Caring Dungeon Chapter 39.33

Sorry about disheartening on you guys, somebody bully me on discord tomorrow to finish this chapter and see into writing more. I don't intend on dropping the story but I've been getting demoralized recently. Chapter 40 is going to be a little data-dumpish/Cara development so I hope you guys enjoy the enlightenment.

When Manning first brought the idea of farming the villagers for mana rather than killing them outright, Cara was less than impressed. Sure, she’d already noticed that she got a slight amount of energy just from them walking around inside of her, inside of her dungeon that is, but she wanted to consume their memories and skills along with the energy. When she realized her thought process she quickly discounted it as dungeon instincts and decided they would give Manning’s idea a try. 

His idea was two fold. He would convince the humans to tire themselves out with his trials above ground, and if they failed he would dump them into a pit that led into Cara’s dungeon. All in all, the first test was a success as they both managed to gain record amounts of energy off the elf who was dropped into the safe room. Still, Cara felt like she had personally failed there. 

She didn’t really have any intention of killing the elf with her floor boss, but she’d wanted him to do a lot better than he had. Were it not for the fact that Gladil was a long range fighter, her troglodyte would have perished almost instantly. She only had herself to blame for that though. 

She’d imparted the near feral troglodyte with weapons knowledge she’d gained from the death of the humans who’d tried to steal her core so long ago. Well, not so long ago as it felt, but that wasn’t really the point. She armed the Trog with a spear because it was one of the better weapons she could make, but gave it knowledge of club and crugel. What that created was an image of the trog flailing around with the spear like it was a club.

The fight was a lot closer than it should have been, but in the end the unnamed boar-troglodyte that was the newly appointed floor 1 boss had died. She’d respawned him and started the other warrior troglodytes on a training regimen. The respawning process was a little creepy, and it still bothered Cara to a certain extent. 

When a bonded sapient dies within a dungeon its soul is returned to the dungeon core. What soul consists of is still unknown to most sentient races, but for the dungeon it is really simple. The troglodyte died and an aggregation of all its memories and thought processes was yielded to Cara, sort of how she was able to claim a few skills from the dead humans, along with a signature of sorts that composed its natural energy. She had a feeling that magic and abilities might be harder to respawn than a simple troglodyte but she’d cross that bridge when and if she ever got to it.

For now, respawning was pretty simple. All Cara had to do was located a boar that was pregnant, for lack of a better term, with a host of troglodyte embryo. She would impress upon an embryo the signature from the dead troglodyte boss and it would develop very similar to how the boss looked before death. Upon birth Cara would return all the memories while forcing its growth, minus the whole battle that led to its death, and it would return to guarding the boss room as if it had never died. 

There were slight physical changes, of course, but Cara was able to respawn several of the troglodyte at a time, occasionally combining the memories of different versions of the same troglodyte if both had learned something valuable like a new weapons proficiency. This process hadn’t backfired on her yet so that was how she kept it. There was no need to respawn the simple beasts but the sapient troglodytes were far more loyal when they did not die permanently. 

What a shame that she’d freed those children from her control and allowed them to die to the adventuring party that assessed her. Their souls were not returned to Cara so they were gone forever, yet another reason she could never allow another troglodyte to have free will. She couldn’t protect them if she did.