inspire-indiana Chapter 90: Dungeon Core
Chapter 90: Dungeon Core
Quash uncapped the lid of the bottle. Then, he used his Proprioception to access the internal registry of the item to configure its fluid intake settings.
He set the absorption rate to maximum. Configured this way, the bottle would violently vacuum up any liquid it came into contact with, continuing until either the container reached full capacity or the source ran completely dry.
He dipped the lip of the bottle into the small pond. Spirit Water instantly started to rush into the container, and within seconds, the entire basin was drained bone-dry. Yet, peculiarly, the illumination inside the cavity didn’t fade.
He looked down at the exposed bed of the pond to locate the source of the light. What he saw almost caused his brain to short-circuit from sheer shock.
A Dungeon Core!
An actual, literal Dungeon Core!
A massive surge of adrenaline spiked through his system, making him feel momentarily dizzy. He forced his ragged breathing to slow down, his mind racing at a million miles an hour. He finally understood why the higher-ups and certain obsessed factions in the novel were so quietly fixated on this seemingly low-level zone. It wasn’t about the surface resources at all; it was about this.
An intact, ancient core is more valuable than almost anything else in the world.
In this reality, there are two distinct types of Dungeon Cores.
The first is the naturally generated variant, which experts generally consider to be trash. It holds no long-term strategic value; it exists solely to anchor a temporary pocket dimension, spawn local monsters, and stabilize the space until adventurers shatter it, causing the entire dungeon to collapse.
The second type is what lay before him: an Artificial Dungeon Core.
These rare cores manifest only when a high-density anomalies system overwrites a pre-existing, historical structure from the old world rather than generating a new pocket dimension from scratch.
The true strategic value of these objects was discovered roughly nine thousand years ago, during an era when the population of the Neutral Continent was exploding. Back then, while there was technically an abundance of raw landmass available across the world, the untamed wilderness was occupied by monsters far too powerful for standard colonization, and foreign continents refused to grant free migration rights to outside races.
The world was on the brink of a catastrophic land crisis when a legendary pioneer discovered that an Artificial Dungeon Core could be repurposed in a way no one had ever dreamed possible.
By binding the physical body and soul directly to the matrix of an artificial core, a cultivator could become a legitimate Dungeon Lord. This bond granted full administrative privileges over the overwritten territory, allowing the user to architecturally reshape the interior, upgrade environmental structures, and manipulate local resource parameters at will.
Of course, operating system controls required a specialized, high-tier currency that could only be harvested through specific, high-risk administrative trials.
When that discovery initially went public, it fundamentally rewrote the global balance of power, plunging civilization into the era of industrial Dungeonization. Great nations and syndicates fought brutal, covert wars to secure Artificial Dungeon Cores to expand their borders safely underground.
In fact, massive powers like the Ogmore Empire and the Dracula Kingdom were structurally built entirely within massive, fully managed artificial dungeon networks, safely governed by their respective ruling lineages.
And now, Quash was looking at an unclaimed one.
The pieces of the puzzle finally clicked together in his head. This explained why a legendary grade resource had pooled here out of nowhere, and why the official archives in the novel had completely suppressed the details of the original discovery. The lucky first-year who historically stumbled onto this place had been quietly locked away or integrated by a major faction to keep the core hidden from the public.
It also explained why a small circle of veteran miners refused to leave this low-yield zone. They weren’t hunting for common ore; they were hunting for the heart of the castle itself.
Quash swallowed hard, his heart hammering against his ribs as his senses dialed into a state of hyper-awareness. If a single soul found out what he was holding, an army of high-level bounty hunters would be tracking him before nightfall. At his current level, even the global influence of the Vampire lineage wouldn’t be enough to shield him; if anything, exposing this would drag Gabriella’s entire family into a war of attrition.
But there was absolutely no way he was walking away from a literal cheat code.
Quash slid down into the empty basin. Weirdly enough, the stone floor of the pond wasn’t wet at all; the surface felt completely dry, as if liquid had never touched it. This was one of the unique physical properties of high-grade Spirit Water—it lacked the molecular residue that allowed standard water to leave things wet.
He landed on a pristine, dark blue platform that formed the true foundation of the basin. A complex, ancient formation was deeply engraved into the material, though most of its outer geometric lines were still buried beneath centuries of petrified mud.
Quash carefully approached the pedestal. The underlying platform appeared to be an ancient structural foundation, while the core itself was held aloft by an elegant column composed of smaller hexagonal pillars that tapered upward into a single point.
Where the column peaked, the Dungeon Core rested. The object was roughly the size of a standard crystal ball, its translucent surface housing clusters of white particles that undulated in an otherworldly, rhythmic pattern. It looked as though someone had trapped a miniature cosmic nebula inside the glass, with shades of brilliant white dominating the shifting mist.
It was a mystical sight capable of taking anyone’s breath away.
Forcing his eyes away from the light, he focused on the logistics. He needed to extract the core, scrub his energy signature from the environment, and get out of the sector.
When an artificial core is detached from its anchoring foundation, the system won’t trigger an immediate spatial collapse because the stone castle existed long before the dungeon mechanics took over; however, the local sector will permanently cease spawning monsters.
Quash reached out and closed his fingers around the crystal. The moment his skin made contact with the surface, an alien sensation rippled into his consciousness—a bizarre wavelength of data that his human brain couldn’t structurally categorize.
He pulled upward, and the core detached from the stone slot cleanly, without resistance.
As expected, the chamber remained structurally stable. He immediately deposited the artifact into the deepest slot of his Spatial Ring, then drew his Rare Grade pickaxe. He wasn’t going to leave the hexagonal column behind either.
In historical architecture texts, these specific anchoring columns are known as Dungeon Nerves. They function as physical data conduits, translating the administrative commands of the core down into the ancient runic arrays etched into the floor. The floor array then draws on environmental energy to execute structural changes based on those commands.
While a high-level MagiCrafter could technically manufacture these conduits artificially, Quash saw no reason to leave a perfectly good piece of pre-made legendary hardware behind for someone else to find.
The Dungeon Nerves were fused to the base of the platform via an old runic adhesive rather than being a structural part of the floor. Quash carefully wedged the pointed tip of his pickaxe beneath the seam where the hexagonal column met the foundation. Channeling a controlled burst of Aura through the tool’s circuits, he executed a sharp, upward levering motion.
The adhesive snapped with a clean click, and the column detached smoothly from the array. He stored the component away instantly.
He scanned the immediate area through his sensory skills to ensure he hadn’t left any physical gear behind. The empty cavity was still dimly illuminated by the lingering ambient energy of the foundation array, though the lines were visibly losing power now that the core was gone. Thinking quickly, he used the heavy head of his pickaxe to smash several key nodes of the runic text, rendering the remaining script completely unreadable to any future investigators.
With the chamber cleared, he dropped flat onto his stomach and crawled back through the narrow breach he had mined out earlier. Because the chamber’s light source was now gone, he reactivated his Proprioception to navigate the pitch-black corridor, scanning the immediate vicinity for any signs of the stalker from yesterday.
The local tunnels were completely empty. Relieved but still cautious, he immediately set to work destroying the physical evidence of his entry. He pulled the storage bottle from his ring and adjusted the output nozzle back to a standard, controlled stream.
He used the high-grade liquid to thoroughly wash the interior edges of the breached wall. If he had left any traces of blood or skin tissue on the jagged rocks while crawling through, a high-level tracking mage could easily harvest the genetic sample to identify him. By flooding the impact points with Legendary Grade Spirit Water, any lingering biological matter or personal aura would be completely overwritten and dissolved by the dense wavelengths of the natural fluid.
He also poured a generous amount of the liquid over the patch of dirt where he had been standing, splashing it across the surrounding stone floor to mask his scent and eliminate any traces of sweat he might have dropped during the physical exertion.
Once the natural scent of the area was entirely saturated with the dense aroma of the ancient spring, he packed the energy-blocking dirt back into the wall fissure, smoothed out the surface to match the surrounding stone, and quietly melted back into the shadows of the 10th floor.