A powerful dungeon. A sheep-herder turned Noble. Their path to ascendance through cultivation. Conquering dungeons and using them to grow has long been the most efficient way to become a powerful adventurer. The only thing keeping the process from being easy is the Beasts that inhabit these places. Questions plague those entering this particular place of power: Where do the ‘rewards’ of weapons, … ‘rewards’ of weapons, armor, and heavy gold coins come from? Why is a fluffy bunny charging at me? For abyss-sake, why are there so many monsters?
Cal has all of the answers to these age-old questions for a very simple reason. He is a Dungeon Core, a soul forced against his will into a magical stone. With the help of an energetic friend, Cal grows a dungeon around himself to bring in new sources of power.
When a threat he doesn’t fully comprehend bares its many teeth, Cal is determined to survive the attempt on his life. Unfortunately for adventurers, the only way for him to achieve his goal is to eat anyone that enters his depths.
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If the description of the book isn’t enough to draw you in I don’t know what is!
This was a good story about a man trapped in a crystal who became a dungeon, and really explores why dungeons do what they do. This is my first Gamelit book, and I have had a little experience with LitRPG, so I think that means that the story takes place in a game world where everything happening to the characters is real. I’m a little unsure about the genre because if characters made by a game die, that kind of breaks immersion for me. Why should we care if characters live or die? Fortunately as I read through the story it didn’t feel fake because the dungeon does what it does to survive.
Dakota Krout is very inventive with his world. I liked the monsters and traps and the deviousness of the dungeon, and the way he explained why certain creatures are stronger than others. The magical system is also quite nice, and it’s intriguing to read about someone who has lost their memory having to relearn what things are.
We also get to read the story from two perspectives later on, which is helpful. It would have been boring to read about a dungeon sitting in the same place doing the same things, but adding the perspective of a human whose life is tied to the dungeon helps give us diversity in story and thought. It can make you feel a little disembodied while reading about someone who lost their body, after all!
I do wish there was a liiittle more character development of the dungeon though. Even though he is no longer human, I would have liked to read a little about any remorse he felt for killing humans. I mean, only psychopaths feel no guilt at all.
However, the writing is a bit subpar. If it wasn’t for the writing I would give this 5 stars. As it stands I had to struggle not to give this three stars.
I stopped counting punctuation and tense errors after about 200. There was about one mistake every page, and sometimes two. There are extra spaces, lack of commas, run-on sentences, and so on. At first I could handle it but I estimate between 500-700 errors, which is really really frustrating! I almost wanted to stop reading, if it wasn’t for the engaging story.
Sometimes the author also switches from past tense to present tense, to future tense. It’s really jarring and reads awkward. When the author uses the wrong choice of words, it’s also a little … awkward to read, because I go “huh”?
There’s another plot hole that doesn’t make sense. It’s when the wisp explains the dungeon rankings and how F-rank zero is the level of a baby, and yet, a monster lower than this level can kill humans. Only until much later does the author use a character to explain that the creatures in this dungeon are much stronger (for reasons I won’t explain for spoiler purposes). The author needed to explain this as it came up so we, the readers, were not confused.
All in all, there were several plot holes I counted but all these errors I’ve mentioned above are what led me to subtract one star overall. If there were fewer errors I would have tried to contact the author to let him know the punctuation and usage errors I found, but as such, hundreds of errors is just too much. Please get an editor …
(The series is five-stars though)
Loved the fresh concepts behind world building. Couldnt put it down!
It takes a long while to build up momentum (basically to the point where dungeon diving starts occurring) but after that it’s a fun, fast-paced and while ride. Looking forward to the next one.
Litrpg
Really fun, original, unique story. Great dialogue. Could not put the book down! Finished it off in two sittings. Finished off book 2 the same way. Now impatiently waiting for book 3! 😀