Goblin Cave was dissatisfied with its work. It was a feeling that had been growing for a long time.

Goblin Cave was, as far as it could tell, a perfectly average dungeon core: 51 floors total, some sixty years old now, and dug into coarse granite rock around the base of a mountain.

Through system linkage it could see information on the nearby dungeons -- Darkwood Grove, a surface-level forest dungeon with a budding water specialization that had typed heavily into gremlins and pixies; Deepmine Delve, a resource-type cave dungeon within the same mountain range that hosted Goblin Cave that was heavily trap-themed; and Elysian Heights, a newer dungeon -- only a decade old -- perched on a nearby mountaintop, currently fairly generalized but with the beginning of an obvious winged-type specialization. Through ambient system linkages it could get vaguer information on another dozen-or-so dungeons further out, with a very similar trend. Additionally, it had access to the local region rankings, where its overall ranking was 1274 out of (currently) 2281, nearly exactly in the middle of the pack.

It had started with a goblin mob type, which it had evolved into hobgoblins and then lesser orcs, with the occasional ogre boss thrown in. It had made a partial lateral move into beast-types twenty years ago that had brought it some much-needed variety, and only a few years ago it had synthesized the two into a goblin rider spawn. It had been looking forward to the evolution -- the choice was likely to be between a goblin knight and a goblin beastmaster, and both of them had intriguing possibilities, but as time had gone on it had been finding it harder and harder to really care about either.

It was the adventurers that were doing it, really. When it was younger everything had seemed frenetic, desperate. Its core had cohered in a shallow gully, only protected from the sky by a single rock shelf, and it had dug down with the terror of the newborn, only knowing it needed to hide itself away. It had chosen goblins because the status information had said they were numerous and easy to spawn, and it had wanted as many things between itself and the surface as possible. But that terror had evened out after the first delves into it, and now its upper corridors crawled with adventurers near-constantly, giving it only scant days, sometimes only hours, between groups. It had to spin its respawn cycles at their utmost to maintain any kind of population on the upper floors.

Most only delved on its upper floors, slowly carving their way to its fifth-floor boss (Gor-bal the Gruesome, a boss it had made when it had first unlocked bronze tools and weapon specializations for its basic goblin spawn. He wielded a sharply-hooked sword with a thorned blade, and had a gallery of stone-throwing assists on an upper level only accessible via a trapped stair. It had been very proud of the design when it had first put it together) and usually stopping there. It had empowered every seventh floor boss, out of a whim at the time, and over time it had determined, from adventurer chatter, that most dungeons tended towards a partially-empowered 'sub-boss' every fifth floor, with a fully-empowered boss every tenth floor, so maybe that was part of the sudden drop in delve completion past the fifth floor, with another big drop after floor seven. Maybe adventurers had been expecting something different. 'Expecting'.

Its first 28 floors were variations on a cave scheme, with a steadily increasing number of rooms, eventually bringing in more and more frequent loops, dead-ends, and disorienting elevation changes. Its 17th floor contained the first instance of it running two passages over each other on the same floor -- it had felt so clever when it'd first thought of that -- and its 18th floor was a thicket of downward slopes, when it had thought to mimic the descent to a new floor within a single floor. To... throw off adventurers' expectations? To confuse them.

What did adventurers expect? It was a thought that weighed on it more and more. At first, it seemed obvious: they expected to descend down to its core, killing its guardians, and then take or shatter its core. Everyone who stepped foot into its dungeon with intent to kill its mobs wanted to kill it. But... why leave after five floors? Oh, certainly, some pushed deeper, but no adventurer had ever stepped foot past its 49th floor. It had really only spun out its 50th and 51st floors of boredom. Fear, too, certainly -- having an adventuring party only a room away from its core had evoked feelings of primal terror it'd thought it'd put behind it -- but that wasn't the true impetus. It was bored.

Slowly, over the years, it had learned the language the adventurers spoke in its halls, and then even slower it had learned to read their language. When it killed them, sometimes they had scrolls or books in their possession, and for decades it had shoved them into a dead-end dumpheap room on its 27th floor. Hidden behind a trio of secret doors (an innovation it'd thought of circa floor 22), no adventurer had ever found their way there. It thought about that a lot, too -- little trails all up and down its levels, everywhere an adventurer had trod, funneling adventurers into the deeps. Its first five floors were entirely linear; its first forked path (rejoining only a room later) was on its 8th floor, when it had started being dissatisfied with curve-packing increasingly long linear stretches. Vast stretches of its vast, maze-like lower floors had never had an adventurer step upon them.

Finally reading its cache of books had been... illuminating. Some of the books were travel guides for various dungeons -- that was how it learned the second-ring boss in Darkwood Grove was a kelpie associated with a certain stretch of deep river, which fit with the system-reported secondary water affinity -- and some were religious, or official proclamations of the human kingdom that laid claim to the overworld region it was beneath. It pieced together an idea of the world slowly. It knew about religion, of course: when it killed adventurers and didn't wipe the whole party, half the time they'd pray over the corpses. Calling for their patron to guide the soul in death. That was something like its own respawn cycle: the animating soul fled from dead mobs, and it would inter it into a new mob, optionally allowing it to recall some of its prior lives to guide its growth, until it was reaped again. The same cycle held true for adventurers, supposedly. Certainly it couldn't do anything with their souls, even as it felt them escape from their dying bodies.

But what was the point of it all? Adventurers killed its mobs, and it respawned them elsewhere. Its mobs killed adventurers, and their god respawned them elsewhere. Goblin Cave constantly dug deeper. It had thought every actor in this cycle did this out of... desire to survive. The brutal fight for survival. Everyone had a motive. But... more and more, it had an inkling that it was missing something.

"Theme". That was the word it was dwelling on. "Boring theme," adventurers said. "Easy dungeon, but it's real static, and the theme is just cave after cave." Easy? Goblin Cave imagined any dungeon would be easy, if you stuck to the first five floors. It wasn't that it wanted adventurers trying to actively kill it, but...

They were delving inside it, what, for fun? Just to harvest the goblin-skin leather and bent copper coins its mobs dropped? For the pittance of experience the upper floor goblins supplied?

The dungeon guidebook entry on Darkwood Grove said the area was the result of a curse by a witch that corrupted the nearby forest, turning it to darkness. That was manifestly not how Darkwood Grove had formed. Like all other dungeons, its core had cohered slowly in system-space, fed by ambient excess mana until it finally crystallized enough to pierce through into mundane reality. Goblin Cave remembered the moment when Darkwood Grove was created. Witch? Curse? It was an invented story. Due to its nature as a surface dungeon, it made sense for it to rank up its existing bosses when it ranked up, and create a new level 1 boss; Goblin Cave had taken the opposite tack and left its higher levels unchanged as it dug deeper. "Narrative". Darkwood Grove's first boss, and final boss, was a mage-type enemy that stayed in a hut at the very center of the wood. The witch. It was a story the dungeon told about itself.

Its ranking overall was 1274, but there were many subcategories. "Difficulty", 1094. "Theme", 1328. "Narrative", 1709.

It had the power to reshape reality at a whim. To build and bury, create and destroy. It spun souls from the nothingness and created living things. And it was using this power to, what? Maintain a themepark for adventurers to grind out their low levels? The power of a god, used to make a replica of a filthy, tedious goblin warren. To provide a constant stream of meaningless fodder mobs. Anything that happened in its halls didn't matter: kill its 1st floor boss, the goblin chief? It didn't matter. It would respawn soon. And, its mob wasn't really a goblin chief: an elder providing leadership to a tribe. What tribe? It had seven spawns on its first floor. Elder? The current goblin chief was five hours old. That it looked like a wizened old goblin was artifice. It never spoke to other goblins, save for using its [War Cry] buff. It sat in its designated room, inert or sometimes pacing, until an adventurer party entered. Then it died, and Goblin Cave respawned it, and the cycle repeated itself. Was it even a goblin? Goblin Cave spun its body out of pure mana on each respawn. A mana construct pretending to be a living thing.

Oh, certainly, it knew all about maintaining ecological cycles. It had made a bit of a hobby of setting them up, on its mid-30s floors. Generate a trickle of water, put down luminous mushroom spores on the shore of the growing pool, put down algae in the water to use the glow of the mushrooms, add fish to eat the algae, and then finally let hobgoblins eat the fish. All those little cycles of life and death fed it with a steady supply of souls and mana; those loops were the core of passive generation. But goblins were reproductively viable on the scale of a year or two, and hobgoblins nearly a decade; there was no way to maintain a stable population without cutting corners. And more and more, it felt like calling them 'goblins' was wrong. They ate and drank, when it reminded them to, or when it had established control nodes to remind them to automatically. Eating and drinking buffed their stats. Maybe because they were well-fed, or maybe just a system bonus for engaging in realistic simulacra. They chittered at each other, but there was never language there. There was hardly thought there. It had options, in its system interface: Tactics. Strategy. To control how they attacked. It'd used them to create the various swarm encounters throughout its warrens. Tactics, not thought up from a mind, or taught, but injected into the puppets it had created to give them some semblance of intellect.

For what felt like the first time, Goblin Cave looked at itself. Really looked at itself. What it had constructed over the years was loathsome, vile. A grotesque clockwork world of idiot machines, pacing through simulated corridors. Was this every dungeon? Was the whole world like this? Was the #1 Narrative dungeon telling some sublime lies about its nature, and reinforcing that with every step through its corridor? It was abruptly intolerable.

Goblin Cave would have to do something different. It needed to do something different.