The river in Carl’s mind gets harder to ignore as Dungeon Crawler Carl goes on. It grows louder when he’s struggling, sometimes until it seems to be screaming. That makes it easy to connect the river to his anger and grief, but other characters describe a river too, and some talk as though they can sense what Carl is experiencing.
This article contains full spoilers through Book Eight, A Parade of Horribles.
My theory is that the river is Carl sensing other minds, and that choosing Primal gave him the ability to connect with them. The clues lead from his own experience to the children speaking through Lucia Mar, the goddess who has reached them, and a way Carl might eventually learn to speak to those children himself.
What Is the River in Carl’s Mind? [Video]
How Carl begins sensing the river
Our starting point is early in Book Five, after Carl and Donut attack the hunters in Zockau. That’s the city where the hunters are gathering before they’re released to kill crawlers on the sixth floor.
After they escape and later make it back to the safe room, Carl sits on a counter waiting for the recap. He realizes that even when he’s trying to relax by playing Frogger, he keeps working through plans and rehearsing recipes in his head, so he’s having a hard time actually giving himself a break.
In Chapter 8 of The Butcher’s Masquerade, Carl compares what he’s sensing to a “bubbling, meandering stream” before explaining, “Only it wasn’t a sound, not really. It wasn’t even a physical feeling.”
Carl is aware of something flowing, but he can’t quite explain how he’s sensing it. He doesn’t think it has just appeared in his mind. It feels as though it was already there and has only recently become loud enough to notice. When he manages to calm down and rest, it gets quieter. During the escape from Zockau, it got louder.
That makes it pretty easy to connect the river to stress, especially when we get to Book Six, The Eye of the Bedlam Bride, and Carl has to talk about his childhood on television.
The host, Rosetta, asks him about what happened when he was fifteen. His mother died by suicide and his father abandoned him, and now he’s having to talk through all of that in front of the crawl’s audience.
After that, he’s clearly upset, and the river gets louder until it seems to be screaming. So this feeling doesn’t just happen when he’s in danger in the dungeon; it also happens when he’s struggling with stressful memories.
Toward the end of the book, his friends reunite with him and insist on helping, even though some of them could have left the floor. Carl has been thinking about his family, his despair, and this deafening river, but seeing his friends there makes him realize how lonely he’s been. With them around him again, he starts to feel some hope and think more clearly.
Carl’s emotional state seems to affect how strongly he experiences the river. If he’s sensing something beyond his own thoughts, being upset could make that experience harder to bear, while having his friends around helps him cope with it.
What the Ring of Divine Suffering changes
Around the time of that Book Five passage, Carl starts using the marking ability of the Ring of Divine Suffering. The ring lets him mark people for death and permanently increase his stats when those targets die.
After he first uses the marking ability in Chapter 6, Carl feels a tingling in his mind. The AI warns him that there are effects of the ring it hasn’t told him about. This is shortly before the Chapter 8 passage describing the river.
The ring is a good suspect because Carl starts using it, feels something different in his mind, and receives a warning about its hidden effects. But he also thinks the river was already there. The ring could be making him more aware of something he already has the capacity to sense.
By Book Eight, A Parade of Horribles, Carl has given up the ring. Yet in Chapter 35, when Eris shows him a coin depicting possible disasters, he feels a familiar rushing sensation that seems to surround him. To me, that sounds like the river he’s described before, even though he doesn’t call it that in this scene. If the ring helped him sense the river more clearly in the first place, that awareness has stayed with him now that he’s no longer wearing it.
Oshun and Inle recognize Carl’s river
In Chapter 15 of The Eye of the Bedlam Bride, Carl and his companions are at a temple with seven ruined shrines and a magical gem that can restore one of them. The gods associated with those shrines want Carl to choose theirs, so they offer rewards and help to win him over.
While Carl is directing the repair of the goddess Yemaya’s shrine, his companions are fighting off the creatures attacking them. Another goddess, Oshun, turns her attention to him and speaks inside his head, saying, “How loud is it, Carl? How deep is it? I can drain it all away.”
Oshun’s questions about loudness and depth, followed by an offer to drain it away, sound like a description of Carl’s river.
Then Inle speaks at Carl’s other ear and says he can see it too. He tells Carl, “She can’t heal a canyon that’s dug this deep. I can. It’s not what you think it is.”
Both gods want something from Carl, so their claims serve their own interests. Even so, they’re talking as though they can see the river inside him. Carl could be starting to notice something these gods already know about.
Lucia Mar and the children on Earth’s surface
Lucia Mar is the disturbed young crawler who travels with her two rottweilers and repeatedly attacks other crawlers. By Book Seven, Carl knows that other children can speak through her, but he still doesn’t understand what’s happening to them.
During Faction Wars on the ninth floor, in Chapter 72 of The Inevitable Ruin, Carl uses a conscription potion to force Lucia into his army and put her under his orders. That lets him stop her from attacking and get her to answer his questions. The child who speaks through Lucia’s body identifies herself as Diah.
Diah describes being with other children somewhere dark and cold, where they sometimes hear people whispering sad things. Then she compares something there to “a river running through our room” and says, “if we touch it, it hurts.”
So Diah’s experience is a little different from what Carl’s been describing. To her, the river passes through the place where she’s staying with the other children, and they can touch it, even though doing that hurts them.
Diah also gives us a clue about what’s happening to Lucia. When Lucia’s dog Gus wanders away, Lucia’s personality fades and one of the children can take control of her body. They take turns looking through Lucia’s eyes until Gus comes close again and Lucia takes over.
That means Diah can sometimes talk to Carl through Lucia, but the rest of the time, she’s back with the other children in this dark room, with something like a river passing through it.
After Gus is killed, a different speaker takes over Lucia’s body and warns Carl that the Eulogist has gained another ally in the dungeon. The Eulogist is the intelligence in the central system that later becomes important to this theory.
In Chapter 73, Zev, Carl and Donut’s contact with the people running the crawl, explains how Lucia ended up in this situation. As a child, Lucia shouldn’t have been admitted to the dungeon. The administrators initially assumed she’d gotten in because of a glitch and wanted to send her back out. Once she started earning money, they kept her there and gave her loot boxes to help keep her safe. Now the AI says it can’t extract her.
The other children tried to enter the dungeon too, but their bodies are being held in a facility on Earth’s surface. The ones linked to Lucia come from one particular wing of that facility. So this connection involves living children who should have been kept out of the crawl, yet can now experience it through Lucia.
Zev says the administrators had expected the problem to correct itself and release the children if Lucia died or left. But they learned something when Gus died that changed their understanding. Now they think that if Lucia dies, the children could die too. Carl insists they keep her alive until they work out how to save them.
Diah can speak through a body in the dungeon while her own body is still on the surface. A connection already allows her mind to reach beyond her body, and part of her experience is a river passing through the room where she waits. I think Carl is beginning to sense that same connection from his side.
What Carl sees at the All-Tree
Earlier in Faction Wars, in Chapter 65 of The Inevitable Ruin, enemy soldiers attack Carl with psionic spells that target his mind. The attacks overwhelm his defenses. He ends up sitting on the ground with his back against a tree, drifting into a trance while the battle continues around him.
While he’s in that state, Carl feels the river rushing beneath him, but now he’s aware of voices and screams within it. He describes what he’s sensing as “Nightmares distilled to light. Souls.”
Then he hears a familiar male voice telling him to steady himself and look at his feet. The voice says, “You’ve been standing in this so-called river this whole time.” Carl doesn’t identify who’s speaking, but he’s already described what he’s sensing as souls before the voice says this.
At that point, his Mind Balance skill, which helps him resist mental attacks, reaches level sixteen. The AI tells him that the stronger skill will wake him up, and it also explains what’s happening to his body: his bare feet are buried in an All-Tree root. The All-Tree has outgrowths like this one connected to a much larger magical tree far below, with roots that spread up into other areas.
When Carl wakes up and tries to stand, his feet are still stuck in the tree. He pulls them free, and the tree he’d been leaning against withers and crumbles around him.
Carl describes voices and identifies souls while he’s caught against the tree. Then the unidentified voice tells him he’s already in the river. My reading is that he normally feels other minds rushing past without being able to distinguish one from another. Under the mental attacks and in contact with the All-Tree, he senses those presences more clearly.
If that’s what Carl is experiencing, Diah could be sensing the same connection from the place where she’s being held. She’s waiting there with the other children for a chance to speak through Lucia. The river passing through their room could be what connects them to other minds, including Carl’s.
Chalchiuhtlicue and the shared river
In Chapter 51 of A Parade of Horribles, after one of the races on the tenth floor, Lucia approaches Carl and says a goddess named Chalchiuhtlicue is with her. She passes on something the goddess has told her: “She says we are vessels in the river, just as you are, Carl.”
Lucia also says the goddess has only recently arrived where the children are: “She’s new to this place, but she is here.” The goddess can reach them without either of Lucia’s dogs, Cici or Gus.
Then a frightened child named Azra starts speaking through Lucia and tells Carl her sister Yaz is there too. They’re the daughters of Mehmet, a crawler who asked Carl to find them before taking a deal to leave the dungeon.
As Carl later talks about Chalchiuhtlicue with his companions, he starts wondering whether they’ve been thinking about this backward. Could the children be inside the goddess, rather than the goddess being inside Lucia?
That could explain where the children are waiting between their turns speaking through Lucia. But the river passes through their room, and the goddess says Carl is in it too. So I think the connection extends beyond wherever the children are being held. The goddess can reach them through it, and she may now be holding them, but she could have entered a connection that was already there.
How Carl’s Primal race could explain the connection
In Book Two, Carl chose Primal as his race. The obvious benefit was that he could train his skills to higher levels. In Chapter 92 of Book Eight, the AI tells him about the people that race is named after, and their history gives us a possible explanation for the river.
The ancient Primal civilization had families and separate lives, but kept expanding and fighting. Its eventual plan was to preserve people’s minds after death by joining them in one shared consciousness. To make that possible, the Primals began changing their own biology. The AI says, “Our first step was to develop a genetics program,” and explains that within a generation, those being born had the “ability to understand what the others were feeling.”
Over time, the plan developed into a collective: one larger intelligence made from many individual minds. The AI says it was already accepting “the minds of those who’d died” before it was developed into a weapon.
The part that stands out to me is that the changes started affecting Primals while they were alive. They could understand other people’s feelings before they ever joined the collective. That gives us a reason to think a Primal could begin sensing other minds without having to die first.
If Carl’s race choice gave him some of that altered Primal biology, the river could be an ability he’s beginning to develop. He hasn’t learned to pick out individual people yet, so he experiences their presence as rushing, voices, and sometimes screaming. Choosing Primal would give him the capacity; understanding what he’s sensing would come later.
This would put the race choice and the ring at different points in the same process. Carl becomes capable of making the connection when he becomes Primal, and using the ring starts making that connection harder to ignore.
His emotional state would affect how well he copes with that awareness. When he’s overwhelmed, all those impressions become unbearable; when his friends help him feel less alone, he can think more clearly again. That would let the river reflect Carl’s distress while also being his experience of something beyond his own thoughts.
The Eulogist connection
In its Chapter 92 account, the AI acknowledges gaps in its memories but explains that the collective eventually became the Eulogist, the intelligence named in the warning Carl receives after Gus dies. Before that, it had begun taking in minds against people’s will. The same ability that let people join their minds together also became a way of trapping them.
After Gus dies, the warning about the Eulogist gaining an ally is followed by Zev’s explanation that the children may no longer be released if Lucia dies. Her death could kill them too.
That makes me wonder whether someone on the Eulogist’s side is taking advantage of the children’s connection to Lucia. The children already have a way to share access to her body, but now that link may also prevent them from escaping safely. The warning gives us a reason to suspect someone is using that connection for their own purposes.
We know the goddess has reached the children, and my theory is that Carl’s Primal ability could let him reach them as well. If he can learn to communicate through the river, he could find out what’s happening to them without waiting for one of them to take control of Lucia. That’s where sensing the river could become something he can actually use to help them.
How Carl could reach the children
The theory brings these clues together: Carl’s Primal race gives him a developing sensitivity to other minds, and the ring helps bring it out. Stress makes that connection harder to bear. At the All-Tree, he gets close enough to hear voices and recognize souls within what he’s been experiencing as a river.
Lucia’s situation shows what a connection like that can do. The children are alive on the surface, but their minds can take turns controlling her body in the dungeon. Their situation begins with children trying to enter a crawl they shouldn’t have been allowed into, and the dogs affect who can take control of Lucia. The goddess has her own way in, and she explicitly places Carl and Lucia in the same river.
My prediction is that Carl will learn to distinguish individual minds within it and communicate with them deliberately. That would give him a way to reach the children even when they aren’t speaking through Lucia.
From there, he could begin to understand where they’re being held, what the goddess is doing, and how to separate them from Lucia without putting their lives at risk. Sensing the connection would be the beginning of learning how to help them.
An ability that once helped a civilization join its minds together could become Carl’s way of reaching people who are trapped and helping them find a way out.
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