Dungeon’s Path

Ally claps her hands, “good choices all around there. As for the question about main and secondary monsters? That is purely a system related matter. Without a system, dungeons start with whatever walks into their territory and dies. This causes young dungeons to grow especially slowly unless they get lucky. After all the most likely creatures to die first are insects and of those the prey. To jumpstart dungeons that develop on newly integrated worlds, every dungeon gets three monsters to start. The difference between your main and secondary starter monsters is how much info on them the system shoves into your head. After you choose your main starter monster, it will become a creature you know inside and out. This not only makes it much cheaper to summon but also modify in the future. Secondary monsters are purely given to you as a pattern. There is a slight discount to summon but it is on the same level if you had many of them die in your dungeon.”

Doyle thinks over this for a moment, “Okay that make sense. Now my first instinct is to take the assassin vine as my main monster to make them cheaper. On the other hand I don’t exactly know how this works. I assume with how you talked about it the system isn’t unique to this dimension and you have some knowledge of how dungeons deal with it elsewhere.”

Ally nods, “yeah, while instances like this where the rules of a dimension are accidently changed by a visitor is rare, systems are not. A niche of creators like to add them to their worlds as it makes management easier. As for having the vine as you main monster that can work. However I don’t advise it as your world has just been integrated. In a world with a more robust community of adventurers it might even be the best choice.”

“For a new world like yours though I would advise the goat. Early on most adventurers will avoid your stronger monsters so the higher price doesn’t matter as much. On the other hand there will be quite a few who linger around on the early floors just grinding out xp. Goats will be the bread and butter of your early floors so you need them to be as cheap as possible. It is assured that you will be bulk summoning goats at a crazy rate. Though I will leave it up to you how you want to pick your choices.”

Doyle takes some time to think it over. In the end though what Ally said makes sense, so he chooses, ‘[goats as my main monster and assassin vines along with kobolds as my secondary monsters].’ With that chosen, sparkling lights appear all throughout his territory and Ally upon noticing them speaks up, “you’ve chosen. Now just be ready for some pain.” Doyle manages a quick, ‘what pain?’ before a sledgehammer of info is shoved into his mind.

Along with that information comes wave after wave of pain. His mind fills up and the pain crests only for the current batch of info to settle itself and the next arrive. He struggles to hold on to his consciousness if only because he does not want to black out again.

Assassin vines are one of the few plants to develop a non-growth method of movement without the use of any mystical energy.

They hunt by vision and are worse than humans in the dark.

Their vines are a specialized type of root.

And more gets burned into his memory but it soon slows down. Now he knows more about assassin vines than he did about humans. It does take him a moment to realize the pain is gone. Just enough time for it to start again and he gets a crash course on kobolds.

Their tails are prehensile despite being thick enough to not be useful for much.

Both males and females develop bright colored scales as they grow in power.

Females are more likely to develop qi while males tend towards mana.

The pain recedes again and this time he braces. The kobold info almost knocked him out as he wasn’t ready but this time will be different. Or so he thinks as once the goat info dump deluges his mind it dwarfs the previous two. It comprises every species of goat native to earth and even some that aren’t.

Doyle is mentally drowning in the sheer volume of information the system provides. The details go down to the sub-cellular scale and even atomic in some special cases. It forces him to watch literal lifetimes of goat experiences from birth to death. The only thing that holds him together is a deep-seated uncaringness. It had plagued him all his life. No matter what, things didn’t matter, but now that quirk preserved him in whole.  ‘So what if I’m a goat? I am Doyle. It doesn’t matter.’ Through endless lives he lives, some of the goats from other planets even advance into sentience while he rides along. There are even a couple goat gods.

All the while this happens Ally floats to the side. Time passes for her and she worries. Systems in other dimensions don’t have a problem but it shouldn’t take this long. After a couple days pass she knows there must be a problem. She pulls out a small circular stone with a fae message rune carved on it. This is the only one like it that she has but there isn’t a choice. The tutorial blocks most communication that tries to enter or leave it and to crack it is difficult. This naturally formed rock which had bathed in a magic spring for a thousand years barely had enough oomph.

When she chose her path, the fae queen of the autumn court had gifted it to her. A very high honor despite the disgrace her choice caused. This dimension was too new to magic for these wonders to form often and their stock was limited. Now though she had to make use of it and so with a wisp of her remaining mana activates the natural rune stone.

A swirl forms in the air above it as the fabric of space around her warps. The light despite not changing directions is woven into a colorful image quite familiar to Ally. It is the queen’s court, eternally in dusk as fae magic holds the very planet it is on in place so the sun is always just about set. Around the court giant pillars crafted in the image of mushrooms to invoke the classic image of a fairy circle yet made from unspeakable materials brought from the cracks between space and time. A bevy of eternally young court officials are just now reacting to the rune’s magic. All the while there are a handful of high nobles sneering in Ally’s direction as they had sensed the magic and it’s source long before it formed.

Then an imperious command echoes forth from behind a curtain weaved with the final rays of a dying sun as it sets on the last world not swallowed when it expanded to go supernova. In words that are barely mortal the figure sat behind those curtains has commanded HER court be cleared. Two of the nobles looked ready to stick around but their bodies marched themselves out of the room.

[So you have finally called my child? It has been millennium since We gifted that trinket to you. The court was quite displeased when they received word of you being called. Some hadn’t even expected you to last a thousand years if the bets are to go by. Now you wouldn’t use that rune unless you had to, so speak up. With the inherent promise in Our gifting it to you We will assist as reasonable.]

“Your majesty I”, [Now child, We might have only adopted you but We still consider you our child. Say it like you did when you were young.] “But, you’re”, [Your mother]. “The nobles will”, [Now now my child. They are for Us to deal with, not you.] Ally sighs, “fine. Mommy, I got chosen as the companion to a young dungeon. We are in his tutorial but the main monster is taking too long to download.”

[Hmm, that is troubling. Can you explain his

[You have stumbled into a problem. The dungeon tutorial isn’t meant for a sentient turned into a dungeon core. In this system you can only take one tutorial. In the normal flow of things a sentient would have already taken their original species tutorial and so the dungeon tutorial would not be an option. For the first time in eons I will get to file a bug report on an immortal created system.]

[If Doyle had left the human tutorial at any point, he wouldn’t have gotten the option. However because his condition to complete it was switched to succeed as a dungeon core he never actually left. In fact, I bet if his entrance wasn’t a portal type this wouldn’t have happened either as it would have had to place him somewhere. Of course all this speculation won’t help you so stop fretting.]

[His problem is they set the dungeon tutorial up to provide a basic framework for a core. It sounds like neither of you thought on it but simple knowledge of a creature doesn’t make it easier to summon. Rather how deep a dungeon core’s connection to the creature is what matters. A naturally formed dungeon under this system is more likely to stick with the original main monster or some related creature because their very minds are warped by the tutorial.]

[Now this alone wouldn’t cause Doyle to spend so long on the goats. A normal sentient would have finished it on schedule but you would have soon noticed they had taken on many goatlike qualities. Even to the point of identifying as a goat instead of a human. Not necessarily a bad thing as for most sentients the tasks of a dungeon core is hard if not impossible to accept. This can cause a mental breakdown later in life when they can no longer handle it. Many good-hearted mages have found their minds split in twain as what they call their ‘evil’ side takes over the dungeon. They are fools of course as they are still one and are just pushing off what they see as bad onto a self-made scapegoat.]

[From what We can divine from here your companion differs from those mortal mages. Some of my younger colleagues would say he has an immortal’s soul.] [Hey, don’t you roll your eyes at Us. They are younger than Us. Just because they have all lived longer than the current ORDER doesn’t mean We don’t remember when they came about.]

[Anyway, where were We? Right, the ‘immortal’s soul’ which is a stupid term for it. All souls are immortal and in fact beyond that, eternal. Rather it refers to how well a soul can handle the passage of time. Some core part of your partner would have raised him up within a few thousand lives under the system to the point of being a self-made god. Quite quick, though most gods from non-system based dimensions would debate if it really counts. After all, unless the system is specifically designed to prevent it they do make the path easier.]

[Now I can’t divine what this core to him is but it has let him stay himself through what he is currently experiencing. More qi based societies would refer to it as samsara. His world’s Buddhists have a very close concept to this. Their wheel of existence which is the suffering-laden cycle of life, death, and rebirth, without beginning or end. Only in Doyle’s case more goat centric. I don’t like to mince words like that so suffice to say he is experiencing the lives of many a goat.]

Akhier

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