On this world, there are all kinds of different islands and continents. Some of which are widely populated by different kinds of sapient species, maybe living in a peaceful and sophisticated society like the Elves or constantly waging wars against their neighbors like Humans or even among themselves like some violent Orcs. The distance between some of those continents makes it so that some sapient species don’t even know about the existence of some of the others. For example, even if the Humans, the Dwarves, the Orcs and most of the Beastkins know of each other, they have never heard anything of the Nires, the Manods and the Raptors.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, there are also pieces of dry land that are only populated by animals and still undiscovered by any sapient species. Truth be told, these lands are even more numerous than those the sapient species populate and contain creatures of every size and color imaginable.

There is also a very special island, lost in the middle of an ocean. It is not special because of its size or its location. It is instead special because of its mysterious inhabitants. Nobody, except for them, has ever put a foot on this land, while they have travelled all around the world. Here lives a special kind of people. Small and happy, they play all day long, flying with their insectoid wings between never withering flowers, while leaving bright rays of light in every color of the rainbow behind them to slowly dissipate. One of their primary topics of discussion is to compare the tastiness of the fruits growing all year round on this island, even though they don’t need to eat. If needed, they could sustain themselves only on the abundant and particularly pure mana permeating their tropical forest.

Mages from any of the known civilizations would sell their whole families just for the opportunity to study one of these beings or even just a simple corpse. Just for an attempt to understand their faceted eyes, which have the ability to see mana flow in the air, or one of their other strange body parts. That is if they had known about their existence and powers.

Humans would probably call them Fairies, based on their tales, and find them amazingly beautiful, Nires would not be fooled that easily and Raptors would just look at them like annoying glowing flies. They call themselves Pixies and would conversely find any other sapient species quite ugly and stupid. Stupid yes, because since all the millenniums the Pixies have been around, nobody has ever been able to discover them and even less made the link between them and the Dungeons. With the exception of the Elves, but this is a story for another time.

On this island, Pixies are living in peace with their Dungeon friend. They exchange mana with it and have a symbiotic relationship with this old being. After all, one of them is the one who brought it to sapience. There is a special place in the forest where young Pixies go to listen to stories of the old ones. Some Pixies a bit older than these younglings are also here to hear the stories and to study, those particular Pixies are waiting for the news of a new Dungeon being born in the world, because it means that one of them will have the chance to leave this island to bound with the Dungeon and help it find the balance between defending itself against the sapient species and luring them inside its Domain.

And today’s story is an old one, one of the oldest stories told on this island. It is the story of what is believed to be the first Dungeon and the story of how the first Pixy came to life. All the Pixies gathered in the clearing are sitting in front of the old and wrinkled Pixy telling it. This old Pixy would be treated with great respect, even if he had not also been considered a sage and an erudite, as he is one of the few males of this almost exclusively female species.

“This story takes place a long time ago, thousands of thousands of years in the past in fact. When the world had yet to unravel its might and wonders for people to see. It was a time where Humans, Dwarves, and Orcs were closer to apes than to what they are now. It was a time where Elves, Gnolls, Kitsunes, and other Beastkins did not exist yet. It was a time when even us Pixies were nonexistent.

“The ancestors of the Dwarves were living high in the mountains, not yet able to dig deep into them. The beings that would become the Orcs were living in small forests which lay between swamps and savannas. And the ones, we will see in this story, the cavemen, ancestors of the Humans, were living in the plains and at the foot of the mountains. Hunting and gathering for sustenance and sleeping in natural caverns. Sometimes, they had to chase bears out from their own caves.

“But one day, in a small mountain not so far away from where one cavemen tribe was living appeared a strange stone, in a flash of light it came to existence right in the middle of the hard stone of the mountain’s foot.

-

Raw amounts of mana gather on a small particle of stone in a small mountain’s base. A few minutes after, the mana starts to crystallize around the stone particle, dirt and rocks around it aggregating on the mana construct. The mixing of pure mana and simple dirt and rock results in the appearance of a perfectly round and black stone floating in an empty space as spherical as the stone. It starts absorbing the mana around it, like a dry sponge in water.

For several days nothing else happens, as the stone is absorbing all the mana it can absorb. But on the eleventh day, something finally changes. An earthworm digs inside the space around the stone.

The stone is surprised, it has never sensed something else other than the air in its room and the room’s wall. Focusing its attention on the intruder, the stone does not notice it’s shining in a pink light. The worm brings with it two things.

The first thing is itself. The earthworm is wriggling around a bit before it starts digging again and exits the place. The only existence of this simple and yet so complex creature is shattering everything the stone knows. The world is not only a space a few times bigger than itself and life can be more than just absorbing energy from the environment and floating around in it. Life can also be about moving from one place to another!

That leads to the second thing. The worm has left behind it two holes in the wall, one above the stone, the other beneath it. And from those holes, particularly the one on the upside, comes a higher amount of mana than can simply permeate through the dirt. The stone absorbs the new amount of energy making it feels as if it was starving before and is now at last able to properly eat till satiety.

With this new amount of energy the stone wills to go into the hole above it. But the result is not what it was expecting. The stone itself does not move, instead, it senses its perception widen through the hole and past it. Surprised and pleased by this development, the stone sends its energy in all directions around it. Being the first time it does such a thing, the sentient stone does not notice the mana consumption and quickly exhausts its complete energy reserve. That makes it pass out as its consciousness sinks into darkness.

A few hours of passive mana absorption later the stone comes back to consciousness. The stone is shining pink as it is surprised by what just happened to it, there are also some flashes of a darker, more purple light, marking that the stone is experiencing its first taste of fear. It fears the state it was in, it was completely dark. It resolves itself to never, ever again fall into the darkness again. And for that, it needs more energy, much more energy.

The bigger amount of energy coming to the stone is arriving through the holes the worm left behind. So the stone expands its perception only in the direction of the holes, and not in all directions anymore. It also makes sure to monitor its mana pool to not lose consciousness once again.

The process is slow, the stone does not use more mana expanding its domain than it is absorbing, keeping the balance between its mana regeneration and consumption. Sometimes, it comes across other small tunnels in the dirt, on those occasions, it infuses its mana into those passages too.

For almost a day the stone keeps on expanding its domain. When it has covered a volume of around twenty-five cubic meters of worms’ and bugs’ tunnels around it, something new happens. It has already come across different creatures than the worm it first saw, but not yet two at the same time and at the same location.

The stone looks on curiously as a bug with eight legs and eight eyes faces another one with only six legs and two eyes. The two bugs are studying each other and suddenly the first one jumps at the other. It plants its mandibles in its powerless prey and injects a small amount of venom in it, it then proceeds to wrap it in its silk and waits on the side.

The stone is greatly surprised by what just happened. It remembers how, at the moment the beetle was injured, it felt a powerful surge of mana flowing to it. It is the greatest feeling it had ever felt. It wants more. Fortunately, the bug is still alive, and as it continues to suffer it releases more tasty mana for the stone to absorb.

The stone’s room is bathed in pink and orange light.

A few hours later, the beetle dies, releasing a new surge of delicious mana and putting an end to the sweet mana flow of pain. The stone is bathing in the good feeling of the mana the bug released at the moment of its death, but the instant it realizes that no more mana is coming from the dead beetle it is overflow by a feeling of anger and envy. Why did it have to stop? The stone wants more. It needs more. And it wants it now!

Completely oblivious of the red and orange flashes of light it emits, the stone pushes its mana into all of its tunnels, and all of the creatures it comes across. It wants them hurt, so they can provide it with the sweet mana they produce when suffering. Soon after this outburst, the stone has exhausted its mana pool once again, sliding out of consciousness for the second time of its existence.

Sooner than the first time, but not knowing that, the stone comes back to consciousness. This time was both worse and better than the first time. Worse, because it failed by letting the darkness come to it again. And better, because it had already experienced it and the second time was not as frightening as the first.

After a bit of thinking, the stone concludes that if it wants more of the mana coming from the suffering of the creatures crawling around, it needs to expand its domain even more. The wider it will be, the bigger the number of creatures able to suffer will be. Therefore the stone resumes its expansion, noticing in passing that some of the smaller bugs are dead in its tunnels, while the bigger ones look perfectly fine.

For a few days, the stone keeps on expanding its domain, absorbing with delight the mana coming from each of the injured creatures it comes across. Life is good for it, and nothing unexpected happens anymore.

On the seventh day, something unexpected eventually happens. A batch of squishy little white balls that were lying in its domain explode and let out a great number of tiny bugs. The stone is mesmerized by this event, as it can sense the little bugs like it senses the dirt and stones of its domain. Those tiny bugs are part of it.

The stone focus on one of the bugs and wills it to move around and the bug complies. It can control them! The stone then simply orders two of them to hurt a third one, while that one is ordered to stay still. Once again it’s a success! The bugs are following its orders. And there are those, now familiar, pulses of tasty mana coming from the injuries and the death of the victim. Unfortunately, the stone does not find this mana as tasty as the one coming out of the creatures it does not own.

The stone then gives the order to its bugs to hunt, maim and then kill other creatures in its domain. It is not stupid, it has seen that small bugs are almost always defeated by bigger ones, and its bugs are the tiniest of all, so it orders them to hunt in groups. The little bugs scatter in several tunnels, searching for prey to satisfy the greed of their master. They go in groups of four or five individuals and only targets bugs that are not more than twice their own size.

As days become weeks, and weeks become months - not that there is anybody to measure the passage of time in something more complicated than days, moons, seasons, and strange blood loss from the females - the stone widens and diversifies its amount of creatures. As there are no more unclaimed beings roaming around its domain and the stone is unable to claim a bigger area, its creatures are ordered to go out and bring back victims before killing them. It had also widened the path to its core to allow its creatures to bring back their prey in front of it before dealing the finishing blow. It tastes better.

Way better...