Lewd Dungeon, Chapter 384

Chapter 384 – Bluemountain

Switching between ‘dungeon me’ and ‘divine me’ always took a moment to focus. Dungeons and gods both had the ability to process a great deal of information. They had to, in order to effectively run a dungeon, or manage their faith across entire worlds. However, they both processed things in different ways, and focused on different types of information.

The easiest way to describe the sensation would be to compare it having two different web browsers made by competing companies open on the same computer, and you had several open tabs on each browser. Flipping between the two was fairly simple. Just a click of the mouse. But the menu bar was laid out differently, the bookmarks weren’t the same, and the default font for everything shifted. Even if you were extremely familiar with both systems, it took a moment to stop working in one mode, and start in the other.

Of course, those ‘browsers’ didn’t just stop when I was in the other one. I couldn’t just turn off divine support for my followers, and shutting down the dungeon didn’t work, either. However, I could leave certain processes on automatic, and set alerts for important things. But, in return, that meant I needed to spend a bit of time catching up on things that I had done while on autopilot.

This was easier on the Dungeon side of things, actually. Most of the processes I had set up in the dungeon were able to run more or less automatically, depending on the groups going through the dungeon, and the dungeon contracts they’d signed. I had some alerts for when higher-tier individuals came into my domain, or when one of my pets in the dungeon needed attention, but most of what happened in the dungeon could be handled by my ‘dungeon subconscious’, for lack of a better word.

Keeping track of my Divine nature was more complicated. First off, I had the domains of Domination, Pleasure, and Dungeons. That meant I had a… wide variety of prayers, invocations, and worshippers coming my way, and I had shrines in some very ‘interesting’ places. That meant I got information from a lot of different sources, about a lot of different things, and I needed to try and keep track of everything.

Secondly was the sheer number of followers I had. I wasn’t a major deity, yet, by System standards, since some gods had worshippers that numbered in the billions. However, I’d recently passed the 100 million mark, which meant I had exceeded ‘minor deity’ status, at least. That sounded like a lot, but deities under the System worked on much larger scales. After all, even after everything, there were still over six BILLION people on Earth. Even if all my followers were on Earth, that would still be less than two percent of the population who followed me.

I did have about twenty million followers on Earth. Most of those were adventurers, though Kamyzny, my little enclave in Siberia, had grown to almost a million people, thanks to the Dungeon Laws making it a safe haven. Not everyone in the town worshipped me, of course, but roughly fifty percent had picked up my creed. Still, even with twenty million followers on Earth my religion didn’t crack the top ten. Maybe if you broke some of the larger religions into their different denominations and splinter-faiths, but otherwise, I was still below religions like Voodoo and Sikhism.

In the wider galaxy, my religion was more dispersed. Usually focused around dungeons that had taken up my creed, and cults that formed amongst adventurers who visited them. However, Bluemountain was my largest concentration of followers by far, thanks to my rather direct actions there. Fifty million people on the planet followed me, which was roughly twelve percent of the world’s population, mostly located in the realms of Knightmarch and Safrea, though I did have some followers in the Msserine Kingdom, Anfelon Confederacy, Syllenlon Republic, Amenalari Queendom, and the Kingdom of Camnas, who had joined the war against Vinastra before it fell. I had made certain that my church did not follow the same path as Pofmis’s church had, so people were still free to choose their faith, meaning the other Atlantean gods still held the hearts of most of the world’s population.

At any rate, because Bluemountain held the greatest concentration of my people, whenever I switched to focusing on my Divine self, rather than my Dungeon self, my attention shifted there, first and foremost. Opening my divine senses, I felt a slight tug towards the Anfelon Confederacy, a loose coalition of city-states that primarily worked together only in self-defense. Someone was preaching in my name. Curious, I followed the thread, shifting my attention to the small chapel built in Palerre, a port city that boasted one of the few trade routes between the continent that had been under Vinastran rule and the city of Bluemountain, where the spaceport was.

The chapel was dedicated to me, with a shrine made from local stone. The man leading the service was Father Hervi, a Level 35 Priest / Slave Master. Atlantean Male. That brought a bit of trivia to mind. I’d learned that, unlike most races, the Bluemountain-native Atlanteans did not typically get racial evolutions as they grew in Tiers, unless they were gaining an elemental template or something like that, and such things were very rare for them.

This was both good and bad, depending on your point of view. The bad was that, after Tier 1, they generally did not gain access to any new racial skills, and they didn’t gain some of the perks of having a higher-Tier race, like increased attributes and better racial abilities. The good, however, was that they were then able to focus more on their class and profession, allowing them to gain more skills in those areas, and their racial ability gave them an extra skill point per level for each Tier they were above the first. Since most individuals only gained 2 skill points per level, a Tier 2 Atlantean getting 3 points per level was a significant boost, that almost made up for the decrease in attributes.

What was interesting to me was the fact that this was clearly not a natural state of affairs. After all, Atlanteans not born on Bluemountain did have racial evolutions, much like humans on Earth did. Generally, the sequence went Lesser Atlantean, Atlantean, and High Atlantean, going from Tier 1 to 3. No Atlantean on record had ever hit Tier 4, so no one knew what was possible for them. I bet that, if I actually cared enough to dig into it, Pofmis would be behind the whole business. Just like she was part of the reason Bluemountain had been kept in medieval times, technology-wise, for centuries.

“Blessed be Lord Kuronoth, the Binder of Man and Dungeon alike, the Contractor of Fate, the Bringer of Pleasure, the Ruiner of Pofmis, the Breaker of Freedom, He Who Dominates All Before Him…”

The priest’s sermon caught my attention. Those were some… interesting titles he was giving me. I mean, he wasn’t wrong, exactly. I did use contracts to bind people and dungeons, and some of those contracts had wildly altered people’s fates. I definitely brought pleasure to people I chose, and ruined Pofmis, and you couldn’t be a Slave Master like I’d started out as without breaking people of their freedom, or dominating people.

There were thirty-two people in the congregation. Most looked to be normal folk. They had a variety of classes, but their professions were all things like Farmer, Merchant, or Maid, and few of them were much over Level 10. Normal people didn’t go out risking their lives against monsters to level up, after all, and profession XP didn’t come in too quickly when you were doing the same thing again and again for years.

Three of the group looked to be adventurers, of different stripes, and different levels. Clearly not in the same party. One was a Slave Master, which made him unusable for my purposes at the moment. The other two… one was only Level 15 in Tier 1. Not advanced enough. The third one, though…

Rhys Lunaleaf

Atlantean Male

Level 12 True Dominator / Master Leatherworker

Titles: Tough, Silver-Tongued, Violator, Devout

Market Value: 35,045 gp

Level 12 in Tier 2 was lower than some of my regulars, but still respectable, especially for a people who were in a more ‘established’ bit of space. Part of the reason why the people on Earth were pushing so hard to gain strength was because while Earth had lost a significant portion of its pre-System population, it was still overpopulated in some ways. Earth’s population was still over six billion, after all, while Bluemountain was more like 425 million.

That population density meant that there were more people on Earth who were disenfranchised in some way, while Bluemountain had a smaller population, leading to fewer dungeons that grew slower. On Earth, adventurers were fighting, and sometimes dying, for money to maintain their lifestyles or improve their abilities. More people also meant more dungeons. Not just that, but people were forced into closer proximity with where the more powerful monsters that existed outside the cities.

On Bluemountain, people didn’t need as much money to survive, even thrive. Less people meant they needed less food and resources to go around. Fewer people who didn’t have a place anywhere else, and decided that fighting monsters was a good way to make a living.

That, combined with the increasing difficulty of leveling up as you rose in Tiers, meant that only forty percent of people on Bluemountain got to Tier 2, and only the top twenty-five percent of those managed to get into Tier 3. The numbers who got to the upper levels of Tier 3 were less than one percent of those who reached the Tier. Those who got that powerful typically had responsibilities and commitments that kept them from blithely seeking out powerful foes to push themselves against.

I looked over the adventurer again. True Dominator/True Dominatrix was a vanilla upgrade to the Dominator/Dominatrix class, and Master Leatherworker was the basic upgrade to the Leatherworker profession. Nothing all that special.

His titles also weren’t terribly rare. Tough just increased his HP. Silver-Tongued made his social skills more effective. Devout showed he was a firm follower of mine. Violator was the only unusual one. You didn’t get that without violently exploiting someone against their will. You couldn’t use drugs, mind control, bindings, or the like. And you didn’t get it from just one event, but after a series of over a dozen. It wasn’t something you got easily, to put it lightly.

However, that was actually to my advantage. If I was going to truly test my dungeon’s new levels, I would need to test them against someone who wasn’t exceptional. Sure, the Dominator route probably wouldn’t be the most popular in Shatterchain, but it wouldn’t be the same as someone walking in with slaves. This might be just the kind of adventurer I was looking for.

In the shadows behind the chapel, I manifested my avatar, taking the shape of an Atlantean wearing all black, and hiding my more ‘demonic’ look. I didn’t want to cause too much of a commotion, after all. Using a bit of magic, I veiled myself from the view of common folk as I walked around to the front of the chapel, and waited.

Eventually, the service ended. Even the most devout worshippers cannot spend all day in worship, after all. The man, who looked to be in his thirties, was one of the last to leave, and I quietly followed him as he made his way towards a building that was marked as the local Adventurer’s Guild. Perhaps he was going to meet his party? Or look for work? Either way, it was a lucky break.

Even if I was a god, I didn’t want to spend all day following someone around like a stalker. Much better for them to quickly lead me to someplace where I could at least reveal my physical form, and see if he would take the job. And yes, I would let him decide whether or not to take the job. If I was going to force the issue, then there was no reason for me to not just reveal myself in all my divine splendor and give him the task. But doing that would likely taint the test’s results beyond redemption. A bit of patience and uncertainty should net the best possible result.