…Pa? How strong is a dragon?

It’s as strong as a dragon son. It’s a dragon!

…Yes but how strong is that? I’ve heard uncle Erick is pretty strong, do you think he could fight a dragon?

Him and a dozen of his closest friends maybe. Listen son. Dragons are some of the strongest creatures in this world. Imagine theres a scale right. At the bottom of the scale is something weak like a slime or your granny. If you go ever so slightly up that scale you get something like yourself and if you go all the way to the top you reach dragons. They are the strongest okay.

…are they stronger than gods?

Gods aren’t on that scale son. That’s the mortal scale. Gods are so far above it the scale might as well not exist.

…I still don’t know how strong a dragon is.

Look at it like this. If your uncle Erick got mad he could probably wipe this city off the face of the planet. If a dragon got mad and rampaged unstopped, it could wipe this country off the face of the planet. This is…a smaller country but that’s still a massive undertaking.

…and we just let them roam around?

Son. No one just "lets" dragons do anything. Besides, dragons don’t rampage, if they wipe a country out its for a reason.

Excerpt obtained from a conversation between one child and his father in the city of Westmouth 782AS.

Innearth settled into a view of his first floor, popped a few unique monsters into it, and started to brainstorm with the background entertainment to fill in the awkward pauses.

Current goal. Relieve pressure from the gods.

There's two ways I can see going about this.

One. First off I can become a god myself. Easy. Except not because if I just had to want It, others would have figured out how to do so first. I have some unique discoveries that would help but…I think the most important point is I keep thinking of the second option instead.

The second method is to raise someone else. My new goal is satisfied if I can help someone else become a god…and in many ways that feels like a very dungeon thing to do.

I’m the one who can challenge an adventurer and push them enough to level into godhood!

…I mean, I'm not sure how to do that yet. It seems simple but if it was as easy as making a hard dungeon area with a bunch of strong monsters someone else would have done it before me right?

Innearth spent a moment resting on that point while watching the newest adventurer attack his “wood slime” in his tutorial floor. The unique monster was a regular slime he threw a random stick into…but because the stick had more mana in it, it became something like a core – its weak slimy ectoplasm turning into an appendage. The adventurer fighting it was small, a child with a massive sword they could barely wield who kept swinging ineffectually at the monster.

As if showing the futility of his goal the child lifted up their sword wobbling slightly to hold it above their head and smashing it down – the stick/slime dodging to the right wobbling as if laughing.

Finally, after 20 minutes the child grew too tired to lift its sword and was attacked by the slime.

Frustrated the child reached out and grabbed the slime with both hands – abandoning its sword and snapping the stick in two. A yell from outside the dungeon made the child start and a stern looking adventurer marched in eyes widening as he saw the scene in front of him.

Rushing forward the man grabbed his sword and son in separate arms laughing off his worry while side-eyeing the goop that was all that remained of the slime.

Watching the two leave his entrance Innearth made more unique monsters and set them loose in his silver mines.

A group of crazy balls without a controlling mother were created – each with a golden shell and “random” madness-infused material from the pollution/whimsy setup.

These balls were meaner, leaner and zoomed around the lower floors trying to inflict as much pain as possible.

Okay, let us see…I’m going to review some information I saw at that one site and see if it sparks something.

There were several sites full of ideas and collaborative efforts of dungeons currently in the process of trying to make a god. Each were locked to the invisible title Innearth gained by reading the meaning of life site. With that key that proved he was “In the know” a world of information was at his influence's grasp.

…there was actually a lot of information. There were at least a hundred cores actively working on this goal – many had been working for decades or more accurately several centuries on this.

It was humbling in a way.

First off there was the system knowledge. The three main levelling systems and examples of godly ascensions were as follows.

A dungeon evolved into a god at rank 6. That was level 844 – a full 24 tiers above Innearth. Their tier increased based on their core's radius in relation to their level 1 size and increased in volume based on experience.

…The stats for that showed the highest levelled dungeon was currently level 559 and 1770 years old. They were a true champ on a massive grind that only got worse the higher a level they gained.

Spending some time relooking at these stats Innearth felt proud at how much time he had taken to reach rank 4. It was roughly twice as fast as the average – faster than anyone other than his friends in his generation…but well below the world record at “5 years” that core must have been a monster.

Using time as a measure of how long it would take to reach level 844 got worse and worse as the levels increased.

While the highest leveled core was 1770 years old there was over a dozen “ancient cores” that had been alive since pre-system times. They all clocked in at 2000 years old and were sitting at a lower level because they weren’t constantly pushing themselves.

“It was only a matter of time for an immortal” …as long as you continued the grind of course. That meant continuing to make new floors and monsters to have any hope of gaining experience.

Innearth watched adventures deal with the golden crazy balls. One unique ball had gained the ability to almost duplicate itself – ghostly double shattering against adventurers' knees or sides while the main body dodged about. A particularly fun fight was one between a crazy ball that spewed an acidic goop every time it impacted something and an adventurer with a large mace that kept beating it away like they were playing baseball.

Finally, the particularly durable unique monster shattered – gifting its loot – and Innearth moved on.

There weren’t any unique monsters in his darkness maze but Innearth stopped there for a time while thinking about the next levelling system.

A monster evolves into a dragon at level 512. It's then theoretically levelled into a god at level 1024 when it's doubled one more time…The highest level goal to reach – not that measuring levels between species and systems is a good idea. Theoretically one of the easier ones to deal with... but I don’t know…

Seeing as how they are the world police…the easiest way for dragons to level is for them to solve world-level catastrophes.

There were actually a couple of dungeons that ruminated on this method – causing massive catastrophes in an attempt at feeding levels to dragons before being put down. The chance of feeding enough experience to a single dragon before being wiped out as the true culprit was slim however and Innearth was not feeling particularly suicidal these days.

…besides that, the dungeons that did go this method found it hard to make apocalyptic problems while fighting against their dungeon instincts and it tended to look badly on dungeons as a whole if too many dungeons were linked to dangerous things. Most Cores didn’t like making their extended family look bad.

I don’t know, if I think of something good that’s a hard “maybe”.

Moving on to the magma halls, Innearth released a set of spider bat pairs really digging into his unique material store. Some garbage bins in the whimsy floor were raided and spiders with long fuzzy green hair prowled about. The bats each had a different shape and colour Innearth stuffing random monster parts into the free space – shrinking some of them to make sure they fit.

Alright. Here you go.

Some nice loot and…done. Let’s review the humanoid system again.

The last manner of advancement was the “humanoid one”. All humanoid sapients became transcendents at level 125…Innearth was pretty sure that had something to do with them having 5 fingers on a hand but he couldn’t be sure.

They became transcendents at level 125 and gods at level 625. Theoretically, they had the lowest level to reach but…once again level to level comparisons were bad to make across species and more importantly they had the lowest chance of becoming a god in the current system because of one important point.

Dungeons and dragons were both unaging. They effectively had infinite time to “eventually reach godhood its only a matter of time”. Even if Innearth stopped doing anything but resetting his dungeon his monsters would accrue small amounts of experience and given a few millennia he was guaranteed godhood. Assuming he didn’t smash himself through boredom obviously.

Transcendent humans and elves and dwarves and merpeople all lived much much longer at higher levels…but they still aged and died eventually. According to one article, a humanoid sapient’s leftover lifespan was increased by a percentage with each level…not their actual total.

A baby gaining 10 extra levels would live a few more years but an old woman gaining those same levels would only live a few extra hours.

Depending on a whole bunch of factors humanoids could live for hundreds of years – with some tracked sapients being clocked in at ages close to dungeons. Apparently the gnome Innearth had seen was well known and had been around since roughly 300AS! He was practically a dungeon celebrity nearly everyone of note had gotten a visit from him.

It's even more impressive when you find out gnomes have a shorter lifespan on average – that guy must be doing something differently. Bunch of spells outside of the system?

Basically, for humanoid sapients the exact math was hard to track, varied between races, was muddied by different stats increasing lifespan disproportionately and had external influences that could change everything. All they could tell was the line at 125 was a solid jump and most transcendents were measurably older than non-transcendents.

Innearth ruminated on humanoids while watching humanoids kill unique spiders and move onto a boss fight. A team of three humans and one orc battled the spider sisters to death with pure strength – not a single mage or archer between them – before moving on and resting in the nature-themed rest room.

Releasing a set of snakes with essence blood and purple scales Innearth started digging deeper into stat sites and pages than he had up till now.

There were endless pages with stats crafted in loving detail. They estimated how high a level adventurers could reach based on their current level and age and how old they would be when they reached every level in between.

They included information taken from “unknown but reliable sources” and straight from the minds of sapients sometimes with mental mana.

These “stats” were split into simple and complex categories.

A simple/good quick estimation was something called the “one in a thousand” rule.

One in a thousand adventurers reached every 100 levels.

So with an estimated current population of 7 billion humanoid sapients in the world, you could estimate one in a thousand would reach level 100. 7 million or so are basically transcendents. Of those transcendent, one in a thousand would reach level 200 – 7 thousand or so. Of those level 200 transcendent, one in a thousand would reach level 300 – 7 give or take.

Following this pattern the number of sapients reaching level 600 was 7e-9 – one over 7 billion…an equal distance from the number of sapients there currently was alive.

Of course, that didn’t mean there was zero level 400+ sapients. Populations fluctuated – a thousand years ago there was something close to 12 billion sapients and 500 years ago that number was closer to one billion…with age coming into play there were sapients alive from centuries or even millennia before... so an intrepid stat focused researcher needed to take into account the number of births and estimated age of death over a long period…More importantly, while the one in a thousand rule was surprisingly accurate it didn't take into account wars or catastrophes that cut populations, nor did it account for modern life expectancy rising in recent years.

...at the end of the day, Innearth didn't know how important any of this information was for his goals. It served only to show how monumental a problem he had decided to help solve and well…other Cores had poured over the probabilities with a frankly boring degree of focus. Innearth was heavily distracted by his more interesting entertainment – one snake had something like a hammer essence and kept jumping into the air briefly morphing its body into the shape of a hammer that crashed down on adventurer shields and then back into a crystal snake form to dodge away.

I like that snake. It's not necessarily as strong as some but something about the way it looks when it smashes adventures makes me laugh.

How much hammer essence do I have?

…that’s not a lot. That’s no good I want to make these a more common enemy.

Innearth didn’t take long to figure out a solution.

He made a new monster – an essence cow – and filled its belly with nearly all of his hammer essence. Around that belly mercury-based liquid life was focused solely on regenerating the essence/potion in the cow's belly. At the bottom of the monster, a handy tap lay – farming crystal dwarves could come by and twist the nozzle dumping essence milk into a bucket every few hours.

While he was on this tangent Innearth made some more essence cows for some of his favourite potion flavours – All the seasonal essence types for example and one that made mushrooms appear everywhere.

…there was a slight problem with this whole setup. Turning the essence into a part of a monster randomly changed it slightly and all the essence cows made essence milk not regular essence…there was also a problem with the essence potions being deeply magical and requiring quite a bit more time to regenerate than something simple like a healing potion but for the most part it worked perfectly.

…Innearth returned to his brainstorming looking about the deprivation floor while he did so.

I’m going to ignore the stats. All I need to know is that to reach a high level an adventurer needs to advance quickly – preferably gaining a bunch of levels when they are really young. That will make them live longer and reach a higher level which will make them closer to reaching godhood.

Also obviously adventurers that take risks and fight stuff stronger than them increase in level much faster than ones who play it safe…but are more likely to die. Rolling higher odds year after year hits anyone harder and it's important to note most transcendents – even those who were risk-takers as youths – have cooled down and started playing it safe. They only have one life and healing, while miraculous, can only do so much…playing it safe means their levelling has slowed to a crawl that’s really the “real” problem preventing them from reaching godhood.

…now that I think about it, Amy’s doing a good job healing adventurers with ambrosia. That’s the sort of thing that can let them take more risks and level faster.

Innearth noticed his original number of deprivation slimes was now frightfully low. Despite protecting them to the best of his abilities…they now had dropped to one ascended one and 3 non ascended ones.

…this whole floor had been ignored for too long. It had become much easier than when Innearth made it.

Let’s see if I can use my current knowledge to fix this.

Besides the blocking materials, a lot of the deprivation floors' initial design was based around loud noises, parrots repeating back sounds and the slimes removing senses.

Now that Innearth knew how to use deletion mana he could try to use it to delete sounds and senses…but he wasn’t a deletion specialist and as a dungeon wasn’t very in tune with most humanoid senses.

It was hard. Innearth spent some time trying to manage it before giving up and searching the market for a deletion core to manage it for him. Finding one happy to part with some sound, taste, light, feelings, and smell deletion cores for a single crate of 100 loot items Innearth began creating a circuit-based monster. A turtle – simple shape – that ate senses, each deletion core’s potential maximized with circuits. This turtle lived in the center of the hallway and sucked senses from nearly the entire floor in a constant draw.

Moving on to his Ice caverns Innearth mixed essence milk into snow making a set of different coloured snowmen – a dash of colour in an otherwise cold and white land.

They attacked and harried different adventuring groups while Innearth finished off his stat review.

Okay, basically all the existing plans and theories that other dungeons have made or tried before…or are currently trying are okay. They are actually great but not enough and doing the same thing as them and expecting a different result seems foolish. The largest idea that Cores seem to be fixated on is playing around with both difficulty and actual danger to adventurers. Something something probability of adventurers gaining levels vs dying using different graphs and massive collaborative big data tracking.

There's so much math! There's so much math it’s taking their delving entertainment to a dry boring place. This is a goal for me to like living why would I turn it into something that’s not fun?

Innearth did agree that a high-level hunting ground needed to be made and had already started brainstorming what it would look like in a separate thought thread.

What he didn’t agree with was the idea of just making a high-level area filling it with high-level monsters and hoping for the best. Innearth would stack as many things in his favour as he could.

Getting Amy’s help with ambrosia life support was a start to that problem. He wanted her help but while he was on that thread…Innearth wanted a whole saving system.

…He should start researching the short timeframe “[resurrection] that some high-level adventurers performed reviving a second or two after their body's death. Doc would probably be the best to talk about that with. Considering Doc had been hinting they should play with death mana that’s a good start but Innearth didn’t want to start that until he actually had a really high-level area to use the system.

Innearth moved past the hidden whimsy floor and started looking about the nightmare mines.

At this moment there was only one adventuring group in the floor collapsed against a wall as they tried to regain energy against the increased gravity…

Not feeling particularly like bugging them from their rest, Innearth moved on once again stopping at his “desert” transitionary floor. This floor had a single group as well, but they were actively fighting a dust devil and were much more entertaining to watch in the background.

I want the “super hard” floor(s) to be in the void and…I think it needs to be tempered cosmic void to withstand the sorts of fights I’m imagining will happen on it.

…but it's going to be big and I don’t want to spend forever just slowly extruding cosmic void out into the void. Is there any way I can automate this? I can’t can I?

Innearth watched sand wurms spin about the dunes weaving between crystal cacti to attack the adventurers.

He thought back to the essence cows he just made and then to the fact that he couldn’t grow or regenerate cosmic void.

…but cosmic void wasn’t actually the only material that could be tempered was it? Just the material that can be tempered and brought back to reality. All the void stone and solid void in the initial facility was tempered wasn’t it? It just took more effort?

Innearth found some of that ancient tempered voidstone and tried bringing it back to reality. Unlike tempered cosmic void, the void atmosphere immediately drained away from the material “detempering it”…that would be a problem in reality but if he only cared about it in the void?

Making some solid void Innearth moved it about trying to temper it – in the same manner he tempered cosmic void.

…it didn’t seem to pick it up as well but Innearth knew it was possible somehow – the whale had done so after all Innearth should be able to do anything some stupid whale could.

Turning this time to cosmic void Innearth created a giant press – two flat sheets of cosmic void inside of a cosmic void box. Placing solid void inside this machine, Innearth pressed the void atmosphere down – pulling the block out afterwards and checking his results.

…it worked but there was no point in this setup if Innearth was the one making the solid void manually. Sure it was slightly cheaper and easier to make than cosmic void but not to a degree that mattered and the result was slightly worse…

Innearth thought back to the cows and thought to the void plants queen made that all created a temperable void-based material. He wanted a solid result… but it was much easier to regenerate a liquid or more sand-like flesh than it was solid body part in a useful shape.

Innearth thought to Queens cement and decided he would need her help with this task.

Wanting to see as far as he could get alone Innearth created a manual machine at the edge of the facility. Large “presses” were made where you could feed solid void in one side and push out a tempered slab on the other. Tubes needed to be made snaking about the whole outside of the facility to suck atmosphere from many different places – a large number of cosmic void turbines sucking atmosphere through and feeding through “intake” vents near the top of each press.

A long constant slab was a good start – even if it was manually filled with void materials currently – but Innearth didn’t quite know how to go about attaching it to more slabs.

Before Innearth started asking his friends for help creating a new zone he returned to his brainstorming session. Some part of him wanted to visit each floor and didn’t like that he had skipped some.

The sand floor was followed by the nightmare magmahalls…or more acuratly the nightmare lazer halls because Innearth had only kept a bit of magma for the asthetic and to match its predecessor. Two adventuring groups were currently exploring – one a trio of fire mana themed warrior/mage/tanks and the other a pair of pink skinned humans with pointed noses…kobolds.

Innearth stayed for a time while imagining the type of monster he would need on this planned zone.

I think…I think I want to abuse the natural resource of the void. Attract demons and have adventurers fight those.

Ideally, for the type of experience we are talking about, adventurers would need to fight stuff on the level of the void whales…but I don’t know how to go about facilitating this?

Innearth thought along this tangent for a while – the barest hint of an idea starting to form. Speaking of void whales, despite it getting slightly repetitive Doc Abe and Queen were all calling for another whaling – Yggdrasil was fine but had run out of food and had slowed down its growth.

Helping them create the newest harpoon and paying more attention to the whale this time Innearth tried to imagine helping an adventurer fight the beast.

As the 20km whale died a few minor ascensions happened…but more importantly his crazy key ascended.

The key to his magma hall puzzle room ascended! That…was not supposed to happen.

Innearth remade the key and brought his ascended key down to its new room.

He tried to see if this event meant anything. Part of him was wondering if there was some higher meaning to the key ascending…but he wasn’t a superstisious Core and no matter how much he thought about it there was zero link between his ascended key and his goal.

Moving to the void transitionary floor, Innearth stared about the walkways covered in void roses. No adventurers again at the current time this deep – just hundreds of void flies buzzing about the roses. One was actually ascended and had gotten ignored till now, ascending in one of the mass ascensions while Innearth was busy.

The fly looked relatively normal but moved much quicker as it darted about like a humming bird – void needle beak stabbing into the rose bushes occasionally as it amused itself.

Can I find meaning in this?

…no. Life doesn’t work that nicely. I could make my own meaning but it would be pointless for this.

Innearth moved onto his nightmare crystal caverns while thinking about the demon problem.

This zone had quite a few groups in it – around two dozen had set up camps before delving the still new and uncharted waters that were the hardmode ice caves/cavern past it.

Adventurers were working together – one seemed to have some [chef] based skills and was grilling arch crystal snakes on a large bonfire.

Working together is nice…I want my friends to help with my goal. Innearth idly mused. He noticed Craig was sitting to the side of a group chunk of seasoned roasted snake meat on a needle skewer and…Innearth reached out. He found an artifact Steve had made a while ago to communicate and brought it down to the zone with an abuse of the loot system.

Pointing it at Craig he asked the question he was dying to ask and crossed an invisible line.

Innearth sent.

Before he could hear a response everything seemed to freeze.

A panel poped up.

Potential insanity.

Due to your level and past strength feat of [Killing multiple Void Whales] potential aberrant status, skips minor concerning tag and minor madness quests.

A inspector should be along shortly to properly verify the claim. Please stand by.

The system popup wasn’t what made everything feel like it was frozen. The inspector was.

A dragon slowly wandered through Innearths dungeon moving through nearly frozen time.

They were not shaped like what first comes to mind when you imagine a dragon. They had feathers instead of scales and were sized closer to a large horse with hawk-like talons for hooves and a short serpentine tail.

They were not particularly lizard-like... but Innearth immediately knew they were a dragon. The amount of mana contained in their body rivalled anything he had ever seen, the way smoke billowed out of their mouth on each exhale, the way they had frozen his dungeon and everyone in it.

Yep, that's a dragon. Didn't even know I had a natural dragon detector. Go dungeon instincts!

The dragon went through each floor quickly – pausing when it saw his steam horse, pausing again when it saw his dust mana cloud. The dragon spent a particularly long time lingering in the whimsy floor before ducking through a portal to the facility and scanning it from top to bottom.

Suddenly as if Innearth's sense of time had been frozen and re-unfrozen, the dragon was in his core room.

It reached out with a talon, tapping the cosmic void shell that protected his core…not maliciously but with a curious sort of knock. Like it was a salesman knocking on Innearth's door the dragon's talon knocked several times and then smashed into it as if testing his defences…

Quite clearly, the dragon gave Innearth a look and head shake indicating it wanted him to open the box.

…Innearth did not in fact want to open his box. If he did, he would be entirely at the dragon's mercy, in fact Innearth was surprised to know his tempered armour even stopped the dragon with how strong they felt to his senses.

…Innearth was definitely not opening his box after that last smash. That would be idiotic. What's the point of armour if you take it off for the first potential enemy you see? No he was going to stay nice and cozy in his shell until the dragon went away and hopefully sped time back up when they did so.

…the dragon was talking wasn’t it.

If only Innearth could figure out how to communicate without opening his box.

Trying to grab the communication device he had just used on Craig, Innearth stuggled to move it or activate it in the frozen world. He actually struggled to do anything in this world the only “thing” that seemed to be sped up was his perception and thoughts.

Partway through yanking the device ineffectually and suddenly the dragon had it and was pointing the sender at itself. The boxy artifact was awkwardly held in a taloned hand.

Innearth reached out.

The dragon muttered.

Innearth sent out hesitantly. The dragon doesn’t seem too angry?

The dragon's voice sounded…high pitched even as a mental communication. It came in almost chirping waves of thought like how Innearth imagined a bird would think.

Innearth didn’t know what the dragon wanted from him. He was safe? Yeah…Innearth knew that. No madness cultivation here whatever that meant.

…Why was the dragon still standing there expectantly.

kkkkkk it feltnice. Also that treestuff. Verynice magic feeling. My nameis Rataka.> the longer the dragon talked the more Innearth felt like communication was breaking down.

He hesitantly agreed – hoping he could hide the dragon from adventurers. The lake was not meant for combat it was specifically designed as a reward.

kkkkk, thanks thanks. Times not frozen yes. I’ve just sped your senses up to matchmine!> suddenly time was unfrozen and the dragon was gone.

No the pure lake was being absolutely trashed – the dragon was happily swimming about at multiple times the speed of sound magic blurring its form and protecting the environment but still making massive waves as it swam everywhere.

Despite asking for a place at the lake the dragon seemed to change its mind after taking an incredibly long several second swim – they moved over to the facility and claimed a part of the room sitting beside Yggdrasil pulling hundreds of shiny golden nuggets shaped like acorns and arranging them into a nice stack before instantly falling asleep a faint hum whistling in the air as it breathed.

Abe: Hey uh…anyone else seeing this?