Mulberry Grove
It’s plan had started off on an annoyingly large expense. Though it was not bound from sending its threshold bosses, like the poison plantaconda, between floors during normal hours, that changed when there were delvers within the dungeon.
The Mulberry Grove found itself raging against the bindings of the realm laws, not for the first nor last time, as it boiled in frustration about all of the rules it was forced to follow that others did not.
Due to the implied contract of fairness, the dungeon presenting an opening and the delver choosing to enter, there was only so much it was allowed to modify while it was actively being delved. The realm laws, unliving as they were, had no way of knowing that the so called ‘church’ had bound the Mulberry Grove’s entrances open to their man-made arches and had sealed any other openings they could find.
Any changes it wanted to make cost exponentially more energy to enact, if only to prevent the occurrence of a mad, murderous dungeon from luring in unsuspecting delvers. Dungeons were allowed to be deadly, but it had to be challenging not impossible.
The moment the thinner male human pulled that coin out, the Mulberry Grove stopped caring about the penalties incurred, though.
Luckily, it had hundreds, if not thousands, of years of extra energy accumulated and stored. The bindings the human church had placed upon it all those years ago prevented it from growing the way it would like, unable to close its doors for potential evolutions or lure in stronger magical creatures from the wilds with its now-sealed or controlled entrances.
That coin, though. That coin reeked of unbridled potential. Even though it had not created the bronze coin, it could tell that it was one hundred percent compatible with the dungeon. So long as it could assimilate it, reproducing the pattern would have no hiccups.
Of course, a bronze coin was useless to the dungeon. All coins were, it made them only because the humans would delve for them. The occasional accidental death of a delver was the only thing that fed any amount of progress for the dungeon at that point, or it would have long since stopped respawning creatures and loot for its captors.
The realm laws did not appreciate it when the dungeon instantly began plotting on the capture and exploitation of the human.
Were the dungeon aware of the concept, it would have filed a complaint about ‘thought crimes’ the moment it felt the invisible shackles tighten upon its soul.
Old as it was, however, it was able to begin to mentally manipulate its own train of thoughts, loosening the regulations that the realm laws attempted to leverage upon it.
Instead of capturing the human, it would present it with a trial. Instead of exploiting whatever ability the human leveraged to create the coin, it would create unique puzzles geared toward skill development and testing.
So long as the dungeon was able to afford to reward the human fairly, it was able to get away with a lot more blatant manipulation.
With thoughts firing hundreds of parralel streams of plans per second, the dungeon was able to map out exactly what would get it punished beyond reason by the realm laws and what it would be able to do within acceptable risk parameters.
It was there that it discovered it would be able to exploit an age-old tradition for dungeons and the divine and create a ‘Trial of Proving’. It was one of the way gods selected their agents amongst mortals and an ancient way dungeons were able to leverage their power to sway sapients to guard them from their own kin. It was thankful that the scrawny human had no class, or that path of manipulation wouldn’t even be available to it.
Under normal circumstances, any dungeon would have a proving ground pre-prepared for challenges, one that would test wit, strength, flexibility, morals, and aptitude to select only the best to become its champions.
The Mulberry Grove fully intended to bastardize the test, though. Keeping only enough of the framework to justify its actions to the realm laws while gutting the rest and filling it with ‘tests’ designed to feed it upgrades.
After thousands of years, this was the first chance of hope it saw for breaking the bindings that were placed upon it and it was willing to pay most prices.
While running through various scenarios it discovered the bare minimum it was allowed to create for ‘tests’, needing at least three ‘virtues’ to be tested alongside minimum acceptable thresholds for passing and rewarding the delver.
As it was building out the trial mentally, it quickly ran into a problem. It would appear that keeping the mortal longer than sixteen hours would cause a massive shift in its fate and the backlash from doing so could very well crack the Mulberry Grove’s soul like an egg.
Obviously, the dungeon had no clue what fate had in store for the human but it knew that the realm laws would not abide it causing too much of a negative backlash on a sapient so much weaker than itself.
Unfortunately, that meant that the trial of proving would have to be built far quicker than it anticipated. The costs associated with the rapid renovations were astronomical, so it was forced to make a few concessions.
Mentally, the dungeon prodded its little snake boss to start herding the humans toward one of the nearby sealed entrances, having cracked the landing zone they entered through enough for them to appear in an abandoned region of the dungeon.
The area was already filled with large shafts down to its deepest regions. It ordered its legions of terramorphing insects to start connecting the tunnels down to its core chambers, somewhere no mortal had set foot in thousands of years. While it was at it, it made sure to instruct them to change the leveling of the tunnel as well so it would be survivable.
The core chambers was one of the concessions it was forced to make. Manipulating the immediate area around its core would always prove to be cheaper on energy costs, unless there was a direct challenge to its authority in the region, and also lent authenticity toward the ‘trial of proving’ angle it was trying sell.
Gleefully, the dungeon watched as the armored human pushed its target down one of the many slopes that would deposit the berry blending coin-maker into the trial grounds that it had rapidly developed. Hundreds of years’ worth of energy accumulation had already been spent making physical changes to the area.
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The dungeon had settled on ‘testing’ the human’s combat abilities via the weakest creatures it could create, the bramblekin. Noticing the weapon laying on the floor on its first floor where it had been dropped, it was annoyed but still decided to create a wooden copy of the blade and tie it to the trial bramblekin loot table.
The realm laws had already begun to rally against the injustice of an unexpected trial by combat with no weapon. Luckily, the human only being required to kill a single one before being armed once more was deemed fair enough.
The first of the chambers the human landed in were considered the ‘aptitude test’, something the dungeon found it was required to implement before its proving grounds. Its only requirements to take place in the trial of proving were the ability to improve its creations the same way it had witnessed the human boy do with the goodberries.
The human’s aptitude would be ‘tested’ via the large wall puzzle it created on short notice to seal itself away from any of the other humans who may have fallen into the hole instead of the one the dungeon was targeting. Any of them would have starved to death on the bottom floor of the dungeon, incurring a grievous penalty for unfairness laid upon the dungeon’s soul. It would rather that then give any of the classed individuals access to its most sensitive regions.
Massive amounts of the dungeon’s remaining energy reserves, equivalent to amount it would be able to store over the course of four or five hundred apogee events, went toward preparing the actual trial ground located behind the door puzzle. A structure for storage and dissemination was quickly created from nothing and enchanted with the dungeon’s own magical matrixes.
A handful of the dungeon’s weaker, and therefore cheaper and easier to manipulate, plants were seeded throughout the chamber surrounding its hearth tree. It was forced to expend energy and effort to cause the plants to grow to maturity in minutes rather than years and used its will power to force them to grow to the exact specifications located in their templates.
Having proven its combat capabilities and aptitude by reaching the second chamber, the human would only need to be tested on one more virtue to satisfy the realm laws dictations on a trial of proving. The dungeon, though, was able to convince itself and therefore the realm laws that the proving grounds would test the human’s wit, endurance, and flexibility.
Twenty-seven, a multiple of three in case the human needed a hint about the trial still, different plants were grown in rows. Its primary target, its hearth fruit, was planted between every single row. It unfortunately didn’t have a template for its own spawn, the mulberry trees, so it was forced to let them grow wild and free.
If it had a template for its own origins, it would have long since evolved itself beyond the capabilities of the seal to hold. That had forever been beyond the dungeon’s capabilities, though, and it was hoping it wasn’t beyond the humans.
It turned its attention back to the human, still rapidly descending the chute to its first chamber. It seemed to have lost its shoes and started using its own pack as a sled of sorts, enjoying the rapid decent through the planet’s crust. The dungeon was happy that the human was enjoying itself, even if only a little bit, since good morale had been proven to have positive effects on skill growth and deployment.
It occurred to the dungeon that it had heard the humans mention that the human was capable of creating its own potions. It quickly began to create high-quality alchemy equipment for the creature, mentally adding creativity to the tested traits for its trial, and found that the backlash it could expect to incur from its blatant manipulation decreased.
Mulling it over, no pun intended, the dungeon found that just creating a large source of clean water for the human to drink had made the trial considered ‘more fair’. It mentally squirreled that tidbit of information away for later started tweaking with the workstation area to see if any other creature comforts would afford it a discount of the karmic backlash it was expecting.
For some reason, the quality of the gear didn’t effect the fairness of the challenge, at all, but the comfort of the seat located at the desk did. Confused but glad to take advantage of the situation, the dungeon elected to make the most comfortable chair in the realm.
High-tier wood, fabric, and filling was a given for the dungeon created furniture, but it decided to go above and beyond. It used its unique enchantment matrixes to add enhancements to the seat, careful to balance energy expenditure with karmic credit.
Luckily, it already had a few enchantments it had created for seating areas and other enchantments it could tailor to fit the seat on a short notice.
The first thing the dungeon did was create an ass-binding enchantment on the cushion. It was a twist on its typical soul-bound equipment it made, making it so that the chair would become the whole property of the first person to sit upon it. By doing so, the chair would always feel more comfortable for the person who it assbound to while feeling stiff and low-quality to anyone the human didn’t grant explicit permission to sit.
Thinking of the human’s penchant for riding on things that should be sleds, the dungeon also implied a scratch resistant-enamel enchantment alongside situational slickness, an enchantment it used to create sneaky patches of ground for humans to slip on for trap purposes.
Finally, the dungeon mildly cursed the chair with one of its own favorites. It called the curse ‘shit for brains’ and it was based off something it’d heard a delver say hundreds of years back.
The human had been complaining about forgetting what he’d been about to do while camping one night. Specifically, he’d said ‘I swear my brain must be in my ass because I forget everything I’m thinking the moment I stand up’ and one of his companions had remarked that ‘that would explain why you’ve got shit for brains, Jared’.
In a moment of inspiration, the dungeon had created a beneficial curse and started to enchant boulders that were frequently sat upon by its delvers.
The enchantment, which it considered one of its most diabolical, would provide very subtle clarity of mind and inspiration to anyone who was sat upon the enchanted surface but would snatch away all of the fleering inspirations they experienced the moment they stood up.
On a boulder, it managed to cause a lot of mischief and frustration throughout the years. On the chair, it’d be purely beneficial so long as someone had a notebook handy.
Ideally, it’d help the human figure out how to solve the challenge within the required time frame. It worried the human wouldn’t finish solving the puzzle before the dungeon was forced to release it on threat a karmic backlash from the realm laws powerful enough to slay it on the spot.
Preparations finally complete, the dungeon turned all of its mind back to the human as it finished its decent and flew through the ‘sky’ of its first chamber, the aptitude test.
Due to the unexpected impromptu test, the human ended up sailing much farther and higher than the dungeon expected and it was forced to grow a massive bush to catch where the human was projected to land.
The energy costs were exponentially larger than they should have been due to the interference, even though it was positive. The tunnel had already been deemed ‘fair’ the realm laws and the human was in the midst of harming itself by giving himself more air time and height, rather than the dungeon doing it.
In normal circumstances, the dungeon would let a human splatter their brains across its dungeon floors of their own accord, but it needed this human to survive the fall if it had even the slimmest hope of profiting from its powers. Additionally, it’d already spent too much of its energy reserves to let them go to waste.
As such, it grew a goodberry bush. It knew the tier two goodberry berry, or the ‘good-er berry’ as the Akashic records had begun to report it thanks to that large doofus of a half-elf half-human ranger, had minor healing properties and it figured that the human might need it despite the dungeon’s attempts to dampen its fall.
Predictably, half the bush was crushed under the human's mass and the dungeon could only hope that the human was wise enough to consume the berry before the first of its bramblekin arrived.
