7 Dungeon Esoterica

1. Dungeon Gnosticism

Dungeon Gnosticism is the esoteric study of dungeons and the metaphysical processes that underlie their form, function, and general guidelines on how they operate. 

2. Cultivation

Cultivation is the basic process of accumulating ambient essence and storing it. Outside of gnostic circles, this is overlooked by the process of taking short and long rests. Within gnostic circles, this is an actual skill, where there are different theories and schools on just what the best way is to cultivate the largest amount of essence, typically creating patterns and mandalas within the self to facilitate this.

Animals become beasts when they start innately cultivating essence, moving them from just creatures that exist to actual threats, albeit low at this point.

This is fundamental to Wuxia and Cultivation LitRPGs, where the pursuit of more essence, refining it, and condensing it, are all important. This process takes the place of the typical core story arc. A different take on this would be the breathing techniques that have become vogue in anime since Demon Slayer appeared. 

3. Refinement

Where Cultivation is the accumulation of essence, refinement is the process of removing corruption and increasing density. Essence is a non-elemental force, a fundamental animating power of the universe. Everything that exists is a manifestation of it. As a dungeon gnostic increases their ability to cultivate essence, they discover there is an absolute limit to how much they can contain, how fast it naturally regenerates, and how quickly they can gather more.

A beast becomes a monster that gains the innate ability to refine its collected essence. These are the most common sort of serious foes in a dungeon, and as their bodies contain refined essence, their mortal remains in manifold parts are useful in the creation of potions, alchemical reagents, spell components, and so forth. This is why the blood of certain beasts is useful for spellwork, not because basilisk blood has innate potency, but because the basilisk was refining ambient essence through its body, and its blood is a very potent carrier of this primordial energy.

In a game sense, refinement is where mages start getting to put things like spell efficiency, maximizing spells, etc into play, and martial heroes start getting to stack and accumulate feats and special attacks.

4. Condensation

As the purity and density of essence increases, it goes through phase state changes, becoming more potent and more dangerous. Each stage of essence is a magnitude more potent, increasingly dangerous to non-condensed essence manipulators, and ultimately dangerous to the fabric of reality. Excessively condensed and pure essence can trigger realm-level cataclysms. The recognized stages are nebulous, gaseous, vaporous, liquid, condensate, solid, and crystalline. Each step increases in magnitude of density so that one 'point' of crystalline essence is equivalent to one million nebulous essence. 

Clathrates, monster cores, and dungeon cores are all technically condensed essence. A monster core, being either condensate or solid essence, typically represents its lifetime of survival, where 100k essence would likely span decades of cultivation and growth. A dungeon core is centuries of growth, and clathrates generate on a geological scale, most being hundreds of thousands and even millions of years old.

In the cultivation LitRPG, condensation is the pursuit of denser and denser essence, which culminates in monsters creating cores that can be used to power magitek items, fuel normal magic items, be used as spell components, or be destroyed/consumed for either raw essence consumption or the experiences of the creature that made it as XP. The same would apply to dungeon cores. Anything strong enough to master a dungeon, reach the core in its depths, defeat its defenders, and then capture the core could make it into an artifact-level magic item, or destroy it, either elevating its level to another tier of existence or triggering a dimensional fatigue event and blowing themselves into an aneurysm of a pocket dimension. 

5. Corruption

One of the weird things about reality is that it is technically all corruption. In the esoteric study of essence, everything cleaves into essence and corruption, purity and dross, energy and matter. What most people consider elemental aspects or attributes is really elemental corruption. The more essence is condensed but not refined, corruption is also condensed, and this creates ... matter. A cultivator who doesn't properly refine their essence as they condense it runs the very real risk of corruption.

What does corruption look like? It looks like elemental aspected monsters, like fire giants, frost worms, and the rest of that. As the corruption in their cultivation increases it manifests in their bodies, as within as without, as below so above. Pyromancers have a ton of fire corruption, and take on the physical aspects of fire as well as its nature, same for any other magic user who specializes into a single element. Beasts and monsters specifically cannot refine their essence, so they can become enormously powerful but at the cost of being unable to expel their corruption. Thus, fire monsters can breathe fire, this isn't a feature, it's technically a flaw of their incorrect essence collection process.

Where do monsters and sentient beings split? Non-sentient creatures have a larger capability of accumulating essence and corruption. As they increase in power, they will accrete corruption in their physical form, grow to greater size, and have other tells. There are sentient beings who accomplish this through a Beast Spirit Cultivation technique and this is where giants and titan versions of sentient races come from, but at the cost of their basic 'humanity' or 'mortality' as they stop being a sentient race, and become a monstrous race, both more and less than they were before.

6. Resonance

One of the underlying aspects of reality is that like begets like. In the fractal nature of the DungeonVerse, everything emanates from ideas. All fire comes from the Ur-Fire, and the same for everything else. As a gnostic's understanding and power increase, they have a greater ability to sense and realize the sympathetic nature of everything that exists.

Exceptionally powerful monsters tap into resonance, which is what makes them so powerful and dangerous. When a dragon hits with a breath attack, its not a biochemical reaction of flammable chemicals, and its not just a magic spell. It is their innate and condensed elemental corruption (fire) resonating with all fire to create an all-consuming flame. Arch-mages who have started to actualize cosmic-level concepts can also work on this level of power, but do so at great risk. Any sufficiently powerful magical work can see a mage exiled to their own reflection/pocket aspect of reality.

7. Evolution

Dungeons are fonts of creation and the rules get a little slippery, new things are created from the old through different processes, be they fusion, fission, metamorphosis, chrysalis, or mutation. When the forces of essence, corruption, and all the rest come into play, well, what happens happens.

This is the fundamental process of how dungeons create things, using ambient essence and accumulated corruption to create living creatures, inanimate objects, and energy. In the DungeonVerse new races appear and vanish at a pace that is astonishing and frightening. A sole dungeon can spawn a new race by blending a few aspects and patterns and aspects it has. These tend to be completely reliant on the dungeon to perpetuate their race, until enough escape and survive outside the dungeon to become a stable and established species. A fire dungeon that devours a few orcs could spit out ebony-skinned fireproof Cinder Orcs and then they completely flop outside, freezing to death as their sulfer blood solidifies in their veins. Likewise, the same dungeon could produce a whole series of fire resistant plants that thrive outside of the dungeon, being spicy as all get out and being useful in fire magics.

When it comes to beasts and monsters, eventually an internal threshold is reached, and the old form can no longer contain the new potential. The monster has to undergo a transformation and become both something new and something more, or suffer its own extinction. Those monsters that fail tend to get a good deal larger, and then just perish. There are some terrestrial creatures that are technically immortal, but eventually reach a point that they cannot consume enough calories to sustain themselves, oxygen density is too low for efficient O2 saturation of their blood, or in the case of lobsters and other crustaceans, they become to large to successfully molt out of their own discarded shells and become trapped and perish.