[D'sP] Finding Instincts - Chapter 350 (Patreon)

Satisfied with his design, Doyle sat back and waited. While compared to his points outlay across all his floors, nearly 75k isn’t really all that much. He doesn’t actually have that much world energy lying around.

If he had to compare it to anything, it would be a saying he heard about farmers. How they’re paper rich, but cash poor. Because yeah, they own a ton of land, their crops are worth bank, and all the equipment certainly isn’t cheap. However, they can’t actually use that money. Sure, on paper they are worth a lot, but all the money they make goes right back into running the farm.

Doyle’s dungeon is very much the same kind of thing. Sure, instead of seeds, he places monsters, but it all comes back to the same thing. What he has is worth a ton of world energy, he just can’t spend it as he has to repopulate his floors and everything. And so populating a floor for the first time is a massive time sink. Though at least if Doyle wanted to, he could bank up the points until ready as his WE storage was a bit more than 80k by now.

Oh, and sure, he knows that if he wanted to, he could pause a few things and put his full 2k and change hourly WE generation towards this. Except, Doyle didn’t really see a point to it. In fact, he already had a half full tank despite having just built an entire floor.

Doyle had even considered having it be closer to full, using the excess income so there was always an emergency fund of sorts. He might not have been able to afford that mythical three months expense in savings while he was a human, but as a dungeon he could afford to sit back. The reason Doyle left it half full was simply so that when a windfall happened, he could take full advantage of it. Yes, that windfall tended to be blood money, as it were, but that’s dungeon life.

Of course, Doyle is missing something very important. He is actually very lucky as a dungeon. Most have the same boom and bust that he has as a human. It isn’t like an unawakened dungeon is going to figure out the farm feature. He actually has a much smaller WE pool than any other similar sized dungeon because the rest need to have the space to instantly respawn multiple floors at once.

After all, if a group full clears a floor, the dungeon needs to be able to instantly respawn everything if another group is coming in right behind them. Then you include the fact that multiple floors can be raided at the same time? Well, some dungeons aren’t even able to instantly respawn floors despite in theory getting just as much WE, if not more, back from the delvers. They can’t help it, as with those that get trapped by the scam that is payday loans or stuff like ponzi schemes, the energy is coming in only to be used right away to pay off old debt.

Doyle, ignorant of this, continues to complain to himself about how long it is taking for him to spawn in monsters for the fifteenth floor. Which honestly isn’t that long, which leaves him with a new problem. Well, not a problem, but certainly a conundrum. What should he carve?

The entire floor is a mountain valley with an impressive view. On one hand, that represents a truly extensive area upon which there has to be some place begging for some art. On the other hand, it is much more natural of an area than even the cavern spaces and as such, lacking in flat walls or floors to make a classical wall carving. Which for the most part represents what has been done.

Except why should he be limited like this? Doyle’s mind rears back at the unknowingly imposed limitation. While small compared to a world, his dungeon represents an entire dimension of its own! To limit his art to such simple mediums? Never!

But why the limitation in the first place? Doyle freezes as thoughts percolate in his mind. What limited his view? Except, what if it was his view?

Doyle glances over his dungeon. He glances over his dungeon? Why? He shouldn’t have to glance. Sure, Ally needs to pull up blue screens and such to view things and yes, Doyle was basically acting like a flying no-clip observer in a video game. It’s just that, would a natural dungeon observe things in this manner?

An exceptionally hard question to answer as people don’t even think to ask this kind of question. Sure, an awakened dungeon could answer, but Doyle didn’t trust Flisle. In turn, Ally didn’t know either as it was always through screens that other dungeons tended to show stuff. Screens which inherently are limited to what the viewer can view.

This could even be seen as a safety feature. After all, it would be a pretty nasty trick if someone could show a scene that could drive others insane. Not to mention the fact it also cuts out a large number of memetic threats such as “the missing number” and the like.

So Doyle sat himself, or at least his viewpoint, on the fifteenth floor and meditated. Before the system came, he had dabbled in mediation as a teen and would occasionally use some of the techniques to calm down after a hard day. However, he certainly wasn’t a pro at it, only attempting it once in a blue moon.

Now, though, it was an odd mix of much easier yet astoundingly hard. The part of his body that still had sense close to his old body was the core and it didn’t have a heartbeat or anything to distract him. However, he hadn’t realized how many of his techniques depended on such things to clear his mind. Even the simple lack of breathing to follow proved an interesting challenge.

Not that he actually needed to meditate, rather Doyle was attempting to use the techniques to get better in touch with his dungeon instincts. After all, an unawakened dungeon must have the instincts for how to look around baked into them. A dungeon core isn’t like some kitten who can get away with being born with their eyes sealed shut. Right from the get go, a dungeon has to be off and running without even the stumbling that a foal is allowed right after birth.

The problem is, Doyle isn’t a baby, but rather an adult, even if not by the standard of even dungeons that start awakened. For a dungeon, unless you survive with a good thousand years under your belt and the equivalent of 25 floors, you’re still young. It’s just that the years growing up as a human more heavily marked his mind than even two centuries as a dungeon core would. That is simply the difference between a short-lived race like humans and eternal or even just long lived races.

It doesn’t even matter how much happened during those years. A human could experience a peaceful decade where they did the same thing every day while a dungeon could be facing non-stop concerted effort to destroy it over a century and the human would still be marked deeper. Not that the dungeon wouldn’t remember all that happened just as well, if not better, than a human. Rather, the grip of father time is simply looser on those long-lived sorts.

This is actually a problem as with power, also tends to come an increased lifespan. Except a baseline human mind can not stand the unending passing of time. Even a thousand years would likely drive one insane. The only reason this isn’t more of a problem, is the fact that any mature path to power will include methods of tempering the mind.

Doyle skipped all that. This is partly because his mindset was already unconnected from the world in a way that emulated an immortal race’s mindset. More importantly, though, the ritual that turned him into a dungeon core had already been debugged a fair bit and had forced those particular instincts into him without him realizing. Though Doyle not noticing mostly has to do with how close he was to it already.

Except now that he was meditating on himself, the edges revealed themselves to him. The ritual was masterfully done, but it isn’t like Flisle had gone and customized it just for Doyle. So, at the edge between Doyle and dungeon, he finds himself.

Now, some might think it a coincidence, but Doyle knows better. If you were to lay out the “him” onto the dungeon, his self would form a triangle. The shape representing three, that of Trinity. While this only represented his mind, even here, the Trinity of mind, body, and soul appeared. His path, three together, [TRINITY].

Though it also represented an unhealthy divide. This triangle of the mind represented his own mind being pushed into a corner by the dungeon instincts that had been forced upon it. Like an island in the middle of the sea, for the instincts that would allow an unawakened dungeon core to create, maintain, and grow a dungeon were certainly no small thing. From knowing how to place the smallest of weeds to designing entire floors, the instincts would guide the unformed mind of the core.

Yet Doyle already had ideas and plans, thoughts and feelings. Those instincts, while they may be helpful and certainly powerful, could not, under the system’s restrictions against mind control, actually fully come into effect. And Doyle wasn’t planning on letting them.

Most, upon realizing this divide might decide the best choice is to just merge everything and be done with it. After all, it isn’t like the instincts are some rogue personality coming to replace. Except, as proven by the system preventing it from happening, they sort of are.

All of those instincts might, on the most basic level be similar to the instruction manual to a model kit. However, the sheer weight of them! As if you had gathered the instructions for every model ever made together and then increased that number by a magnitude. Even a dungeon core couldn’t handle it all.

Which was the key, dungeon cores didn’t handle it all. In fact, to a certain degree this ocean of instincts represented all that was to be a dungeon! From the patterns, to the various quirky little upgrades like the ability to [Name] stuff which Doyle still hadn’t gotten around to fully buying.

Now, this isn’t some old saw about there being nothing new under the sun. It didn’t literally contain information to make everything ever from the beginning of beginnings to the absolute end of all. Rather, it has some common things, which is why you find goblins in dungeons across the multiverse and more importantly? It has the instincts to take what you have and build on it.

At least, every dungeon should have that. Except, Flisle did do a lot of work “perfecting” this ritual and it would be a shame if someone who didn’t like that used their newfound power for revenge. Now, he couldn’t cut someone off from this all. It was too core to being a dungeon core, the darlings of the multiverse, as any truly immortal natural species tends to be.

Delay? Oh, most certainly. Hide behind some of the more mind warping instincts? Simple. And what do you know? Up until now, Doyles various patterns hadn’t been growing all that fast. Ally wasn’t worried, but Doyle knew this wasn’t right.

Ally was simply too knowledgeable of normal dungeons. It isn’t strange for an unawakened dungeon to have stagnant patterns. After all, they have nothing to base anything on. All the instincts in the world won’t help improve a deer pattern if the dungeon doesn’t know what a deer is. Doyle? Not only does he know what a deer is, he also knows a number of different kinds of deer as well as some interesting mythology around them. There is a reason the original monster patterns are basically burned into the dungeon’s mind and have numerous examples of the monster. Without that, how could a newly born dungeon ever hope to improve their core monsters?

Finishing Fifteen - Chapter 349

Volcanic Island - Chapter 351