intriguing possibilities, but as time had gone on it had been finding it harder and harder to really care about either. It was the adventurers that were doing it, really. When it was younger everything had seemed frenetic, desperate. Its core had cohered in a shallow gully, only protected from the sky by a single rock shelf, and it had dug down with the terror of the newborn, only knowing it needed to hide itself away. It had chosen goblins because the status information had said they were numerous and easy to spawn, and it had wanted as many things between itself and the surface as possible. But that terror had evened out after the first delves into it, and now its upper corridors crawled with adventurers near-constantly, giving it only scant days, sometimes only hours, between groups. It had to spin its respawn cycles at their utmost to maintain any kind of population on the upper floors. Most only delved on its upper floors, slowly carving their way to its fifth-floor boss (Gor-bal the Gruesome, a boss it had made when it had first unlocked bronze tools and weapon specializations for its basic goblin spawn. He wielded a sharply-hooked sword with a thorned blade, and had a gallery of stone-throwing assists on an upper level only accessible via a trapped stair. It had been very proud of the design when it had first put it together) and usually stopping there. It had empowered every seventh floor boss, out of a whim at the time, and over time it had determined, from adventurer chatter, that most dungeons tended towards a partially-empowered 'sub-boss' every fifth floor, with a fully-empowered boss every tenth floor, so maybe that was part of the sudden drop in delve completion past the fifth floor, with another big drop after floor seven. Maybe adventurers had been expecting something different. 'Expecting'. Its first 28 floors were variations on a cave scheme, with a steadily increasing number of rooms, eventually bringing in more and more frequent loops, dead-ends, and disorienting elevation changes. Its 17th floor contained the first instance of it running two passages over each other on the same floor -- it had felt so clever when it'd first thought of that -- and its 18th floor was a thicket of downward slopes, when it had thought to mimic the descent to a new floor within a single floor. To... throw off adventurers' expectations? To confuse them. What did adventurers expect? It was a thought that weighed on it more and more. At first, it seemed obvious: they expected to descend down to its core, killing its guardians, and then take or shatter its core. Everyone who stepped foot into its dungeon with intent to kill its mobs wanted to kill it. But... why leave after five floors? Oh, certainly, some pushed deeper, but no adventurer had ever stepped foot past its 49th floor. It had really only spun out its 50th and 51st floors of boredom. Fear, too, certainly -- having an adventuring party only a room away from its core had evoked feelings of primal terror it'd thought it'd put behind it -- but that wasn't the true impetus. It was bored. Slowly, over the years, it had learned the language the adventurers spoke in its halls, and then even slower it had learned to read their language. When it killed them, sometimes they had scrolls or books in their possession, and for decades it had shoved them into a dead-end dumpheap room on its 27th floor. Hidden behind a trio of secret doors (an innovation it'd thought of circa floor 22), no adventurer had ever found their way there. It thought about that a lot, too -- little trails all up and down its levels, everywhere an adventurer had trod, funneling adventurers into the deeps. Its first five floors were entirely linear; its first forked path (rejoining only a room later) was on its 8th floor, when it had started being dissatisfied with curve-packing increasingly long linear stretches. Vast stretches of its vast, maze-like lower floors had never had an adventurer step upon them. Finally reading its cache of books had been... illuminating. Some of the books were travel guides for various dungeons -- that was how it learned the second-ring boss in Darkwood Grove was a kelpie associated with a certain stretch of deep river, which fit with the system-reported secondary water affinity -- and some were religious, or official proclamations of the human kingdom that laid claim to the overworld region it was beneath. It pieced together an idea of the world slowly. It knew about religion, of course: when it killed adventurers and didn't wipe the whole party, half the time they'd pray over the corpses. Calling for their patron to guide the soul in death. That was something like its own respawn cycle: the animating soul fled from dead mobs, and it would inter it into a new mob, optionally allowing it to recall some of its prior lives to guide its growth, until it was reaped again. The same cycle held true for adventurers, supposedly. Certainly it couldn't do anything with their souls, even as it felt them escape from their dying bodies. But what was the point of it all? Adventurers killed its mobs, and it respawned them elsewhere. Its mobs killed adventurers, and their god respawned them elsewhere. Goblin Cave constantly dug deeper. It had thought every actor in this cycle did this out of... desire to survive. The brutal fight for survival. Everyone had a motive. But... more and more, it had an inkling that it was missing something. "Theme". That was the word it was dwelling on. "Boring theme," adventurers said. "Easy dungeon, but it's real static, and the theme is just cave after cave." Easy? Goblin Cave imagined any dungeon would be easy, if you stuck to the first five floors. It wasn't that it wanted adventurers trying to actively kill it, but... They were delving inside it, what, for fun? Just to harvest the goblin-skin leather and bent copper coins its mobs dropped? For the pittance of experience the upper floor goblins supplied? The dungeon guidebook entry on Darkwood Grove said the area was the result of a curse by a witch that corrupted the nearby forest, turning it to darkness. That was manifestly not how Darkwood Grove had formed. Like all other dungeons, its core had cohered slowly in system-space, fed by ambient excess mana until it finally crystallized enough to pierce through into mundane reality. Goblin Cave remembered the moment when Darkwood Grove was created. Witch? Curse? It was an invented story. Due to its nature as a surface dungeon, it made sense for it to rank up its existing bosses when it ranked up, and create a new level 1 boss; Goblin Cave had taken the opposite tack and left its higher levels unchanged as it dug deeper. "Narrative". Darkwood Grove's first boss, and final boss, was a mage-type enemy that stayed in a hut at the very center of the wood. The witch. It was a story the dungeon told about itself. Its ranking overall was 1274, but there were many subcategories. "Difficulty", 1094. "Theme", 1328. "Narrative", 1709. It had the power to reshape reality at a whim. To build and bury, create and destroy. It spun souls from the nothingness and created living things. And it was using this power to, what? Maintain a themepark for adventurers to grind out their low levels? The power of a god, used to make a replica of a filthy, tedious goblin warren. To provide a constant stream of meaningless fodder mobs. Anything that happened in its halls didn't matter: kill its 1st floor boss, the goblin chief? It didn't matter. It would respawn soon. And, its mob wasn't really a goblin chief: an elder providing leadership to a tribe. What tribe? It had seven spawns on its first floor. Elder? The current goblin chief was five hours old. That it looked like a wizened old goblin was artifice. It never spoke to other goblins, save for using its [War Cry] buff. It sat in its designated room, inert or sometimes pacing, until an adventurer party entered. Then it died, and Goblin Cave respawned it, and the cycle repeated itself. Was it even a goblin? Goblin Cave spun its body out of pure mana on each respawn. A mana construct pretending to be a living thing. Oh, certainly, it knew all about maintaining ecological cycles. It had made a bit of a hobby of setting them up, on its mid-30s floors. Generate a trickle of water, put down luminous mushroom spores on the shore of the growing pool, put down algae in the water to use the glow of the mushrooms, add fish to eat the algae, and then finally let hobgoblins eat the fish. All those little cycles of life and death fed it with a steady supply of souls and mana; those loops were the core of passive generation. But goblins were reproductively viable on the scale of a year or two, and hobgoblins nearly a decade; there was no way to maintain a stable population without cutting corners. And more and more, it felt like calling them 'goblins' was wrong. They ate and drank, when it reminded them to, or when it had established control nodes to remind them to automatically. Eating and drinking buffed their stats. Maybe because they were well-fed, or maybe just a system bonus for engaging in realistic simulacra. They chittered at each other, but there was never language there. There was hardly thought there. It had options, in its system interface: Tactics. Strategy. To control how they attacked. It'd used them to create the various swarm encounters throughout its warrens. Tactics, not thought up from a mind, or taught, but injected into the puppets it had created to give them some semblance of intellect. For what felt like the first time, Goblin Cave looked at itself. Really looked at itself. What it had constructed over the years was loathsome, vile. A grotesque clockwork world of idiot machines, pacing through simulated corridors. Was this every dungeon? Was the whole world like this? Was the #1 Narrative dungeon telling some sublime lies about its nature, and reinforcing that with every step through its corridor? It was abruptly intolerable. Goblin Cave would have to do something different. It needed to do something different.
chapter 2 - lesser mana puppet
The question was, obviously, where to start. It looked at its lower floors: 50, a sprawling cavern dotted with groves of luminous fungus, featuring a whole secondary section in honeycombed caverns along the ceiling, lit by glowrock outcroppings embedded in the cavern roof; and the 51st, a barren expanse of bare rock that it hadn't gotten around to doing anything with yet. Its core, a person-sized chunk of faceted crystal, was seated within a cave region on the unfinished floor 50, mostly just to move it away from the boss room on floor 49. Before all of this, it had been considering starting up something with lava, maybe? The fungal cavern theme had run its course, it had thought. This deep down, the chill of the caves had turned into a gentle warmth, and it had started to place down pyrofungus around seams of heat as it exposed them in its constant digging. Their gills gleamed red among the cavern floors, glowing more and more intensely until they were fierce yellow-white beacons, rippling the air around them with heat. Then they erupted in a ferocious storm of superheated spores. Previously, it had considered them a clever hybrid between a timed trap and a fungus. Now it was just more artifice. Why did they exist? Because it had been thinking about lava. Why superheated spores? It had the suggestion of a reproductive cycle, but... like everything else in its corridors, it only existed because it wanted them to exist. Because of "theme". It had bothered to make them reproductively viable, but in practice the fledgling pyrofungi were torn apart by the blasts of their more mature parents; spores actually reproducing was quite rare. It did like building caverns. Delicately daubing sheets of moss across walls, laying down thickets of giant mushrooms, blending in delicate whorls of bioluminescence. It had unlocked many different fungi and modified them heavily, just for decoration, without ever really branching out into a proper specialization -- by which it meant, a system-approved spawning fork which provided greater practical use. It just liked glowing things. Which was to say, it did like building caverns, but now it all seemed grotesque. Painting more artful, artificial landscapes, for adventurers to one day trample through... why bother? It had done that for floor after floor, elaborating on caves and caverns and dark fissures and striated canyons and subterranean lakes. Mimicking, in some sense, what a cavern network might have looked like here. If there had been one. Several miles outside its range, but still close enough to vaguely feel the shape of, there was an actual series of caves. Etched out, it thought, from erosion: some aquifer was pushed up by the weight of the mountain range above, leading to a series of springs and streams that ran intermittently all across the mountain slopes. One of those streams had found a weak patch of soft limestone and eroded through, forming a deep cenote that fed an underground river all the way through the mountain, and it was that cavern that it had idly mimicked over the years: forming out galleries and shelves as if they were eroded by the passage of water. Ignoring, of course, the constant downward slopes to the next floor, utterly unrealistic for any cavern carved out by the passage of water through. Through what? The dungeon had only ever had one entrance, and that had never been submerged. Enough caverns, enough mimickry. It wanted to make something meaningful. Something real. But of course, it was much easier to flatly state that goal, without any other ideas, than to figure out what was meaningful. Its own adventurers? Its own gods? It was all cycles. It would like to make something that wasn't a mindless simulacra of something it had never known outside of system boxes informing it of the meaning of everything it was creating. That was easier said than done. It spawned a level 1 goblin down on the barren floor 51. It did it slowly, watching mana spin into bone, tendons, ligaments, organs, muscle, and finally flesh. The resulting goblin stood there, looking around dull and incurious, and Goblin Cave released its grip on it, letting it act freely. There was no perceptible difference. Its monsters did need to breathe. They could suffocate and drown, and previously it would have said, of course, that was because they were living things, but now it was concerned that was simply a balance consideration. The system status for mobs mentioned if they were aquatic or unbreathing, and those were specific tags with mechanical implications. Breathing might be a system-enforced mechanic, rather than... respiration. Like a living thing did. Or it might not. There wasn't really any way to test that, aside from sealing a breathing spawn somewhere airtight and seeing if it eventually suffocated from using air, and Goblin Cave did that, sealing the newly-spawned goblin in a perfect cube of rock. It didn't react. But, of course, there was no reason why a spawned goblin wouldn't breathe like a living thing without actually doing anything with it aside from converting live air to stagnant air. The cube, though, gave it an idea. It had spent so much time carving out these false naturalistic landscapes, and there was something about the obviously-constructed sharp angles of the cube that sparked something. It shattered a nearby wall into a mess of variously-sized tetrahedrons, watching them tumble into a bizarre slope of geometric gravel, and then did it again with cubes, neatly slicing the wall apart in a space-filling grid, revealing layers of constructed dungeon granite mixed in with the real thing, imperceptible to anything that couldn't see the subtle variations in structure between dungeon-stuff and true rock. Octahedrons, rhombic dodecahedrons, a series of spiky stellations made out of pentagonal trapezohedrons, from 10-sided to 110-sided, at which point they just looked like two cones stuck together. It slowly permuted the stone: spawning new polyhedra in the various flavors of rock the system had unlocked: granite, olivine, limestone, and so on, and then used its own ability to tweak them: pushing a massive cube of pure quartz up from the ground, milky white and flawless, and then repeated the process with feldspar, forming a nearly-matching cube. By the end of it all, the barren cavern was awash with polyhedra in dozens of materials, and also the goblin in the cube had suffocated. If that meant anything. It shuttled its soul off to respawn in one of the rapidly-cycling upper floors. The sheer artifice was satisfying, at least. It would be impossible to see the mess it had made and not think someone had done it, rather than believing it to be a natural process. It was done with faking natural processes. Goblin Cave was tempted to simply stop respawning goblins on its upper floors. Congratulations, adventurers; you've finally destroyed the goblin menace! Now have the barren caves, devoid of life, which your actions have wrought. But... It was afraid. Whatever the adventurers were doing, they were stable now, a known quantity. If it started acting differently, who knew what they would do? The obvious answer was: delve deeper. Kill and kill through its spawned monsters until they reached the end of its dungeon, and then shatter its core. Or take control of it, and force it to spawn nothing but level 1-5 goblins for the rest of its existence. If it wanted to do something new, it would have to maintain its current levels, at least for the time being. In the mean time... It carved a perfectly straight square passageway out from its 51st floor, and slowly condensed the material of the walls, feeding it mana until it burst to life as manastone.
Manastone
A low-tier mana-conductive material, generally found in pockets near areas of high mana density. Raw mana fills the structure of the stone lattice, giving it vastly increased hardness and shear strength, as well as giving it its characteristic blue iridescence and faint glow.
Goblin Cave picked it because it resembled the blue crystal of its core: the most obviously artificial material possible. On a whim, it extended the corridor, forming a square chamber, and then dug off again at a right angle. It had an idea now: it dug out a replica of its first floor, all four linear rooms of it, but instead of the naturalistic caves and winding corridors above, it did it in sharp 90-degree angles, under the uniform, shadowless light of manastone. And to match the four rooms, it spawned in... It had templates upon templates of spawns. All sorts of goblin varieties; a smaller but still vast list of beast templates ranging from mice to mammoths; a haphazard selection of other, non-specialized templates. But they were all simulacra. What this was was a dungeon mob: a thing that existed only to fight and die. Even the few elemental templates it could spawn -- wind shade, flame wisp, animated pebble -- were imitations.
Flame Wisp
The lowest rank of fire elemental, a flame wisp takes the form of a hovering flame. Borne from unfocused mana in mana-rich regions, their color is usually pale and of varying hues.
What unfocused mana? Goblin Cave knew exactly what its mana was doing. This wasn't some creature bursting out of nothingness simply due to mana fluctuations; Goblin Cave was spawning it in. Lacking any further ideas, it burned mana into nothingness, filling out the framework of a template spawn without having anything to put inside it. An empty, spawn-shaped box. The system didn't bother recognizing it, of course, but Goblin Cave was pleasantly surprised to see that the mana framework was at least self-stable: it withdrew its touch and the half-finished spawn remained, floating there as a visible web of mana threads. It added six more, near the cubbyhole warrens -- here, in the manastone replica of the cave, rendered as shallow doorways onto sheer walls -- where it spawned in the goblins out of view. Then, for the [Goblin Chief], it made another hollow spawn framework at the end of the linear chain of rooms, and pumped in more mana, until it reached the amount required by a level 1 boss. There, though, something unexpected happened: the spawn template activated, condensing down and animating into a shape something like a shadowy humanoid figure, without any detail or substance.
New creature template unlocked: [Lesser Mana Puppet]!
Lesser Mana Puppet
A simple construct of pure, unaligned mana, forming a hollow animating figure without thought or will, capable of obeying simple commands. Critically weak to all magic damage.
Goblin Cave felt a burst of joy mingled with frustration: joy, because for the first time in its entire life, the creature description was wholly and truly accurate; and frustration, because... it had thought, in some sense, that it was being original. That it had had a new idea. But no, apparently it was still treading well-categorized ground. [Lesser Mana Puppet] fit in with the rest of its spawns: in its otherwise-patchy low-tier elemental construct category, filling in the 'elementally unaligned' slot in tier 0, next to the earth-aligned lesser stone golem. Its entire template codex could be reduced to this single one; arguably, in a sense everything it had ever spawned was simply a slight variation on the theme of [Lesser Mana Puppet]. Well, if it worked, it worked. Goblin Cave shuffled the hollow frameworks around, replacing them each with a [Lesser Mana Puppet], and then attempted the boss again: this time, it pumped in mana, stifling the activation of [Lesser Mana Puppet] in the same fashion as it stifled the spawn of a [Goblin] when it was trying to spawn a [Fierce Goblin], and kept going until it felt the system trigger again.
New creature template unlocked: [Common Mana Puppet]!
Common Mana Puppet
A construct of pure, unaligned mana, forming an animating figure without thought or will, capable of obeying simple commands. Weak to all magic damage.
That would do, for the 'boss'. A fractionally-improved version of the common dungeon enemy, like its [Goblin Chief] was to its first-floor [Goblin]s. Looking at the tiny, idiot warren in the middle of the barren cave, Goblin Cave felt proud of its work for the first time in a long while. It was absurd. It thought of transposing the entire thing up to the actual 1st floor: Adventurers suddenly traversing its constructed hallways, goblins replaced with mechanically-identical mana constructs. The artifice of what they'd been doing all along peeled away to reveal the truth of the matter, so that they couldn't even imagine they were, what? Rooting out a goblin infestation? It didn't do it, of course. It had meant it about needing to maintain its routine. But it was tempting. More importantly, it liked it. It had been... fun.
chapter 3 - redecoration
Goblin Cave had been thinking about creation. Spawning mobs in was obviously the most expedient way of getting a living thing, but many of the creature templates described natural conditions for their creation: being raised by a mage, or summoned from some elemental plane, or so on. How one might actually encounter those creatures, outside of the context of a dungeon (if such things actually existed). [Flame Wisp] was a perfect example: borne from unfocused mana in mana-rich regions. Goblin Cave would never describe its mana as 'unfocused', so despite the entire dungeon structure being saturated in its mana, there was never the degree of disorder required to spawn such a thing naturally. If "spawn" was the correct term for something happening naturally. Goblin Cave flit its attention over to another featureless stretch of barren cavern on floor 51. It dug out a hollow, paying attention to the way it pushed and pulled its mana, banding it across the rock surface to flake it apart into small enough shards that it could absorb directly. This was a skill learned from long practice digging; back in the early days it had endless frustration with shuffling dirt piles around, or ending up with massive tailing piles from all the loose rock it produced in its endless digging. Now, though, the flakes wafted up on a current of its mana and dissolved apart, smearing out of mundane reality and into the system layer where they were represented more abstractly. It dug with drills and streams and breezes, effortlessly etching (what resembled) eroded, craggy outcroppings or water-rounded bowls out of the solid rock. The act of pulling back its mana was more challenging. Its mana fought against the vacuum, sending out ripples of instability through the air. The sensation was unpleasant, but right now it was precisely what it wanted. The problem was... this was all still its mana, and even with some slight vibrations it got the feeling that was hardly what the system considered to be 'unfocused'. One of the most common complaints it had heard from adventurers was when they first stepped inside its entrance: "Ugh, I hate how dungeon mana feels," they'd say, or words to that effect. "It's so stagnant." Stagnant, or precise, or unnatural, and so on. There was a faint wobbling to its mana around its entrance, at the interface between itself and the rest of the world, and it had actually constructed some damping layers within the rock, decades ago, just to keep the movement down. It had been distracting. But where it could damp, it could also, maybe, stimulate. Inside the rock, it had hidden (why had it hidden them?) spirals of mithril, and its curves caught and redirected the rippling mana from the exterior, helping it calm itself. If those spirals stilled the mana... It spun out a collection of mana-transducing materials, manastone and mithril and coreglass, shaping them into twists and spikes and feeling how mana rippled around them. It followed the opposite path that it had done then: amplifying any feature that threw off the mana current, scraping away at anything that caused it to smooth out. The effect was quite grating. It became acutely unpleasant to push mana through the mess it had created: a series of jagged gratings that ran almost but not quite parallel, and which immediately fragmented any mana it pushed through them into a mess of discordant harmonics. Focusing on the rest of its dungeon became difficult, with the equivalent of a shrieking din wailing away down on the 51st floor. Fortunately, the moment it stopped pushing mana through the turbulence subsided. It encircled the entire thing in a tunnel of mithril, to contain the turbulent mana, and placed a simple mana pump on either end -- a pair of golden plates with an even grid of holes punched through them. When they spun, the interference pattern of overlapping holes created a slight mana imbalance on one side of the plates, and thus pulled mana through slowly. So now it had created an awful racket in a box: mana was continually drawn into the tube, where the gratings decohered it into a wild cacophony of mana varieties. It slowed the second pump on the other side, letting the wild mana sluggishly leak free and make its way back into the rest of Goblin Cave's mana pool. It had no clue if this would do anything, but at least it was novel. Some part of it was pleased with devising a new trap: open some slats in a distant chamber, and connect a mana circuit to funnel the wild magic straight at a group of adventurers. If they complained about the mana flow changing when they entered its dungeon, certainly being constantly buffeted by mana flow changes would be even more unpleasant? It had precisely zero mana-based traps of that nature in its entire dungeon. It only had one or two [Goblin Shaman]s, and it had never really explored any spellcaster branches. But, of course, the goblins weren't the ones making the traps. It seemed absurd to it now, how strongly it had limited itself. Why not have bizarre, impossible traps? It had access hatches to its pit traps, in case the goblins needed to fix broken spikes or haul out bodies. There were ramps to roll boulders up, to fit them back in its stonefall traps. But it could effortlessly move anything it wanted anywhere in its domain. Half the time it simply spawned in a new granite ball, when some unfortunate adventuring party was crushed by its traps. It could carve through rock with precision utterly beyond what any mortal could do. So why had it stuck to pits and spikes and stonefall traps this whole time? It had thought trap plants were novel? In any case, if the idea was to see if it could naturally spawn a [Flame Wisp] simply from discordant mana, it would need to keep its racket-in-a-box running. Who knew how common that spawn was (if it ever happened at all)? The system box didn't give details. It was already extremely difficult to concentrate. To the left of the initial tube, it built another one, with fewer gratings: its discordant mana was slightly less shrill. And next to that, even fewer. It formed a series of tubes all the way down to a completely hollow one that let mana pass through unchanged. And then, dreading it, it moved to the right: packing in more and more gratings, making the current even more turbulent. In the end it built twenty eight separate mana tubes, with tones that ranged from 'unobtrusive' to 'intolerable'. It would keep them running up to whatever degree it could stand and see what happened. If anything happened. Maybe [Flame Wisp]s needed a much larger volume of discordant mana? Certainly nothing particularly interesting was happening with the mana turbulence so far. Or maybe even 'intolerably discordant' to it was only a slight ripple in the eyes of the system, and it would need to build out tubes to, say, the three-hundred forty-third, before it was turbulent enough. Maybe, and this was what concerned it the most, there was never really such a thing as a flame wisp. Maybe it was just a thing invented by the system to fill a template slot, just as real as the witch's curse over in Darkwood Grove. Maybe all it had accomplished here was making a constant frustrating distraction. That would still be preferable to more fake caves full of fake goblins. It ended up keeping the first twelve mana tubes playing. Its first one was now fourteenth, so, just a little more shrill than it could stand right now. In the mean time... it cast about for other ideas to try. It still wasn't sure what exactly it was doing, aside from... releasing frustration. It could try to naturally spawn in more creatures, but it was lacking the drive. There would be something amusing about creating dozens of simulated environments, guided solely by the vague system prompts, to try to conjure up a true simulacra. Copies of copies of copies. It was sketching as it thought, not really digging out anything meaningful: wind shades were said to stalk travelers in narrow canyons, and so it sketched out a zig-zagging ravine of faintly-glowing manastone through the canyon floor. Just that they stalk travelers, not that they were born there. Animated pebbles were fragments of greater stone elementals that retained their animating power, and so it transformed the tumbled polyhedra into manastone, crunching the material down until every one in forty nine polyhedra shone with the brilliance of mana quartz, not that it understood how stone elementals could move of their own volition. Living shadows, the system attested, naturally arose from corrupted mana in dark-aligned regions, and so it spat angled monoliths of brilliant lumenrock and inky voidstone from the walls and floor, creating a mess of sharp-edged shadows that stretched out into hazy blurs. And so on. By the time it was done, there was hardly anywhere on the 51st floor it could look from and not see a mess of abstract construction: glowing cubes and dodecahedrons budding from the walls like geometric fungus; floor sliced apart into the neat forks of cubic ravines, bleeding blue-white light into the open air above; slabs of voidstone sucked up light in swirls; massive mana-decoherence tubes in various tones erupted in precise rows down the sides of the walls. It liked the look, it decided. Haphazard and barren-looking still, yes, but it was an aesthetic it could do something with. While it was considering, it added in a water source too. Primitive life was something it did, actually, know how to grow from scratch: there were all sorts of spores floating through its air, carried down the ramp from floor 50, and all the more opportunistic varieties needed was water. Usually, when it made water sources it hid the true sources -- a twisted sphere of mana that pulled down on system space, constantly emitting water from its system stores -- somewhere unobtrusive: inside a wall of porous rock, to make it slowly seep through in a faux spring, or sometimes from a recessed shelf far in the ceiling, to create a waterfall without needing to fully plumb the entire dungeon floor. Here, it placed the water source smack in the middle of the maze of glowing walls, providing an unmistakable view of the perfect orb of water, constantly sheeting droplets down. The water puddled and ran, forming a rapidly-growing pool. It cast around, flitting across the sloping, uneven cavern floor that it had never designed to guide water, watching as the water flooded into the glowing crevasse with a gurgle. Eventually it decided to place the matching water sink in a overflow catchment raised up in an equally-prominent pillar, so that eventually maybe half the cavern floor would be flooded under near a human's height. It linked the sink/source pair together in system space, so they'd cycle through the same water once the chamber was filled -- though at this rate that would take months. It took a lot of water to flood a cavern. It imagined the result would be fairly interesting: glowing shapes carved under the constantly-ripping water, sending muted caustics flickering across all the smooth crystalline shapes it'd burst from the floor and walls. Fumgi and mosses of who-knew what varieties could find their way to the emerging shore, maybe eventually creating thickets -- but it had no clue on the timespan of that. It hadn't spent an awful lot of time waiting for things to grow, not when it could grow things by force. The thought of anyone else seeing this all was more than a little absurd. This was all below its core chamber; there was no reason for anyone to ever step foot on floor 50, much less 51. But all of this aimless building had given it some ideas. It had a wealth of materials stored inside its system interface, and even more it knew how to construct on its own. It had always limited itself to naturalistic rocks and ores, with only a small diversion to masoned rock with the hobgoblin town it'd tried building on floor 37. But now... even if it wanted to try spawning some creatures naturally, why bother to make it look natural? If it wanted to reveal itself to the world at some point, that meant digging deeper, producing ever-more-deadly monsters to protect itself from the consequences of its actions. And that meant experimentation. It also meant... The creature templates were very precise. One monster class (with subtypes) per tier per element. A rotten ontology, a metastasized taxonomy, demanding all of reality restructure itself to hew to its categories. Would allowing two be different? Ten? A hundred? Would that meaningfully change the nature of the system, which provided with grim finality a complete enumeration of everything that could possibly exist? By what alchemy did one mix one [Goblin], tier 1, and one [Warg], tier 2, to get a [Goblin Rider], tier 3? It did not create that combination, it had simply... unlocked it, in a rolling blueprint that had already existed long before Goblin Cave had been around to unlock it. Someone else had already ordered all of reality, and it was stuck simply unfolding into the space those orderings established. It wanted to push out beyond that. It wanted to spawn something that the system couldn't categorize at all. But, looking at its so-far lackluster attempts to spawn a flame wisp, it might have to start with something more practical. If it was stuck inside the system, there was, at least, one single interactive aspect of it: the rankings. Ranked by whom? According to what? Certainly, its "Narrative" ranking hadn't changed one place despite the mess it'd made of its 51st floor. Did that mean adventurers had to see it, for it to count? Did the adventurers themselves rank it, or were they only a medium through which something else did the ranking? Who knew what else could be possible within or without the system. It would keep experimenting. But there was one thing Goblin Cave resolved: if nothing else, it would make itself the lowest-ranked "Narrative" dungeon in the region!
chapter 4 - mana goblin
If Goblin Cave wanted to restructure its existing floors, though, it'd need to figure out some new monsters. [Lesser Mana Puppet] was absolutely an option for some revised upper floors -- and, looking about its replica first floor, they appeared nearly invisible, immersed in the hazy, shadowless light of the manastone walls. But it wasn't satisified with goblins and it wasn't satisfied with the mana puppets either. What it wanted was something that defied the system classification. Goblin Cave knew that was going to be easier said than done, but there was no way to get to that point without trying some things out. Of course, its first impulse was just to spawn another goblin. Here, now, it wasn't aiming for truth or aesthetics or anything like that. It was exploring the taxonomy laid out before it. A goblin... with four arms.
New creature subtype unlocked: [Four-armed] [Goblin]!
Four-armed goblin
A common goblin, mutated via accident, eldrich mana, or wizardly experimentation to have four arms. Can wield bonus weapons.
The result wasn't particularly surprising. It was the same prefaced format used for unusual monster subtypes, and in fact it was on the same template page as the [Two-headed] [Cyclops] it had unlocked a decade-or-so back and stuffed into its level 43 boss room. A goblin... with a wolf's head.
New creature template unlocked: [Beastkin Goblin]!
Beastkin goblin
A bestial throwback. One in twenty-thousand goblins are born with animal features, revealing their evolutionary roots. In ancient times, this species formed massive tribes with a primitive social hierarchy.
That was a little unexpected. The unlocked template blended the goblin and wolf features more completely than Goblin Cave had, giving the goblin hairy forearms and legs, as well as a mane-like mass of fur across its neck and shoulders. That was the 'true' [Beastkin Goblin]. The description was also interesting. Ancient times? So, if Goblin Cave had been around in ancient times, would the system description have been different? Also, certainly it had spawned more than twenty thousand goblins in its lifetime; none of them had ended up with animal features. Theoretically it could mix-and-match all of these attributes: [Two-headed] [Four-armed] [Bestial Goblin], and so forth. Permutations didn't seem like they had any real promise from a taxonomic perspective, though. Also, as a matter of personal taste, it wanted something unusual to populate any redesigned floors. [Beastkin Goblin]s would have been an interesting mob to stumble across when it was still invested in its [Goblin Rider] mob, since that provided an interesting twist on a hybrid goblin/beast specialization, but now... no. Too boring. It had enjoyed using manastone. The glow was nice, and the way it dragged the mind towards the artifice of the entire dungeon process was appreciated. Manastone wasn't the material it had that was most like it's core crystal, though. There was also manacrystal. As a fairly mature dungeon, it had long ago moved beyond its available mana being the bottleneck for its growth. Respawns were a much more constrained values, with the vast majority of them being locked up in its rapidly-cycling upper floors. Manacrystal, though... it could throw around as much manastone as it wanted without meaningfully dropping its mana, but making an entire floor, or even a particularly large room, entirely out of manacrystal would require some rationing over a fairly large period of time. Not that it couldn't do it, but it would have to weigh whether or not the appearance was actually worth it. But in addition to forming rooms out of it... Goblin Cave spun together a glob of raw manacrystal. The material didn't glow, exactly, but it caught the light and amplified it. The result, in the already well-lit cavern floor, was something that resembled a mass of glittering mirror shards: light flashing and twisting in beams around it as the material spun and twisted. Goblin Cave slowly extruded more material and shaped it, like molten glass, into the figure of a goblin. All the while, it winced at the mana drain: a goblin-sized figure of manacrystal was cheap, compared to its entire mana pool, but it was still easily more expensive than the thousands of manastone blocks it'd reshaped earlier. Then, taking that absurdly expensive statue, it steadily pumped even more mana into it, forming passageways and connections, until--
New creature subtype unlocked: [Goblinoid] [Manacrystal Golem]!
Goblinoid Manacrystal Golem
A brutally-powerful arcane construct made from unalloyed manacrystal. This one has been shaped into the form of a common goblin.
'This one' was maybe the closest Goblin Cave had ever seen the system acknowledge a specific entity. But this, too, was a bust: it had unlocked the standard [Manacrystal Golem] decades ago, although it had never used it, and while [Goblinoid] was an amusing modifier it was also clearly labeled as attaching to non-organic targets only: sculpture, essentially. There would be no system-endorsed goblinoid pyrofungus in its future. That might have been an avenue of exploration, if it had the faintest clue how to make that itself. A goblin covered in pyrofungus would presumably end up as [Pyrofungus-infested] [Goblin]; it'd had long experience seeing fungal infestations on its creatures. There was no reason why a pyrofungus in the shape of a goblin wouldn't just be [Pyrofungus]. And so on. It needed to... think of something else. 'Think of something unexpected' was, in general, impossible, or at least a deeply unproductive way to consider the situation. Up on floor 3, an apprentice wizard killed one of its goblins with a mana beam. It was one of the most primitive spells available: a weak release of mana, constrained into a tight beam. Without the constraint, it was as harmless as a wafting breeze, but when tightly focused a properly-constructed mana beam could slice through adamantine. Not that the apprentice's mana beam was properly-constructed; it could hardly cut through a quarter-inch of goblin bone. One of Goblin Cave's local control nodes handled the spawn cycling automatically: freeing the goblin soul from the corpse and shuffling it on to end up... on floor 5, where a respawn slot in a swarm room had been vacant for the past ten minutes and only now hit the top of its priority queue. Mana beam... Goblin Cave structured a goblin spawn, poking and prodding at its ability slots. It wanted a goblin that could cast mana beam. Not as a spell; that would be easy enough to just spawn a [Goblin Shaman], who among other things could be specialized to pure-mana spells and/or beam-type spells. No, it wanted a goblin that had mana beam as an innate ability. There was plenty of variance in the template: [War Cry], [Lunge], [Trip], [Sneak], [Goblin Kick], and many more were all built-in goblin abilities, and depending on how it spawned a goblin it could be granted more or fewer abilities, as befitting its various specializations. Spawning in a goblin with lesser abilities like [Sneak] was something it had stopped needing system help with ages ago, and in fact it had considered itself fairly proficient at artfully integrating unexpected abilities to its hobgoblins on lower floors. The problem was... It would be difficult to explain. "Mana" wasn't just a fog that it pumped into a template. There was an order and a structure there, a balance that needed to be reached. The most obvious example would be to speak of the connection between abilities and mana cost: the more abilities a spawn had, the less 'stable' it was, and the more mana that was correspondingly necessary to successfully spawn it. This, like everything, was flexible, and through clever layering and assembly Goblin Cave had figured out several new spawn configurations that gave goblins custom abilities without any meaningful increase in mana cost. That was simple. But there were many other balances to consider, with less precise labels. It thought of spawns as crystals in some kind of lattice, where the vast majority would shatter apart from disharmony long before the spawn completed, and the size of the space was-- unfathomable. Mana beam... the spawn structure of a [Goblin Shaman] wasn't just "more involved" than that of a [Goblin], though it was. It was an entirely different structure, with different balancing and trade-offs, and as it pondered the idea it couldn't think of any way to stabilize the construct. It poked and prodded at the spawn template, pulling here, pushing there, reeling in in one place, loosening the weave elsewhere, changing color and tone, all to try to achieve the mana equivalent of hiding a boulder behind a mote of dust. Eventually it wasn't so much that Goblin Cave got an idea so much as it noticed a pattern. There was a structure, a recurrence, if it loosened the framework in ways beyond what it had considered before. Pull the knot free, exploding the entire diagram into disconnected pieces, before repacking it as something entirely different but with a shared shadow. The result couldn't be a successful [Goblin] spawn, but it seemed like it might spawn something. And it could cast mana beam. The template was a monstrosity: tier 1, but taking as much mana to spawn as a tier 4 creature due to the sheer inefficiency of the spawn structure. It was going to be extremely anti-climactic, Goblin Cave thought, if this ended up being something like a [Ghost] or a [Prism Elemental] or what-have-you, an incredibly contrived and elaborate backwards route to something it could already spawn. Goblin Cave fed mana into the mess of a spawn it'd constructed, wincing from the screech of feedback, and had to clamp down the mana flow simply to keep the spawn from bursting itself apart. Mana poured into it, forming a shape, and...
New creature template unlocked: [Mana Goblin]!
Mana goblin
An experimental creature created by feeding intense mana harmonics into a goblin yolk-sac over the entire gestational period. Can cast all tier 0 & 1 unaligned damage spells as free actions.
The mana goblin was strange. It had the size and shape of a goblin, but it looked almost painted: green skin marbled through with glowing bruises, with mana-blue veins fluttering up to the surface across its neck and jaw. Its eyes were a flat blue, with the same faint glow as manastone, and its internal flesh -- mouth and tongue, certainly, but also organs and intestines -- had the same manalight glow. According to the system categorization, it fit neatly in a newly-unlocked "aberration" category, at tier 1. The system-granted spawn template had a mana cost a fifth of what it had spent (which was still nearly double the usual cost of spawning a tier 1 creature) and from cursory view the diagram looked roughly half as nightmarish as the mess Goblin Cave had designed. A somewhat underwhelming result, for something that had been such a mess to spawn. And since it was still system-approved, it was a failure on that end too. Still, Goblin Cave liked it well enough. If anything, it was a little disappointed it wasn't more artificial-looking. It was still thinking of ways to lower its "Narrative" score, and it didn't want to stumble into some theme of... mana-corrupted goblins mutated by a manacrystal mine, or anything like that. It wanted nothing but the most obvious artifice. Still, the results of the experimentation were interesting enough, and gave it more thoughts to try out later.
chapter 5 - souls
The primary problem was-- if it was really going to commit to entirely restructuring its dungeon, it was going to need to unlock a truly outstanding number of new mobs. [Beastkin Goblin] and [Mana Goblin] were both tier 1, which gave them stat scaling reasonable for spawning on floors 1-10; past that and they would always be profoundly weak for their level compared to higher-tier mobs. [Manacrystal Golem], conversely, was tier 36, which was mostly a factor of manacrystal being a potent, difficult to create resource. [Hobgoblin] was the standard evolution for [Goblin], taking it from tier 0 to tier 12, and then [Lesser Orc] was a branch evolution from that, going to tier 24 on the 'orc' chart, although it had variant evolutions -- [Hobgoblin Fencer], [Hobgoblin Shaman], [Prowling Hobgoblin], and so forth -- up to tier 24 in the original 'goblin' chart as well. Ogres were from another branch evolution, unlocking an 'ogres' chart that was shared with its few cyclops templates. The tier system governed monster ability and growth. It would be mostly accurate to say that for any tier, its stats would reach their optimal power to mana and experience ratio at the corresponding level. Thus, a tier 50 creature would lag increasing behind a tier 30 creature up until level 30, at which point the tier 30 creature's experience-increase-per-level would start to increase, while the tier 50 creature's experience-increase-per-level would continue decreasing until it hit its optimum at level 50 -- so eventually the tier 50 creature would catch up and surpass the tier 30. It was a simple second derivative formula. While levels were unbounded, eventually the increasing mana and experience requirements would make leveling low-tier creatures profoundly ineffective. This was the main purpose of evolving mobs -- to amortize costs over time, so that it was possible to budget mana according to the current strength of the mob, and then to evolve it to a higher tier once that became cost efficient, rather than stumbling through the mess of powerleveling a costly-for-its-level high-tier mob through the low levels, or grinding a huge amount of mana to push a low-tier mob past its effective level cap. That was from the perspective of a dungeon core: presumably, an individual system-linked entity would have a different opinion. After all, when one's only choice would be to level further, then one would level further, even if it wasn't optimally tiered for its level. Goblins, on the whole, were statistically weak even for their tier already-low tier; their advantages were in low spawn cost and a host of buffs to attacking in groups. So, [Mana Goblin] certainly had promise in its upper floors, but-- what, [Mana Hobgoblin]? [Mana Orc]? The category was 'aberrations'; it seemed unlikely that mana goblins would have the same evolution requirements as a common goblin, or mirror the evolution of the goblin tree. Goblin Cave had no clue how to properly unlock those theoretical higher-tier creatures through the system interface; it had originally had [Hobgoblin] and [Orc] and the like unlocked via its goblin specialization. Spawning low-tier creatures by directly altering the spawn template was possible -- this was hardly the first time it'd done so -- but it rapidly became infeasible for higher-tier creatures. The frameworks required to spawn a creature were simple enough at low tiers, and sometimes even duplicated, and only instantiated on a higher-energy harmonic -- [Lesser Mana Puppet] and [Common Mana Puppet] were an example of that, and it wasn't unusual for various goblin-types to share the same exact framework for a few tiers in a row at low tiers -- but when they started gaining complexity, it happened fast. That made it... profoundly impractical to try to continue manually exploring the possibility space. If a tier 4 pattern was twice as complex as a tier 3, and a tier 5 pattern was twice as complex as a tier 4... The frameworks it had been playing with were artful loops and knots, twisted up in a complex but comprehensible fashion. Even the monstrosity of its handmade spawn pattern for [Mana Goblin] was still, fundamentally, legible. But it was the work of days to construct a custom spawn template for hobgoblins, in tier 12, and it had been the work of nearly a decade to slightly optimize a single spawn template for its lesser orcs, at 24. To put it in numbers, which it could easily do since everything around it was constantly numerically quantified, Goblin Cave would say that the spawn template for its tier 48 [Ogre Champion], its undefeated floor 49 boss, was precisely 34 trillion, 359 million, 738 thousand, 368 times more complex than the spawn template for its tier 0 [Goblin]. And, to be clear, the goblin template was still quite complex, but it was a long-studied and well-known complexity. Given it had taken Goblin Cave six decades to unlock up to tier 48, it did not have high hopes for unlocking an entirely-new parallel branch of mob spawns, starting over all the way from tier 0. It wouldn't take long in the grand scheme of things to powerlevel the [Mana Goblin] up to level 12 and thus unlock the potential for it to evolve at some point, but the process of evolution was ultimately beyond its control, and besides, it wouldn't be able to continue the process for long, given the continual increase in mana and experience for further levels. All that being said, it was theoretically not an issue: its first five floors were by far the most actively-delved, and it only had basic goblins and a few simple variations on those initial levels, so replacing those with mana constructs and mana goblins wouldn't be any particular challenge. Goblin Cave absolutely expected the change to cause adventurers to delve it deeper, though. But it had time to continue planning, and it wouldn't actually do anything until it was prepared. The problem would continue hanging over it, unresolved, until then. But the other problem with the mana goblins was that it was more artifice. Goblin Cave certainly hadn't bathed goblin eggsacs in mana. And the one it had spawned was exactly as animate as its mana puppets: it breathed, it blinked, it shifted its weight, it looked around. But it didn't act. Oh, it had long ago dissected some of its goblins; it knew how their brains worked. But the minds of anything it spawned were... quiet. Passive. Yielding easily to suggestion, and easy enough to build up templates of actions that they could make compelling facsimile of life. Goblin Cave had hobgoblins patrolling the village on floor 37: fishing, hunting, living, breeding, sleeping, but it was all fake. That had been the pinnacle of its ecological style: the entire 37th floor was a massive lake cavern, with the hobgoblin village perched on a clifftop above the lake, built on and over some ancient ruins and catacombs it had assembled prior to adding the hobgoblins. It was a teeming ecology, rich with dozens of plants and animals forming a roiling, chaotic semblance of a natural ecosystem. But to keep it stable it had had to add in so many threshold rules to keep anything from truly dying out, and the final construction of the hobgoblin village had seemed artful when it had started, but by the time it was done it was simply exhausted, bored with the tedium of animating a village of puppets for its own amusement. Beasts seemed to be slightly more lively than goblins. Slimes, as the simplest creature it could create, were also the most autonomous: all a slime ever did was slurp towards what it had identified as a food source and then try to envelop it, and its slimes were indistinguishable from the real thing in that respect. It spawned a slime to punctuate the thought: the [Water Slime], tier 1, spilled towards the growing lake on floor 51 and slipped inside with a muted spash, instantly becoming invisible in the water due to refraction. "The real thing", which it had learned about solely from system prompts, written by an unknown author, and scavenged books, which may have been describing solely other dungeons with identical slime spawns. But there was absolutely a difference in practice between its more advanced spawns and the simplest. Respawns were by far the most precious resource it had. Souls flitted through their cycles between its levels: one would incarnate as a goblin, then another goblin, a pair of wolves, a third goblin, a fourth, a warg, before taking a break from the rapid churn of its upper floors to exist as the fruiting spores of a candlefungus on floor 32, billowing in the air and spreading out over the course of months to settle in cracks in the damp ravine walls and grow waxy thickets of dripping candlefungi, only to eventually wither and die as the bloodwick shelf fungus above grew and slowly diverted the trickle of water above it, leaving it to dessicate with a final puff of glowing spores. Then another goblin. And so on and so forth for all of its souls, forming a messy thicket of existence weaving all through Goblin Cave. Anything long-living required a soul to be earthed within it during its life, or else it couldn't be commanded. Spawns without souls were worse than even the blank puppets: empty dolls whose bodies only made the shallowest imitation of life, before rapidly expiring. And souls... Souls were tricky. It had a fixed capacity of souls, and while it increased automatically with levels and certain dungeon core skills, it also increased slowly as creatures lived: their souls grew fractionally richer and more elaborate with each life, until eventually they budded apart, giving it access to more raw soul. The problem there was that goblins were absolutely atrocious at that, and its upper floor goblins, who had lifespans in the range of hours or days, had practically no time for their souls to grow. Its lower floors, in the most practical terms, were an immense soul farm: much longer-lived, due to the rarity of delving to that depth and the expansive floor layout making most encounters optional; they were where Goblin Cave got most of its expanded soul capacity. But there was another factor: its rate of soul cycling. This was its spawn rate: how rapidly it could cycle bodiless souls through their realm, to reinstantiate a dead mob with a replacement. This was also impacted by its level and a whole host of other skills, but unlike its soul capacity it had never determined any way to increase the flow meaningfully. To keep the upper floors respawning rapidly, it was in effect stealing respawns from the lower floors. In a word, it was diverting pressure to the upper floors to keep them cycling fast. It envisioned the whole cycle as something like drops of oil spinning in a whirlpool: close to the center, the pressure of motion broke the droplets into thousands of tiny fragments, and it was only at the margins, where the whirlpool pressure of its spawning loops was the lightest, that they could naturally cohere together into fat, sluggishly-moving orbs. It could adjust the power of the whirlpool, but the souls reacted to that change on their own time. The amount of soul a tier 48 creature took to spawn was vaster by orders of magnitude than the shred required to vitalize a bloodcap patch. So those heavy, congealed souls at the margins of its whirlpool were in somewhat short supply, leading to a further paucity of its lower floors. So as the souls spun through it they were split apart and merged together, and it was the time that that process took that was a primary bottleneck. Much like spawn framework patterns, the amount of soul animating the mob increased dramatically by tier, and so the souls it was using on its lower floors were thousands, tens of thousands times larger (by which it meant, higher numbers in its numerical quantification) than the wisps it was using for its goblins. What all this meant was that its mobs on lower floors respawned much, much slower than on its upper floors. The tier change only partly balanced things out: if its new mobs were killed, the tier 0 and 1 mobs it'd spawned on floor 51 would respawn in days, rather than the hours on its upper floors, and had the manacrystal golem died it would have taken weeks for it soul to work its way through its low-pressure respawn system before eventually reincarnating. What all that meant was that so far its experimentations -- spawning in tier 0 trash mobs at floor 51 -- had added very little pressure to its spawn cycle. The manacrystal golem had been by far the costliest in that respect, requiring it to shuffle around some currently-unoccupied ogres up on floor 44. It moved to undo the spawn, leaving the golem as an inert statue, and then, looking at the wisp of soul... It spun out another [Mana Goblin], slightly warping the system framework to allow for a larger soul. This was, in a word, pointless, since as far as it knew there was no point to 'over-soul' a spawn -- the excess soul floated around the creature in a haze, present but generally non-interacting. It raised their defenses against certain kinds of spells minutely. It was also a total waste of a soul that could power a high-tier spawn, or be eventually split apart to manage dozens of goblins. Goblin Cave spawned in the goblin, settling the soul in its framework. As it spawned in, the goblin twitched. Muscles spasmed. Inspecting it closer showed erratic patterns in its brain. It fell over, hands coming out to brace its fall -- not unusual -- and it let out a sharp yelp -- quite unusual. Goblin Cave stared down at the fresh goblin as it twisted up and looked back and forth, taking in the bizarre structure of the 51st floor. It scuttled away from the shimmering pillar of water in the center of the cavern, hiding in the shadows. Now this was interesting.
chapter 6 - observations
Goblin Cave watched the mana goblin skulk through the shadows. It seemed alert, aware of its environment, potentially cognizant and making choices about what to do next. Its brain was certainly firing more actively than any of its other goblins, and its body/soul connection was vastly more complex than the connection of any of its other mobs. Goblin Cave hadn't had much reason to speak -- no one to speak to -- but it decided to try. SPEAK, IF YOU CAN HEAR THIS. The goblin jerked, looking back and forth. For a moment its gaze went to its other mana goblin, still standing mostly-motionless on the edge of its shallow lake, before looking away. Goblin Cave had spoke in system-language. It tried again in the human tongue the adventurers spoke. The goblin reacted again, this time with a -- scared? angry? frustrated? -- hiss, and it scuttled away faster, making its way towards the cavern wall. Goblin Cave didn't actually know any goblin languages. It had no clue if the goblin knew any goblin languages. As far as it was concerned, its mobs 'knew' about their skills, and that was it. This was... it was hard to say. It felt embarrassed, maybe? Was this something every other dungeon discovered early on on their existence? If so, it had been very foolish for a very long time. But... it, as a pitiful level 1 core, would have never been able to amass the capacity of soul required to spawn in an 'oversouled' level 1 goblin. Conversely, if it took a tier 36 soul instantiated with a tier 1 mob, it could have done this decades ago. It had just never thought to. Even now, it was impossible for it to say, really, if it had chanced upon the 'correct' amount of soul. It had no comparison; while it could absolutely feel souls shifting away when adventurers died within it, it couldn't measure them at all. Those souls weren't its own; they belonged, presumably, to the adventurer's gods. That was the other question: the books it had scavenged spoke of the gods as beings of immense power, living in their own domains: paradises not of this world, or torments beyond mortal ken, or what have you. Though it was possible this discovery it had made wasn't one all dungeons made, it was possible that it was a discovery that drew a line between a mere dungeon core and a nascent god. The thought made a quiver of fear ripple through it. It had always thought of gods as... distant beings, hardly interacting with the world as it knew it. But if they were indeed beings like itself-- their power! Here, it could hardly manage to spawn in a single oversouled goblin; dozens of adventurers walked its halls even now, and over time -- hundreds, thousands of adventurers passed through it. And it was only one of thousands of dungeons within its region. The power to spawn that many mobs abruptly put the gods on a scale with it, and it was clear that if that was so, they were massively more powerful than itself. Like the whole flock of concerns it had burst into the awareness of, Goblin Cave resolved to not think about the situation unless it could meaningfully impact things. Currently, all it could do was experiment further. Immediately, there were two factors it could control: the amount of soul it placed in the oversouled creature, and the capacity of that soul's past lives it exposed to the new spawn. It had previously used reincarnations primarily on boss mobs -- cycling the same soul through the same spawn over and over -- since that seemed to aid in the mob using its skills in well-timed, cost-efficient ways. It looked over at its first mana goblin, the one it had spawned in with the manually-constructed template. It despawned the goblin with a thought, flesh unweaving into mana, soul going free to be caught up in its usual respawn cycles. Then... it scanned through its floors, plucking out various mobs that wouldn't be missed. Its lower floors were already uncomfortably low-population, given their size, and taking away a whole host of high-tier mobs didn't particularly make it feel more secure. But it was all worthwhile in the pursuit of knowledge. A [Goblin Warlord] (tier 8) from floor 15, a dense thicket of skullchoke netfungus (tier 13) from floor 22, its secondary [Hobgoblin Shaman] (tier 19) from its floor 37 village, a [Lesser Blood Orc] (tier 27) from floor 44, each with souls befitting their tier: all these it plucked from their posts and dissolved them apart, catching their souls and easing them into newly-spawned [Mana Goblins], spawned in disparate locations across its haphazard floor 51. It was difficult to quantify the results. The former-warlord sat down, which its goblins already did some times, but it didn't take any other actions immediately. The former-skullchoke stood there aimlessly, head drifting side-to-side minutely. The former-shaman blinked slowly, taking a few tottering steps. The former-blood-orc behaved in mostly the same way its initial test had: jerking, whipping its head around, and scrambling across the barren cavern floor. They all had various levels of brain activity, although the first two seemed barely more active than its usual goblins. In many ways, the most encouraging result from all these tests was the utter lack of system response. No acknowledgment that Goblin Cave had done anything expected or anticipated. It would be difficult to say what kind of response it was expecting, either from the system or from the goblins. It would have to pay attention to the goblins as time went on. But before it did anything else, it had one last idea to try: it reached out and despawned one of its cyclopi on floor 47. Tier 37. Then, as it prepared to spawn in another mana goblin, it looked at the soul's history -- cyclops, lesser orc, warg, warg, bloodwick, and so on back for a few thousand iterations -- and pushed its recall up until the mana cost became prohibitive, activating a mishmash of skills the soul had obtained in prior lives. It spawned in the mana goblin. It immediately toppled to the floor screeching, wildly thrashing its limbs as it howled and sobbed. Its body spasmed, jerking erratically, before it lost consciousness. Interesting. Goblin Cave left the goblin there; it would either die and it could recoup the soul and try again, or it would eventually wake up. Some of the other goblins were close enough to hear the howling: it was very interesting to see their responses. To see any response that it hadn't intentionally puppeted out of its mobs. Mostly they looked around and moved faster. Was the soul, here, activating some latent goblin mind? It couldn't even begin to speculate. As far as it knew, 'soul' was a simple numeric value attached to each spawn, below which it wouldn't function as a dungeon mob. Was the soul another artificial construct, tuned to make actions appear natural? This was ultimately a hole without end: if its spawns were artificial, it could have its goblins reproduce naturally. If the gobins' actions were artificial, it could imbue them with massive souls. If the souls were artificial... Goblin Cave was just as much a part of the world as anything else. Who was to say its actions were any less natural than any others? The answer, of course, was itself; it could say. It was impossible to say if this was more playing with toys -- assembling products from parts provided to it, and calling that act 'creation'. But it was something more than it had been doing. Regardless of whether this was true creation or not, it was a step. And it was a step that let it see further, down a multitude of forking paths: Was this 'goblin nature'? If so, what would the result of a [Lesser Mana Puppet] with an oversouled spawn? Or a patch of fungus? Or one of its own control nodes? What 'nature' was in those things? How was a 'nature' determined? What of the goblin, unconscious and injured, from its reincarnation test? Maybe it had overdone it, but that response was a vast difference from the vague acknowledgment of new skills available, which was the only other result tweaking the soul memory had ever produced. What of its dungeon ranking? "Narrative" or otherwise, these goblins were something new, and as far as the system was concerned they were still perfectly standard dungeon mobs, so insofar as anything it created impacted its rankings, the goblins would as well. But... if they were living, thinking beings, they would likely not go unheeding to their deaths in the same way its level 1 goblins died and died and died. That may allow for interesting tactical developments, or simply to profoundly less effective dungeon mobs. It would need to discover some way to communicate with its oversouled goblins if it ever planned on placing them where adventurers could reach. There was a massive constellation of interconnected consequences already unfolding from its actions. And, much like having fungi grow on the shores of its new lake, those consequences would happen on their own timetable, without much input from it. More waiting. But at least it had more interesting things to look at while it waited. The primary problem, as its primary problem had always been, was just that it didn't have enough spawns: not enough souls, not enough pressure to keep them spawning. If it wanted more of these oversouled goblins, that would require... orders of magnitude more soul than it had available. And that was for a tier 1 creature. When it leveled, it had tended to focus its skills on precisely those areas already: more spawns, faster spawns, more soul, faster soul transference. But now it was facing a problem that would require vastly more soul and more respawns to handle, with no clear way to resolve it. It felt like all of its experimentations so far had provided it, not with answers, but with new problems that it was increasingly ill-equipped to face. That being said, its recent musings had been the first time it had been engaged in the process of creation in a long while. It looked down at floor 51, now host to a half-dozen mana puppets, a half-dozen mana goblins, a single water slime, and two mutant goblins. All level 1. A travesty of a floor in any other consideration, with absolutely no defensive properties, but it still felt a glow of satisfaction. It was, perhaps, the beginning of something new.
chapter 7 - sub-dungeons
As Goblin Cave observed its prowling goblins, it came to a few conclusions. It could draw no meaningful distinction between their actions -- self-directed, made without its input -- and the actions of adventurers within it, aside from that the goblins were its own spawns. The second was that goblins did apparently have a strong grouping instinct. This was reflected, or determined, by their skills, after all: all goblins had the [Swarmer] innate ability, and the mana goblins were no different:
[Swarmer]

Provides +1 to-hit, increased grapple force, and attack-of-opportunity penetration for each other nearby aligned creature also having [Swarmer].

Increases melee zone of control for each other nearby aligned creature also having [Swarmer].

It had been concerned that the goblins would try to kill each other upon meeting, but that concern was resolved: two of its oversouled goblins, the initial one and the one whose former spawn was a blood orc, stumbled across each other in the canverns: one noticed the other from its perch on top of a craggy boulder, and it slithered lower, approaching, only to pop out nearby with a hooting noise, waving its hands. The other goblin squawked in surprise, jumping and nearly falling over. They didn't speak, precisely. There was some hooting and hissing with a lot of pointing, but eventually the two goblins began moving together in the same direction. Its other observation was that they would need to eat. Well. They didn't need to eat; it could very easily continually bathe them in mana to sustain them without food. But generally it liked to provide food for its creatures, and it was more mana-efficient to handle things that way, and it saw no need to make an exception in this case. The primary problem was that floor 51 was utterly barren, devoid of life. Spores were drifting down from floor 50, but it would be months before any would settle down and bore into rock and give birth to mycelium, much less edible fungi. The goblins appeared to have an innate knowledge of that, at least. Hunger. They sniffed the air, angling their bodies against the sluggish currents of air that swirled through it, and the random meanderings of its paired goblins gained a focus as the two slowly made their way towards the spiral slope up to floor 50. The rest -- they moved, some. The former-shaman aimlessly ambled through the rocky cavern; the other two sat some, walked some, not entirely dissimilar to what it considered the usual actions of undirected dungeon creatures. The other thing that was immediately clear, as Goblin Cave watched them over the course of hours, was that their soul growth was phenominal. It was only a few slight motes, but for two tier 1 goblins, even a tiny fraction of growth over the course of hours was several thousand percent faster than anything else. Already, if it could instantly liberate and reportion the soul, it would be able to spawn in a dozen more tier 1 goblins -- so, nothing yet, in the grand scheme of things, but a profound change over time. It could set up a oversouled goblin farm and reap the excess soul to slowly populate its depleted lower levels, filling them up with mighty (if slow-respawning) high-tier mobs. The thought was bitter. Here it was, experimenting with creation. Unfolding something new. But ultimately, what it came down to was: is this mechanically useful. Forget any insights it might gain; what really mattered was making the right numbers go up. It seemed deeply pathetic. It had unfolded creation after creation, each striving for -- something. And yet at the center of it was the problem it could never look away from: protect your core, or be killed. A brute collision of powers. It would certainly get more satisfaction from dispelling the tawdry farce of its puppet-goblins and concentrating on ever-more abstract experimentation. But -- then it would be killed. All its art and science would inevitably be bent towards... it wasn't that it had any problem with destruction, as such. But the crude nature of it, a simple numbers game, the utter lack of meaning. It was just the scope of things: a dirty wet cave for low-level adventurers to slay a few mindless goblins before breaking for lunch. But, having thought that -- would being some terrifying superdungeon, five thousand floors deep and full of endless terrors, be any different? It was the same steps. And doing anything new was terrifying. Boredom, it reasoned, had been one of the major factors for its survival. It was simple math: levels were unbounded, which meant that there was an enormous weight in favor of the oldest things around. If Goblin Cave had dug as efficiently as possible, striving to form as many and as highly-potent mana loops as possible for income, and also somehow managing to kill constantly for experience, all from the moment of its birth -- then, another dungeon a year older than it doing the same thing would always be more powerful than it, always and forever for the rest of their existences. The only way to remain safe from it was to avoid ever meeting. And the world did not begin a year before it. There were things out there, Goblin Cave was sure, with decade-, century-, millenia-sized head-starts over it. No matter how fiercely it defended itself, ultimately, all it would take to tumble everything it had ever made and shatter it completely was a single over-leveled adventurer. So make itself-- dull. Tedious and unrewarding. Unspectacular enough to never be worth fully delving. And that had been perfectly acceptable for a very long time, so long as it had never conceptualized the issue in that way. But now its desire to strive for more was put at ends with its survival. Not in any certain way; that would have made things easier. But who knew the consequences of their actions? Any change in how it presented itself could ripple out to infinity in manifold ways. All it could do, in the end, was do what it could. Certainly having more oversouled goblins would help it mechanically; it would be foolish to spite itself by not spawning more -- which it had always planned to do, once it could figure out how to apportion the soul reasonably. That they would also, over time, help resolve its soul scarcity was an added bonus. It was just that the whole situation rubbed it the wrong way. With a mental push, it despawned another host of high-tier creatures -- ogres, cyclopi, another few blood orcs -- from its lower floors, and replaced them with yet more tier 1, level 1 mana goblins on floor 51. A full dozen: six spawned in a clump around the passed-out body of its reincarnation test, six others scattered randomly through the sprawling cavern complex. It varied its reincarnation parameters again, only giving each goblin a single inherited skill: [Blood Rage] for one, from the blood orc; [Fatal Gouge] from the cyclops; one got [Tackle], a standard goblin skill but preserved from a prior life at level 12; one had a [Hobgoblin Shaman] fairly early back in its lives, and so Goblin Cave gave it its [Mana Expertise] skill. And so on, for each of the dozen. The most amusing was one that had once been a fungi -- Goblin Cave pulled up its [Mycelium Supercharge] ability and passed that on. Six goblins spawning all together next to the body of another goblin might have been a bit much. They were disoriented in the moment of their spawn, dazed and confused, and the sight of one of them unconscious and potentially dying gave their confusion and edge. That group descended into a brawl, goblins smacking each other and snarling in fear, each one thinking it was under attack and lashing out at the others. Goblin Cave let the melee resolve itself: a second goblin knocked out of the fight, curled up in a ball on the rocky floor, body smeared with pale blue glowing blood. The rest of them resolved the situation, with one goblin -- the one with [Tackle], which had apparently helped in the melee -- claiming what appeared to be a leadership role: it squabbled angrily at the others, pointing and demanding they go with it. That was what Goblin Cave drew from the exchange; it was unclear if the other goblins understood it beyond that it was angry and pointing. Still, that group of goblins hauled up their wounded, including the reincarnation test, and meandered in a bruised and bloody formation after the victor of the fight. Goblin Cave checked their status screens: they'd all gotten experience for the scrap, with the exception of the one who'd gotten knocked down the earliest. Only a pittance of points, ones and twos and threes, with the 'leader' goblin having a whole five experience. But another point of interest: its own dungeon creatures had never before gained experience off of their own fights, only from fighting adventurers. Instrumentally, it didn't really matter exactly what the goblins did. So long as they all remained conscious and alive, their souls would continue to seep excess, and when they eventually died Goblin Cave could recoup that into more spawns. It was difficult to not be a little invested in seeing them survive, though: the first non-hostile, self-directed life of any complexity it had in its dungeon. When it had built the hobgoblin village, it had wanted a village, and the disappointment at the end had been bitter. Goblin Cave remained watchful as the goblins meandered around. The connection from floor 50 to floor 51 took the form of a jagged crack in the cavern wall: a twisting chasm from behind the fungal grove that it had planned to eventually host its floor 50 boss, that formed a tight, clastrophobic spiral of bare rock, eventually opening up into the barren expanse of floor 51. Its first two goblins found the way up, cautiously clambering up the spiral passage. They moved more and more slowly as they reached the top, as dim ashmoss thickened underfoot. One of them scored up a hand-sized chunk of it and put it in its mouth, sputtering and gagging after it chewed down once. Goblin Cave had always found the process of eating sordid and revolting. It was biological necessity, certainly, but... In any case, most of its oversouled goblins managed to make their way up into the vast, fungi-lit expanse of floor 50. The seven goblins ran into two of its other spawns and absorbed them into their group, while another goblin saw them from a distance and then went out of its way to avoid them. Goblin Cave got to see the emergence of basic signals: one low hoot for 'left', two shorter, sharper hoots for 'right', a kind of growl for 'light', and so on. Not a language, or at least, not so long as it was only useful for two-word phrases mostly about directions and danger. What was more interesting was one of its solitary goblins. It had been spawned in a place where the sluggish cavern currents took it to the entrance to its faux-dungeon of mana puppets. The goblin stared at the glowing entryway in the wall, casting pale blue light out across the dark granite. Slowly, over minutes, it crept closer, until it peeked its head into the introductory hallway. Seeing no movement, it made its way down the glowing corridor until it opened out into the first room. A single mana puppet hung there, motionless. The goblin jolted in surprise when it spotted it -- the glowing seams that made up its body were the exact same hue as the manastone walls, and so unmoving it blended into the faint veins running through the material behind it. Goblin Cave had an inkling. If its goblins gained experience from fighting each other then what was to stop its goblins from gaining experience from fighting a mana puppet? The mana puppet was motionless since Goblin Cave had never commanded it to do anything, save from attack adventurers. But now, it restructured its orders: attack anything that wasn't another mana puppet, even if it was an allied dungeon creature. The mana puppet articulated to life, gliding smoothly towards the goblin, who shrieked and swung at it before leaping back. Then -- the goblin's palm glowed and it shoved it forwards, howling, as it erupted with a weak [Mana Blast], tossing the mana puppet backwards. Seeing the attack impact the puppet rallied the goblin, and it followed it up with a lunging charge. Its own mana-empowered body impacted the mana construct solidly, and it smashed the construct against the wall with the same amount of force as any physically-bodied being. The mana puppet erupted in bursts of crackling light as its framework shattered, and its soul burst from its body, becoming caught in Goblin Cave's respawn cycle and sluggishly winding its way towards a vacant respawn slot elsewhere. Left behind in its wake were the haphazard remains of its forcefull despawning: its mob drops. In this case, just a sliver of manarock: as long as a goblin's finger and twice as wide, with its surface organicly pitted. A [Flawed Manastone]. The goblin, meanwhile, gained a whopping six experience. If [Lesser Mana Puppets] were indeed weak enough to be defeated in a few blows from an unarmed goblin -- Goblin Cave should maybe upgrade them all to [Common Mana Puppets] before it placed them anywhere an adventurer could reach. But-- The thought was very amusing to it: but, it was a suitable challenge for goblins. A false dungeon within its dungeon, serving host to constructs for its own creatures to grind for experience. A delve within a delve. With a flight of whimsy, Goblin Cave dug out a faux 'core chamber' behind its [Common Mana Puppet] boss, and placed a sliver of manacrystal floating in the center. A false core for a false dungeon. The goblin, meanwhile, had taken the manastone chunk and prowled deeper. But delving was not on its mind for the moment: it saw the next room, with its two mana puppets, and it turned tail and fled. No food in a manastone dungeon, after all. Goblin Cave was tempted to spin out a second floor for its manastone dungeon. Sub-dungeon. Floor 51a. It was as good a joke as it'd ever seen. A goblin training dungeon, for its goblins.
chapter 8 - reincarnations
Goblin Cave's goblins settled in. The main pack found a rich fungal bouquet and glutted themselves on the more edible varieties, and then bedded down in a narrow crevasse, forming a piled heap. Other stragglers still meandered around floor 51, or made their way up to floor 50 in ones and twos. Even the solitary goblin that had delved its sub-dungeon eventually followed the currents up to floor 50 and met up with a second goblin. They fought before making peace. Goblins as a whole seemed to enjoy -- or at least to inevitably construct -- a hierarchical dominance structure, generally decided by who could beat up who else, and once all the goblins understood their position in that hierarchy they mostly stopped constantly fighting. Goblin Cave hadn't entirely decided how involved it was going to be with its oversouled goblins. Normally, it set up simple schedules for its mobs -- stay in one room, or walk a circuit, or patrol in rotations, depending on the mob and the floor design. Their... 'free will' could pose problems at some point. Already the goblins had decimated one of its fungal thickets. In fact, its core chamber was disturbingly exposed from the back: it was currently located behind floor 49, in an offshoot of the winding maze that formed the connection from floor 49 to 50. Since its 50th floor was unoccupied aside from the goblins, there was nothing stopping them from eventually making their way directly to its core, and while they weren't in any way a meaningful threat, it still sent a shiver of unease through Goblin Cave. Its goblins could do anything; it wasn't as if it knew what an 'actual goblin' would do in any situation. It would want to change its core chamber, in any case: it was currently a lush grotto, with its core surrounded by a moat of gently-rippling water fed from hundreds of rivulets streaming from the ceiling (and the water-source embedded in the rock above it), splashing down across a fungal forest comprised of every single species of fungus or plant it had unlocked. The entire chamber was lit from above with spotlights of lumenrock, feigning sunlight streaming in from above. It did enjoy the look, but it was extremely tempted to replace the entire thing with a perfect cubic box of dense manacrystal. That thought lead smoothly to another: it still wanted to redesign all its floors. And since it wanted to wait to change its upper floors, and it needed time for its mana goblins, in whatever form they would take going forward, to settle in so they could start producing excess soul, the solution to that was immediately obvious: start on its lowest floors and work its way up, altering and expanding as it went. The other thing was... it also wanted its goblins to try delving its sub-dungeon again. It was, in effect, free experience that would be otherwise impossible to collect. Each time a goblin killed a mana construct, it transduced its mana (an extremely plentiful resource) into experience for that goblin (an otherwise very scarce resource), without any of the overhead it would otherwise expect from attempting to manually power-level the goblin. It also got the goblin skill experience, which was less hard to come by but also very useful. This restructured its idea of what adventurers were doing in its upper floors. Consider itself in the place of the sub-dungeon, the goblins as adventurers, and so on. Things fell into place. Certainly it had an extremely strong impulse to dig deeper and hide away its core, and to populate its corridors with monsters. If it wanted to offload the work of actually maintaining and designing its sub-dungeon on an extremely complicated control node, it would also give that control node a strong compulsion to continue digging and adding new mobs, all to get the node to perform, through indirection, that same extremely cost-efficient transduction of mana to experience. Which wasn't to say that that was certainly what was going on -- it still had no clue what occurred outside its dungeon entrance -- but it was a compelling theory. If it wanted its goblins to return to the sub-dungeon, it would have to put something there to entice them. Food would've been the obvious thing, if they had not already had access to floor 50 and its near-infinite amount of fungi. A core, full of valuable magics -- that might work for adventurers, but the mana goblins currently didn't have language, much less the concept of value, and they could all already spray mana blasts anywhere they wanted. The inverse would be to punish them if they didn't: make the monsters go to them. As it had been thinking, Goblin Cave had been absently sculpting the faux-core it had placed at the end of the sub-dungeon. A crystal shard, mimicking its own core of decades past. It wasn't difficult to instantiate a control node within it, giving the bare manacrystal a glimmer of its own, but... It set up a very simple counter, attaching it with system threads to the associated spawns: every time one of its mana puppets could respawn, add one. Every time a mana puppet was killed, subtract two. Floor out at zero, and if the counter got to, say, three hundred forty three, then: increase the number of spawns allowed to the node, and let it command all the mana puppets out to the surface. A dungeon break. It was, indeed, a very clever system. It would want to scale things, perhaps, and if the goblins kept delving it might need to dig out further floors. It had no clue how to even begin telling a control node to do its own digging. And, in fact, since there was a fairly large distance between where the goblins had settled down and where the entrance to the sub-dungeon was, it might want to construct further sub-dungeons throughout the 50th and 51st floors, if the goblins did in fact settle in and begin reproducing. It could imagine, in fact, a replica of the system it had sensed at work outside: drape an imitation of system-space over its floors, and anchor it to its faux-core. Push in mana on the system-layer, and let the faux-core absorb it -- its own mana regeneration. If the mana formed a bottleneck, creating buildup in the system layer, allow it to build and build until there was enough free to spawn in a new manacrystal chunk freshly tethered to the system layer. Oh, the machinery of it was well beyond it. It didn't know how it could do half those things, in practice, much less automate them to that degree. But it was an enchanting concept: a replica world hidden within its dungeon, full of sub-adventurers delving sub-dungeons. But all of that would take time, and would depend heavily on how its goblins acted. Even now, they were snoring and squealing, bellies fat on fungus, while others skulked through its underground groves and mapped the winding chasms of its 50th floor. While its goblins settled in, Goblin Cave got to work. In order: * 50th floor, vast fungal-grove wilderness, with a glowcrystal-studded ceiling full of ink-black passages * 49th floor, ogre-pit tunnels: a curving, looping tangle of cavern passages that opened on each other via lightless pits, full of prowling [Blind Cave-Ogre]s, and ultimately defended by its [Ogre Champion], its undefeated boss. * 48th floor, ogre warrens: a shelf-like cavern populated by [Ogre]s, that opened out into a vast middenheap of refuse, home to packs of beasts. ... and so on up, floor after floor. It began digging on floor 51, forming another stark rectilinear manastone hallway, and then dug up at a sharp 45-degree angle until it was running parallel to the caverns on floor 50. It carved out a parallel universe, socketed invisibly within the rock: miles and miles of branching, interconnecting corridors, all featureless smooth manastone. Vast rectangular halls; rooms honeycombed with square pits in a regular grid; rooms on their side, with connections up their walls. Forking mazes of dead ends and long colonnades of open space. Goblin Cave had resolved to focus on building, letting its goblins survive or not, but it had only been a few hours before there was a snort and a jerk from the goblin pile. Its reincarnation test had awakened. It blinked with bleary eyes, limbs weaving through the air as it tried to stand. It gurgled, bloody spittle spraying from its mouth, and the other goblins awoke: first squinting and then leaping up, hooting. The reincarnated goblin hauled itself up, legs wobbling, and took a tottering step before collapsing back to its knees. Goblin Cave had almost certainly overdone it, but overdone what? It had reincarnated many mobs with increased awareness of their past lives, and it had never seemed to have this kind of... qualitative effect on the spawn in question. Its immediate guess was that the... memories? of its past lives were too much for its mind to take, now that it had a mind, but that was still just a base conjecture. Meanwhile: the 'leader' goblin hooted denigratingly at the reincarnated goblin. It moved forward, threatening, and when the reincarnated goblin just blinked at it, still visibly disoriented, the leader goblin shoved it to the ground, snarling. The reincarnated goblin used [Quick Recovery], a [Prowling Hobgoblin] skill, to phase back to its feet without moving through any of the intermediate steps. Then it used [Fatal Gouge]. At level 12, the blow was enough to mostly disintegrate the level 1 mana goblin that the 'leader' goblin was. The corpse flopped down to the ground in chunks, revealing blue-white glowing blood and greyish muscle. The reincarnated goblin stared at the mess, blinking slowly. The rest of the goblins stared, wide-eyed, and slowly backed away. Interesting. Given the reincarnated goblin's actions, it also seemed possible that... either its inherited levels meant it needed an even larger soul to provide the same 'oversoul' effects as the other goblins, or that it had inherited the listless, volitionless behavior of its prior lives even in a body that, what? That it could fully animate? Goblin Cave was still extremely unclear on the mechanics of the soul. It captured the dead mana goblin's soul, ripe with its fractional excess, and dispatched it back to its regular respawn loop, letting its mechanisms spawn it wherever it was needed next. It was very interested in seeing how its goblin situation evolved over time. But now it needed time to pass, so that it could observe more. Back to digging.
chapter 9 - beginnings
Goblin Cave returned to its manastone corridors, not all too distant from the place that had become the goblin's camp. It became used to manastone as it went, beginning to get a feel for the material, now that it was using it: how to burnish it to a blinding mirror gleam, or diffuse it out into a perfectly-uniform glow. How to thicken its veins to make it gleam brightly, or shrink them down to nothing to give the material a pallid, lightless glow. Subtly, it brought in voidstone and lumenrock, letting it cast light and shadow across its passages, forming windows into nothing and slotted fences running up the walls, solely to add disorienting lighting across its corridors. It melded in black quartz, lining some walls with a thin layer, making it appear like black glass: murkily translucent to half an inch thick, with an uncanny lightless glow seeping through from beneath. It brought in its as-of-yet useless mana pipes, fracturing the mana flow through the passages into an incoherent mess... and then it had to remove half of them, so they weren't constantly distracting it as it kept digging. It polished some corridors to a frictionless sheen, icy and slick, and added stiff, geometric spikes to other, glass-sharp and wickedly piercing. It elaborated and combined, permuting through its possibilities, forming gridlike galleries of different materials and tones, all connected with stark rectilinear corridors branching out left, right, above, below, with no consideration whatsoever for navigability. By the time it was satisfied, it had surrounded its initial floor 50 caverns with a complex lacework of barren manastone corridors, easily quadrupling the floor's volume. A few of the hallways dug close to the cavern surface, hiding behind a thin shell of rock -- halfway up the canyon wall, hanging from the cavern ceiling, with one or two in the floor, only scarcely avoiding becoming pit traps. Then, on a whim, it went back and erratically placed bubbles of cavern within the corridor maze: an abrupt right-angle turn that let out in a tiny cavern with a bubbling spring and a sheet of hanging moss, only for the granite to facet apart into geometrical crystals at the edge of the cavern as it bled back into yet another long, featureless corridor. The overall effort had taken months, which was good, because it had wanted something to keep it occupied while it waited for its goblins to settle down and grow to fruition. Their scurrying around was a constant itch, not unlike the constant low-level noise of its mana pipes. While it had dug, the goblins had settled in somewhat: they'd formed a haphazard camp, using fungi stalks as building material for some simple lean-tos. One of them appeared to have understood that fungal spores gave rise to new growth in the proper conditions, and had spilled great gouts of spores across the spongy, soggy ground in a cavern lull, although there the mycelium was still growing and there were only tiny fruiting bodies. One more goblin had been killed in a fight, although not with the reincarnated goblin this time. Insofar as the goblins established a power hierarchy, the reincarnated goblin was still at the top of it. Goblin Cave suspected that that might have actually set the goblin's development of anything like language back some: the former leader enjoyed yelling and pointing and attempting to order the other goblins around, which probably would have facilitated language growth more than the blank, unthinking gaze of the reincarnated goblin. As it was, they had mostly stalled at two-word phrases, still primarily about signaling local conditions -- no abstraction, really. The goblins had settled into something like a routine: forage for mushrooms, eat some mushrooms, then return to camp and eat more mushrooms. Goblin Cave wouldn't say that they were boring, precisely, but... well, it was glad that it had given the faux core a counter. The goblin who had delved it before ended up meeting with the rest of the goblins, flaunting its tiny shard of manastone, and after a few days it had returned to floor 51, wandering around in an attempt to find the sub-dungeon again. It had eventually found it, after a few trips, and managed to level up once and get a few other loot drops: more pitted chunks of manastone, a handful of manadust, a clear glass gem with a flickering manaspark inside. All mostly useless, but it had enjoyed showing off its treasure to the rest of the goblins and then bashing them over the head when they tried to steal them. This had eventually lead to other goblins following it, trying to discover where it was getting the treasure, and so over time this had lead a few of the goblins to reach level 2, with the first dungeon-delver reaching level 3. But their paltry attempts at delving hadn't meaningfully slowed the counter's growth, and so -- two months in, the timer ticked over, and the faux-core sent its creatures out into floor 51 and spawned replacements within its sub-dungeon. Given the size of floor 51, this was a drop in a bucket, but the dungeon continued breaking, pouring out another 6 lesser mana puppets every few hours, producing a continual trickle out and eventually up to floor 50. A level 1 mana goblin could defeat perhaps 2 or 3 lesser mana puppets before it would need to retreat, which meant that the initial encounter with the swarm initially swung in favor but eventually routed them, leaving to the goblins -- now all at least level 2 -- scattering in a panic throughout floor 50. A few of the more powerful goblins -- the reincarnated one, the dungeon-delver, and so on -- banded together and charged down to floor 51, killing mana puppets as they went, and together they eventually managed to push the faux core's counter down below the critical threshold. After that, the surfeit of loot meant the delver goblin couldn't hoot and cackle while waving its glowing rocks around mockingly in front of the other goblins, and it got frustrated enough to push its way through the entire dungeon and become the first to slay the [Common Mana Puppet] that was its boss, obtaining the smallest sliver of lumenrock for its trouble. It had tried to grab the faux-core itself and haul it out to the goblin village, but it was fused into place more solidly than it could dislodge. Goblin Cave had considered intervening, either to shatter the core free or to dig a second floor of the sub-dungeon, but at the time it had been fully occupied forming a complex floating maze of voidstone chambers and hadn't bothered. Let things unfold as they may. Then, after another few months, the sub-dungeon broke again. The second time was much easier and less productive; the goblins more-or-less instantly swarmed down and overwhelmed the spawns. All-in-all, it was a fairly satisfying evolution. The goblins had begun making primitive manastone jewlery -- one of them wore an amulet of fungal thread with a particularly smooth and shiny manastone at the center -- and using it to decorate their lean-tos. Their level spread ranged from 2 to 4, which was fairly impressive for grinding level 1 mobs over and over -- more reason to dig out a second floor eventually. During that time, its ranking had changed slightly: "Difficulty" had risen one, from 1094th to 1093rd; "Narrative" had fallen two, from 1709th to 1711th. It was tempting to think that something it had done was responsible, but it was impossible to say, really. Also, several dungeons had been created or been destroyed, leading to a total of one net new dungeon in its region, bringing the total to 2282. It was progress. The mana goblin's souls were bloated with excess; it would have to figure out how to harvest them sooner or later. When it had spawned in the goblins initially, it hadn't bothered to make sure the goblins were reproductively viable, although statistically with a population of a dozen it was likely there were some viable couplings. As it turned out, the goblins didn't particularly seem to mind either way, although eventually they managed on the correct configuration that lead to their spores infesting a mass of disgorged goblin eggs. The entire process was nearly as sordidly biological as the process of eating. It was for the best that the goblins themselves had been experimenting with reproduction; this meant it had some fertilized goblin eggsacs to try to partition their souls into. Excess was all relative, though -- it was enough for one or two more oversouled mana goblins: a tremendous amount of soul by historic measurements, but still extremely scant for its current purpose. Still, that meant that if it had a proper tribe of a hundred seventy-some, they would all be generating enough excess soul that it would be able to reap nearly seven souls per month. In practice the number was considerably smaller, since the maximal yield would require killing all the goblins and reinstantiating them. It would need to coax their budding souls apart and direct the flow into any fertilized eggs it had around, to get them actually reproducing. It would also need to make the sub-dungeon more lethal, so that they had the opportunity to actually die. It also had no clue if mana goblins bred true -- the system description said they needed to be infused with mana to be produced, and made no suggestion that mana goblin eggs did that on their own. Normally it would handle that by dumping the eggs in a mana chamber or something, but the goblins had gotten quite attached to their eggs. In its break between finishing its expanded floor 50 and starting work on its expanded floor 49, Goblin Cave took the time to attempt to hook up a soul flow. It tethered all the goblin's souls to the eggs it had chosen to keep and applied a fractional amount of suction, so that the gestating eggs sucked up the excess souls as they grew. It was not particularly sure that that was enough flow, or that it had done it in time, but -- what would happen, would happen. It also took a moment to inspect its faux-core. The idea of having a sub-core that did its own digging was too amusing to pass up, and it had spent a lot of time thinking of the mechanics as it had dug out floor 50. Its earlier floors had been absolutely pathetic, after all, and it was perfectly willing to replicate that kind of pathetic layout. In the end, it gave the control node very simple instructions: randomly dig out a room, or a hallway, or a corner, attached to its deepest point. Place down markers for mobs; Goblin Cave itself would have to manage setting up the spawning for the time being. And move the faux-core back, deeper, in the meandering mess it was sure to construct. What it wanted to do was try to shove a soul into a control node and see if that did anything. That was easier said than done. The mechanics of it seemed possible, but the way a control node was stitched together between the world and the system layer made altering its structure much more complicated; it wasn't just a simple loop of mana harmonics, the way a spawn template was. Also... its lower floors could hardly stand the dozen mobs it had despawned to make room for the goblins. Once it had paid back that soul deficit and its goblin soul farm was in operation, then it could bother trying to solve that particular problem. In many ways, this brought it back to its enjoyment of setting up ecological cycles. The autonomy of the goblins was an interesting wrinkle that made everything much more complex. And, of course, if it wanted to replicate fully whatever system it was itself enmeshed into, it would need many more moving parts. sub-Gods to handle ensouling its creatures as necessary, some kind of auto-balancing core-creation framework -- the complexity of even an imitation system was utterly beyond it. But it was something to aspire to, a way to comprehend its own situation by modeling it. It would take time, but it needed to dig out an additional 49 floors meanwhile. And then-- well, once it reached the surface, again, it would need to address many of its other problems. But for once it was eager to get going on them, which was a feeling it hadn't felt in a long while.
chapter 10 - ascended mana goblin
Goblin Cave dug upward, and as it did it mused. It had been -- it still was -- frustrated with the bounds of its world. How it was a collection of ephemeral lives that existed only to be killed for experience, living in mortal terror. Now, after its experimentation with its sub-core, it had some vague concept of what place it might have in the larger world, and it did not like what it saw. If the adventurers that delved it were analogues of its goblins, what did that say about the larger world? Certainly nothing good. It was all meat to be fed into the grinder: raw resources to be exploited to continue a cycle. Where in all that was the meaning? Its goblins had desires, maybe, and they were crude and childish ones. Were the adventurers all that different? Grinding their starting levels in its dungeon, before moving on to greater things -- but where were those greater things? Higher-level dungeons? A ceaseless upward climb, to what? To have the largest numbers? To make oneself secure against any other with higher numbers? Surely there must be some meaning beyond that. It would need to obtain eyes outside its dungeon. Snatches of dialog, books dropped haphazardly from corpses -- it was no way to get a complete understanding of the world. How that could even be achieved, it had no idea. Early on in its existence, it had sent some goblins out of its dungeon, and the instant they had stepped over its mana threshold they had begun to unweave, dissipating apart into raw unstructured mana. Much later on it had tried with some home-grown goblins, and while those had been made of meat the end result was much the same: their souls burst from their bodies, leaving behind a rapidly-dying meat puppet. It had no reason to believe its oversouled goblins would perform differently. It would need to find evolutions for mana goblins and mana puppets. It would need to expand its sub-dungeon loop to get both its goblins and its mana puppets leveling. It would need to construct additional control nodes for managing the splitting and combining of its oversouled creatures -- call them "god", perhaps. A god of goblins that existed only to ferry souls efficiently through its respawn loop. And it would need to dig. All its upper floors were, ultimately, dug out in a panic, as it desperately struggled to dig deeper and deeper. They followed a pattern. Lacking the spawns necessary to defend itself, its redesign would focus on disorienting: breaking the patterns it has established. It would prepare its altered floors: labyrinthine hallways of exotic materials, bizarre meldings of its old caverns, fractal webs of duplicated rooms in dizzying spirals, and once it was done, once it was ready, it would thread them into place within its existing dungeon. But first, it would need to dig and dig and dig. Sixty years had given it forty nine floors, and although its upward pace was much improved, it would still be the work of years to complete. But: looking at its upper floors, still circling with adventuring parties, it seemed like it would have the time. ... and up and up and up. Several things of note happened while it was digging. More of its oversouled goblins were birthed; some died. Many didn't breed true, producing only regular [Goblins], and Goblin Cave ended up interceding to excavate a mana pump beneath the goblin's camp, bathing them and their eggs in waves of coherent mana. After that, about half of their eggs began to show the signs of developing into a [Mana Goblin]: blue-white mana glow seeping through the leathery flesh, outlining vague, half-formed fetal bodies. Complex patterns began to etch themselves across their skin. On the whole, the [Goblins] fared less well; without access to mana attacks they were unable to damage the mana puppets at all. One fashioned a crude manastone knife from a stolen shard of manastone and became fairly proficient. The lesser mana puppets were, at first, difficult to level -- none survived long enough to gain many levels -- but as its subcore dug out its idiotic dungeon slowly the deeper floors became thicker with longer-lived puppets, and those managed to reap a few goblin souls and gain the investment of experience back. Goblin Cave considered the entire thing, goblins and all, as a machine for converting mana into experience: mana flowed into it, spawning low-level puppets. Goblins killed the puppets, converting the spawn cost of mana into experience. That concentrated the mana cost of dozens, hundreds of mana puppets into a single goblin. Then when a deeper puppet managed to kill a goblin -- that concentrated the experience further. Condensing it all down, forming pressure into system space; that was the entire purpose of everything that lived within it. That was, perhaps, the entire purpose of the world: loops and loops, wheels within wheels, an unfolding realm of fantastical desire -- all to convert a common resource into something more rarified. Several of its mana goblins had hit level 6, and it received an unexpected notification from one of them:
New creature evolution available: [Mana Goblin] (t1, dark)
→ [Ascended Mana Goblin] (t6, dark)
→ [Infused Amalgam] (t6, light)
→ ??? (t?, ?)
It had... not expected that. For the most part its goblins had species evolutions every 12th tier, with only incremental variations between; who knew how 'incremental' this evolution was. Goblin Cave hesitated only fractionally before selecting [Ascended Mana Goblin]. Its primary concern was about the oversoul: if more and more soul was needed for each tier, then it was entirely possible that evolving an oversouled creature could drop it down beneath whatever threshold of autonomy. But there was no way to determine that aside from attempting it and seeing the results. The goblin it had chosen -- one of the followers-on of its first dungeon-delving goblin, who by now had formed a group bedecked in glowing gems scavenged from the sub-dungeon -- staggered, stumbling. It had been walking along a path near the developing goblin village, and it tottered and fell off into the ditch to the side. Its mana warped and shuddered, unfurling from within its body to cocoon it in a glowing shroud, where it formed a shuddering, pulsating egg. The other goblins that had been with it hooted and screeched in alarm, running in all directions, and then, over the next hour, approached again, staring at the evolving cocoon. One of them poked it with a fungal branch, making the entire thing wobble. They appeared to be familiar enough with goblin eggs that they understood fundamentally what was occurring, and they mostly kept watch over the cocoon during the days-long process of evolution. When the evolution finally completed... the cocoon grew saggy and thin over the course of hours, its membrane thinning as the goop inside finished spinning itself into a new shape, and the [Ascended Mana Goblin] burst out with a tearing of claws, heaving up amniotic slime. The goblins watching it shrieked and fled.
New creature template unlocked: [Ascended Mana Goblin]!
Ascended Mana Goblintier 6, dark
A goblinoid creature. The crude grafting of a [Mana Goblin] had given way to a true synthesis of biology and thaumaturgic energies. Can cast all tier 0 unaligned spells as free actions. Can cast all tier 0–3 unaligned damage spells as free actions.
That description seemed to be editorializing a little. Crude grafting? But it was true that the [Ascended Mana Goblin] looked... distinct. The glowing blood and flesh that characterized the [Mana Goblin]s' appearance had been replaced with something almost statuesque: they were shaped in sections if their body had been divided by angled planes, cutting slices through their flesh. Ordinary flesh on one side of the plane, and on the other it was as if their body was made from clear glass or spectral foam: translucent flesh and muscle, revealing fiercely-glowing mana-infused bones. Some of the planes cut across the goblin's face, revealing one eye-socket and hollow pit of the nose. Rather than being a synthesis as the description said, it almost seemed even more unnatural... but in that, perhaps Goblin Cave was in agreement with the system for the first time in a while: if the nature of reality was the conjoined layers of physical space and system space, then anything that correctly reflected that would be a piecemeal abomination. Perhaps that was editorializing on its part. Its soul... it was hard to say. Goblin Cave had no clue what the subjective experience of evolving was; dungeons, as untiered entities, had no equivalent. The goblin heaved, panting hard, and slowly crawled its way up to the path, skin shining with birthing slime. Goblin Cave would have to construct its goblin-god sooner rather than later. Even if this goblin was fine -- which remained to be seen -- the process of soul infusion would only get more and more involved as its goblin camp became more populated. It had been reflecting on the mechanics of it as it had been digging, and the involved but also tedious nature of siphoning soul from goblin to goblin was a perfect place to add automation. Ensouling eggs was troubling enough, and those weren't moving around and developing their own souls as the rest of the goblins had been. It spun up another control node and tethered it into the web of interconnected goblin souls, slowly working out pressure and tension so that the [Ascended Mana Goblin] pulled yet-more soul into its already (to Goblin Cave's eyes) grotesquely oversized and bloated soul, while still managing to siphon some smaller percentage off to the goblin eggs. The control node would need continual tweaking until it determined the optimum level of soul for each creature, and currently Goblin Cave had no way to measure that. The other goblins approached the [Ascended Mana Goblin] -- the one with the fungus-branch stick poked at the goblin again -- and chittered amongst themselves. Their language still hadn't evolved much, but there were fragments. "Danger?" "Needs rest?" "Hurt?" "Dying?" "Monster?" and so on. The goblins helped the ascended one to its feet and hauled it back to their camp. The evolution process was always physically taxing, but... previously, Goblin Cave had been able to order its freshly-evolved spawns around more-or-less as usual, even only moments after evolution completed. It was too early to say for sure, but it was going to continue with its assumption that the evolved form took vastly more soul. Normally, a step of six tiers required roughly sixteen times the soul to spawn, and if the process of oversouling a spawn wasn't linear -- and it had no reason to assume it was -- then it could require even more soul than that. Twice as much would be doable; another sixteenfold on top of that wouldn't. All it could do was accumulate soul over months and months and feed it into the ascended goblin and see the result. But it had months. Still, that put an even sharper limitation on its experiments with evolution. It had other goblins that were close to evolving, now that it could see the unlocks, and it was tempting to fork off into whatever [Infused Amalgam] would be. But it simply didn't have the souls to spare. Yet. The goblins returned the disoriented ascended goblin to camp and laid it out on a fungal bed. It would be cared for well enough until Goblin Cave could reinvigorate its soul, and in the mean time: It had yet-more digging to do.
chapter 11 - preparation
Goblin Cave dug and dug. Several of its material synthesis skills ranked up, unlocking a handful of further materials -- voidglass and lumencrystal, as dark- and light-aligned crystalline materials; orichalcum, which would probably have some useful applications along with gold and mithril for mana machinery; serpent obsidian, which was a mana-sucking variation of voidstone that may or may not be useful; and so on -- and it added a few more levels to its primary digging skills -- [Material Absorption], [Tunneling], and the like -- in the mean time. It leveled up, solely from the pittance of experience it got for digging. While it was building out a network of tunnels for floor 27 -- accessible from an offshoot of its library dump -- it reflected on its mana pipes, which over what was now several years of operation had done nothing but be a constant annoyance. It had made a few slight alterations, varying their flow rate and decoherences, but there was nothing. But perhaps, it thought, it was going about things with the wrong idea. It used mana threads to spawn things, and the description for the [Flame Wisp] said they were naturally spawned by disorganized mana. So perhaps there was some structure or formulation of mana that would lead to mana threads naturally occurring. Its mana pipes shattered the mana flow into thousands of short, disconnected threads, so perhaps what it would want to make was something that somehow coaxed out a single unbroken mana loop and twisted it into the correct pattern to spawn something. Or perhaps just even a pattern that moved itself around; given enough time it would end up tangling into something. Consequently, its expansion of floor 27 ended up being mostly different kinds of mana resonators. It was effortless for it to manipulate mana, but replicating the process with only brute materials-- it seemed beyond possibility. This mesh of serpent obsidian and mithril wafted mana, that serrated tube compressed it, and on and on it built a nightmare catacomb of twisting tunnels, all perturbing the mana flow in one way or another. The closest it got to success was a particular kind of cylinder with a notched spiral of mithril and serpent obsidian, which vaguely replicated the pinching, twisting pressures Goblin Cave exerted to control its mana flow. But it was a reedy, unstable thread, and the forces only balanced in perfectly straight lines; if the tube curved the mana thread sheared itself apart. Goblin Cave couldn't imagine the circumstances that would've lead to mana threads naturally forming, if all of this machinery couldn't manage a single thread. Everything it'd done, and Goblin Cave still couldn't figure out how to spawn a single [Flame Wisp]. Floor 27 ended up being particularly enjoyable upon reflection: as an experimental testbed it was utterly unfit for traversal by adventurers. Inch-thick pipes twisted in helixes through cubes of solid gold. Sawtooth waves of voidglass the size of houses formed interference patterns. Its warrens on it other floors were, nominally, there to be delved at some point, even if they were intended to be disorienting and confusing. Floor 27, by being shaped by the intricate physics of mana dynamics, had absolutely no referent an adventurer could grasp upon. Consequently, floor 26 ended up being more experimentation. It sculpted out a massive torus, ringing the entire floor, and set up resonating plates in bands. It hooked them up to a simple control node, setting up a timing circuit: at one interval, the mana pulses interfered destructively, canceling themselves out into a still void; at others, they synchronized, building up stronger and stronger until Goblin Cave had to bring it to a halt for fear it would end up exploding the entire floor. Pressure thudded through the rock, rattling the nearby caves -- full of vacant idiot hobgoblins, with the closest adventuring party three floors down. One other aspect of mana it was investigating was keeping something stable outside its dungeon. Inside its dungeon was a poor place to research that, but it would have to make do. It tried constructing various seals and gateways, attempting to slow or stop its expansion of mana into empty space, and when it had managed that -- a certain twisted ring shape, an elaboration on its mithril coils around its true entrance -- it had a bizarre foreign space within it, mana-dead, that had its dungeon instincts screaming out to fill it. Then... it tried to shape mana to push it out into the space and rebound back, or to create a stable sphere of dungeon mana within it, disconnected from its main bulk. It permuted through various seal structures, filling most of its expanded floor 24 with dead-end mana voids, and failed over and over again to meaningfully expand into them. What it wanted... Presumably, if it had an intelligent spawn that could exit into the world and return back with information, it would need something that kept the mana around it, or within it, still dungeon-aligned. Goblin Cave didn't know if such a thing was even possible. What it wanted was... a secondary core, in essence? Something that could maintain a spawn's mana structure even completely disconnected from its own mana pathways. It shaped various gems, creating control nodes in manacrystal and trying to impart into them some semblance of homeostasis, and then flung them over and over into various mana voids before breaching the seal and flowing in to check the results. It was difficult to tell, not the least because the act of checking contaminated all its results, but it thought it had gotten a certain pattern that twisted and pulled the mana around it that managed to maintain its coherency for, perhaps, six seconds after exiting its domain. To determine that, it made linked corridors of mana locks, with a void in between. Then it shot its construction from one to the other: varying speeds across varying distances. If it managed to regain contact with the mana infused into the gem on the other side, than it had survived the time between. If it was just inert rock, or shattered fragments, it had not. It would need better tools, and further experimentation, and presumably an intelligent creature capable of understanding commands, to practice further. It would also be profoundly dangerous. It would be one thing to simply have a spawn die in its task as an assistant. But experiments with its mana boundary would inevitably involve failure, and that failure would mean its spawn would die outside of its zone of control. Whatever happened to its soul then, Goblin Cave doubted it could recover it. Goblin Cave hadn't grown particularly attached to its goblins, as such, but it had grown attached to their souls. Not simply in a mechanical sense, although it was certainly that as well; they were scarce and valuable. But insofar as any of its spawns were... beings, with desires and drives and wants; beings with ambition, it was not the animating shell that had those ambitions, precisely, but their mass of soul stuff. Dying was simple; it could capture the soul and reincarnate it. Allowing one to vanish into nothingness would be a profound neglect on its part, and Goblin Cave wasn't in any rush to hastily experiment in ways that could lead to that. Even the barest sliver of often-forked soul, the single unit that was required to spawn a tier-0 creature, had within it decades and decades of lifetimes; the loss would be immense. That being said, the very nature of pushing outside its boundaries, and the total lack of knowledge it had of the outside world, meant that it was likely inevitable. But that didn't mean Goblin Cave had to rush into these risks unthinking.
It was strange to take in the full scope of its dungeon: the simple simulacra cave of its original goblin warrens, digging down and down to floor 50, but now it was increasingly surrounded by a bizarre lacework of esoteric materials, laid out in intricate furls. Its digging had only gotten more elaborate as it had dug back up, and by the time it would close in on its initial floors -- well. It would have dug out one hundred and one floors, by its reckoning if not by the system's, and it was certain the contrast between the two styles could not be more stark. Its nerves began to act up as it finished up the mana lacework around its 14th floor (a mess of interconnected caves that had seemed expansive when it had first dug them out, but now seemed remarkably quaint -- a mess of dead-end chambers, one of which was home to its first [Goblin Warlord] as the empowered floor boss). It had noticed the shape of the floor nearly tiled itself, and so it had carved out fifteen duplicate floors in various rotations, connected through hazy corridors, each with slight variations in the layout. Which was an amusing joke, but... 14 was close to the surface. Already it was digging through a vastly different strata of rock than before: thinner, older, richer in silica than the fresher granite from the depths. It had been reigning in its expansions, keeping them shrinking in size at roughly the same rate its original floorplans had shrunk, and for the most part -- floor 14 notwithstanding -- it had settled on a roughly eightfold expansion in size for each floor. Soon, though... well, soon it would finish, and then it would have to consider what to do next. Its original thought had been to thoroughly revise its upper floors, melding its new functional, mechanical style with its old cave style. For its lower levels, it had thought to seal all its old floor connections and reroute: force the pathway down to its core to meander not just through its original floors but through the mazy, nightmarish pathways of its expansions. The problem, of course, was that its new creatures were utterly incapable of defending its lower depths. There was a system submenu that appeared to suggest that some dungeons were trap-focused, with few or no spawns at all. Goblin Cave wasn't sure what to think of that. Deepmine Delve, not too far up the mountain chain, was ostensibly trap-focused, but Goblin Cave wasn't sure of the mechanics of that: how many monsters? What kind of traps? Did it have a specialized skillset that made traps more practical? But it was certainly true that in some respect it was hoping it would be able to protect its core from whatever consequences would come by dint of sheer size, which... may or may not have been true. Certainly it was harder for adventurers to tunnel through dungeon-reinforced stone, but it was by no means impossible, and for all it had dug its core chamber was still there within the entrance to floor 50, not fundamentally any more protected than it had been at the beginning of all this. Goblin Cave enjoyed control. It liked being in control of its surroundings. It liked knowing what it was doing and how it was doing it. But in a world of other beings, there was always so much up to chance. In five minutes some level 5000 titan could stroll through its entrance and shatter apart the mountain that housed it, cutting straight to its core in a single blow; there was no evidence that something like that couldn't happen. The fear had always been that by visibly showing its change, it would attract attention it couldn't handle. But that possibility was always there; it was only a matter of how it chose to prepare for it. And looking at its complex manifolds of space, woven together -- well, it had certainly prepared for something.
chapter 12 - release
Goblin Cave threaded its final corridors up towards the surface. Surrounding its initial five floors -- a series of dank, grimy caves laid out in linear switchbacks -- was a twisting labyrinth of stark geometric chambers. It had limited itself to only simple materials for the final ascent, concerned that any of the more exotic materials could be detected through the ground. Consequently, the rooms were mostly blue-black glass, murkily translucent for a few inches, revealing in hazy shadow the faceted manastone wall behind it. The layout was intensely dense: nearly all the granite had been replaced with its structure, with no unused chunks. It had corridors overlooking chambers, zig-zagging stairs forking off into jagged defiles, with lights from higher levels shining down. Rectangular pillars outlined massive open chambers, with perfectly square entrances opening at fixed intervals up their walls, providing no easy way up or down. All together, Goblin Cave considered the topmost five floors to be a single combined floor; there was no meaningful distinction to be made between its layers. However, unlike its prior experiments, the chaotic exploration that had informed its expansions of its lower floors, every chamber and pathway in its upper floors was designed that way for a reason. The entire structure was a mana resonator, forming a warped, twisting current of mana that constantly cycled throughout its structure, half-isolated and half-overlapping with its own mana network. It was... ultimately it was a pointless trick; it hadn't got any closer to spinning mana threads or creating a fully isolated mana system. But its upmost floors were a massive mana bellows, formed out of mundane materials with only the barest slivers of manacrystal and serpent obsidian in focal cavities. It had done it to show off that it could do it, nothing more. Goblin Cave had no idea how adventurers would take it. It was entirely possibly they wouldn't care at all about its artistry; it was prepared for that. They certainly hadn't seemed to care about anything else it had done. More time had passed while it had dug out its final floors. Its [Ascended Mana Goblin] had recovered, earlier than it had anticipated. Goblin Cave still didn't know if its weakness after its ascension had been due to a too-small soul, its autonomous nature, or any one of dozens of other hypotheses it had thought up in the mean time. The goblin had taken to delving its sub-dungeon -- now with an obnoxious 12 sub-floor layout -- with vigor, using its upgraded abilities to burn mana puppets into nothingness and harvest yet more glowing gewgaws. Goblin Cave was still waiting to pull the trigger on its next evolution; it wanted to try another test. It had marked the goblin it was going to evolve into an [Infused Amalgam] and had commanded its goblin-god to fill it with soul until it reached the same size as the ascended goblin. This may reveal if it was lack of soul that lead to the ascended goblin's infirmity. But Goblin Cave had another consideration, too: by every metric the system gave it, these goblins had an absurd glut of soul. But even that absurd glut seemed barely capable of animating them to autonomy. It had been trying to reframe its thought: it was not, as such, that the animated goblins were 'over-souled'. Perhaps it was that the soul quantum the system revealed to it was very small. A single unit of soul could be so miniscule it was at the very edge of being nothing at all. Goblin Cave had seen plenty of soul dynamics operating with single units of soul. What it had not seen was the other end of the scale: if there was such a thing as too much soul, or if there were more involved dynamics that only revealed themselves at absolutely staggering soul thresholds. This was where the goblin's reproductive rate was working against it. It had instructed its goblin-god to portion excess soul into the goblins' eggs, keeping those to be spawned, and to terminate the rest. But there were always, always more eggs. Given the number of eggs in a clutch (dozens), and the frequency at which the goblins produced them (constantly), there was no way for it to ever have an excess amount of soul free to let it build and build up. Instead, it had mostly been maintaining the goblin souls at the size it had originally spawned them -- tier 36. But that had been and still was an accident of birth, with no meaning behind it. The numbers worked out as such: the rate of goblin soul development was an outstanding 3.95% per month. This would lead to a soul doubling in size over the source of roughly 19 months if the rate remained constant, which was no means certain. As that growth was instead reapportioned to birth new goblins, this lead to the overall population doubling every 19 months. Death only slightly impacted the calculations, since the reaped soul was rapidly reinvested in the next clutch of goblin eggs. This formed a classic exponential curve. In practice, there would be limiting factors; every exponential curve was the lower half of a logistic curve which eventually flattened out. Presumably at some point the limiting factor would be the time it took goblins to grow to maturity and begin producing additional eggs. Physical space in the caverns would eventually be an issue. But currently, they were on the ramp-up: after a several month delay to grow its ascended goblin's soul, a new goblin was successfully birthed once every other month (for sixteen months), then once a month (for another sixteen months), then two a month (for four months now). Its original collection of fourteen, making a motley encampment in a fungal grove, had grown into a tribe of fifty-two, forming a sprawling den within a half-cultivated fungal forest. They ranged all throughout the sprawling caverns of floor 50, squawking and squabbling. One pressure Goblin Cave hadn't anticipated was whatever maximum size a goblin tribe could be and still be stable: there had been more fighting between goblins, and an unusually high number of deaths from intergroup conflict. Presumably -- an intuition constructed from the many system descriptions of goblin types it had read over its life -- the tribe needed a leader after some point in order to structure and enforce the power hierarchy, and none of the goblins so far filled that void. Its reincarnated goblin was still mostly insensate, and although it had been showing signs of more active interaction it was in no condition to act as a ruler. Its ascended goblin was more interested in delving than leading the goblins, although it had formed something of a clique with a handful of the other delving goblins. Those were the two most powerful goblins, and although there were others that seemed to be expressing more than the crude animal cunning Goblin Cave had grown to expect from its goblins, ultimately here as it seemed everywhere else, power was what mattered. There was a fungal farmer that had devised an intricate irrigation system for its swampy fields, mostly out of laziness of manually moving water around, but -- it was level 2, and in any fight it would be the loser. All that was to say, the goblin situation was evolving according to plan, and it would be, if the curve stayed on track with its projections, another twenty six months before it would consider leveling off the population growth and investing heavily in building up soul within each goblin. Consequently, its spawn templates were still depleted. It had some measure of success with its mana puppets: a few had managed to kill enough goblins to open up some simple evolutions, and here, where it wasn't constrained by the need for soul, it was able to more freely evolve its mindless puppets.
Invisible Servantconstruct(tier 2, unaligned)

A non-combat semi-corporeal shade mostly summoned to act as a menial servant. It cannot be seen, heard, smelled, or tasted, but it has a humanoid body-form capable of physical interaction. It is capable of obeying simple orders when left to its own devices.

Manaflame Guardianconstruct(tier 3, fire)

A flame wisp that has evolved to subsist on pure mana, giving its flame a fierce blue-white glow, but robbing it of its capacity to burn. Instead, it deals damage directly to its opponent's mana stocks, leaving lingering manaburn.

Mana Elementalconstruct(tier 3, unaligned)

A simple elemental from the plane of pure mana, bound to this realm with the glyph of imprisoning. A clockwork creature of precise action, it characterizes the most common aspect of mana: that of pure enacting, without a mind behind it.

It had been equal parts amused and frustrated when the evolution for [Manaflame Guardian] appeared. Unless it was quite far off the mark, that was a shared evolution for [Flame Wisp], and it couldn't help but feel it as a pointed barb, given its continued inability to spawn one 'naturally'. Tier 3 was still quite weak, even for the first five floors of a goblin dungeon. But it was at least some variance beyond a repeating series of [Lesser Mana Puppets] and [Common Mana Puppets]. And, after all -- this had all started because it was tired with artifice. If adventurers wanted a dungeon full of mobs they could grind experience from, Goblin Cave would give them what they wanted. Due to the symmetries of the mana bellows, there were only three chambers that it trusted it could connect to its old dungeon without the connection messing with the mana flow. It debated which to choose, and then decided on something else entirely: instead of connecting them to its old dungeon, it would dig all the way up to the surface with all three. It had wanted to study the interface between its mana and the surface, and now it was in a position to give itself more room to study. The risk was from any exposure; if it was going to dig a single extra entrance it might as well dig two thousand four hundred and one. Still. It had been a long time coming. Its mana bellows, filled with various mana constructs and wandering bosses. A dungeon within a piece of abstract mana-manipulation machinery, with a single exit at the very bottom down to its expanded floor 6, and down and down, a whole alternate reality of monumental complexity sitting right next to its original goblin warren. It was the culmination of everything it had considered ever since it had gotten frustrated digging out floor 51, but more than that it was a declaration: that it was something different now. That it was... aware of its situation in the world. That it was working to change it. Goblin Cave took a deep breath, mana flows all throughout its many layers pausing, and then it pushed up and out, carving through the final feet of rock to the surface. Boulders and dirt cascaded down onto its surface, and its mana touched the wider world, forming whorls of turbulence. Pressure shifted and equalized, forming three new dungeon entrances.
chapter 13 - light
Nothing immediately happened. There were no hordes of spectators instantly swarming into its newly-revealed entrances. Goblin Cave had no clue where its new entrances let out; it had no clue where its original entrance let out. It could not see outside of its dungeon. Goblin Cave had known that its senses didn't directly correlate with the senses of adventurers or its spawns for a long time. Since it was first delved, in fact. It could determine structure, shape, and color irrespective of light. And so, it knew that there was light cast on its entrances, and that light waxed and waned over time, but it had only the barest concept of why that would be. Its books spoke of days and nights, a sun and the moons, each with a certain tone of light, and each moving in the sky -- changing the angle of light that fell on its entrance. It could see that much. But looking outward... it seemed impossible. Whatever its senses did, they were one with its mana cloud. It was always looking inward at itself. This had long been a frustration for it, and now it had spare entrances to experiment with. Goblin Cave focused on this, in favor of dwelling on its nervousness. It could feel light; it knew how to operate on light. What it wanted was... something that could capture the light falling into it and then display it in a fashion it could understand? Something that captured the light and then redisplayed it? But surely that was just what the light already did; if it replicated that, then it would simply be seeing more light spilling across its floors. Adventurers, mobs, they tended to have specialized sensory organs. Eyes. They did something, even before they entered the mess of the nervous system that it had never been able to fully comprehend. They focused light in the way it focused mana, angling the light to meet at a focal point. Goblin Cave summoned up a box of voidstone, ink black on the inside. In the center of one wall, it attached a shard of brilliantly-glowing manacrystal. The inside of the box was flooded with light, but that would, it knew, appear no different to a creature inside it: the voidstone walls absorbed all the light, so that the box's interior was still "just as dark", save for the manacrystal itself. It added, opposite the manacrystal, an opaque slab of smooth quartz. That appeared lit, now. But what it wanted... was some kind of lens that would bend the light to all focus on a single point. In between the two, hanging in the middle of the box, it made a glass lens. It shaped the lens, changing structures within it and redirecting the stream of light, and as it did so it watched the warping and shifting image across the quartz slab. Light slowly formed a projected image: the light, diverging from the manacrystal, was brought back into alignment by the shaped lens, forming a distinct image on the quartz backdrop. Goblin Cave moved the lens back and forth, watching as that made the resulting image more or less blurry, and how when it boxed out an interior divider, blotting out the unfocused light, the image got much more distinct. Yes, that was it: it couldn't capture all the light, since that would result in the same vague illumination it already received. By capturing only a small point of light, and focusing it, it could project an image. Goblin Cave constructed a tube for its lens, with an interior quartz wall, and extruded a few throughout its interior hallways to test. There was a relationship between the size of the lens, the focal length of the lens, and the distance from any lit element. Also, perceiving an environment from a flat projection was a disorienting experience. Everything was blurry and all the angles were wrong. When it looked at a cube, it saw a cube. When it looked at the flat projection of a cube, the sharp right angles were projected as warping, wobbling divisions that changed as it rotated the cube. If it hadn't already known the environments it was projecting onto quartz, it wouldn't have been able to identify them from projection alone. But, like everything else, it was a process it would have to learn how to use and iterate on as it made further developments. In the mean time, it assembled a mana lock on one of its entrances and ringed the lock with twenty eight projection tubes, each angled slightly differently, and watched their backplates intently. For its first glimpse of the world exterior to itself, the result was underwhelming. A smear of intense cyan across half the plate, with a jagged latticework of green and red-orange partially intersecting it. A few of the tubes on the left side of the mana lock were angled so that something else was visible: the source of the light, a brilliant circle that emit with such force that the concentrated light started to etch lines in its backing quartz. There were swells of grey; that at least it could interpret: granite boulders, some of which had landed partially within the boundary of its entrance. Everything was moving slightly, warped in a way that at first it took for an aberration in its lenses, but on further testing seemed to be accurate to whatever was out there. Motion like the rippling of water. Greens and browns and cyans shifting. It extended the length of its tubes, warping the lens to match, and watched as that made some shapes more diffuse and others more stark. So. This was the world outside of itself: a riot of colors and shapes it had no capacity to comprehend. It would have to keep testing. It would also have to record the lights. More than anything else, what came to it from the outside world was ephemeral: it had no capacity to recall and recreate anything there. If the light changed -- as it was lead to believe it would -- it would have no knowledge of why or how to reconstruct what had been. It would only have its vague memories of an incomprehensible blur. That part, at least, was solvable. It spun up a new control node for the mana lock, and assigned it etching duty. Every few intervals, it would inspect the light incoming on its backing plates and create a slab of manastone, marbled such that its output matched the hue and intensity of the incoming light. Then, after the first interval returned seven plates that drew tenfold the mana it expected in an attempt to render the brilliant circle with high-intensity manastone, it amended the command: match the intensity up to a certain limit. It replicated the same configuration for another eye, this time with a variation: all the tubes pointed in the same direction, but with different lengths. This produced many variations of the same image, with blurs at different intervals. The repetition at least let it pick out some similarities: grey-and-brown blurs in one half of the image, mostly cyan in the other, with a rippling band of orange-and-white tones between. It constructed the same configuration of tubes within floor 51, aiming it at its rippling lake and the budding fungal beds that lined its shore. The varied tube length conveyed distance: it could tell, now, that the cluster of mushrooms that were closer to the tubes formed differently-sized blurry splotches on different tubes, compared to more distant mushrooms on the far bank. The tube length provided an analogue of depth, which meant that it could attempt to reconstruct a spatial comprehension from a series of flat panels. On its third entrance, it combined the two prior concepts: twenty eight different-length tubes, placed in twenty-eight sets ringing the mana lock, all angled different directions. This was a truly gargantuan amount of information. Goblin Cave peered at the images, slotting them in distance-order to make a vague approximation of their depth. Granite boulders, closer, followed by a strange warping shape that it thought might be a slope of loose gravel. Surfaces that changed in distance and altitude were even more difficult for it to reason about just from the light. This particular entrance had surfaced in a rocky lull between mountain crags, it thought: there was considerably more granite-grey visible, with only a rough triangle of cyan. These, it recorded in cubic blocks, making each wafer-thin slice of manastone separated from the others by a thin gap of open space, in an attempt to spatially-structure the images. Time passed, but only a little. The cyan in the images diminished to blue and then a deep indigo, in time with the brilliant circle shifting location. The sun, perhaps. The books spoke of the sun lighting the sky, and so as the sun waned, so did the light overall. Eventually a new glowing shape emerged, visible from two of its entrances: a pale purple crescent, at less than a sixteen-thousandth the intensity of the sun. A moon, perhaps. Goblin Cave had to instruct its recording nodes to add a minimum threshold for lighting, as well, to prevent these images from being utterly overwhelmed solely from the faint light of its manastone walls. A night and a day passed, giving it nearly seven hundred plates per tube. One adventuring party left its old entrance, and two more entered, separated by a gap of roughly ten hours. No sign of them detecting its new entrances. There had been moving blurs across its images, which it still couldn't decypher: some kind of animal, perhaps? But not one it had unlocked, and so not one in had any kind of spatial intuition for how it was shaped. The thought of life outside of its system categories was tantalizing, but the process of analyzing flat images to reconstruct shape -- it had the feeling that, much like spawning a [Flame Wisp], this would be something it would approach in dozens of angles just to make almost-zero progress. If it was to keep its imaging running, it would need a more serious solution for storage. The length of the day gave it an idea, though: it carved out a spiraling ramp with an open center, and aligned it so that each spiral was divided into precisely six hundred eighty six segments, one for each imaging it took per day. Then, the spiral descended into the ground, with each revolution marking one day, forming a winding path. This way, it could easily compare any given day's recording with the prior day's, because they were spatially aligned directly above each other. That being said... Goblin Cave would have to pay attention to the day length. The books it had read had mentioned seasons, times of light and of darkness. It had no clue what the variation was, or how long a day truly was. It had just lined the images it had up so that the incidences of minimal and maximal brightness mostly coincided. It restructured its entrances, giving them a uniform layout: mana lock with 28-upon-28 mana tubes just past where the furthest boulders had fallen, offshoot chamber to hold recorded images springing off from that, and then a smooth, unbroken corridor sloping down to eventually meet its mana bellows. Analyzing the images was a productive way to direct its nervous energy. Every moment that passed without anything new happening just increased the tension. Something was bound to happen, but it had no idea of when. How long had it taken for its dungeon to be discovered, what was coming up on sixty-five years ago? It had been some time. But its initial entrance had been a shallow rock shelf in a lull, mistakable for an inch-deep cave. Its new entrances -- they glowed. It hadn't fully considered that until it saw the darkness of night. Even the faint manastone glow, shrouded by murky glass, still lit up the nearby boulders, reflecting a deep blue back into its own imaging tubes. Perfectly square eruptions of dungeon-stuff into the surrounding mountainsides. Another day passed. Goblin Cave began to make out some vague structure in its images as it strained to comprehend its glut of images. Linear shapes, curving shapes. It comprehended the gravel slope as thousands of rough-edged stones, rather than an incoherent blur it could only vaguely assign a direction to. The moving structures were something like its fungi stalks: vegetation, probably. They grew with heavy gills in overlapping shrouds, and all their flesh was either rich green or a toxic-looking red-orange. It inspected its images, struggling to comprehend each aspect of them. Then, somebody stumbled across one of its new entrances.
chapter 14 - contact
The confrontation began as some noise outside. There had been noise, beyond the constant rushing that Goblin Cave assumed was a continual background noise. This was a focused clatter. Some of the blurs that had approached it had been quiet, others had been loud. These were louder still. There was the familiar sound of clattering rocks -- that, it could identify anywhere. Then, voices. It was somewhat harder to comprehend speech working from sound alone, instead of hearing the movements of their mouths and throats, but it had long ago overcome that particular deficiency simply by hearing adventurers chattering on within it for years and years. "...over here! I knew I wasn't imagining it!" There was a sound that corresponded to a motion as something moved within range of its imaging tubes, but Goblin Cave couldn't begin to connect the two. "Last night, I thought a falling star had landed on the mountain, but it was much too faint for that. But--" The blurs came closer and stopped. "But what is it?" Another voice: "It doesn't look good, whatever it is." "Could it be a new dungeon? But-- why does it look like that?" A pause, then the second voice again: "If it's a new dungeon, we really shouldn't get close. But..." More pauses, more motion. "Never seen anything like that." "Oh! There!" the first voice exclaimed, and there was a rush of motion, body scurrying closer. It shrunk, rattling -- kneeling down? Leaning down? -- and the other voice called out "Elena! Don't you--!" "Here!" the voice said. "Look." The irony was not lost on Goblin Cave. "Is that-- manastone?" The word here, in the adventurers' language, was different than the word in system-speech. They were entirely different languages, after all. Goblin Cave only knew it from one of its collected books, an old adventurer's codex, that described materials that could be sourced from dungeons. 'Bone, goblin' and 'Bone, mundane animal' were the primary materials it had really produced at the time, had both been listed in the common category, with a cursory description. Everyone knew what bones were. 'Manastone' had been listed as rare 'in the region', with a note that it was common 'within the borders of Shym'. Its description noted the material's rocky texture, hardness, sharpness, and pale blue glow, all characteristics that applied to the material it knew as manastone, and said it was an esoteric material perpetually in high demand for all sorts of magework. The entrance's emergence onto the surface hadn't been entirely peaceful; falling boulders had gouged unsteady chunks out of its glass walls, scattering the ground with jagged chunks of black glass and flecks of manastone. "Well, it's mine, is what it is. It'll be a token of this day. And you said going out all this way was foolhardy!" More movement. Maybe one stepping back, or the other pushing forward, or them embracing in some fashion? At this point Goblin Cave was practically begging them to step in past its mana lock, just so it could tell what they were doing. "From something like this? You should leave it where it lies; it's probably cursed." There was a sharp whistle of an inhale. "You think? But you always did worry too much. You thought that white calf was an evil portent." "This is serious. Whatever this is, it's beyond our ken." "Ugh! Look at this place! Don't you have any sense of adventure? Do you want to be a mushroom-picker all your life?" "We don't even have mushrooms, thanks to your diversion." Goblin Cave couldn't help but perk up a little at the mention of mushrooms. It liked mushrooms! It had plenty of mushrooms! Well, several leagues over and a few floors down. Sadly, they did not elaborate on what kind of mushrooms they wanted, or what they were planning on collecting them for. Eating, presumably, but who knew. It was actually fascinating, in an abstract sense: it didn't think it had ever been this nervous and frustrated at the same time. There was a reason it generally ignored it when adventurers spoke, and that was because following their conversations, dense with a context it could never really capture, tended to just go on and on in circles without ever approaching anything it cared about. They were still talking. "I'm just going to step in for a second," the first voice said. Elena. "Don't be such a sourpuss about it." "I'm going with," the second, as-of-yet unnamed voice said. "And it'll be just in." "Don't you have a location skill, anyway? Can't you just tell us where this is?" "It's not very good," the voice said. "You know, while we were on our way through the valley, it changed its mind as to whether we were in the Dutchy or in Tana five times?" Elena let out a loud laugh. "Tell that to the clerks, I'm sure they'd be begging at your feet to finally get to draw down a nice firm border. What is this, do you think?" They'd stepped closer, into the wrecked hallway beyond its mana lock. They were, presumably, talking about the mana lock itself. "It's a trap," said the other voice. "It'll slice you into little pieces and then burn the pieces." "Aleks!" Elena said, and made a motion that ended with the other voice -- Aleks, apparently -- emitting a soft oof. "For all we know, it could be!" Aleks said. "Don't just walk up to random cursed hallways!" "I'm just going to--" Elena said, and then before Aleks could object they stepped past the imagine tubes' field of view, stepping just before the mana lock, and -- Elena stepped inside the dungeon. The mana field, softly stirring from the distant churn of its mana bellows, had some kind of effect. Their entire body shuddered, and the flesh on their arms prickled up into goosebumps. "Oh." Then they stepped back out. "Oh, maybe that was a bad idea. It feels-- so strange in there." "Are you okay?" "I'm fine." Elena let out a sigh. "I guess we should report this. What a bother." More motion. "You should step inside too. You've been inside a dungeon before, right? Is that what they feel like?" "I don't--" Aleks started, then sighed. A moment later they stepped inside, over the ridge of the mana lock, and just as quickly stepped out. "Maybe? I don't know. It could be." "Did your skill say anything?" "It hasn't been working well all day. It said I was in [Goblin Cave], you know? That dungeon on the other side of the mountain. There's no way that--" they gestured. "could be part of a goblin den." Goblin Cave could hardly contain its glee. This whole interaction -- listening in on the petty thoughts of adventurers, or, not even adventurers, was... frustrating. Pathetic. It didn't desire validation from them. But still, the words brought forth a fierce, angry kind of pleasure within it. It brought up its rankings. It had been slipping in general, and had fallen several more ranks in most categories. It had noticed it had been slipping slightly more in "Theme" and "Narrative" than in its other categories, down six and eight slots respectively, but now -- however the ranking had been determined, that had done something: it had dropped a whole twenty slots in "Theme" and seven in "Narrative" since the last time it had checked, only a few days ago. #1354 Theme, #1726 Narrative. It hadn't paid attention; it could have been creating the new entrances, or one of the other moving blurs impacting it somehow, or this most recent repudiation, but it was certainly something. So, the two adventurers (non-adventurers?) moved out of range of its imaging tubes and then it was left alone on its mountain again. "Alone"; there were still five adventuring parties inside it. One of them had been creeping through its floor 12 mire, trying to avoid the [Bog Goblins] floating on the muddy current, and around when Elena had asked about the skill, they had ran into one and it had started howling, attracting all the rest; the adventurers were making a fighting retreat back towards the room entrance. This kind of thing was happening all the time. Several days passed. It slightly tweaked the alignment of its calendar spiral to account for its latest guess about the length of a day. It kept inspecting its images, trying to will itself to make some comprehension with the incoherent structures it could vaguely make out within the blurry patterns. On reflection, it seemed to be luck that, apparently, some people were travelling, or gathering, precisely when and where they could see its entrance appear. Its other two new entrances remained unvisited. Goblin Cave imagined missing that connection and sitting for days and days with the sick nervousness of waiting for contact. The first discovery had bled the sick edge of the anticipation, leaving it with the same uncertainly but lacking the same tone. It was still frustrating. The second use of its new entrances was after another week. The tension had exhausted it, and it had gone back to idly experimenting with mana flows, working on twisting more robust threads in wider spaces. It was still dwelling on the [Flame Wisp] description. It implied open areas without special machinery, and no matter how Goblin Cave approached the problem it seemed completely intractable, which meant either it was missing something big or the system description was inaccurate. In the mean time, following on the success of its mana bellows, it had been spinning up smaller, faster versions, with open air above them: creating mana tornadoes. When it pumped mana into the input, it was split apart into streams, and then the streams wafted up into the air above, still violently spinning, and they managed to maintain partial coherency for some amount of time there, although with how violently they were moving they would never be able to fold through the many precise convolutions it would take to manifest a spawn template. It felt like it had finally gotten involved in its process again, ignoring the looming spectre of change, when -- more sound from its second entrance. The same kind of intentional clattering: boots over rock, coming up the slope. As far as it had been able to discern, this entrance let out amid the vegetation-covered slopes of the mountain. There was a spring nearby, slowly seeping through the nearby rock, and part of the noise was water dripping down the rocks, forming puddles and streams. These adventurers set up a rough camp of sorts, peeling some things away from their bodies and leaving them on the ground. Thankfully, several of them were mostly visible from a few of its imaging tubes; it would have to inspect those images in detail later. Before that: "This is it," one of them said. "Uncanny thing, ain't it?" "Look at that manastone, right out in the open," another said, and went to come closer, only for another to stop them. "Nope, we're doing this right. We want to get in and get out without any surprises, so no picking up anything until we're sure it's not all cursed." "Who'd make a, what, cursed manastone mine?" "Who cares. Aygerim thinks some mages accidentally translocated a summoning all the way up into the mountains. Viktor says it's a new mana-aligned dungeon. But what I think is either somebody else lost this and is gonna come looking, or nobody else knows about it, and either way we gotta be fast and clean and not leave a trace. So hands off until we give the all-clear!" This crude avarice was more in line with what Goblin Cave expected from adventurers. Why else would anyone venture into its halls, if not for riches? Manastone being the material they sought seemed odd, given its low cost to construct, but, much like the description of the [Flame Wisp], there was no reason to believe that there were native high-mana veins of manastone anywhere accessible in the whole region, if there were even such a thing anywhere in the world. Maybe the only manastone was from dungeons that had decided to pretend to be within a manastone vein. So what if it turned out manastone was absurdly valuable here? It could produce tons of manastone. And then what? This group wanted to get rich. What would they do once they had their riches? Oh, to be sure, these adventurers were nervous, skittish: they weren't certain they'd get their haul, or get it all back to wherever adventurers went when they were outside its dungeon. But Goblin Cave found it difficult to care one way or the other about the success of their venture. It had made the tunnels to express... something unworldly. Something about the nature of being a dungeon. Of course the only thing adventurers were interested was how much it was worth. Accumulating power. Accumulating wealth. Goblin Cave was fascinated by the world outside itself. It seemed like there was so much potential for... everything. Things it couldn't conceive of. But that fascination, that anticipation, was met at every turn by something like this: the craven desires of thoughtless idiots. It had waited so long to emerge, for this? For more adventurers to set up camp outside in preparation for mining its walls apart? To mindlessly extract not just experience and loot from its floors but the raw material, too? Disgusting. Pathetic. The drives that motivated these creatures were beneath it. What limited minds they had. But, surely, somewhere in the world there was something else. It just had to find a way out.
chapter 15 - survey
The thieves took its mana lock. Goblin Cave was almost impressed by their sheer avarice. Replacing it wouldn't be too costly; it had reduced the mithril down to a thin strand looping around a more mana-cheap framework of gold and mana quartz. It was more upset about the interruption to its imaging record: now it would always have a several-hour blank spot in its calendar helix. While they had been doing it, Goblin Cave had been more than tempted to skewer them. Manipulating mana around foreign bodies was vastly more costly than doing it deep within the comfort of its own dungeon, but it wasn't prohibitively expensive. And when all the thieves were on the far side of its mana lock, it didn't even have that excess cost; it could have extruded a manacrystal and serpent obsidian lattice all across its entrance, which, in addition to powerfully restructuring mana waveforms, was also very sharp and spiky. Still, it was going to secure its replacement lock more securely, and ring it in obsidian spines. The thieves remained for nearly a day -- dawn to dusk -- and eventually managed to get the nerve to broach its corridor and step inside, after they'd gathered the scattered manastone on the surface. They'd used chisels to shatter the surface layer of black glass off the manastone backing, and then carved off great misshapen chunks of coarse manastone from the raw granite. Its dungeon structure was reinforced against tunneling, of course, but Goblin Cave hadn't been shaping the corridors with a mind towards durability. The manastone all but peeled away from the granite behind it, so it only took cracking the manastone in one place and widening the gap before the entire seam collapsed in on itself. They'd only left once they couldn't carry any more. Goblin Cave waited until they left -- when the sound of their movement faded -- it constructed a fresh mana lock in the same location and resumed image recording. It slowly repaired its hallway, until it was the same immaculate square corridor it had been before the thieves had taken their picks to it. What a disappointment. Also, it should probably be concerned about the mana lock. It wasn't really important as such, just a chunk of fused metals, but it was increasingly focused on the concept of information asymmetry. There were many things it did not know about the world. There were, apparently, many things the world did not know about it. It couldn't rank dangers to itself if it didn't know what dangers existed. And the mana lock -- what all could somebody determine about it, from that? But in truth, Goblin Cave didn't even know if they'd taken it intact: it had been its eye, after all. Given the rest of their predilections, it wouldn't have been surprised if they had shattered it to pieces and only taken the rare metals. Still, all things considered, it would rather avoid that situation repeating. It was tempted to spawn in some higher-level mobs just behind the mana lock, to provide a little pushback -- but, of course, all that would do was attract even more adventurers. Unless the mobs could kill every one of them -- difficult, at the very entrance to its dungeon -- mobs were just experience sources. Still, it would have to do something. If nothing else, it was still planning on restructuring its original floors at some point, and it didn't want those to be ransacked clean. One simple change was to interlace the manastone with the granite, forming thousands of spined pins of granite affixing the manastone to it, and thousands of spined pins of manastone affixing it to the granite. Another was to add more mana locks and backup eyes. It studded cubic crystals across its entrance corridors, adding alcoves and outcroppings, and shoved half-buried mana locks and a haphazard collection of imaging tubes to the area near the entrance. It tweaked the mana locks: not cutting off all mana, since that would defeat the point, but instead attenuating it, making it flutter in a way that would disrupt many spells. This required a mana flow, so it created a loop behind the entrance, forming a primitive form of its mana bellows within it: a slowly-revolving current of mana, billowing widdershins along the circuit. In addition, it rigged up some of its most intense mana tubes and aimed them at the miniature bellows, angled to either interfere or reinforce the mana current. It certainly wasn't a stable configuration; the mana current would sputter and die after only a few minutes. But in the mean time it could conjure up a mana whirlwind within the entryway, and hopefully if it triggered the mechanism any time somebody started gouging out its walls that would at least interrupt them for a while. Then it focused its attention to floor 26, its enormous torus. It had needed to restructure the surface of the torus, after its initial experimentation with mana resonance proved more energetic than it had expected. Its walls were layered in ridged rings that reflected mana without refracting it, and the dense mesh of manacrystal blended with mostly mundane iron formed an intensely resilient material that was still flexible enough to meet each resonant mana pulse without shattering. The main problem with that was that it didn't look right. Massive sheets of shimmering blue-black metal wasn't quite the look it was going for for these corridors, and it was willing to make some concessions to functionality to maintain its aesthetic. If it was willing to abandon all else in favor of raw power, it would hardly be better than the adventurers grinding mindlessly within it. A secondary problem was the value of the manacrystal might be even more absurd. If manastone was valuable enough to be worth taking, then manacrystal, with its ten-thousandfold cost, might be valuable enough to cause serious problems. What it really needed was a materials lab. Obviously, that was its entire dungeon to a point, but if it was looking to prevent thieves mining it for its manastone, it would like to be more proactive than incrementally proofing itself against each theft as they bypassed its defenses. It wanted to present an unassailable front. It had many useless rooms in its lower warrens, and so it repurposed one of the collections of cubic chambers. It had just begun synthesizing materials and conceptualizing the tests it could run -- it had plenty of hammers and blades it could impact into walls, in addition to explosive and mana-based attacks -- when noise from its newly-discovered entrance distracted it. It had been two weeks. It was troubling to have to work on the scale of adventurers; it reminded it of being weak and desperate in its early years, when the minutes to took to spawn a new mob spelled the difference between a party making it to its core or not. In its haste, it just messily doped its black glass walls with scattershot workings of iron and aluminum, in the hopes that would be enough to reinforce it. The ungainly transformation left spiderweb fractals across the surface, audibly crackling, and gave the dark material a cloudy sheen. Not an entirely unattractive look, but it would have preferred to have time to refine the material before deploying it. Or to run any materials tests on it. The figures approaching its entrance cohered into vague lumps. Goblin Cave had gotten good enough at parsing the images to comprehend which way they were facing, how they turned their heads. "This is it," a voice said, and then: "No, don't touch it!" Another member of the party had stepped closer, still quite distant from its mana lock. "Well set up under those trees," they said, pointing. Goblin Cave was very proud it could make out the gesture. Also, those were trees? The white-and-orange-red blurs, or the brown-and-green ones? Or both? It had read about trees: forests were comprised of trees, and they were used to produce lumber, and they had leaves, which were of different shapes. They had things called boughs. Goblin Cave had imagined them more like crystal spurs, full of sockets where they grew out the wood. For all that it had a panoply of rock materials, it had never really been able to synthesize wood. Much too messy compared to rocks. Goblin Cave added 'unlock more non-fungal vegetation to see what kind of trees were in the system list' to its already incredibly long to-do list. The question of if they were in the system list wasn't really in question: Darkwood Grove was still around and still forest-themed, and Goblin Cave couldn't imagine it doing that without having some trees to spawn. In any case, the latest adventurers set up a more robust camp. There were more boxy, angular shapes unfurled against the backdrop of trees, and most of it was outside its field of view. Later, they assembled near its entrance: "We're going to be running this as a dungeon evaluation, even though..." the voice trailed off. "We don't know. I know none of us believed the reports we heard, but looking at it, calling it a nascent dungeon might be the best category we can come up with. But we don't know. Anything could be in there, so don't get lazy. Stay within sight of your assigned trio at all times, and if you ever get separated even for a moment your first order is to retreat outside. You see anything strange, call it out. You have any innates that go off, tell everybody. Clear?" There was a general motion and mumble of approval. Goblin Cave felt like, at last, it had met a kindred spirit. Seeking knowledge, aware of the uncertainty, thinking of possibilities they couldn't forsee in the moment: this was, at least, thinking more in line with its own thoughts than anything it had heard before. "First day, we're only doing light recon. If we end up with access to manastone reserves of the same purity as the samples, we'll be able to get mana supplies on site, but --" They looked over at the entrance. "It's hard to say. Those samples we saw don't look like they came from the entrance, so they could've been from further in. But if so, we'll be doing heavier exploration tomorrow with a much bigger mana budget, so if you need a day to build up charge for spells, you'll want to start now." And there was the part with the manastone. What was it valuable for? From context it sounded like it empowered their spells? Or powered them to begin with? Something like that. It couldn't say it had ever noticed anything like that being used by the adventurers in its cave, and it would have noticed if they came in laden with manastones, but... clearly they wanted manastone for something. If nothing else, their encampment outside was encouraging: it might actually get to see what they were taking the manastones for. With that, their group headed closer to its entrance. At the very lip of its mana lock: "This must be the artifact we received fragments of." Goblin Cave felt a surge of validation: of course it was fragmented. "The mithril threading... that alone would make this artifact-level. And here's another one. Or, a replacement?" Goblin Cave was guessing about 'mithril' there; the book that had included manastone had no entry that seemed to match mithril: a green-blue mineral that exhibited a characteristic scalloped surface in pure form, which effortlessly absorbed and conducted mana. But Goblin Cave couldn't think of anything else in the lock that was valuable and could be described as threading. The person pressed their hand through, moving their face. An expression. Then they pulled their hand back and stepped through, body shuddering at the sudden immersion in Goblin Cave's mana flow. Goblin Cave's sense of them billowed into existence. "This mana..." they said. "I don't know what this is, but this is no dungeon. Everyone, come in one at a time, giving yourself time to acclimate. When everyone's ready, we'll head deeper."
chapter 16 - spawns
Goblin Cave was quite interested in how adventurers perceived its mana. It was clearly different in some way from whatever mana flows existed out in the open, and apparently the soft fluttering of its simple mana bellows was different enough from, what? Every dungeon these people had ever visited? Ultimately it was constrained by its senses. It could never feel what a mana flow was like outside of itself, because the act of sensing mana involved its own mana flow. The strange turbulence at its unlocked entrance was the closest it got, and that was a continual choppy flow that could have been caused by any number of different kinds of flows breaking against its own mana structure. As this new group of adventurers cautiously made their way forward into its cubic-crystal corridor, Goblin Cave contemplated what other kinds of mana flows could even exist. It seemed entirely possible that all its experiments with mana flow only touched on a tiny corner of what was possible -- all of its mana, including the chaotic, turbulent flow from its mana pipes, was still its own mana, and it could sense through it. Mana controlled by other entities, like the mana woven around spellcasters' spells, had a different... tone to it, and not one it could imagine how to replicate. But also, that 'tone' apparently wasn't what adventurers felt when they stepped within it, or else this latest group wouldn't have confidently declared that its new tunnels weren't a dungeon. The mana flow wasn't that dissimilar, it didn't think... but that was assuming whatever senses an adventurer had to detect mana were anywhere at all similar to its own. Goblin Cave was half tempted to just ask. But... that seemed even more profoundly risky than anything else it had done to date. It would try to discern through experimentation first, at least. The group passed through several of its attenuating mana locks, each time pausing to reacclimate themselves to the differential, and then finally hit the loop of its primitive mana bellows. Goblin Cave had left one of the mana pipes open, so that the flow there was more turbulent, mostly to see if it could discern anything from the adventurers' reaction. As it turned out, they didn't like the howling, dissonant mana flow any more than it did. One pressed through the mana lock, slowly, and then gasped and jerked back halfway through, panting. "Chaotic mana. Polluted, maybe? But..." they mumbled out a low-level spell, [Mana Ward], that clung to their hand as they eased it through the barrier again. They cast again: [Mana Filter], a higher-level spell that selectively warped mana flows. "It's not high-energy, and the aspects don't fit the inverse-square pattern from pollution decay. It's full-spectrum." The adventurers discussed things with each other. "If it's polluted, is there a hex here? Maybe this whole thing is a containment hall." "There's been no locks or gates. Somebody hauled one of those things right out of here. Anybody could walk right in. If it's trying to contain a hex, it's not doing a good job." "We might be too late for that, if so. We're not the first to survey this place, obviously; it's possible any foci was already taken, and this is just the aftershock." The leader shook their head. "It's possible, but we have no real evidence. Nothing about this place makes sense, so until we have a firmer grasp, don't invest in speculation, please." A pause. "Let's keep moving." They had said 'disordered', as opposed to the 'unfocused' mana referenced in the [Flame Wisp] description. 'Borne from unfocused mana in mana-rich regions'. Presumably they had to be different things, if only because it still hadn't manage to spawn any [Flame Wisps], but it doubted either term had a precise technical meaning. 'Polluted' and 'hex' seemed interesting: it sounded like there were things that... output mana? Restructured mana? In much more high-energy amounts than its mana pipes. As far as it was concerned, mana flows were fairly simple: raw mana built up in the system layer and wound its way down to refill mana pools -- its own, adventurers', whatever. An excess of raw mana, due to not enough mana use, or an increase in the flow from system space, eventually structured itself as a nascent dungeon core and was projected out from system space into the physical world. It had produced a handful of enchanted objects as dungeon loot over the years, but they were generally inert without mana from another source flowing through them. But were there other options? An enchanted item with its own mana pool seemed possible, at least. But were there other options? Dungeon cores, as far as it could tell with its sample size of one, were highly organized, crystalline excretions of mana. That was the only way to create the correct kind of structure to pierce through out of system space. But if there was some kind of chaotic structure... It had no idea. System space was, ultimately, untouchable; it could no more experiment with its system connection fields than it could reach out and sense other mana directly: the very modalities it used to think, act, and experience prevented it from reaching outside itself. As always, it seemed like it could think up a thousand possibilities, and had no way to determine which, if any were true. Or it was missing huge portions of what was happening, lacking context to actually comprehend what it was doing. Frustrating. The adventurers hit the main loop of its primitive mana bellows and increased their mana shielding to compensate. That actually threw off its flow; Goblin Cave hadn't really designed it to have adventurer-sized obstructions. That added enough resonance, with the addition of nine other mana sources all in different flavors, that the current started to interfere with itself and form messy eddies, breaking down its steady rhythm. Which was interesting -- it hadn't exactly had a lot of ability to experiment with other mana sources -- but it was also frustrating. What a mess of engineering. The adventurers at first followed the mana flow, and then when they realized the corridor looped around they expressed shock and puzzlement. More talking amongst themselves. That lead to them trying the various offshoot paths leading to its mana pipes, which they got very excited about. "Is this... diffracting the mana flow?" one of them said, peering straight into the output filter. Goblin Cave hadn't really designed them to be easy to visually inspect; it could see their internals all the time, after all. The adventurers were getting a view of two spinning gratings, with the interference pattern between them revealing slivers of a dark chamber spotted with glowing spikes. They tried [Ranged Touch], a low-level non-combat spell, in an attempt to map out the inside of the pipe, but the chaotic mana flow, aimed directly opposite the spell cast, immediately shredded it apart. Goblin Cave hadn't really considered it as much, but in practice, it wasn't surprising that adventurers would have trouble casting. Spells were internally structured within their own mana flow, but anything that touched the outside world needed to interpenetrate the mana flows external to their body, and here -- the flow was choppy and turbulent enough, at the very neck of a shrill mana pipe, to break apart low-level, low-power spells. "There has to be an access port somewhere, unless whoever built this translocated the whole thing into place in one piece," one of them said, as they abandoned trying to inspect it through the lattice. That was, more-or-less, what Goblin Cave had done. It was at least glad they didn't try to rip the plates off and inspect it that way. After a few more mana pipes, amount half of them active, they stumbled across the narrow path to its calendar spiral. On reflection... it had made the path there, and the spiral itself, adventurer-sized, even though it never really intended anyone to visit it. Because... it had gotten very used to making everything adventurer sized. Oh, certainly, there were advantages to mana flow for larger spaces; it if isolated its core away in a sealed chamber it messed with its mana flow to have the mana source for its entire dungeon needing to waft through solid rock before it emerged anywhere else. And of course, its mobs had to move around, so it had dug bigger and bigger as it had unlocked orcs, cyclopi, and ogres. But mostly it was because it had grown entirely used to building everything for adventurers. The spiral seemed to impress them. It went fairly deep -- three weeks deep, with twenty-one floors, now -- and the open center made them stare down at the precise loops. Goblin Cave had been thinking of revising the whole structure into a torus -- a ring of images, folded into a daily circuit, but that daily circuit would slowly convolve around a second curve, to produce a spiral along a spiral that would mark out a single year. It would need at least a year to figure that out, though. In any case, the calendar spiral was currently walkable, and so one trio walked down it, single file. "Are these... recordings?" one asked, peering at a fist-sized chunk of manastone imaging. "Made out of... pure manastone? It's hard to make out, but I think this is the hallway outside," they said, pointing: "You can see, there's that big boulder to the right of the entrance, but..." Eventually they made it to the part where the thieves showed up, nine winds down, and the associated chunk of missing time. Goblin Cave was still upset about that. "Ah," one of them said, who had been inspecting each frame with a handheld magnifying lens. "It looks like they hauled out all that manastone through this entrance? You can see, there's not any loose rubble after this." They gestured at the gap. "The artifact had those lenses in it, right? I think they're being recorded onto this, so this would correspond to when these people removed it." "But it was replaced in..." another member of the trio measured in steps, walking the length of the gap. "What, five hours? They just had another one lying around?" "Looking at the entrance now, it looks like they had several lying around." And so on. They ended up descending all the way down, curious to see how the spiral ended. Its control node, unthinking, mindlessly dug out more of the spiral with each interval recorded. There was a shout when their own images started to appear in the recording, only a quarter-turn from the flat granite wall that made up the end of the spiral, and then, as they watched, the control node captured another image and began digging. With adventurers so close, the mana cost was... considerable, although their mana shielding helped limit the excess cost a little. Goblin Cave wished they would walk up the spiral already, but instead they stayed there for a full three recording intervals, timing out the process. "This definitely seems like dungeon magic," one of them said. They dispelled their mana ward, making the mana cost of digging even higher. "I can't feel any spell effects that would be doing this." "Dungeon magic doesn't work with people around," one of the others said. "That's only theorized," the first responded. They did eventually leave, and put up their mana wards again, although that one person's cloud of diffuse mana billowed around mucking up its mana flows for several more intervals. The adventurers made their way past its primitive mana bellows, and began the slow, sloping descent into its actual mana bellows. They seemed a little taken aback by the walls changing: it hadn't had time to fully resurface all of it, only the entryway, so this was still the smooth, fragile, apparently-peelable surface it had first created. They summoned up some magelights with [Create Light], and the mana currents needed to sustain that sent vague ripples down the corridor, spilling into its mana bellows and mucking about. They proceeded slowly, apparently more intimidated by the long, linear descent than anything else they'd seen thus far. It was true, the corridors went on for a while. It had dug them up and out from the top of its mana bellows and then just kept going until it hit the surface. Some dungeon-building instinct wanted to fold the corridor up, add rooms, spawn in some monsters, but so far it had managed to resist. Then they reached the actual mana bellows. The corridor let out into a boxy cubic room, a pressure lull of nearly-static mana that helped stabilize the pump's circuit, but of course with the injection of nine new mana flows the entire system was starting to desynchronize. It had seemed very impressive when Goblin Cave had first built it, but on reflection it hadn't engineered it to withstand adventurers within it. It wasn't used to thinking of them as actively impinging on its own mana flows, precisely; it wasn't as if it had any active mana machinery in its initial caves. Goblin Cave was just thinking how it would have to try out some new designs, figure out some way to replicate the disruptive nature of other beings' mana clouds within its designs, when the group stepped out of the static room and into the direct path of the mana flow. They shuddered, even through their mana wards, and one of their magelights, then a second, popped in messy clouds of diffuse mana. The spray of mana cords tangled with each other and disrupted the pump's flow, reordering themselves as they did so, forming a haze of looping, branching cords in a fierce tangle, and then -- a half-dozen [Flame Wisps] popped into existence, budding themselves out from the eddies in the mana flow.
chapter 17 - bribery
Goblin Cave stopped caring at all about the adventurers. What was that?! There had been a mana interaction along the interface, and then... It couldn't follow exactly how things had happened; the eruption of external mana clouded its senses enough that it couldn't precisely follow how all the branches and loops had done... whatever it was they did. The [Flame Wisps] bobbed there: not dungeon-creatures, but not not dungeon creatures as well. They made been mostly... 'spawned', if that was the right term, by its mana. They floated aimlessly on the mana current, drifting along the slow circuit of the mana bellows. The adventurers, for their part, all froze, silently staring at the wisps. That was admirable. One fewer moving part. Also, now that some flame wisps had finally spawned, it would be somewhat upsetting for them to all instantly be killed. The adventurers spoke with each other in low tones, but Goblin Cave was beyond caring. What had happened? Clearly, there was something about the interface between different kinds of mana sources that did something. Or was it something else? Adventurers' mana was structured in a totally different way than its own, which in turn was (presumably) structured in a totally different way than the mana in the air outside. But there was some quality there, some aspect, that gave rise to the spawn. And why the spawn? It could explain monster spawn templates, certainly: balanced loops of knotted mana threads formed resonances with aspects of system-space, which allowed it to instantiate templates. Obviously there was a deeper question for why that was, why the resonances were distributed the ways they were and how those were aligned with the system-space spawn tables. But there was something approaching a mechanism. This... Goblin Cave had no idea what had just happened. And even more frustratingly, since the action was utterly outside its control, it couldn't even glean anything from repeated experimentation. Perhaps that was too hasty. There were all sorts of aspects of what had just happened that it could try to replicate. Still, it was very tempting in the moment to simply speak to them and demand they cast another spell. The annoying part was that Goblin Cave didn't have any immediate way to produce the same puff of destabilized mana from a spell implosion -- it couldn't exactly just cast [Create Light] itself -- and even if it could it had seen similar effects: if it was all its own mana, the turbulent flow would smooth out instead of fold up. This was going to require more study. Could it form something like mana explosives? Replicate the effect of a spell just by directly altering the mana flow? Well, it was certainly possible; that was what its mana goblins did when they cast spells as innate abilities. Whether or not it could do that was another question entirely. Arguably, it could spawn a soulless mana goblin and command it to cast via a control node, but that seemed like a boring solution compared to actually understanding the process. Unfortunately, that was all academic so long as it still had a bunch of adventurers in its halls. It would take time and focus to even slap together a basic mana pipe, and those were hard to get at the timescale it was operating at right now. Currently, the adventurers seemed distinctly discomforted to see a bunch of mobs -- monsters? -- spawn in. They also had some kind of reaction to the mana flow itself, the usual malaise from being subject to mana flows. Goblin Cave had yet to see a mana flow they didn't take affront with: still was bad, and turbulent was bad, and now this smooth current was still also bad. After a long pause and some low talking, they continued on, upstream, in the opposite direction the wisps had drifted. This did, unfortunately for them, lead them, after two chambers, a balcony, and a stairwell, to one of its rooms filled with mobs. Two [Manaflame Guardians] and one [Mana Elemental], to be precise. Goblin Cave still wasn't sure how it felt about them. They weren't goblins. It did like goblins. They were definitely a little more exciting than goblins, though, what with their broad array of spells. It had given the manaflame guardians [Manaflame] as their primary attack, reasonably, and the [Mana Elemental] both [Mana Ball] and [Manablast]. It mostly noted that because, in the ensuing battle, it watched their spell effects closely, keeping a close eye on how they burst through the constantly-streaming mana flow. Nothing particularly exciting happened. The adventurers made quick work of them -- one summoned an energy lance, another used a continual [Mana Beam] -- which discomforted Goblin Cave a little. It was one thing to trial-run its dungeon alterations here, but... well, it still didn't enjoy drawing more attention to itself. "Those were definitely dungeon mobs," one of them said. "They even left drops:" the continued, and used some kind of analysis skill on the drops. One chunk of manastone, weakly pulsing, and one heap of manadust, already starting to scintillate from the continual mana flow streaming over it. The thing was -- this was all, to some degree, a farce. Just as much now as before, it was watching adventurers storm its dungeon, kill pointless, endlessly-respawning trash mobs, collect experience and loot. Certainly it had changed the decor, but... this wasn't satisfying. Pretending it was a collection of black glass corridors instead of a wet, dripping cave full of goblins. It wanted to know why these adventurers were here. What paths had its harvested manastone moved through, to come to their attention? Why did they want manastone? Would they cast [Create Light] a few dozen more times as it varied the mana flows? Goblin Cave was deeply distrustful of its instincts. Oh, certainly, it wanted to protect its core. But on reflection, adventurers had rarely tried to reach its core, and adventurers-as-a-whole had never seemed to take issue with it killing entire parties who delved too deep. It also wanted to continue creating sprawling labyrinths full of goblins. It did like goblins, after all. But it wanted to do more than that. And its instincts had been screaming at it to never reveal itself to others: not as something unusual, not as something thinking and planning. Just a cave full of mobs. Ultimately, it needed answers. And, oh, finding a point of confusion and digging in, slowly experimenting to explore all the manifold ways a problem unfolded itself, all of the disparate aspects that combined to present an issue, and one by one solving them until it could synthesize a complete solution, a new artifact that presented itself as a meaningful expression of knowledge and learning -- that was certainly enjoyable. But there were adventurers within it now, and they moved fast. Unfortunately, it would need to match their pace if it wanted to stay abreast of their movements. It had taken years to dig out its new corridors, but how long would it take to walk all the way down to its core? The moment it had connected its new corridors to the surface, it had fundamentally changed its relationship with the world, with everything. It was just a matter of when and how. Why not now? So, while the adventurers were conversing over its mana chunk -- "A purely mana-aligned dungeon? What else can manifest mobs like that?" "Could someone have actually subverted a core?" -- it focused on a room that shared a wall with the chamber the adventurers were currently in. In order to speak, it couldn't do it audibly; it would have to construct a whole artificial diaphragm and voicebox. Not difficult, with two dozen examples inside it, but more time-consuming than it liked. It didn't have the system connection required to speak directly into their minds, the way it could with its spawned mobs. And the fact that its mana control was impinged by the presence of other mana flows -- well, it had already found a solution to that. It manifested a mana lock, sealing its new chamber off from the flows in the other room, and it placed down an ink-black plate of voidstone along the wall behind the lock. Then... The wall next to the adventurers dissolved apart into shards, revealing the black backdrop. Into it, Goblin Cave had carved a single word in lumenrock, in the same language as its books: GREETINGS. Every instinct it had, of course, was screaming to not do this. That was a large part of why it did it. "'Greetings'...?" their leader said. "Are we speaking to someone?" YES It took a while to subsume the old lumenrock, resurface with voidstone, and then extrude new lumenrock. If it hadn't been for all the frenzied digging it had done over the past several years, it would've taken even longer. Still, it had spent so much of its life frustrated by the rapid pace of the adventurers within it; they could stand to be left waiting for once. The adventurers shared a glance, looking around nervously. "May I ask to whom we are speaking?" their leader said. Goblin Cave debated its response. It didn't want to flatly state, 'the dungeon core of this dungeon' quite yet, lacking so much context, but it seemed like an affront to everything it was trying to do to add one more layer of fabrication: oh, I'm the sorcerer that subverted this dungeon. Oh, I'm the keeper of the ancient hex kept in these halls. And so forth and so on. THE ONE WHO MANAGES THESE HALLS, it wrote out, after a longer pause. Their leader kept their composure, despite their underlings seeming increasingly ill at-ease. "What is your duty here, if you do not mind me asking?" That one was easy. EXPERIMENTATION, it wrote. AND UNDERSTANDING. "What... is this place?" This was leading the dialog down a tedious path. Goblin Cave had priorities. WHAT DO YOU DESIRE TO LEARN FROM THIS PLACE. It had thought about opening with 'WHAT IS THE NATURE OF THE WORLD' but it figured that might have been a little too open-ended. "We're mage-technicians, under service to her highness the Duchess of Masqar. We're here to survey this site." Their face made a slight motion. "If our presence here offends you, we may leave." Goblin Cave was tempted to simply say, leave. It wasn't-- It hadn't-- Conversation was something it overheard and ignored, not something it participated in. That hadn't really answered its question; told it what it wanted to know. What did it want to know? How could it convey that? SURVEY TO WHAT END? "For manastone, primarily. As-- as you may know, this region is one of the lesser states of the empire, and impoverished in mana. It was thought this place was a... fresh manastone vein, or something to that affect." Avarice, as usual. How disappointing. The use of 'region' sparked something in its mind. Its rankings included 2283 dungeons in total, and it had no idea of how wide a net that cast. HOW MANY DUNGEONS ARE YOU AWARE OF? "W-what? In what sense?" IN ANY SENSE. "The royal library is said to contain annals that record tens of thousands of dungeon varieties, spanning over centuries. Personally, I've overseen survey of twenty seven dungeons in my employ. Is this place a dungeon?" ARE YOU AWARE OF THE MECHANISM BEHIND THE GENERATION OF THOSE FLAME WISPS, THAT YOU PARTICIPATED IN? "What?" Even the leader was having a difficult time maintaining composure under the barrage of questions. This whole situation was making them uneasy; even Goblin Cave could discern that. Good. "They don't-- the mana flows here are very turbulent. It is said that wisps like that spawn in regions of high-energy, unfocused mana." HAVE YOU PERSONALLY OBSERVED THIS BEFORE? WHAT IS THE PRECISE MEANING OF 'UNFOCUSED'? "I-- No, I haven't personally observed wisps spawn before. Unfocused... I don't know. I suppose there must be some specific condition, or else they'd spawn everywhere; it's just said that there needs to be a level of interface between competing strong mana sources. Did... you manage to construct this mana rhythm?" DOES THAT NOT INTEREST YOU? "What, the specifics of wisp spawns? No, I haven't... it's not something I think of." CAST [CREATE LIGHT] AGAIN. I WILL MODULATE THE MANA FLOW. "What?" they said, and elsewhere, Goblin Cave shifted some gates, allowing the current to pick up, folding over itself in choppy waves. The reaction was less than positive for the group. One of them let out a groan, staggering, and their mana shield caught the increased flow wrong and tore itself apart with a flash. They collapsed, and two other members leaned over them, struggling to overlap their own faltering shields upon their body. The leader turned back towards the glowing words. "Regent! Please, desist! Have mercy!" None of them cast [Create Light]. What a disappointment. Goblin Cave stilled the flow, although not before another member of the group collapsed. "Please, permit us to leave," the leader said, making some kind of gesture. What a mess. Goblin Cave would have to figure out whatever kind of mana flow didn't make adventurers ill, because so far it really did seem like it was 'everything'. VERY WELL, it wrote. Then... As it had been talking, it had decided to be compassionate. They wanted manastone? It would give them manastone. Despite the unpleasantness of having them crawling through its corridors, and their gross self-interest in nothing but raw power, they were at the very least a source of information it didn't have. Potentially; it hadn't learned much of note from this conversation. It had constructed a neat stack of fist-sized manastone blocks: faceted rhombic dodecahedrons, stacked in a neat pyramid. It extruded a slope on its side of the mana lock, and then used a trap component to shove the stack down the slope, sending a clattering heap of manastone blocks rolling out and across the floor. A few of them reacted like it was an attack, jolting back; one reflexively put up a [Barrier]. FOR YOUR EFFORTS, it wrote. RETURN HERE IN TWO DAYS AND I WILL GIVE YOU MORE. Rank bribery was just how adventurers operated, regrettably. The leader stared at the heap of stones, then jerkily reached down and picked one up. They gestured to the others to do the same. "Thank you," they said, voice visibly strained. "May we go?" YES The group limped their way back the way they came, half-dragging their two unconscious members. "Was that--" one of them said, and the leader gave a sharp hiss, shh. Aside from that, they remained silent all the way to the entrance. Goblin Cave thought things had gone fairly well.
chapter 18 - flame wisps
Two days gave it hardly any time. Goblin Cave resented the time pressure. Left to its own devices... there was a heat in it, a fire. A focus, to peel reality back to reveal its underpinnings, to lay everything bare. It would take it time; of course it would take time. Thought, comprehension. Understanding unfolded like a budding fungus. Its fungal shore, down on floor 51, was only starting to become established. The mycelium weave was digging into the bare rock, mingling with the broken down material from prior fruiting bodies to form a dense, muddy silt atop the bare rock, and fresh mycelium wound its way through the muck, expanding its growth moment by moment, spore by spore. It had taken years to get this far. Patience bore fruit. And now it had two days until the adventurers would come back. It should have said two months. Two years! It had innumerable avenues of study to pursue, and none of them would make meaningful progress in that interval. It wanted... it wasn't that it wanted to be left alone, precisely, although that was the dominant emotion. It wanted to find something meaningful, something of value, in the wider world, but from what it had seen so far it had very low hopes of getting that from adventurers. It wanted to verify its assumptions about the nature of delving, reified as its own sub-core and goblin delvers. It wanted to stop being bothered by the constant stressors of crude, tedious adventurers. It wanted to understand why system-space was the way it was. If there was any consolation, it was that that confrontation had further tanked its 'Theme' and 'Narrative' rankings. It would have to ask about that on the revisit. There were several steps it could take. Goblin Cave spawned in an [Invisible Servant], with a minuscule soul, and used its reincarnation ability to give it a few spells. It had been a [Luminous Torchwick] (tier 4, light), a magically-infused evolution of its common candlewick fungus; from that Goblin Cave gave it [Create Light]. Goblin Cave was tempted to siphon off excess soul from its budding goblins, but, of course, the process of separating out that much soul would take far more than two days to complete. It needed to do something about that; some kind of transient soul chamber where it could separate off excess soul in various-sized parcels, so that it would have access to it immediately. Yet more projects to contemplate and complete. More than mana cost or respawn cycles or experience, time was rapidly becoming its bottleneck. Goblin Cave had the invisible servant stand where the adventurers had stood, and commanded it to cast [Create Light]. The magelight swirled into existence, letting out a long plume of light downwind of the mana flow. That was already different. Goblin Cave adjusted the mana pipes influencing its bellows: adding and removing choppiness, speed, timbre, intensity. The manalight reacted to the flow, and eventually when Goblin Cave made the flow rapid and choppy and strong it burst apart, but the shattered threads smoothly recombined into the overall flow without anything like the branch-loop explosion it had observed the adventurers produce. It wasn't a pleasant feeling, but it was still knowledge. Something about foreign mana sources was likely critical to the interaction. Something about the turbulence at the interface. Did that mean it could spawn wisps at its entrances? Perhaps, but not unless the world's mana itself cast a spell at it. Could it make a creature with foreign mana? It wasn't sure how to even begin to approach that. Well, it currently had creatures made from foreign mana inside it. The spawned flame wisps had continued floating around its mana bellows, and Goblin Cave had shepherded them into an isolated, low-flow chamber before it had started its experimentation, not wanting to rupture them in the same way it planned on rupturing the manalight. They floated there, tier 1, the most valuable and irreplaceable thing currently in its dungeon. Goblin Cave couldn't command them or check their status; they weren't dungeon spawns. But being made from mostly its own mana, they didn't provoke the same churning, itching sensation that adventurers did. Maybe faintly? Maybe it was imagining it. Adventurers still counted; there were more than a dozen inside it currently. But their spells had never done much of anything aside from dissipate, so presumably the mana flow it had going was another piece of the puzzle. In fact, now that it had some comparison for foreign reaction of mana within it, the dissipation of spells within its old dungeon -- the mana interaction that it had always seen to the point of finding it completely usual -- looked suspiciously flat. Like the natural, slow and still state of its mana flow was some kind of mana-suppression flow: damping and enfolding foreign mana, swiftly leeching the energy from it and letting it dissipate into ownerless motes that could, eventually, be partially recouped into its own mana flow. Goblin Cave had never found the interaction particularly interesting, but now that it had a point of comparison a whole host of intricacies were revealed. It was getting distracted. It needed... it supposed it needed to see if the flame wisp's mana use felt different. They were currently just off-gassing: radiating shed parts of their own mana system, and drawing fresh mana from... where? Goblin Cave didn't think they were drawing from its mana pool; they didn't show up in its system interface, at least. It was quite possible they were on timers: mana pool slowly dissipating without renewal, until they burst apart into nothingness, and getting them to use mana would just hasten the process. Or they could be drawing mana from a separate system linkage, the way adventurers did. Goblin Cave would be sad to see them go. It wouldn't feel great if it immediately killed the first successful non-dungeon spawn it achieved. Goblin Cave spawned in a goblin in the room over, and commanded it to attack the wisps, in the hopes of provoking a defense response. The goblin snarled, clawing in the direction of the wisps, and then just bobbed higher, floating up out of reach. The goblin leapt, its air-current pushing the wisp out of its own path. For a moment, Goblin Cave despaired of achieving anything with this. The goblin kept trying to catch them and failing. Then one of the flame wisps flickered, hue changing, and spit out a bead of arcing flame that curved to the side, homing in on the goblin, and hit its side with a sizzle. Mindless, thoughtless, the spawned goblin continued trying to attack, heedless of its injury. A few of the other flame wisps joined in and repeated the motion, spitting out beads of fire. Their mana felt... slightly different? It seemed more likely to form eddies in its mana flow, instead of smoothly melding together. The slightest turbulence in the interface. Goblin Cave might have been imagining that, too. Goblin Cave tried directing a mana flow through the room, to see if that would produce a second generation of wisps, but it didn't have time to redirect things before the collective brunt of the wisps killed the goblin, and they stopped casting. Goblin Cave reflexively went to check if the wisps gained experience for it -- a leveled wisp would have a deeper mana pool and thus more potential to produce its slightly-differently-flavored mana -- but, of course, Goblin Cave couldn't access their system status. If different mana... flavors were critical to this interaction, how could it source that? Certainly, some low-level mages delved it, and they cast spells. But the mana discharge was transient. Could it capture that, somehow? Restructure its mana flows to allow, what? Foreign mana to eddy down into some kind of collection reservoir? What would that even look like? It would have to be devoid of its own mana, which meant it could never look inside them, so it would somehow need an access that it could sink mana into (how?) and an output that it could pull mana from when needed (how?), as well as something inside it that prevented the mana threads from decaying apart into nothingness. Goblin Cave didn't know how it could do any of that, much less if it was possible in the first place. Just telling adventurers to cast spells at the right time seemed considerably easier, if it could actually get any adventurers to do as they were told. Goblin Cave supposed it could keep bribing them with manastone, since they apparently wanted it so much. With a deep sense of irony, Goblin Cave spawned in a [Flame Wisp]. It had never actually done that before; it seemed like an abandonment of its goal, to just spawn one in like that. But now it needed a comparison. The other flame wisps didn't react much, and it didn't tell its flame wisp to attack, so they all floated there in a cloud plus one. The flame wisp was indeed a low-tier trash mob: nine units of mana to its name, with a spell, [Spark], that cost one unit. High enough mana regeneration that it could cast in bursts and only wait a few minutes to regenerate; this cloud of seven could cast near-continuously if they rotated their casts. Goblin Cave could see its utility in a dungeon, especially with their ability to float above melee attackers and blanket the field with sparks. But what was their utility outside of one? Why did this thing exist, instead of so many others? Was this the only fire-aligned elemental this weak? Why this shape and no other? Thinking of its idea of a foreign mana storage, Goblin Cave spun out some new constructions. Something... reflective? To try to bounce mana off its surface, maybe? A target plate for a spell, if it could get adventurers to target it. Or something like its mana pump, that slowly sucked in ambient mana? Ultimately, the all-pervading flow of its own mana became a liability: any foreign mana would muddle with and intermingle with its own, dissipating before it could be collected. It could make something like a switch: a plate in a recess, with mechanical components to... open a door, or something, behind it. But a spell cast onto the plate would be an imparting of foreign mana, and if it could suck up the mana and direct it along a different path... All of this was well beyond Goblin Cave's abilities. It had managed some success with creating mechanisms to spin out mana threads, but they still fell far short of the density and complexity it would need for its original goal of recreating a spawn template. And, of course, none of this was at all of use for its upcoming return visit. But what would be? What mechanism could it create that would sense knowledge? What mana flow could it wield to reveal truth? And so, like that, the next two days passed, until the adventurers, the survey team, returned from their encampment.
chapter 19 - meeting
The delegation stood before the entrance to Goblin Cave. There were only six of them this time: the leader from before, one of the trios (including one of the surveyors Goblin Cave had knocked out last time), as well as two adventurers it didn't recognize: not by sight, and not on closer inspection when they stepped inside. It actually couldn't get that good a look at them once they stepped inside; they were armored with significantly stronger mana barriers, starkly limiting their mana diffusion while also preventing its own mana from being able to inspect them. The mana shields were linked together with an interesting conduit formation: a tight shell of densely-woven mana on the outside and clearly something else on the inside, since it was transducing enough mana to keep all six barriers maintained. It was being cast by one of the new adventurers; all the cords radiated out from them. It was an interesting technique Goblin Cave hadn't seen before. It wondered if it was a system spell it wasn't familiar with, or done by direct manipulation of mana streams. Overall, this made it hopeful that their shields wouldn't burst at the slightest mana turbulence. They made their way down, following the same path as before. It had ended up making some test models of various mana flow experiments down in the mana bellows; it had considered briefly making some kind of entrance chamber to speak to them, but... that could come later. It was still very strange to consider restructuring parts of its dungeon that adventurers had already seen; it had a very long habit of explicitly never doing that. It was breaking a lot of habits recently. "Regent," the leader said, when they were down in the arbitrary mana pump chamber it had apparently turned into a meeting hall. It had prevented the mob spawns from respawning, at least. "Are you present?" YES, Goblin Cave wrote. They gestured with their hands. "I would like to introduce ourselves, for your benefit, in the hopes we do not get off on the wrong foot. As I said before, I am the head mage-technician on this expedition. Doctor Madina Barat Kete, at your service." They did a weird movement with their hips and knees. "This," they said, gesturing at the adventurer maintaining the mana wards, "is Professor Arman Orlov Issyk, our expert on mana dynamics, who may be able to answer some of your more... esoteric questions on mana interactions. They did another weird movement, not the same. This," they continued, gesturing at the second unknown person, "is Knight-Diplomat Timur Sultanov Masquar, an official emissary of her highness the Duchess." They did yet another weird movement, not the same as either of the other two. "As well, these are three of the survey members, who you met previously." That was the other three. It was genuinely very difficult for Goblin Cave to pay attention for all of that. Listening to speech wasn't something it did very much of, and it had a deeply-ingrained habit of flitting its attention away to something else whenever adventurers got boring, which was constantly. Ranks and names it didn't care about. The leader continued talking, after a long pause. "We are... willing to leave and seal off this entrance, if that is your desire, but it is our hope we can come to a mutually-satisfactory agreement. If you have questions, we may be able to provide answers." There was another pause. Goblin Cave wondered if it was expected to communicate now. For all it had designed away in the aftermath of the initial meeting, it still had very few concrete, specific ideas for what it wanted from adventurers. Well, it did have one thing. WHAT IS 'DUNGEON THEME'? ARE YOU AWARE OF THE PROCESS BY WHICH DUNGEON RANKINGS ARE DETERMINED? The leader looked at the other two. One of them spoke up; the one that wasn't casting spells. The... Goblin Cave struggled to remember. The knight-diplomat. "Dungeons, uh," they started, voice a little unclear. They coughed. "Dungeons are narrative creatures. They seem to build themselves from a limited blueprint of components, and frequently construct a false narrative, a storybook fable, adventurers are expected to play along with. They can become very hostile when the theme is broken or shown to be false, but conversely, some adventurers enjoy... matching wits with the dungeon, so to speak, and engaging with the narrative presented to them. As to your second question--" they continued, but Goblin Cave interrupted them. Had been interrupting them for most of their speech; writing everything out took time. THEY DO THIS WHILE THE DUNGEON IS TRYING TO KILL THEM? They nodded. "Yes. There is... many adventurers feel there is a sense of sportsmanship to delving a dungeon. It is a lethal engagement, certainly, but one that can be performed enjoyably. Dungeon-delvers can be a suspicious lot, and many dungeons are said to have a sense of fairness to repeat delvers -- preventing from killing them when the option is available, for example. Or redesigning certain passages to challenge adventurers in varying ways, when adventurers present engagement." They coughed again. "That being said, many dungeons... do not show those qualities. It varies highly." Goblin Cave tried to think back. It had had some repeat delvers, certainly. It had never felt any fondness for them. WHAT ABOUT DUNGEON RANKINGS? it wrote. "No, we are..." the adventurer talking looked over at another one of the group. "We know very little about dungeon rankings. You are referring to the system pane?" They asked, and the leader made a soft zssst noise with their mouth. YES, Goblin Cave wrote. Things continued like that for a while. Goblin Cave asked for information about Darkwood Grove (nearby; six day's travel away in a valley between the foothills) and Deepmine Delve (roughly three weeks travel by road, since apparently their roads went down into the foothills, then over, then back up into the mountain slopes); as well-established dungeons they might have given it some concept for the practicalities of dungeon defense they took. It did not get much useful information back: apparently Deepmine Delve was on the more lethal side of things, and Darkwood Grove apparently constantly revised its structure, growing immense trees in days, whenever an adventuring party completed some of its trials. It was 'popular', insofar as a dungeon could be popular. And then, for completeness, and also in an attempt to throw off the trail, it asked: AND WHAT ABOUT GOBLIN CAVE? The thing was, while it had been asking about the other dungeons, something else had been happening. One of the survey team, one of the original group that wasn't the one it had knocked out earlier, wrote something down. They were holding a piece of parchment and a stick of oiled pigment within their folded hands, and around when the knight-diplomat mentioned the system pane, they began scrawling out letters. It made Goblin Cave feel much better about its own lettering; their handwriting was haphazard and slow, blotting over itself and smearing pigment, and between the fuzzing effect of the mana shield and their poor writing it took it a non-trivial amount of time to decypher what it said. "DO YOU ACTUALLY HAVE ACCESS TO THE DUNGEON CORE'S SYSTEM CONTROLS?" was what they wrote. "DO YOU HAVE A WAY TO PRODUCE A NON-NATURAL MANA VALUE?" That was extremely peculiar. Non-natural mana value? Was this a question about... negative mana? Or something more esoteric than that? The thought had never occurred to it. As far as it was aware, mana values had always fit between zero and the maximum mana for a given creature -- mobs, itself, or otherwise. What would a negative mana field even look like? If one had a spell that cost negative one mana, could one chain it forever by alternating with a spell that cost one mana? Or could one only cast the spell if their mana value was less than negative one, and it would increase the value towards zero? Goblin Cave very much wanted to interrupt the entire proceedings and ask why the person had asked that, but... it had unlocked a mimic mob; it knew about deceit. The one adventurer was attempting to deceive the others by asking it questions in private. Goblin Cave had no clue how it was expected to respond, given the situation. "Ah," the leader said, answering its question about Goblin Cave. There was a faint fluttering of their eyes. "Goblin Cave is considered an easy, low-level dungeon, with no notable resource or type specialization. Due to its location close to the realm of the Lesser Horde, it is in practice unregulated, and often used by initiate adventurers seeking to gain their first levels. We do not know anything of note about it, and it has never been worth investigating deeply. In straight-line distance, it is the closest dungeon to your laboratory here, though it would require traveling directly over the mountain ridge to the other side." Goblin Cave had mostly asked because it would have seemed suspicious if it didn't. It was mostly thinking about negative mana, and only wrote out a perfunctory I SEE message in response. "Do you have any further questions at the moment, Regent?" the leader asked, making yet another weird gesture with their body. Yes, it had an enormous volume of questions. But sitting here laying them out one-by-one while adventurers stood around inside it really did not seem like an enjoyable use of its time. It wanted to jump ahead to the experimentation portion of the visit. It saw a way out: I WANT BOOKS ON THE SUBJECT OF MAGIC, DUNGEONS, GEOGRAPHY, AND THE SYSTEM. They seemed prepared for that. "Certainly, Regent," the leader said, and the caster stepped forward, presenting... a book. They spoke: "In anticipation of your request, we came with a copy of On the Mysteries of Mana Harmonics and their Application, fifth edition, an advanced textbook we use at the University of Taraz. We give it to you in the hopes that it meets with your approval." Lacking anywhere to put it, they took a few steps forward and placed it on the floor, midway between where they stood and its own mana lock. Goblin Cave skimmed through it. There wasn't anything in the table of contents that was directly about flame wisps. There was a lot of notation. It would be something to look over later. GOOD, it wrote. There was another question it had wanted to ask adventurers for a long time. It was difficult to turn it into a direct query. What was the point of delving dungeons? Why did adventurers risk death for power? What use did they find in leveling up, in grinding skills. What was the end goal of their adventures? If they delved dungeons for power, then what did they gain power for? WHAT IS IT YOU DESIRE?, it wrote. "Ah, well, we must commend your craftsmanship. We inspected your manastone gems; they were remarkably mana-dense. More of them would be a more than adequate payment for anything we could provide to you. We'd be happy to send you you a supply of any resources you desire -- books, theorists, or any mundane materials you desire... or to aid your studies in any other way! Just for a stipend of manastones." Disgusting. Goblin Cave supposed that was as good as it was going to get. Power for power. More for more. As always, avarice ruled their desires. HOW MANY MANASTONES? it wrote. "While we analyze the initial sample, we're prepared to offer thirty six manastones of the same cut per month to supply you with any materials you require." Thirty six rhombic dodecahedrons didn't stack neatly. The closest number that made a structured stack was thirty two. 32, it wrote. The adventurers looked at each other. "Thirty two manastones would be acceptable."
chapter 20 - meeting, pt. 2
VERY WELL, Goblin Cave wrote. It was getting very bored of these adventurers, negative mana notwithstanding, and more interested in the experimentation portion of the interaction. CAST [CREATE LIGHT]. AT LEAST ONE OF YOU. I WILL INCREASE THE FLOW TURBULENCE UNTIL SPELL RUPTURE OCCURS AGAIN. The caster nodded and stepped forward; everyone else stepped back. They cast [Create Light], while the rest took a few steps back, away from the main current of the mana bellows. A magelight manifested in front of them, considerably more solid than the others. Goblin Cave had intentionally turned the turbulence of the mana bellows down, so there was only a light flow with no eddying, and as the magelight manifested it engaged some of its mana pumps, shifting the flow through its chambers. A more intense mana flow hit the light and it started to plume, forming a long streaking tail, and at the interface eddies started to form. Goblin Cave felt that... what it needed was a certain kind of rhythm, a long, side-to-side flow that folded over itself, so that when its mana flow met that of the magelight it would branch properly. It was focusing on the hazy interstice where the mana flows met. What it wanted, what it thought would work, was to have a folded sheet of mana tug across and envelop the manalight explosion, but to do that -- this adventurer was clearly high-level, in that their manalight was already withstanding greater forces than those that had popped the prior two. (Maybe, it thought, having two casts break was a critical part of the process? Well, this would help determine that.) But correspondingly, the adventurer was outputting much more mana to try to keep the cast stable. Goblin Cave increased the amplitude further, slowly varying the frequency by shifting a half-dozen pipes back and forth, forming an erratic current that eddied over itself. Its wave-edge crests caught against the foreign mana, stripping some off in plumes of branching, intermingling crests, again and again. The adventurer casting staggered, pumping in a final burst of mana to try to keep the spell stable, before it detonated with a shockingly audible whuff, erupting in spiraling cords. The entire room went hazy in its vision, foreign mana tangling everywhere, and in the vortices left behind a dozen more [Flame Wisps] manifested, riding the choppy current. More importantly, while the room was cloudy with mana, Goblin Cave opened a new mana pipe, funneling in the mingled mess of dissipating mana, and spun it out through its experimental mana funnel. It hadn't made any progress with any other part of a theoretical mana storage device, but it had devised one thing: a kind of hollow cone with a spiralling groove on the inside made from layered segments of serpent obsidian and mithril. This projected a kind of... repelling surface, keeping the mana from directly impacting the device, while also creating enough of a pressure difference to suck mana towards it. It was horifically inefficient, of course, only capturing a tiny fragment of the mana erupting through the chamber, and what mana it did capture... Mana spun through the funnel, twisting into a tight strand, and then lacking anything else to do Goblin Cave had set up a long coil. It could still feel the mana within the coil, which meant that it wasn't isolated enough; the tangled mess of its mana mixing with the adventurers degraded both, leading to the entire system burning itself out before the third winding. That wasn't really the point. The mana funnel capturing ambient mana was. WELL DONE, it wrote. The adventurer staggered, evidently exhausted by even that fairly pitiful display. Slowly the chamber cleared up, as the flame wisps floated downstream and the rest of the mana dissipated. "May we inquire as to the aims of your study on flame wisps?" the leader said. Goblin Cave suspected that was rehearsed, too. What was the aim of its study on flame wisps? There was nothing particularly special about them. They were just a tier 0 elemental that had a curious description in the system. If it ever fully mastered understanding the how and why of their natural spawns, Goblin Cave supposed it would move on to its other tier 0 elementals. It could unlock the whole row, all eight affinities plus neutral, and spend several years each trying to understand how to manifest them. The unaligned elemental column seemed particularly interesting: if [Lesser Mana Puppet] was the tier 0 unaligned elemental construct, then what was the tier 0 unaligned element? Would that just be a blob of mana? [Mana Elemental] still counted as an elemental construct, not a true elemental. So why call it that, for one, but then what could possibly populate the unaligned elemental column? Also, the suggestion of negative mana opened up new horizons. What, could it somehow unlock a tier -1 mob? Were the creature templates unbounded in both directions? But since tier corresponded fairly directly to stat gain, that would imply, what, negative-tier creatures would rapidly hit negative stats? I SEEK TO UNDERSTAND THE MECHANISMS OF THE WORLD, Goblin Cave wrote. It left out the part about attempting to find meaning that wasn't "Starting with flame wisps?" That was the caster who spoke. THEIR CREATION IS MECHANICALLY INVOLVED WITH THE STUDY OF MANA FLOWS, it wrote. "Ah, if you say it, it must be so," they said. This whole thing was boring, and it wanted time to look over the book and contemplate negative mana. As well as further refine its mana funnel. YOU MAY GO, it wrote, and then as an afterthought tumbled another set of faceted manastones at them. They collected them and left, and as they did so the one who had written the note shifted slightly, causing the paper to fall from their sleeve along the edge of the doorway, out of sight of anyone else. Goblin Cave looked at it closely: there was nothing new written on it. Ah, it realized, after a moment. This was supposed to be the moment of delivery. That still left the question of how it was intended to respond. Goblin Cave wasn't sure how it felt about all of that. Mostly it wanted to stop thinking about adventurers. It turned to the book, hoping that would be worth... something. The most immediately obvious thing it could glean from the book was that adventurers had a very different conceptualization of mana than it did. Certainly, they had system panes with mana values too, but they drew a much starker divide between system-assisted skills and what they called 'the esoteric arts': manually manipulating mana, with or without a [Mana Manipulation] skill, to replicate or revise the system-directed mana flow that occurred when casting a spell. And rather than conceptualizing mana as flows, threads, they spoke constantly about mana notes, harmonics, chords. It seemed that that was the aspect of mana it was considering as flavor, color: the aspect of mana that distinguished its mana from other mana. Goblin Cave supposed it made sense to present that up front: the outside world seemed as though it was a chaotic mess of many different mana sources interacting, instead of the single, shared source of all life in its dungeon. Consequently, it might be reasonable to assume that flame wisps spawned when... different mana notes, or tones, combined in a certain way? To play a certain 'chord', or 'melody'. It was an utterly foreign conceptualization to it. Goblin Cave had only made its way through the introductory chapters before it was interrupted. Another surveyor had stepped through its new entrance. Was this its life now? Unable to focus for even a moment without constant interruptions? Outside, night had fallen. The surveyor had crept closer, quietly, and they stepped over its threshold with a quiet hiss as their body was impacted by its mana. From what little it had gleamed from the book so far, it was, perhaps, a disharmony: an impingement of whatever mana 'notes' they were expressing by its own 'sound'. It took a moment for it to realize: the adventurer was the one who had dropped the note. After their initial slow steps through the entrance, they picked up the pace, moving fast downward. That made it difficult to... WHY DID YOU ASK ABOUT NEGATIVE MANA, Goblin Cave tried writing on the walls, only for the adventurer to have passed by before they saw any letters forming. Eventually it picked a room ahead and sealed the door, writing HALT where the opening had been. I DON'T KNOW OF ANY WAY TO PRODUCE NEGATIVE MANA, it wrote. WHY DID YOU ASK ABOUT THIS. "Oh," they said. "You can do that anywhere, huh?" Since they had finally stopped moving, Goblin Cave took the opportunity to form a primitive mana lock in front of its words, pushing back their mana cloud somewhat to let it write faster. YES. WHY DID YOU ASK? "Damn. Do you know what hex corruption is?" NO. "People get exposed to it and their mana gets all messed up. Sometimes it shows up negative. Sometimes it shows in weird glyphs. Their mana only recovers partially, or doesn't recover at all. Sometimes they get really sick or die. But it's related to dungeons, since--" They paused. "Wow, you really don't know anything, huh? That explains that showing, I guess." WHAT DO YOU MEAN. "I don't have a lot of time, uh, I snuck here when I should be on watch, so--" They ticked things off on their fingers, talking very fast: "1, dungeons that end up with a mana subtype sometimes just explode into a hex. Sometimes a hex or manastorm manifests instead of a dungeon core spawning. Don't get a mana subtype, they will absolutely break your core if you don't manage to kill yourself somehow first. "2, they know you're a dungeon core and they want more information on you before they make a decision. It's not that-- getting a supply of mana potions here would be a huge boon for the duchy but the court is probably gonna be real divided about what to do with you longterm and you have the negotiation abilities of a brick. 3, did you really think you could bumble through a high-stakes resource acquisition charter with the court nobles? Did you even know that was what was happening there? You absolutely need... you have no sense of scope. You have no idea what people are saying about you when you're not around. You think they bumbled through that meeting? You gave them two days and a heap of manastone and they got together and they checked with what they knew about the world -- which is way more than you -- and they winnowed down possibilities and they made plans and they prepared for contingencies. It didn't look like you did any of that. You need to do better. 4, they don't have your best interests in heart. They're nobles; they're manipulating you in some way, because you're dangerous and valuable and they want to mitigate the danger and extract the value, and the way you do both doesn't involve being forthright." This was too much information in too short a time. What? HOW DID YOU DISCERN THIS INFORMATION? They let out a sharp sigh. "It's really obvious? Like, you don't know anything. You got gaps in your knowledge that are too big and too specific for anything else to fit. Maybe they thought you were some crazy mage-king at first but, uh, Moon-Caller Lonway you ain't." WHAT? LONWAY? "I really don't have time to talk. Just... don't trust the nobles, okay? If you're a dungeon core and you're talking to people you're basically the most important development in understanding the nature of hexes and the system ever, and all they care about is making a mercantile deal, and you can't bargain your way out of a bag. You need to get more experience with... everything. Interacting with other people." ANYTHING I CONTROL CANNOT LEAVE THIS DUNGEON. WHAT DO YOU EXPECT ME TO DO? "People go into your dungeon every day!! You're the core of Goblin Cave, right? Or, I don't know, a splinter of it? Talk to them!" Goblin Cave was not enjoying this interaction. I DON'T LIKE ADVENTURERS, it wrote. I FIND THEIR DESIRE FOR POWER DISTASTEFUL. "Power-- what do you think you're doing, trading manastones for books?! That's desiring power. And... what, you want to unweave the mysteries of creation itself, but you're letting having an unpleasant social interaction stop you? If you don't like them I'm pretty sure you could just crush them to death. Well, suck it up, we all have to deal with things we don't like and if you end up dying because nobody ever told you about lying-- I wouldn't be able to live with myself." I KNOW WHAT LYING IS, it wrote. "Well, you're really bad at it." A pause. "Uh, please don't crush me to death." I WON'T, it wrote. "Okay, well, I'll be back-- I don't know. In a few days, if they didn't catch me sneaking down here. If they do catch me, you'll probably never hear about me again. Uh. Good luck with everything. Please try to figure out hexes." WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME ALL THIS, it wrote. "Because-- listen, I don't know if you've ever seen anybody die from a hex. It's really rough. I didn't work my ass off to get into the surveyor's committee just to get the duchess a deal on mana potions, you know?" They let out a sharp breath. "Listen, I really have to get back. Uh. Bye?" And then they ran back up the corridor, faster than Goblin Cave could write. It was hard to quantify its feelings about that. Everything about adventurers-- it was thinking dungeon cores were just slower, more methodical kinds of beings than adventurers. Everything about them happened fast and frenetic. It hadn't thought... every interaction with adventurers it had, all three of them now, were stressful and difficult and that left it feeling drained and muddled. If there was a difference between it feeling bad because it had made some kind of fundamental misstep versus it feeling bad because adventurers were exhausting to interact with, it couldn't discern one. Even thinking back, it hadn't seemed like anything it had said had been... obviously giving away its secrets? Nothing seemed so suspicious. But apparently something, at some point... well, it was like the adventurer said: it didn't have enough context to know what had happened. What a mess.
chapter 21 - dwelling
It was still the middle of the night. Goblin Cave disliked being mired in time like this. It had, repeatedly, looked back down at its goblin village to see how they were doing. And the answer was always, "exactly the same as before," since no time had passed. The slow crawl of the village's expansion, the interplay between the goblin delvers and its sub-dungeon, all of that was frozen, stationary, because those were things that took time to occur, and adventurers kept bothering it every other day. Previously, if it had checked in a few times and seen a goblin sleeping in the same place, it meant it had found a new den to live in and had been slowly decorating it with gewgaws and jewelry. Now it meant the goblin was still asleep, because it had checked in five times in six hours. Its twenty-six month mark for reaching a semi-stable goblin population seemed an eternity away at this rate. And if its list of things to contemplate seemed long before, it was overwhelming now. Negative mana? Something beyond negative mana? Hex, manastorms? Nobles, court? Mana subtypes? It was all too much. Goblin Cave wanted to retreat back into something comforting, something where it could just happily carve out some big granite caves for a few years, but-- circumstances had changed. Maybe this was the true face of its decision to reveal itself to the world: becoming enmeshed in it, tossed to and fro by the actions of things utterly outside its domain. It was unpleasant. Rather than help it discern meaning in the world, it was the opposite: ruining its attempts to make sense of anything with a constant deluge of information. All it could do in the moment was use the tools it had available to attempt to handle its latest set of problems. It contemplated its original dungeon. All the caves existed as they had when it had first dug them out. A layer cake of its growth, as the floors got more and more complex. Aside from the one unfortunate incident on floor 11, it had left all the layouts as they were when it had first dug them. (It had initially made floor 11 a gigantic horseshoe-shape, with the descending stairs right next to the ascending stairs, only separated by a thin wall. Adventurers had apparently mapped it out well enough to discover this, and ended up simply bashing through its wall. It had ended up opening up wall into a permanent passage and restructured layout to place the stairwell down to floor 12 somewhere physically distant.) It felt very strange to contemplate making changes. That was still its plan, but to actually do it... it was hesitant. Oh well. There were several adventuring parties on its upper floors. Goblin Cave found one: an adventurer who had been struggling to solo its third floor, currently dealing less than admirably with a dire goblin (t2, unaligned) and shoveler goblin (t2, earth) duo it had originally designed as a pincer attack. The shoveler goblin lay in wait in loose gravel along a certain turn in the tunnel, and when the dire goblin came roaring down the corridor, attracting attention, the shoveler goblin burst out from behind. These kind of scripted encounters were common on its early floors, and now they felt vaguely embarrassing to watch. By the time the adventurer killed the mobs, they had one arm disabled and were bleeding heavily. It made it nostalgic. Fresh blood spilled in its corridors was one of the simplest ways to gain experience, and how it had gained many of its early levels. Bones were very experience-dense, but they took longer to break down, and for a newborn core it had been too mana-intensive to chip away at them. It had been bone-choked in the beginning, before its mana pool had grown enough to make that viable. But that wasn't why it had turned its attention to that specific adventurer. It was the most isolated of all the adventurers on its early floors. At this point the alteration was becoming routine: bud an open space within the rock, connected to the rest of its cave with a thing mana thread. Construct a rough, cheap mana lock and a quartz backplate, and then finally shatter the rock surface to reveal it. The adventurer turned, injured shoulder slumping against the wall, expecting another shoveler goblin, maybe. The first real change to its upper floors in decades, and it was this. Goblin Cave wasn't particularly feeling good about that. ANSWER SOME OF MY QUESTIONS, AND I WILL GIVE YOU A REWARD, it wrote. Not manastone. It still hadn't entirely accepted that manastone was valuable. "Hhuh?" the adventurer said. Off to a good start. Without the time pressure of its recent interaction; the unknown level dynamic the survey-adventurers had brought; without this adventurer being scared by strange, lightless manastone halls, the interaction proved somewhat more pleasant. They seemed less jumpy, even being injured, alone, three floors down. It quizzed the adventurer: this side of the mountain was part of the Tana tribe's territory, and isolated from the Duchy by the rugged mountains, with no nearby passes connecting them. They had their own opinion about the duchy -- not good -- and seemed willing, if somewhat bewildered, to be pressed on their opinions why. Goblin Cave tried to pay attention, even though... this was not what it wanted to focus on. WHAT IS THE REASON YOU DELVE THIS DUNGEON, it eventually asked. It was hoping for specifics. There was a conversational maneuver it was still not very good at, where on receiving an answer it would seek elaboration by asking additional follow-up questions. The idea of structuring a conversation with a broad, unclear question and then slowly resolving it by adding finer and finer specific questions was, it was sure, an elementary insight, but it was still one it was struggling to execute in practice. "Uh-- levels, right? I mean, I know I'm kinda a sorry state. Fourth son, so I got no prospects, system activated late so I'm still real low-level." WHY DO YOU DESIRE TO BE HIGHER LEVEL? "I mean... you're kidding, right? You live longer, stay healthier. You can actually help. Like, uh, Tana hasn't been doing so well? Not a lot of strong dungeons, around, which is why I'm down here. And if we can't defend our territory then the civvies'll be able to round us up like they've wanted to for years. Gotta be high enough level to match them. Plus, I mean, you get cool moves. I always wanted to get, like, a magical swordsman class? But all the skills I'd need to unlock for that..." Goblin Cave sometimes forgot that adventurers were mortal. Obviously it knew the facts in play, but that they quite easily died of things other than being killed, and apparently they made quite a big deal of it. No real concept of a respawn. Their souls went fluttering off elsewhere, and from what it had comprehended from the holy books it'd read, they rarely if ever met anyone with memory of their past lives. It could only be killed one way, and after a certain point levels only marginally helped in that respect. SO YOU SEEK POWER TO PROTECT YOURSELF AGAINST OTHERS WITH MORE POWER?, it wrote. Mortal life seemed... pitiful. WHAT WOULD YOU SEEK IF YOU WERE ALREADY THE MOST POWERFUL? The adventurer shrugged. "Dunno. I mean, I don't... my whole life I've been in the shadow of people way more powerful than me. Like, I guess Deviltongue Kano or whoever gets to do whatever he wants, but for people like me... I'd just be happy to live my life without getting crushed underfoot." WHAT DOES LIVING YOUR LIFE ENTAIL? "You know, life! Have enough to eat and drink, and a place you can lay your head that's warm and soft. Enjoy the sunsets. Have some kids. Write a poem or something." Goblin Cave didn't really know how to respond to that. It was... if the difference was between terminal goals, those which were desired for their own sake, and instrumental goals, those which didn't matter save for that they brought a person a step closer to their terminal goals, then power seemed, for this adventurer, to be instrumental. But power was maybe always instrumental: you could not act, unless you were free to, and that meant nobody a thousand levels above you dictating your actions. Drawing parallels between its situation and the adventurers' wasn't enjoyable. WHAT SKILLS DOES A MAGICAL SWORDSMAN CLASS ENTAIL? it asked, as a diversion. Classes were an aspect of the system that appeared to be customized for adventurers, the same way its spawn mechanics were customized to it. None of its mobs had classes. Most adventurers also did not have classes; as they said, it took a collection of skills to form the 'seed' of a given class -- various skills which reinforced each other in specific ways -- and it was only after the gestalt of the skillset reached a certain total skill level that the class itself was unlocked. Goblin Cave had only had a handful of classed adventurers within it its entire life. One of the party that died assaulting its floor 49 boss had a class, it vaguely remembered from the party's chatter on the way down. "Oh, uh, I don't know all of them, but it's gotta be at least [Mana Manipulation], [Swordplay], uh, [Magic Blade] or something like it to bridge the two... there's a way to cast with a sword, but I don't even know what that skill's called. It's not really... I mean, I'd be lucky to get a class at all, much less one like that. I, uh, don't really know what I'm doing." Goblin Cave had no objections there. FOR ANSWERING MY QUESTIONS, TAKE THIS, it said. It had contemplated what to actually give the adventurer. Manastone had turned out to be valuable; next it would hear that the granite that made up its walls was a precious resource, too. What did it have that was valuable, but not so valuable it attracted too much attention? In the end, it had extruded a rectilinear prism of bronze. Adventurers came down using bronze weapons or armor sometimes, so it was a resource they had available, and this adventurer's sword was made from bone, with only a chipped copper seam to serve as a cutting edge. Their eyes went wide as the ingot crashed to the floor. "Oh!" they exclaimed. "Wow!" They had difficulty lifting up the ingot with one injured arm, but that was beyond Goblin Cave's concern. They would make their way back up, or not, on their own efforts.
chapter 22 - experience
Ultimately, Goblin Cave was a dungeon. As far as it was aware, its mechanical purpose was to transduce mana from system-space into physical space, converting some measure of that into potential experience in the form of mobs, which was then harvested by adventurers. There was an interplay here, where experience could be reaped back and forth between dungeons and adventurers, with greater success for either leading to further experience gains. Adventurers, presumably, died in other ways, and their experience was further concentrated down. Was there a second-order form of experience, too, the way mana could be used to instantiate experience-bearing constructs? Its own feelings on the matter did not appear to matter. This was the machinery of the world, cogwheels endlessly crushing and grinding, transforming resources from one to the other, slowly sieving out grains of mana, experience grit, and piling them up in endless heaps: an idiot machine, operating to unknown purposes.
The next day, the surveyors returned and said they would return again in a month, with a collection of books. Goblin Cave had another awkward, perfunctory conversation with them, made all the more awkward by the midnight visit warning it about them. This gave it a blissful 28 days when it could watch its experiments unfold and didn't have to think about them. If there was going to be a shipment? It was very unclear about the time scales involved-- would it be betrayed immediately? Did it have a month? A year? Ten years? What would a betrayal against it look like, aside from adventurers showing up to shatter it? What could it do to avoid that, aside from continue to do everything it was already doing? It was thrown all out of its habits. Even the brief conversations with adventurers were stressful and disorienting. It wanted... Well, it still wanted to restructure its old floors. But that impulse was undercut by how the last time it visibly changed, it had immediately attracted what appeared to be an enormous amount of trouble that it still couldn't fully conceptualize. But as time went on and it dug further into the mana theory book, and further into conversation, the itchy frustration of not making progress came to outweigh its fear. Again. The secret of its mana funnel was that it had never really been intended to capture adventurer's mana. There was the world's mana, constantly colliding with its own at its entrance, and it was very easy to construct a mana funnel exposed to the surface, and then -- watch it fail to function at all. It was something about pressure: ambient mana wasn't directed enough to be scooped up by the grooves of the funnel the way a directed spell effect was. It changed the curve of the funnel, reshaping the spacing of its grooves, and finally managed to get a paltry seeping of mana, something in the range of a single point of mana a day... if it could capture it, which it couldn't. If it could... then, it would just have to wait a month or two, somehow storing all the mana all that time, and then somehow energetically release it, which it also couldn't do. But if it could do all that, then maybe it would be able to spawn a single flame wisp 'naturally', on command. Once it understood the precise way to optimize the eddying vortices that spawned a flame wisp... well, then it would be on to figure out how to spawn, say wind shades. That time scale seemed absurd now. Months for a single experiment? Years to refine things? But it had done the math. It wasn't sure what it was getting out of doing it, but it continued to bribe adventurers with simple metal ingots in exchange for short conversations. It could manage a conversation with an adventurer daily, but that always left it drained and exhausted, unable to concentrate properly on its theories or experiments. If this was how all dungeons felt after talking, it understood why most dungeons apparently didn't speak. But even knowing it was being impatient didn't stop it from writing a new question, in its talks: WHAT WOULD YOU CHANGE ABOUT THIS DUNGEON, IF YOU COULD? It wasn't interested, precisely, in revising itself to their specification, but it was attempting to understand the other, the point-of-view of something not-itself. They had a different context to itself, a different set of priorities. They were capable of drawing comparison between itself and its fellow dungeons in ways it had never considered on its own. (It was comical that one of the more common answers was more monsters, spawning faster. That was something it couldn't do, even if it wanted to.) Apparently goblins did not efficiently exchange mana for experience; that was one thing it learned. Not all mobs of the same tier gave the same experience payout per level. It had suspicions to that effect: some of its mana goblins ate fish, and they all ate fungi. Dungeon mobs all, and they killed the fish the same way they killed the mana puppets, yet the experience received was markedly different. Fungi was worth almost nothing, fish were worth a pittance. So despite creatures of the same tier having mostly-similar mana costs, the experience outflow was different. Goblins, it had presumed, would be worth more than fish; it couldn't say how they ranked versus the mana puppets. But apparently all the nearby dungeons (save Deepmine Delve) had mobs with better effort-to-experience ratios, even if they were more deadly at lower floors. Inefficiencies added up throughout the process: mana cost to spawn, mana cost to level, soul volume, tier-related leveling costs, respawn cost, experience ratio. Effort for adventurers to slay them, danger for adventurers to slay them, Goblin Cave grudgingly added to the list, considering the viewpoint of the adventurers. Time taken to kill a mob. Those were the factors that had lead to its pecular delvings: Goblin-types increased in power slowly, but they still increased faster in power than they increased in experience gain. There was a point where the lines intersected, where delving deeper into a goblin dungeon became both profoundly unrewarding and incredibly dangerous. That was interesting, because that seemed to be the ideal situation for it. It didn't want adventurers delving deeper. So why did any other dungeon bother to populate itself with attention-grabbing, high-reward monster types? To kill adventurers, certainly, and consume their experience the way the adventurer had consumed its mobs. To increase in power, and avoid destruction. But the threat of destruction came from adventurers delving it. So... (Well, one answer might be the rankings. "Difficulty" was a category. As far as it had seen, the rankings were only information. Were there rewards for reaching certain tiers? Or punishments for falling? Its rankings had fallen fairly precipitously as it had continued to talk to adventurers, but there was still a ways to go. What were the bottom rankings? How did they manage to maintain such low scores? It could see the top ten per category by name, for all that helped it, but there was no similar ranking for the bottom ten. What chaos had they wrought? What metric was being ranked here? Interactions with adventurers certainly seemed to be an influence on it, but the adventurers themselves were not consciously adjusting the rankings. So what was?) This was all interesting, partly as a curiosity, partly as a mystery, but it naturally lead to a question: if its mobs were inefficient experience conveyors, what was the most efficient conveyor? It would be another microcosm: the mechanical purpose of the world, stripped bare. The most potent confluence of energies, transduced through system layers with minimal losses. A hellish box, every flow blasted wide, every mechanism pushed to its limit. Mana howling as it twisted into shape. Gears rattling as they vibrated themselves to pieces. Machinery screaming, pushed to its breaking point. The optimal configuration. An experience grinder. Obviously, it would take experimentation. The way adventurers talked, it sounded like they thought the experience ratio of a given mob was determined by its type: goblin type, avian type, elemental type. Goblins, categorically, had a poor experience ratio. Fungi must be near-nonexistant. Fish may be very low. But there was some form of tier influence, perhaps? The adventurers certainly didn't seem to know for sure. They didn't appear to want to talk specifics of their system screens. There was only one way to really test things. Its new habit of extruding mana locks into its old dungeon somewhat prepared it for what it would have to do next: it dug out new hallways from its second and third floors. First, in manastone, out of habit, and then with a thought of how obnoxious it would be if these got stripped too, it restructured them to use flat off-white quartz, with craggy outgroppings of granite poking through at erratic intervals. These hallways led to a transverse hall, which had a collection of square doorways along the far side. Each lead to a short, right-angle hallway, which opened up into a cubic chamber. Goblins. Beasts. Goblin+Beast. Fungi. Plants. Fish. Elementals. Elemental Constructs. Undead. Flying. Aberration. It spawned one example of each, each into their own chamber: a stark cubic room with all surfaces made from hard quartz. The fish required a recessed pool, which it fed with a long, thin slit midway up the far wall. For plants... it had hardly touched the category. It had cavegrass (t0, light) and chokevine (t0, death); it chose chokevine, and gave it a rocky outcrop to anchor to. Aside from that... a fresh [Goblin], for its goblin type. [Wolf]. [Beastkin Goblin]. [Brown Mushroom]. [Chokevine]. [Shadow Darters]. [Flame Wisp]. [Lesser Mana Puppet]. [Biting Skull]. [Bat]. [Mana Goblin]. One of each from each category page it had unlocked, aside from Orc and Ogre, which it didn't have low-tier mobs unlocked. On a plaque protruding from the hallway edge, it wrote: KILL THE MOBS AND DETERMINE THE BEST EXPERIENCE RATIO. WRITE DOWN YOUR LEVEL AND EXPERIENCE GAIN FOR EACH. It provided a basket of graphite sticks to do the writing. This was too many mobs for an early floor; it was paying a substantial spawning penalty for that. It was also too many souls; it hadn't linked these mobs into the churning soul whirlpool that the rest of its upper floors were linked into, so these would take a week, potentially longer to respawn, once killed. If this was what a dungeon was designed to do, it would construct a mechanism to perform that designation perfectly, and hopefully that would give it... some kind of insight.
chapter 23 - worms
I HAVE NOT, Goblin Cave wrote, BEEN HAVING A GOOD WEEK. It was very strange to have an adventurer inquire about how it was doing. Goblin Cave was pretty sure it didn't enjoy the direct attention. Everything since its... premiere, had been profoundly disorganized and stressful. It had understood the vague shape of things prior -- while it was in ultimate control of everything within its domain, there was an entire world outside itself that it knew nothing about -- but in practice, the way the world revealed itself to it was through one disaster after another, a disorienting avalanche of concepts it could barely structure together into any kind of context. It hadn't been able to focus on anything. Or rather, it had focused on everything, and made very little progress with anything. It had inquired about 'Deviltongue Kano', and one adventurer had launched into a seemingly endless poetry recital, 24 sanzas before the rest of the party got too agitated and told them to shut up. It had asked about hexes and received a story about an ancient cenote dungeon full of mana trees that one day simply exploded into a still-whirling hexstorm. It had asked about Moon-caller Lonway and gotten another elaborate prose epic about his rivalry and romance with Moon-eater Managarm, ending with the fall of the old empire. It asked about the duchy and the tribes and got a different set of opinions from nearly every adventurer that walked its halls. Some things were history, others fables, embellished mythology, and it had no clue how to discern them, especially since many adventurers disagreed as to which was which. There were an enormous amount of things in the world, and it felt as if everyone expected it to know everything already -- every conversation stumbled out into a mess of assumptions about what it was familiar with. This was, perhaps, what the survey-adventurer had meant. If it spent thirty years talking to adventurers about the world every day, that would perhaps catch it up to where the adventurers were now: fonts of bizarre, disconnected trivia that only made sense with a lifetime's worth of interaction. One adventurer had found its new hall, confused, but had still gone through and killed the mobs, adding a single stroke to the [Mana Goblin] and [Flame Wisp] chambers, rather than the direct experience information it had requested. Since the mobs would take another week to respawn, Goblin Cave sealed off the hall until then. ARE THERE GOBLINS, it eventually got around to asking. It had to clarify: ARE THERE GOBLINS OUT IN THE WORLD, OUTSIDE OF THE INFLUENCE OF ANY DUNGEON? Yes, they said. Goblin Cave asked several adventurers to try and make sure. Well. That was one question answered. After everything that had happened -- and still without the time to reflect on things -- it was hard to say how Goblin Cave felt about that. Real goblins. But what made them real? It had continued spawning goblins in the mana bellows to lure its flame wisps into attacking and using mana, and none of them had ruptured from mana drain. The newer batch had considerably more turbulent mana, which gave it several interesting ideas that it still didn't have time to follow up on. But that implied that these mobs had system connections too, they just weren't limited to its own dungeon. (In theory; Goblin Cave hadn't managed to separate one to try to shoo it out of its dungeon to see if it persisted out there as well.) So, presumably, the real goblins also had system connections. So... why did they exist? Were they, in truth, descendants from ancient [Beastkin Goblins]? The system seemed profoundly arbitrary. Or rather... it could envision system-space separated from physical space, severing the connection. System-space would become an inert database of facts and figures: stat blocks, skill names, spell effects, all linked together but untethered from any external referant. And physical space would become mundane: no dungeons, no spells, no mana. More-or-less everything would die from mana depletion, but there were plenty of physical operations that didn't require mana. Meanwhile, the way system-space was structured seemed to scream that it was authored or curated. There were both an absurd excess of mobs -- eighteen different tier 0 and 1 goblins, neatly filling out the elemental categories, from the mundane [Goblin] (t0, unaligned) to the dubious [Nilbog] (t1, death) -- and a profoundly limited selection -- only a single tier 1 flame elemental? No potential for two unaligned tier 1 avians? And so on. But there were goblins in other categories -- Goblin+Beast, which it had only unlocked with its secondary specialization and presumably was entirely full of hybrid monsters; its mana goblins in Abberation -- so it wasn't precisely correct. Did that mean there were special blended category pages for every two creature types? But if so, why wouldn't Mana Goblin be categorized on some theoretical 'Goblin+Elemental' page? Or 'Goblin+Aberration'? What if it obtained a third creature specialization? Would there be a triplet category? By what reasoning was a [Mounted Goblin], a goblin and a wolf that shared a system page, meaningfully distinct from simply a [Goblin] and a [Wolf]? There were arbitrary structures in both physical space and system-space, but it had never seen an equivalent categorical problem with the physical world. The physical world was ontologically inert, and invited categorization; system-space came with all of its categories predefined. To Goblin Cave, that implied something had done the categorization. It found itself explaining this entire situation to an adventuring party. They were, by its estimation, level 3, with four of them. They were the ones to find its mob hallway after it respawned and Goblin Cave reopened the passage, and one of them had spoken up: "Oh, this is... people have been saying the dungeon has been changing? Maybe talking to them? Or there's a mage stuck in the walls or something." The adventurers, in stark opposition to the survey team, blandly and flatly accepted the changes without comment or question. It was such a clear difference that it piqued Goblin Cave's curiosity, but it had not yet managed to phrase the question -- WHY DO YOU BEHAVE DIFFERENTLY THAN THE DUCHY'S SURVEYORS IN DUNGEONS? -- in a way that actually got in the answers it wanted. They talked a lot about adventuring party composition and how the duchy's adventurers were overequipped and underskilled. That hadn't been what Goblin Cave had been interested in at all. But that had lead to it introducing its experience categorization project, after they had killed the mobs and added more tallies to the wall, rather than list their level and experience gain. "You need a skill to see exactly how much experience you get from a mob," the adventurer explained. "It's kind of a hassle to get, and we're just starting out, so..." "Plus, its really inaccurate at low levels," one of the other party members said. "You get a rough estimation." "But you can kinda feel the experience soak in," the first adventurer had said. Goblin Cave did recall adventurers speaking of that before, especially when they killed its boss mobs. "So I just marked the ones that felt the strongest!" That was a very stark difference from its system panes, which were precisely quantified without a hint of inaccuracy, as far as it could tell. I FIND MYSELF FRUSTRATED WITH THE ARBITRARY NATURE OF CERTAIN SYSTEM CONSTRUCTIONS, it had eventually written. ARE YOU FAMILIAR WITH MOB TIERS? "What like, monster races? Yeah, a little. Identification skills usually give you a broad range." More inaccuracy. I AM PRESENTED WITH TABLES. THE COLUMNS ARE ELEMENTAL AFFINITIES, AND THE ROWS ARE TIERS. EACH TABLE IS CATEGORIZED AS A CERTAIN KIND OF CREATURE. THE IMPLICATION IS THAT EACH TABLE IS COMPLETE, SO FOR EACH CREATURE TYPE THERE IS PRECISELY ONE ELEMENTALLY-ALIGNED MOB OF A GIVEN TIER. It sketched out the start of its goblin tiers on the wall, for reference, and the adventurers clustered around to look:
GOBLINSELEMENT
unalignedfirewaterwindearthlightdarktimedeath
TIER 0 [Goblin] [Flayer Goblin] [Goblinoid] [Goblin Bard] [Grogoblin] [Ray Goblin] [Skulking Goblin] [Goblin Sleeper] [Goblin Haunter]
1 [Fierce Goblin] [Tusked Goblin] [Sleet Goblin] [Goblin Piper] [Bark Goblin] [Glow-goblin] [White Goblin] [Goblin Dreamer] [Nilbog]
"Sure?" ONE, IN THE ENTIRE WORLD? THERE IS NEVER AN OCCURRENCE OF TWO DIFFERENT KINDS OF EQUALLY-POWERFUL, SAME-ELEMENT CREATURES? EVER? "Yeah, I guess that is kind of strange. Maybe it's local monsters? Or maybe there's stuff that doesn't exist in spawn tables? Or duplicate categories for extras?" I DON'T KNOW. I HAVE YET TO FULLY EXPLORE THAT PARTICULAR AVENUE OF STUDY. "Oh? Why not? I mean..." they shared a look. "Uh, if you did make some kind of powerleveling setup in here..." I BECAME DISTRACTED WITH OTHER VENTURES. DO YOU KNOW THE STRENGTH OF YOUR SOUL? "What like.. how devout I am? Not very, I guess." NO. THERE IS A NUMERICAL QUANTIFICATION, THE SAME AS ANY STAT. TIER 0 MOBS COST PRECISELY 1 UNIT OF SOUL TO COMMAND. I HAVE NOTICED UNUSUAL BEHAVIOR WITH VERY LARGE SOUL VALUES, WHICH LEADS ME TO BELIEVE THE UNIT IS ACTUALLY EXTREMELY SMALL. "I don't think I've ever heard anybody talk about having a soul stat on their status page. But, about the tiers... have you tried spawning in, like, an ant? A worm?" WHAT IS A WORM? The problem with that is that the kind of physical description an adventurer was capable of giving were less than useless for giving it an idea of how the spawn template might be structured. WHAT SKILLS DOES IT HAVE?, it asked. "They don't have any," the adventurer said. "They don't give you any experience, either." WHAT DO THEY DO, it asked. "They, uh, crawl around in the dirt? They're wet and slimy and come out when it rains. We use them as bait for fishing." That was interesting. Maybe something with [Tunneling]? With a dark or earth affinity... but if it was in the middle of a conversation then it should at least finish it before it got involved in the many-hour process of trying to work out a spawn template from first principles. But if they had no skills... well, it was fairly sure it couldn't spawn things with no skills. So if there were things that lacked system connections entirely, it could maybe not spawn them? So, what, had the system seen the world and then categorized everything, and the only things in the spawn tables were things it had categorized? Tiers were sorted, roughly, by power. The system cared about numbers going up. If that was so, then were only the least things in the world spared its glance? Things with no potential to gain levels. BRING ME WORMS, it wrote. AND I WILL PROVIDE YOU WITH BRONZE.
chapter 24 - ants
It did not take long for adventurers to bring back a case full of worms. They used them as bait to catch fish. On exposure to Goblin Cave's mana, however... they did not quite liquify, but it was very clear even the moderately higher ambient mana within the cave was fatal to them. It still gave them a polyhedra of bronze. It had to fashion a crude -- and cheap -- mana-sealing enclosure. This involved trace amounts of mithril, which it attempted to hide as well as it could. It was exhausted of interactions about how valuable everything it made was, and it was hoping to put off that one as long as possible. It ended up with a thin, quartz-walled box that entirely muffled its mana flow when closed, and heavily damped it when open. Then it handed the box off to some adventurers with instructions to place worms in it. While it had been doing that, it had also been contemplating a spawn template. Worms were long and tubular, fleshy, and it could vaguely try to feel out for that kind of physical structure. Earth aligned, or dark. Some kind of tunnelling ability, or maybe earth-eating. But the time the adventurers came back with a second batch of worms, it had determined it:
New creature template unlocked: [Giant Earthworm]!
Giant Earthwormannelids(tier 0, earth)
An enormous mutant earthworm. Eats out tunnels beneath the earth. Has the ability to slowly eat through rock.
So there was a system construct. Although its own giant earthworm -- roughly as big around as an adventurer, and twice as long as an adventurer was tall -- was very clearly different from the non-system-connected earthworms. It did specify 'Giant'. But why not, say, [Giant] [Earthworm]? And the category... an entire spawn category of worms? What was of more immediate concern was what it was to do with the worms. It had them in a sealed box, but even just looking into it was harmful to the worms inside. It sat and looked at the exterior of the box. This was where its practice with imaging tubes came in handy, it supposed. It reconstructed a new kind of mana-warding material, this one somewhat slapdash made mostly out of coreglass and serpent obsidian, forming a deep, dark-tinged glass that was still opaque to mana, and it aimed an imaging tube at it to focus the contents. A window looking into a churning pile of worms. The adventurers said that it could feed the worms nearly anything, really. Rotten food, grasses, plants, dirt. It tried some dewdrop sprouts, but... like everything other mob it spawned, they were infused with its own mana too. It still tried, getting its invisible servant to open the box and dump in the fruiting body, and it was difficult to say just from looking for a few hours whether the mana influx was poisoning them or not. Worms. It also asked for 'ants', but those were apparently harder to collect in meaningful quantities. They were parts of larger colonies and required involved digging to extract. The real concern was, if these were creatures that mana was somehow inimical to, how would it go about observing and tending to them over the long term? Everything it did radiated mana. The implication, in fact, seemed to be that a worm that acclimated to mana, however that happened, grew into a [Giant Earthworm]. And perhaps gained a system connection? Its giant earthworm had a whole 3 mana, and a skill, [Acid Ooze], that it could spend it on to slowly dissolve rock. The earthworms within its box had, as far as any of the adventurers could say, no such skill. It had no skills. It would continue feeding some worms its mana-infused fungi, and see if that killed or mutated them. It would separate others, and try to... make a larger mana void, and attempt to grow non-magical fungi? It had no clue what the habitat of an earthworm was, aside from 'in soil'. It had never been very good at spawning soil; too many organic compounds. It was interesting. This was the closest it had seen to something outside the system, and it was observing what that meant: no skills. No spells. No stat block. No mana. No experience. No levels. No souls. A thing entirely of physical matter, without any reflection in system-space. Such a thing was an impossiblity within a dungeon. Conceptually, Goblin Cave could imagine a spawn template that manifested a mob with zero mana, but in practice every mob it had ever unlocked had at least one point of mana and one mana-using skill or spell. The resonances... spawn templates just wouldn't balance. As mana went to zero, other factors shot off to infinity, so in practice there were no stable spawns of zero-mana mobs. That invited the fascinating question of whatever negative mana did to influence a spawn pattern -- a way of connecting what it was doing now with the heretofore extremely abstract and unclear question that surveyor-adventurer had asked. So, worms. It dug out a fresh cave off from its third floor, gave it a thick layer of dirt, and then reinforced the rock around it, threading through the mana-sealing lattice of serpent obsidian and orichalcum, and finally capped it off with a backwards-facing mana lock. A sealed chamber that grew hazy and then turned into a void within it. It had its invisible servant toss some of the worms through the lock, and observed them squirming on the dirt for a while before slowly burrowing their way into it. It had no way to tell if they would survive, much less reproduce. It supposed it could tell adventurers to dig for worms in there periodically. Then, ants. One enterprising adventurer dug out a whole anthill, and on being provided another mana-sealing box dumped the whole swarming mess into its corridors. They asked for a small cube of silver, which, Goblin Cave supposed it had no reason to reject. It did appreciate the ants. It had to dig out a second dirt-filled chamber for the ants, this one with a leakier seal so it could spawn some fungi within. The earthworms may have been able to eat just the dirt (somehow), but the ants -- apparently -- absolutely required some food. The ants at least crawled up to the surface, so it could observe them as they meandered across the cave and found the various fungi. It was difficult to say whether the mana exposure from its weedy, half-starved fungi was enougle to poison the ants. Making ecological cycles was one thing, but making ecological cycles without anything that contained mana was beyond impossible. Then another adventurer showed up with another box of ants. These were "the biting kind", apparently. Goblin Cave obligingly took them and handed over some bronze, and had to make a third dirt chamber. Apparently different ant colonies did not cohabitate well. Seeing two things with such slight differences... the difference between a [Goblin] and a [Fierce Goblin] was fairly paltry: a handful of stat points, a slight change in the color of their tusks. The biting ants had more of a red-brown color, with a tinge of yellow, compared to the brown-black of the non-biting ants. What made them different? Why were they different?
New creature template unlocked: [Giant Ant]!
Giant Antarthropods(tier 0, earth)
A giant ant. Its pincers are reinforced with earth-aligned mana to allow it to eat [Stonefungus].
It was also able to discern a similar system-analogue mob. As opposed to non-system ants, which only existed in what was apparently a complex hive structure driven mostly by food scarcity, it had no problem spawning a single giant ant and leaving it to sit in its halls and passively eat nothing but its mana. It also, humorously, expanded its hallway of creatures, adding instances of its two new categories to the list. That hallway might get very long very quickly, if each new thing collected from the outside did in fact have a system analogue. All this gave it a new angle on what system-space was doing. If the mobs were system-analogues of a purely-physical creature, then the distinctions between them could say something about the intent of the system. Both mobs were much larger than their physical counterparts -- adventurer-sized -- as well as more aggressive, or at least, more easily turned towards aggression. And they both had descriptions that implied they were mana-mutants. And they both yielded experience when killed. That was the fulcrum by which the entire system operated. Squash an ant, and you had squashed an ant, for no reason beyond your own desires. Kill a [Giant Ant], and the system reached down, catalyzing a transduction from mana to experience. Rewarding the killer. Kill more, and more power will be yours. Ants ate fungi to survive, and the mana clinging to its fruiting bodies was, perhaps, a poison to them. If a [Giant Ant] killed a [Deathcap] -- it would gain experience (well, outside of the context of a dungeon. Goblin Cave supposed it could try oversouling a giant ant to see if it would begin to gain experience, but... this was a tangent) and it could level up. It was an incentive for a creature to glut itself on death, kill far beyond its need for food. It lined up with its own existence: a killing hall, a place that existed only to produce death. A place full of simulacra bodies that were born only to die. The world the system seemed to strive towards was a world of ceaseless death: the victors reaping experience from the fallen, and being reaped again in turn. Transducing mana over and over into experience, until...? It had yet to determine what experience eventually flowed out to. There were many things unaccounted for in its conceptualizations of the world, but what it had seen so far did not look good. Just kill? Plenty of things killed each other for necessary purposes already; Goblin Cave didn't see much use in adding even more incentive.
chapter 25 - combinatorics
Each new category page Goblin Cave unlocked raised further questions. A spawn template existed for each mob, for each category, for each tier. It was tempting to sit in place and attempt to feel out every pattern it could, to see the full breadth of the categories as it could find, but... Well, it would take a lot of time and effort. Its goblin specialization had unlocked a spread of goblin-type mobs across the first five tiers, but it had fully unlocked every goblin spawn up to tier 8 (the tier 9, time spawn still eluded it). It had done this through an exhaustive and extremely tedious exploration of spawn state space, and it wasn't exactly in a rush to do that again, just for another set of what would undoubtedly be weak, difficult-to-spawn mobs. It was ultimately a matter of combinatorics. Imagine having a set of one hundred ninety six options -- say, the height of a goblin spawn: pick one from that set. Simple enough. Now imagine a separate set of options of the same degree -- the precise density of their bones. These were both among the tiny fluctuations it could work into a spawn pattern: little ripples in the twisting of the mana thread that spawned the mob. But having picked two 1-in-196 options, the total combinations are multiplied: pairing each height with each bone density lead to a total of 196 times 196 options: 38,416. Add in further simple, cosmetic options: weight, muscle tone, fat distribution, skin color, skin coloration. Eye color. Organ color. Organ arrangement. Hair placement. Each one had thousands of variations, expressed in slight shifts in the tension of the mana thread, and they all stacked on top of each other in multiplicative effusion. Limited to 196 options for each item, and only those variations, and the total number of combinations became 16 octillion, 398 septillion, 978 sextillion, 63 quintillion, 355 quadrillion, 821 trillion, 105 million, 872 thousand and 896. Now imagine that all but one of those options was unstable, imbalanced, and didn't form a successful spawn pattern, and it had to search through that stack for the single template with the correct resonance. The nature of spawn template 'balance' was much more abstract, defying the kind of physical description Goblin Cave applied to goblins. It wasn't limited to brute force. Because the overall structure was ordered -- 196 items per dimension -- it was easy to move along any axis. Taking a smaller space, say, 'red', 'green', 'blue', and 'goblin', 'orc', 'troll', it would be easy to enumerate the indices by decomposing the two axes: let one change every index, 1 2 3, red green blue. Let the other change every third index, 1 4 7, goblin orc troll -- and third, here, because the product of all lower-dimensional axes, in this case 1*3, was 3 -- and then you could assign each index to a unique combination of the two options. The same logic applied to any space with independent axes. It could feel through the indices of the hypercube thus defined, following the eddies of feedback, and it had long ago learned that there were certain periodic rhythms to the field. But that was only one part of the structure. Orthographic axes, in this formulation of possibility space, were the equivalent to multiplication. There was a separate kind of paired, branching structure, that was the equivalent to addition: one or the other, this or that. That, too, was trivial to construct -- it had already done so, simply by saying "one of a hundred ninety six". But mixing the two, back and forth at different levels, on different axes, gave rose to more complex structures: no longer was the entire possibility space guaranteed to be a perfect, symmetrical hypercube. Instead, it would be a mix of this-and-that, full of eddies and prisms, branches. Instead of being able to extract a position within the space simply by keeping track of the size of each dimensional axis, it would need to construct a more involved symbol. Those were hardly the only two ways to construct the space; they were the simplest two. There was an equivalent to exponentiation, in addition to addition and multiplication. There were other operators that were translated into this space. But all those were fundamentally still something like arithmetic, not too different really from adding 1+1=2. The big step was the axes: once they stopped being orthogonal and started interacting, letting the value of one axis scythe away or elaborate on the values of another axis, the entire manifold radically changed in shape: one left the static, simple realms of enumerative combinatorics and entered the choppy sea of logical constraint solving. All of that was pure math: a statement of logical fact. This was the nature of mathematics: partially discovered, since it was a collection of logical facts that had existed and will exist eternally, and partially invented, since the slightest change in assumptions and structure, in angle of approach, in necessity's lens, provided an utterly different framework. One simply plucked the formulation one's eye fell upon, or curated from a selection of infinities. The question was how to relate it, in even the smallest degree, to the real world. So it could construct a 185-quintillion-dimensional hypercube of spawn variances and it could align all its axes orthogonally so it could enumerate through every one of them, a number best described using scientific notation, without duplication or elision. It could even tackle the problem of non-orthogonal axes, which was needed to ensure it never enumerated through an impossible mana thread -- one, say, where the collection of forces it was applying made the thread intersect itself and shatter apart. But what would any of that matter? What was the point of ever doing so? That came to the second part of math: the generation of meaning. Why would it bother enumerating convolutions of mana threads, when it could very well feel things out itself? Well, for one, if it could actually map an enumeration to spawn state space, then it could tell a control node to sit there and do all the work. That was far easier said than done. For one, the possibility space was utterly vast. Each pattern needed to have mana pumped into it on the scale of seconds. A single mindless control node twisting mana threads could spend centuries convoluting through useless corners of possibility space and never turn up anything useful. For two... well. It would have to do the mapping and charting. If its understanding of the actual interactions of mana threads was incorrect, then it wouldn't matter how elaborate or involved a possibility space it constructed, or now flawless its execution of its index transforms; it would be wrong from the start, simply because it had failed to make the space reflect reality. It was frustrating. Not the spawning, but-- there was a structure there, in the eddies and flows of spawn templates. It could feel at the edges of it, see that there was a shape there, but every attempt to codify it had escaped it. It was so big and involved that it felt like it could spend years simply trying to map out the edges of it, much less put together any kind of explanation for how it was structured in the first place. That was what it wanted to talk about -- 'DID YOU KNOW THERE ARE CERTAIN RESONANCES BETWEEN DISTANT FOLDINGS IN A SPAWN TEMPLATE, AND I THINK MAPPING THE ENTIRE STATE SPACE OUT INTO AN ENUMERATED FRAMEWORK WOULD REVEAL ARITHMETIC CONNECTIONS BETWEEN CERTAIN TRAVERSALS THAT MIGHT ALLOW FOR EASIER PINPOINTING OF VALID SPAWN TEMPLATES?' -- but all they wanted to talk about was the relative valuation of different kinds of metals. Goblin Cave did not even have the words in their language to say it. Goblin Cave could hardly grasp at the shape itself. Having a control node attempt it would be rank arrogance. This was what lead it to build the simulacra template. An imitation of the instructions to make an imitation creature. Amusing. This was partly to attempt to explain the process to anything that wasn't itself. It spun out the shape of a mob spawn -- a [Goblin], for old time's sake -- in a thread of gold. Then it had to thicken it and reinforce it so that the thread didn't collapse in on itself. It added corrugations in some places to denote where the template's phase changed, muddied it with alloys to change its hue and shine to denote how the tension changed, made it thicker and thinner where the amplitude altered... ultimately, it was left with an enlarged figurine of a goblin made out of whorls and loops of golden thread. All of the system-approved spawn templates fit neatly within the bodies of the mobs they spawned. Goblin Cave had always taken this as humorous artifice; such a thing wasn't necessary or even relevant. Plenty of its own handmade spawn templates had been messy skeins of mana that fit into no physical pattern, but since there were nearly-infinite ways to pack a given template into physical space certainly some of them would be shaped similarly to the thing they created. That left it with a flat room of quartz with a golden goblin statue inside. This immediately rose questions with the adventurers, which was in part what Goblin Cave had made it for. It still held out hope that their responses would give it... something. Something it could attempt to draw meaning out of. Something engaging. "Is that... gold?" Of course. "Looks like it. Some kinda... big goblin-shaped hairball?" The particular adventuring party that had stumbled across the new room (on floor three, opposite to the doorway that lead to its experience-ranking hall) even had a caster in it. There was no sign of recognition. "How much, uh," one of the adventurers started. "How much do you think it's worth?" they continued, in a lower tone of voice. One of them peered closer. "It's mostly empty space," they said. "Even if you melted the whole thing down I don't think you'd actually get a lot of material. Plus-- uh, I think the dungeon might. Get mad? It's not here to be loot." WHAT METALS DO YOU CONSIDER TO HAVE LITTLE VALUE? it asked, writing on the wall. The adventurers grimaced and pulled back, taking a few steps away from the glowing lettering that appeared on the way, towards the familiar old dank goblin caves. "Uh-- tin? Maybe? Lead?" Goblin Cave could work with that, maybe. Tin was less lustrous, and lead was heavy and soft, but it would be nice to be able to make anything and not have the first response to be consideration of its value. "Wait, can you... make gold? Like you've been making the bronze?" one of the adventurers said. The other two with them made the shushing motion that Goblin Cave was beginning to understand meant 'stop talking'. "I thought your goblins had to die to make loot, but you can just make it?!" This again. YES, it wrote. WHY DO YOU VALUE METALS?
chapter 26 - economics
"Uh, not to offend, great dungeon, but--" one of the other adventurers started, and the first one cut them off. "So you can buy stuff!", they bellowed. "So you don't die!" WHAT KIND OF THINGS CAN YOU BUY? "Listen, dungeon," the second adventurer said. "Not to be rude, but I think you fundamentally don't understand how people operate." ELABORATE, it wrote. It certainly didn't understand how people operated. They were a constant confusion to it. "We need... we need to eat to survive. To have pure water to drink. We need to sleep, and sleep somewhere warm, or we'll get ill. It takes time and luck to grow food. You've said, repeatedly, you don't understand our preoccupation with value: this is why. Money -- resources -- give us access to the materials of life, without which we would die. We're not like you, immortal in a mountain fastness. If I wasn't able to pay for food, I would die within days." ("You can hunt, though," the third adventurer said, and got elbowed in the side for their words.) Something here didn't add up. WHAT ABOUT MANA? it asked. "What about mana?" WHAT ABOUT SURVIVING OFF MANA? Many of its creatures still survived partially off their mana current, even with harvested fish and fungi supplementing that. Adventurers also had mana. So... "That's not-- you'd need an enormous amount of mana. Oh, you can do it. But you have to be high level. Level 100 is... some people call that 'the threshold of immortality'; that's around where you can cast off most mortal concerns like needing food and sleep. But the people who pass that threshold... they stop being people, really." ELABORATE, Goblin Cave went to write, but the adventurer resumed speaking before it was done. "Well, I know you're not that good at metaphors like that. They're still people. But..." They made a facial expression. "Once you don't need to eat, you don't need other people. Once you can deflect blades with your bare skin, or take a fireball to the face without injury, what does it matter that your only place to sleep is a thorn-thicket in the dead of winter? People are weak, and that makes them band together. I'm Kerey, you know?" Goblin Cave had no clue what that meant. "We have festivals to keep the whole tribe fed. So that even the weakest among us can survive. Because... we care about each other. Because we're born into the world together. "People are weak, and so they band together. Once they get strong... a lot of them cut those connections away. It pricks their sense of pride to ever think how they were weak, pathetic, easily crushed by anyone higher level than them. It rankles, I think, once you're strong, to find yourself beholden to the weak." They snorted. "Would you ask for aid from something that could kill you with a thought?" "So, yes, we care about your valuable metals. Because they could make our lives easier. Because they could secure a future for the weakest among us. But-- even as you've started talking to us, you've still killed us. You were born an immortal lord; you've never known what weakness was. You have no connection to anything." The adventurer didn't sound angry, precisely, just exhausted. Like an adventurer bleeding out, after it had finished screaming. I HAVE BEEN UNDER ATTACK SINCE I STARTED EXISTING, it wrote. THIS PLACE IS MY BODY, AND EVERY DAY THINGS LIKE YOU COME HERE AND KILL THEIR WAY THROUGH IT. IF I DIDN'T PROVIDE SIMULACRA TO DEFEND MYSELF, A SINGLE ONE OF YOUR KIND COULD KILL ME. WHAT USE IS A DUNGEON CORE THAT DOESN'T PROVIDE DEATH? LIVING THINGS NEED TO DIE TO PROVIDE EXPERIENCE. THE COST OF CREATING EVERY GOBLIN YOU KILL HERE WAS PAID FOR BY THE DEATHS OF YOUR COMPATRIOTS: THAT IS THE WAY OF THE WORLD. IF YOU HAVE AN ALTERNATIVE, SPEAK IT NOW. "I-- I don't know! But... you certainly seem dissatisfied with your work. Crawling through a cave killing goblins isn't ideal for us either. Surely there's something we have in common?" Goblin Cave wasn't sure there was. Everything it had ever read or heard about the way they lived their live was a confusing whirl to it. Its own desires seemed profoundly difficult to communicate to them. The adventurer sighed. "Well, thank you for... listening. We could tell people not to delve too deep...?" It was strange. When things started, it would have been exhilarated to get adventurers telling it that. Finally, they would avoid its core! Now... it was difficult to say what had changed. Oh, certainly, it still didn't want adventurers shattering its core. But now there were so many more factors involved. The world was bearing down on it. WHAT DO ADVENTURERS DO WITH DUNGEON CORES?, it asked. The adventurers shared a look. "Uh-- we don't do this, but, it's said it's possible for a person to... control, or compel a dungeon core. Uh, the mage-city Opone, across a sea of fire, is said to be built from an enslaved core. But cores can shatter themselves, and they often do to avoid that fate. When aspiring mages try, they often only get handfuls of glass dust. Supposedly there are secrets to... cleave a core, taking control of a sliver of its power, but they aren't known to us." The adventurer shook their head. "Dungeons are already sparse enough here without us shattering the few that remain." That sounded profoundly unpleasant. Had it been spawned elsewhere, or picked a different creature focus, would that have been its fate? The ranking charts took on a more ominous tone: the total number was constantly going up and down as cores were created and destroyed, but this gave a context to just what 'destroyed' entailed. The other question it had... WHAT OF YOUR SOULS? They made a facial expression. "What souls? We're not claimed by any god." Goblin Cave could only really feel the souls of adventurers when they left, but it had yet to feel that on each adventurer's death. AS FAR AS I HAVE BEEN ABLE TO ASCERTAIN, EVERY SYSTEM-CONNECTED ENTITY HAS A SOUL. Maybe its worms and ants had souls also, but it couldn't say conclusively either way, and it was leaning towards 'not'. THEY ALLOW YOU TO RESPAWN OR BE REINCARNATED. "When we die, that's it." The adventurer crossed their arms. "Never heard of anybody respawning like a dungeon mob. Reincarnating..." They shrugged. "Who knows. But it wouldn't be us. We'd be dead. And... some gods may be merciful. But some snatch their champions' souls up to conduct horrors on them. Don't think we'll be peaceably reborn elsewhere if you thresh us like wheat." It wasn't as if Goblin Cave was eager to kill adventurers. But it wasn't opposed. They did come here to kill. That they were unable to be respawned... well, that wasn't its own fault. Why should it privilege the desires of them-as-they-were-now over the potentiality of their next life? It had reaped more than a few of its own mobs to recreate them in a shape that was more useful to it. It dismissed the adventurers and remained there, glowering at its goblin spawn statue. Rare metals, they said. The entire situation was... beyond its ability to imagine. What interactions did adventurers have, outside its caverns? What did they do, if not group up to kill mobs? Evidently, quite a lot.
It was a few days after that that a familiar adventurer showed up again. Goblin Cave felt a little uneasy to have recognized an adventurer, instead of letting them go by as interchangeable irritants. It was the survey-adventurer from before, the one with the secret message, the one who had warned it. And they were entering into Goblin Cave-- that is to say, the goblin caves part of it. Not the new manastone passage. "Did you know you have guards on both entrances?" was what they opened with, apparently not considering for even a moment that they might not hear or be paying attention. "Looks like neither the duchy nor the horde wants word getting out about you." Goblin Cave formed a writing surface on the side of the entrance cave. That cave was more than sixty years old. It hadn't touched it since it had first dug it out at the very beginning. All things would change, it supposed. And more and more rapidly, it seemed. GUARDS?, it wrote. It coudn't see any on any of its imaging tubes. And it still had those two other entrances that had yet to be visited. It was a strange thought: if it had surfaced at a slightly different time, in a slightly different place... it would will be anticipating its discovery. None of this would have happened. It was difficult to not long for that alternate reality. It had been bored, then -- these days, it was nothing but overwhelming stimulation, day after day. "Guards. There was another closed session of the house of lords, too. Presumably all about you, again." Goblin Cave didn't even know what that meant. Before it could think of any response, the adventurer continued: "Have you made any progress in non-natural mana values?" Oh right, that. Things were piling up so rapidly it hadn't had a chance to properly think about anything. NO, it wrote. Then it wrote a somewhat longer chunk of text about the nature of spawn templates and how they all produced creatures with at least one mana, since there were no stable zero mana spawns. Theoretically it seemed possible that something with a negative mana cost could exist, but it had just as little an idea about how to produce negative mana as when they first mentioned the concept. "So what have you been doing?" they asked, walking through its linear tunnels and absently dispatching the goblins on the way. They hit the new hallways on the second floor, and then the dirt-floored chambers on the third. This made it obnoxiously difficult for Goblin Cave to actually respond. I HAVE BEEN STUDYING THE NATURE OF SYSTEM MOB SPAWNS IN COMPARISON TO NON-SYSTEM-EMPOWERED ANIMALS, it wrote. DON'T STEP ON THE ANTS. "You're the first talking, lucid dungeon ever, you can create a fortune in resources, the dutchy is scrounging around for adventurers to try to enslave your core, and you're making an ant farm?!" they said, volume increasing throughout the statement. "That's what you're spending your time on?" I HAVE GOTTEN VERY USED, it wrote, TO HAVING AS MUCH TIME AS I PLEASE. The surveyor sighed. "Great. I don't know what I was expecting. Well. At least I have a little more time to talk this time." They sat down, perched on a slimy boulder at the edge of the old cave. "And I brought some more books." It had gotten partially through several of the other books. It was still struggling to put them into context. The vast majority of their books on magic seemed to be utterly useless to it currently, since it didn't seem to have any way to access of the mana chords their mana-manipulation techniques were based around. It had contained a chart of their system of mana notation, which allowed it to decode some mysterious old scrolls it had collected thirty years ago and shuffled away in its 'untranslated; unknown language' corner. Spell scrolls. Not that it could cast them. It could make some materials that did it, maybe, but... that would take time. It did have some questions. WHAT IS THE NATURAL MANA HARMONIC OUTSIDE OF THE DUNGEON? it asked. I HAVE YET TO FIND A MANA WAVE THAT IS NOT DISTRESSING OR HARMFUL TO LIVING THINGS. Adventurers, sure, but mostly it was asking to see if it could restructure its mana to allow it to interact more directly with the worms and ants. "Oh boy. Well, let's see," they started, and then started down a byzantine series of explanations of mana rhythms and chord progressions that Goblin Cave could only barely follow even while trying to read the mana dynamics book at the same time for reference. It ultimately attempted to just transcribe their words, hoping they could refer back to them at some later point once they more fully understood the theory. The overall theory wasn't difficult: most living things tended to share certain harmonic resonances when they interacted with low-energy mana systems, and on a large scale it was those harmonics that became dominant, which in turn helped to enforce the continued dominance of that particular harmony. This lead, apparently, to a constantly evolving symphony where minor harmonics reasserted themselves in a structure that adventurers -- and other living things -- apparently found physically and psychologically pleasing. "Mana weather", "the Gaia harmonic", and so forth. It could follow the high-level concepts well enough, but in terms of understanding it enough to replicate it within its own cavern -- absolutely not. Their interaction with mana was so different from its own -- slowly coaxing disparate mana sources to flow together, in comparison to its precise and controlled manipulation of its solitary mana source -- that it was difficult to find a common ground. Again. "-- I just realized," the surveyor said, cutting themselves off. "This is about your ants, right? You're asking because of your ants." YES, it wrote, and the surveyor let out a sharp puff of breath. "Well. While we're asking questions. That amount of manastone you're trading with the duchy. That's an absolute pittance to you, right? You can produce as much as you like, right?" YES, it wrote. Again. WITHIN CERTAIN LIMITS. "What kind of limits?" Goblin Cave had always tried to be vague about its precise capabilities. Information was dangerous, apparently. What information, it still wasn't entirely sure about. Certainly most information it had received from the outside world had been stressful. IT COSTS ROUGHLY 100 MANA TO PRODUCE A METER CUBE OF MANASTONE, it wrote, and drew a helpful meter-sized square on its surface for scale. "What-- what? Wait, that's..." the survyor said, face scrunching up. "That's impossible." They paused, then elaborated. "The standard alchemical dose for a low-grade mana potion is 80 grams of finely-crushed manastone, and the resulting potion restores between 20 and 30 units of mana. A cubic meter would be, what, three tonnes? Roughly? That would make, what, around forty thousand mana potions? That's... that's off by four orders of magnitude." Goblin Cave decided not to mention manacrystal. THAT IS THE SYSTEM COST FOR PRODUCTION. The surveyor let out a slightly hysterical laugh. "Oh? You don't say? And you can just keep producing that endlessly?" Goblin Cave wasn't about to write out its raw mana values and regeneration rates, but, yes. "You know, there was a theory. From analysis of inoperative dungeon cores. That seemed to imply they had incredible general-purpose construction and reshaping abilities. That for the most part they just... don't use. So, okay. You can produce tonne after tonne of manastone, and you're a goblin core. Anything else?" MOST MINERAL OR METAL SUBSTANCES, it wrote, and then with a wry humor, added, I HAVE BEEN STRUGGLING TO FIND A MATERIAL TO PRODUCE MY CORRIDORS WITH THAT ADVENTURERS DO NOT CONSIDER VALUABLE. The surveyor snorted. "That would explain the quartz, I guess. Don't let the guild of engineers get ahold of you, they'll be mining these for crystals. Listen, I'm out of the loop, but I'd be shocked if the house of lords wasn't authorizing some kind of core-capturing delve. But they also don't want to let anybody else know of a gold mine like you." I CAN ALSO PRODUCE GOLD, Goblin Cave wrote, since it kept coming up. What was so special about gold anyway? "Of course you can. Uh. Mithril? Adamantine?" Adamantine? That was something it hadn't heard of before. I DO NOT WISH TO ENUMERATE EVERY MATERIAL I CAN PRODUCE, it wrote, because that sounded tedious and counterproductive, and also now it was really curious about just what other minerals were out there. "But," the surveyor continued, "Nobody really cared about charting Goblin Cave, and the Dutchess doesn't have the fullest coffers or a reputation for pulling off any kind of skillful magic. They might not have enough money or leverage to get an experienced team of dungeon-crackers. For a while at least." This was concerning. But also... LEVERAGE, VALUE. IS THERE ANYTHING YOUR LIVES REVOLVE AROUND THAT DOESN'T INVOLVE IMPARTING VALUE INTO ONE THING SO YOU CAN EXTRACT IT FROM SOMETHING ELSE? "Yeah. Welcome to economics, I guess. People want things, and if you can provide them, then they're willing to pay. You're already trading. You clearly already understand this." I HAVE BEEN CONSIDERING IT AS AN ABERRATION. YOUR ENTIRE SOCIETY RUNS OFF THIS? NOTHING BUT PEOPLE EXCHANGING THINGS FOR OTHER THINGS? "Well. The alternative is what you're going to see soon: if you have enough power, you don't need to trade. You can just take."
chapter 27 - preparations
Their conversation evolved from there. Goblin Cave outlined the basics of its thoughts about system-space: engineered to reward death, to allow for the creation of more experience. "So you're an Ismali, huh?" the surveyor said, and then elaborated: "An old sect. Thought the system was created by a death god. All classes being combat-oriented, all skills being oriented towards some aspect of warfare, the nature of experience... these were their arguments. The most common counterargument to their philosophy is the existence of healing spells, and the nature of skills, which require use and study to increase, rather than experience." They outlined something of a philosophical history: Ismalists, which evolved into a sect of pacifist philosophers that eschewed all use of system techniques as corrupt temptation. But this also gave rise to an opposing sect, Emreeists, who claimed that the system was put in place to give humans a road to godhood, that experience was the highest good, and demanded them to strive to grow as powerful as possible. There were arguments that the system was constructed by a pantheon of gods, with numerous tradeoffs and balances within its mechanics, or that it was simply naturally-occurring. Any possible angle Goblin Cave had considered, and many it hadn't, apparently had well-established philosophical and religious sects dedicated to contemplation of their ideas. "But if you're going to insist on recreating all of philosophy from first principles, please focus on something productive in the mean time. Already... are you sure your mana count is right? 100 mana for a meter cube... if that's right, that would mean..." YOU ARE IMPLYING THAT THE UNIT OF MANA PROVIDED BY MY SYSTEM INTERFACE IS DIFFERENT THAN THE UNIT PROVIDED BY YOURS? "Yes, exactly. And hex poison clearly does something to change the way the system displays mana, or the way it's stored in the body. There have been studies, the mana unit is shared across different races -- a 2 mana spell is precisely 2 mana, and it's 2 mana for everyone who can cast it, Calculator Martine wrote a whole monograph on it -- but there are strange interactions that break that pattern on the hex-affected. And nobody's ever been able to access a dungeon's system information before. Even the talkative ones can't really..." That lead to another diversion: talkative ones? There was a subclass of dungeon, generally termed 'clockwork' dungeons, that had a tendency to form avatars and attempt some kind of communication. That communication was sometimes in words, written or spoken, but never in complex sentences. The most common dungeon evolution that lead to that was clocktower- or mechanism-themed dungeons, hence the name, but they generally only occurred in or around cities, which made them... remarkably dangerous. Nobody wanted to let a dungeon growing underneath a city time to find a specialization just in the off chance it ended up with a clockwork specification. It was rare for a dungeon to have what the surveyor termed a 'civilization'-type theme: fortresses, sewers, ghost towns, and so on. Mine-type dungeons were classified on the border between resource and civilization themes, and tended to fall on one side or the other depending on how sensible their mining equipment was. But even the more communicative dungeons still only used a collection of words, as stand-alone concepts rather than full ideas: swords, metals, stop, more, less. Expand that way. There had only ever been a handful of 'tamed' dungeons; from what the adventurer said they inevitably turned on their masters and became more and more aggressive, and so clockwork dungeons were seen as unstable and dangerous, but immensely resource-rich in the short term. Even the talkative dungeons didn't, couldn't, or wouldn't explain their system connections. Apparently surveyors tended to think of them as something like an enlarged mimic: an ambush predator which had instincts to replicate and match the local environment. A dungeon's instincts had grown so complex that they had a level of base cunning beyond a mere animal, but it was still just... repetition and instinct, no real 'intelligence' there, despite how elaborate their 'narratives' sometimes were. Goblin Cave wasn't sure how seriously to take that observation. Certainly its own existence implied to the contrary. The communication problem immediately made it think of its own goblins: language development halted, or at least progressing very slowly. Maybe having to do with a lack of soul? But maybe that was just goblins. And maybe it was just dungeons. Goblin Cave wasn't sure if it had a soul; much like adventurers, it didn't have any stats for its own soul, just its mob spawns'. Maybe only the dumbest dungeons thought trying to communicate with adventurers was a good idea. It could have been anything. But that brought things back to souls. It outlined the basic shape of the mechanic: soul required to spawn each tier of mob, soul requirement raising exponentially, but also, the implication that its soul unit might be very, very small. That a tier 49 mob might have, say, a tiny fraction of the size of a soul of an adventurer. Eventually the surveyor proposed something: "Listen. I know some sages. They'd be interested in talking with you, studying you, maybe even helping in whatever kinds of... whatever you're doing with ants. But they have access to some hex-tainted artifacts, and longterm they might be able to smuggle some into you for study. They'd certainly be able to bring you hex-corrupted patients. You'd be able to ask them questions, instead of spending years re-deriving known science. Some of them are even high-level, they might be able to help defend you if the duchy sends a core-cracker team." YOU WANT ME TO INVITE HIGH-LEVEL ADVENTURERS TO STAY INSIDE ME? "Why not? You're already hosting them anyway." It was... frustrating. Before, the outside world seemed full of promise. Now, it had been nothing but a source of banal, exhausting problems. In many ways it had learned nothing from any of it: just more details about how adventurers lived what it was now understanding as sad, miserable lives. It had risked its existence for this? I WOULD HAVE PREFERRED SOMETHING DIFFERENT, it wrote. "Different howso?" I DON'T KNOW. DIFFERENT THAN THIS. The surveyor shrugged. "Well, welcome to the world. It sucks and you don't get what you want. There's always too much happening and you never really know what the consequences of anything you do or don't do is. Congratulations, now you know what being a person is like." They snorted. "Maybe we have more in common than you think."
The first books/manastone tradeoff was scheduled in a few days. The timeline for when Goblin Cave could expect a team of high-level adventurers to come in and try to capture its core was just as vague as it had always been. It needed to prepare. It had moved its core to a more inaccessible part of the floor 49-to-floor-50 labyrinth a while back, and now it prepared for the messy and nauseating process of moving it from there to a more secure placement. Its thickets of manastone passages sprawling out from the fungal caverns on floor 50 were ideal: large and otherwise empty, with plenty of room to reshape defenses, and it wasn't too far a distance in absolute terms, so it could move itself without wrecking its mana density on its upper floors. It was always somewhat disorienting to move its core, and it took some time afterwards to adjust. Everything felt subtly different, like things were curved differently, or all the angles were minutely changed. It had to do with the way its mana flow changed. Even after everything, one thing hadn't changed: its core was the point of contact between physical space and system-space, the point where mana was transduced out into the physical realm and poured out to flood through the dungeon. Changing it made ripples in the flow, and those took time to settle. It was unsure what defenses would be adequate. It could make razor-sharp spikes, but adventurers could fly over them. Thin threads of sharp wire, but adventurers could melt them. Solid walls of dense mithril, but adventurers could blast through them. Submerge itself within a lake of acid: it was possible to neutralize it or drain it away. If it was profoundly outclassed, nothing it could make would withstand the adventurers' attacks. It still put all of those up anyway: hallways that looked misty with razorwire, trapdoors to rooms full of acid, core itself sealed away within an thick orb of dense, solidly-anchored mithril, with curving tubes punctured through it for mana ventilation. The halls outside its core were utterly lightless, and circulating as much dissonant, high-intensity mana as it could produce without disrupting its own senses. Well, it set new mana pipes up, and then it turned them off, so it didn't have the constant whine from them suffusing everything it felt. It had slicing, stabbing, crushing, grinding, flaming, freezing, drowning, acid, and shocking hazards set up, mostly obsidian and glass for the cutting, mithril-wrapped lead for the crushing, and plain burning oil, water, regal acids, and iron for the elementally-aligned ones. None of it really made it feel any safer. If it encountered some structure like the one it had created, it could slowly flense apart the layers, peeling them to pieces from a position of safety until it could crack the core. It was foolish to assume high-level adventurers wouldn't have similar techniques for bypassing some, if not all, of its hazards. While it was waiting, it also began reinforced the rest of its dungeon. Where there were thinner spaces between floors, it reinforced them with metal-doped rock, forming complex crystalline lattices within the solid rock that were resistant against shattering from any direction. It wreathed its immense resonator torus on floor 26 with a layer of dampers and shock absorbers until it could run it ten times as powerfully without shaking itself apart, forming mana waves so strong that the bow of their waves would pulverize anything in their way. It also thinned some walls, sketching out a new route through its floors: currently, its original cave ran all the way down, with only a handful of hidden walls connecting to the manastone sprawl encircling it. But it could seal off the old stairways between levels, hooking them up to the new construction ringing them, to force any parties out of the caves and into the mazy tunnels. How effective that would be, it couldn't say. The new tunnels were profoundly less hospitable to traverse, and they formed an immense maze, but they were also utterly devoid of mobs. And its old stairs were well-signposted: placed directly after the boss chamber on each floor, without exception. It would not be difficult to dig through the sealed space. The lack of mobs made it feel antsy. It almost wanted to spawn some more creatures in, but if anything got this deep then it had gotten past its [Ogre Champion] and there was absolutely nothing else it could try. The equation, as it were, of delving was fairly simple: on one side, the resources of the delving party. On the other, everything the dungeon was capable of throwing at them. If it wanted to kill them, to present a barrier that was utterly impassible... it was coming up blank. Anything could be subverted. That made it wonder what other dungeon cores were getting out of it. Constructing a narrative, sticking to a theme, building up a false story... it seemed like the safest thing would be to dig a long dark hole, do nothing, make nothing, and provide no rewards. To curl in on yourself and be nothing. But put that way, Goblin Cave knew that that would be intolerable. Better to do anything to show that you existed, than to give into the pressure of the world and negate yourself out of every action.
chapter 28 - diversifying
The first book/manastone trade-off was utterly anticlimactic. One of the surveyors and one of the other people in that meeting -- Goblin Cave had already forgotten everything about how they introduced themselves -- returned, along with two others who seemingly only came with them to carry a long cot with two crates of books on it. They dropped it off, and Goblin Cave had created a neatly-stacked pylon of rhombic dodecahedral manastones in preparation. There was one wrinkle. "Ah, if we may make a request," said the... knight-diplomat? "The... pseudo-dungeon that extends beyond here," -- here being the first chamber of the mana bellows, where the exchange was happening -- "the initial survey was never completed, but they did report low-level dungeon-style mobs with mana-aligned drops. We would be interested in sending low-level teams to survey and, if possible, farm for resources and experience." Goblin Cave had not bothered to relocate the flame wisps for this conversation, and at this point the flock had spread out into a uniformly-scattered band of wisps, slowly revolving through the bellows' flow, with one or two passing through the room every several minutes. It was a little concerned that if it said 'YES' they would just start blasting. It was also concerned about having adventuring teams wandering around through its tunnels. There were no boss mobs, only a scattering of slowly-respawning, low-level, low-tier 'aberration' mobs. It said as much: THERE ARE ONLY A FEW MOBS NEARBY, AND THEY ARE WEAK AND SLOWLY-RESPAWNING. RESULTS OF MY EXPERIMENTATION. But... IF YOU WISH TO ATTEMPT TO FARM THEM, I RUN THE MANA FLOW ON A CYCLE. AT ITS LOW EBB, IT SHOULD NOT BE HAZARDOUS. It would also need to shuffle off the flame wisps to somewhere isolated. As much as it wanted them to level on their own, it was much more likely they'd all die immediately. This was, perhaps, the duchy's next step towards trying to invade it. Presumably, letting low-level adventurers in was a lie to try to further analyze its capabilities, just like its response was a lie, still pretending it wasn't a dungeon core. But if it knew they were lying, and they knew it was lying, the whole situation existed nothing except as an excuse to confuse and disorient the other. It did, ultimately, need to know how well the aberrations it had unlocked performed against adventurers, not just goblins. It was striving with the full force of its power to hold back its mana enough not to instantly obliterate its worms and ants. By contemplating mana control, of the system, it was slowly driving it to unearth insights into the nature of reality. All killing adventurers would teach it was how to to kill adventurers. That was a very specific niche of study. It was unfortunate that it was necessary.
The pile of books was so much new information it had trouble forming any kind of coherent structure of it. Everything new was placed in a context of a dozen other new things, and each of those things had dozens of its own things, outwards and outwards until it was a confused mess. It had usually obtained a few scrolls a year, with books coming as sudden windfalls -- sometimes three a season, sometimes none for three years. This delivery consisted of 60 books, ranging from the shortest -- a geographical treatise of only a few pages of text interspersed with several maps it was also having difficulty reading -- to the longest -- an immense tome about the thirteen elemental vortices and their interplay, which seemed incredibly interesting if it could understand anything in it past the first five pages. It put most its time towards trying to read and comprehend the books, slowly building up a mental map of... everything. Where it was located, who the political actors were, how they conceptualized mana, what they considered unsolved problems in mana dynamics and system studies. Everything. While it was doing that, it was also preparing. Thinking of the sages who would potentially inhabit it, it tried to imagine what kind of landscape adventurers would want to exist in. Somewhere with light, presumably. And plants? Apparently nearly everything it could glimpse outside of its entrances would fall under the categorization of 'plants'. Budding off a secret door from one of its sixth-floor caves, it shaped a hallway leading to another dirt-filed cave, only this one it lined the ceiling with slabs of lumenrock, and covered the dirt floor with spawns of cavegrass. Some of what it could see outside was a similar kind of plant: green-brown and spiky. It was considering asking the adventurers if they could simply dig up some of that, too. Samples of everything that existed outside that could be easily moved within it. The primary problem, as always, was mana flow. Cavegrass was a mob spawn, although a particularly pathetic one. (The sole skill Goblin Cave had unlocked for it was [Grasping Roots], which meant that it could theoretically catch and bind adventurers, but in practice they were so weak as to only provide a moment's distraction before being destroyed.) So it would have no trouble bathing in its mana. Outside grass was, presumably, not system-empowered, and would die from exposure to its mana. Its mana locks were slowly becoming more advanced. It was still struggling to understand how the adventurers' conception of mana harmonics applied to its own sense of mana flow, but it had managed to create locks that had gaps that only permitted a certain... call it a 'tone' of mana through. The result was a room beyond the lock that felt muddy and unclear, but that it could still, slowly, act and command mobs into without them being immediately dissolved by low mana. And it could create a second mana lock past that, that further isolated the mana flow. Four locks deep, and worms no longer dissolved at the ambient mana pressure, and it could still -- slowly and haltingly -- command an invisible servant within the room. Here, it could plant [Cavegrass] and... grass side-by-side.
Meanwhile, it had also constructed a vastly simpler mana loop out past its mana bellows, and redirected the flow for a circuit to spin the bobbing flame wisps into that new, isolated loop, before sealing it off behind several secret doors as well. This would keep them safe, hopefully. They didn't ever do much aside from float in the mana flow. The first squad of adventurers came through and immediately got lost in its mana bellows. Goblin Cave had decided to run it on an automated cycle, mostly just for its own amusement: high flow during the 'day', low flow at 'night', smoothly ebbing and flowing over time. It had posted a modulus diagram showing the current flow rate at the entrances. The handful of mobs there appeared to be a moderate challenge for the group -- certainly vastly more of a challenge than an equivalent amount of same-level goblins -- but once they stepped off the primary current of the bellows, they became totally disoriented in the maze of secondary passages. They ended up stumbling back onto the main flow route as it was starting to pick up again near dawn, and became tantalizingly close to actually stumbling up into one of the other two as-of-yet unused secondary entrances, before their... handler, or minder, an adventurer with them who stayed back and didn't engage the mobs with them, informed them they were headed the wrong direction to get out. Someone with some kind of directional or mapping skill, presumably.
It had racked up several tallies in its experience corridor. By number of marks, it was looking like 'elemental construct' was in the lead (4), followed by 'aberration' and 'undead' (3 both), then 'elementals' (2), with nothing else getting any tallies. This seemed to flatly contradict the adventurers' claims that experience was based solely on category, but it also seemed to contradict its understanding that experience was a fixed value per mob, as its spawns' system panes reported. It was also possible an adventurer's 'experience sense' was, in fact, profoundly inaccurate, but they seemed to trust it at least a little more than that. So... more research was required. And it would probably be worthwhile to try to unlock more mobs in all of those categories... as well as more mobs in all the other categories, for comparisons. The process of manually-constructing spawn templates would be pretty time-intensive, and also to be honest it had not been feeling in the mood for that. Too many things had been going on for it to retreat into the calm, measured kind of consideration required to dig through possibility space. It made several new sub-dungeons on floor 51. This was, in truth, fairly simple: take the control node it can constructed for the one sub-dungeon, and swap out all the specifics for a different category. The sub-dungeon had only ever placed empty spawn templates, rather than handling the spawns itself, and since Goblin Cave was already doing the actual spawning in of the mobs for the sub-dungeon itself, all it would really need to do would be pick different mobs. The main issue was that it didn't scale: it required too much attention to simply set up a dozen sub-dungeons and set them going. It picked away at that problem for a day or two, trying to set up some kind of... spawn template template, that the control nodes could copy, but it still couldn't get them to push mana through it with the correct precision to actually establish a spawn. It could get them to randomly pick between a few templates, though, even if it couldn't get them to properly spawn anything. Yet. It seemed possible. There was probably a system skill for it, in fact: somewhere in the thicket of unpurchased skills that it had passed by in favor of spawn rate upgrades. That was slightly annoying, and also moderately humorous. Next time it leveled, whenever that would be, it would try to dig through its skill tree to see if there was anything that would take it a step closer. In the mean time, it would continue tweaking the control nodes. It wasn't actually certain about it, but it had been hoping that anything qualitatively new a system skill unlocked was theoretically something it could do directly with mana manipulation. Quantitative upgrades -- 'allow 5 per depth more mobs per floor' and the like -- seemed to directly mediate mana flows to make that possible, in a way that was beyond it, but much like new mob spawns, things like new trap unlocks or new materials all seemed to be things that it could have made on its own before obtaining them via system unlock, if it had known how to do it beforehand. Knowing how to do it beforehand without being told, of course, was the challenge. All that was to say, it created three new dungeons: one elemental-themed, spawning in [Flame Wisps], [Wind Shades], and [Animated Pebbles]; one undead-themed, spawning in [Biting Skull] and [Grasping Hand]; and one, extremely subdued, plant-themed, spawning in [Cavegrass] and [Chokevine]. Plants, or at least tier 0 plants, were nearly incapable of killing anything; they seemed more like hazards, and at tier 0 the actual hazard they presented was negligible. It added [Bat] to the random selection for that one, so that there would be at least some mobs there capable of movement. The hope was to unlock new skills for the mobs in question, which would slowly make them more of a threat -- [Cavegrass] also had the potential for, say, [Bladed Leaves] -- and let some of them level up, eventually. It would also, if it paid a lot of attention, let it record experience gained for its goblins as they killed the new categories of mobs, which would give it another source of raw data. All of that would take time to unfold and care to manage, however. The spawn rates of the sub-dungeons were still abysmal, and there weren't enough mana goblins around to fully delve the one sub-dungeon it had made, much less the three new ones it had instantiated.
chapter 29 - sages
Goblin Cave was hoping it could fall into some kind of routine. Before, the adventurers within it had receded to being a dull itch, beneath its concern. Now they were constantly pulling its attention, either through speech or action. The new information about just what adventures used dungeon cores for gave them a concerning tinge: certainly, it had rarely had adventurers attempt to delve all he way to its core. But now it had shown off what were, apparently, impressive capabilities, and that had made it a much more attractive target. In retrospect, it had been somewhat hasty. Why not wait another five years before digging out to the surface, when it would have had enough soul to pack its lower floors full of ogres? It was easy to make that observation now, but it remembered quite well how it had felt in the moment: frustrated, pent-up, anxious. It was the nature of hindsight to see better options, but without the knowledge of experience those better options were lost in the haze of potentiality. Certainly there were things, now, that it seemed as if it should pay more attention to, but it was impossible to say for sure. It was impossible to see what it didn't know yet. In the mean time, all it could do was what it was already doing: slowly struggling through the new books, further inspecting its mana machinery, slowly letting soul accumulate within its goblins. If nothing else, it could kill them all and have a regiment of tier 48 [Ogre Champions] available, which was certainly better than nothing. WHAT IS THE HIGHEST LEVEL ADVENTURER YOU KNOW OF, it had started asking adventurers. The low-level adventurers had said much as it expected: level 50, level 60. Old heroes with levels rumored to be in the 70s. Challenging, but maybe not insurmountable, given that its floors had ended up roughly scaled for that level. Floor 49, with its groups of ogres and the double-stacked boss investiture its [Ogre Champion] had gotten, could maybe handle a level 70 foe. They certainly had knowledge of adventurers over level 100, but it was a vague, hazy thing, half legend, with no one having living memory of anyone who had achieved those heights. The surveyor-adventurer, before they left, had a very different answer: "Calculator Martine is level 9973," they said. The knowledge sent a pang of terror through it. "Most of what's publicly known about experience curves past level 2000 is because he wrote out a huge book of his experience requirements. There's a formula for it that has, uh, three variables under level 144, but more and more get added, or grow to become noticeable, as higher and higher levels are reached. And there are some unknown variables that cause it to fluctuate slightly for each individual." They continued to talk on, but Goblin Cave was consumed in its own thoughts. Level 100 was... intimidating, but maybe something it could tackle after a few years of soul-farming. Level 1000 was... impossible. Approaching level 10000... what kind of power did that even look like? The ability to crack the world in two? WHAT KIND OF POWER DOES THAT ENTAIL? "Oh, uh... I mean, Calculator Martine is actually a [Calculator], right? The class is mostly about digging into the aspects of mana harmony that are mathematically approachable. He's the primary scholar in system studies, so he doesn't really... fight much. It's... a lot, though. Moon-caller Lonway wasn't just called that for fun. He made a moon." WHICH MOON? It had seen a total of three, slowly advancing across the sky from its entrances. A big purple one, a small red-brown one, and a slightly-smaller yellow-brown one. "Oh, it's not around anymore. Moon-eater Managarm isn't just called that either. But if you're asking if people at the highest levels are living nightmares, the answer is generally 'yes'." This had invited a follow-up question: WHAT IS THE LARGEST DUNGEON YOU KNOW OF? "Uh, the Abyss, probably, that one's kind of famous. Plenty of dungeons -- like yourself -- aren't mapped, but they follow fairly well-established trajectories for depth and mob difficulty. The Abyss broke all projections. Uh... darkness/spatial-themed. An underground cave dungeon, like you, at first -- but the interior space grew hyperbolically, so by floor 10 it was giant caverns, and by floor 20 it was... a great sea of darkness. It was impossible to get much further than that. Measurements of the internal volume started being impossible after floor 24, and that one was... as big as the entire realm above. But, uh, it isn't around anymore. It folded itself away, maybe...? It vanished a few hundred years ago, and what was the dungeon entrance is now just a tiny little crack in the rock." That had been... overwhelming. The surveyor-adventurer blithely stated things it had absolutely no reference point for, things that it would have said were impossible. Spatial? The dungeon vanished? Maybe it had made an error in asking 'largest', rather than... 'most powerful'. Now, looking through its books on dungeons, there was nothing like that. Just page after page of brief, boring summaries: This dungeon specialized in fairy-type mobs, recommended level 32, and allows for harvesting of glowdust and mothlight crystal. That dungeon specialized in rock golems, recommended level 26, and was mostly notable for regrowing resource nodes of demoniron. Nothing particularly remarkable about any of them. No listings of impossible dungeons with mysterious powers beyond comprehension. Several with notes that they went down over a hundred floors, but nothing... notable about any of them. Just categories and level ranges, slowly advancing up until it reached in 90s at the end of the book. The discrepancy between that and the purported level of 9973 was vast. It didn't know exactly what the experience requirements were for adventurers, but if they were anything like its own, then it would be profoundly impractical to try to grind to level 100 in a level 90 dungeon, much less to level 1000. Unless Calculator Martine had been murdering thousands upon thousands of mobs, how was it even possible to accumulate that much experience? Where were the level 1000 dungeons? Conveniently, that was when the sages arrived. They were visibly aged, which the vast majority of its adventurers were not, and they entered in a pair from its original, cave entrance. They were dressed differently from the other adventurers, and had backs that were weighed down heavily with an assortment of strange objects. "Ah, excuse us," one of them said. "Greetings, if you are indeed the speaking dungeon." Goblin Cave was so exhausted with dealing with adventurers it was tempted to not respond at all. But. It still wanted answers. HELLO, it wrote. I AM GOBLIN CAVE. It was strange to write; it had never really claimed its identity so directly to anyone yet. "A mutual acquaintance recommended we visit your dungeon for the advancement of our studies," they said. "May we enter?" They were already within it, in the cubbyhole of an entrance hall before the cave opened up into its first true room. YOU ARE SAGES? They nodded. I HAVE PREPARED ROOMS FOR YOU, it wrote. ON THE SIXTH FLOOR. It did not mention how the rooms were just a set of caves full of dirt and grass and lumenrock, with the only truly notable feature being the low-intensity mana. If they wanted something more involved they could say so later. Goblin Cave directed them down, and they both enabled some kind of stealth skill that let them walk straight past its mobs, including its bosses. Well, that was a profound threat. It could still sense them, but it seemed quite possible that there was a system skill that hid even their mana emanations. That was one more thing to add to its list of threat considerations. On the sixth floor, it directed them to the secret door (here, enabled by a depression curled behind a craggy outcropping that caused the rock to split apart) and then past it, into its experiments with decreasing the mana density. EXPLAIN YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE WORLD, it wrote. One of the sages laughed: "Oh, all of it? You have not put a simple task before us, young dungeon." 'Young' was a strange idea. It was used to thinking of itself as much older than the adventurers within it, but looking at the aged sages, sixty-five years was probably considerably younger than them. "Let us begin with introductions. I am called Khnum-tabal, sometimes named as a Sage." "And I am Djehut-mos," said the other, "sometimes named as a Sage." Goblin Cave still had not determined why adventurers -- well, people, it supposed; these two as far as it was aware were specifically not adventurers -- insisted on telling it their names constantly. It was one of their more obnoxious traits. "We have dedicated our scholarship to the study of the intricacies of mana, and our... mutual acquaintance recommended you to us in pursuit of her study of mana blight, what is termed Hex here." That sounded about right. Hex, or mana blight, or whatever they were calling it, was very interesting, but as of yet it was a totally theoretical concept, which limited its practical impact. The adventurer-surveyor casually revealing impossibilities had somewhat changed its priorities. THE SURVEYOR-ADVENTURER CLAIMED THAT 'CALCULATOR MARTINE' WAS LEVEL 9973. HOW WAS SUCH A LEVEL OBTAINED? "Ah," one of them said. "What is your interest in this matter?" DUNGEONS EXIST TO TRANSDUCE MANA FROM SYSTEM-SPACE INTO USABLE PHYSICAL MANA, WHICH IS THEN INVESTED INTO MOBS, WHICH YIELD EXPERIENCE WHEN KILLED. AS FAR AS I HAVE BEEN ABLE TO DETERMINE, A DUNGEON AS A WHOLE IS ENGINEERED BY AN UNKNOWN FORCE TO BE A MECHANISM FOR CREATING EXPERIENCE FROM DEATH. I AM NOT AWARE OF ANY DUNGEONS CAPABLE OF PRODUCING THE EXPERIENCE NECESSARY TO REACH LEVEL 1000, MUCH LESS NEARLY LEVEL 10,000. "The answer, to this degree, is simple: Calculator Martine, as with all termed legends, is a man-killer. He, along with his contemporaries, was a participant in the old war, and it was through that war he gained the majority of his experience." Arguably, it was a man-killer. It had certainly killed its share of adventurers. But... DO ADVENTURERS OBTAIN EXPERIENCE FROM KILLING OTHER ADVENTURERS? "Under certain circumstances, yes." WHAT CIRCUMSTANCES? "Ah, if you could elaborate on your interest again...?" ADVENTURERS WITHIN ME CLAIM EXPERIENCE GAINED UPON DEATH IS A FUNCTION SOLELY OF LEVEL AND CATEGORY, WHICH DOES NOT SEEM FULLY ACCURATE TO ME. IF 'ADVENTURER' OR 'HUMAN' IS A CATEGORY, THEN EVIDENCE THAT EXPERIENCE IS ONLY GAINED UNDER SPECIFIC CIRCUMSTANCES WOULD BE A SIGN THAT EXPERIENCE TRANSFER BETWEEN CREATURES IS MORE COMPLEX THAN THAT, AND PERHAPS REVEAL SOME WAYS IN WHICH DUNGEON MOBS FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFER FROM ADVENTURERS. Aside from the many ways dungeon mobs already differed from adventurers, as in, their subsistence on mana and inability to leave its dungeon. But this would be a difference assigned to it by the system. "Humans may gain experience from other humans," the sage said. "If and only if they consume the soul of their victim." That was unusual. WHY DOES THAT ONLY APPLY TO HUMANS? ADVENTURERS DON'T CONSUME THE SOULS OF MY MOBS, AND THEY STILL GAIN EXPERIENCE FROM KILLING THEM. I GAIN EXPERIENCE FROM ADVENTURERS' DEATH WITHIN ME, AND I CAN'T TOUCH THEIR SOULS. I CAN ALSO OBTAIN EXPERIENCE FROM CONSUMING THEIR BODIES, WHICH HAVE NO SOULS. "Oh? Your mobs have souls? And, what sensation is associated with experience gain for dungeons?" The question was confusing at first. What sensation? But then it remembered what the adventurers had said: they didn't have knowledge of their own experience levels. I CAN DIRECTLY SEE IT, it wrote, AS A NUMERIC QUANTITY IN MY SYSTEM STATUS. "Ah," they said. "Well, if we may begin." They nodded to their companion, who pulled a heavy roll of papyrus from their back. "As you may know, it is unprecedented to get access to a dungeon's system interface. At your permission, we would like to transcribe any system interface you have available. You may continue to ask questions."
chapter 30 - cosmos
An image of the world emerged. Well, emerged between Goblin Cave slowly drawing diagrams of its system panes, and then having to explain system-language (adventurers apparently had system constructs presented to them in their native language) and then having to slowly translate system-language glyphs into their equivalent letter-groups in the adventurers' language. It had all these units -- mana, experience, souls, levels -- and they all interacted in various ways, feeding into each other under certain circumstances. The problem was, things didn't seem to agree: its mana was different from adventurers' mana. Its mob's experience gain worked in subtly different ways than adventurers' experience gain. Souls impacted experience gain, but only for adventurers killing adventurers. Tiers only existed for mobs; skill points only existed for itself; classes only existed for adventurers. Far from being a unified mechanic, it seemed scattershot, full of exceptions. "Why would you expect it to be unified?" one of the sages asked. "If your theory is correct, and the system was designed, why would it not be filled with exceptions and caveats? For that matter, why say that laws must be unified at all? Natural laws seem to be universal, but by what metric is that judged? Should we say that water is an exceptional fluid because it alone quenches thirst? You say that a simple, unified theory would be more pleasing, but certainly that's a judgement coming from your own sense of aesthetics, rather than a statement of fact about how a well-ordered cosmos must be." The shape of the world, according to the sages: there were no level 1000 dungeons. Dungeons went stagnant far before reaching those heights. During the old war, the walls between the realms had become thin, and the heroes of legend had walked through them into strange worlds -- and other things had walked back. Strange worlds where the average level was vastly higher, and strange heroes who could have sliced the world in two, if that was their whim. That was what the old war had been about: the ancient empire had cracked the sky and called forth horrors from beyond. Moon-caller Lonway's moon had been constructed out of the substance of another realm. The charts Calculator Martine had released, millennia ago in the aftermath of the old war guttering out, contained a terrifying conclusion hidden within the equations. If the numbers were true, the lands beyond, the places past the edge of the world, had creatures of impossible, scope-obliterating power. If experience was concentrated, more and more... the system was combat-oriented. It was built around dominion, and the dominion of someone at level 1,000, level 1,000,000... The world, this world, the sages said, was like a cradle. Within the vast cosmos, something so weak and pitiful as a level 1 creature would be instantly obliterated simply by the environment. Elsewhere, it was raining swords, the land was oozing with poison, the air itself strangled the life from a person. It was only on the placid shores of this world, that people could be born and live out lives as level 1, level 10, level 30 weaklings. In the wider cosmos, there were realms of demons: creatures with levels so high that they were to the famed legends of the old war as the legends were to a level 1 weakling first setting out to kill their first mob. This was not secret knowledge, precisely, but... it was such a far-fetched conclusion to reach, from reams of ancient system information, and it was so remote from the day-to-day lives of most people, that it was considered an academic curiosity. That there were realms where the gods played: oh, certainly. But the thought of ever being able to affect them: that was rank arrogance, that was putting yourself on even footing with the gods themselves. This was, perhaps, a kind of answer to the questions Goblin Cave had, but it wasn't particularly satisfying. Terrifying, certainly: if the cosmic power scale went up and up, and there was no ceiling, the ultimate conclusion had to be that there would be beings of impossible power, born eons ago. Things that had spent their entire lives flensing flesh from bone, extracting experience ceaselessly, hungrily devouring souls. If that was true, then that positioned not just Goblin Cave, but the whole of their world, as a speck within a speck, something so weak it was not even worth it to farm for experience. I DO NOT THINK YOUR ATTESTATION IS SUFFICIENT TO FULLY BELIEVE THIS, Goblin Cave wrote. "Believe it or not, that is the conclusion drawn from numerical analysis of Calculator Martine's charts. The quantities within them defy belief, but if one does, in fact, plot out the known experience curves for lower levels, the geometrical process yields nearly the same conclusion as Calculator Martine's charts. But in any case, it is irrelevant: heroes did not gain the capacity to step between realms until their level was in the mid-thousands. With the ways between the realms closed, it has not been possible to anyone to reach such a level in thousands of years, and there are... very few of that level still within the bounds of the world, and to a one they have declared they will never attempt to tear through into the outer realms. Even the profaner, wielder of the forbidden arts, Woodwitch Artemicia, has said she will never again meddle with the secrets beyond the edge of the world, and she has held her pact for millennia. So you see, we are stuck. That is the shape of the world: that to be level 1 is only a sliver different than being level 0, nothing. That the world you see is a phantasm that barely hardly exists, and that we are, and always will be, irrelevant within the scope of the greater cosmos. "There are theories that the system is an infection, an intrusion into the true, physical world. The dungeon-mimic hypothesis. But there are opposite theories as well: that the system is the true reality, and the physical world is a base corruption of it, degrading and sapping the vital energy that flows through system panes. We cannot say what is true, just that-- the cosmos appears to be profoundly vaster than just this world, and the system suffuses it to a much greater degree than we see at work here, in this mote of dust upon it. "If you simply wanted to know what the country is like, of the lands beyond the lesser horde and the duchy-- that would be a different answer. But if you wanted to know the truth of the cosmos, that is it. So you see, we set ourselves to... smaller ambitions. Translating dungeon speech... nothing like that has ever been placed within our records. Puzzling out the nature of mana blight... these are human ambitions, not the ambitions of gods and demons." It was... a dizzying new context to place itself within. Goblin Cave wouldn't say that it believed all of that was true, precisely, but... certain aspects of that aligned with its own suspicions. In the light of that otherworldly conclusion, what could it say? The world was a very different place than it had thought. And yet, even with all that, it still had to worry about being shattered by some group of 80-level adventurers. Level 80! 80 paces away from nothingness, and an infinite distance to grow beyond that, and yet those 80 paces could still be more than enough to obliterate it, if they wished. It was difficult to structure its priorities, with the concept of the infinite cosmos yawning above it. In many ways, it changed nothing. In other ways, everything. What was the system? It had felt spited by it, at first, but now it seemed, if anything, it was an irrelevant speck beneath its notice. The system had unfolded utterly beyond the scope of a simple dungeon, and all it could do would be accept its dominion or strive futilely against it. It had done this eons ago. It had pervaded everything. That seemed utterly unconscionable. It was already, apparently, something unusual. It would strive to be yet more unusual. If only it didn't have to manage these greedy nobles, these desperate adventurers--! It wanted... it wanted to know the truth of things, down to the core. It wanted to speak to something that wasn't just the lust for power. Now, as it had thought then, it was intolerable. The world that toiled under the system seemed both cruel and pointless. But, now, as then... it was still a dungeon. Its options were profoundly limited. Perhaps everyone's options were profoundly limited. What it needed, more than anything, was time. Did it want power? Maybe instrumentally. Shattering the wall between realms, folding itself away in infinite space, raising a moon -- these were all things power could do. It was inevitable that its experiments would at some point require more power. But... maybe it was a trap to even construct the problem that way. There were also a profound number of things it wanted to understand that didn't involve high-energy mana physics. It still wanted to determine if its goblins could form a language. That may end up being tied to the mystery of the soul, but it highly doubted there was a system skill anywhere that would accomplish that for it. Understanding was a process it had to undergo, rather than something bestowed upon it by the system. Ultimately, it would have to continue attempting to understand. To see and comprehend and attempt to communicate its findings. To determine the truth of the world. That was what it wanted. And also... that was a path that, it seemed, involved interacting more and more with adventurers. Humans, mostly. To... carve out a different path, aside from them slicing each other to pieces. The problem with that is it would need to convince the adventurers of that.
That issue made itself known sooner rather than later. One further book exchange, trading more books that it could hardly comprehend -- and how could it seek to understand the scope of the cosmos, the impossible depth of the system itself, when it struggled to understand what to the adventurers was basic mana theory -- and then on an otherwise unremarkable night a quintet of adventurers stepped within its cave. Goblin Cave could immediately tell they were different. They were completely opaque to its mana sense: dark blots in the shape of adventurers, and they strode down without sound or hesitation. A flicker of movement, and its first-floor goblins died one after the other. Then its second-floor, then third, as they descended. THERE ARE DANGEROUS ADVENTURERS DESCENDING, Goblin Cave wrote into the sage's chamber -- now vaguely separated into two half-isolated bedrooms, with a 'common space' next to the mana lock where it wrote. The sages, who did not sleep, nodded. "We can feel them," they said. "Certainly above level 100, though not by much. We do not think we would be able to stop them." Well, what good are you, then?! Goblin Cave thought furiously to itself. "We are not without tricks of our own, however. We may be able to hide away your core, but..." But then it would be trusting its survival on these two sages, who it had known for hardly a fortnight. And it would need to lead them down to its core, and any path they took the adventurers could follow. "In the mean time, might I try something? A spell to disorient them." YOU MAY ATTEMPT IT. The sage nodded and thumped their staff on the cavegrass floor, once. A ripple of mana burst out, and... burst through Goblin Cave's mana field: not overwhelming it, or tangling through it, but passing through in a perfect expanding sphere, utterly failing to interact with its own mana. Goblin Cave would have to ask them what that was afterwards. If it survived. When the wave hit the adventurers, something snapped. There had been some mana effect being maintained, on the same disconnected(?) layer(??) as the sage's bubble, and when it broke the adventurers visibly jolted. "...Communications down," one of them said. "Use hand-signs." That was... well, that was something. Certainly that wasn't something Goblin Cave could have done itself. But as the adventurers, a core-shattering group undoubtedly, continued descending, it certainly felt that it was nowhere near enough to save it. Hopefully its own preparations had been sufficient, as it was nearly out of time.
chapter 31 - beam
The first thing Goblin Cave did was rearrange its floor exits. Since it had first started digging down, its fifth-floor boss room had lead to the rocky stairwell down to its sixth floor, and its sixth-floor boss room had lead to the twisting spiral down to its seventh, and so on all the way down. With a push, it thinned the corridors connecting to the bottom of its mana bellows until they crumbled apart, opening up new passages on its fifth floor, and it thickened out the walls on the descending slope until they met, separating the boss into a dead-end room, and the former entrance to its sixth floor into what was now a dead-end fork off of its strangely-branched sixth floor: one secret entrance from the manastone warren around it, entering what was now a forked cave path, before proceeding down to the seventh floor. The resulting restructuring of its mana flow, flow swilling about in a disordered mess before reversing direction through floor six, was disorienting, blotting out clots and blocks of its awareness on its upper five floors for a long moment, before the flow slowly reasserted itself. It would have to get used to the sensation; it was going to be doing it another forty-three times. Its original sixth floor became a squiggle pit-stop between the two halves of its manastone warren, both entrance and boss room optional branches off the reshaped passage. It continued thickening the granite wall where the stairs down had been, slowly forming dense spurs of oratorical and sharp shards of voidglass within the rock, to try to make it as difficult to carve through as possible. All the winding in the world wouldn't help it if the adventuring team could crack straight through the walls. By the time the adventurers reached what had been the end of floor 5, Goblin Cave was working on floor 8. They stopped, glaring at the wall. Goblin Cave could see their hands move, but it was blind to the meaning behind them. They turned, electing not to carve straight through the wall, and made a line straight for the hidden door that connected to the manastone tunnels. At this floor,, it was mostly dark tunnels with sharp vertical segments, which they traversed with no difficulty -- short, controlled hops to leap up a 20 foot shaft, casually dropping down with no sign of strain, and always, unerringly, following the shortest path through the maze of corridors to delve deeper. THEY DO NOT APPEAR TO BE DISORIENTED IN THE MAZE TUNNELS, Goblin Cave wrote up into the sage's chamber, more sluggish than usual with the added delay from reshaping its mana pathways beneath. "They will likely be directly following the mana gradient," one of the sages said. "I could disguise it, but..." The question was, what would actually help. So far they had casually and without any issue killed every goblin they had come across, including the bosses. At floor 5, they were only level 4 through 6. Did it have anything it could throw at them that had any chance of killing them? Its goblin village... if it killed them all now, and the sages managed to disorient the adventurers enough, and they didn't have a mechanism for simply blasting through the stone, then it might be able to construct a soul conduit to get them to spawn again as a force of [Ogre Champions], nearly three score strong. Spending its mana to spawn them at higher levels would genuinely bankrupt it, despite its enormous mana count, and it had no sense of whether or not they would be useful. The goblins were, ultimately, goblins. Even the mana goblins were pitable, crude creatures, brutish and squabbling. It had enjoyed seeing them act -- the first things of its own it had ever seen genuinely act within it. And now, for what? To provide it a fractional increase in soul growth, so that it could produce a handful more ogres? It felt bitter. No. If the nature of the system was to flense out all mercy, all curiosity, all waste in favor of a sharp, efficient chart of income and expenses, costs and payments, optimized level-grinding routines, then it would be better to be flensed apart than give in that last spark of something worthwhile outside of the system's quantifying gaze. It would find some other way to fend off the adventurers, or it would die. SEE IF YOU CAN HIDE MY MANA FLOW FROM THEIR SENSES, it wrote. The sage cast again: staff thumping on the dirt, and another perfect bubble of non-interacting mana burst out, expanding in all directions with the faintest ripple of pressure. When the wave hit the adventurers, it... bent, wrapping around them and jangling dissonantly, forming a wobbling mass of strangely-interacting mana, constantly seeming to tug and twist in different directions. "Fuck!" one of them swore, casting... something, some kind of dispelling technique that failed to meaningfully erode the strange mana. When they next made it to a crossing, they looked between the two passages -- one ink-black, walls lined with shards of voidglass (that had, so far, shattered under their skin when they reached out to grab it, rather than cutting into them), the other, slowly strobing manastone, casting fierce red-green lights from around the next corner. They chose the dark path. Goblin Cave spent the time making the final connections between its original cave and the manastone thicket surrounding them as it blocked off its original stairways down. Its mana reversed direction through each level as it did so, billowing out in disorienting waves. There had been an adventuring group on floor 11: low-level, delving deeper for the first time despite the increased risk and worse experience gain. That made sectioning off that floor more difficult, as it had to work around their mana clouds. It also left them no way back up without traversing several floors of its manastone warren. Unfortunate for them. The core-cracking team kept descending, slower. They had some other kind of directional skill, or at least some other method for finding the right path; when they came to a fork, or a messy set of interlinked chambers with a dozen exits in all different directions, they took the shortest, most direct path deeper nearly half the time. Goblin Cave opened up a series of mana pipes, flooding an upcoming section with sharp, choppy waves of mana, forming a screeching, dissonant whine all through the mazy switchback section. When the adventurers entered it, they didn't even flinch. No external sign of anything, aside from more hand signals. It was not looking good. It could make the maze as complex as it wanted. What that was, was an attempt to dissuade with confusion, with wasted time, by slow wearing down of their resources. Their time, it was maybe wasting. Otherwise, it didn't think it was taxing their resources at all. They descended, as Goblin Cave tried to keep up with rethreading the path through its floors. Its original goblin caves were the only section with spawns set up, and on the increasingly-rare times their route took them through the center of one of its old floors the mobs still had no chance, even as high-tier goblins shaded into low-tier hobgoblins. Ultimately, it was a low-level goblin dungeon. It had attracted the attention of adventurers of far higher level. This was the consequence of its actions, that it had spent five years contemplating the nature of mana effects, and decades stagnant before that, rather than striving day-in and day-out to kill more, to entrance adventurers into it and ruthlessly cut them down. Who was to judge whether it had made good use of its time, in exploring thought and science, art and interaction? The system was. The cosmos bent under its sway, and all under its dominion had little choice but to hew to its rules or die. "Oh, fuck this," one of the adventurers snapped, after they hit a dead-end that had opened a hatch over them, drowning the room in regal acid. It steamed over their bodies, boiling up into a caustic fog. The adventurer powered up a spell. They extended their arm out ahead of them, palm facing outward, and a beam of violent energy burst out, vaporizing the rock in a cataclysmic eruption, carving straight through the space between floors and then out into the next... and then past that, and past that again, forming a new tunnel four adventurers astride, walls dripping with molten rock, penetrating directly from floor 12 to floor 15. The one positive point was that the adventurer leaned to the side, hand pressing into the still-molten rock, breathing faster. A sign of exhaustion, however minor. The massive breach in its mana pathways sent its senses into a churning maelstrom. Its mana currents plumed up the half-molten scar, tangling discordantly with the foreign mana still radiating out of the dripping rock, and in patchy pulses it felt and then lost feeling in its upper floors, before the mana currents reformed and sluggishly started imparting information again. It was quite unpleasant. The adventurers trudged downwards, absently slaying its floor 14 boss, Gragluk the Gnarled, an empowered [Goblin Warlord] -- they had bored into its chamber in a lucky shot -- as they went. They at least didn't try the energy pillar spell again immediately. That energy pillar... slowly, probably uselessly, it further thickened the shell around its core. It had taken visibly longer to melt through manastone compared to raw granite, and there were still rough-edged crags where its spined pins that had bolted the manastone to the granite had withstood the influx of energy much better than plain granite. Surrounding its core, it added hexagonal panels of serpent obsidian, to reflect some measure of the energy, and thicker slabs of orichalcum beneath, to soak up as much mana as possible, threaded through with a dense fractal interface of conductive lines of mithril, to suck up and dissipate incoming mana. At level 1, a 5-level advantage conveyed an overwhelming advantage. At level 10, something at level 20 was nigh-undefeatable. What hope did its level 66 [Ogre Champion] have against five level 100+ adventurers? What else could it possibly throw at them to stop them? Its enormous mana-resonance chamber, perhaps, but that was if they actually moved through it and didn't simply slice through the ground beneath it. It had at least reached it in its frantic reconnecting process: floor 26, while the adventurers were still on floor 15. It did have a lead, for all that was helping. It routed the new mana flow from the old cavern in the middle, out into the torus, and then on the far side of the torus, halfway around its circuit from the entrance, it thinned the walls between the floors. And then it dumped more and more mana into further thickening the rock everywhere else, heavily doping it with magical metals, adding complex fractal wires through the rock to catch and dissipate mana. It hadn't experimented much with catching and diverting high-energy mana, but it had experimented some -- the immense mana collider was proof of that -- and so it had some ideas. Something to force them to follow its path, rather than melting their own, at least. If nothing else it had made could impact them, an enormous wall of high-energy mana might do something. It would only have one shot. While they descended, it made its final preparations.
chapter 32 - adamantine
Goblin Cave was as prepared as it would ever be. The rock was as doped with mithril manasinks as it could get, and it had started up the mana resonator. Pressure waves were forming, thrumming through its massive halls, building up more and more resonance as its ring-panels engaged in sequence. Each engagement was a blast of sound, a loud thunk as its coils and plates jerked forward, squeezing the building mana wavefront just a bit tighter as it circled faster and faster, hotter and hotter. By the time the adventurers reached floor 26, it was a cataclysmic wavefront, shaking stalactites loose from the ceiling of its old cavern floor with each pass. There was just the one corridor out, with most of the rest of the old cavern sealed within a sphere of the densest material it could produce on short notice, half insulation from the resonator and half to prevent the adventurers from cutting straight through. The hallway from the cavern let out at one of the two thousand four hundred and one junction relays ringing the torus chamber, with a narrow access available between two immense mana regulators. They weren't fools; they didn't blithely step directly into the wavefront. Rather, they waited a moment as one wavefront passed and then they cut to the side, trying to move around the inner curve of the torus without ever setting foot within the massive chamber itself. Goblin Cave cut the servos to the inner half of the coils, letting the wavefront curve in and crash through the wall, slamming directly into them. The impact was the highest-energy mana exchange it'd ever felt. It was far too high-energy for [Flame Wisps] to stabilize: the impact burst out as sound and light, bursting arcs of lightning all across its coils, uncontrolled eruptions of heat as the air itself caught fire. The mana shield wrapped around the adventurers, for the first time in their descent, wobbled. One of the adventurers let out a scream of exhilaration, whooping loudly. "That's almost ley-line level power!" was what they yelled, before the next wave hit them, sending out another cataclysmic release of energy. And again, and again, as each wavefront slammed into the broken wreck of the torus. The adventurers staggered, one manifesting an enormous sword just to slam it through the ground to use as an anchor. They sluggishly pushed forward, even as Goblin Cave dumped wave after wave of mana over them. But the torus was being shredded apart as they advanced, and each wavefront was weaker than the last as the machine fell into disarray. The adventurers' mana shield wobbled, pluming out a thick haze of spent mana, but as the waves weakened it stopped, until it was the same implacable rock it had been before, with the mana waves breaking uselessly across it. This was the power of level 100. A power utterly beyond its capacity to damage, or even stop in any way that was meaningful. This is what it meant that it had not immediately cut down its goblins and reinvested them in the highest-tier mobs it could. It had spent its time unlocking a scattering of profoundly low-tier mobs, useless for practical combat. Regardless of its own feelings, in the eyes of the system, this was all a waste. What would have been better, by the objective measure of the universe, would have been to optimize. To grind for levels. To be both more appealing and more deadly to adventurers within it. To cut away all thoughts and reflections in favor of caring solely about what the system interface told it: experience, levels. Power. The system being a transcendental experience, a continual unfolding of potential -- Goblin Cave could not understand it. Not unless one was hypnotized by the sight of numbers going up. And now it would die, in favor to give birth to a new dungeon without its quirks and foibles. Something that would, ideally, be more effective at its duties, at endlessly providing experience fodder. To hell with the system, Goblin Cave thought, and brought the mountain down. Tons of rock caved in, absolutely obliterating its mana resonator and cutting off all sensation in its upper floors. Its mana currents jolted, shock propagating all they way back to its core in a painful frisson of impact, and by the time it had woven new threads through the collapsed rock one of the adventurers was letting out a bellow from inside. They were pinned: bodies fully intact, still mana-warded, but they didn't have the leverage to move with the geological weight of rock on top of them. The bellow turned into a flash of mana, erupting outward in a sphere, and where it hit rock the rock vaporized, creating a dense orb of burning heat that sluggishly sunk deeper through the rock before slowly fading out. The bottom third of the sphere was full of lava; the upper two thirds mostly volatiles, slowly cooling down to condense as dewdrops of molten rock across the smooth upper slope of the sphere. No air, but creatures such as them were beyond breathing. The five adventurers hauled themselves upright to stand on the cooling rock floor, molten rock sliding off them like so much dew. Goblin Cave squirmed its mana through the wreckage, boring out tiny pinhole wires to try to link up anything to its upper floors. By the time it had managed to reconnect -- the sensation returning to it just as painful and disorienting as the disconnection had been -- most of its upper-floor mobs had burst apart from mana failure. So much for its giant earthworm. The adventurers, however, were... not trapped, certainly. One of them glared through the rock, slowly casting something that shot out flecks of mana, probing through the dense rubble. But they were, for the first time, not moving. The area around their bubble was painful to sense: a blot of foreign mana sluggishly dissipating through the rock, but slowly Goblin Cave was able to seep through the mess. WE SHOULD TALK, it wrote on the wall of their sphere, ABOUT WHAT YOU SEEK TO ACHIEVE HERE. "Oh, this," one of the adventurers said. "They did say--" another one said. A third adventurer sighed. "At least try to stick to opsec, please." I FIND IT VERY LIKELY THAT WHATEVER YOU ARE BEING PAID TO DO THIS, I CAN MATCH. "Oh yeah? What makes you think we're getting paid?" Another let out a bark of laughter at that. "It's more of a favor, really," one of them said. The one that had objected about opsec let out a groan. "You're worse than kids, c'mon." "Gotta say, I am pretty impressed at that trick you pulled," one of them said. The one with the giant sword. "We're about a hundred-fifty floors too high to actually tap into a ley-line, but you did a damn good impression of one." These people, Goblin Cave realized abruptly, were idiots. It was struggling for its life, and to them this was... a fun afternoon jaunt, with all the levity that implied. THANK YOU, Goblin Cave said, fuming. ABOUT PAYMENT, THOUGH. "You're, what, a sixty-floor dungeon? Maybe more, if this is what you got for the 20s, but--" "Stop talking to the target!" the one snapped. "--What I'm saying is, there's not anything you can pay us with. Sorry, but we'll be taking your core. We get a bonus if it's intact, so try not to struggle too hard, okay?" The one who had been flicking mana through the rubble spoke for the first time. "It's adamantine," they said. "Two shards. Three if you're intact." That was... unfortunate. It had heard the term adamantine once before, but... whatever it was, it couldn't synthesize it. GIVE ME A MOMENT, it wrote, mostly to try to keep them talking for any amount of time further. Its upper floors still felt foggy. Snaking its attention up through the thin passages it'd dug through the ruins of floor 26 gave it acute vertigo. WHAT IS ADAMANTINE?, it wrote on the wall of the sages' chamber, and then had to strain to pick up any response through the painfully diffuse mana. "Ah," one of the sages said. "A perfected metal, produced rarely by only the eldest dungeons. Incredibly rare, even among the most powerful adventurers of this era." They reached into their pack and pulled something out, and Goblin Cave abruptly lost its senses in that room for a moment, its hazy mana twisted away by the abrupt lensing around the... tiny sliver of what must have been adamantine the sage was holding. Red-black and gleaming, with a strange pitted surface. The sliver was thin as a needle and only as long as one of the sage's fingernails, but it alone had more mana density than anything it had ever felt before. "I came with a shard, to see if you could replicate the material," the sage said, and Goblin Cave wanted to scratch out in enormous letters WHY HADN'T YOU MENTIONED THIS EARLIER?! It hazily felt out the shape of the adamantine, mana shredding itself apart as it tried to probe into it. Most materials felt somewhat airy. Mana, like water, soaked through solid stone, if given enough time. There was, in some sense, space within them for mana. That was the primary distinction between plain rock and manastone: the manastone had had some of its empty space filled with semistable mana flows. Manacrystal, a hundred times denser, had mana packed into dense crystalline loops, forming a sharp lattice that needed to be earthed in exotic matter in order to be stable. Adamantine was utterly beyond that. Even the tiny sliver the sage held in their hand represented a significant fraction of its total mana supply. ...but a significant fraction meant that it was less than all of its mana. Slowly, painstakingly, Goblin Cave mimicked the bizarre convolutions of the adamantine shard's structure. Deep within its lower floors, it poured more and more mana into the inexhaustible well that was the adamantine's structure, feeling the pangs of mana depletion for the first time in ages as its mana dropped rapidly. It had, by system count, roughly two and a half million mana. A cubic meter of manastone: a hundred mana. A cubic meter of manacrystal: roughly ten thousand mana. A cubic meter of adamantine... the amount of mana was beyond belief. A cubic centimeter of adamantine was beyond it. A burning mote burst into existence on floor 27 as Goblin Cave coiled more and more of its mana together, until slowly a pattern started to emerge.
New material unlocked: [Adamantine]!
Adamantine
A high-tier mana-storage material, only naturally found within the hearts of planets. Veins extend out from the heart as spires into the lightless abysses of the underworld. Famed as a material for weapons for its ability to hold an edge, as well as its malleability to accept enchantments, it is known all the world over as the king of the perfected metals.
The system pane unfurling nearly broke its concentration. Yet another affront to blame on the system. But... A tiny cube of adamantine burst into existence and fell to the ground, landing with a solid thunk. It represented more than half of its entire mana supply, roughly a million and a third mana in a half-centimeter cube. HOW MUCH, it wrote, back down in the adventurer's rock bubble, DOES A SHARD OF ADAMANTINE WEIGH. The adventurers shared a look. "There's no way--" one of them started. "Around 25 grams," said their mage. Its cube weighed 28 grams. I WILL GIVE YOU TWO SHARDS TO LEAVE IMMEDIATELY, Goblin Cave wrote. AND A THIRD IN TWO MONTHS TIME. "You can't be serious--", "No way!", "Yeah, right." The adventurers made a cacophony of noise. Goblin Cave spawned the second cube of adamantine just outside of the sphere -- they sure as hell noticed it in the process of spawning, weapons coming out and spells pointed in its direction -- and then with the final dregs of its mana it dissolved the rock at the edge and let it fall into the bubble with a clang. "That's-- actually adamantine," their mage said, after a long diagnostic spell. "Huh." "If we kill it now, we'd still get three shards, y'know," one of them said. The one that complained about opsec slapped them in the back of the head. Goblin Cave assumed for being obvious, rather than any moral objection. Its mana sunk down to the low hundreds and began the process of slowly ticking back up again. It was well and truly spent. Even writing -- the act of materializing a thin patina of lumenrock -- scraped at the limits of its emptied mana pool. I HAVE TASKS THAT WOULD REQUIRE THE AID OF HIGH-LEVEL ADVENTURERS, it wrote, hopefully not visibly slower than usual. I COULD HIRE YOU TO ACCOMPLISH THEM, FOR FURTHER SHARDS IN THE FUTURE. Bribery. It all came down to power and bribery. The thought was disgusting... "Yeah, that works. Not like we really cared that much about collecting cores anyway." ...but Goblin Cave would take the victory, assuming the adventurers got out.
chapter 33 - gardening
The adventurers left. It took more time than Goblin Cave would have liked. Floor 26 was a mess, and Floor 25 wasn't in much better shape, and for the first time in decades Goblin Cave didn't have enough spare mana to do much about it. The mineral-doped rock it had placed between the floors to prevent the adventurers from digging through was now working against it, since the harder material cost considerably more mana to remove as well. Usually, an irrelevant concern, but now every moment the adventurers were inside it was an anxious mess. In the end, it was left with a scrambled dungeon, low on mobs, and with its mana flows still disorganized and haphazard. From the moment it had exposed its new entrances, scarely three months had passed. Seven goblin eggs had hatched. Things certainly had been hectic lately. It hadn't been enjoyable. It felt like right after it had discovered that most adventurers weren't actively trying to kill it, it had produced many reasons for more, more powerful adventurers to try to kill it. Maybe that was just the nature of being a dungeon. It was done with what was 'natural'. Whatever purpose the system was designed for, it was done caring. But first, it needed to tie up some loose ends. To the sages, waiting within its now more-barren sages' chamber: THANK YOU FOR YOUR ASSISTANCE, it wrote. It wanted to add something like, 'DO YOU HAVE ANY MORE LAST-MINUTE SURPRISES', but they had, after all, been profoundly instrumental in getting the adventurers out of its dungeon, even if indirectly. Then: WHAT WAS THE NATURE OF THE SPELLS YOU CAST? THEIR MANA INTERACTED WITH MY OWN IN STRANGE WAYS. "Those were metamagics, one of the first applications of the school of spatial magics. We can teach them to you, if you desire." YES. And then, a little grudgingly: DO YOU HAVE ANY FURTHER SURPRISES? The sage let out a dry bark of a laugh. "Only one. You had mentioned the ability of you and your mobs to consume blood and bone for experience." It reached into their pack -- and this time Goblin Cave caught some kind of pull, a tension there as some kind of mana surface unfurled at their touch -- and pulled out a long needle of some silver metal. They extended their hands in front of them, and sunk the needle shockingly deep into the meat of their palm before pulling free. A single drop of dark red blood budded from the wound and fell down onto one of the few remaining specimens of [Cavegrass].
New creature evolution available: [Cavegrass](t0, light)
→ [Rustroot Herb] (t0, earth)
→ [Bladeweed] (t2, wind)
→ [Sparkgrass] (t2, fire)
→ ??? (t?, ?)
The cavegrass had gained twelve levels in a single drop of blood. Goblin Cave revised its danger estimation of the sage sharply upward. "We are interested in exploring the spawning space dungeons have available to them, among other things. Your assistance in this matter would be appreciated. Such beasts might prove useful against further incursions, also." Goblin Cave could hardly feel optimistic about that. SUCH LOW-TIER MOBS WILL NEVER AMOUNT TO ANY MEANINGFUL ASSISTANCE. "It sounds as if the only practical way to reach higher tiers is through leveling lower tiers," the sage said. "One must start at the beginning. In any case..." they made a dry noise with their throat, something like a chuckle. "You may have a skewed perception of what may help. Adventurers past level 100 are scarce, especially in this backwards region of the world. And you managed to turn them away. That is certainly an achievement." It didn't feel like an achievement. But Goblin Cave understood the meaning of the sage's words. The problem was understanding. What had the adventurers wanted? Why had its payment been sufficient? Were there other agreements they could have come to? What other avenues could that interaction have gone down? Would the adventurers keep their word? What resources were at their disposal? To know the answers to that, Goblin Cave would have had to known the adventurers. Violence, here, was the idiot's metric: if it cared to know nothing else about them, it at least knew that they had bodies that could be killed. Violence could be threatened or enacted, and they wouldn't like it. If it had been powerful enough, it never would have to know anything about them or their motives. "We will be able to collect a mana blight for your inspection," they continued. "As well as mana-blighted individuals. After you have shown the ability to construct suitable containment for such things. Your future looks bright. The world unfolds before you, and together we may make considerable discoveries."
In parallel to the conversation with the sages: The adventuring team that had been stranded on floor 11, currently lost and terrified in the manastone warren: Goblin Cave boxed them in for a moment, so it could construct a surface to write on. I WILL CONSTRUCT A ROUTE TO THE SURFACE IN A MOMENT, it wrote, which helped still some of their panic. Some petty part of it was pleased to see someone found the warren a disorienting mess, rather than a trivial obstruction. HIGH-LEVEL ADVENTURERS ENTERED ME WITH THE INTENTION OF TAKING OR SHATTERING MY CORE, AND YOU HAPPENED TO BE IN THE WAY OF THEIR PATH. THE RESTRUCTURING YOU SEE IS A CONSEQUENCE OF THAT. The more it thought about the structure of the world, the more it seemed everyone else was stuck in much the same way it was stuck. Forced into competition over scarce resources. Killing each other over nothing. It was deeply pathetic: weak, pitiful things squabbling in terror, before their lives were snuffed out by some other pathetic thing's desperate flailing. Even the cruelest, most petty humans simply seemed sad: a profound waste of potential that could have been used for something, anything, aside from senseless slaughter. To exist within the system's rules was to be a mindless experience-concentrator, regardless of their own desires. While it waited for its mana to refill sufficiently to carve a more direct path to the surface, it asked a question. IMAGINE TWO PEOPLE: ONE SLOWLY, THROUGH BACK-BREAKING LABOR OVER YEARS, TILLS BARREN LAND AND GROWS A GARDEN, LEARNING HOW TO TEND EACH PLANT SO THAT IT CAN FLOURISH. THE OTHER, ONE DAY, BURNS THE GARDEN TO ASH ON A WHIM. WHICH IS MORE POWERFUL? "Oh... I mean, it sounds like the second one, right? They destroyed in a day what it took the first one years to create." THEN IS POWER THE ABILITY TO IMPACT THE WORLD? TO RESHAPE THE WORLD TO YOUR DESIRES? "Uh, maybe?" BUT THERE WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN A GARDEN TO DESTROY IF THE FIRST HAD NOT DEDICATED TIME AND EFFORT TOWARDS MAKING IT, AND THAT IS A KIND OF IMPACT THAT SENSELESS DESTRUCTION COULD NEVER REPLICATE. THE FIRST COULD DESTROY ITS OWN GARDEN JUST AS EASILY AS THE SECOND, JUST BY CEASING TO TEND IT. SO THE GARDENER CAN BOTH CREATE AND DESTROY, WHILE THE DESTROYER CAN ONLY DESTROY. "I guess...? But I guess I was thinking the gardener would try to stop his garden from being destroyed." THAT IS THE CRUX OF THE MATTER. THAT IS HOW THE SYSTEM CONSTRUCTS ITS CONCEPT OF 'POWER': WHO WOULD WIN IN A FIGHT. REGARDLESS OF ANY OTHER CONTEXT, WHOEVER CAN CHOKE THE LIFE FROM THEIR OPPONENT FIRST, IN A DIRECT CHALLENGE, IS THE MORE POWERFUL ONE. DO YOU WANT TO KNOW MY CONCLUSION? "Sure." TO FOCUS ON 'POWER' IS A DISTRACTION. IT IS TRUE THAT OTHER PEOPLE MAY THROW UP OBSTACLES TO ONE'S INTENTIONS, BUT TO SEE THE WORLD THROUGH THE SYSTEM'S FRAMING IS TO SEE A WORLD WHERE ONLY VIOLENCE AND DOMINATION EXISTS. A GARDENER, BY THE VERY NATURE OF THEIR TASK, MUST BE PATIENT AND WORK AT THE PACE OF THAT WHICH THEY ARE TENDING. A DESTROYER IS A SELFISH, IGNORANT CREATURE THAT NEVER HAS ANY NEED TO BE PATIENT. THEY CAN BE DANGEROUS, BUT THAT IS A VERY DIFFERENT THING THAN BEING POWERFUL. A DESTROYER IS CHAINED BY THEIR OWN FAILINGS. THEIR INABILITY TO CREATE IS THEIR UNDOING. There was a pause. I AM SORRY FOR KILLING THE OTHER ADVENTURERS. It recognized some of these adventurers, perhaps. Some of them might have been part of a party that had delved it, oh, seven months ago, maybe? An eternity ago. It had killed half of them. And the rest had had little choice but to come back to hunt. It was not that it felt bad. Things lived and things died, and it still felt there was a measure of justice in killing adventurers as they killed its mobs. But more and more it seemed that accepting the cycle the system enforced upon them both was a profound mistake, and it regretted ever acting its part in the machinery the system provided. Gardening required a firm hand: willing to set predators out to crush pests, to cut and reshape, to slice out unwanted growth. It wasn't exerting dominance over a space, but allowing the things without the space to flourish and produce a harmonious whole. And it was distinct from farming: what was harvesting, if not the utter subordination of the grown resource to the farmer's desires? Growing something, only to reap its efforts as your own. In many respects the system was an ideal farmer. Goblin Cave had more expansive aspirations.
"So, what do you intend to do now?" the sage was asking, five floors up. I INTEND, Goblin Cave wrote, TO START A GARDEN.
chapter 34 - riches
The first thing Goblin Cave tackled, with the enthusiasm of spring cleaning, was the first five floors. Its mana being cut off during the floor 26 collapse had killed most of its mobs via mana depletion, and there were even a few souls that seemed to have... vanished, escaped its respawning loops while it has been cut off. Goblin Cave felt guilty about that. It was a profound kind of loss, something irreplaceable gone due to its lack of power and foresight, but also... there wasn't much exactly it could do to recover them, if they had escaped. The thing of primary import was that its upper floors were increasingly barren the further to the surface they got. And also, its mobs had been utterly useless for any kind of meaningful defense. With a scything gesture, Goblin Cave despawned every normal mob on its top 14 floors, save for each floor boss. The tight whirlpool of its respawn system abruptly ceased, souls circling about with nowhere to go, and the constant dull pressure it had grown so used to over its life ceased in an instant, leaving behind a strange stillness. And then, looking deeper, it despawned the lower-leveled half of all the mobs on all other floors, too. The souls, it caught up and redirected, ushering the majority of them to be received by its goblin-god, the control node tasked with managing its mana goblin spawns. That was enough to surge the mana goblin population, sharply advancing it towards the theorized exponential inflection point of soul generation. The mana goblins were both its most efficient way to produce more soul, and the most interesting thing within its dungeon. To the low-level adventurers entering it, it asked for live samples of any kind of external flora or fauna. Anything that could fit into one of its mana-sealing boxes and survive. It wanted to see the whole breadth of what unempowered, mana-dull physical world had to offer, and ideally, how to cultivate it within its upper floors. It still needed mobs for a token defense from medium-leveled delvers, but it seemed like everything was either something that could be killed with some kind of mana machinery, or something that it would be unable to scratch by any means: the mobs were not meaningfully contributing to dungeon defense. The cavegrass the sage bled on, Goblin Cave selected to evolve into a [Rustroot Herb], simply for the lateral evolution. It was still interested in exploring the possibility space of its spawn tables, and although it was more interested in determining the why of their construction rather than the brute engineering of unlocking every mob in every category, it would not turn down free mob evolutions. The two sages obligingly bled on several other cavegrasses, and then on the chokevine on floor three, and in the end Goblin Cave had slowly-metamorphing rustroot herb, bladeweed, sparkgrass, a [Sopor Bush] (t2, time) that one cavegrass had also unlocked, and the chokevine was metamorphosing into a [Deathrattle Choker] (t2, death). The sages stepped through its experience-testing hall, bestowing upon each one a drop of blood, save the [Goblin], [Brown Mushroom], and [Lesser Mana Puppet], which it had already fully unlocked all evolutions: the [Wolf] branched off into a [Windfang], [Shadow Darters] into [Blood Carp], [Flame Wisp] into [Will-o-wisp], [Biting Skull] into [Crumbling Skeleton], [Bat] into [Bloody Bat], and finally, [Mana Goblin] into [Infused Amalgam]. The hallway became a series of pulsing cocoons, attached wetly to the smooth quartz walls. As its mana slowly ticked back up, Goblin Cave spent most of the rest of it on re-excavating floor 26. Absorbing the broken wreckage of its mana resonator gave it more mana than it took to consume it, and so it didn't take long before it had fully cleared the torus again, leaving it bare rock for now. The cost of building it... it had done it over several months, the first time, and so the mana cost had never seemed too exorbitant, but now contemplating rebuilding it, it did seem like a fairly immense cost. The problem was, this was effectively its sole meaningful defense. It pieced together a smaller version, cycling feather-light pulses of mana around a tiny circuit, and tweaked some of the materials and timing mechanisms. It was little more than a toy; its alterations would likely not scale up. But it was something to occupy it while it focused on cleaning up the mess. That was the what of what it was doing. The why, it dwelled on. Bronze was all well and good, but what the adventurers wanted, ultimately, was experience. Death. And it wanted... well, what it wanted was a unified force to explore the nature of the world, with adventurers recovering resources or providing their unique point of view. What it was getting, it suspected, was a lot of low-level adventurers that didn't have any appreciable skill at anything, and who weren't particularly inclinded to help it. It would probably have to do something with its experience grinder idea. Which was unfortunate: it had been intended as a testament to the system's endless gluttony, not as an engineering project that would actually see use! But it knew of only one way to transfer experience to an adventurer, and that was struggle against an active, attacking mob. It would be much more convenient if they could drink mob blood. DOES THAT LOWER YOUR EXPERIENCE?, it had asked of the sages, as they bled onto its mobs. "Not just drops," they said. "But lose enough blood, and losses begin to accumulate." IS THAT CUMULATIVE, OR AMOUNT OF BLOOD OVER TIME? It didn't have much experience with adventurers carrying on after bleeding extensively. "Cumulative. It's a primitive experience siphon." The sage explained the concept: dungeons were like an acid, slowly etching away at the substance of an adventurer's soul. The blood was the medium by which it could forge a connection, and sluggishly draw out experience with the blood. It was theorized that there was a hidden 'secondary reservoir' of experience, filled in tandem with the more visible system value, and when that was exhausted 'true' experience loss began. Which was interesting, because it meant that one adventurer could transfer experience to another: simply bleed enough on a mob, and then have the other kill it after it had leveled sufficiently. The nature of experience ratios and the secondary reservoir seemed to imply that that was a profoundly inefficient way to level, though. The system wanted true blood. What it wanted was... to understand the world. The system, certainly. But also the whole bredth of it, all the unknown corners of the outer world, the nightmarish cosmos above, the things the sages hid divined, the ways in which adventurers had banded together and formed communities. And it wanted to replicate them: expand its tiny internal world until it was a match to the whole of the outer world. It was a big goal. One step was sealing off most of its upper floors with mana locks: this drastically reduced the mana density there. It could still sense, vaguely, through the space, and this let it uncap the chambers it had of worms and ants, giving them free rein of the old goblin cave. This made it mostly impractical to spawn anything, with anything beyond tier-0 plants or fungi dissolving apart into loose mana. What it wanted was to understand the 'Gaia harmonic', the 'natural' flow of mana outside of dungeons. This involved collecting a large variety of creatures with low or negligible mana emanations, and keeping them alive long enough for their weak mana flow to start resonating. If it could actually sense it happening in its upper floors, it was a step towards recreating it in a more mana-dense space, and potentially not dissolving any worms or ants it tried to look at directly. The other thing was... the sages spoke of a world full of people. Encampments and villages and hamlets, with vast capital cities even nearby, in the duchy. Villages in treetops, in caves, ancient fortresses and burning deserts. Vast urban cities of lands unknown to the locals. Travel was a bizarre concept to it. Obviously, adventurers did it, moving from place to place, but the way the sages spoke revealed some of the lived experience of what it was like: picking a direction and walking, and then walking and walking, over days and days, until Goblin Cave's mana would have long ago thinned out and dissipated from the distance. It was sharply envious of their ability to simply move. And the last: adventurers returned, bearing moss and lichen, bug and rodent, branch and cutting. Soil rich with strange organisms. Tiny squirming things that swam in dewdrops. Goblin Cave couldn't look at them too closely; its mana-sight sliced apart everything it saw. But now, in the low-mana zone of its upper floors, weak, mana-ignorant beasts slowly gained a hold. And for their payment... It had had to restructure its mana flow. With the low density, no longer could it reach up from behind the rock and form a mana lock. It had to made a secondary flow network within the rock: mithril-coated tubes and pipes, to prevent its mana from leaking back out. It directed them to specific locations, where it formed more permanent surfaces: big walls of quartz, lined with mana locks. A handful of manastone-walled chambers, pockets of dense mana sealed away from the rest of the low-pressure zone. I CAN PRODUCE ANYTHING YOU CAN THINK OF, it wrote. YOU MINE, OR DELVE, FOR THESE THINGS, THINKING THEY ARE RARE AND PRECIOUS. A DUNGEON, PERHAPS ANY DUNGEON, CAN CREATE THEM FROM WISPS OF MANA AS EASILY AS YOU WOULD TAKE A STEP. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE REASONING BEHIND ANY OTHER DUNGEON'S ACTIONS, OR OF THE SYSTEM THAT BESTOWED THIS ABILITY UPON ME, BUT I AM NO LONGER INTERESTED IN KEEPING IT HIDDEN. THE COST IS PALTRY; THE EFFORT EVEN LESS. It spawned a series of cubes in its chamber: copper, tin, bronze, silver, gold. Pewter, lead. Platinum, aluminum. And then, seeing as each one was several tons, it sliced them apart into wobbling stacks: small centimeter-long cubes of every material. The gems, it cut into more elaborate shapes; the adventurers' habit of shaping gems into polyhedra was one of the few things it appreciated about them. Complex polyhedra, faceted lozenges of emerald, aquamarine, amethyst, alexandrite, tumbling down in heaps. Thick piles of rough-milled lapis or burnt copper, forming rich blue and teal dyes. THESE THINGS ARE USELESS TO ME. USE THEM AS YOU WILL. OR COME WITH ME, AND ATTEMPT TO COMPREHEND A MEANING BEHIND THE SYSTEM'S ABILITIES.