Here is chapter 5, I hope you all enjoy it! Almost time for the dungeon to be open for business =D

Alice pondered a bit and said, “Still to make a rank C skill book already, we honestly don’t have a strong enough dungeon to for such a rare drop to appear. But it would be a good idea to let people know that skill books can be obtained here.” Alice paused for a bit and continued, “ Oh I just remembered something good. There are special cases when a dungeon is awakens an item is created along with the dungeon. This usually represents that the dungeon is specialized in whatever item is summoned during their awakening. These items are normally given to the first party to clear the dungeon, which honestly isn’t hard and just means whoever comes first, as a reward and help spread the name!”

“I can always just summon more of these, it’s not that big of a deal.” Sage replied.

“Nononono, Sage that’s not how things work. You have to balance the risks and rewards in your dungeon. If you give too much too easily you will easily tire yourself out because you’ll have to use up too much mana to resummon everything. Also this will lure far too many greedy people and your dungeon will be flooded and will only end in your destruction. Of course making it too difficult and giving no good rewards no one will bother to venture in anymore.”

“But I recover mana so fast wouldn’t it be better for me to take advantage of that and lure more people in so I can level up faster?” Sage asked.

“Sage even if you can keep it up it would attract too much attention. It is rare enough for a dungeon to spawn skill books. If you summon them too fast then you will have people who would come to capture you to make you summon for them. The reason why people don’t bother to take control of dungeon cores and force them to summon materials for them is the fact that it takes the dungeon a very long time to gather enough mana to summon high rank items. By the time a dungeon can summon high rank items at a good rate they are too powerful to be messed with. However you’re weak but can summon skill book and at a fast rate, which makes you the ideal target.” Alice explained.

“I can be controlled!” Sage shouted in surprise.

“Yes but don’t worry too much about it. The process is very complicated and difficult as it requires many rank A mages.” Alice quickly explained, “It’s also dangerous with high chance of backfiring so unless there is something worth the risk you don’t have to worry about it happening to you.”

With that in mind Sage no longer worried about it as he thought back to his original problem, teaching these monsters to cultivate. Since the monsters he can summon now are too weak to cultivate stronger cultivation methods he first had to test their limits.

For the rest of the day Sage summoned various cultivation technique of varying degrees of mana cost. Starting from the low grade Core rank cultivation method he went down all the way until elementary rank cultivation before something finally worked. In the end it wasn’t until he reached the low grade elementary level technique, the Bear Breath cultivation method, that the goblins and kobolds were finally able to learn one. To be honest anything at the elementary rank can’t even to be considered a real cultivation technique as the peak anyone can reach with them was elementary rank 10. Most don’t consider cultivation to truly start until Core rank as before that you’re simply preparing your body.

“I guess I really was too hasty. How could I forget that the most important thing in cultivation is to lay a solid foundation. Without that foundation how could these monsters possibly cultivate at all. I must start with the basics, these aren’t genius that has been groomed by those top sects. Luckily mana is very thick in the dungeon and on the first floor the concentration matches a well off small sect. From what Alice said, once I build more floors the lower floors will have higher concentration of mana, this will be important should I wish for the my monster to advance further in cultivation.” Sage thought to himself.

Since the cultivation technique being used to teach the monsters was so low it only costed 50 Mana to summon one book. It took only half a day before all the monsters have learned the Bear Breath cultivation method.

For the next 5 days Sage continued finished expanding the dungeon and finally completed a full floor. The result were 10 rooms beside the entrance and the final boss room. The first two rooms after the entrance were pretty straight forward as you only need to pass through them. In the second room there would be two paths that branched into two sections of the dungeon. Each section contained 4 rooms that people must pass through before finally reaching the boss room at the end.

Building the dungeon hadn’t really taken much effort from Sage, so most his attention had been focused on training the monsters. Although it wasn’t much ,the goblins and kobolds were showing some progress. These were known to be some of the weakest creatures and just by having a breathing technique their growth increased a lot. The Goblin’s movement became faster and they became slightly stronger. At that rate the goblins and kobolds would be able to enter elementary rank 1 within 1 month. But the most notable growth was their fighting style because with proper training the goblins and kobolds would fight with technique rather than just simply swinging their weapon randomly. Granted they were far from even the weakest adventurer’s technique but compared to before they were much more dangerous.

Alice was getting very excited as the dungeon was almost ready to be connected to the outside. She rushed in and excitedly shouted “We are almost done with setting up the dungeon! All that’s left is the finishing touches and we are good to go!”

“Finishing touches?” Sage was confused, isn’t dungeon set up already? Doesn’t he just need to move the monsters to their proper places? Thinking for a moment Sage suddenly realized something and made a chest and put the Rank C cultivation skill book inside.

Alice angrily said, “No no no, that’s not nearly enough! You can’t just have one treasure at the very end. You need to space smaller loot across the dungeon and also give your monsters things to drop that way even if a group doesn’t reach the final room they are still rewarded for their efforts.”

“Oh right!” Sage felt embarrassed. Because the training was producing results that he tunneled himself on to the whole cultivation thing again and forgot about everything else. He quickly followed Alice’s instruction and placed loot across the dungeon and give loot to his monsters, which currently consist of 40 goblins and 10 kobolds. He could have summoned more but was advised by Alice against it as there was already a lot of monsters for a newly borned dungeon.

“Now that loot is set we just have to decorate the dungeon a bit and we are all set!” Alice happily announced.

“Decorate the dungeon?” Sage seem very confused at this.

“Remember I told you that you can change the environment of the dungeon and also add in normal animals to let them live and naturally evolve here. Having a varieties of different environments in the dungeon will attract more people as each produce their own resources. Most first floors remain a cave as dungeon don’t have too much resource at this point so the environment stays what it originally was. Just add some bats, rats, spiders, and all the good stuff found in caves!” Alice explained.

Sage summoned the environment menu and once again the menu appeared, showed a hint of something from his past world, a flash of violent red light, and the list was modified again. This time Sage was prepared after encountering the situation so many times. He believed his dungeon power was working around his knowledge but because they didn’t belong in this world the law of the world corrected it. Sadly there was no way for him to really confirm any of this as this was one secret that he won’t be telling anyone.

The one other thing that caught his attention was his ability to summon demonic environments, plants, and animals but after pondering a while Sage assumed that it is the same reason why he can summon HellHounds. Considering his own origin it is very likely that these inconsistencies are caused by the law of the world acting on him.

Sage was sad at the lack of ability to summon plants from his world. Now it would be much harder for him to get himself soul recovery pills if he couldn’t plant the needed material himself.

“I might be able to resist the changes the law of the world is imposing once I’m a higher level or find something in this world that will substitute for what I need. After all, from what I heard from Alice, ghosts and spirits are a thing in this world.” Sage quietly thought.

Once again following Alice’s instructions, Sage began to add the last finishing touches to his dungeon. Patches of minor herbs were added in the various rooms along with a bunch of cave animals such as rats, bats, spiders, and snakes. Sage decided to make one route to the final boss room be monster fighting based and the other to be trap based. One route would force the party to fight and increasing amount of monsters in each room for 4 rooms while the other would be mainly about avoiding traps and ambushes by small amounts of monsters. Each route also had different herb plants as well. The monster route contained a plant that can be used to make antidotes while the trap route contained a herb used to cure paralysis.

After Alice made a trip around the dungeon she came back and happily said, “Well done, the rest of the dungeon seems pretty much all set. All we need to do now is finish up the boss room and the entrance! I would suggest growing some mana herbs in the boss room. They’re very valuable and a good reward for people who made it this far. Beside that they would increase the mana density for the room which would be very beneficial to your dungeon boss!”

“Dungeon boss? Like a final guardian to the treasure here?” Sage looked at the chest containing the Rank C skill book. “Do I just leave a group of these guys here?”

“Well you can but that is hardly a challenge. As a dungeon you are given the ability to make one of the monsters a boss monster. They’ll evolve to a higher form making them much stronger than the rest. Once you gain more floors you would be able to have more boss monsters and the boss monsters placed on lower floors will naturally evolve more than the bosses on the upper floors.” Alice replied.

“Eh?! I can get one of them to evolve? Now? Why didn’t you say anything sooner?” Sage was shocked by the news, he has been troubled by the fact that his monsters were too weak to cultivate and he was too weak to make them stronger. But here was a chance and it has been in front of his eyes the whole time.

“This is common… sense…” As Alice spoke she realized her mistake and face palmed. After seeing Sage doing such a great job at building the dungeon she completely forgot the fact that he had zero common sense when it came to being a dungeon.

“Forget it, first tell me how do I make one of them my dungeon boss?” Sage quickly said.

“It is quite simple, just focus on one of them and think of making them the level 1 floor boss. You can change the boss monster at any time assuming you have the mana but is it not advise to do it too often.” Alice responded.

“Why is that?” Sage questioned.

“Bosses are different from your normal monsters. When normal monsters are destroyed you summon another one to place it but that is not true for boss monsters. When a boss monster is killed their soul is retained and you will reform their body with your mana. This way the boss monster retains everything. The longer a boss monster has been around the stronger it will get as it will have fighting experience to back it up.” Alice slowly said.

Sage pondered for a while and decided to make a kobold his new dungeon boss as he still wanted to see if he could awaken the power of a dragon inside the kobold race. He focused on the one kobold that has became stronger than the rest and named his first dungeon boss. Mana left his body and wove around the kobold changing it. Its figure slowly grew until it was 6 feet tall. The resulting monster was a Kobold Lord, this creature looks much stronger than a normal kobold.

“A kobold lord!” Alice shouted, “Well that is surprising but I guess since it’s you Sage I should stop being shocked all the time.”

“What is so surprising about this?” Sage responded as it scanned the new dungeon boss to see what he can do with it.

“Well normally the first boss for a newly borned dungeon would only be an elite version of the mob you picked but you manage to get a Kobold Lord rather than Kobold Elite.” Alice responded.

“I see…” Sage half heartedly responded as his focus was on the Kobold Lord. After carefully examining the Kobold Lord Sage was still disappointed. While the Kobold Lord is much stronger than the normal Kobold it is mainly a physical difference. In term of their mana channels the Kobold Lord is better but only to the point of a poor talent human. Still this was a lot more than what he had to work with before.

Quickly Sage pulled out a low tier Foundation ranked cultivation skill he had created before and gave it to the new Kobold Lord. The Kobold Lord held the the book which turned into a ray of light and entered the Kobold Lord’s body. The cultivation the Kobold Lord learned was the Armor Scale Cultivation method. This was a common cultivation method among low ranked reptilian spirit beasts. This cultivation method strengthened their scales to make their defense much stronger and make the reptilian blood in their body more pure. It would be a slow process but someday this Kobold Lord might prove that their species do indeed contain the blood of a dragon.

With all this done Sage organized the monsters across the dungeon to live and train at the assigned location. Sage spent another 2 days making sure everything was ready when the dungeon was opened for adventures to explore. One thing he finally did was mess around with the slime monsters that has piqued his interest. Alice has suggested summoning them for the pitfall traps and just having them in the dungeon add variety. They’re pretty cheap to summon so he didn’t mind summoning a bunch and scattering them across the dungeon. However from Alice’s introduction of them they seem to be very versatile creatures that can involve into many different forms.

Sage kept one slime with him inside his secret chamber to study and for some reason just watching the slime was very calming to his soul. What neither of them knew was that slimes are much more sensitive than they originally thought.

Finally, on the 3rd day after the Kobold Lord was summoned, Alice happily shouted, “We’re ready for business!”

Edited by: mossclaw64

Edited by: The super secret and mysterious masked editor... from space!