NOVEL NEXT 73 - The Dungeon Is Quiet
Archmund stood in the opening of the Dungeon.
Alone.
His Gems hovered in front of him. His Ruby Tetrahedron, for Energy Manipulation.
His Ruby Octahedron, for Fire.
His Onyx Cube, for largely-uninvestigated defensive properties.
His Rapier and his Sword, strapped to his back.
An unshaped Gem and a Storage Gem in a pouch on his waist.
All of them pulsing with magical power. His power. Twisted, refined, refracted, but still a reflection of him.
He was here for two reasons.
First, to figure out how the Dungeon had changed.
Second, to figure out more about Gems.
Catherine had called the Gem Angelina had used "not of the Goddess."
But what did that mean?
Could she be mistaken?
If she was right, what about his usual Gems?
They came from Monsters, which were the coagulated spirits of the wrathful dead escaping from Hell. They, too, should have lacked any touch of the Goddess's grace.
That was why he was here.
Was he damned, moreso than he already was?
Well, usually that was a matter of unfalsifiable theology.
But it seemed that no matter what he did, no matter how far he made it in life, no matter how much schmoozing he did in the Imperial City, he would have to return to the Dungeon.
Push his way down the Tiers.
Find the point that broke into Hell.
And figure out what awaited in eternity.
It was a far cry from setting himself up for a comfortable mortal life, enough to coast and rest for the next sixty or so years.
But what was the point of sixty years of comfort if he knew an eternity of suffering awaited afterwards?
But that was years away.
Today, he came to scout. To feel the oppressive darkness, which was less oppressive than he remembered.
He spent an hour or two poking around the highest level of the Dungeon. He was reckless, not stupid. If he went on an 8 hour trek, two whole days might pass before anyone realized anything was wrong.
Though with how fast the beasts moved that might not matter. If they attacked him and he lost, he was dead.
Overall, his explorations were anticlimactic.
The Dungeon was quiet.
There was a sense of calm that lied over it. The constant looming shadows, the constant fear that had haunted him, was gone, replaced by a gray blankness.
He couldn't say that he preferred this.
Just what had Angelina done?
In every dead-end of the Dungeon, there was a pool of darkness, inky black and elemental. He could touch his fingers to it, feel its oily undeath slime over his fingers, eating at him with the rage of hungry ghosts.
He could disturb the darkness just briefly, shattering the pool, revealing the stone beneath, but then it would return, viscous oil coalescing upon itself.
He didn't bother making his way to the false manor hall. It was too far and too risky, but he doubted it had been much disturbed.
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He didn't want to traverse the middle subtier, either, and deal with whatever Monsters might have spawned. In theory the path he'd marked out, on his descent with Mercy all those months ago, would remain safe.
But many things about Dungeons were theoretically true, yet proven false by observation.
There was just so much he didn't know. Assumptions he was operating on, pilfered from the books he'd read. Stories and rumors from those he'd met, who'd had some level of their own experience.
Who was to say they weren't operating on survivorship bias? That Dungeons only behaved the way they did because they'd survived the adventurers that looted them; that adventurers and their wisdom arose from the luck of survival; that the secret successes of the Empire arose solely from alchemy, chance, fate, all the perfect things that had to align for them to arise.
He'd seen this in his past life. YouTubers, a class of people who talked into a camera for a worldspanning audience, often gave advice on how to join their ranks. But for every successful YouTuber there were doubtless hundreds who failed, because they lacked charisma, or spoke about things nobody else cared about, or were simply unlucky.
But the Dungeon was peaceful. Quiet. Gray. The beast that clawed at his heart, that instinct that warned him he was on the verge of getting eaten, was wholly silent. Replaced with a sense of grand adventure and possibility.
Temptation, perhaps.
A steady and safe path.
Deceptively safe.
The sun remained in the sky, though low, when he emerged from the darkness.
And no Monsters or ghosts troubled him as he made his way back home.
He took the next day for himself, ignoring his father and his cousin and his guests and Mary, locking himself in his room. He put his Gemstone Tablet on the table in front of him, spreading out his Gems as well, idling wondering how much he looked like so-called "iPad kid" from his previous life.
He'd spent so much time around other people, and it was an outright miracle that he'd been able to sustain himself. He'd had minimal social contact with his peers for years, only to be thrust into dealing with so many of them in the span of weeks. He'd catapulted himself into actually having a social circle.
In his past life, he could meet hundreds of people in a month and forget all of them by the next. The human mind had only evolved to remember 150 or so people in a lifetime back in the savannas of Africa, so of course he'd forget the least important names, but back then he could look them up on networking sites like LinkedIn to remember them.
Here he had no such luxury.
But that wasn't the only thing on his shoulders.
When he jabbed at his Gemstone Tablet, he saw, without much fanfare, several expanding lists. Lists describing his Gems. Lists describing his skills. Lists describing his relationships. Lists describing his stats.
It was all very head-turning.
The other infuriating thing was how the information was both in-depth yet far too sparse. He had lists of names and titles and relationships — the Crown Princess Angelina Grace Marca Prima Omnio, who went by "Mercy" and was his ally, but he had very little information about her achievements. Nothing as comprehensive as LinkedIn.
He could see his current stats, but he had no historical information and no way to assess the speed of stat growth. He could see the magical reservoir and Attunement of his Gems and gear, but that may well have been useless because he could feel their connection to him intuitively.
"You haven't eaten," Mary said, pushing her way into his room. He hurried to throw a book on top of his Gemstone Tablet, so it would look like he was just doing a bit of his usual reading.
He pointed at his Gems. "Magic's keeping me full."
"That can't be sustainable," Mary said.
It wasn't. This was probably actually horrifically wasteful. He'd probably lose another day keeping his Gems topped up with power.
"What's got you all worked up?"
"Well," he said. And he debated how much to tell her.
Obviously, the full details of the Gemstone Tablet were out of the question, even if she already knew that it existed and even if she was incredibly unlikely to betray him. It was a state secret, and it wasn't hard to imagine why. If nobles knew for a fact that they could powerlevel their charisma and strength, they would optimize themselves into charming behemoths, capable of stopping rebellions with but a word and crushing any capable of resisting.
"Horse breeding, huh?" Mary said. "Why do we even have a book on that in this house?"
He looked at the book. She was correct.
Though, judging from fighting the Centaur, his ancestors had been quite close to horses. Hopefully in a normal way.
"I guess you're finally developing a healthy curiosity?"
"This would be anything but healthy," he said.
He told her his actual problem.
He had a task list, and a list of questions, and all sorts of goals he intended to achieve. But all of those were discarded now, because new shit piled up faster than he could resolve the old.
What he needed was a way to track these numbers.
Numbers associated with personal health.
Numbers associated with Skills, and how they changed over time.
Numbers associated with the health of the country, whether it was Gross Domestic Product or Labor Force Participation or any number of economic statistics he'd only ever paid vague attention to.
Mary gave him a bemused look. "You, admitting to not knowing something?"
Sure. Maybe he was doing that. He preferred to think of it the other way. He'd learned too many useless things that at any given moment, he couldn't remember the best useful one.
Right. Yes. That was the proper way of framing it, totally.
"I'll be right back," she said.
She shuffled back into his room with a rolled-up sheaf of paper and unfurled it dramatically on top of the book about horse breeding.
"This," Mary said, dramatically, "is how we always kept track of figures and quantities that changed over time. Nothing too complicated, but we use this format for basically anything. Inventory. Customers. Repeats."
He scanned the sheet.
Black ink, with the stylistic dribblings of a quill pen.
Weathered, yellowing paper.
Divided neatly into rows and columns.
Labels for each column and each row.
A spreadsheet.
A fucking spreadsheet.
He'd seen so many of those already in his lifetime.
And yet he couldn't deny it at all.
One of the best ways to keep track of everything that was going on, to keep track of all the data that mattered for his goals and metrics?
Was to use spreadsheets.
And so the maw of responsibility once more began to snap closed around him.