I blinked, and too many eyes blinked together. I tried to breathe, and found that I not only couldn't, I didn't need to. And strangest of all, superimposed on the confusing shatter of images, but completely independent of any of them, I could see Day 1.
Blue Core is an occasionally-NSFW fantasy Web Serial Novel available on Royal Road, here
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The protagonist suddenly awakens in a fantasy world with no memory of how he got there. He quickly realises A Dungeon is him, and he's stuck in an RPG Mechanics 'Verse.
Unusually for both the world he finds himself in and for the genre, he eschews monsters and tries to avoid killing, instead using individuals he empowers as his agents in the world. The story itself slowly moves focus from the mechanics of the dungeon to his interactions with the wider world as he navigates the politics of surrounding nations, all the while trying to solve the mystery of "depletion" that is slowly eating away at the very magic of the world.
Blue Core contains examples of:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: It is ultimately revealed that Depletion is a result of a Great Dungeon becoming damaged and disconnected from the Akasha that is supposed to govern its behaviour, and so treating everything in the world as unrecognised abominations to be destroyed.
- Amplifier Artifact: Sources greatly increase the wielder's ability to work with a particular elemental Affinity, and are often necessary to advance a class to the next tier, but finding naturally occurring ones can be difficult. When it turns out that Blue can literally grow them, there's tremendous international interest.
- Artificial Human: The protagonist, before he was isekai'd.
- The Assimilator: Dungeons, and by default Mage-Kings, are capable of this. It doesn't seem to be a very pretty process, essentially described as Meat Moss growing on objects until they’re consumed. Blue has this ability, but doesn’t use it to the horrifying extent of other dungeons.
- Babies Ever After: Once the Great Dungeon of Air is fixed, Shayma plans to spend a lot of time with all the newly hatched dragons, as the Caldera Aunt to Taelah's Caldera Mom, and tells Blue that she wants twins herself. Iniri ended up with three children, whereas Taelah, Shayma, and Ansae all ended up with at least four apiece. Possibly many more, as Blue, Shayma, and Ansae have all stopped aging by the end of the series.
- Battle Couple:
- Shayma's parents are shopkeepers, but they've also adventured together a lot. Sienne's Void Affinity makes her exceptionally dangerous, both to others and herself; Giorn helps take the edge off.
- Montagne, Ansae's child by Blue, isn't allowed to leave the Caldera until he's at least third tier, because if he were to be hurt, his parents would probably break the world.
- Beast Man: While normal humans exist, it seems that the majority of the world's population is some form of theriomorph. Justified since they're descended from the various monsters that inhabit the dungeons.
- Beyond the Impossible: Blue’s ability to cure Depletion counteracts a basic element of the fantasy world, and people who learn of it react accordingly (e.g. Ansae losing her temper and disintegrating a room with a shout). Depletion drains away abilities so there shouldn’t be anything there to cure, but Blue is capable of completely restoring all the skills and abilities that were stolen.
- Blessed with Suck: Void-affinity users. Sure, they get a power that can rip through almost any defense like it doesn’t exist, but using it quickly eats through anything the magic touches, such as weapons, armor, and even their own body. Prolonged use of void affinity even eats away at their emotions, which results in all of them invariably ending up addicted to something just to function.
- Big Eater: Both of Shayma's parents are this. Giorn because he's The Big Guy and a kinetic mage, Sienne because of her void magic.
- Big Fancy Gun: Blue didn't actually intend for the Sungun to be man-portable, but Shayma's abilities (like shape shifting) mean she can handle it. And scour an entire cavern of blightbeasts with it, with the side effect of burning a massive tunnel through the rock and transmuting the sides into stellar materials.
- Big Good: The Blue Core by default. He's not only the only power not trying to deplete people to empower himself, he grows stronger by fixing depletion.
- Breeding Slave: Red-core dungeon "wives". Blue locks himself from this option almost immediately (and deliberately).
- Class and Level System: As per LitRPG standard, everyone in the world has a character class that defines their abilities and a level that gauges relative strength. Classes are further divided into specialized tiers of increasing power; a group of fourth-tier classes is roughly equivalent to a modestly sized army.
- The Corruption: Depletion slowly drains a person of their very soul.
- Corrupt the Cutie: Inverted. Blue is able to remove corruption from people and saves the life of Shayma as she was nearly at her limit of depletion.
- Defector from Decadence: Tor Kot, once it becomes clear Blue can actually solve depletion, (more or less) happily leaves and retires to a quiet island in the middle of nowhere.
- Did You Just Romance Cthulhu?: Blue is one of the most powerful beings in the setting, and many people view his relationships as this in universe.
- Disintegrator Ray: Void affinity mana destroys anything on contact, whether magical or mundane. Sienne uses it, to great effect, but only in short bouts, because she has to stop and heal her skinned and bleeding hands afterward. Also, she goes through a lot of weapons, because once she infuses void into them, they don't last long.
- Distant Finale: The epilogue is split into three parts, showing glimpses of what's going on two years after the main plot finished, then two decades, then two centuries.
- A Dungeon Is You: As per the title, the protagonist, eventually named Blue.
- Elemental Powers: The usual fire, ice, wind and earth types make their appearance, but most of the extended list also show up, such as gravity, light, void, shadow, illusion and metal. Blue accidentally creates a new one, star mana, when he sets off an explosion worthy of a star.
- Equivalent Exchange: Bargains are magical contracts made between a Power and a petitioner. While they don't have to be technically equivalent, both sides have to agree to the terms, so they should at least be equitable.
- Evil Sorcerer: The mage-kings and their goons are perfectly content to lord their arcane might over others, and thoroughly villainous.
- Extreme Libido:
- Upon building a breeding station for the first time, Blue feels a rush of highly specific carnal appetites. He's a little freaked out by the implication that parts of his personality are sectioned off or enhanced by what he builds.
- Void magic consumes everything over time, including happiness or contentment. Any practitioner can never be satisfied, and invariably becomes addicted to something. Sex is one of the healthier options, assuming you have a willing partner.
- Floating Continent: The Adamant Fortress, when fully assembled, is a floating castle. The Mage-Kings' War Cores are like flying islands. Blue's Hedron is like a floating country. In the Distant Finale, the Far Voyager is a spacefaring continent.
- Functional Magic: While there are still a lot of mysteries, most of the RPG-mechanics are pretty well understood.
- The Gloves Come Off: After an agent of the Anells kills Shayma, Blue abandons restraint and responds with a [Starlance], which erases the city, leaving an expanse of stellar-infused water known as the Bay of Stars.
- Healing Hands: Keri, with some power-ups from Blue, becomes one of the most famous healers in the world.
- Heroic BSoD: Blue undergoes one when Shayma is killed.
- Human Resources: Any biological matter gets converted into a simple biomass resource by dungeon mechanics. Including the bodies of adventurers they kill. And since dungeons can also produce food edible for humans...
- Intimate Healing: Turns out a Blue Core can fix a lot of things, at least if you're female and don't mind having sex with a dungeon...
- Know When to Fold 'Em: Tor Kot and his associate Yit Niv, upon establishing that Blue can erase depletion in a way that they can never match, eventually decide to step aside out of his way. They release their monsters and hand over their cores to him, then retire.
- Level Drain: Technically, someone affected by Depletion still has the same level, but they lose the benefits, lowering their health and mana and weakening their Skills. Hitting the cap will strip their soul of everything and put them into a permanent coma.
- Level-Up at Intimacy 5: Those who Blue designates as his companions can indeed level up their relationship status, though admittedly it's mostly by things other than intimacy.
- Lizard Folk: The Scaleminds, who are much nicer than they look.
- Loyal Phlebotinum: Primal Sources, besides being more potent than regular Sources, will bind themselves to the first person who uses them, becoming unusable by anyone else. Blue considers them excellent diplomatic gifts, since they can only be of use to the ruler they're actually given to.
- Ludicrous Gibs: Mage-kings can draw on their linked dungeon cores to massively amplify their strength and resilience, but when one runs out of mana, he reverts to normal — while still facing attacks calibrated for his enhanced state. Which means he basically explodes.
- The Magocracy: The Mage-Kings have a council that distributes dungeon cores and designates their territories. Blue first has contact with them when they send a testy letter via shadow demon concerning his "encroachment" on the Mage-King who's seized the nearby kingdom and fed it to his dungeon.
- Master of Illusion: Shayma, as she grows into her trickster class.
- Maximum HP Reduction: Blue is shocked to encounter this effect when he's attacked with Dungeonbane weapons, which permanently reduce the HP of his cores.
- Mook Maker: Standard dungeon modus operandi is to generate monsters along with traps and mazes; Blue is notable in-setting for not doing so.
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast: The Light of Eschaton. Eschaton is a synonym for the end of the world. Blue doesn’t even need to see it in action to decide he doesn’t want it going off anywhere near him.
- Naughty Tentacles: Those averse to this trope may want to avoid chapters marked "nsfw", though at least things are kept consensual.
- N.G.O. Superpower: The Anell trading house, modelled after the East India Trading Company by
Word of God. They have no problem with assassinating heads of state or destabilising entire continents just to keep their void magic monopoly. Or simply make a point. - No-Flow Portal: All dungeons doors work like this, being partly magical. A lava pit next to a glacier won't affect the temperature of either. Blue eventually learns how to create this effect without anything physical at all by just manipulating mana.
- Nuclear Option: When no lesser weapon will do, Blue can set off a Contained Star, a massive fusion reaction trapped in a container that only he can breach. He later even gets an option to turn it into a directed weapon.
- Person of Mass Destruction: This has actually been Ansae's role in the world, for millennia. She purges large-scale threats, favouring a scorched earth approach to conflict. Under the light of her moon, she can simply command her foes to die en masse.
- Physical God: Blue is a Power, a being who broke away from the rules of the world somehow and gained incredible powers for it. Though how those powers express themselves is usually unique to each Power, one ability that all Powers possess, and which acts as proof they are Powers at all, is the ability to grant wishes and alter reality in exchange for equivalent payment. Up to, and including, the contractor selling their soul to the Power.
- The Power of the Sun: Stellar affinity is a potent type of mana, offering a number of upgrades compared to regular Light affinity, as well as various other options. Such as immunity to Depletion for all Stellar classes. The affinity is created when Blue produces his first Contained Star.
- Practical Currency: The Wildwood Retreat uses capsules of Source dust as currency and a crafting resource for magical items.
- Pyrrhic Victory: ANY clash with a mage-king will result in this, at best, due to their sheer power and the fact that they've weaponized Depletion. Vok Nal was an idiot who didn't know how to fight worth a damn, and it was still a close thing with over 20 dead, one 4th rank adventurer completely depleted, and Shayma grievously wounded, and even then, it was only because she grabbed his dungeon's core that there was any victory at all. Tor Nok nearly depleted one of Shayma's companions just by being present, without any fighting.
- Questionable Consent: There is a lot of heated debate surrounding the chapter labeled "Day 20" in regards to what happens to Shayma, the fox-woman. She is clearly being chased by human hunters and runs into Blue to try and take refuge. Blue opens a secret room with food, table, chair, bed, and breeding device, and opens another corridor full of spike traps. She goes into the room (which Blue immediately conceals) and listens intently as the hunters take the corridor. Once the hunters are dealt with, Shayma asks Blue for a safe place to hide a metal cube she'd been carrying, and after he creates one, she strips naked and sits on the breeding device herself... to predictable results. Rape, Sexual Extortion, and Unproblematic Prostitution get tossed around as the interpretation of what happened, as there's no way Shayma, or anyone else, could testify about Blue's intent, since Blue was physically incapable of communicating with Shayma.
- Reality Warper: Powerful enough illusion magic basically becomes this, as its practitioners start to be able to give solidity to their illusions.
- Removed Achilles' Heel: Ansae is immensely powerful, both physically and magically, but has no defence against Depletion except to retreat, and has almost been destroyed by it. Then she learns that Blue can purge it and render people immune... Once he gains enough mana capacity to actually pull it off, restoring her full power, it's time for the endgame, going after the Depletion rift to fix the world.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: It's not a very long rampage, but after Shayma is killed, Blue gives up all attempts at cowing or punishing House Anell, and just vaporizes their entire city with a fusion lance.
- RPG Mechanics 'Verse: Regular people have a Status and Skills, and they may unlock a Class through their actions.
- Screw Destiny: Fate is one of the many flavours of mana that can be manipulated. It is literally the future, or potential of something, and if you should lose it you lose everything you could or would have been. On the other hand, if you're sufficiently powerful and knowledgeable you can generate and restore Fate mana, literally creating your own destiny.
- Sexually Transmitted Superpowers: Becoming a Companion brings a number of potent benefits, including the ability to draw on Blue's mana pool (which is orders of magnitude larger than a human's), and being recalled to his core in an emergency. The process of becoming a Companion, though, is rather... intimate, shall we say, and only available to women.
- Spare a Messenger: When Ansae denounces the mage-kings who come to ambush Blue at the rift, she announces that one of them will be allowed to survive and carry a warning back. The rest turn to dust.
- Sustained Misunderstanding: Thanks to Blue being completely unable to communicate with anyone except Shayma, for all of book one, just about everyone thinks he's a captured mage-king dungeon owned by either Shayma or Queen Iniri, and act accordingly. This causes numerous problems as idiots of all types go after his core to try and steal, enslave, kill, or otherwise exploit him. In fact, a certain duke's idiot son uses a magical device to get dangerously close to both Blue's core and the resident visiting dragon, getting himself and his party killed in the process.
- The Trickster: Shayma gets this as part of her Bargain with Blue.
- Ungrateful Townsfolk: Even after being rescued from the deprivations of Vok Nal, Queen Iniri's people aren't as grateful as they should, decrying that the battle wrecked their city, and earlier, despite Blue having rescued them all from a swarm of thousands of goblins launched at them by Vok Nal, an adventuring party uses a magical device to track Blue's core, to steal, destroy, or enslave. They wind up tasting a water cutter and steam explosions, getting killed.
- Walking Wasteland: Mage-kings have an aura of depletion around them. They don't have to attack to destroy their enemies. A simple, friendly chat with one can be fatal, as Shayma, Keri, Cheya, and Annit learn the hard way as they try to flee the city of Duenn with Tor Kot hot on their heels, him actively blocking their teleport attempts.
- Weapon of Mass Destruction: The Adamant Fortress is armed only with something called The Light of Eschaton. When activated, it strips everything within a several mile radius of all Fate mana and completely annihilates anything in that area not in the fortress itself.
- Weapon of X-Slaying: Forging "Bane" weapons requires such hatred of the target that you would be willing to dedicate your life to destroying them. Once done, however, those weapons become inimical to everything about the target, even their senses, making Bane weapons hard to see coming. Blue eventually gains the ability to give his mana Bane properties against his current ANATHEMA target.
- Winds of Destiny, Change!: One of Shayma's original powers is Luck, that can nudge reality in small ways to her favour.
- World-Healing Wave: When the Great Dungeon of Air is repaired, it ignites and rebuilds its whole interior with the [Of Light And Fire Born] field, turning all the blightbeasts into regular monsters and fixing the deficiencies of air Affinity (deficiencies that no one had noticed, because they had existed for longer than anyone could remember).
- Zillion-Dollar Bill: Many of the things that Blue produces are noted as being so valuable that he literally can’t sell them lest he crash whatever’s left of the local economy or attract attention he really doesn’t want.
