Dude, you’re a dungeon! I shouted back. No wonder I can’t see anything! I must just be a core buried randomly in the ground. Holy crap that’s awesome! I’ve always wanted to be a dungeon. It seems so fun. Ooh, bring up the dungeon menu.

Menu!

Expand dungeon 1 mana per square foot Expand dungeon 1 dungeon point per ten square feet

...Well that was underwhelming.

Nah, it’s fine, that means that this is an unlock system. That’s actually pretty cool because it probably means there are a bunch of hidden things. Good point, good point. I opened the menu. This time trying to bring it up without saying the words. It worked, which was pretty cool because I didn’t want to ever have to yell anything like ‘Exploding Star God’s Valiant Three Dances of the Nine Phantom Dragons - First Form – Divine Light Comes at the Dawn from the Shimmering Jade Lotus!’. I wouldn’t rather die, but it would be close.

Looking at the menu options again, I mentally side-eyed my human self. Man, what the heck. Even if it’s an unlock system, why are your options so much cooler than mine? Jealous much? Besides, why do you care? You can just switch your perspective with mine, or better yet, figure out a way to get teleportation before level ten. Yeah right, there is no possible way we could get teleportation before level ten. What kind of world has teleporting teenagers? Can you even imagine? Just the rise in teen pregnancy alone... geez.

Oh crappity crap crap.

What?

Am I going to have to kill people?

I paused as I considered the new thought. Being a dungeon was undoubtably awesome, but the costs could also be staggeringly high if we had to sacrifice our soul to do our job.

Well, how do people deal with it in the LNs? It seems like they usually go one of a few different paths. A few of them just go straight up murder hobo and don’t even care.

Obviously that’s not an option for us.

Obviously.

The most common path seems to be the ‘murder hobo but it’s ok because these are bad guys’ route. Yeah, I always find it amazing that every single person who enters a dungeon just happens to be a serial murder rapist.

Well, unless we get very lucky, I'm going to guess that not very many of our guests will be S.M.R.s. Well hang on, let’s do the math: in the US 0.6% of deaths are murders. That number goes up to 1.6% if you include the entire world and all war-related deaths. You figure that a lot of those are coming from bombs and multi-target weapons, so the number of people who are actually murderers has to be under 1%. The amount of rapes in the US is about 90,000 a year, with a population of 330,000,000, so that’s what, one out of every 3,500 people, times five or ten because most of them aren’t reported, so let’s say one out of every 500 or so people every year? Over ten years that means 2% times 1%… so we’re looking at about a one in ten-thousand chance of finding one of those to dungeon kill.

Huh. Well remember that the war and murder rate over the last few thousand years has dropped from about 15%, so this world could have ten times the serial murder rapist for us to blast. Sure, but that’s assuming we’re counting soldiers as murderers, and that they’re also rapists.

So, we pretty much both knew that plan wasn’t going to work the whole time.

Yep.

Still, it kinda illustrates how unfeasible that route is despite its popularity, but hey, maybe this world will be filled with cultivators. If webnovels have taught me anything, it’s that virtually all of them are psychotic bastards who deserve to die.

I paused for a minute to reflect on what the ratio of arrogant young masters could be in this world, but quickly returned to the point at hand.

Alright, what’s the third option? I’m glad I asked. Thank me very much. Well, we could always go the Mother Delta route.

Puns and mushrooms?

Puns and mushrooms.

Obviously we’re going to go the benevolent route. That’s not even a question. The problem is that we don’t have powerful protectors sheltering us from outside influence.

Yeah, that’s a big problem. We don’t really know anything yet. About anything. We don’t know if people try to kill dungeons, or love us, or try to enslave us.

We both sat in silence for a moment considering. After a minute or two of thought we decided that our best bet was to expand and gain strength while avoiding creating an external entrance for as long as possible. As for dungeon finding mages or magic, there wasn’t much point in worrying about things we had no control over, so we agreed to deal with that scenario if and when it happened.

Now the exciting part!

Aww yeah! I replied. My human half stood up and prepared to find some civilization. Or failing that, shelter, water, or food, in that order. My dungeon half began dungeoning like crazy.

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