In the icy north exists a young orphan, and a war on a microscopic scale.
Marstin Hardgrove was orphaned at a young age, forced to live on the streets, and needed to turn to thievery to survive. When a special job assigned to him by the Thieves’ Guild went awry, the guild leadership punished him with a beating, compelled him to eat dirt and rocks to soothe his hunger, and left him to die in an abandoned mine. Unbeknownst to the young thief, when he was forced to eat that handful of dirt and rocks…he also ended up swallowing a tiny dungeon crystal.
Thrown into a highly unusual world filled with cells, bacteria, and other dangerous pathogens, the tiny dungeon crystal is, at first, confused by his surroundings. After seeing how the different complex systems of the body work together, the crystal is quickly fascinated; it isn’t long before he decides that, instead of trying to escape, he wants the body for himself. He wants to possess the living being for his own use as a crystal, wholly unlike anything the world has ever seen before.
To get to that point, however, the fledgling dungeon crystal has to learn how to survive against the different enemies trying to destroy him. Not only will he have to defeat the hostile pathogens standing in the way of his complete domination; but also, as a foreign invader to the body, himself, Marstin’s natural immune system sees the crystal as a threat. The only way to survive is to create his own immune cell defenders, and to place traps to prevent anything from reaching his dungeon crystal. In short: He has to turn the body into a dungeon.
But will his new Bio Dungeon be enough to keep him – and the body he wants to possess – alive?
Contains LitRPG/GameLit elements, such as character progression, statistics, and resource management. Also contains an in-depth, science-based portrayal of how the immune system responds to foreign pathogens via different white blood cells and other microscopic protectors. No harems, sexual content, or foul language.
My Opinion: 364 pages, $3.99, Available On Kindle Unlimited
Lots of Biology
There are two narratives: 1) One from a human thief on a job that goes wrong. He gets thrown into a mine and accidentally ingests a dungeon core. He's just trying to survive his punishment and figure out the mystery of who murdered his family and how he can survive the terrible disease that racks his body. There’s a bit of normal dungeon diving and plot setup in this narrative. 2) A dungeon core story where the core inadvertently gets swallowed by a thief and tries to take over the body as his dungeon. It reminded me a bit of that Magic School Bus episode where they explore the body. There's lots of descriptions and explanations about various biological functions, types of cells, and other parts. But there's also a dungeon core story where the core expands his influence, fights off the body's defenses, and fights off various problems like viruses and bacterial infections by upgrading his ability to create his own immune cells, and biological traps.
Overall, it's an interesting take on this kind of story, written by two big names in the genre.
Score: 7.5 out of 10