Chapter 1: A Lovely Error

Error.

Error radiation levels rising.

Contamination from high radiation levels occurring.

Uploading data as per protocol to Medieval Monstrosities Online.

Warning data is contaminated, upload compromised beginning again.

…

Uploaded as (Dungeon Core 9,991) due to data being insufficient to properly construct a human form.

Dungeon Core 9,991 Joseph has formed.

…

10,000 new dungeons have spawned beginning distribution across the world.

World building complete: 10 Mythic/Legendary Dungeons, 100 Epic Dungeons and 10,000 new dungeons introduced into the world.

All AI’s have been placed and programmed.

…

Welcome to Medieval Monstrosities Online Joseph. Congratulations on being one of the very first adventurers to dive into this brand new world. You have our condolences at your untimely demise but we wish you luck on your new adventures.

“Crap, I feel like shit. What happened?” God what did I try this time. It’s even worse than the day I drank the batch of bad liquor and had a bowl of Berny’s mystery meat soup, not that it was a mystery everyone knew it had a little bit of everything mainly rat, dog, and cat. Thinking back, I vaguely recall an explosion, then the roaring boom that accompanied it, and finally searing pain.

Does that mean I’m dead? If the blast didn’t kill me the radiation surely did. I must be in one of the various virtual reality worlds. God, I never expected this. I mean I’d always known what would happen if I died. Hell, I even signed up for some new medieval fantasy one but still you never really believe it’s gonna happen.

As I sunk into a downward spiral of depression my training kicked in and I started to observe my surroundings. I was surrounded by what appeared to be some kind of whitish rock, couldn’t tell you for the life of me I was never a rock guy. The only rocks I knew were diamonds, rubies, and emeralds, and oh yeah what was that blue one sapphires. Besides the rock I appeared to be in a room bare room roughly ten feet across with only some kind of statue over in the one corner and a single hallway leading out.

Now for the important part how bad do I look? Did I pick some crazy race or weird creature too play as, I’d always treated these things as a joke? It helped to keep your mind off all the what ifs. Would I really still be the same person? Am I just a string of numbers, a remnant of the person I used to be? Is this the real me or am I the body out in the real world blown to bits? Is heaven real? Did I just damn my soul?

After what seemed like hours but was probably minutes I came back to myself and looked down at myself or tried to at least. Below me was a tone pillar. I gulped this isn’t looking good. Turning my vision inwards, a new phenomenon I had just discovered I could do I saw myself, a shining pink multifaceted gem. Well fuck, I don’t think I’m gonna get laid like this. What else is there oh there seems to be a flashing message icon.

“Oh, this doesn’t look good.” Opening up the flashing mail icon in front of me I glanced through the message log and saw the long string of errors. All those errors are definitely not good for me, when it says dungeon it can’t possibly mean what I think it does, can it?

That’s when I notice how everything seems tinted by a pinkish film. I really was pink rock barely the size of my fist. Shit this couldn’t possibly get any worse. Or wait could it? The message log said my data had been corrupted, did that mean I wouldn’t respawn like all the other travelers? Still there was one thing that got me.

“I mean come on, I can get being a dungeon core but why does it have to be pink?” It was bad enough being a dungeon but why did it have to be pink? Have you ever heard of the scary pink dungeon? No of course you haven’t because it doesn’t exist.” Ranting as a way of trying to relieve some stress over everything that had happened in what seemed like the last few minutes. Still slowly I started the long process of accepting my new reality. It wasn’t like I had much of a choice if I wanted to keep on living.

Dungeon Core 9,991 (Joseph)

Titles:

Classes: Dungeon Core lv 1

Floors: 1

Evolution Points: 10

***

Traits:

· Blessing of Love: all creatures in your dungeon give birth in half the normal time (normal dungeon 10 times normal rates) (current rate 20 times normal),

***

Skills:

· Summon Weak Animal: cost 1 evolution point

· Enhance/Evolve Monster: cost variable

“So, let’s see what I have here.” Looking around I noticed if I flexed my metaphorical muscles I could spread my awareness by expending bursts of what I can guess was mana. I’m great at flexing my muscles so I soon got the hang of this. After a while I had tinted everything with a pinkish glow, oddly the glow seemed brightest on the ceiling and got dimmer towards the floor but whatever. After some observation I realized that my dungeon consisted of three small rooms probably 10 by 10 feet square connected by a series of short tunnels. The only strange thing was the statue which appeared to be some kind of altar but to a deity I didn’t recognize, not surprising really, I was never one of the religious types. Most of them chose to ignore the possibility of a virtual afterlife and put faith in their gods.

The altar if that was really what it was, was a white stone carving of a heart with wings encrusted with pinkish gemstones. The gems appeared similar to how my core looked but smaller and obviously not sentient, I tried but they didn’t respond and after a couple of minutes I felt like a fool for trying to talk to a rock. Still I was a rock or a dungeon core at least. I wonder if I can absorb it? Much as it feels a little like rocky cannibalism I tried it. As I reached out with my mana toward it another one of those screens popped up.

Altar of the Goddess of Love

A sight of worship for the Goddess of Love this altar has been integrated into a dungeon and as such been changed. Altar has become indestructible for as long as the dungeon stands or until high level divine magics are used to destroy it. Any who desecrate the altar or curse the love goddess inside the dungeon shall suffer her curse.

***

Traits:

· Blessing of Love: all creatures in your dungeon give birth in half the normal time (normal dungeon 10 times normal rates) (currently 20 times normal).

· Curse of Unfulfillment: for offending the Goddess of Love the creature cursed with love will find themselves impotent, loveless, and unhappy for an indeterminate amount of time determined by the severity of their actions.

· Curse of Never Ending Lust: for offending the Goddess of Love the creature cursed with love will find themselves unable to quench their insatiable sex drive. Every waking moment will be filled with unquenchable lust. Will last for an indeterminate amount of time determined by the severity of their actions.

***

Skills:

· Summon: this will randomly summon two different creatures or objects associated with the Goddess of Love, cost 1 evolution point.

“So, this is why I’m pink!” Damn gods meddling in everything. Even dying can’t stop those guys and their followers from trying to but their heads into everything. Huu, breathe in and out. Oh wait, I can’t breathe because I don’t have lungs. No don’t panic, I’m sure there is something good about all this. I guess one good thing came is I only need to spend have the points to get my first monsters. Yah, that means I can create twice as many monsters. After I’d calmed down I spread my awareness to the other rooms and realized that all I had was a few clumps of green moss that was slowly turning pink. First off, I tried changing the color of my dungeon but all it did was go from varying shades of light pink to a darker pink. I settled on one of the various color schemes. My core would be a dark almost reddish pink that lightened to a pale almost white shade of pink as it got closer to the entrance.

Now what else could I do? Not much it turned out without monsters. After giving the altar, an evolution point I waited for my new monsters, then waited some more and just as I turned away from it a bright flash appeared, pink of course, and two things were on the altar. Or well one was on the altar and the other was hovering in the air above it.

“Really, a dove?” How am I supposed to make a killer dungeon with this? Let’s me see what kind of monster can I make from a dove and an apple. Maybe a scary tweety bird monster how horrific or a man eating apple tree. That last idea sounds kind of cool actually.

I spent an evolution point on the apple to get its natural evolution. Apparently, I could use my evolution points for four things. Firstly, they could be spent to summon a random low level monster, which turned out to be regular animals and plants. I could use a point to have a creature in my dungeon evolve following its natural evolution pathway. Apparently natural evolution is affected by a variety of factors including its age, class, and the environment it lives in. The third use was a variation of the second, I could spend more points than normal to have a creature evolve in a direction I wanted it to. Lastly, I could spend points on giving my monsters various classes. Apparently in this particular fantasy world creatures got stronger by leveling their classes and everything could have a maximum of three classes.

My apple monster well let’s just say it didn’t happen. It sprouted and grew into a large tree that spanned the entirety of my core room, hell it even grew apples but it didn’t grow a mouth or a bunch of sharp teeth. No, the bark took on a pinkish hue and the apples started giving off an alluring smell. You ask how I can smell? I have no fuckin idea.

Well natural evolution isn’t very helpful. Next time I’ll have to do a directed evolution. Now I just need to think of something that is really badass and cool, oh and somehow related to birds. I got it nothing is more badass than a dragon, everyone would be jealous if I became a dragon dungeon.

So, let’s see how I can make the connection between dragons and birds. Doesn’t really seem possible but I have a vague feeling it depends more about how I perceive things than it really is, magic can make almost anything possible after all. Now I just need to find the link between the two. Dinosaurs that’s it, birds are supposedly distantly related to dinosaurs and a dragon is basically a giant winged type of dinosaur.

Unfortunately, though that wasn’t a strong enough connection to make use of evolution points even if I could use however many I needed. So, let’s take a step back what is something else like a dragon and a bird? I got it, wyverns. All of a sudden it popped up as an evolution pathway for my monsters but the cost was still to high at 9 evolution points still this was progress.

After a couple tweaks I ended up replacing the scales with a bird’s feathers, it would drastically cut down on a creature’s defensive power but I had some ideas to counteract that. Now my feathered wyvern evolution path was only 5 points. Too further lower the cost I made the body more of a hybrid of bird and wyvern, it dropped to 4.5. In a rush to lower the cost further I tried to think of all the things I could change. I the end I chose to go with a purely bird like pair of legs which dropped the cost to 3.8. Lastly to get it back up to a whole number so I didn’t lose anything when I purchased it I modified the feathers to be harder, almost metallic or scale like. The birds now gleamed in a myriad of reds, pinks, silvers, and white.

For a cost of 4 evolution points I now had my new evolution pathway, bird wyverns. It cost me a single point to evolve the doves along the bird wyvern evolutionary path now that I had a template for it. From this day forth the dove wyverns were born.

I got a screen describing them. Apparently, the system recognized them as an unusual branch of the bird family that was born from the mating of doves and pygmy wyverns, the smallest of the wyverns. The best part about everything was I got an evolution point for creating and evolving my first bird wyvern. It turns out the creation of a new species could give you points, though I had a feeling this world had countless species so it wouldn’t be so easy next time.

Now that I had one monster it was time to create an army. Right now, I had no way to spawn a second dove so I couldn’t have the two of them start breeding up an army. I needed some kind of monster lair or something that could spawn my new army of monsters. After a bit of looking through the options I found what I was looking for.

Dove’s Nest (Lair):

1 Evolution Point

A dove monsters lair it will continuously spawn more of any creature with the dove racial class or one of its rank ups.

Size: 5 Nests (doves lay 2 eggs each time)

Spawn Rate: 5 times normal (normal time: 30 days; 15 days to hatch, 15 days to become a juvenile) (Dungeon natural rate: 20 times)

10 level 1 dove monsters will be born every 7 hours and 12 minutes

Upgrades:

· Size: double nest size (10 nests), 1 evolution point

· Spawn Rate: double spawn rate (10 times), 1 evolution point

· Level: improve all spawns to level 2, 1 evolution point

In the end I went with the basic lair which only cost a single point. After spawning it I learned that a new dove’s nest would automatically spawn on every floor I made which made me feel better about the purchase. Now I just had to wait and soon my dungeon would be full of dove wyverns. Level 1 dove wyverns but still they have wyvern in their name.

I put the dove nest in the middle room. Not too close to the entrance or my core. From there the doves slowly spread out across my dungeon and into my three rooms. I’d wanted to keep them out of the core room but doves don’t really eat moss and the only real food in the dungeon was the lover’s apples on the tree in my core. Over the course of the day I came to realize that while monsters don’t need to consume food in my dungeon they will grow much faster if they do.

My first bird, the one that came with the summoning had already eaten two of my apples and as it started pecking at a third it suddenly grew slightly bigger. Not much but now it was just a hair bigger than the rest. It had reached level 2. Soon I would have an army of doves to challenge the world, waah haha. No, the evil laugh thing just doesn’t do it for me.