Dungeon at the End of the Universe

Can I just make a tutorial for myself? It doesn’t really make sense, how could I teach myself something I don’t know? But maybe the System has the knowledge. Only one way to find out.

Quest notification:
You’ve received a quest!

Quest: Burgeoning Dungeon – Revised
After a long journey you’ve at last arrived where most Dungeons start. Monster creation is an integral part of any Dungeons life. Now it’s your turn. Learn how to turn even the most harmless creature into a mighty monster to defend your Dungeon.
Objective: Make a custom monster
Reward: Monster customization technique

That seems sort of self defeating. To get the reward I have to use the reward. But I don’t have it yet!

Maybe my gruesome method will count as good enough? After all, it just says I have to make one monster, no mention of how to do it. Let’s just hope that whatever technique it gives me is better and less bloody than my own improvised one.

It takes me a little while, and I’ll spare you the details, but eventually I have something I’d consider good enough.

Before me – that is, before one of my Dungeon Seeds – stands a creature that I can’t imagine nature ever intended to exist. Unfortunately, I don’t exactly have the best materials in my mini-Dungeons, so I had to make use of what I had. Mainly the squirats.

And sure, maybe I could’ve been more creative, or maybe just made a giant rat or a rat king. But I’d say a rat centipede is good enough, while also simple enough for me to accomplish with my method.

Luckily for me, since I never want to repeat that again, the System agrees with me.

Quest notification:
Quest complete!

Suddenly, new information floods my mind. It doesn’t hurt or anything, but I can’t focus on anything other that it.

Once the stream of knowledge subsides, I realize something. I’m stupid.

I was so close, yet so far away. I never had to tear my poor creatures apart and the hope an infusion of mana could stitch them together. I could’ve just infused them with mana from the start and then guided their changed from within.

I really need to stop overcomplicating things.

But in other news, I was also somewhat right. I never could’ve figured this out with my Dungeon Seeds. Because my own monsters are somewhat immutable by this method.

Constructs are animated matter with no flesh or genetics to manipulate. Wyld-trees are already extremely unstable and change by themselves based on their environment. And Purge Slimes convert mana into matter.

Maybe that last one would be somehow doable, but also needlessly difficult when compared to more normal animals. Take this squirat for example. Now that I know what to do I just have to inject it with mana, and… there. It’s the size of a large dog.

With this new knowledge, managing my newest mini-Dungeons would be a breeze. And speaking of them, they’d landed some time ago and other than burying them I haven’t touched them.

All of them landed more or less on a coastline. I managed to make sure none of them would end up as underwater Dungeons at least.

With them in place, I had a tiny bit more leeway into how tightly I could release mana with the original island Dungeon Seed. The three newer Dungeons would act as a sort of net, catching any stray mana that managed to escape.

And actually, now that I think about it, yes. That would be a wonderful idea. I think I’m going to start working on connecting all of these mini-Dungeons underground. Make a nice Dungeon network.

But none of that I really truly too resource intensive on my mind. It’s mostly just a bunch of tunnelling, which is simple enough for me to do.

Which means I can do a small check-up on my little Dungeon fairy.

Everything seems to be going great there. The new group of adventurers, another few youngish adults, are slowly making their way through its training course.

However, once Faellen realizes I’m watching, it opens up a mental connection.

“Anything strange out there recently?” it asks out of nowhere.

I’m a bit confused, “No. Should there have been?”

“I’m… not sure. I just feel weird, like something is off. Just, make sure you’re careful, and look out for anything unusual.”

I feel like most of what we do is unusual, but it doesn’t feel right to point that out. “Alright, sure.”

Meanwhile, on the outskirts of the solar system (called Lichtung if you’ve forgotten), the unknown deity had finished constructing its divine palace. All throughout the construction it had been thinking about what it had sensed.

Someone was messing with time. Severely.

And the deity was conflicted. Should it alert someone of the time criminals and risk its loot being claimed by someone else? Or should it remain silent and risk being implicated as helping the time criminal?

It was a tough choice, especially for such a young deity who still didn’t have too much experience with their divinity. Even so, the warning of basically every peer it had met eventually won out.

With a divine palace built, they could connect to the much more expansive divine realm now. So that is what they did.

Once there, things almost took on a will of their own. As soon as the deity reported the time crime, a whirlwind of activity started. Most surprisingly though, an atmosphere of fear emerged as well.

For this was one of the few things gods were truly afraid of. For one, those who could mess with time could, theoretically, revert them to a state before they were gods. But the second, and main, reason were those who hunted these time criminals. For some things, even deities don’t mess with.