Darius Supreme

Now that he had established a rapport with the core, Darius and it began to 'chat'. To Gunner outside, Darius had only closed his eyes for a few seconds before opening them again with a thoughtful smile, whereas Darius had spent what felt like hours conversing with the core, with him doing most of the talking and teaching.

After all, the speed of thought was extremely fast. What had been exchanged between them was hard to calculate in measurements relating to data.

What he did know was that he actually learned most, if not everything, there was about dungeons and how they functioned through the innate memories within the core.

First things first, the majority of his speculations based on the structure of the dungeon's internals and the details given by the Analyze skill were correct, yet they had left out a lot.

To start from the beginning, Dungeons Cores are split into two types, Natural Cores, and Artificial Cores. The former was what one expected, Dungeon Cores that had been created slowly over time by Faust itself.

They did not spring up from nowhere, but were rather birthed due to the heavy accumulation of a specific element in an area that coalesced into a core after a few hundred years.

For example, this current jungle used to be a place where Darkness Energy had been rampant, which had then slowly compressed into a core through the workings of nature.

This left the area devoid of the energy, allowing for a jungle to spring up due to the amount of curious living beings that had come from afar to explore its depths.

Upon creation, dungeons usually didn't stay hidden because they needed to attract willing adventurers to harvest the type of energy they needed to grow.

As such, they had their ways of being known. This dungeon had even managed to do this passively while being damaged, leading to a peasant discovering it and mapping its location so that he could later lay claim to it when he had more power.

As for Artificial Cores, their existences were something interesting, yet tolerated by the Laws of Faust for its ingenuity. Basically, one would choose a crystal type that fits an element - ruby for fire, sapphire for water, emerald for nature, quartz for earth, or topaz for wind - and concentrate elemental energy within, compressing it over and over again to fit as much as they could within.

Doing this directly decided the upper limit of the Dungeon Core, so the number of compressions made were crucial.

To this Dungeon Core's innate knowledge, the recorded limit had been 30 at the time of its birth, which limited Artificial Cores to the Advanced stage.

As for what it could have been now? Darius was unsure. The core obviously did not know the date on which it was born and since it had been unconscious for most of its life, it didn't know how long it had existed for either.

Back to Artificial Cores. What truly set them apart and had led the Laws of Faust to accept them, were the consciousness planted within. Initially, the creators of these cores had used those of animals or monsters, yielding only sub-par results.

It was then that a certain dwarf engineer somewhere had thought to use sentient beings, who had then placed the entire consciousness of a slave into a manufactured core.

This had led to the biggest breakthrough in core production, as it proved that they could indeed house sentient consciousnesses!

However, the type of Artificial Cores created this way would be filled with problems, like the madness of the consciousness due to the pain of soul extraction, as well as a special hatred for the creator and the general fact that sentient consciousnesses were too powerful for such a small inorganic crystal.

There was a reason semi-sentient consciousness that was carefully programmed by nature was used.

Fortunately, a few centuries later, there had been a second breakthrough at the hands of the Goblin Empire.

Instead of using a foreign consciousness of someone unwilling, the core's creator had willingly split a small amount of his own consciousness and infused it into the core.

The Laws of Faust had been marveling at the creation and had approved of it silently. As such, whenever an Artificial Core was born through this method, it would receive a 'giftpack' from the Laws of Faust, allowing them to gain some heritage of Natural Cores.

This included the knowledge of how to seize territory, convert dead foes into energy, how to craft monsters and how to create resources.

As for how to use that energy to strengthen themselves, how to change elements, and how to attract living entities into their depths, they would have to figure that out on their own.

Still, it was a great thing regardless, and this interested Darius greatly. He had not heard of this distinction no matter what book he had read on the topic of dungeons, so either Andrato was too lowly to know about this, or it was a tight-kept secret by the topmost empires.

As for both types of Dungeon Cores, the type of resources they acquired after absorbing one's corpse and turning it into nutrients was called Soul Energy.

With it, the Natural Cores could power themselves and grow stronger, gaining access to more natal skills and memories, as well as types of resources. Soul Energy was the most crucial thing for a core to survive in this world.

Well, this at least explained the actions of the Adventurer's Guild of Andrato. They were stupidly tossing weaklings to harvest resources. They were tossing the poor and desperate in there to die and become fuel for the dungeon, increasing its grade.

It was truly insidious and ingenious. Either the Basic Adventurers would die inside and become Soul Energy, or they would come out with some resources in hand, before the guild would take half of it away by force and the other half by coercion.

They dared not pull any stunts with Awakened and gave them proper rights, knowing that the death of such fellows would adversely affect the kingdom's power. As such, they were furnished with much more than what the cannon fodder were given.

This realization only strengthened his belief that the leader of the Adventurer's Guild in Andrato was definitely a merchant, and a good one at that.