Chương 2: Rules of Operations

Twenty-three goblins. ENVIRONMENT Goblin Warren A low-tier goblin pit. It is a small hole in the ground found in the deeper regions of the [Kerzenwachs Forest], where a tribe of goblins have made their home. It is crude and unfortified, barely more than a wild cave. Twenty-three surviving goblins out of a warren that had clearly once held many more. They sat or stood or lay in clusters around the chamber, their green skin washed gray-blue in the fading phosphorescent glow of the mold.

Some were clutching wounds that seemed to regenerate slowly, just like his did. One held the body of another goblin in her lap, rocking back and forth without making a sound. A group of four had pressed themselves into a corner and watched Matthew with the flat, unblinking stare of animals deciding whether to bolt. Their arms were thin, their ribs showed through their skin, and every one of them had the hollow, sunken look of chronic malnutrition. Apart from everything else, they were starving.

Matthew felt a grimly familiar managerial twinge: this was a team that needed resources, structure, and probably a motivational speech he did not have the material for yet. Matthew could see it in the way they moved. Or rather, in the way they did not move. Even the unwounded ones were sluggish, their reactions slow, their eyes dull. The ones who had been hiding in the tunnels had probably been hiding for days, conserving energy, waiting for the adventurers to leave or for death to come. Whichever happened first.

He could also smell it on them. His new nose was far more sensitive than his old one, and the chamber's smell was a layered thing: blood, feces, and fear sweat. Beneath all of it, the acrid, sour note of death. Slowly, his eyes scanned the cave. There were not many good options here. But then the solution came to him. Namely, he was staring at some goblins hunkered over a broken human arm jutting from the debris. They were already gnawing on one of the adventurers.

Goblins had no conventions about not eating human meat. He, personally, had qualms. But he also had people to feed and his new instincts overrode his once-human sensibilities. He had known these creatures for less than twenty minutes and was already feeling responsible for them. A decade of retail experience had trained one reflex into him deeper than fear: that this situation was not his fault, and it was absolutely his problem.

"You," Matthew said, pointing to the nearest goblin, a male. The goblin flinched.

"Wood. Bring us wood. Dry wood, if you can find it." The goblin stared at him.

"Wood. Fire. Go." The goblin looked at the others. None of them moved. None of them understood what he was asking, and Matthew realized with a sinking feeling that they had probably never built a fire before. Goblins lived in holes. They ate raw food. They scavenged. The concept of a controlled fire was, to them, something that happened when adventurers came with torches to burn everything. Fine. He would do it himself. First law of management: you have to lead by example.

They could clearly speak in some manner, but could they understand him? Matthew found a flat stone near the wall and set it down as a hearth base because the cave floor was wet. He gathered dead roots and dried brush, then broke a wooden spear shaft into short lengths and arranged the pieces in a cone over the tinder. From the shadows, the goblins watched him. But one of them seemed to read his intentions.

The girl with the nicked ear, the one he rescued, came to him with one of the adventurers' torches, still smoldering. The cut had healed shut already. Her bleeding had stopped. But where the adventurer's knife had sliced at her ear had left an indent on it. He noted the same for his torso wound. So that meant they would heal quickly but still scar. That meant there was a limit to what regeneration would allow him to get away with. As for her, she was taking personal initiative. This one was management material.

He noted that as well. The dry roots and brush ignited instantly, and the fire crackled to life, its light pushing hard against the darkness of the chamber. The goblins recoiled. Several scrambled backward. One bared its teeth at the fire as though it were a living enemy. Matthew fed the flame with thicker, dried roots, building it. The warmth pushed back the damp cold of the chamber, and the light was steadier and warmer than the fungal glow from the distant walls.

Slowly, the goblins who had recoiled inched closer, drawn by the heat despite their fear. Then he turned and stared for a moment. Warming his hands, Matthew thought. Was he really going to do this? This was crazy. He knew this was crazy. He was a logistics manager, not a cannibal butcher. But then again, his last performance review did say that he "needs to be more hands-on."

Crushed, the two unfungused human bodies were already broken in multiple places, their limbs bent at wrong angles and their torsos flattened by the weight of the limestone. But the meat was fresh, and in the cold of the cave it had not yet begun to turn. He unburied what he could from the mess, dragged both corpses to the fire, laid them out on the stone, and began his work. It was gruesome, frankly. The moral nausea bothered him more than the physical, which never arrived.

Channeling a decade of repressed retail rage, Matthew gutted the first human corpse with a small knife one of them had on them. He had never butchered anything in his life, but the body knew how, and he had also watched an online video once, which made him the most qualified person here. Matthew's hands moved, disjointing limbs, stripping flesh from bone, and sectioning the meat into rough cuts. He laid the pieces on flat stones beside the fire and let the heat do its work.

Then he repeated the process with the second corpse, working steadily while the goblins watched in silence. They kept creeping closer as he worked, drawn in by curiosity. The smell of cooking meat hit the chamber, and the effect on the goblins was immediate. Every head turned. Every nostril flared. The ones in the corner abandoned their post and crept toward the fire, their eyes fixed on the sizzling. None of them had ever smelled cooked food before. It did smell good. Even his conscience had to admit that.

He pointed at one and gestured him over. Terrified, the goblin approached. Matthew gave him the knife and gestured for him to cut, and he did. The goblin cut off pieces, and Matthew began handing them out. Essentially, he was now running a cafeteria with one menu item and a deeply compromised health code. They took the human meat from him, terrified but eager. Like animals, they fell upon it.

"Slow down," Matthew said, pushing one goblin's hands down.

"Chew. Eat slow." Meat cooked over fire was easier to digest, carried fewer parasites, and delivered more usable energy than raw flesh. A goblin who ate cooked food would stay stronger longer and fall sick less often. These were not lessons from his old life. They were survival fundamentals that every culture had learned, and they applied just as well in a cave full of starving goblins as they had in any prehistoric settlement.

He rose and stepped back, watching as they handled it themselves now, cutting and cooking. They were very quick learners, even if it did cost several burned fingers of various origin. FOLLOWER LEVEL UP! Through proper nutrition, all present goblins have gained +01 levels of experience! This makes them marginally more proficient at all things. All goblins are now Level 02! The girl with the nicked ear was the one who brought him the liver.

She had been watching him from a distance since the fire, staying close but not too close. She was small even for a goblin, with a sharp face and dark, watchful eyes. From the circle where he sat apart, she crept forward to Matthew with both hands extended. An offering. She held it up to him. Matthew looked at it. The human liver was heavy and dark, still warm, and something in him recognized it immediately. It was the good part. The lead wolf of a pack always ate the liver first.

It was the most nutritious part of the body. He saw that in a documentary once. He didn't actually know if it was true, but it sounded true enough to be believable. He did not take it. Murder? Yes. Butchery? Sure thing. But eating liver? Gross. Apart from that, eating people was a line he was not ready to cross. Not yet. He was smart enough not to promise himself not ever. Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit. But not yet.

Goblin King or not, killing someone and consuming him felt, morally, quite different. Maybe that made no sense. But the word 'sense' meant little to him considering he just discovered the facts that reincarnation, other worlds, and monsters were all real within the last hour. He pushed her hands back, gently, toward her own chest. The goblin froze.

Something flickered across her face, and for one terrible second, Matthew thought he had made a mistake, that this was some grave breach of goblin etiquette, refusing an offering from your own. She tilted her head, studying him like she was checking she had understood correctly. Then she brought the liver to her own mouth in a sudden, ravaging snap, like an animal clamping down on a kill before someone else could steal it. Her sharp teeth ripped through it, splattering juices across her face.

It was exceptionally violent. She ate it like it was the best thing she had ever tasted. Her whole small body seemed to unclench as she ravished it, and there was something in her face that had not been there before, not just hunger satisfied but also pride. She had offered the king the best part of the kill, and the king had given it back to her. Whatever accounting goblins used for these things, that math had apparently worked out in her favor. Horrified, yet confusingly intrigued, Matthew watched her eat.

Another goblin approached, trying to take the liver, and she hissed at him, snarling and baring her teeth. Afraid, the contender ran back to the circle. The fire was dying down to embers by the time Matthew turned to the next problem. The goblins had eaten, at least those who could, and the ones too wounded to feed themselves had been fed by others. That was a good sign. It meant some level of social instinct was still functioning here.

But they were still just a group of unorganized survivors sitting in the ruins of their home, and Matthew could not manage what he could not identify. He crouched in front of the nearest goblin, the one with the broken arm in the rough splint, and studied him. The goblin looked up with wary, tired eyes. It seemed that while flesh healed quickly, broken bones took longer to heal.

"What's your name?" The goblin blinked. Then it looked at the others as though the question were a trick. Matthew tried again. He pointed at the goblin, then at himself.

"Matthew. Me. You?" He pointed back at the goblin. Nothing. Not confusion at his accent, but a genuine lack of comprehension about the concept itself. His understanding came to let him know that goblins did not give themselves names. Given how rapidly goblins lived and died, in their culture, names were granted only to special souls for acts of distinction in the tribe. Matthew stood up and rubbed his jaw. In his old life, he had managed a warehouse team.

He had known every one of their names, their shift preferences, and their strengths and weaknesses. You could not run a team without names. You could not assign tasks or track performance or build accountability without basic identification. This was not a cultural tradition he was going to respect. This was a critical operational failure. He found dead wood and stripped it into thin, flat strips of bark.

He burned the tip of a thin stick in the embers of the fire until it was charred black, then scratched a symbol onto a bark strip and tied it around the splint-armed goblin's neck with a length of dead ivy.

"Your name is John," Matthew said. The goblin touched the bark tag with his good hand. John looked at Matthew, then at the other goblins, and something shifted in his expression. His shoulders straightened by a fraction. His chin lifted. They understood him, apparently, after all. Matthew moved to the next one, a female with a scar across her scalp.

"Sarah." Then a young male, wiry and quick, who had been one of the first to creep toward the fire.

"Gary." A stocky female with thick arms and a jaw that jutted forward.

"Diane." He went through all of them, naming them one by one with the mundane names from the people he used to work with, until he got to the girl with the cut ear. He paused at her.

"Nicole," he said. It sounded right. Her face broke into an expression he had not seen on any of them until now. She smiled. After they were named, he stood before the group and addressed them. Most of them would not understand his words, but they would understand the pointing and the tone. He added a lot of visual emphasis.

"John, you take Gary, Diane, and Mike. Collect the bodies." John straightened, looked at his three, and pointed. The three followed him without argument.

"Sarah, you take Carol, Janet, and Susan. Clear the rubble from the main tunnel. Move the loose stone first, then I'll handle the heavy sections." Sarah nodded. She was already moving before he finished, and she grabbed Carol by the arm and pulled her to her feet with a briskness that surprised Matthew. The others followed. The difference in energy that a good lunch break can make was astounding. He made several teams out of several small groups of three to five, depending on the task.

That was when Matthew noticed the pattern. Most of the goblins followed orders passively, shuffling to their assigned tasks with dull obedience. But a few of them, Sarah and John and the one he had named Rick, a broad-shouldered male with a crooked nose, moved differently. They took charge of their small groups without being told, directing the others. They were management material. A sharp grunt. Something yanked on his arm.

"Nicole!" said a voice at his side, calling her own name. He looked down at her, the last one left. The goblin with the nicked ear, Nicole, was pointing at herself.

"Nicole," she said again. She actually looked fairly angry and indignant at the fact that she hadn't been given a task. She was a violent, horrific little monster. The splattered tinge of the blood-filled man-flesh she had devoured was still painting her face. He had just the right thing for her.

"Head of Human Resources," said Matthew. He needed to open the warren. The main tunnel was blocked by the debris from the ceiling collapse he had triggered during the fight. He placed both hands on the rubble pile and felt the stone. His dungeon sense mapped the interior, finding the fault lines, the stress points, the places where the weight was distributed and the places where it was not. He could feel the inside of this cave system like it was the insides of his own nervous system.

He sensed where things were and where things were wrong. The collapse had been chaotic. The stone had fallen in a rough arch, and the keystone of that arch was a single boulder near the top of the pile that the goblins were struggling to move. He was much stronger than they were. A collective muttering and gasps of awe came as the boulder started to roll the moment he laid hands on it. It shifted, then cracked, then split into pieces. A rat ran by, skittering in the shadows. The tunnel was open.

"Tandaradei!" called Rick, a few of the others starting to chant in excitement. By the time the crews had settled into a rhythm, Matthew finally had a moment to check on the one resource nobody else in the warren could see. Mana. His reserves had crept up while he worked, from the paltry sum he had woken with to forty-six now, fed steadily by the human still cocooned against the wall. It was the first genuinely good number he'd seen since arriving in this body.

Matthew learned the rest of the mana economy by accident when he leaned against the cavern wall and felt the stone respond to his attention. It was not a thought so much as a pressure, a sense of the rock's density and weakness and potential. He pushed, experimentally, and a chunk of limestone the size of his fist crumbled inward like wet sand. Territorial Manipulation: Active Mana: 46 / 1, 000 He could change things in the warren, but it cost mana to do.

The parasitic drain on the cocooned adventurer was feeding him mana, but the man's life was finite. Matthew could see him through the fungal lattice, his body shrinking, his skin drawing tighter over a frame that was being hollowed out. He carved a small room next, just a hollow in the tunnel wall. It was rough and crude, and it cost him six mana. DUNGEON UPGRADED Constructed: [Empty Small Chamber]! DUNGEON STATUS Currently, your dungeon is F-tier.

The higher your tier, the more abilities, monsters, and capabilities you unlock. However, your upkeep costs will also increase. Upkeep. Of course. Even if an office was empty, one still had to pay for the unused utilities. He was running his entire operation on a single dying customer, and the account was going to close soon.

Matthew felt it through his connection to the warren, a slow migration of stolen life traveling backward through the fungal lattice, down through the roots that threaded the cave floor, and into the ancient tree at the chamber's heart. The tree seemed to be a central node of the warren. He was the CEO, but the tree was the heart of the machine. The ornaments hanging from its branches trembled faintly, though no wind moved through the cave.

Then, the black bark seemed to swell, almost imperceptibly, like how a throat moves when swallowing. There was a bulging. Abruptly, near the base of the trunk, one of the low branches split open. Matthew stopped working on the walls and watched. A branch pulled apart, deliberately, along a seam that had not been visible a moment before, the wood parting like a wound peeling wide apart. Inside the opening, something pale and wet pulsed and strained against a thin membrane.

The membrane itself was fed by a knot of fungal roots that ran directly into the tree's own bark, indistinguishable from it. It was rather grotesque. Matthew watched with a mixture of fascination and deep concern. The pod bulged further, the membrane stretching thin enough to show the shape curled inside it, small and folded, limbs drawn up against a swollen belly. The tree groaned, a low creak of strained wood, and the branch bowed under the weight of what it carried.

The membrane split with a wet, tearing sound, and a new goblin dropped out of the tree and onto the stone floor below. Horrific. It was a small and damp thing, blinking as it lay there in the remains of some sort of amniotic sac. It looked at Matthew with eyes that held nothing. No fear, no recognition, no memory. A blank slate. Above it, the branch was already closing over, the wood knitting itself shut around the empty socket where the pod had hung, ready, in time, to swell again. Goblin Spawned!

Default Level: 01 Tribe Population: 24 Currently, new goblins inherit no skills, no knowledge, and no survival instincts beyond basic motor function and hunger. Goblins age rapidly and will reach self-sufficiency within a short time. With a clawed hand, he picked the infant up off of the ground. Matthew stared at the newborn. It stared back. Then it opened its mouth and wailed, a thin, reedy sound that echoed off the chamber walls. It was an ugly baby. He understood the system now.

While capable of biological reproduction, his goblins were not born in the traditional sense. There just wasn't time for that, given how fast they died. They were produced. The dungeon consumed the life energy of their enemies, converted it into mana, and used that mana to spawn more goblins and maintain the existing ones. The goblins were the dungeon's product, its workforce, and its military. Expand. Evolve. Repeat. But babies were just dead weight that had yet to become productively exploitable.

They were, essentially, student interns. This new creature was of no help until it grew. Diane came over from corpse duty and held out her arms. Looking at her for a second, he gave her the baby and she began cradling it. Apparently, she had a lot of experience with such matters. She'd be in charge of internal resources from now on. Something moved in the water. Past them, several goblin corpses floated in the stream.

Matthew watched, looking as they floated down river and into the hole at the base of the tree, where they were swallowed by darkness. Seeing it happen, he understood the last link of the cycle of goblin life. Upon death, they were returned to their sender.