Ian had finished his protection maze, but now he only had one normal floor and one death floor. To counter the effect his death floor would have on intruders, he needed quite a few more floors. He debated with himself whether or not to try mass producing floors, but decided against it. First off, he didn’t have the required mana right now, and second off, if he had his floors be completely the same with minor differences, then he would hate his own dungeon.

However, he still needed to work quickly, since only one hundred and twenty five days of his four hundred remained. The mana wait for Yervin had cut his time in half, only a little over three of his total ten months remained. Ian sighed as he realized a year wasn’t enough time to build a proper dungeon. Of course, little did Ian realize how much other dungeons would want to punch him in the face, or book spine, for thinking that.

Ian’s focus shifted to building his dungeon. After a quick contemplation, he decided to make each floor unique in three ways: floor layout, creature composition, and type of puzzle. He had created his teleporting treasure chests on the first floor and forewent puzzles, but his dungeon felt empty without them. If there were no puzzles, then any brute, who could punch things really hard, would make it through his dungeon. Not only did puzzles prevent idiots from clearing his dungeon solo, they also allowed individuals of lesser strength, but greater intelligence, to clear a dungeon in a party. Of course, they still had to find the right party, otherwise they were liable to be killed at the end of a dungeon run.

Ian purchased the ability to create puzzles for ten thousand DP. Now he could make his second floor.

Ian liked the themed rooms from the first floor, and decided to implement them on the second. It had come to him late, but the spider room was his favorite. Thus, he decided to implement the spider room but on a greater scale. The second floor would be a circular floor with smaller rooms and corridors surrounding the largest, circular room, the spider room, which in turn led to the boss room.

The spherical spider room was twice as large as the largest room on the first floor. As he created it, Ian made sure to add normal cave like features, however only along the edge of the room. He implemented the same teleporting treasure concept but with seven spots and two treasures instead. The other terrain features he added were five large boulders throughout the floor, and fourteen golden apple trees in two circles: a circle of eight along the outer edge of the room and a circle of six towards the center. None of his variant spiders had reached full development yet, so Ian only placed ten G rank clear web spiders in the room. He ordered them to make as many webs as possible.

Besides the spider themed room, Ian decided to wait until he had created the floor plan before placing his creatures. There were multiple paths like he had on the first floor, but unlike the first floor there wasn’t any short path. Well, there was a shortest path, but no one would consider it short. Ian had implemented his large room plan again with a triangle, a rectangle, a rhombus, and two circles. There was also a hexagon and another circle that were between a medium room and a large room.

Ian also created eight ‘puzzle’ rooms. They weren’t Rooms, as he had seen that option in the dungeon store, but small rooms filled with different puzzles that Ian would create. Of course, they weren’t filled with puzzles yet, they were just empty rooms. These rooms were completely optional, but would provide treasure. However, these wouldn’t be the only puzzles on the floor, Ian planned to install puzzles for progression as well.

The general concept of the floor could be distilled down to two or three paths, interrupted by rooms, curving counterclockwise for the first three fourths of the floor. There were various shapes of rooms, paths that connected the main corridors, and a small section of twisty paths and small rooms about halfway through. The last section of the first three fourths of the floor became more twisty and interconnected, but still had two main corridors running counterclockwise.

The last fourth of the floor became mainly linear with only a few offshoot corridors and rooms for puzzles or sub-bosses. The linear sections started with a narrow, straight corridor that twisted back and forth multiple times before reaching the hexagon room. The hexagon room led to the trident/arrow room, it was supposed to be an arrow, but Ian wasn’t able to get the fletching shape thin enough. This lead to long, curvy corridors interrupted by small rooms connected to two medium sized oval rooms and a large oval room. The large oval room led to a sub-boss room, separate from the main path, and a straight corridor with a forty five degree turn leading to a small square room, leading to the rhombus room, which Ian supposed was also a parallelogram room, which lead to the enormous spider room, as in the room was enormous not the spiders.

All in all, the process took Ian a total of five whole days. At thirty hours a day, he worked for a total of one hundred and fifty hours. It seems he was going faster than his previous floor attempts, but he still didn’t have any magic, traps, creatures, or treasures.

Ian decided to place his creatures next and implement his magic, traps, and treasures based on where he placed his creatures. Now, looking back on his first floor, Ian realized that he created a high creature density floor. If he compared it to other dungeons he had been in, then he had the most creatures in a cave dungeon floor that he’d ever seen. If he was to be quick about making floors, he needed to tone down the density a little. However, not to the level of a normal dungeon, Ian liked having a lot of creatures.

Currently Ian’s creature options were generally the same as his first floor, with a few creatures that he hadn’t placed on either of the two floors he created previously. Well, there was the difference of his monsters being G rank now, but not much changed between G- rank and G rank. Thankfully in the five days he made the layout of the floor, the variant spiders had developed enough to evolve, so Ian now had G rank versions of those and placed ten of each variant in the spider room.

Ian didn’t feel that one hundred and ten spiders were enough for the room. They were only a little larger than fist sized after all. It would only take him about four thousand mana to get to a G rank spider, so Ian continued with different mana infusion spider evolution. However, he did want to try something with his creation perk for the sub-boss of the spider room. It wouldn’t be much of a sub-boss, only a rank or two higher than the indicated rank of the floor, but it would be different.

So far, Ian had created his monsters in the core room, but it was getting a little crowded in there, and….Ian gave a quick glance in the direction of the training room, he needed to think about separating his dungeon into the dungeon for adventurers and living quarters for certain creatures. In fact, Ian had been somewhat haphazard in his placement of his floors in the non-existent space, and it was starting to bug him. The floors were just sitting next to each other, the training room and Mina’s and Izu’s just sat next to the core room, and the water and magma rooms didn’t have good symmetry.

First, Ian decided to stack the floors. G- rank would be on top, then G rank, then EX rank, then the core room. Rather than stack them directly on top of each other, Ian also made it so they went front to back. The G- rank floor was in front, the G rank floor started as the G- rank floor ended, but was a level below, then the EX rank floor started as the G rank ended, and the core room finished it off. At the end his floors looked like a staircase.

Ian shifted the water and magma rooms, so they were right next to each other, but had a wall in between them. They were centered in the back of the core room directly across from the transfer entrance. Right after he moved the rooms, he realized that a room specifically for transfer formations would fit perfectly between the two rooms. Thus, Ian put a room between the water and magma rooms and placed the transfer formations for the training room, that was only called that because he had the goblins training there, not because it resembled a training room in any way, and Mina’s and Izu’s room.

While he was moving the floors and rooms connected to the core rooms, he made sure to observe the reactions of the creatures inside them. The creatures in the floors had no reactions whatsoever, and the only reaction the water elementals and the flame tongued flasterby catcher had was to the sudden creation of a wall while he was moving the rooms.

Ian moved Mina’s and Izu’s room to below and back from the core room, and he started to move the training room before he stopped suddenly. He created a separate room, the same size of the training room, and placed a single goblin in it that he inhabited with his mind. With him inside it, he moved the room around. It was hard to tell, since he knew the room was moving around, but it didn’t feel like the room was moving at all to Ian. Happy with his experiment, he moved the training room down next to Mina’s and Izu’s room. Ian was thankful they didn’t notice anything happen in the training room.

With his floor arrangement set, Ian created a separate room about the size of his core room to the right of his stair setup. If he wanted to make creatures the size of Giants or Dragons, he would have to make a new one, but he didn’t plan on making creatures of that size anytime soon. The creatures he created here would be for the dungeon only, if he planned on making something….someone similar to Yervin, then he’d make them in the core room. Happy with his setup, Ian started to create new monsters.

Ian started with two similar mana attributes: electricity and lightning. Well, it would be more accurate to say that lightning is a from of electricity, so they were in fact the same thing. Most mages he knew of used lightning magic and more specifically only used it for combat. Lightning magic by itself took a lot of time to accurately use due to its destructive and chaotic nature, so trying to use it on small scale proved nearly impossible. After Ian was able to successfully convert lighting mana into electricity mana, he realized how much easier it would have been to do it the other way. When Ian gave his findings to Andre and Mackenzie, which they had presented at their college for him, he had chuckled to himself at the fact that electricity was so much easier to use, and had more uses, than lightning magic. Back then he couldn't wait to see the mage community's reaction.

The spider infused with electricity mana was called an Electric Web Spider. It had the same markings as the normal web spider, but the white markings changed into a light yellow color. The most prominent change was its ability to give a shock to anyone touching it. The upgrade to G rank extended the range of its shocking ability.

Next, the lightning mana produced the Lightning Web Spider. Same as the electric spider it kept the original markings, but instead of light yellow, the markings were a deep yellow. There was no shock from coming close to the spider, but it could raise one of its legs and shoot a small bolt of lightning. Unsurprisingly, the bolt caused severe burns, however the range was short. The surprising part was that a G- rank monster could produce anything that did severe damage. At G rank the range of the bolt extended a bit, and it seemed to Ian that the damage increased slightly.

Ten of both spiders were placed in the spider room. The room was quite large, and he only planned on spiders in the room, so only one hundred and thirty barely fit the room. Ian sighed to himself. What was he thinking, he just decided that the floor needed a lower density of creatures. ….He supposed he would max the room out at two hundred spider monsters and one sub-boss.

For the next spiders, Ian had an experiment he wanted to try. Based on how Yervin turned out, he already had some guesses about how the experiment would go.

The first spider was infused with magma mana. It resulted in a Magma Web Spider. The spider was now a blackish red color without any of the marks of the normal web spider. It had gained two skills: heat resistance and melting resistance. Ian noticed the biggest change after he let it start to spin webs. Its webs were made out of molten rock. Based on the level of its heat resistance, he wondered how the spider walked on its own webs. Ian really wondered whether he should put this spider on the G rank floor, but the menu said it was G rank, so Ian just shrugged his pages and placed it in the spider room.

What Ian wanted to test the magma spider against was infusing a spider with half fire mana and half earth mana. The spider that resulted had a red body with yellowish brown stripes running down its abdomen. It was called a Flaming Earth Web Spider and had both the fire and earth resistances. Ian was unsurprised by the result, but wondered if it was possible to artificially create a mana flow within the spider that resulted in a magma spider with fire and earth attributes.

Ian created numerous flaming earth web spiders in his attempts to make a different kind of magma spider, but to no avail. Sometimes they weren’t even flaming earth web spiders, they were fire web spiders or earth web spiders. He tried to get the mana to fuse together or act with one another, but he couldn’t influence the overall mana flow inside the spider without expending far too much mana. It seemed changing the mana flow was a part of his creation perk.

Ian contemplated the problem for a bit more, but considered giving up as he was wasting time. However, right before he gave up, it came to him. The revelation made him smack his inner spine with his pages. Of all the times he sat on the edge of volcanos or swam in the magma, how could he forget about the heat and pressure present there.

Before Ian continued with his experiment, he had two new spiders to make.

Ian produced a Heat Web Spider. It looked like a normal web spider, but sometimes it would produce steam and sometimes ice crystals would form around it. It had low level heat production and heat elimination skills. Ian wondered why it received those skills rather than the resistance skills that the elemental spiders received.

The Pressure Web Spider also had the same patterns as the original web spider. It had the unusual skill called Equal Pressure which allowed it to exert the same amount of force from every surface of its body. Ian was interested in how this spider would evolve. Most monsters got a resistance skill eventually if they had a mana attribute in their name, so would this spider receive a resistance skill for just pressure or for all force in general. One of the things Ian liked about being a dungeon was he could conduct experiments that were impossible for him as a human being.

Ian continued his experiment to produce a magma spider without magma mana. First, he used all three attributes in equal measure, but all he got was a Thermal Pressurized Earth Web Spider. Ian considered not making too many multiple attribute monsters as the names were getting a bit long. The new spider had the ability to absorb and release heat, apply equal force to a small circle in front of it, and had rock resistance. They were all reduced versions of skills that singular attribute spiders had. The spider itself, however, looked identical to a earth web spider.

Ian spent the rest of the day fiddling with ratios of mana attributes but nothing came of it. Eventually he realized what he was doing wrong, and it came from reminding himself about Yervin and remembering how he had originally come across magma mana. Even though he infused Yervin with the same ratio of mana for most of his evolutions, it took awhile for him to receive skills from all three attributes. Now, the thermal pressurized earth web spider did have three skills, but they were inferior versions. This had reminded Ian that the levels of his heat and pressure magic spells had to be quite high before their combination with earth magic produced magma, or lava, when he did it on the surface. Most likely if he continued to evolve the spider with the ratio of heat, pressure, and earth mana, they might become a magma spider that can use those three attributes. Ian set aside his experiment that had wasted about two days, and continued making spiders.

Ian decided to go with some more basic attributes.

The Ice Web Spider received ice resistance like the rest of the elemental spiders. It had a clear blue color compared to the darker blue color of the water spider.

Poison mana created the Poisonous Web Spider. This spider, in addition to the venom it had normally, was now also poisonous to anything that ate it. Its entire body was now a greenish purple color. A lucky turn of fate meant its webs were also coated in poison.

The addition of the ice and poison web spiders brought the spider types up to twenty. As such, two hundred G rank spiders were now present in the spider room. The room was slowly being covered in webs with the periodic magma or poison web to act as traps.

Now for Ian to make his sub-boss. Ian thought he would be testing if his creation perk applied to modifications here, but he already found out it did when modifying the mana flow of the spiders earlier. So far, Ian has focused on creating different varieties of monsters through different mana attributes. Ian loved seeing all the different spiders, but besides a few color changes they were all the same physically. Of course, Ian realized that physical differences were likely going to arise the more he evolved them, but for now they were very similar.

He hoped to create a spider with physical differences as his sub-boss. First, it needed to be bigger. Ian had realized after studying the goblins that the body was composed of extremely small interconnected parts. He severely hoped that he wouldn’t have to modify each one of those because that would take time, and he assumed mana, that he didn’t feel he had. He focused on enlarging every aspect of the normal web spider and suddenly the spider doubled in size and ten thousand mana left him.

Ian was surprised. Only ten thousand mana? Admittedly going from one fist to two fists wasn’t a large increase. As such, Ian increased the size again. The spider enlarged and ten thousand mana was lost, however the spider did not double in size. Ian enlarged the spider three more times and realized that the spider was increasing in size by a fistful each time. It seemed ten thousand mana got him a base web spider increase in size. Ian upped the spider’s size a couple of fistfuls more to get it to human head size.

However, Ian wasn’t going to just increase the overall size of the spider. He made the front two legs of the spider into scythe like cutting implements. The last change Ian made was to greatly enlarge the abdomen compared to the rest of the body. Ian didn’t have to spend as much mana on the abdomen as it increased in size at a greater percentage than the whole body. The enlarged abdomen was used to hold a much larger silk creation gland. Pleased with his work, Ian infused the spider with mana. Unlike the usual thousand he had to infuse from a normal web spider to a monster web spider, he had to infuse twenty thousand mana. The end result was a F- rank monster.

Normally Ian would be pleased with his creation, but its name gave away its problem. It was called an Immobile Scythe Spider. Apparently Ian had made the abdomen so disproportionate to its size that it could no longer move. Its legs attempted to pull itself forward, but after a little struggle it gave up. It could still produce silk, but the silk just sprayed out of its abdomen, since the spider couldn’t weave it into a web.

Ian was displeased that he was unable to accurately create his idea. He also felt a bit sorry for the spider that wasn’t able to move on its own, but he wasn’t one to waste monsters, so he would place them on the F- floor. They could act like traps with their scythes or cover intruders with their silk. Ian was now regretting not infusing them with poison mana, since large amounts of poisonous silk would have made a good trap.

Ian repeated the previous process with a new spider, but reduced the size of its abdomen. He also target infused endurance mana into the exoskeleton and the cephalothorax that controlled the movement of its legs. To make up for his last mistake, Ian also infused poison mana overall into the spider. When Ian let it go, it began to scuttle around like any other spider. It seemed that its movement was fine. Pleased with his Poisonous Scythe Spider, Ian added it as a singular monster to the spider room to act as a sub-boss. There was technically a Sub-Boss Room that he could purchase, but Ian didn’t want to go through the process of purchasing numerous upgrades at the moment.

To finish off the room, Ian put two glow worms next to the golden apple trees and two hundred biotic web spiders throughout the room. Ian looked down at the room pleased, and went to finish off the rest of the floor.