What the Crawl Is For (The Fuel Harvest)

The galaxy-sized secret Odette lets slip mid-confession: Dungeon Crawler World, Battle Royale, Land War and every other game are not, at heart, entertainment. Each is run on a seeded planet to harvest the elements thrown off by its overgrown biology: raw fuel. The mantises mine those elements and graft resurrected AIs into the resulting planetary engines. The lethal game show was bolted on later because the harvest is ruinously expensive and the broadcast pays for it; without the spectacle, the whole apparatus shuts off. Odette insists the crawl can't simply be stopped: doing it carelessly would starve and kill half the known universe. Her aim is to end it responsibly, in a way that makes future collections humane and bloodless.

Book 6 appearances

• Chapter 37 — Odette reveals the planets are mined for fuel and resurrected AIs grafted into planetary engines: the crawl is a financing scheme for a galactic harvest.

Related entries

• Odette’s Confession (Event)
• Odette (Character)
• The Celestial Ascendency (Lore)
• The System AI (Character)

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• All Dungeon Lore & Know-How
• Everything debuting in Book 6, Chapter 37
• All of The Eye of the Bedlam Bride