Their conversation evolved from there. Goblin Cave outlined the basics of its thoughts about system-space: engineered to reward death, to allow for the creation of more experience.

"So you're an Ismali, huh?" the surveyor said, and then elaborated: "An old sect. Thought the system was created by a death god. All classes being combat-oriented, all skills being oriented towards some aspect of warfare, the nature of experience... these were their arguments. The most common counterargument to their philosophy is the existence of healing spells, and the nature of skills, which require use and study to increase, rather than experience." They outlined something of a philosophical history: Ismalists, which evolved into a sect of pacifist philosophers that eschewed all use of system techniques as corrupt temptation. But this also gave rise to an opposing sect, Emreeists, who claimed that the system was put in place to give humans a road to godhood, that experience was the highest good, and demanded them to strive to grow as powerful as possible. There were arguments that the system was constructed by a pantheon of gods, with numerous tradeoffs and balances within its mechanics, or that it was simply naturally-occurring. Any possible angle Goblin Cave had considered, and many it hadn't, apparently had well-established philosophical and religious sects dedicated to contemplation of their ideas.

"But if you're going to insist on recreating all of philosophy from first principles, please focus on something productive in the mean time. Already... are you sure your mana count is right? 100 mana for a meter cube... if that's right, that would mean..."

YOU ARE IMPLYING THAT THE UNIT OF MANA PROVIDED BY MY SYSTEM INTERFACE IS DIFFERENT THAN THE UNIT PROVIDED BY YOURS?

"Yes, exactly. And hex poison clearly does something to change the way the system displays mana, or the way it's stored in the body. There have been studies, the mana unit is shared across different races — a 2 mana spell is precisely 2 mana, and it's 2 mana for everyone who can cast it, Calculator Martine wrote a whole monograph on it — but there are strange interactions that break that pattern on the hex-affected. And nobody's ever been able to access a dungeon's system information before. Even the talkative ones can't really..."

That lead to another diversion: talkative ones?

There was a subclass of dungeon, generally termed 'clockwork' dungeons, that had a tendency to form avatars and attempt some kind of communication. That communication was sometimes in words, written or spoken, but never in complex sentences. The most common dungeon evolution that lead to that was clocktower- or mechanism-themed dungeons, hence the name, but they generally only occurred in or around cities, which made them... remarkably dangerous. Nobody wanted to let a dungeon growing underneath a city time to find a specialization just in the off chance it ended up with a clockwork specification. It was rare for a dungeon to have what the surveyor termed a 'civilization'-type theme: fortresses, sewers, ghost towns, and so on. Mine-type dungeons were classified on the border between resource and civilization themes, and tended to fall on one side or the other depending on how sensible their mining equipment was. But even the more communicative dungeons still only used a collection of words, as stand-alone concepts rather than full ideas: swords, metals, stop, more, less. Expand that way. There had only ever been a handful of 'tamed' dungeons; from what the adventurer said they inevitably turned on their masters and became more and more aggressive, and so clockwork dungeons were seen as unstable and dangerous, but immensely resource-rich in the short term.

Even the talkative dungeons didn't, couldn't, or wouldn't explain their system connections. Apparently surveyors tended to think of them as something like an enlarged mimic: an ambush predator which had instincts to replicate and match the local environment. A dungeon's instincts had grown so complex that they had a level of base cunning beyond a mere animal, but it was still just... repetition and instinct, no real 'intelligence' there, despite how elaborate their 'narratives' sometimes were. Goblin Cave wasn't sure how seriously to take that observation. Certainly its own existence implied to the contrary.

The communication problem immediately made it think of its own goblins: language development halted, or at least progressing very slowly. Maybe having to do with a lack of soul? But maybe that was just goblins. And maybe it was just dungeons. Goblin Cave wasn't sure if it had a soul; much like adventurers, it didn't have any stats for its own soul, just its mob spawns'. Maybe only the dumbest dungeons thought trying to communicate with adventurers was a good idea. It could have been anything.

But that brought things back to souls. It outlined the basic shape of the mechanic: soul required to spawn each tier of mob, soul requirement raising exponentially, but also, the implication that its soul unit might be very, very small. That a tier 49 mob might have, say, a tiny fraction of the size of a soul of an adventurer.

Eventually the surveyor proposed something: "Listen. I know some sages. They'd be interested in talking with you, studying you, maybe even helping in whatever kinds of... whatever you're doing with ants. But they have access to some hex-tainted artifacts, and longterm they might be able to smuggle some into you for study. They'd certainly be able to bring you hex-corrupted patients. You'd be able to ask them questions, instead of spending years re-deriving known science. Some of them are even high-level, they might be able to help defend you if the duchy sends a core-cracker team."

YOU WANT ME TO INVITE HIGH-LEVEL ADVENTURERS TO STAY INSIDE ME?

"Why not? You're already hosting them anyway."

It was... frustrating. Before, the outside world seemed full of promise. Now, it had been nothing but a source of banal, exhausting problems. In many ways it had learned nothing from any of it: just more details about how adventurers lived what it was now understanding as sad, miserable lives. It had risked its existence for this?

I WOULD HAVE PREFERRED SOMETHING DIFFERENT, it wrote.

"Different howso?"

I DON'T KNOW. DIFFERENT THAN THIS.

The surveyor shrugged. "Well, welcome to the world. It sucks and you don't get what you want. There's always too much happening and you never really know what the consequences of anything you do or don't do is. Congratulations, now you know what being a person is like." They snorted. "Maybe we have more in common than you think."

The first books/manastone tradeoff was scheduled in a few days. The timeline for when Goblin Cave could expect a team of high-level adventurers to come in and try to capture its core was just as vague as it had always been. It needed to prepare. It had moved its core to a more inaccessible part of the floor 49-to-floor-50 labyrinth a while back, and now it prepared for the messy and nauseating process of moving it from there to a more secure placement. Its thickets of manastone passages sprawling out from the fungal caverns on floor 50 were ideal: large and otherwise empty, with plenty of room to reshape defenses, and it wasn't too far a distance in absolute terms, so it could move itself without wrecking its mana density on its upper floors.

It was always somewhat disorienting to move its core, and it took some time afterwards to adjust. Everything felt subtly different, like things were curved differently, or all the angles were minutely changed. It had to do with the way its mana flow changed. Even after everything, one thing hadn't changed: its core was the point of contact between physical space and system-space, the point where mana was transduced out into the physical realm and poured out to flood through the dungeon. Changing it made ripples in the flow, and those took time to settle.

It was unsure what defenses would be adequate. It could make razor-sharp spikes, but adventurers could fly over them. Thin threads of sharp wire, but adventurers could melt them. Solid walls of dense mithril, but adventurers could blast through them. Submerge itself within a lake of acid: it was possible to neutralize it or drain it away. If it was profoundly outclassed, nothing it could make would withstand the adventurers' attacks. It still put all of those up anyway: hallways that looked misty with razorwire, trapdoors to rooms full of acid, core itself sealed away within an thick orb of dense, solidly-anchored mithril, with curving tubes punctured through it for mana ventilation. The halls outside its core were utterly lightless, and circulating as much dissonant, high-intensity mana as it could produce without disrupting its own senses. Well, it set new mana pipes up, and then it turned them off, so it didn't have the constant whine from them suffusing everything it felt.

It had slicing, stabbing, crushing, grinding, flaming, freezing, drowning, acid, and shocking hazards set up, mostly obsidian and glass for the cutting, mithril-wrapped lead for the crushing, and plain burning oil, water, regal acids, and iron for the elementally-aligned ones. None of it really made it feel any safer. If it encountered some structure like the one it had created, it could slowly flense apart the layers, peeling them to pieces from a position of safety until it could crack the core. It was foolish to assume high-level adventurers wouldn't have similar techniques for bypassing some, if not all, of its hazards.

While it was waiting, it also began reinforced the rest of its dungeon. Where there were thinner spaces between floors, it reinforced them with metal-doped rock, forming complex crystalline lattices within the solid rock that were resistant against shattering from any direction. It wreathed its immense resonator torus on floor 26 with a layer of dampers and shock absorbers until it could run it ten times as powerfully without shaking itself apart, forming mana waves so strong that the bow of their waves would pulverize anything in their way. It also thinned some walls, sketching out a new route through its floors: currently, its original cave ran all the way down, with only a handful of hidden walls connecting to the manastone sprawl encircling it. But it could seal off the old stairways between levels, hooking them up to the new construction ringing them, to force any parties out of the caves and into the mazy tunnels. How effective that would be, it couldn't say. The new tunnels were profoundly less hospitable to traverse, and they formed an immense maze, but they were also utterly devoid of mobs. And its old stairs were well-signposted: placed directly after the boss chamber on each floor, without exception. It would not be difficult to dig through the sealed space.

The lack of mobs made it feel antsy. It almost wanted to spawn some more creatures in, but if anything got this deep then it had gotten past its [Ogre Champion] and there was absolutely nothing else it could try. The equation, as it were, of delving was fairly simple: on one side, the resources of the delving party. On the other, everything the dungeon was capable of throwing at them. If it wanted to kill them, to present a barrier that was utterly impassible... it was coming up blank. Anything could be subverted.

That made it wonder what other dungeon cores were getting out of it. Constructing a narrative, sticking to a theme, building up a false story... it seemed like the safest thing would be to dig a long dark hole, do nothing, make nothing, and provide no rewards. To curl in on yourself and be nothing. But put that way, Goblin Cave knew that that would be intolerable. Better to do anything to show that you existed, than to give into the pressure of the world and negate yourself out of every action.