All rulers inevitably deal with a core issue, whether they are cognizant of it or not. Ultimately, power is only as useful as the ability to apply it. Recognizing your borders, not as merely marks on a map or the physical characteristics that shaped them, but rather as the limits of power, is eminently needful.

  Too many rulers are used to the power they hold within their own domain. As such, when powers outside it gainsay them, they make the mistake of overreach, of assuming that their power and influence have no limit or end.

  No, the truth is simple. Using or extending power beyond its natural boundaries incurs a cost. A wise ruler considers that cost before they choose to pay it.

  Unknown and unexpected costs, profligately spent, can bring down dynasties.

  -Ifo Mim Dawef, Prices and Opportunities: The Art of Ruling

  ==Caden==

  Zidaun had explained, but I didn’t entirely understand.

  I mean, I understood the idea of state secrets, that wasn’t exactly new. And acting against the perpetrator made sense, if only to dissuade others from doing the same in the future.

  I still don’t like it. It’s too mercenary.

  Despite my distaste, I understood the response, but I wasn’t entirely clear about why it was a secret in the first place.

  I was too much a product of modern times. The internet, and modern culture, made secrets more difficult to keep, and their exposure less impactful. Hard to be shocked when scandals have become the norm. Plus, personally, I wasn’t particularly fond of secrets.

  Everything would be so much easier if there were no secrets.

  It had been looking like we might head that way, eventually, on Earth. Enough technology, nanotech, and AI, and secrets would be impossible.

  Better for everyone to have that knowledge, rather than just hoarded by some governments or corporations.

  And, though I might be loath to admit it, I understood the necessity of secrets. Secrets could be more damaging than any weapon. I firmly believed that human society would be better off with no secrets, no privacy, but the transition to that state would be messy, complicated, and invariably dangerous. Without an external force moderating or controlling that transition, it could easily become a disaster, if only because various figures in power would act to bolster and consolidate that power before the true extent of their underhanded deals became known, revealing how they had been placing their hand on the scales.

  Plus, anyone who had done anything truly monstrous would need to fear the wrath of society as a whole.

  However, all that was irrelevant to the world I found myself in now. I might know more about it, and the context needed to understand the chain of events, but I was still woefully lacking in overall framework.

  There were odd bits here that reminded me of my old world, like the instant communications possible through the little mail capsules. Those were more like old style telegrams. Almost instant, but also expensive.

  Governments and wealthy organizations used them freely, but they were out of reach for most.

  The human government styles were recognizable enough from my old world, but further back in history. Honestly, considering the multitudinous attempts at governing ourselves, plus all the fictional ones I had read, the governments would have needed to be truly strange to be completely unfamiliar.

  A monarchy and an imperial court were practically mundane.

  The Adar were at least a little more interesting, having no exact analogue.

  Just because there wasn’t an exact parallel to Earth, didn’t mean I couldn’t consider similarities. An alliance of city states was pretty close, or maybe a heavily dispersed empire. Collectively, they were apparently the most powerful force on the planet, but they maintained that power by acting in very limited roles.

  The human nations knew what to expect from the Adar, and they never settled away from their contracted dungeons. Exactly how many heads of state had known the truth of those dungeon’s intellect, before it was public knowledge, was unknown. Honestly, I would be surprised if a great many of the Adar’s secrets weren’t squirreled away by various spy organizations. Fortunately, those were exactly the sort of people who usually understood where and when deploying a secret was advisable. Still, if the Adar weren’t helping to manage an existential threat, I doubt the humans would have tolerated them, and I doubt their secrets would have held.

  As it was, they had the largest stick, but were wary of overusing it.

  And then there were the dungeons…

  Where do we fall on this little facsimile of governments?

  I could lose myself in tortured metaphors easily enough: the power behind the throne, the nuclear deterrent, the gods of a theocracy…

  There was little point dwelling on it further.

  Still… this situation developed as a disaster.

  Pretty sure it set this up.

  GAIA told me that the System was primarily designed to foster growth via conflict. Perhaps it was appropriate that the System was in conflict with itself as well.

  It might not be able to influence personal choice directly, but it had practically dropped an artifact on Gurek. Enough understanding of Gurek’s psychology, and that became a ticking bomb.

  Enough of those and… some of them go off.

  Honestly, I didn’t have time to consider the System right now.

  An issue for another time.

  Perhaps that was why I didn’t feel like a god. The scope of my problems had merely grown. It had been that way ever since I arrived here.First it was a struggle merely to escape. Then it became a race to build up my dungeon, to become safe and secure in my new role. And, as vast as my power might be in this little domain, I had no idea how to even approach solving some of my problems.

  How would I even go about trying to fix something as vast and powerful as the System?

  Could I make the dungeon space worthy?

  Stone, metal, and water are enough to deal with radiation, no problem. Life support…

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  I glanced out the window at the waving grass.

  Yeah, that shouldn’t be a problem.

  The fact that the answer was even a maybe was remarkable, but it left more than a few issues unresolved.

  Navigation and propulsion at the least, enough mana for fuel…

  What was it GAIA mentioned, radiation and pressure?

  So a way to counteract gravity? Probably need a way to deal with massive amounts of heat, as well.

  I shook my head.

  Not the time to be dealing with this.

  My thoughts attempted to go on, but with some effort, I corralled them.

  There were even larger existential questions waiting for me, as well. Not that I had any better solutions for those.

  I had been told the meaning of life. Sure, it boiled down to gaining enough knowledge and experience to move to the next phase of existence, but that boiler plate summary severely undersold the magnitude of what it meant for me.

  I could found an entire religion on less than I had just learned… Maybe I already have.

  I was Caden, the dungeon who was once human. And that was already far more change that I had considered possible.

  Yet, I was far more than that.

  Millions and millions of years of sapient experience, and far longer as more rudimentary life forms.

  I was me, but I was also something other. It was the physical and mental dysphoria of becoming a dungeon writ on a larger scale.

  This might not have hit so hard, before…

  That was the thing. As a human, on Earth, I had no context for this. Now, however, I understood how different and alien my situation could become… and might have once been.

  I don’t even know why I’m dwelling on this.

  That was the crux of it, once again. Another issue that made me feel less than worthy of godlike power. Though, ironically, this cumulative experience was apparently preparation for having exactly that.

  My lips quirked up slightly.

  Honestly, my experiences in this world might actually help my future gestalt intelligence more than most.

  Maybe that’s it…

  I’d found out I had an immortal soul, which wasn’t exactly a surprise by now. However, in finding out enough detail, I had also learned, or at least had confirmed, that the soul wasn’t exactly… me. It was the other way around, instead. I belonged to the soul, not it to me. Whenever I died, I would die. This aspect, this incarnation, as GAIA had put it, was temporary.

  I died and came back already, only to learn that this was the exception. I mean, it was obviously the exception… but that wasn’t what I meant. I suppose, on some level, I thought that it would always be like this. That if I died and ended up reincarnated, that my current self would be the basis for the new personality, the new individual.

  The scope of my soul, the nature of what I was now, and had been, it spoke of a scale that made me only a small part of something much vaster.

  Maybe I should find that comforting; I’m sure some would.

  I looked out the window again, a storm starting to pour out water on the diverging paths.

  I could see Zidaun, out of the corner of my eye, patiently waiting after I asked for a moment to process.

  This will have to wait.

  It was always going to need to wait, unless I wanted to spend the rest of my life locked away from the world and doing nothing but considering the nature of my existence.

  I shook my head, sighed, and then looked at Zidaun fully.

  “Quite the mess,” I said.

  He just nodded in response.

  Fortunately there was little else I needed to deal with on that front immediately. Zidaun had left orders to cancel the other planned executions after I forgave Tarrae.

  At least that part is a relief.

  And it was. I hadn’t pardoned something monstrous, just saved someone who foolishly decided to step in front of a train. Or maybe it was more like untying a tangled rope, paying no heed to the weight it kept suspended hung overhead.

  It wasn’t like my identity was ever going to stay a secret.

  Even if I had had the choice, if I had come out of my soul dive and talked to Zidaun, and had the option to stay hidden…

  I wouldn’t have… probably.

  Maybe I could have been convinced how important it was to stay concealed, but there were a great many factors weighing against it.

  If I hadn’t, the only people I could have talked with would have been Zidaun, his party, and the rest of the Adar.

  The Adar… were fine. Good industrious people, as far as I had seen so far, but religion was baked into their thoughts. Based on what Zidaun had told me and what I had put together, it was perhaps literally built into them.

  Hard to be angry, with what I suspect. If I am wrong though… Zidaun is going to get a hell of a dressing down.

  It said something, when I sincerely hoped that I was linked to someone whose morals completely failed to match my own, because the alternative was worse.

  The Adar… well, they had obviously been manufactured. It seemed likely that some dungeon had done it in the past.

  And I had barely thought about it. Had practically ignored it.

  Which… isn’t like me.

  Unfortunately, I suspected that the System had been messing with my mind. Or possibly editing things in my soul which then impacted my mind… the differences were academic.

  And I had done something in my soul, something that upset that balance. And I suspected that was why I was able to think about this now.

  And it wasn’t the only thing I had been ignoring. I had patterns… for people. A small exertion of my will and I could make a person. They would be functionally a clone, with no knowledge… so just a child really.

  Pretty much all the applications of creating humans wholesale were abominable, so I wasn’t going to do that, but the simple truth was that I should have at least thought about it. Instead I had noted the patterns, noted some surface level applications could be used to heal, and then moved on.

  If I hadn’t needed to heal that man in the sewer so desperately, it’s possible I wouldn’t have even been able to think of that application.

  I had picked up shards after my crystal was damaged. I had absorbed them and then never given it a second thought. I hadn’t tried to recreate the material, or see if it was special in some way.

  And then, again, the Adar. Sure, I had realized I could take the traits of their plant form and apply it to other plants, but that was it. Obviously some of the best possible applications would be to activate them in an already living Adar, or transfer those traits to other humanoids, so they could have new abilities or resistances.

  Again, I wasn’t going to do that. At least without a very good reason, because I didn’t want to accidentally mess them up.

  However, I hadn’t looked any deeper.

  The Adar pattern was practically a guidebook on how to create an artificial organism. Potentially how to create a great many engineered organisms. The monsters that the System was generating via guided mutation were great, but I would love to be able to design my monsters directly.

  And who knew what, if anything, dungeon crystal was useful for?

  That was beside the point. The point, was that using the patterns of anything sapient, beyond a tiny amount, had simply been blanked out of my mind.

  I hate mental influence.

  Unfortunately, that brought me to my last and most delicate issue.

  Zidaun sat quietly waiting for me… An Adar, a manufactured organism that was almost certainly designed by some past dungeon. And… I was pretty sure he was mind controlled.

  I was pretty sure they all were.