Chapter 46: Chapter 45: Sticky hubris comes at a price. Faith is free, but it is hard to hold on to

“Crystals of thin ice slowly fall from the darkness above my head.

However, I do not understand how they could do so, as I know that up there is nothing but solid rock for a good kilometer, at least.

My campfire wavers in the wind present here in the frozen wastes. Yet this airy presence has no business being down here either. Where is the wind coming from? We’re underground. It just doesn’t make any sense.

This is the perplexing nature of dungeons. They are entirely magical environments that only adhere to the rules of nature in the loosest sense.

If I bend down now and dig through the snow beneath my boots, I could touch dried, dead grass, lying beneath it. It would appear as if I were in a frozen tundra on the surface.

Again, I am underground. How can there be grass here to die beneath the snow?

There can’t be.

This means that the dungeon-core not only created a frozen environment in this underground chamber that perfectly resembles a real frozen wasteland, which it can’t possibly have ever witnessed itself given the location of the dungeon, but it even put in the effort to seed grass in such an impossible location, only to smother and kill it with snow. All of this is done in the name of authenticity alone. There’s no reason for the grass to be here, other than for the artistic detail.

What does this tell us about dungeon-cores?

It tells us that they are more than just simple hive-minded constructs. There’s something else behind the masters of these places.

I am afraid to say that this frightens me more, than if it were some hive-minded critter.”