The full picture was both better and worse than expected, which Malric had decided was going to be the fundamental nature of his new existence.
The better: the Abyssal Dungeon was big. Not adventurer-map big — actually big, in ways the surface maps didn't capture because adventurers had only ever explored the central corridors of each floor, marking the obvious rooms and the obvious threats and missing, entirely, the lateral complexity that Core had been slowly generating for three centuries of autonomous operation. The real dungeon was three times wider than the maps suggested. The real dungeon had chambers that no human eye had ever seen. The real dungeon had, on floors sixteen through twenty-two, a partially intact underground ecosystem that was doing things with bioluminescent fungi and mineral-rich water runoff that had, Core informed him, produced at least four species that existed nowhere else in the world.
The worse: three centuries of autonomous operation without a Lord had made the dungeon efficient in a very narrow and rather stupid way. Core could generate and maintain, but Core could not direct. The dungeon had optimized for the only thing it could optimize for without guidance: killing adventurers. Which it had done, reliably, on the upper floors, where the traffic was heaviest and the kills most frequent.
The result was a dungeon that looked, from the outside, like an extremely effective death machine, but was from the inside a largely untapped mess of wasted potential.
"How many active floors are properly functional right now?" Malric asked.
Floors one through twenty-two are stable and defensible. Twenty-three through twenty-eight are functional but not optimized. Twenty-nine and thirty were designed as kill floors — high difficulty, high monster density, effective at discouraging deep penetration. Below thirty—
"I felt something down there. In the bond. Something deep."
Yes. There are floors below thirty. They are not floors I built. They are older than I am. A pause that felt almost uncomfortable for an ancient metaphysical entity. I do not fully understand what is down there. My previous Lord never reached the lower seal. I advise, for now, treating the thirty-first floor as an extremely theoretical problem.
"Noted." He pulled his attention upward. "What's the raiding situation?"
Core gave him something that was functionally a summary report, delivered not as text or sound but as direct knowing — the dungeon-sense he was still learning to interpret. He processed it into approximate language:
Fourteen active adventurer parties had contracts with various guilds to raid the Abyssal Dungeon. Of those, six were currently between expeditions, three were in the dungeon's upper floors right now, and five were preparing to depart within the week. Standard raid depth ran between floors four and fifteen. The deep push record was floor twenty-two, held by a party called the Iron Vanguard, who'd made it that far twice before losing a member to a floor boss on the second attempt and declining to try again.
Malric had, until very recently, held the unofficial record for deepest solo penetration. He thought about how that was going to read differently now.
"Three parties in the upper floors currently," he said. "Can I see them?"
Through what the dungeon sees, yes.
He closed his eyes and reached through the bond — tentatively, the way you reach into dark water not quite sure what you'll touch — and the dungeon gave him eyes.
The first party was on floor six. Four adventurers, Class Three average, doing what looked like a resource-gathering contract — they had collection bags out and were harvesting the crystallized mineral deposits off the floor-six walls that the dungeon grew as a byproduct of its geological processes. Standard lower-floor work. They moved with the bored competence of people who'd made this run fifty times.
He watched them scrape his walls and felt something that was not quite indignation and not quite amusement but lived in the zip code of both.
The second party was on floor eleven. Six members, better equipped, working through the dungeon's current defensive layout there. They were doing well — too well. Two of his floor-eleven creatures were already dead. The dungeon-sense told him this floor had been run so many times in the past decade that the monster placement had become effectively memorized by the serious guilds. They moved through it like a pattern they knew, not a place that could surprise them.
He filed that under first renovations needed.
The third party was on floor fourteen, and it was struggling.
He looked at them more closely. Five adventurers. Good gear — not lord-class, but well-made guild equipment. Four of them were holding a choke point in a side corridor while their fifth, a slight figure in a leather coat with what looked like several different arcane catalyst rigs strapped to both arms, was doing something complicated at the wall.
Mapping. She was mapping. He could see the notation tools, the measurement string, the quick sketches.
They'd found one of the hidden lateral corridors.
He felt a spike of something cold and alert move through the bond.
They are a deep survey team, Core confirmed. Not a raid. They are mapping the floor for a client.
"Which client?"
Unclear. The guild contract system doesn't run through my architecture. But survey teams are typically commissioned by parties planning extended campaigns or by interests seeking specific resources.
Like mineral rights.
Malric watched the cartographer work for a moment. She was good — fast, precise, keeping notes in a shorthand he couldn't quite read from this angle. Excellent instincts for the hidden geometry of the space.
"Pull the monster density in that corridor," he said. "Let them finish the map and get out."
...You are letting them go.
"I'm letting them deliver bad information to whoever sent them. She's found one hidden corridor — there are four on this floor. If whoever commissioned this survey thinks they have a complete map, that's worth more to me than five corpses and a rumor that floor fourteen got more dangerous." He paused. "Can I adjust what she finds? Subtly?"
A beat. Then something in the dungeon-sense that felt like respect. Yes. With care.
"The fourth corridor — the one that leads to the ore vein. Close it. Not obviously. Make it look like natural stone. If she finds three of four hidden passages, she'll feel thorough. She won't look for a fourth."
Adjusting, Core said, and somewhere on floor fourteen, a stone wall shifted two inches and a thousand years of accumulated grime redistributed itself and a lateral corridor ceased to exist as anything except solid rock to anyone without a Lord's eyes.
Malric opened his eyes. He was back in the northeast chamber, sitting against the wall with the Primer in his lap and his new boots on his feet and eleven years of adventuring knowledge in his head.
He needed to understand what he had. What he could actually build with.
"Start from the beginning," he said. "What can I do right now, today, with the Depth Points currently available?"
Core told him.
It was not a lot.
Three hundred years of passive accumulation and autonomous operation had generated a baseline reserve, but the dungeon had been spending it constantly to maintain floor stability, replace killed monsters, and keep the structural enchantments from deteriorating. He had enough to make meaningful changes to two floors, summon perhaps a dozen low-tier creatures, or begin extraction work on the mineral veins Core had identified in the lower-floor geology.
"Which mineral veins?"
The most valuable is on floor nineteen. A deep seam of Veyrath — a magnetic-resonant ore that surface artificers use for high-tier enchantment work. Current market value, based on trade data from before my dormancy adjusted for typical inflation— Core paused. I do not have current market data.
"I do." Malric's memory for numbers was excellent — it had to be, for contract negotiation. "Veyrath ore was pricing at four hundred silver per weight-unit at the major guild markets eighteen months ago. High demand because of the eastern expansion projects. Probably five hundred now, maybe more." He thought. "How large is the seam?"
Significant. If the geological stability has held — and I believe it has — you are sitting on several years of extraction at moderate pace before the seam runs shallow.
Malric did the math. He did it twice to make sure.
He sat very still for a moment.
"Core," he said carefully. "I think we need to talk about priorities."
The list he made in the back of the Primer, in the margins Ardenvast had left blank, ran to two pages.
Immediate: Redesign floors eleven through fourteen before the survey team's client sends a real raid. If a lord-backed interest group had commissioned that survey, he had perhaps two weeks before someone tried to push deeper with better intelligence than any raiding party had ever had.
Short term: Begin Veyrath extraction on floor nineteen. Establish a way to move the ore to the surface without anyone connecting it to the dungeon. Find an intermediary he could trust — which was a rich problem for a man who'd just been betrayed by the people he'd trusted most, but the economics were impossible to ignore.
Medium term: Start actually understanding his monsters. Not as units on a defensive board but as the Primer described — as people of a sort, with individual variance, with potential. Three hundred years of autonomous operation had produced more than simple drones. Core had hinted at this and he wanted to see it directly.
Long term: The floors below thirty. The history Core wasn't ready to tell him. The System's fear of what he was. The people who'd tried to kill him.
That last item wasn't on the list exactly. It didn't need to be written down.
"The survey team is leaving," Core said.
He reached through the bond and checked. They were — all five of them, moving efficiently toward the upper floors with their notes and their three-out-of-four map and their confident sense of a job completed. The cartographer paused once at the junction where the fourth corridor had been and ran her hand along the stone, frowning slightly, and then moved on.
Good instincts, he thought, almost admiringly. Wrong conclusion, but good instincts.
He watched them go.
When the last of them was above floor ten, he stood up, tucked the Primer into the salvaged pack from the northeast chamber's supplies, and said: "Show me floor eleven."
And his dungeon carried him there.