Marcus Cole built bridges for a living. Now he IS the building.

After a fatal car accident, a 34-year-old civil engineer from Detroit wakes up as a dungeon core — a glowing crystal embedded in a cave wall with the power to absorb mana, construct rooms, design traps, and spawn creatures. The catch? Adventurers will come. If they reach his core, he dies. Permanently.

Most dungeon cores run on instinct. Marcus has a civil engineer's brain and three decades of infrastructure design experience. He doesn't just build a dungeon. He engineers one.

Three floors. A fungal garden feeding a self-sustaining ecosystem. Traps designed around adventurer psychology instead of brute force. Load-bearing walls that would make OSHA proud. And Skrit — a cave rat he poured extra mana into because even a sentient crystal gets lonely — who is evolving into something the bestiary says shouldn't exist.

When veteran trap specialist Sera Voss leads a party into his halls, she notices what no one else has: the layout is too intentional. The sight lines are too clean. Something in this dungeon is thinking.

Marcus has two problems. The first is that Sera is very good at her job. The second is that if the Adventurers' Guild figures out his dungeon is sentient, they won't send divers.

They'll send a core-break team.

He used to build bridges that connected cities. Now he has to build a dungeon that can survive one.

A Dungeon Core LitRPG | Dark Humor | Progression Fantasy | Base Building
Book 1 of the Bedrock series.

AI transparency: AI helped draft the prose. The world, characters, plot, and engineering jokes are the author's.

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