Dungeon at the End of the Universe

“What in the Wylds was that!?” a voice like venom reaches my mind.

I guess I should have expected that. It isn’t every day that your entire existence gets rewritten. Then again, it also isn’t exactly nice to put the blame on me… Okay, not nice to put the entire blame on me.

“Right, yes,” I mutter, “where to begin.”

“How about you at the start. What happened after the End?” Faellen sounds angry, but the controlled kind of angry. Good, I think.

“Sure. So, I think we got pulled into another world pretty much as soon as we got into the Void, but even that was enough for the System to register me as being able o stay there indefinitely. Yada yada, I got some notifications, some upgrades to Abilities and a new Aspect. But as I said, we got sucked to another Universe, Ferras. You’re the expert on that, I have no clue how this usually goes. Anyway, my new Aspect messed with the Translation to Ferras Law, and I’m fairly certain that that caused the issue.”

“Hold on a sec,” Faellen pauses, “everything else aside, what Aspect did you get?”

“Eldritch,” I say, with perhaps a tad bit too much enthusiasm.

“Oh for fucks sake-” it starts, but is interrupted. By me.

“But that’s not all, I’m also a System Core now, and I would be a Void-vessel if I hadn’t absorbed some properties of the Universe that attacked us. That’s actually why I got Eldritch.”

After that little bombshell, it took a little while to explain everything in a clear and concise way. Faellen kept pushing for more details, but I quickly ran out of those. As much as I wish it to be otherwise, I’m not omniscient.

One thing that made me pause was when I was telling it about how my Aspects affected my placement in Ferras. It asked me if I’d looked outside yet. Only then did I realize that if I really did enter this Universe at its beginning, my Dungeon should have melted from the heat.

And indeed, when I did so all I saw was blindingly bright light, as well as similarly intense heat. Thank whatever created Dungeons that our Dungeon senses don’t appear to have pain receptors. (Then again, Core pain is all the more painful for it, so it balances out.)

When I reported this, Faellen was perplexed for a minute. Until it remembered an earlier notification I had told it about earlier. About my Dungeon Barrier becoming a Dimensional Barrier.

“That is such complete and utter bullshit,” it said. When I asked why, I got this: “Your bullshit Dungeon is only partially inside Ferras. You probably won’t be affected by most environmental effects.”

So, yeah. I think I’m doing pretty good. Maybe excluding the fact that I would now appear as some form of otherworldly monstrosity to the natives. And sure, maybe that is an apt description of me, but it still doesn’t feel nice.

Anyway, after all that, we got to talking about the future. There was still the slight problem of me being catapulted through time until we reached another End, but since I could now survive in the Void in wasn’t that much of an issue. Which is why we turned out attention to Quests.

I still had one of my original ones, A Dearth of Adventurers, as well as my new System one.

In the end, we came up with an awesome plan. (Yes, I helped.) One that would take care of both Quests at once. But for that to happen, I’d need to master my Abilities to a much greater extent. That, as well as learning how to work the System.

And it’s a good thing too that that would be needed, as Ferras was still in its infancy. It would take a long time for it to cool down and life to evolve, even with me speeding through time. We got to work.

I mostly focused on my inner world, the core of my Core where the manifestations of my Aspects existed. I needed to master the infusion art I’d used to make my spears affect abomination Faellen. That’s not to say I tunnel-visioned on that and that alone. I kept a small part of my mind separated, working on my Dungeon Abilities (since I still haven’t fully figured out the rest).

Faellen, on the other hand… well, Faellen was doing Faellen things. It’d be interesting if its part of the plan worked.

Finally! It was time!

It has been so long of us just preparing, preparing, preparing. But now, now it’s finally done! We can move on to the next step, and oh boy am I excited for this. Maybe it’s something in my Dungeon instincts, maybe it’s the boredom, but I can’t wait for my first adventurers!

This is going to be the best Dungeon delve ever!

Meanwhile, outside the Dungeon of out story, big things were happening.

Oh, did you forget me? The narrator from chapter 0? Don’t worry, sometimes I forget myself too. But never mind that, I’m sure you’re interested in what’d happening in Ferras.

Many, many years had passed since its inception, far too many to count. Naturally for our Dungeon it took far less time, but that’s neither here not there.

In fact, so much time had passed that the universe was no longer a hot mess. That is to say, matter could exist in states other than plasma. But that’s not all. After that, even more time passed, and matter began to aggregate into clumps. Those clumps then, eventually, turned into the first stars of Ferras. And yet, still more time passed. Around those stars formed even more, smaller clumps of matter, and those then turned into the first planets.

And it was on one of those planets (well, on many of them, but only one is important to our story) where life sprouted and took its first steps. More time passed. The life, as primitive as it may have been at first, advanced. It became more and more complex, growing ever more efficient at keeping itself alive. It evolved.

And at last, after a truly gargantuan amount of time had gone by, a sapient was born. Perhaps through coincidence, perhaps by some great cosmic joke, these sapients were also featherless bipeds, even if of a different kind than the ones out Dungeon originated from.

From there, history took curse as it usually does with featherless bipeds. They congregated, they build, they advanced. They gathered and hunted, settled and farmed, explored and invaded, fought and died. They lived, laughed, and loved.

Until, one day, something strange happened. A new light appeared in the sky. A light that grew larger and larger as time went on. However, it was no meteor, coming to wipe them off the face of the planet. No, as it grew more and more and as astronomers turned their focus on this mysterious light, it grew clear what it was.

You see, while the Dungeon was preparing, it was also training its Dungeon Abilities, mainly Create. And so the Dungeon grew in size so much, that it became the size of a moon.

Yes, the light, the mysterious object that the astronomers had spotted was our Dungeon. And when the Dungeon saw the planet, something strange happened. With a twist of Control, the Dungeon grabbed space and placed the moon-sized Dungeon into a perfectly stable orbit.

The featherless bipeds on the planet bellow were perplexed by this event, as they so often are. But little did they know, thing were about to turn much stranger.