Dungeon King: The Hidden Ruler-Chapter 42: [Roots of Dominion 1] - No Safe Haven

Duskmire Outpost reeked of sweat, steel, and streaming hype.

Raven pulled his hood lower, weaving through the flood of players pouring into the plaza like moths to a bonfire.

Another streamer stood on a crate nearby, screaming at a floating camdrone.

"We’re live from Emberstone Burrow! Red eyes! Chains! One-shot party wipe! Was it a hidden boss? An AI glitch? Or some Easter Egg? Let’s find out!"

Raven didn’t slow down. He walked past them and opened his map.

Then instantly swore under his breath.

A rookie mistake.

No, not about the highlight. He knows the consequences of slaughtering two guilds, there will be attention. It will be just a minor setback, he could just stop the gathering and XP share. Just a matter of time before the attention shifted elsewhere, as the game has 300 million players. It’s just—

He zoomed in on the region.

Bone Ruins. Goblin Nest. Emberstone Burrow. Hollow Fang Den. Shadowfen Hollow.

All of them—his entire network—stacked in Caelmarch Bastion. Every one of them is under the Velkarin Axis faction zone.

It hit him like a cold splash of lag.

And here he thought he’d planned everything.

He’d built an empire in one basin. Now it was a spotlight trap. All it would take was one dev audit or some streamer swarm, and the whole thing would collapse.

Goblin Nest had to be shut down immediately.

It wasn’t about losing the dungeon—no, that was still under his control. But the moment streamers flooded in, so did their followers.

Casuals. Curious players. View-hungry guilds. All making alts and swarming the starter cities.

And that meant...

No more 24/7 potion crafting in the background.

What kind of beginner dungeon has a tribal shaman working like a pharmaceutical factory?

If someone caught that on video—

"Hey, why is this goblin mixing potions non-stop?"—

It’d go viral in seconds. Conspiracy threads. Accusations of cheating. Dev audits.

Dungeon Sovereign class—his class—purged.

No. It wasn’t worth the risk.

He’d had to pull the plug.

One of his most consistent, passive income streams—gone.

A hard decision. But necessary.

He clenched his fist, then exhaled slowly.

Fine. So be it.

And Emberstone? Don’t even think about it.

The Emberforged Titan—his new tank, his anchor, the spine of his war roster—was now the centerpiece of a streamer circus. His entire team strategy was built around it.

Raven, Phantom Seer, Duskrunner—all glass cannons with no true frontline.

The Titan was supposed to be the wall. The shield that gave them space to strike, retreat, reposition. Losing it meant losing tempo. And he’d known the risk when he wiped those guilds. Maybe they’d been randoms. Maybe not. Turns out—one of them had a streamer with two million subs.

That dungeon had flipped from a shadow stronghold to a tourist trap overnight.

Even if he tried to use the Titan now, it’d draw fire from every direction.

He could fight the world from the shadows.

But cornered? In one burning zone?

Thousands of players with nothing better to do, ganking him for content?

Not even a world champ could survive that.

They’d spam his location. Chain-lock him on spawn. Devour him alive.

And they’d monetize the whole thing.

"Kill the Dungeon Phantom! $5 per shot! Get your name on the hit list!"

Chatter buzzed around him.

"Yo, anyone seen the Dungeon Phantom new video on the forum?"

"My streamer said he one-shot the Titan, no cap!"

He brushed past a group taking selfies next to a wooden NPC stall. Someone tried to cast a buff on him for a thumbnail.

"God-tier glitch hunter visits Duskmire?" they joked.

Raven didn’t even flinch. This wasn’t a celebration. It was a funeral in real time—and they didn’t know the corpse was still twitching.

Raven tuned them out, but he knew the damage was done.

He zoomed out on the map, breathing through his nose.

Three factions divided the world: Velkarin Axis, Meridian Fold, Cindraleth Union.

Velkarin Axis was blown. Too many eyes, too many leaks. At least for now.

What started as a fortress of silence had turned into a coliseum of clout-chasers. Worse, he knew the devs had already begun scanning flagged dungeon behavior.

If any one of his dungeons got picked for a retroactive audit, especially after Emberstone’s broadcast, it wouldn’t just be a balance patch.

It would be a surgical purge.

Monster behaviors rolled back.

AI parameters reset.

Custom routines deleted.

And once that happened, the system would neuter his control layer—mark him as an anomaly, a glitch. Not even a hidden class could survive a full meta-nerf.

Velkarin preached peace, but it bled control. Citizens were ranked from birth, their roles predefined, their futures dictated by obedience. Discipline was the highest virtue. Everything was symmetrical, curated, clean.

Raven remembered once in tutorial on one of Velkarin Axis quest, he getting flagged in a by NPC commander not because he attacked—but because he didn’t wait for proper formation protocol.

A nation where order meant control. Where loyalty replaced thought. Where deviation was disgrace.

He needed out.

The world had three factions—and only two left that hadn’t noticed him yet.

Meridian Fold?

Tempting. Merit-based, prestige-hungry, wrapped in gold-trimmed civility.

The Fold was ruled by association leaders—mercenary masters, merchant heads, arcane consuls—each one a king in their own tower. Status was everything. Wealth meant votes. Debate and power were weapons, and social rank was visible like armor.

They voted. They debated.

And while they played parliament, knives changed hands in shadow.

Contracts had weight there. Fail one, and you weren’t just blacklisted—you were erased.

He remembered one Fold story—an archmage who refused to share credit for a new spell. She disappeared. Her invention didn’t.

Still... if you had coin, vision, or lies worth selling, you could climb.

Freedom and rank were everything. You were free to fall, just as fast as you rose.

Cindraleth Union?

Dangerous, but predictable.

Ritual-bound, tradition-locked.

If you followed the signs, the land tolerated you.

Break rhythm, and you bled.

Every decision flowed through councils, omens, and ancestral lore. To move without permission was to invite spiritual wrath.

A healer once ignored a moon-signal and cast early. They found his account banned, not by devs, but by the land itself—ritual-flagged from NPC story quest.

You could live there, sure. But not without eyes watching. Not without proving you belonged.

Still, anything was better than staying here, under the guilds on the Axis faction’s watch.

A single dungeon scandal, and they’d send "investigators"—which meant three iron squads and a full data-purge.

No.

He needed to vanish.

And Meridian Fold was the best place to disappear—loud enough to distract, layered enough to hide.

His gaze shifted east—into the Fold.

Then, he found it: a lush, toxic green zone nestled at the edge of the region.

The Gilded Thorns area.

Three dungeons inside:

Blooming Maw.

Chimeblood Quarry.

Thornspine Estate.

That last one caught his attention.

Thornspine Estate.

If he was going to lose Goblin Nest, he needed a replacement. A dungeon that could plausibly support potion crafting, poison production, and alchemical output without raising suspicion. Thornspine Estate was infamous for its corrupted flora, alchemical toxins, and venom-bloom enemies—on paper, the perfect mask for passive poison processing.

The terrain looked like a cursed garden—flowers dripping acid, vines that pulsed like veins.

But then he remembered the beta.

His stealth was top-tier, and yet the poison tracked him like a curse once he exposed and got hit.

No footsteps. No aggro.

Still—tick, tick, tick—his HP melted like wax.

DoT didn’t need to see you.

It just needed you to breathe.

Back then, they wiped three times before rage-quitting.

And that was with a full squad.

One guy in beta tried to tank it with a plant-resist build. Got melted through the floor.

Now?

Just him, Phantom Seer, and Duskrunner. No frontliners. No tanks. And this place didn’t forgive that.

What could one stealth ganker, one burst-DPS predator, and an AoE debuffer possibly do against poison terrain and creeping DoT?

He needed tanks.

And he couldn’t use his tank.

He scrolled deeper into the map...

Then paused.

A dungeon in the far corner of Cindraleth Union.

Vault of the Rootbound.

He remembered the boss vaguely—a clone-summoning psycho.

A maniac who could build battlefield short-time doppelgangers, redirecting attacks to disposable clones.

That... was something he could work with.

No tanks?

Then screw tanks.

Let the disposable clones soak the poison.

Let the clones overload the DoT algorithms.

He had Phantom Seer already—distortion, misdirection, perception control.

Together?

That was a viable team comp.

Clones weren’t elegant. They were expendable. And that made them perfect.

Raven didn’t need honor. He needed results.

He tapped the portal menu and hesitated.

This wasn’t the same world as Velkarin Axis. He remembered the shift the last time he stepped into Cindraleth. The atmosphere changed. The game slowed, like the land itself was watching. He’d have to tread carefully. The rituals weren’t just for flavor here—they governed action. One wrong step, one ignored omen, and the land might decide he didn’t belong.

Still, he locked the portal and set his destination:

The Astraline Expanse—the closest town to the Vault of the Rootbound.

It wasn’t glamorous.

It wasn’t ideal.

But it was doable.

And Raven knew better than anyone:

Doable was enough to start a war.

Next stop: Vault of the Rootbound.

Let the world chase ghosts.

He was about to build a new one.

Let them hunt shadows. I’ll build a war behind the curtain.

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