by Lycaon Virex
RISING STARS RANKING: DUNGEON CORE #10, MONSTER EVOLUTION #17, GAMELIT #49 After a quiet life shaped by loss, responsibility, and unfinished memories, seventy-two-year-old Theodore Smith returns to the attic of his old home one final time before moving out. There, he discovers a forgotten book he once wrote as a teenager—an abandoned story that once helped him survive the hardest years of his life. But as he revisits it, something in his body fails. His last moments blur into fragmented consciousness, and death arrives not as an end, but as a transition. Instead of nothingness, Theo awakens inside a structured system. His soul has been detected, scanned, and transferred into an unknown construct. He is no longer human—he is designated as a Dungeon Core, assigned to Eldenmoor Forest, Sector 7. What should have been the afterlife turns out to be something far more unsettling: a world that feels partially authored, where the location, rules, and even early encounters mirror the unfinished story he once wrote and abandoned. Now, trapped as the living foundation of a dungeon, Theo is forced to confront a reality where imagination, memory, and existence are no longer separate. His first visitors arrive not as salvation—but as the opening move of a system that expects him to continue a story he never finished.
