Chương 1: Career Change

According to corporate policy, he should have waited until after work hours to die. But the vending machine that fell onto Matthew Lee and crushed him flat, apparently, had belonged to an independent franchiser. He'd been reaching for a bag of chips when the entire unit groaned forward, the mid-century carpet glue beneath it giving way as it almost seemed to have been tipped by some unseen force. After years of neglected maintenance, he was the one who paid the final deductible.

One moment he was thinking about the quarterly review he had to finish before Monday. Next, an eight-hundred-pound machine folded his ribs one crack at a time. The fluorescent lights dimmed, and somewhere in the hallway someone screamed. His immediate thought was of his precious vacation days: HR won't accept sick leave for this. He died on company property, which would spike their insurance premiums significantly. That brought him a tiny smile before he left the mortal coil.

Somewhere else, perhaps even somewhen else. A rhythmic buzzing was deep in him. It was not a heartbeat, but something else that pulsed through the dead man. It felt a little like static electricity, always just about to shock him. His skull, his jaw, and his hands all vibrated with it. It was the feeling of life flooding back into a dead thing, like pins and needles across his entire body at once. Matthew opened his eyes. Blackness.

A near-total subterranean darkness, broken only by a faint phosphorescent glow to his side. The air was thick with copper and something like shit, like overripe fruit rotting away. It was the smell of a break room fridge left unplugged for an extended weekend. He lay on rough stone, noticing immediately that his body was wrong. His arms were too long, his hands were too wide, and his fingers were tipped with nails thick and hard as flint.

He felt the weight of bone above his brow and the dense cords of muscle in his neck and shoulders tightening in real time. He felt like he'd become the vending machine. Karma had a sense of humor, apparently. Light bloomed. Translucent text scrolled before his eyes, anchored to his field of view in some sort of glassy window that defied gravity. It appeared to be some kind of cosmic onboarding process.

[SYSTEM NOTICE] Soul Integration: Complete Class: [Dungeon Core (Goblin)] He turned his head, and the text tracked. More lines populated with the slow deliberation of a loading bar. He'd seen faster HR portals. DUNGEON STATUS Mana Reserves: 12 / 1, 000 Status: Critical Slowly, he pushed himself upright. The ground, stone, beneath him, was wet. Not with water. Rather, this was warm and thick. Blood. Even in the dim glow, he knew.

His hands came away slick, the stains on them proof of a workplace incident with no OSHA to report it to. But it wasn't his. Whatever blood he had spilled, dying, it was somewhere else entirely. He rose to his full height, hunched under the low ceiling of a cave. Seven feet tall, arms past his knees, hands that could wrap a man's skull. Scars. A topography of them across his chest, his arms, and his jaw. To him, this was all new.

But to the muscle memory of his new body that he had been reincarnated in, it knew this place. Every tunnel, every choke point. The cavern opened around him as his eyes adjusted. A glow came from a fungal vein creeping up the far wall, casting everything in a sickly green-blue. A thin underground stream cut a shallow channel through the stone, flowing toward the center of the chamber he was just outside of. Inside of that chamber, a tree stood on an underground stone island.

It shouldn't have existed without sunlight. But there it was. Gnarled, black bark, bare branches spreading to fit the ceiling exactly as if it were the thing holding the cave open. Hundreds of ornaments hung there from its many dry branches: polished bone, grayed cloth, copper rings, cracked beads, a carved wooden toy, and a rusted bell. Offerings left over generations. On either side, the tree's roots broke through the floor and fused with the pale, veined fungus.

The cave stream ran into the darkness beneath its center. All around it, bodies. Goblin corpses, dozens of them. GOBLIN A goblin. Goblins are a low-tier subterranean humanoid species. They average low in stature, possess moderate regenerative capacity, and age rapidly.

Goblins are omnivorous, highly adaptable, and possess rudimentary tool-making ability, but their low individual strength, small mana reserves, and lack of structured social organization caused by exceptionally short and brutal lives have historically confined them to the bottom of the global monster ecosystem. Rank: F They were crumpled and broken around the tree, cut down from behind, pinned by arrows, or curled protectively around a still bundle of cloth.

One still clutched a crude knife it never got a chance to use. Laughter. Human laughter, followed by a scream that was not human. His body moved, and he went with it. A rolling, silent lope, his hands reading the walls. Despite having just been reborn, he knew this place inside and out as if it were his home of twenty years. He'd never had intuition like this in the office, unless you counted anticipating which printer would jam next. The tunnel widened into torchlight.

Three humans: mismatched armor, rusted chain, and steel gleaming wet. One kicked a goblin corpse over into the stream, the waters taking it away. Another pried a crude bracelet from a dead hand, checking if it had any monetary value. The third dragged a rabidly fighting goblin by her hair, her snarls raw as she bit uselessly into his leather glove. He tried to line up a knife to the base of her ear. Most of the dead goblins had an ear missing, Matthew realized. They were being harvested, likely as proof of a kill.

Matthew stopped in the shadow of the tunnel. This is my home. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. The system flickered. Dungeon Ability: [Territorial Manipulation] You can sense and influence the geological features of your territory. At that thought of this being his, something in Matthew's new instincts overrode his shock at his own death and transmigration and the scene before him. It was something animal and innate to his new being.

He came out of the darkness like an avalanche. The first adventurer never had time to see him approaching. Matthew's hand closed around the man's throat, and the stolen bracelet clattered to stone. With a quick heave, the adventurer's body flew and slammed into the ceiling. A stalactite punched through his back and chest. The cavern roof above cracked from the force of the impact around the area. — His severance package was literal. Stones cascaded from above, the cave shaken.

The second adventurer, still holding the goblin's hair, looked up a half-second before several tons of limestone buried him. He screamed, covering his face as his compatriot and the debris both fell to crash down over him. Quick on her feet, the captured goblin scrambled free on hands and knees before the cave-in. The crash shook dust from every surface and sent torchlight spinning. The exit was sealed. The third man had already drawn his blade, intelligence in his eyes and not much of any hesitation in his feet.

Pressing the moment, he slid his sword in below Matthew's ribs, into the gap between bone and muscle, every millimeter of steel a white-hot shock. Leaning in closer rather than pulling away, Matthew roared right into his face, a sound that shook the chamber as he bent down low to his head level. The adventurer's confidence broke for one second. It was enough. Matthew grabbed him by the throat and swung him overhead like a sack.

He slammed the man into a patch of blue, glowing fungus against the cave wall behind him. The sounds of cracking and a scream filled the air as his features flattened from the impact. The fungus responded. Pale, translucent roots erupted from the stone like worms after rain, winding around wrists, ankles, and torso. The adventurer hollered and thrashed, but the roots tightened. They layered over him in a lattice of pulsing tendrils, muffling the sounds.

He became a cocooned silhouette, still rising and falling beneath the mycelia as he struggled and failed to fight free from the binds that had constricted him. It was like a spider had wrapped him up in a bundle of webbing. The system flickered. Dungeon Ability Parasitic Drain (Passive) Via parasitic symbiosis, your dungeon passively feeds on the life energy of killed, captured, or immobilized beings through a fungal growth. The amount of energy gained is dependent on the spiritual energy of the victim.

Corpses are significantly less lucrative than living beings. Goblins are immune to the mold. Note: High mana targets are rationed by the fungus. Low mana targets are consumed instantly. DUNGEON STATUS Mana: 15. 27 / 1, 000 INCOME / EXPENSES (PER HOUR) Passive: +1 Parasitic Drain: +3 Upkeep: -0. 5 Goblins: -2. 3 Net Result: +1. 2 Mana per Hour The sword was still in his ribs. Almost indifferent, Matthew yanked it out. Black blood sprayed out from the hole, but the wound was already sealing.

As the edges pulled together, a section of the intruder's face sunk inward. His life force was being drawn to heal Matthew through some sort of ambient transfer of life energy. Talk about a resource reallocation. Slowly, he turned around. The rescued goblin was pressed against the wall, shaking, her huge eyes fixed on him. Her ear was cut and bleeding.

"Tandaradei," she whispered. Slowly, she came over, and she grabbed his hand, grip fierce despite the trembling, and shouted into the tunnels.

"Tandaradei!" Silence. Then movement. Small shapes pulled themselves from the dark, crawling on bellies, dropping from crevices. Wounded, thin, filthy. Every one of them stared with the same expression: recognition. Disbelief. One with a broken arm and a rough splint stepped forward, face crumpling. He dropped to his knees, forehead to stone.

"Tandaradei," he said, his voice cracking. Another knelt. Then more. The chamber filled with kneeling bodies, the word spreading through the tunnels like a tide. In the flickering torchlight, he saw drawings scratched into the rock walls. Crude panels, charcoal, and pigment, telling a story. Goblins fighting, fleeing, and dying in waves against looming armored figures shaded with lines of red.

And in the center panel, a larger goblin, with a crown of bone and scars across his face, stood between his people and the things that came to kill them. Tandaradei. The Goblin King. GOBLIN KING A goblin king is a goblin that has undergone severe physiological mutation, increasing in size, density, and cognitive capacity far beyond standard goblin parameters. They serve as the central nervous system of their species.

Historically, goblin kings rise once every several centuries, when the global goblin population is on the brink of collapse. This has led scholars to classify them as a powerful immune response from the powers-that-be, designed to keep the species alive despite humanity's distaste for them. They are notoriously ruthless and vile in their tactics, having earned them a place as one of the most hated enemies of the civilized world. Rank: SSS He skimmed the description. Ruthless and vile.

His old regional manager would've framed that and hung it above his desk. Matthew realized rather coldly that he had just killed three men, but somehow, that didn't do much to him. He didn't feel like one of them, like he did something wrong. He felt like one of these pitiful creatures, here. Most of the goblins were wounded. He could tell that none of them were trained in anything beyond rudimentary scavenging. Goblins didn't live long enough for vocational education. Before now, Matthew had been a middle manager.

He'd managed logistics in a warehouse for a soulless global conglomerate. He'd been very good at it. None of those skills were supposed to matter in a world of swords and magic. But the numbers were grim and this place looked like it needed a numbers man. SPECIES OVERVIEW Population: 23 [SYSTEM NOTICE] You are a Dungeon Core. Your existence is tied to the territory you control. Your body is your dungeon core's vessel. If it is destroyed, your dungeon collapses, and all inhabitants will die. Survival Estimate: 2.

3% A two-point-three percent survival rate. A heap of untrained personnel, a collapsing facility, and a hostile business environment were not a fantasy problem. GOBLIN CORE A goblin-specialized dungeon core is an ecologically symbiotic dungeon core whose territory, abilities, and population are intrinsically bound to the goblin species and the flora and fauna of their region. Goblin Cores are in tune with dark, natural elements.

Caution: The Adventurers' Guild has posted a standing bounty on goblin ears in this region. They were, collectively, an operations problem. He could handle that.