Ian pushed his mana towards the entrance and attempted to form a tunnel. As the mana reached the entrance nothing happened. He inched his mana further away from the entrance attempting to make a tunnel each time. Mana had spread across the entire wall but no tunnel was formed. ….At least the Core Room window didn’t pop up and make him feel like an idiot. Since that didn’t work he might as well just mentally say what he wanted to do, it seemed to work for everything else, “Make first floor.”

What Ian didn’t expect to happen was his vision to rise up above his core room. While in his dungeon he had no ability to tell if there was anything outside it, but now he could see all around it. However, the only thing that surrounded his dungeon was pure white in every direction. As Ian’s vision stopped moving upwards, a window appeared before him.

Please Choose the Terrain Type for the First Cubic Kilometer of Dungeon Volume.

Shallow Cave

Deep Cave

Underwater Cave

Metal Cave

Fungi Cave

Ice Cave

Magma Cave

Underground Lake

Underwater Lake

Underground River

Evergreen Forest

Mountain

Lake

River

Prairie

Canyon

Swamp

Floating Island

Castle

Castle Ruin

Crypt

Crypt Ruin

Tower

Tower Ruin

Town

Town Ruin

Fungi Forest

Living Metal Forest

Taiga

Tundra

Perpetual Storm

Sewer

If Ian had ever been able to whistle, he would have. Did he pick the right place for terrain types or what? Also, one cubic kilometer? That was a lot to work with, in fact it may be too much to work with. When he used the space like he intended for a cave system then the total length would be around 20,000 km, so half the circumference of the planet. Yeah, no one would want to enter his dungeon if he did that. “Split dungeon volume.” Nothing happened. With a sigh Ian supposed he would have to pick the terrain type before trying that. Before Ian did that however the Perpetual Storm terrain type confused him since it was more of a weather condition than physical terrain. With a shrug Ian picked it, since his other selections had asked him to confirm them after selection.

To Choose Perpetual Storm, Another Terrain Type Must be Combined with It.

Hoho. So terrain types could be combined. He should try that with later floors. Now, he needed to make his floor.

The terrain type for your first cubic kilometer is: Deep Cave.

Achievement: First terrain chosen.

+1,000 DP

Please Choose Five Deep Cave Creatures.

If Ian had a face, he’d have the widest smile right now. He got more creatures for choosing a terrain? Hell yeah. He did wish he’d known about his option earlier, so he could have picked a wider variety of creatures during the tutorial. The amount he could choose from was deeply reduced with it limited to Deep Cave Creatures. Only a slight scroll this time. Ian quickly picked his five.

You have chosen: Newborn Albino Bat [G-], Red Cap Mushroom Spore, Soris Blind Swallow Egg, Soris Cave Snail Egg, and Spotted Salamander Egg

The window disappeared. Ian had expected a large kilometer cube to appear before him, but instead a small window appeared in the corner of his eye telling him how much volume he had remaining. Could he create whatever shape cave system he wanted? The beginning floors of dungeons had such similar and simple structures even though they were allowed such free reign to make their floors? ….It was probably the mana cost then. Ian tried to remember the mana concentrations of dungeons, but inside they were all the same. The mana they spewed out however varied depending on rank, so the amount of mana released might correlate with mana generation. If so, then creating complicated structures was likely more mana intensive with how little mana low level dungeons spewed out. His mana generation was exceedingly high, so Ian supposed he should have no problems.

Ian’s vision was unlike in his dungeon and more akin to his human vision. His vision tried to zoom around the white space. He could move away from his core room but his core room never moved away from him, and since the core room was the only reference point he truly didn’t move at all. The white space wasn’t emptiness but nonexistence with his dungeon being the only part of the space that truly existed. He had always wondered why dungeon walls were completely indestructible. If he had ever succeeded in breaking through and exiting the dungeon, he would have ceased to exist. Ian chuckled at his past attempts especially after he became an EX rank mage. He had been dumbfounded at the time and with obstinance studied the same one square meter of dungeon wall for two years, which was a bit much even for him. As Ian zoomed the short distance back above the center of the core room, he made a basic stone cave unconnected to his core room. “Finish floor.”

Floor Requirements Not Met

Magical Beauty

Not Met

Connected to Core Room

Not Met

Path to Core Room

Not Met

Traps

0/10

Treasures

0/10

Biota

0/50

Animals

0/10

Plants

0/10

Fungi

0/10

Monsters

0/50

Animals

0/10

Plants

0/10

Fungi

0/10

Other

0/10

Magic Formations

0/50

Magic Spells

0/50

Well, he certainly had a ways to go.

What surprised Ian the most was even though the stone room wasn’t considered a floor, it was still a part of him. Ian reabsorbed the stone room, and it felt like a part of him disappeared. Slowly he made a second room and every little piece added felt a part of him even before he finished the room. If the rooms felt a part of him before they became rooms, were they solid? Ian stopped creating his floor and his vision zoomed back to dungeon vision. However, his vision now consisted of his core room and the second room he created. A jelly was created in the center of the stone room and started exploring. It looked like he could place monsters in uncompleted floors. Could he connect a non floor and his core room?

Ian zoomed back out and shifted the stone room so its walls became one with the core room. The rooms successfully combined but there was no door. Could he make a door without paying DP? With a shrug Ian carved an arched doorway in the wall and reabsorbed it. He quickly popped open his status, but no DP had been lost. Doors to and from the core room seemed to be free at least. ….Wouldn’t he be able to extend the size of his core room that way? He supposed he was limited to the appointed volume, but that certainly didn’t seem a problem. All the creatures in the room had looked at the wall as the entrance opened but ignored it after a short while. The jelly in the stone room did come into the core room however. Whether it wanted company, to be closer to his core, or something else Ian didn’t know. Ian removed the stone room and began the actual floor construction.

Since he would have the Entrance Hall and Boss Room, Ian built the floor without those in mind like he had originally planned.The short distance tunnels were generally straight while longer tunnels had curves to them. He made multiple paths to the same location which meant there was always a shortest path to the boss room, but Ian would make sure to place the worst rewards there or maybe just randomize it. The rooms were divided into three sizes: small, medium, and large. The small and medium rooms were both circular but the three large rooms each had a unique shape: a triangle with rounded edges, a clover, and a square. He made two long tunnels that wound with multiple dead end paths. There was however a true path to the boss room through both of these tunnels. When all was said and done he still had nearly a full cubic kilometer to work with. Even though Ian liked the layout of his first floor, that’s all it was, a layout.

The rooms and tunnels were completely empty except for unnaturally straight rock walls. Now Ian needed to make it look more like a cave. The walls received a makeover with rocks jutting out, imperfections and fissures in the walls, and they became sloped rather than completely straight. Stalactites and stalagmites appeared throughout his cave system along with columns and other natural protrusions. Ian did have to reign in making the caves too natural as adventurers and dungeon divers wouldn’t be able to fight with unstable footing, junk in the way, low ceilings, sudden drops, breakable floors, and other dangerous things formed by nature just being itself. He would leave that stuff for higher tier caves or maybe a whole thirty floors dedicated to fighting in completely natural caves.

The caves certainly looked a lot better but they only contained rock. He made sure but forming plants and the like wasn’t possible unless he summoned them. However, Ian was able to make water in multiple forms. Small puddles of water alongside the walls appeared in half the small and medium sized rooms along with some of the tunnels. A small waterfall that led into a small stream which flowed into a small pond appeared in the triangle room. Clover room received just a small pond in the center. He got it so water would periodically drip down the stalactites throughout the floor.

Ian flew through the rooms and tunnels giving everything a once over. Satisfied with how the environment looked, Ian moved onto creatures. Only creatures he already created would be placed, since he knew he didn’t need the distraction of creating/summoning new monsters right now. One thing he was happy about was both green cave moss and moving moss could be reshaped as long their surface area was the same. Throughout all rooms and tunnels Ian placed green cave moss and moving moss in different sizes, shapes, places, and patterns. He designated one of the medium sized rooms as the moss room where every surface was covered with both moss types. ….If Ian had hands, he would have smacked his face. None of the green cave moss had mana hearts! Well, he supposed after he updated the basic structure he could replace them as they were taken. ….How would a mana heart fit into a mat of moss comprised of multiple individuals? Hmmm….no! No, he needed to focus on the floor right now. Snap out of it, Ian!

With Ian’s mind out of the creature gutter, he proceeded with spiders. One clear web spider for each small room, three clear web spiders for each medium room, and ten clear web spiders for each large room, and they were also sprinkled about the tunnels at lower densities. Ian tripled the density of Soris Web Spiders compared to the the clear web spiders. He then tripled the web spiders number with baby spiders. The spiders were most dense towards the ceilings….he should have put the ferns in first.

Ian started placing the ferns throughout the rooms and tunnels to give them a good feel. The ponds and puddles were surrounded by them otherwise they were spread out. However, Ian made sure there was a walkable path through the rooms and tunnels, so the ferns ended up closer together in certain areas. In the hope that ferns with fronds would appear, Ian placed seedlings and spores throughout the adult ferns. The centipedes liked the ferns in the core room, so they were places at the same density as the ferns. Luckily after placing the ferns, more spiders moved to the lower levels, but most still stuck to the ceilings.

Phosphorescent mold was the most useful non-dangerous creature on the floor, so Ian decided its density should be lower. His original plan for phosphorescent lighting was put on hold, and he decided to make do with magic lights. Each large room had a large section of the mold along with one of the dead ends of the twisty tunnels which was covered in it. Otherwise small patches of mold were places throughout the rooms and tunnels. With the mold done, Ian wanted to place the mushrooms but held off. A surprising show of control by him.

Slimes and jellies were the only ones left to place. These two would be the main fighting force of the floor. There was a twin path each with two sequential small rooms. Both paths fed into another small room making for a total of five rooms. On one path Ian place only slimes while the other path contained only jellies. The first room of each path would have one jelly and slime while the second room had two jellies and slimes. The final fifth room would have two slimes and two jellies for a total of four monsters. A random assortment of slimes and jellies between four and seven were placed in each medium sized room except for the moss room. Large rooms had between ten and twenty jellies. The only small room remaining not associated with the two diverging paths contained either one or two jellies or slimes.

Ian was not looking forward to personally having to respawn his creatures, so opened the dungeon shop and looked for respawns.

Dungeon Shop

Creature Respawn

1000 DP

Treasure Respawn

1000 DP

Trap Respawn

1000 DP

Creature Spawn Number Randomizer

1000 DP

Treasure Type Randomizer

1000 DP

The respawn perks did exactly as they said and respawned a creature, treasure, or trap after a certain amount of time. They did state that the individual or thing would only respawn after its main body disappeared and only floors could be designated as respawn areas. Specifically designating a room or tunnel as a respawn area was impossible, at least with these perks.

He hadn’t searched for them, but he was thinking about how to randomize. Him choosing how many monsters were in each room wasn’t truly random and that bugged him. Also, if intruders knew what each treasure chest would give then they would start avoiding some and only go for others.

Hmmm, Ian was considering buying all five. But while having the respawns would be good, would instancing his dungeon be better? He searched for Dungeon Instance and it came up but was ten thousand DP, affordable but much more expensive. Ian thought about it for a while but realized he didn’t need these right now as no intruders would be coming into his dungeon for another three hundred and eighty three days.

With all but his new monsters placed, Ian moved onto the treasures. He wanted two types of treasures on this floor, hidden treasures and challenge treasures. There would be a single hidden treasure in each of the large rooms, two hidden treasures randomly in medium sized room, and five challenge treasures down dead ends. The question was how Ian was going to randomize treasure locations? Simple. He was going to create interconnected teleportation spheres that randomly teleported the treasure chest every hour.

Ian had been manipulating pure mana while making and evolving his creatures along with creating his floor. However he had yet to transform that mana into magic. The entire dungeon was his body, so Ian surmised that he should be able to cast mana anywhere inside his dungeon. The flow of mana inside his dungeon was slightly more refined that his body was even at the EX rank. Before trying the moderately complicated teleportation spheres, Ian created the simple spell: Light. As his mana was all attributeless he pulled the mana he as going to use into straight lines that spread out from a center and would reflect at known angles. After the conversion of his mana into Light attribute mana, the detailed image of a dim glowing ball appeared in his mind and soon after appeared in the center of a medium sized room. Everything had gone off without a hitch, with the only noticeable difference being his dim ball of light was constantly receiving mana. It made sense, if he had to create fifty magics and magic formations for each floor and constantly maintain them even he would start having mana problems. With a thought the dim light ball disappeared, he would make more interesting lights later.

Simple spells worked, so onto complicated ones. Ian started making the formation near the wall of one of the medium sized rooms. The formation had to completely surround and intersect the object of interest. No line could touch one another while constantly jumping and moving through space all within a three dimensional construct. Space mana and magic didn’t like being in one place for too long, so this was all a requirement for the mana to flow properly. To get the formation to activate an inscribed magic was much simpler than setting up a properly flowing mana formation. All that had to be done was overlay the nearly complete mana structure that was the spell right before it became magic. This would twist the formation into the proper structure to activate the spell. Formations no longer had to attempt to mimic the mental image of a spell and only produce reduced effects. To complete the formation Ian added safety, invisibility, and exception spells to prevent body parts from being teleported away, prevent curious mages from analyzing his formation on such an early floor, and to make sure only treasure chests would be teleported. Pleased with his work, Ian created nineteen more formations in dead ends and medium sized rooms.

The connections were created between formations by a string of space mana that vibrated upon activation of a formation forcefully activating another formation to receive the incoming teleportation. The strings totaled one hundred and ninety. Randomization of the process was achieved by the constantly shifting nature of the formation itself. Mana strings flowed throughout the formation shifting between the outer edge and the center. The string closest to the center vibrated the strongest resulting in that string becoming the connection.

Ian finished his formations, and realized he had no idea how to create treasure chests. Were they a part of the floor he could form? He thought about creating a treasure chest and it popped into existence right in front of him. The usual wood chest that all dungeons had stood in front of him. Could he create different looking chests? Ian tried making as many different chests as possible, but could only create one more in addition to the original wood chest, a stone chest. The stone chest looked like the surrounding rocks of the cave which gave it a camouflage factor. The wood chest would be used for the challenge chests….hmmm….with the teleporting chests did his challenge chest idea even make sense anymore? Not really. Lower floors with stronger monsters would work better for challenges anyway. Moving on, the stone chests would be the hidden chests in the large rooms. Five teleportation formations were created in the large rooms and a stone chest was placed in each room. Ian supposed stone chests were enough camouflage for a G- rank floor.

Originally Ian had planned on separating the medium sized room chests and the dead end chests. However, without a functional difference between them he had just made a single network. The large teleportation network had a much greater chance of a treasure chest showing up at a location, so he should make them contain less treasures. The treasure would either have ten stone coins or two G- rank mana stones. The treasure chests in the large rooms would have ten stone coins, two G- rank mana stones, and a weapon. The problem was the weapons were terrible, but Ian supposed he could enchant them. However, they would need to be single use enchantments for such a terrible material.

An Arming Sword appeared and clattered to the floor. Tired of stuff hitting the floor, Ian formed extremely dense mana threads to act as hands allowing him to see all sides of the sword. Ian chuckled to himself as he put a flame enchantment on the sword. Short, curved, and fierce lines surrounded by a unbreaking circle composed this enchantment which include setting the blade of the weapon on fire for fifteen minutes and forming a protective barrier around the weapon for ten minutes. The time limits came from the infused fire and barrier mana, so this kind of enchantment was activated with a thought rather than personal mana, mana stone, or ambient mana. Just in case someone was smart enough to turn the enchantment off when the barrier disappeared the enchantment also contained a spell which erased the enchantment after a single use. If the inscribed enchantment was saved, then only fire and barrier mana in the right amounts would be needed to activate it. Ian also included single use sharpness, hardness, and flexibility enchantments that made the weapons act like a normal sword, mace, and bow respectively.

Achievement: First Enchanted Treasure Created.

+1,000 DP

Ian also received +100 DP awards for the seventeen different enchanted items he created.

With treasures out of the way, Ian should have turned to traps but instead turned to creating lights. Two types of light came into existence across the floor. The first was a transformation of the basic light spell. Rather than dim globes, thin strands of light hung from the ceiling giving off enough light to see a few feet in front of an intruder. The second set of lights were based off a light spell used by dancers to create their light shows. Long lines of light that curved, intersected, and looped with one another covered the walls, ceilings, and floors. The long lights provided enough light such that the caves were only slightly darker than a normal autumn’s day outside. The strands of light were much longer in the large rooms to give them enough light. As Ian finished his lights he wondered if they should all be natural light or be multicolored, but the nag at the back of his mind kept reminding him about traps.

None of the traps Ian picked seemed worthwhile, so he started making trap formations. Multiple flash formations appeared throughout the floor. The formations that shot a burst of bright light out were placed on the ceilings while the activation formations were placed a foot behind them on the floor. The activation formations activated upon physical contact, but Ian made exceptions in the formation for every creature on the floor. He made sure to test it, but water drops from stalactites didn't activate the formations. Non-lethal water jet formations were placed on the walls of a tunnel stacked vertically with the activator in the center. Lethal Rock Spike formations were placed so the formation was directly above the activator and a spike made out of rock would launch towards the invader’s head at the speed of a falling stalactite. The formations shined dimly without the invisibility spell he placed on the teleporations formations, he couldn’t make a G- rank floor too hard. Pleased with his three trap types, Ian looked at his floor checklist. His smile turned upside down when he realized none of his ‘traps’ counted as traps only magic formations. While grumbling Ian placed ten holes with wooden spikes at the bottom, good to know he could do that, with a very obvious illusion spell that shimmered constantly. When he finished the first one a window appeared in front of him.

Achievement: First Mixed Trap Created

+1000 DP

Achievement: First Minor Illusion Pitfall with Wood Spikes Created

+100 DP

At least something good came out of him making a trap.

After looking at his status, Ian had used about three and a half million mana on his floor. While he had created far more than the average first floor, the amount of mana it took him to simply create a room or tunnel seemed far too high for any low rank dungeon to create a floor. ….Mental commands. “Make Room.” A square stone room ten meters cubed appeared. “Make Tunnel.” A tunnel twenty meters long and five meters wide appeared. The mana cost to make each one was low at only ten mana a piece. Highly structured and dungeon created objects seemed to require a lot less mana. Ian supposed he could have constructed a treasure chest on his own rather than summoning it. After creating a few more rooms and tunnels, Ian was done with his experiment and erased the newly created rooms and tunnels.

Quite pleased with his work, Ian flew through the floor once again filled with wonder at what he created. Pleasure flooded through him as he realized he was making a dungeon. All Ian had left to do was make a fungus monster, connect the floor to the core room, and figure out why he hadn’t met the requirements for Magical Beauty. He was a bit worried about the last one.