Literature / Dungeon Core Chat Room

Unnamed Core: Hello?
Immortal Spring Of Certainty: Well hello what's this.
Xero: Why haven't you set your name?
Amy: How haven't you set your name? I thought it was a requirement to advance.
Abe: I'll name you. Listen from now on your name is "Abe's little bro" write that down.
Xero: 😄

A new dungeon core awakens underground, told by the [System] that its purpose is to "regulate mana and challenge those who enter you". It might eventually need to find more purpose in life than that...but at least it has friends to help!

Dungeon Core Chat Room is a dungeon core LitRPG posted on Royal Road, and is complete, though with occasional side-stories being added.

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Dungeon Core Chat Room contains examples of:

• Back from the Dead: A sufficiently powerful priest can resurrect the dead if they can repair the body before the soul has dissipated, but there is generally some degradation of stats. The dungeons devise an alternative setup to enable safer Level Grinding against demons, incorporating ambrosia, which doesn't require a priest and doesn't lose any stats, but is addictive.
• Become a Real Boy: Innearth's crystal dwarves have a degree of sapience built in, making them very helpful crafters and runesmiths, but if they gain enough experience and ascend, the system hiccups and turns them into organic beings, a mixture of dwarf and kobold. Innearth considers them to be his children, even more so than his other ascended monsters.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Amy is perhaps the most cheerful dungeon core you will ever meet and loves all her adventurers and takes great steps to reduce deaths. She also has some of the most terrifyingly brutal monsters of the group.
• Crystalline Creature: The majority of Innearth's monsters end up incorporating living crystal in some fashion, often even launching spikes of it at enemies. His crafting dwarves are entirely made of crystal.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: The gods designed the system of levelling up to replace cultivation with something easier, safer, and universally accessible. However, cultivation did theoretically allow for faster growth, at the cost of risking madness, mutation, Power Incontinence, or sudden death from a lack of self-control. It's still possible to use demonic mana to disconnect from the [System] and potentially grow stronger, but not only does it have the aforementioned drawbacks, it also requires Heroic Willpower to avoid Demonic Possession.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Rakata the dragon tries to fight off a 15-kilometre-long demonic void whale, using time manipulation to attack it at Super-Speed for a linear half-hour until he's exhausted, then babbling at Innearth to close the portals and cut off the facility before it can break through into the world. Innearth tries to reassure Rakata that everything is under control, while his prepared defences make short work of it; the demonic whales are par for the course at this point.
• Door Dumb: One of the events in the dungeon games is making monsters to act as adventurers. One of the obstacles that Innearth’s team spends the most time on is an unlocked door because their monsters don’t have hands and the dungeons have never needed to know how to open a door before.
• A Dungeon Is You: There are hundreds of dungeon cores, all over the planet, each able to manipulate mana and space within their territory. Gaia creates them to clean up the flow of magic.
• Entertainingly Wrong: Questlines are one of the few ways dungeons can communicate with adventurers, and adventurers are not really prone to questioning them. Combined with a well-designed space, this can lead to adventurers believing things that are patently (and provably) untrue, such as a dungeon area that has existed for maybe a few years at most being the remains of a millennia-old forgotten civilization.
• Fantastic Nuke: Combining Fire, Explosion, and Entropy mana will create Nuclear mana. Even Abe doesn't recommend trying it. His dungeon is, of course, highly fire-resistant, but nonetheless, his first experiment in binding nuclear mana to a tiny chunk of material vaporised a large portion of his territory and nearly reached his core.
• Gargle Blaster: The dungeons' combined experiments in brewing actually kill one of the dwarven taste-testers — but it might overlap with Too Dumb to Live, since "the drink that did him in had melted every cup they had tried to contain it in and had been lapped sizzling off the melting floor." Innearth persuades Amy to add healing potion stations to the testing area after that.
• Genius Loci: As you might expect, dungeon cores have a high degree of control over their area of influence, even if it takes time to implement.
• Hidden Depths: Pretty much all of Innearth’s friend group.
  • Abe is an explosion-happy dungeon whose monsters are all capable of detonating. He also puts a surprising amount of thought into his set-ups and makes sure to impress on his ascended monsters that they are not expendable.
  • ZeMadDoctor toys around with demons and other highly dangerous concepts, but is perhaps the most cautious of them all.
  • Amy is an absolute sweetheart… who designs brutal challenges and deadly diseases for fun.
  • “Bose” is overly dramatic and a Large Ham, but he is also an amazing friend with a keen attention to detain who will absolutely gush over how amazing someone else’s creation is.
  • Brutality Queen may lean a bit heavily into “Survival of the Fittest” and value strength over most anything else, but she is a solid friend once won over.
• Lethal Chef: The dungeons have a cooking competition, just for fun, although they don't really have a sense of taste and thus don't properly understand what they're doing. "Charred and salted" or "boil it in alcohol" is about the extent of their culinary knowledge. Amy, however, takes the cake, by accidentally turning her crab into a deadly virus instead of soup.
• Level Grinding: Ultimately, the largest obstacle to obtaining godlike power in the [System] is simply the fact that experience requirements scale with level, and experience rewards scale with danger. The rule of thumb is that for every hundred levels, only 1/1000 as many will reach it. The highest level individuals tend to be fairly risk-averse, which keeps them alive but means that levelling further is a very long slog, so long that many die of old age before getting far. Innearth sets out to cut the process shorter so he can make a god to join the fight against the demons.
• Mad Scientist:
  • ZeMadDoctor named himself that for a reason. He has some expertise in undead, but his primary specialty is summoning and studying demons, just to learn more about them. Ordinarily, summoning a demon is something that young cores often do by accident when experimentally mixing incompatible mana types, and it's usually fatal, as the demon shrugs off everything they can throw at it and devours their core. Doc summons them into controlled environments routinely.
  • From a mortal perspective, even more "normal" dungeons can seem amoral and crazy. Amy, who is probably the kindest and gentlest of the group, cheerfully and supportively leads her friends through an engaging workshop about creating virulent plagues.
    Amy: To start off we are going to make a simple necrosis that spreads through human touch. Nice and simple. Does everyone have their disease starter?
    Innearth looked down at the stone bucket with an "Innearth <3" on it. Looking around, everyone had a similar bucket with their names and a heart written in dungeon script along the side.
• More than Three Dimensions: Travelling outside the normal three spatial dimensions takes you to the void, where demons live (and prey on visitors). With the right preparations, though, it's possible to survive there and beat the demons back; ZeMadDoctor is particularly knowledgeable about the subject.
• Outside-Context Problem: Basically what makes demons so dangerous is that their abilities do not conform to the logic of either the world or the system. On the other hand, they’ve been a problem for so long that there is at least some basic information to build off of.
• Paralysis by Analysis: "Indecisive Earth"/Innearth chooses his name after receiving the "Indecisive" title for spending 5 hours agonising over his first choice of elemental affinity.
  OG: Hey, noob if you're seeing this you probably need a push.
• Pyromaniac: Abe loves explosions. Most of his monsters don't survive long, but even the ones that do, are pretty much guaranteed to self-destruct when killed.
• The Reveal: When Innearth feels that he's lacking purpose, he meets the conditions to unlock a website that tells him the true purpose of dungeons. They were created by Gaia to filter and clean mana on the surface, and their sapience is essentially accidental and incidental. All they really need to do is exist, and everything they've built on top of that is just finding ways to keep themselves busy so they don't commit suicide out of boredom. However, there is one possible higher purpose that they could take on, to help create a new god for the fight against the demons.
• Reincarnation: Early on, Innearth comes across the remains of a dungeon core that was killed by a demon and the lava-based floors it had made before dying. Later, Innearth used the shattered core as materials for a super-boss in a shared space with his friends and the resulting boss has dungeon-like control over its area and memories of lava despite there being none in the space it controls. It doesn’t remember being a dungeon core though.
• So What Do We Do Now?: In the epilogue, a group of dungeons focused on creating a new god are taken aback to learn that they've been beaten to the punch. Reactions vary; one wants to keep trying and make a better god, one leaves to rethink its goals, some just want to keep talking about what has happened.
• Stalker Shrine: Innearth gets a little obsessed with following a low-level solo adventurer he (incorrectly) calls "Craig", collecting various mementos of Craig's exploits within Innearth's dungeon like remnants of one of his first traps, some unexploded bombs he had to leave after being caught off-guard, and the severed head of a crystal snake with his blood on it.
• Strength Equals Worthiness: Brutality Queen won't even talk to people who fail to impress her with their monsters' strength. Innearth passes, but finds her attitude both intimidating and abrasive, which keeps their relationship distant despite their mutual friend Amy. They start getting along better after working together in the Dungeon Games, including impressing her by winning a building contest.
• Summoning Ritual: Summoning demons is unfortunately quite easy. Mixing Life and Death mana will do it (although there are other ways). This is one of the classic mistakes made by young dungeons, and is usually fatal, as demons are considerably more powerful than the tier of monster used to summon them, and are extremely magic resistant. Innearth later learns more about why it works; the mixture produces a twisted fourth-dimensional soul, which sticks out into the void where demons live, and acts like a beacon, giving them a path into reality.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: After reaching tier 8, Innearth finds a site composed of nothing but recordings of dungeon cores committing suicide because of how bored they are with their own existence.
• World Tree: Yggdrasil mana affinity allows the production of "Yggdrasil heartwood", flexible and improving mana channelling and yet much stronger than steel. Theoretically it should be possible to grow a tree from it, but between its extreme nutrient requirements, the amount of space needed, the risk of penetrating into the planetary mantle and burning it, etc, no one has succeeded before (and picking up the affinity at all is quite rare.) Brutality Queen takes Yggdrasil mana affinity at rank 4, and with extensive collaboration and preparation, the group makes a tree that can survive, protected by the best armour they can devise, along with extensive runic magic, and fertilised with demonic void whales. It gives bonuses to all magic usage in the vicinity, as well as providing an ecologically safe way to dispose of demon remnants.

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Indecisive Earth: So what exactly are you designing your pages for?
Immortal Spring Of Certainty: Isn't it obvious? They are my Undying Legion. Once I get some readers in me they shall spread my name far and wide as a wiki of impossible obstacles.
Abe: Hey you chose a name. Not quite as good as "Abe's little Bro" but I like it. Swol.