“I initially tried to stop Isiphelo’s touch upon the Caer System, the dungeon hearts, as you call them, from spreading and infecting it with his evil. That ended… badly. You only know one side of that story, your efforts to return Azeban to his dungeon. I could not risk another event like that happening again. Isiphelo seemed content to merely rattle the cages of his prison, not break out himself. I wonder if he knows how close he came to that goal.”— Reylynn, recorded in the Archivist’s Log

  Caer Siddi, Diurne. Day 02.

  Congratulations! Your Caer Fragment has successfully been attuned to your soul. As you have not attuned it before dying, you have been assigned a random location to return to Navorinelle from.

  Location assigned: Delphianna

  You have died. The magic of the Firestone Mine Dungeon prevents you from opening a gate to your party. As no one in your party is capable of casting resurrection magic, you have been returned to Caer Siddi.

  Alert! Your party has found a safe zone within the Firestone Mine Dungeon. You may respawn there if you wish.

  You have died. You must pay the Cost of Resurrection in order to respawn.

  Alert! The Cost of Resurrection has changed. The cost is now:

  

  
• -10% to the total amount of experience needed to reach your next Class Level. You cannot lose a level, but the total experience needed to reach the next level can fall below zero.


  

  

  
• -10% Progress in your top 10 highest skills. You cannot lose a level, but the total experience needed to progress to the next level can fall below zero.


  

  

  
• Injuries sustained below 25% of your maximum HP will only be healed to the point of no longer being life threatening. You will need to heal those wounds before your health will regenerate above 25%. This cost cannot be avoided by any Ability, Skill, or Item.


  

  Alert! Equipped items and items in your inventory are now considered Soulbound (Level 1) automatically. You will no longer have a chance to lose equipped items or items in your bag of holding. Items are only considered Soulbound (Level 1) in the context of dying. Dropping or unequipping an item removes this protection. An Enchanter must soulbind an item to create a permanent bond or reach a higher level of soulbinding.

  Alert! Due to your high level as a party leader, your party possesses a buff which allows one person to respawn without paying the Cost of Resurrection or your entire party to respawn at the site of their death after paying the Cost of Resurrection. This buff has automatically been applied to you as your entire party did not die within thirty seconds of you. You can use the buff by selecting it when you leave Caer Siddi, or you may pay the Cost of Resurrection instead.

  Congratulations! Your party has slain Corrupted Miner Samira! Your party has been awarded the following:

  

  
• +1050 Experience towards your next Class Level. Note: Reward reduced to +630 experience because your unsuppressed level is 40 higher than this dungeon’s maximum level.


  

  

  
• Corrupted Miner Samira’s Pickaxe (Only one person may recover this item per instance)


  

  

  
• The right to search for this dungeon’s Heart for the next thirty-two hours and safe passage out of the mine.


  

  As your party is the first to defeat this Instanced Dungeon’s Boss, your party has also been awarded the following:

  

  
• Your party’s members will forever be recorded as this Instanced Dungeon’s first champions.


  

  

  
• All experience rewarded inside this Instanced Dungeon has been increased by 150% retroactively. All enchantments found on any gear inside this Instanced Dungeon are 150% stronger.


  

  Saiph’s body ached all over, but the sight of seeing their crazy plan having worked made it worth it!

  He sat up and looked himself over. His armor had certainly taken a beating. The few plates still attached to the shredded chainmail were dented, cracked, and warped into barely protective sheets.

  Saiph was almost certain he didn’t want this armor repaired. It held the scars of his first dungeon crawl and victory over its boss, but most importantly, it announced that he had died and come back to tell the tale! Saiph tried to let out a whoop, but the absence of air in the chamber and the pain all over his body immediately shut that down. He settled for an excited, if pained, raise of the fist instead.

  “Oy! Nap time’s over. Get back down here and help us dig Rose out of the mess you buried her under!” Nix called out.

  Damn, I guess not even dying grants a man time to himself, Saiph thought as he moved to the center crystal pillar and opened a portal to the dungeon’s safe zone. Seeing as how they’d beaten the dungeon and been granted free passage out of it, Saiph used their free respawn.

  The safe zone itself was empty, with their party just outside the door to the boss lair. Nix was sitting cross-legged on an outcropping while Cassi and Slaine were busy removing the rubble blocking the boss lair entrance.

  Nix looked up at Saiph, “Didn’t I just get through fixing your armor?”

  “Sorry, Dad, I’ll take better care of my toys next time.”

  “You’d better,” Nix said with feigned indignance.

  Saiph knelt down beside Nix. “So, how big was the boom?”

  He hadn’t actually seen the explosion that had killed him, Samira, and robbed himself of nearly all of his armor’s durability.

  “Big enough that you destroyed the whole boss room and a good section of hallway leading to it,” Nix replied. Then his mouth suddenly curled up into a devious smile. “But not big enough to kill the boss. Rose had to finish her off.”

  “Bullshit!” Saiph scrolled through the combat log and, sure enough, Lueur Rose had gotten the final blow. She had a full zero hit points remaining, meaning zero HP isn’t necessarily an insta-kill. Some realism, I guess. “How the hell did you survive, Rose?”

  “I’m a Rogue,” Rose answered weakly. “There are i-frames on my shadowstep. The explosion was way bigger than I thought it would be and I had to blink into the shockwave. Aftershocks, though, give me a beating. If you guys could hurry up, surviving several explosions back to back really, really hurts.”

  Nix summoned a life wisp and set it on Saiph. The burns and bruises covering his body healed slowly, but it was when the deeper pains finally subsided that his health regeneration finally took over.

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  Shortly after, they cleared a path to Rose. She was lying on the ground, her golden-yellow hair matted down with blood and both her eyes were swollen shut. Her armor was nearly as bad as Saiph’s own.

  “I think I might have broken a rib or several,” Rose coughed up blood and still forced a smile, “but it doesn’t hurt anywhere near as bad as I think it looks.”

  Nix joined his life wisp in healing Rose and her ragged breathing finally returned to normal.

  Saiph offered a hand and pulled Rose to her feet. “Congrats on getting the killing blow. Per the rules of North Remembers, you get the first pick of any boss loot.”

  “You sure you wanna say that? You should know the explosion opened up a hidden entrance over there.” Rose pointed past Saiph and he followed her hand.

  Nestled inside a small alcove sat metal mining carts loaded with a rainbow-like assortment of gems and ore in addition to piles of mined firestone. But perhaps the most amazing item in the cache was the small black crystal sitting atop the cart of gems. It pulsed with a soft purple light.The dungeon’s heart! Saiph picked it up.

  You have found the Firestone Mine Dungeon’s heart. Would you like to claim this dungeon as your own?

  Alert! You are already in possession of a dungeon heart and cannot claim another. Instead a heart crystal has been created and placed inside your inventory. Giving this crystal to someone who does not already own a dungeon will allow them to claim this dungeon instead.

  A little annoyed that the rules hadn’t changed to allow him to own a second guild castle, Saiph pulled the crystal from his bag and handed it to Rose. “Rules are rules. It’s yours.”

  Rose held up her hands. “Actually, I think we should give it to Cassi and Slaine. Technically they found the dungeon first. I think it’s only fair.”

  Both Cassi and Slaine balked at the idea of running a guild castle when the purpose of the dungeon heart was explained to them. They didn’t care who owned the dungeon as long as they could mine it in peace. Following that exchange, Rose accepted the crystal and placed it in her bag of holding.

  Saiph picked up Samira’s pickaxe, which had lain unbroken beside the dungeon heart, and handed it to Slaine. “This should serve you better than your old weapon. Before we can create a safe instance for you, we will have to leave the dungeon.”

  Cassi looked like she wanted to say something. She brought her hands to her chest, then dropped them, repeating the action two more times in what must have been a nervous tick.

  “Yes, Cassi?” Saiph asked in as kind a voice he could muster.

  “I think… I think I would like to explore the outside of the dungeon and not come back here. At least not right away.”

  “You’re both welcome to travel with us to Orleana if you’d like. It’s a beautiful city and I know a lot of nice people. If you guys want, we might even be able to get you some items that’ll allow you to change your stat point allocation. You’d be able to use your abilities to the fullest. Now, I think we’ve wasted enough time down here. I really need some fresh air.”

  Many of the rooms they’d cleared had their wraiths and dreygur respawn. Exactly as the dungeon had promised, none of the undead made any attempt to harm their party. Some even avoided them intentionally, shambling away as they walked by.

  Saiph thought it best to let sleeping dogs lie, but Nix had a different idea. He stopped and got close to one of the shorter dreygur. It backed away from him, but Nix kept walking closer to it until he boxed it into a corner. Though it continued to shy away, it didn’t make any attempt to harm the Summoner.

  “It’s a kid,” Nix said after a moment of intense scrutiny. “Probably early teens. What the fuck…”

  Saiph had made every attempt to not look at the bodies of the dreygur he’d put down over the course of their dungeon crawl, but he couldn’t help but look now. The undead’s skin was desiccated and the clothing rotted rags, but without a doubt, this dreygur had been a kid before turning.

  “I don’t think Samira’s our monster,” Nix said.

  Saiph nodded. He’d had a similar thought. A dungeon full of undead and no necromancer as the final boss? It went against all the “rules” of a dungeon. Even if this world wasn’t a game, it still made no sense. Something had reanimated these dead and beefed up Samira. In a game, it could be waved away as magic slapped over a dungeon mechanic. But this wasn’t a game.

  It was entirely possible the dungeon had more than one boss. Saiph knew of three instanced dungeons that had two bosses that needed to be beat in order to clear the dungeon, but then this dungeon would probably have told them they hadn’t beat all the bosses and let them leave it freely.

  Rose walked over to another, adult-looking dreygur. She winced and pulled away. “Look at their status pages. Their disposition is ‘suffering’. Same as Samira’s had been. Can we help them?”

  “I’m not sure. We’re definitely in a better position to do so now. But we don’t know anything. We’ll have our work cut out for us if we want to help them and clear the mine.” Saiph frowned. “I would think if there’s a way to destroy the dungeon, then the dungeon’s heart’ll be it.”

  “But it only lets you make a guild castle or an instance with custom difficulty,” Nix said.

  Rose suddenly looked up. “How many instanced dungeons are there?”

  “Fifty-six. No, fifty-seven. This one’s new,” Saiph answered. “I’m pretty sure at least as many have been found on the other servers.”

  “And how many dungeon hearts have been found?” Rose asked.

  “North Remembers has five, six if you include Pallas’ Watch. The LCS and LP guild systems each have one, and the Sonnet Guild System owns two. And this dungeon makes another one. EU West and East servers each have six between them, Asia One, Two, and Three have eleven. And I don’t think South America, Oceana, and Africa have found any yet,” Saiph answered again.

  “So that makes the odds roughly… one in ten, right? What if there’s another item that can disable the dungeon, but it’s so rare no one could even stand a chance of finding it.” Rose said.

  “North Remembers has cleared Azeban probably a thousand times by now. I’m pretty sure if there were another item to control a dungeon, we’d have found it by now. Unless…” Saiph suddenly had a thought. “That room where we found this dungeon’s heart, did anyone remember seeing even a hint of an entrance for it before we blew up the boss room?”

  Everyone shook their heads. Environmental destruction hadn’t been possible in Annwyn Online. But that wasn’t the case now, which could mean the dungeon hearts could be literally anywhere in hidden rooms or secret pockets that no one would ever have been able to find.

  Finding an instanced dungeon was hard. Finding its heart was even harder and was considered the peak quest in the game. But this, finding Rose’s hypothetical item, if it existed, would greatly surpass that goal.

  But the reward prompt had been clear in its language: they were free to search for the dungeon heart and leave the dungeon. They’d already done the first part, the dungeon might turn hostile if they stayed past the thirty-two hours they’d been given or tried to hunt down a way to destroy it. Saiph didn’t intend to find out how seriously the dungeon meant what it had said.

  The cool, crisp evening air was a welcome relief from the oppressive high ambient heat and stale air of the dungeon.

  Both Cassi and Slaine froze in the mine’s entrance, mouths agape. Solaire had set and in its place as the center of the cloudless night time sky, a full Diurne cast a bright whitish-purple light on the forest. The blues and greens of the forest pulsed with a soft purple from the rhythmic light of Diurne’s crystal half. Saiph didn’t see Nocturne, but that moon was hardly ever visible. She was nearly completely black and much smaller than Diurne, leaving her really only visible when she eclipsed her larger sister.

  “So pretty,” Cassi said, mouth agape.

  Placing a hand on each of their shoulders, Saiph said to them, “We take this kind of view for granted. I am only sorry you couldn’t have seen the preceding sunset.”

  A tear trickled down Slaine’s cheek as he glanced from Cassi to the brightly lit forest. “I want to protect you while you mine, but I do not think I can go back into that cave with so much beauty to see here.”

  Cassi turned and hugged Slaine. “Me neither.”

  And the two took off, touching every blade of grass and sniffing every flower. Even Nix was wiping tears at the child-like behavior of the pair. When Saiph eyed him, Nix gave a stare and turned away, leaving Saiph to smile.

  Lueur Rose was still inside the cave. She was kneeling on the ground with her back to Saiph.

  “You alright, Rose?”

  “You guys didn’t hear her?”

  “Hear who?”

  “Samira. She was standing here. She looked like a normal person. I tried to speak to her, but she just fell on the ground screaming. I tried to help her, but her body disappeared. You really didn’t hear anything?”

  Saiph looked around the cave. There was no sign that anyone else had been in there. “No, I didn’t.”

  Rose sniffled and wiped tears from her eyes. “I think she was calling for help. What do we do?”

  “We’ll bring up your idea about another possible dungeon controlling item to both North Remembers and the Brotherhood of Pirates. We’ll come back here with a full party and we’ll see if we can talk to her again,” Saiph said. “If there’s a way to help her and the people of the mine, even if it means destroying this dungeon, we’ll do it.”

  “Okay,” Rose wiped her eyes and took one last look into the cave.

  She, Saiph, and Nix continued to watch Cassi and Slaine get their fill of the new world they’d been introduced to before heading back to Eric’s shop.