Becoming a dungeon was not on Owen Ashford’s post-death schedule.
It had been raining that day.
All he remembered was the sound of rain striking the ground, followed by the sudden screech of brakes, sharp enough to set his teeth on edge. He could barely remember where it had happened, or how.
According to plan, he should have gone home, slept off the exhaustion of the day, then dragged himself out of bed the next morning while complaining about work.
Clearly, things had not gone according to plan.
Anyway, he was dead.
Being dead took some getting used to, but Owen could not exactly file a complaint with management. Besides, worrying about something that could no longer be changed had never been his style.
At first, Owen thought he’d made it to heaven.
He felt none of the constraints of a physical body, nor any weight pulling him toward the earth. He could ride the wind through the open sky, drift among the clouds, and experience a strange freedom he had never known while alive.
Time had lost all meaning to him here. Owen wandered wherever he pleased, chasing cloudbanks across the vast sky, following rivers all the way to the sea, and occasionally venturing deep into the mountains to explore places no human foot had ever reached.
No hunger. No pain. No shrill alarm clock dragging him out of pleasant dreams. Even the bills that had always arrived with impeccable timing were no longer his problem.
The only downside was that none of the video games he had relied on to pass the time had come with him.
Still, if this was the afterlife, Owen thought he would probably give it a positive review.
No. He was absolutely certain he would.
Unfortunately, those peaceful days did not last.
It did not take long for Owen to realize that this was no heaven.
It was a world that had once existed only in his imagination, a place he had seen countless times in games and novels but had never expected to witness with his own eyes.
Another world.
This could not possibly be Earth. Here, people conjured fireballs from empty air and mended torn flesh with glowing hands. Knights in archaic armor guarded wilderness roads leading to monster lairs.
And this world was home to something else Owen knew all too well.
Dungeons.
People flocked to them in search of treasure, but not everyone emerged alive. Some returned to the sunlight carrying gold and glory. Many more died silently in the darkness, leaving behind nothing but nameless bones.
Owen once watched two adventurers draw their weapons over a single treasure chest.
One moment, they had been calling each other brother. The next, they were driving daggers into each other’s sides. They collapsed in a bloody tangle and fought until both had bled dry, neither of them ever managing to lay a hand on the chest.
Owen could only stare in disbelief.
The treasure chest remained untouched between their bodies, as though the dungeon had opened an invisible maw and was laughing at their greed and foolishness.
But he had also witnessed someone entirely different: an adventurer who chose to stay behind alone so his companions could escape.
Owen could still remember what the man looked like. He had a wild, tangled beard, and blood covered almost his entire face. Even so, he managed a strained smile and told his companions not to look back.
His legs could no longer hold him upright. He braced himself behind a cracked shield that looked ready to give out at any moment. Monsters slammed into it again and again. Every impact shook his entire body, while the bloody streaks beneath his boots stretched farther across the ground.
Only after the last of his companions stumbled out of the darkness and collapsed sobbing in the sunlight beyond the entrance did the man finally lose his footing.
The horde swallowed him.
And finally, Owen witnessed what the people of this world celebrated as a “great victory.”
Outside the dungeon entrance, the crowd was deafening that day.
Bards sang at the tops of their voices. Musicians on a makeshift stage played rousing music. Merchants and commoners raised their cups in celebration, while nobles sent envoys to present wreaths to the adventurers who had returned in triumph.
Yet behind the celebrating crowd, bodies covered in white cloth were carried out of the dungeon on stretchers, one after another.
The cheering never stopped.
People spoke of the courage of the dead and praised their sacrifices, then raised their cups once more and continued celebrating the hard-won victory. Those who would never open their eyes again became little more than a few lines in a bard’s song, their deaths the steps that carried the survivors toward glory.
That was when Owen finally understood.
Victory could be this heavy.
Back in his old world, people rarely witnessed victories like this firsthand.
He did not know whether he should be happy for those who had survived or grieve for the people beneath the white sheets.
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But no matter what he thought, there was nothing he could change.
He was nothing more than a ghost drifting above them.
Owen had no idea how much more time passed before something even more terrible happened.
The earth split open as though the abyss itself had opened its jaws. Countless monsters poured from beneath the ground, forming a black tide that swept across every village, field, and road in its path.
Fires merged until the night itself seemed to burn. Screams spread across the land as the Demonic Tide advanced. Wherever the black tide passed, only burned-out ruins remained.
In the end, humanity barely managed to hold the Demonic Tide at bay with an enormous wall.
The wall stretched across the wilderness from horizon to horizon.
Owen drifted above the battlefield and watched.
He saw soldiers fall one after another. Their bodies piled up beneath the wall until they nearly formed a second barricade of flesh.
He watched the monsters seize the battlements and trample the defenders’ banners beneath their feet. Then another group of soldiers would charge forward, wading through the blood of their companions to raise those banners once more.
The battlements changed hands again and again. It was a battle fueled by flesh and blood, one that might never end.
Eventually, the Demonic Tide withdrew.
But that did not mean humanity had won. They had merely traded countless lives for a little more time.
And far beneath the battlefield, in a darkness no living person could see, the dungeon continued to stir.
It was starving, yet endlessly patient.
Nothing could satisfy its hunger.
Only then did Owen truly understand.
The dungeons of this world were nothing like the levels he had known from games.
They ate people.
They actually ate people.
◆ ◆ ◆
During that endless drift, Owen’s consciousness began to blur.
His memories began to fall away as well.
The first thing he lost was the sound of his own voice. Then his face disappeared. After that, even the names that should have hurt him to forget began vanishing one by one.
Eventually, even the knowledge that he was forgetting could no longer make him sad.
Just as Owen thought he was about to disappear completely, he sensed something calling to him.
No. It was not a sound.
It was more like a dying heart beating faintly in the dark.
One beat, then another.
Drawing him closer.
Owen followed the pull downward.
It was better than slowly fading away, wasn’t it?
He passed through layers of solid rock, through ancient ruins whose age could no longer be determined, and finally through a narrow passage that had not yet fully taken shape.
A stone chamber waited at the end.
A cracked crystal floated above a pedestal at its center. Dull gray fractures webbed its surface, and a dim light pulsed through it in time with that heartbeat-like rhythm.
This was what had drawn Owen here: an immature dungeon core.
A moment later, the crystal seized him and yanked him forward.
The cracks across its surface spread rapidly as something unseen compressed Owen’s consciousness and drew it bit by bit into the crystal’s depths.
Then the dungeon opened its eyes.
Owen’s eyes.
For the first time since his death, Owen felt something again.
It was not the sensation of limbs, nor anything resembling ordinary physical senses. Instead, he felt a cold Core Chamber, a rough-hewn stone corridor, and a few strands of energy so faint they seemed ready to vanish at any moment.
Before he could make sense of these unfamiliar sensations, a fierce hunger seized him.
The hunger was so deep and unmistakable that, for a moment, Owen forgot he was no longer a living creature.
Instinct told him that only devouring the living could satisfy it.
Owen sat with that realization for several long seconds. Then, very carefully, he thought:
Absolutely not!
Once he had made that decision, he found himself growing slightly calmer.
At least he still existed.
In a world where dungeons ate people, he had not disappeared completely. The thought brought relief, followed almost immediately by a profound sadness, because it seemed he had become one of the monsters that ate people.
Owen weighed his options, such as they were.
Should he become like every other dungeon and survive by devouring every living thing that wandered inside?
Or should he do nothing, allow the core to wither away, and disappear along with it?
Neither choice left him much of a way out.
Then a broken management interface unfolded inside his mind.
Lines of unfamiliar text appeared, and somehow he understood every word.
[Core Status: Immature]
[Energy Reserves: Critical]
[Low-Tier Guardian Generation: Available]
[Death Processing Mode: Soul Reclamation]
Owen’s attention caught on the final line.
Death Processing Mode?
Did that mean the dungeon had different options for what happened to challengers after they died?
He focused on the line. A moment later, more options appeared beneath it.
[Full Death]
[Body Reclamation]
[Soul Reclamation]
[Trial Return: Severely Damaged]
Owen stared at the final option for a long time.
Severely damaged.
That meant it had not failed completely. There was still a chance it could be repaired.
He immediately began feeling his way through the damaged sections of the core. At first, he was painfully clumsy, like a man without hands trying to take apart an unfamiliar machine by feel alone.
Owen traced the broken pathways, repeatedly tested commands that no longer responded, and fed what little energy remained into fragments of code that should have been inert.
Most of his attempts ended in failure.
Several times, the core’s already faint pulse nearly vanished altogether, forcing Owen to pull the energy back and frantically check what he had broken.
But he did not stop.
It reminded him of his old job: staring down an obsolete system that should have stopped working years ago but was still expected to keep running, cursing under his breath as he tried to reconnect every broken component.
If the function was still there, he would find a way to make it work again.
He had no idea how long it took, but eventually, the chaotic flow of energy within the core began to stabilize.
A new prompt appeared.
[Trial Return: Minimum Viable Operation]
[Challenger deaths within the dungeon will no longer trigger Full Death.]
[Challengers will sustain recoverable Soul Damage and be forcibly returned outside the dungeon.]
[The dungeon may recover a portion of the Soul Activity generated at the moment of death.]
Owen went very still.
So that was how it worked.
Perhaps a dungeon had never needed corpses at all.
What it truly needed were the sparks released when a soul was pushed to the edge: fear, courage, greed, hope, and every other emotion that flared in the face of death.
Death might make those sparks burn brighter.
But actual death was not required.
And Owen had no intention of allowing it.
From this day on:
No one truly dies in my dungeon.