“Dungeon purpose. That answer to that might be complicated, but the basic answer is that no one alive knows why dungeons exist.” Violet said. “There are some things we know for sure. The first thing we know about dungeons is that dungeons are artificial. The System creates or partially creates each dungeon. The System also rewards dungeons for various kinds of growth. You probably remember getting experience rewards for various things.” He said.


    A subgroup of loops began scanning memories with System messages, looking for “experience”. They found several messages where intruders were defeated or repelled and experience was rewarded. “Affirmative.” They told Violet.


    “Good. Experience, levels, kinds of treasure, and even boss creatures are rewards from the System. That’s most of what we know for certain about dungeons. There might be more, but I mostly used that class to do homework for a different class.” Violet said.


    “Curiosity, homework?” The loops asked.


    “Uh, never mind that. I just mean that I’m not the expert on theories for dungeon existence. Maybe I can get a book about it that Yrryth can read to you.” He said. “I do remember one old theory. Some people think that dungeons were meant to create armies for some ancient war. The way dungeons help make adventurers seems to support that theory, but it might also be that whoever created the first dungeon just liked fighting and finding treasure. We don’t know.” Violet said.


    “Curiosity, war?” The loops asked.


    “Yeesh. That is a big topic. War is a bit like what happened when you spawned all those creatures to fight the bandits and drive them out of the dungeon. Yeah, that’s actually a pretty good example of war, I think.” Violet said.


    —————


    “Desire: Spawn 1 creature.” The loops prompted the System. Violet had answered the loops’ questions for several hours, but eventually asked them to stop so he could play music and sleep. The dissatisfied loops complained that Violet didn’t play much hide-and-seek since his last sleep break.


    Mental energy briefly drained into a specific part of the foundational instincts. The loops were ready for this and tried to track as much sensory data as possible in order to understand the spawning process. The loops attempted to analyze the sensory data for a while before spawning one more creature.


    It was too much sensory data. The loop-dissatisfied loops complained that the analysis skills of the loops was lacking and seemed to lead to more questions that answers. The loops attempted a few more single spawns, but correlation was difficult and uncertain when trying to detect an unknown effect in the middle of so much data. Groups formed to discuss alternative approaches. The group that pushed for more experimentation grew to be the majority. Without control over the spawning process, the dungeon would have no way to prevent an entire category of causes for creature death.


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    “Desire: Spawn creatures.” The loops shifted their desire and the System helped direct mental energy to activate rapid creature spawning. The loops scanned the incoming sensory rain and quickly identified multiple locations where new “other” signals appeared regularly. The loops in the best locations to collect data near the spawning creatures shared out the sensory data as quickly and as broadly as they could. Other loops focused their mirror light beams on the main receiving loops so they could duplicate the collected sensory data and share it even further.


    As the data near the spawning creatures spread through the loops, their new abilities with mana drew their attention to the mana signatures of the dungeon creatures. Underneath the mana of the new creatures, a set of quiet signals was identified by a few subgroups. The loops briefly reviewed some memories, but decided it was unlikely there were significant memories related to such weak mana signals.


    “Desire: Stop spawn creatures.” The loops prompted the System at the same time as they forced the mental energy away from the spawning instincts. Creature spawning stopped almost immediately. The loops continued to drink in and analyze data from the creature spawning locations. Analysis quickly revealed that the quiet signals remained mostly unchanged. The loops attempted to follow the quiet signals away from the spawning locations. The loops discovered that the quiet signals connected a few of the spawning locations, and that the signals got slightly stronger in one direction. The loops continued their investigation and found that the quiet signals were present in every worldlet and every section of the underworld.


    —————


    Beneath the dungeon mind vines, a section of the foundational plant instincts stirred. Echoes of mental energy flowed along the mushroom fibers and into the plant instincts. “Vines, leaves, roots.” Concepts flowed out from the instincts and into the network. “Water, sap, fruit.” The instincts pushed these concepts out.


    The oldest loop felt these concepts in the mushroom network and pushed them up into the white vine. The feelings and concepts from the plant instincts soaked into the branches and loops of the white vine. The loops found that they were able to detect the quiet signals more clearly and felt almost certain that they were feeling the branches, roots and leaves of a vine in the same somewhere else where they sense mana through the mushroom network. The loops that discussed the nature of loops pulled in memories of the experience as quickly as the other loops could record them. The group of loop-dissatisfied loops shrank significantly.


    The experiment-focused loops pushed forward and tried to manipulate the somewhere else vine in the same way as they had learned to manipulate mana. The loops did detect some changes in the other vine, but the response was much slower than the response from mana. After analyzing the change in vine sensations, the loops recorded the growth of a few new vine leaves.


    The loops turned creature spawning on and off a few times. Each time, they watched the flow of mana and water in the other vine. The amount of creature death rose high enough that even the experiment-focused loops pulled back and decided t o analyze the existing data and ask Violet for more information.