Chapter 57: Chapter 55: A salty trickle flows through the soft lands and poisons the sweet-water

Dungeons are engines of prosperity.

Just like a great manufacturer will draw in people from all around the region to work for them, just like a trade-hub on the ocean will draw in ships and merchants from distant nations — so too, will a dungeon draw in adventurers.

There is incredible wealth to be found in dungeons.

Traditionally, ‘adventurers’ as they are colloquially known, stem from lower socio-economic tiers of society. While the noble and the wealthy certainly have the same capacity to become adventurers, there is simply no need for them to do so. If you have blood or money, you can live much more comfortably running mercantile businesses or enterprises of trade and politics.

Only those who are desperate enough to need to claw through mud and bones for coins and scraps become adventurers. Yet, paradoxically, they are, by some measures, the most productive members of our society.

After all, a mine will only generate specific kinds of metals and minerals for its limited lifespan. A forest will only provide wood, meat and fruits until it is harvested bare.

A dungeon, however, provides tangible amounts of everything, forever.

Meat, metal, bones, potions, equipment and tools — literally anything, ranging from raw materials to prefabricated, completed items can be found in the dungeons of the world and they are harvested by none other than adventurers.

Adventurers provide our societies with a broad, very wide base of limitless raw materials of very diverse origin and use.

A mine could not run without tools and equipment crafted from a dungeon’s resources.

A port of harbor could not function without the wealth that it has to offer in trade to foreign merchants, which stems from the dungeons.

The armies, guided by noble-blooded officers, could not be fed without the incredible masses of food that are earned with the wealth of the dungeons.

Our society is built upon these simple, easily obtained resources. Without dungeons and the adventurers who plunder them, using their bodies as tools, our civilization as we know it would collapse.

So it is fortunate for us, that there are always more bodies of the poor available.