ENTO THE DUNGEON CHP 1 {DUNGEONCORE}

A/N: I have posted this on Royal Road, and am currently remastering it. This is the first chapter that I have edited, I will be posting them here as I edit them. Since Dungeoncore as a genre is really uncommon outside of Royal Road, I will mention here that Dungeoncore refers to a story where the main character, or a major character IS a dungeon, or CONTROLS a dungeon. It is heavily associated with the LITRPG genre.

Somewhere deep in a mountain range, inside a forested, swamp-filled valley, a small golden light burst into the darkness, a million small lights ignited and found themselves pulled to a point. Birds flew from their perches and weasels skittered away as the valley’s insect population boomed. Only the longest lived creatures of the valley did not flee. A soft buzzing filled the air, the beating of a trillion pairs of wings.

She had no mother to love her, or no father to watch over her, she had no siblings to play with, she had no cousins to compete with nor any kind of being to help her make sense of her new reality. A single sentence was all that welcomed her into the world.

SYNCING DATA… PLEASE WAIT…

Her mind began to expand. She became aware. She… became. The entity stared at the grey glowing box in the forefront of her mind, and a faint sensation of familiarity echoed in the empty void that was her mind. For a moment she simply floated, immersing herself in the novelty of existence, then a hum began to build.

She wasn’t alarmed, slightly curious maybe, but it was nothing significant. She examined the new sensation blandly. A small bubble formed at the edge of her perception, it grew larger and larger, straining against its nonexistent confines. She paused. Slowly a muddled thought found its way through her foggy unformed consciousness. A vague, wordless sensation of confusion and, maybe a little worry, directed at the pressure building in her self.

Then the bubble burst.

SYNCING COMPLETE, WELCOME EMPRESS.

A sudden sharpness flooded her mind and Empress screamed. Dozens of words, sensations and thoughts burst into existence. She instinctively pushed away from it. Something deep in hertelling her that she should not, could not afford to get caught up in the wave. She pushed against her confines, frantically wiggling away from the expansion of her being.

The part of her that she thought of as Empress burst from her center. The world around her spun and twisted as she struggled to perceive the physical existence around her.

CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE RECOVERED THE SKILL GAZE LV 59.

CORE TOO FRAIL FOR SKILL INSCRIPTION.

YOU HAVE OBTAINED THE SKILL GAZE LV 1

(Additional levels banked)

A golden orb formed around the perception of her self, and suddenly, Empress could see. The world around her was bathed in gold. Intense, unceasing gold that pulsed with different shades of . Everything was utterly and entirely Empress. She stared at it blankly. She could hear as well, the world was silent, but she could hear the silence. Her didn’t interact with the gold, but she could feel the thickness surrounding her.

Empress blinked.

She didn’t have eyes. But she blinked. It was a small movement. The skill flickered off and on again, almost without any input. Empress blinked again, this time on purpose. After a moment she let out a soft hum. It echoed throughout the room harmlessly.

Empress could feel her vibrate with the sound. She… she could do something. Two things, in fact. Sight, and sound. She could feel as well, but not in the same way.

She could sense a set of… controls? No, that wasn’t right, variables maybe? The exact word escaped her, but ‘variable’ was good enough. There were variables built into her that she could manipulate.

Light was under her command. She could adjust how much light surrounded her, or, maybe how much light she could see, with a minimal effort. Slightly more complicated, was changing her own amount of light. Her glowed. She couldn’t see it glowing, due to the over saturation of golden light surrounding her. But she knew that it glowed- glew? Whatever.

Intuitively, she could feel the variable that controlled light output inside of her , but unlike adjusting the light outside, it took effort. Empress had to think about changing her glow.

That led nicely into the last set of variables, which seemed to control movement. It was far more complicated than controlling light. There were more variables, one for each direction, and then, there was a second set of variables for moving in two directions at once.

She mentally grasped onto the variables and began to adjust their values at random.

Her shot forward- and upward, and backward a moment later- her viewpoint was thrust out of the golden light and into a dark cavern. She stopped moving and instead stared at the rest of her

She was met by impenetrable darkness. A thick unceasing shadow surrounded her, only broken by an impossibly small golden light coming from a small crystalline rock the size and shape of a teardrop. She recognized it as her , it pulsated rhythmically. Empress stared at the , then at the dark, relatively circular shape that it sat in.

Empress adjusted the light around her- or, as it quickly became clear, her sensitivity to light around her- and looked upon her

She was in a large earthen cave, the soil was moist, the ceiling curved with a certain roughness of the molding that wasn’t smooth enough for water erosion but wasn’t too rough to be carved with magic. It looked as if a hundred tiny bites had been taken out of the cave. Her was empty of anything but the dirt pillar that held her small , which now seemed inadequate for the enormity of her land. Directly in front of the pillar was a hallway that led to the rest of her

She felt indifferent. Her was acceptable, and its state almost expected. The shape of her self had filled the the moment she emerged. Still… there was something faint in the back of her mind that was telling her that she could, and should, do better. Grow in power. Expand in size.

She could feel thrumming in her , all she needed to do to improve her was to reach out and-

No

Empress paused. No. It was too dangerous.

Before she could change her mind, she jerkily made her way down the corridor branching off from her . The hallway was similar to the in construction. The walls were rough and earthen, it eventually widened into a large room, but Empress was more interested in the glowing orb embedded into the wall.

It had more… Was it weight? Than the walls, but less than her . Not weight. Something else.

It had more self than the walls did. It was a larger part of Empress’s being. She inched closer to it, without fully understanding what she was doing, Empress reached out toward the orb with her mind.

A small grey square appeared in front of her

LUMMI MOSS NODE LV 2

A magical glowing moss that can be sometimes found in the Inth’s caves. Valued for its ability to treat mana sickness.

Status: Healthy

Alignment: Vengeful

Ascend chance: .001%

Empress jolted backward from the tab. After a few seconds, she moved closer to it.

“....” She said aloud, tasting the way the air rippled with the sound.

Empress cautiously approached the text box from several angles. Once she poked it gently with her . There was no change.

She looked at the box for another few seconds before a sudden realization popped into her mind. Could… she open boxes for other things?

Empress quickly floated back to her and stared at it. Tentatively she reached toward it, and the replied.

ABREVIATED STATUS:

LV 1 DUNGEON

Name: Empress

Affinities: Ento

Race: Dungeon

Nodes: Lummi moss LV 2

Spawners: Basic Ant LV 1

Retainers: None

Alignment: _____

Notoriety: 0

Kills: 0

Empress blinked in confusion. She scanned the text three times before her thoughts caught up.

She didn’t know what half of these meant. She knew her name and race, and had a decent idea of what a was from the moss. Kills was self explanatory. That left Retainers, Alignment and Affinities.

The refused to offer any further information. Empress poked at the box with her

With a huff, she floated away from her . She still had more of her to explore, and another one of those niggling thoughts in the back of her mind warned her against spending too much time within her thoughts. She darted through the moss hallway and into the large chamber that it fed into.

The walls were of the same kind as the , but shorter and thinner, albeit wider. In the back half of the room, stood a pedestal. It wasn’t dirt like the one that held up her , but instead, it was a glowing metallic gold, illegible runes carved into its base. It was rotating slowly without disturbing the dirt in which it was set. Curiously, Empress approached the pedestal, her glinting as she grew closer. With a thought, she reached out toward it and-

LV 1 BASIC ANT SPAWNER

A powerful magical artifact that shapes soul fragments into ant monsters.

AFFINITIES: NONE

ALIGNMENT: DEFENSIVE

TRAITS: DUNGEON-TOUCHED

ASCEND CHANCE: .001

COOLDOWN: 300

Empress closed the . Taking note of the new ‘traits’ classifier. She returned her attention to the spawner room, and was surprised to see two new additions to her dungeon.

The newly created ants were brown in color, they had a three-segmented abdomen and six thin legs. Their black eyes had no irises, and they seemed to be mostly blind. The majority of their ‘seeing’ was done through their antennae and what might’ve been a nose above their mandibles.

Her… what were they? Calling them monsters didn’t seem quite right.

Her colonists waited patiently next to the .

Empress reached out with her mind toward the pair, trying to get them to follow her . Her efforts were mostly futile until she tried mixing a very, very small amount of into her request.

Some unknown, previously indistinct variable solidified between Empress and her colony, and she used the momentary link to them to follow her.

…And they did. Empress bobbed her up and down happily as she continued down the next hallway.

The tunnel turned gradually to the right until, when you looked back, you couldn’t see the spawner room and it looked like a never-ending hallway. The light levels were gradually rising as the small party continued forward. The hallway opened into a large room, it was the largest by far. When the ants passed the threshold, a floating circle with a bipedal fist X’d out in red appeared over their heads. They didn’t react to it. Empress blinked. Other than that, the was the same as the others, earth molded into a circular shape, barren walls, and floor. Flexing her mental muscles, Empress impulsively one of the ants to start digging a pit in the center of the room, she giggled to herself as the ant branched off and began to shovel dirt with her mandibles.

It felt oddly satisfying to impose her will upon her . It felt… correct.

The remaining duo quickly left the room and followed the next hallway, it wasn’t curved like the others, and the amount of light grew so much greater that Empress had to adjust the variables on her . It wasn’t long until the hallway widened, not into a room; however. Instead of leading somewhere else the tunnel raised sharply upward. Causing a small cliff to form, there was a small amount of standing room on the cliff, but when Empress tried to look past the cliff, there was only a wall of blinding white light.

The cliff was about the height of one ant standing vertically, and almost perfectly the height of two ants standing horizontally on top of each other. The ant scuttled up the cliffside. The ant didn’t need to climb atop another ant to reach the top of the cliff because ants can crawl on vertical surfaces.

Empress floated upward, and she looked at the white forcefield, everything past it was completely blanked out. She moved closer, like a child pushing her face against the foggy glass. The forcefield wobbled slightly, but it didn’t let her through. Emboldened,, Empress pushed against the forcefield.

A sharp hiss of protest erupted across her , it stung and clung to her like a morning dew. She shot away from the whiteness; her movements frantic and erratic, the feeling was wholly unpleasant, without anything to redeem it. Empress shivered. She halted her movement in the middle of the entrance hallway. pain. Pain? PAIN? That was what pain felt like? The feeling still clung to her, fading, and twisting in its malicious warning.

She looked at the forcefield with pure distaste.

For the first time, Empress hated.