The Survivor Becomes a Dungeon

Vitmori POV

With the kids put to bed and Legosi opting to go patrol the forests surrounding the village to keep himself busy, I was left to my own devices all over again and soon found myself in the castle's library.

It was a single room with shelves that lined two of the walls from the floor to the ceiling on my right and left; with a pair of large windows with thick-looking curtains on the opposing wall from where I walked in.

There was a rolling ladder set up along each wall of books for ease of access to the higher shelves, and in the middle of the room was a single long table that had six chairs for those who wished to read in the room as far as I could tell.

Back towards the far wall between the windows, there was a well-padded and frankly comfortable-looking lounge chair for those who really wanted to be comfortable while reading, but since I can't even enjoy such comforts, I quickly moved on from it and began looking over the books on the shelves.

All in all, the library was fairly small compared to the libraries of my world, even considering the small-town public libraries I've stopped through over the years. However, at the end of the day, I suppose it really isn't fair to compare what I know to be a standard library to what was in this room. If I had to find a comparison, this room was more like the personal study of a particularly affluent lawyer or something. One that liked to show off with all their tomes of law and glossaries with their walls of shelves that had the occasional overpriced knick-knack or small sculpture.

Despite its small size, I could see myself spending a few weeks reading everything here if I wasn't already preoccupied with making my way to the capital. I... Missed reading. Sure I've collected and read a few books here and there these last few years, but it's been decades since I had the time to sit down and read just for the fun of it on a day off or something.

Now that I was here, I wasn't sure where to even begin. After all, each and every single one of these books is a veritable treasure trove of untapped knowledge never before seen in my world. Even if the knowledge is mundane or basic, these pages, the very words on them have never been seen by anyone from my world. While I could probably speed read through a few of them throughout the night, that isn't the proper way to enjoy a book; so I have to look through all these books and pick just one to commit my time to.

Not bothering with trying to turn on the crystal lights in the room, I conjured a simple ball of white light and had it follow me by hovering over my shoulder as I started looking through the books, plucking them at random and giving the first few pages cursory glances to see what they were about.

There were all kinds of interesting-looking books, there were fictional stories about romances or tales of heroes, tomes of history on families of particular note in the country, a glossary on technical terms in regards to alchemy, a tome on alchemy and... Oh? "A Deep Dive on Dungeons..." I read aloud while stepping away from the shelf with the book in hand before looking through the first few pages until a line caught my eye. 'A modern reflection on the study of the mysterious beings that are known as dungeon cores, a bountiful resource for civilization which was paid for in the blood of innocents.'

While I have been told about the broad strokes in regards to what dungeons are and how they're boons to society as a whole, I still don't exactly know how they work... Well, how I work, now that I consider it; since at the end of the day I am a dungeon core, no matter how much I try to pretend I'm still a human being.

Maybe I'll look into actually setting myself up as a proper dungeon if the benefits outweigh the costs, especially now that I have two proper spawners with my own unique beasts running around.

Taking the book over to the long table and settling down, I open it up and start going through the pages of information as the seconds turn to hours, trickling by like grains of sand.

With the morning sun cresting through the curtains, I can't help but really reflect on all this new information as what I've found between these pages has proven to be rather illuminating. Well, not just the info from this book, as the memories of Rita's two semesters of 'Dungeon Studies' during her time at the academy bubbled up to the forefront of my own thoughts while I had been reading.

I'm just lucky she's such a studious girl, though I wonder if I should touch base with some of her teachers in the academy. As far as I can remember, she had a good relationship with a couple of them at least before she got swept up into being enslaved by that pink-haired scum's family.

Anyway, I'm getting off track. From what I learned, at least from the perspective of scholars and officials who manage and oversee dungeon affairs from the outside, dungeons benefit from the release of vital energies of those who delve into them. Not just the use of magic or mana from those with manahearts, though that certainly helps, but even from the unenhanced delvers who come into the dungeon's territory.

In fact, those who don't have manahearts have a better chance of actually igniting one while in a dungeon's territory because of that expenditure of vital energies while fighting and training; and of course, those with manahearts could further train and develop what they already have while in dungeons. The commonly accepted metaphor presented by those of the academy is that delvers are like dripping wet sponges while the dungeons are bowls of water.

Delvers as a whole are just filled with energy that they bring into the dungeon from the outside, the more they fight and the more energy they expend, the more energy they release into the dungeon itself. Basically just squeezing the wet sponge while it is submerged. But what happens to the sponge while it is still submerged? Well, it soaks up water again, though it is new and different water. Just like how they fueled the dungeon, the dungeon in turn fuels the delver so that they can bring back even more energy next time to expend it all over again.

So based on what I can interpret between Rita's studies and what this book is telling me, is that the relationship between cooperative and competitive dungeons to those who delve into them is akin to a kind of symbiosis. The dungeon cultivates the land that makes up its territories to entice delvers to seek out whatever riches or bounties are within them, and the delvers expend energies and mana that fuel the dungeon's growth and allow them to put up even more of a challenge and offer even more riches to then lure more delvers to return.

So that's all well and good, but what does that mean for me, given that I figured out how to pull natural mana from the air itself and can thus introduce fresh mana into my own territory? Is this how Lichtdren did it? I mean, I'm not sure how long it took her to get a core as big as she did, but I know that based on the dates on the map crystals she had, and the grave of the birdkin who was in the photo in her room, that she was at least two, maybe three centuries old.

Of course, I can't be so naive as to think that Lichtdren never killed anyone, but she had a thriving town that was the equivalent of a capital city within her territory. Surely all that activity and a dungeon likely fueled her to the extent that she was able to grow to be as big and powerful as she ended up being before her core got cracked.

Now that I think about it, if the fort town of Sunspot Keep is a thousand years old, does that mean the hegemony capital which was built next to a dungeon is also over a thousand years old? How massive could a dungeon that managed to live that long get? Is it as intelligent as a person by now or what's going on with it mentally? I wonder how it'll react to me being close to its territory or if it'll even care at all.

My speculations aside, an interesting piece of information that I came across was that all known dungeons have killed someone before. Even the friendly and peaceful cooperative ones. It is in fact that first kill that shapes the dungeon into what it'll be as the sudden influx of both vital energy and the experience of killing changes them. While I had seen this play out through Orwis' memories, I don't think I had realized at the time that it was because they killed someone that the blue core ended up becoming a cooperative dungeon with low-threat battles.

The only really messed up part of this all is that for the majority of cooperative dungeons, their first kills ended up being children who accidentally wandered into their territories, at least according to both the book and Rita's lessons at the academy. The academy and the book both theorized that the act of killing the child while the dungeon core itself was still in its nascent stage traumatized the simple mind of the dungeon and thus they tended to go towards more peaceful and less threatening endeavors.

In regards to competitive and belligerent dungeons, the records showed that their first kills tended to be teenagers and adults, though the academics hadn't been able to find a correlation between the deaths of children, teens, and adults or the type of dungeon a dungeon core will develop into.

Though with all that in mind... I... I think I know why the nascent cores that happened to kill children tend to become cooperative... It has to do with the memories.

I wondered why I always absorbed the memories of those I killed. At first, I thought it might have to do with one of those skill things I might have because of my titles or something, but what if that was just something inherent to me being a dungeon?

I mean it makes sense, doesn't it? Outside of whatever limited guidance the cores may get from the beings that placed them in the world, if they get even that; how else would they learn and grow to be more competent at being a dungeon?

Hell, even I learned the general idea of how magic worked and a few of this world's languages when I initially killed Reyvyre, Reonim, and the bandits that were working for her.

Though with all that in mind, why aren't there more hyper-intelligent cores out there? If the nascent dungeon cores are getting condensed copies of the minds of people sent right into their own undeveloped minds, why aren't they becoming copies of those people or some kind of amalgamation of multiple people's personalities?

Maybe... Maybe it's due to there being a fundamental difference in the way that a dungeon core's mind works when compared to that of a person. Like how you can teach a dog to associate words and phrases with certain items and actions but the dog itself cannot formulate actual speech or converse with a person in any meaningful way.

At the very least that may be the case for dungeons that are still young, but what about dungeons that have already aged past their first couple centuries? Well, considering the only experience I have with dungeons is myself, a dead other-worlder, and a comatose cooperative core, I can't really give an all too educated guess.

As I flip through the pages of the book to reread some sections about the behavior of competitive cores putting treasures behind boss grade scions, my attention is finally pulled from the book itself as the doors to the library are opened up, and a maid I don't recognize steps inside with a small smile on her face before offering a small curtsy in a show of respect. "Good morning, Great Mage, I'm terribly sorry if I'm interrupting, but would you care to join everyone for breakfast?" She asked while standing upright again.

Right… I did notice the sun was coming up earlier, but to think I really spent the whole night studying. It… It was nice not to be alone with my usual thoughts for the first time in a longtime without throwing myself into some sort of project.

Seeing the maid patiently waiting for my answer, I just offer her a small smile while standing as I shut the book. “Sure, breakfast sounds nice right about now.” I mused in a cheerful way, crossing through the small library and approaching the shelves again. Making sure the book was returned to the spot I took it from, I soon followed the maid out, eager to greet the new day.