Chapter 482 – Whatever That Is

Sophia could only think of one thing Revanos might mean, and it wasn’t the magical lemons. “The dungeon core?” 

“Is that what that is? Wait, you mentioned those earlier; that’s what wanted to talk to the World Tree?” Revanos sounded incredulous. “It’s alive?”

“Bunny wanted to talk to the World Tree,” Leo corrected Revanos. He continued forward, to where the trio had set up a series of bins for their harvest that morning and carefully placed the rest of the fruit in them. “Spark says he wants his own Tower, like the Tree’s. Other than that, he hasn’t said anything yet.”

“Dungeon cores don’t see the world the way we do,” Sophia agreed. She knew that much from her interactions with Cliff. He cared about his monsters and was overjoyed to get to design a Tower, with its many different environments and stories and even Challenges, but at the same time he didn’t get bored the way she did when things weren’t happening; he simply didn’t have the drive to do something that she did sometimes. “That reminds me, we wanted to ask you about them and the Towers. In Kestii Tower, Ansuz told us that he was installed by a couple of people he called the Mage and the Builder. That means there has to be a way to approach the central column and do something, at least when it’s small enough. It didn’t give me any issues when I was there with Cliff, either.”

“That’s not quite what Ansuz said,” Dav offered slowly. “He said that the Mage came up from below shortly after the Builder placed him in his pillar on the main level. Cliff found his spot on that lower level.”

Sophia inclined her head towards Dav in a sort of half-nod. She didn’t really remember that, but she could easily believe that was what Ansuz told them; all she remembered was that both the Mage and the Builder were involved. Dav’s memory was better than hers for details like that.

Revanos frowned and held up a hand. He counted on his fingers for a moment, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a book that definitely didn’t fit in the pocket. It was clearly cared for, with a worn paper sleeve over the cover. “Kestii Tower, I know I wrote something down about … ah, there we go. M’Beja worked with Yverilin on crystal-minds, then placed one in Kestii Tower at cost … she was happy with how it worked out but worried about something else. No, that’s not it … hmmm.”

It took Revanos at least half an hour of paging through his diary before he put together the pieces and explained them to the group. M’Beja’s excursion below where Ansuz was installed was necessary to connect him to the Nexus network while not allowing him to be connected to the Tower itself. 

They’d tried that; the crystal minds couldn’t handle the input. Their Towers grew more dangerous quickly. The rewards also rose, but that wasn’t enough when third upgrade people struggled on a floor meant for the first upgrade. M’Beja shattered at least four crystal minds before she decided that it wasn’t the specific individual minds that were to blame; it simply wasn’t possible for them to handle a Tower.

The solution she managed in the Kestii Tower was supposed to be a stepping stone to a more complete solution, but Revanos didn’t think she’d ever managed it. He’d certainly never heard about any Towers other than the World Tree that had unique or dynamic zones and a wide variety of Events. There were thousands, possibly even hundreds of thousands, of different zones, so most people never noticed, but Revanos knew that each Tower had a subset of those zones. He’d seen them all in multiple places.

M’Beja theorized that it might work in a newly established Tower, but Revanos’s diary said she’d never managed to get it to work. She might never have been able to get access to a young enough Tower; you couldn’t get Gateways until the Tower was conquered, and that was apparently too late. If she needed a Tower that hadn’t gone beyond its first floor, that was essentially never going to happen unless she could find a way to reach worlds that didn’t yet have Gateways.

Traveling to worlds that didn’t have Gateways was obviously interesting to Sophia, because it was part of what was needed to get home, or at least to get to Dav’s home. It was also interesting to the Wanderer, and he was able to categorically state that M’Beja had never managed it without the help of an Archon Gatekeeper. Their current plan to find the most famous Gatekeeper, Archon of Stone Issvako, was still the best plan Revanos could offer, even if M’Beja wasn’t missing.

Dav shook his head. “I hate to have to ask, but why are you helping us? You’ve been helpful since we arrived and you’re giving us a lot of time; surely there are better things you could be doing.”

“What better things?” Revanos asked with a shrug. “When you arrived, you were lost in a strange place. I’ve been there; even a small help can be huge if it’s at the right time, and that’s one of those times. After that, well, I don’t ask for payment but if I did you'd have repaid everything I’ve given you several times over. You reopened Kestii Tower and dealt with the remnants of the man who broke it. On top of that, you’re interesting and I have time. Unlike some people here, I‘m not a ruler.”

“No, you’re just a Patron,” Sophia snarked back at him. 

“Right.” Revanos grinned at Sophia with his teeth bared. “And unless something strange happens, that can wait until I’m done here. Almost everything strange that’s happened in the past few years has been associated with you guys, so I think I’ve got the time.”

“Good to hear,” Dav answered. “Sorry to ask, I just worry.”

Revanos waved his hand dismissively. “You’re not the first and you won’t be the last. Some Patrons do keep track of what they feel like they’re owed; I generally think they’re dicks. That’s not the point of being a Patron. We’re not lords or employers … ah, whatever. You don’t need to hear that from me. Those Patrons usually don’t last that long anyway. They’re too inflexible. Speaking of which, where were we?”

“Reaching worlds that don’t have Gateways … no, I think we covered that,” Sophia tried to figure out where they got off track. “Do you know much more about what Lady M’Beja was doing with the crystal minds?”

Revanos shook his head. “I don’t. I don’t think I ever knew much more than what I’ve already told you. I see Towers as places to explore, while M’Beja sees them as magical artifacts that can be improved. I don’t think she ever told me exactly what she was trying to accomplish. Knowing that she wanted to make all Towers have the ever-changing variability of the Arcatiz World Tree is enough for me.”

Revanos didn’t have even that much information about Builder Yverilin’s involvement in the project. He knew the man worked on it, but he had no idea what his purpose was beyond building something M’Beja asked him to make. Sophia’s guess was that the crystal minds were probably the Builder’s project at least as much as they were the Mage’s, possibly even a project of Yverilin’s that M’Beja tried to adapt for her own purposes. That would certainly explain their presence elsewhere in the Broken Lands; the crystal minds other than Ansuz were probably made by the Builder for their specific purposes.

The fact that he could find that much information so quickly in notes he’d taken over a thousand years earlier was impressive to Sophia. She couldn’t always find stuff in her schoolwork that quickly and those notes were a lot shorter and theoretically organized by subject.

Revanos credited an enchantment placed on the book by M’Beja but Sophia doubted that was all of it; after all, he had to take good notes in the first place for whatever enchantment he had to help index them.

Naturally, Sophia had to answer with what she knew about dungeon cores. That took a lot longer than half an hour; she knew a lot about them. Every dungeon core was unique, the same way every person was unique … which meant that a lot of them were really similar. There were a number of different standard classifications, from historical dungeons that imitated either actual history or stories to puzzle dungeons and combat dungeons without a story. Many of the same elements were present in the Towers and Challenges, so Sophia assumed they served a similar purpose.

Dungeons weren’t that different from any other life, in some ways; they needed to take in energy and they had waste. The fact that the energy that was best for them was used mana and their waste was clean natural mana was analogous to plants. The presence of creatures that weren’t bonded to the dungeon was helpful as well; oddly enough, even though there definitely were murderous dungeons, killing people wasn’t actually useful. Pushing them to use magic and skills was good, but if the people actually died, the dungeon gained only some not-very-useful meat. People did die in dungeons, but for most dungeons that was an unwanted side effect rather than the point.

Everything Sophia said about dungeons applied to Towers and Challenges until she got to the most important part: the dungeon core. Every dungeon had a core that housed its central intelligence, which controlled everything from what the different areas were to what they held and what story they told, if any. There were guidelines established by the Voice and the God of Dungeons, but those guidelines left a lot of room for creativity, and dungeons used it extensively.

In that sense, the World Tree was essentially a dungeon core. It was also literally an enormous tree, which made Revanos question how something as small as a dungeon core could do the same thing. Sophia didn’t have a great answer to that; she could guess, but that only got her so far. The one thing she could say for certain was that she’d never heard of an individual dungeon as large as the World Tree. There were some planets that had dungeon complexes with common features, like the Necropolis on Tzintkra, but it was made up of the lower levels of a lot of different dungeons. 

Revanos was incredibly interested and tried to get Sophia to tell him about every dungeon she’d ever seen. He even took notes as she talked. He didn’t stop asking for more until a reminder from Leo that they hadn’t had dinner yet made them both realize just how long they’d been at it.

While Dav cooked, Sophia turned the conversation to what it would take to add a dungeon core to a Tower. Revanos hadn’t ever installed anything in a Tower, of course, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t explored the entire area and he knew something very important about all of them: the central pillar was relatively safe for someone of the correct upgrade for the top of the Tower. The World Tree’s central pillar  wasn’t safe for most people because most people were nowhere near fifteenth upgrade. Most people didn’t make it past the third or fourth upgrade; that was enough to live a good life, at least for most. 

Almost every Tower had someone responsible for it who could get at the central pillar. If adding a dungeon core was as easy for them as it was for Sophia, there was no special installation required. All they had to do was somehow get the dungeon cores to the central tower pillars and they’d be able to bond.

At least, that was Sophia’s guess.