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The recent entries will mostly focus on worldbuilding and lore. Red’s personal storyline may be less central or sometimes absent entirely because I’m currently quite busy, and I do not want to rush things and damage the quality of the story.
Red’s Dungeon Diary
Day 54: Blood wolves
The Ninth Floor of the dungeon is built like a colossal maze of flesh. Narrow passages twist endlessly through the living structure, and wide open spaces where adventurers can truly rest are painfully rare.
The floor is divided into four main regions.
The first are the Flesh Corridors. These make up most of the Ninth Floor: dark, suffocating tunnels where the walls, ceiling, and ground are formed from living red meat. The flesh constantly shifts and pulses, radiating heat alongside the stench of sweat, blood, and rotting bodies. The air inside these corridors is unbearably oppressive. Adventurers must carefully watch their health while traveling through them.
The second region is the Flesh Forest. True to its name, it is a vast area filled with towering growths resembling trees, though they are made entirely of meat and bone. Muscles, veins, nerves, and tendons twist together into massive trunks that stretch upward to the ceiling. White spikes, likely sharpened bones, jut from their sides, while some of the “trees” split open into gums lined with teeth. Across the ground and walls, thick veins spread like moss, pulsing endlessly beneath every surface. The forest is so dense that movement is nearly as cramped as inside the corridors, and the darkness there feels even heavier.
The third region is the Bone Tunnels. As the name suggests, they resemble the Flesh Corridors, but are formed entirely from a hard, bone-like material. These tunnels are more stable and far less suffocating, since they do not ooze slime or radiate heat like the flesh passages. Because of this, many adventurers and traveling groups choose them as resting points or temporary shelters. However, this is strongly discouraged. The Bone Tunnels are the main territory of the Monster Cult, the most dangerous cult within the dungeon, devoted to the worship of Mother Monster.
The final region is a smaller transitional zone connecting the Ninth and Tenth Floors: a realm of molten rock and endless fire, where dragons make their nests.
Determining which region one is entering is extremely difficult. Like the other floors, the Ninth Floor constantly changes its structure. The flesh walls continue to grow over time, sealing old paths while other sections rot away and collapse, revealing new passages. Attempting to carve through the living flesh is both dangerous and exhausting. The walls are incredibly thick, and disturbing them can awaken the dungeon’s defensive instincts.
Within the Flesh Forest lives an enormous variety of dangerous creatures. Beyond the high-ranking slimes that infest nearly every corner of the Ninth Floor, and the gigantic insects whose overwhelming numbers surpass most other species, there are also the Flesh Creatures themselves — beings of twisted meat appearing in countless shapes and sizes.
Inside this forest, even the ground beneath one’s feet or the walls beside them may in fact be living creatures waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Any wound suffered here carries a high risk of infection due to the filth and decay saturating the environment.
Among the many horrors of the Flesh Forest, few are feared more than the Blood Hounds.
These wolf-like creatures travel in massive packs, each one larger than the biggest wolves known on the surface. Their appearance is mostly canine, though jagged bones protrude randomly from different parts of their bodies, giving them a grotesque and unnatural form. Worse still, they possess frightening intelligence — and the ability to speak.
Blood wolves often stalk unlucky adventurers for hours before attacking as a coordinated pack. Once they bring down their prey, they rarely kill or consume them immediately. Instead, they delight in tormenting their victims, using both physical cruelty and psychological torture through their human-like speech.
These creatures are deeply afraid of magic. Using spells to drive them away is strongly recommended whenever possible. Without magic, swords and physical weapons can still harm them, but piercing their thick hide is far more difficult than it first appears.
Today, Red wandered through the Flesh Corridors as usual when he suddenly noticed a change in the environment around him. He had entered a new region.
The cramped walls of living meat were gone. In their place stood towering growths of flesh resembling trees and tangled vines, packed tightly together as they stretched upward into the darkness above. Even with the lantern swinging in his hand, the forest remained almost impossible to see through. The fleshy trunks vanished endlessly into the shadows, though somewhere ahead, a faint light flickered in the distance, pulling him forward.
The place was horrifyingly silent.
Now and then, the stillness was broken by familiar sounds — wet squelching, heavy throbbing, the trickling of unseen fluids — along with the constant droning buzz of insects Red desperately hoped never to encounter again.
He kept walking, carefully avoiding the teeth and bone-like spikes jutting from the monstrous trees. The forest itself seemed alive. The trunks twitched and pulsed constantly, shivering with small spasms that made Red’s skin crawl.
Though no monsters appeared before him, he could not shake the feeling that something was watching him.
Then suddenly, he stopped.
Standing ahead of him was a wolf.
No… two wolves.
Then three.
They stood motionless among the trees, staring at him with pale white eyes. Saliva dripped from their open jaws. Panic surged through Red as he spun around, only to find five more waiting silently behind him.
The creatures slowly began to close in.
There was nowhere to run.
One of them rose onto its hind legs in a horribly unnatural motion. Its body cracked and twisted as it stood upright. Then it opened its mouth wide and spoke in a low, dreadful voice.
“If you… wish to live… then obey.”
Red’s hands trembled violently. His supplies slipped from his grasp and hit the ground one by one. He knew exactly what kind of creatures these were, and he had seen the cruel hunger in their eyes long before they spoke.
The dungeon was deep in its breeding season.
And Red understood that surviving this encounter would depend entirely on whether he could keep his fear hidden long enough to escape.
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