Chapter 31

  He moved.

  At first, it was strange. The weight. The balance. The absence of sensory lag.

  Every golem he’d made had that half-second delay, that little wobble between command and response. Not this one. This one was him. When he thought about walking, his legs moved. When he wanted to shift his weight, it just happened.

  No interface prompts. No mana rerouting. Just thought to motion.

  It was addictive.

  He spent hours—maybe longer, time got weird inside the dungeon—just walking around the third floor. Climbing scaffolding. Dropping into pit traps to test fall resistance. Grappling a Combat Strider and flipping it over for fun. It felt good.

  Too good, honestly.

  For a moment, a dangerous thought slipped through: maybe I miss this more than I thought.

  He shrugged it off and kept going.

  He ran simulations against Mirage Golems. Played tag with Engineer units. Snuck past his own sensory wards to see how well his stealth enchantments held up. They passed—barely. The construct body was too advanced, too real. It triggered dungeon responses even when cloaked, just because it felt like an intruder to the system.

  Still, nothing tried to stop him. The system recognized his core. Recognized him.

  When he was satisfied with how it moved, how it fought, how it resisted heat, cold, pressure, and mana surges—he started testing the Observer tools.

  The first thing he tried was a portal.

  He focused. Reached into that new part of his mind where the permissions lived, the same place the Strategist’s voice used to echo. Thought portal.

  A seam split the air in front of him with a whisper-crack. Smooth. Clean.

  On the other side?

  A blinding white space. Flat. Infinite. Familiar in a way he couldn’t place.

  [Welcome to System-Space.]

  [Personal Access Node: Observer Tier – Low.]

  [Status: Stable.]

  It wasn’t his dungeon. It wasn’t even a real place.

  He stepped through anyway.

  The floor didn’t exist, but he didn’t fall. There were no walls, but he didn’t drift. Just a sense of stillness. Of waiting.

  He walked for a while. No direction. Just to see what would happen.

  Eventually, he spotted something—little floating anchors of light. Tags. Each one labeled with names he didn’t recognize. Dozens, maybe hundreds. Some flickered out as he passed. Others tried to read his status but bounced off his Silence protection.

  One light hovered nearby, pulsing dimly. Curious, he tapped it.

  It snapped open like a menu.

  [Unknown Region – Unmapped]

  [Status: Inactive]

  [Potential for System Expansion: Confirmed]

  [Discovery Credit Available]

  Would you like to begin Observation?

  Ethan blinked. “Wait… really?”

  The system chirped again, almost cheerfully.

  Observers expand System-Space through discovery.

  Discovery Credit can be converted into Tier advancement, system tools, or personal upgrades.

  That caught his attention.

  He didn’t need more fighting power. Not right now. But reach? Reach was everything. The ability to see more, know more, influence more?

  That was priceless.

  So he tapped Confirm.

  The light spread like spilled ink on glass. Space unfolded in layers—jagged mountains, crumbling ruins, half-formed regions that flickered like memories still loading. He watched it all from above, like a god peering into a half-finished world.

  A new prompt appeared.

  [Discovery Complete.]

  [+0.7 Discovery Credit Earned.]

  [System expanding data tags…]

  [New Tag Created: Zone ID#K-33-Alpha – The Shardscape]

  “Shardscape?” he muttered.

  Apparently, he’d just named a place.

  The system pinged again—this time with a small pulse of warmth in his chest. A subtle stat boost. A new slot unlocked in his interface. Minor, but noticeable.

  It was real.

  A slow grin crept across his face.

  So that was how they did it. The real Observers. The ones who weren’t sealed. They didn’t just sit and watch. They found things. Pushed the system into places it hadn’t mapped. They got stronger by exploring.

  And now… so could he.

  He marked the region. Opened a portal back to the dungeon.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  It worked. Sort of.

  The portal didn’t take him directly to his floor. Just to his system-access node, which then let him select a re-entry point into the dungeon. So he wasn’t teleporting around like a game admin. More like hopping between server rooms.

  Still—faster than walking. Faster than anything.

  Back in the dungeon, Ethan stood perfectly still.

  He looked down at his new hands.

  Flexed them. Made a fist. Opened it again.

  Then said, quietly, “Okay. Time to get to work.”

  ______

  Ethan sat cross-legged on the edge of the core’s control interface—not because he needed to, but because sitting made thinking easier now. A habit, maybe. Or instinct.

  He’d finished the tests. He knew what his new body could do. The Observer tools were stable, the constructs were on autopilot, and the third floor ran like a well-oiled machine.

  But he was still stuck.

  The system only let him see what it considered “relevant.” Every time he tried to access news beyond Redroot, or peek at world-scale events, he got the same message.

  [Insufficient Clearance.]

  [System-space expansion or authority growth required.]

  It wasn’t unexpected.

  What was unexpected was the Strategist’s reply the last time he asked.

  He’d worded it carefully, just to avoid triggering a filter. “Give me a brief rundown of major events beyond this region. Nothing detailed. Just enough to keep up.”

  The Strategist had paused for half a second before responding.

  “The Silence has not deemed it necessary to spoon-feed you, Core-Ethan. Perhaps you could try thinking for yourself.”

  Ethan had just… stared at the log after that. Not because it was offensive—it was, in a weirdly passive-aggressive way—but because it didn’t sound like the Strategist.

  The Strategist was dry. Neutral. Sometimes smug.

  But never rude. Not like that.

  That response hadn’t felt like code. It had felt personal.

  Which meant either something was wrong… or something was changing.

  He didn’t follow up. There was no point. The system wouldn’t explain.

  Instead, he looked around his now-quiet interface and muttered, “I miss talking to someone who didn’t sound like a broken rulebook.”

  It had been a while since he’d had a real conversation. Not with a golem, or a strategy module, or some glitchy memory of Chip. A real talk. The kind that reminded him he used to be human.

  He could force someone into a dialogue window if he really wanted—his Observer perks made that easy—but it wouldn’t be the same. They’d panic. They wouldn’t get it.

  What he needed was someone smart. Level-headed. Someone who’d been through his dungeon more than once. Someone who already saw the weird stuff and hadn’t broken under the pressure.

  Someone like—

  “…Corwin.”

  He smiled, small and to himself.

  Corwin’s party had nearly made it to the boss room before. They knew how the dungeon worked. They’d seen enough to recognize that something deeper was going on.

  They could talk.

  And maybe—just maybe—they’d be willing to listen.

  _______________

  The city didn’t have a name yet.

  Not officially, anyway.

  People still called it Redroot, even though the actual village was long gone—buried under a mess of construction, merchant roads, stone spires, and half-built towers. Some of the older hunters still told stories about the “old days,” before the dungeon had turned their quiet backwater into a hub of commerce and danger.

  But most of the new faces didn’t care.

  They were adventurers. Craftsmen. Scholars. Opportunists. People who came chasing the dungeon’s power, or the wealth it leaked into the surrounding land.

  And tucked between them, sipping from a chipped clay mug in the corner of a smoky tavern, sat someone they didn’t even realize was watching.

  Leo leaned back in his chair, eyes half-closed, ears twitching with every conversation that echoed through the common room. His appearance was casual—dusty coat, travel leathers, a leather pack on the floor—but nothing about him was normal. Not really.

  Not when you were the son of a Gryphon and a Celestial Lion.

  Not when your mother had died in a flash of starlight, and your father had burned through the skies screaming revenge.

  Not when you’d once held your dying mentor in your arms as her Observer sigil cracked apart in the middle of her final report.

  His fingers traced the edge of his mug. Slowly. Thoughtfully.

  It had taken weeks to get permission to come here, even under the radar. The Silence didn’t particularly care what happened in most fringe zones, but even they noticed when system logs started returning “Inconsistencies Detected” in an area this small, this isolated.

  It was nothing loud. Nothing a High Observer would bother with.

  But Leo had seen enough anomalies in his short career to know that silence didn’t mean safety.

  Especially not this kind of Silence.

  A soft pulse rippled through the system layer of his vision, invisible to everyone else in the room. Just a gentle flicker. The same one he’d been tracking since he arrived.

  It always came from the dungeon.

  Always from underneath the official layer.

  Leo stood slowly, tossing a few coins on the table and slinging his pack over his shoulder.

  He didn’t know what was happening yet.

  But someone in that dungeon had tripped the system’s curiosity—then kept on walking like it didn’t matter.

  That either meant they were stupid… or very, very smart.

  And Leo wasn’t sure which was worse.

  ____

  Corwin moved cautiously through the third floor.

  This place always gave him the creeps.

  Not in a “giant-monster-jumps-out” kind of way—though that did happen sometimes—but in a quiet, too-aware kind of way. The kind where the lights always dimmed just slightly when you passed through, and the walls felt like they were watching.

  It didn’t help that Osric had stayed behind this time to rest a cracked rib. Renna was still sore from the last run, so it was just him and Lena, poking at the new floor’s side passages.

  “Anything?” Lena called from a branching corridor.

  “Nothing lethal,” Corwin answered. “Just a pressure plate and a very dramatic puff of steam.”

  Lena snorted. “Wow. This place is getting theatrical.”

  He chuckled—then stopped.

  There was someone up ahead.

  Not a golem. Not a Mirage unit.

  A humanoid figure stood at the end of the hallway, one arm braced casually against the wall, as if it were just waiting. Pale metallic plating gleamed softly in the dim red light, and for a moment Corwin thought it might be some kind of upgraded Sentinel.

  But no.

  This one moved differently.

  Fluid.

  Natural.

  It turned toward him—just a little. Just enough to show glowing, mask-like eyes behind a metal hood.

  “Uh… Lena?” Corwin said quietly.

  “I see him,” she replied, stepping up behind him. “That one’s new.”

  The figure raised one hand in a small wave. Slow. Non-threatening.

  Then, in a voice that wasn’t quite mechanical, wasn’t quite human, it said: “Hello. I’ve been meaning to speak with you.”

  Corwin felt his hand drift toward his sword. “We talking or fighting?”

  The figure tilted its head. “Talking. For now.”

  Lena whispered, “He’s not hostile. At least not yet.”

  Corwin didn’t lower his guard, but he took a step forward. “Alright. We’ll bite. Who are you?”

  The figure didn’t answer right away.

  Then, almost like a joke it was telling only to itself, it said:

  “Call me… Ethan.”

  How long should book 1 of Industrial Dungeon be(its 180 pages rn)