Chapter 13: Chapter 13: The prospective perspective

One has to remember when dealing with dungeons, that they aren’t just simple things like a cave or a bear’s den.

A dungeon is a living, breathing place in and of itself. A dungeon contains monsters, but the dungeon itself is also to be viewed as if it, as a whole, were a monster as well.

Never trust the walls. Never trust the floors. Never trust a door, a chest, a mechanism. Everything has been perfectly designed by the makers of those places with one intention in mind.

— That is to keep the dungeon safe.

And the best way to keep a dungeon safe, apart from it simply never being found, is to kill any who find it.

Particular dungeons have gone overzealous in their lethality, especially when they begin to creep out in the landscape and fill the surface-world with monsters.

In these extreme cases, destruction teams are sent out to pacify the threat and to return natural equilibrium to the places that the dungeons have found their residence in.

That isn’t to say that every dungeon must be destroyed, just because somebody died there. After all, dungeons are useful and it is important to weigh a balance between their economic boons and the lives lost in pursuit of these gains.

If those who die are simply adventurers, plunderers and so on, then there is little argument in favor of the total destruction of a dungeon-core. These people made their own free choice to go there, after all. As with a miner who dies during a collapse, it is simply a risk of the trade. That does not mean that we will stop mining.

However, when innocent bystanders are put at risk by the ambient monsters present outside of a dungeon, or when vital economic routes are hindered, then more drastic measures are wise to be considered.

Per year, professional destruction teams permanently destroy one to two dungeons and exactly this many seem to arise in the landscapes around the world, shortly thereafter.

It would seem that the divine will has an intent for there to be a specific amount of dungeons present in the world at every given moment. However, we can not say for sure why this is.

This number is forty-nine.