Ian stared at his floors before inhaling and exhaling deeply. He gave a quick thought of how he was able to do that as a book, before copying over the G- rank floor. His mana was sucked out, the floor created, and he received a notification that his fifth floor was completed.

He stared at the notification. ….He couldn’t do it. He knew he needed to make floors quickly, but copying a floor verbatim just felt lazy to him. Three floors and then a copy? Who would want to go into that dungeon. He certainly wouldn’t. Well, he wasn’t the most normal dungeon diver, but still.

He shooed the notification away and erased the duplicate floor as the mana returned to him. Duplication wasn’t completely off the table, but he needed more than three floors before he did so. The problem was he still needed to make floors faster than four in a year, so one every two and a half months. Although, he did simply build up mana for five of those months, so it was more like a floor every fifty days. ….When he laid it out like that, it wasn’t that bad. Well, not bad for him. Even G- rank dungeons generally had at least ten floors before adventurers discovered them. Also, it wasn’t as if those dungeons had a lot more than the same year prep time he had, since they were discovered soon after opening.

The easiest way would be to copy the generic room and hallway structure of a lot of other dungeons as he had considered before. He had tried with the G+ Illusion floor, but still ended up going into more detail than needed. If he was going to go generic for a few floors, then he needed magic and monsters to compensate. He could only hope that the illusion he created for the G+ floor was overkill, and that degree of magic wasn’t needed to meet Magical Beauty.

The layout was simple. Five square rooms each a fifty meter cube. The generic create function still created cave features like stalagmites, stalactites, columns, and puddles, but with more space for movement than he had given. It wasn’t similar in density and construction to a natural cave, but most dungeons weren’t.

Now, what was he going to do to make them magically worthy? Ian rubbed his pages together in thought for a while. Some ideas like more traps, more puzzles, or more monsters, he just threw away as they came to him. Others like more advanced traps or more magical monsters, he contemplated, but threw away after realizing they would add too much difficulty to an F- floor. What he had was basically five large rooms, so what was he to do with them? Then it clicked. The water elemental room on the EX floor.

Enchanted rooms were different than the illusion floor. The illusion floor was covered in illusion magic, while the enchanted strength room applied to the water elementals inside it. At least with enchantments he had practice reducing their effects, although he had not enchanted many rooms, especially of this size.

However, what to enchant? There were generic enchantments like strength, endurance, agility, etcetera, but even those had certain types of monsters and creatures they fit better.

Since the layout was a simple hallway, room, hallway, room, until the final hallway led to the boss room, it made sense to make it linear in difficulty. Even if all the monsters were F- rank, there were still differences between species. Of course, adventurer groups that lacked in certain areas may find earlier rooms harder, but that was their problem, not his.

He’d start off with plants, then insects, then how about the fox? ….Oh wait. That’s right, he didn’t have a fox. It ran away after the spiders tried to swarm it. Besides, a fox turned monster would probably be an E or D rank monster. How about the rabbit? Hmm, that was a definite possibility. It had thankfully died trapped by the boss.

Now, what insects and plants. He was iffy about making more of the same themed rooms, but this was supposed to be a fast floor so there would be some repetition. Ferns and mushrooms again then. For insects he only had cicadas as monsters, and for arachnids he had a lot of spiders. However, a spider room again would be a bit much. ….Actually, he might be able to get the spider dungeon title. Hmm. No, something new would be for the best. He did have a lot of biotic insects that could be turned into monsters, especially with all the new-.

Ian’s vision snapped to the entrance hall. What was that? It looked like a horse, but was only a foot tall at the top of its back. Rather than a bushy tail and mane, it had no mane and a tail like a cat. It’s head was the miniaturized version of a horses’. It’s legs however were stubby in comparison only reaching half the creature’s height. The four legs were also much thicker proportionally than a horses’. Unlike a horse, which had a one-toed hoof, it had a three-toed hoof.

It was moving its head back and forth looking around the room, while its ears twitched. A huff spat out of its mouth as it headed for the transfer formation.

This was it. He wanted to make this into the fifth room monster. However, he needed to make sure it didn’t run away like the fox. He could order the spider automata to kill it, but that was a bit overkill. That meant it was the perfect opportunity for the goblins to gain some experience. It shouldn’t be too difficult, it was currently munching on the ferns, but they would have to make sure it didn’t run away.

He focused his vision on the goblin town, “Hey, Mina.”

She wiped the sweat off her brow as she stopped practicing sword swings before responding, “Yes, my lord?”

“I have a job for you and the other four goblins.”

The sides of her mouth twitched and her eyes lit up, “I shall go gather them immediately!”

A couple of minutes later, the five goblins and Yervin were standing in his core room. Izu had been the first to arrive as he had been resting near to where Mina was training. Narcy was sleeping on her bed, so she came next. The others were practicing in the learning room, so they arrived together.

“A creature that I want to create just entered the dungeon, and if you kill it, I’ll gain the ability to create it,” Ian informed them.

“If all you need to do is kill it, then why not have that death machine kill it?” asked Yervin with a smirk. He used his thumb to point at the spider automata that had scuttled in behind them.

Ian wondered how Yervin’s personality came about. It didn’t seem the most appropriate for someone that was supposed to follow his every command with no questions asked. Of course, he didn’t want worshippers, Mina was already a bit too much, but it made him a little worried.

“Because it’s a good opportunity, Yervin. It may not be the most powerful of creatures, but it will be good for the five goblins to practice their teamwork, since they have to make sure it doesn’t run away. Thus, you’ll have to stand back and watch.

“It’s currently on the G- floor chewing on ferns and crushing spiders with its hind legs. The five of you have traversed my dungeon as a team before, so I’ll leave it to your discretion of how to kill it and make sure it doesn’t run away.”

That fact that he was terrible at teamwork and had not paid any attention to them while they traversed his dungeon had nothing to do with it.

“It shall be done, my lord!” saluted Mina, “Let’s go everyone!”

“Yes!” Izu, Pugi, and Botan shouted back, while Narcy just groaned in response.

Yervin nodded in approval and followed after them.

The spider automata turned back and forth between the leaving goblins and his core before it scuttled over and laid down next to his core.

Ian relayed the position of the horse-like creature, which wasn’t that hard at it hadn’t moved for a while. It had attempted to eat all the constriction ferns in the fern room, resulting in their death and disappearance. It had whined in anger for a while before going back to eating the normal ferns. Currently it was rolling around on top of the ferns in glee. It made him feel a bit bad about killing it, but that was almost completely overridden by his two main desires.

♦️♦️♦️♦️♦️

When they reached the G- floor, they split up into two groups. Group one, Izu and Pugi, headed through the spider room to cut off its escape path to the entrance hall. Group two, Mina, Botan, and Narcy, headed through the mush-room and the moss room, so they could surround it. Yervin stood behind Izu and Pugi to observe.

The two groups split up and started walking through the floor. The first group to reach the entrance to the fern room was Izu’s group. They hid in the shadows and observed the small horse creature rolling around on and eating ferns. About a minute later, Mina’s hand appeared from the other entrance and waved at them. However, before she finished waving, a loud scream echoed behind her, and Botan bolted past.

Izu and Pugi were surprised by the new development, but decided that Mina must have changed the plan and rushed out after him.

The horse creature was laying on its back as Botan ran into the room screaming at the top of his lungs. It panicked and stumbed to its feet as fast as possible. As soon as it stood tall, Botan was upon it. He dug his claws into its side and bit into its neck. A screeching whine resounded through the room as the creature bucked to get Botan off.

By that time Pugi and Izu had arrived. Pugi immediately sent a kick towards its groin, but the creatures hind legs hit her shins causing her to tumble a few feet backwards in pain. Izu sent a few slow moving water balls towards the creature, but most of them hit Botan instead making nasty red welts on his head and back.

The bucking of the creatures started to slow down as a pool of red blood formed around its feet. As it did, Botan was pulled off of the creature, while a sword was brought down onto its head. The resulting splatter disappeared as the mana was released back into the world.

“Botan! Explain yourself!” Mina growled as she placed him on the ground.

“It was crushing and eating the plants!” he yelled back with fire in his eyes.

“And? We may not need to eat, but most things do. That’s not good enough reason to go off plan.”

“But, I didn’t like what it was doing, so I had to do something about it!”

“We were! The entire point of this was to learn teamwork, but you just ran off on your own!”

“It-It wasn’t like we needed teamwork. Any of use could have taken that thing on our own. In-In fact trying to work together resulted in more injuries to ourselves,” Botan said pointing to the red welts on his body.

Mina’s hand quivered, but it stayed at her side, “Those red welts are your own fault, Botan. Izu and Pugi may not of made the best decision to go off plan, but they only did so because you rushed in!”

Izu and Pugi shuffled their feet trying to avoid eye contact with Mina.

Botan bit his lower lip, put his head down, and didn’t say anything else.

“I know you love plants Botan,” Mina sighed, “but you can’t let that love interfere with any jobs we are given. Wouldn’t it have been better to beat that creature into submission as it recoiled in fear over not being able to do any damage whatsoever to us? Giving it back the pain it gave your plants should have been a given, but it got the easy way out since you got too emotional.”

Botan looked back up at Mina and gave a resolute nod.

Yervin stood against the wall watching over the group with a small smile.

Izu was staring at Mina with a raised eyebrow and some slight trepidation.

Pugi was still staring at the ground.

Narcy, however, was sleeping in the entrance of the room.

♦️♦️♦️♦️♦️

After he felt the nice moment between the goblins went on long enough, Ian spoke up, “Well, thanks for killing the creature, even if the training exercise didn’t go as planned. It seems to be called a Chequin, just in case you wanted to know.

“However, your teamwork seems to be lacking,” Not that he was one to talk. “There are currently creatures entering the dungeon, mostly insects, so you all shall hunt them, even Yervin,” He really should have thought of this before. “The five goblins will attempt to practice their teamwork, while Yervin will get used to his powers in the main dungeon. Most importantly, make sure that none of them escape,” That fox escape wasn’t going to happen again.

“Yes!” the four goblins responded.

“Fine,” sighed Yervin.

“*snore*”

“Good luck, and if any adventurers enter my sphere of perception, then I’ll make sure to tell you. I don’t want abnormally powerful monsters on the wrong floors for them.” said Ian.

He got nods from each of them. A nod of reverence, acceptance nods, and an exasperated nod.

As the goblins went to hunt intruders, he went back to making his floor.

He had three of the five rooms decided: ferns, mushrooms, and chequins. Were mushrooms plants? No, but they fit his linear progression idea. Now for two insects. Hmm, even with all the new ones, he supposed he should finally use his centipede. Its naturally serrated edges would come in handy. For the other….how about the beetle, the first insect he killed. What was it called? Right, black beetle. There, five. Two old creatures, two new creatures, and one updated creature.

What enchantment would fit each creature? Nature? That technically fit all five. Although, nature did have a tendency to be more related to plants than other organisms for some reason. It might fit the fern room in that case.

A big aspect of mushrooms and other fungi was their reproduction through spores. Most monster variants often had a spore attack of some sort. Spore magic then? ….That would be difficult. Magic attributes related to life were often more difficult to produce than abstract concepts like nature and the sky. What was an abstract concept related to reproduction then? ….Proliferation. That’s good.

Should black beetles or serrated centipedes go first? Based on their biotic forms the centipede already has greater natural defenses than the black beetles, so it was likely to become more dangerous. For now, black beetle in the third room and serrated centipede in the fourth room. If their monster forms flipped their positions, he could just change it around.

A lot of insect monsters tended to be difficult to damage due to their exoskeletons, so a monsterized black beetle should be the same. However, if he was to use endurance to enchant the beetle room, what was he going to use to enchant the centipede room? The centipedes were long and spiky, so sharpness? That could work, but their serrated edges were passive defense, not active offense. Ian spent a couple more minutes thinking about it with nothing coming to mind. If thinking about centipedes didn’t come up with anything, then another avenue of enchanting would be worth pursuing.

What was something non-creature related that his dungeon was lacking? The first thing that came to mind was mechanical traps, but unless he wanted to pursue the dungeon trees or make an engineer monster that wasn’t going to be quick and easy. Still, traps. Of the magic ones he had, what was he lacking? He had water, earth, slime, jelly, light, illusion….he didn’t have fire. A chuckle bounced inside his head as he realized he didn’t have one of the most common trap types. Fire traps, although various in form, were abundant in every dungeon. It really shouldn't be a surprise as magically fire had a better ease of use to potential destruction ratio compared to most magics.

Of course, children with the fire attribute were a disaster waiting to happen because of this. Andre and Mackenzie often complained about university students that had never learned the difference between creating a lighter’s worth of fire and fire pillar. Even then, all he had to do was mention Estella’s attribute, and they were thankful for their fire students. The story her parents told, of how minutes after she was born, their house and the entire block blew up, embarrassed Estella to no end. They had to hire a tutor and a magic nullifier immediately in the hopes she could control her power as soon as possible.

Ian already knew what he was going to do for the chequin room, so with all the enchantments decided, he moved on to making the monsters.

He wanted three types of monsters in each room. He already had two ferns, constriction and water ferns, and two mushrooms, ankle biters and tiny mushmen, but he would have to make the rest.

For the first room, the ferns were nature attribute by default, so there weren’t any restrictions on the type of fern monster he could create. Thus, he pumped the fern full of shadow mana.

Race:

Shadow Fern

Rank:

F-

Attribute:

Shadow

Title:

﴾Biotic Born﴿

Skills

Spore Creation 〖Lv 1〗

Shadow Enlargement 〖Lv 3〗

Shadow Paralysis 〖Lv 2〗

Shadow Camouflage 〖Lv 2〗

Description

Fern monsters that have developed the ability to manipulate shadows with their mana. Low rank shadow ferns have not yet become one with the shadows and can only minorly influence them. In complete darkness these monsters are weaker than any other fern of equivalent rank as there are no shadows for them to manipulate.

Common Item Drops

F- Mana Heart

Black Frond

He compared the shadow fern to the F- rank constriction and water ferns.

Race:

Constriction Fern

Rank:

F- (+3)

Attribute:

Nature

Title:

﴾Biotic Born﴿

Skills

Spore Creation 〖Lv 1〗

Extend 〖Lv 2〗 (+1)

Constrict 〖Lv 3〗 (+2)

Bind 〖Lv 2〗

Race:

Wet Fern

Rank:

F- (+3)

Attribute:

Water

Title:

﴾Biotic Born﴿

Skills

Spore Creation 〖Lv 1〗

Water Creation 〖Lv 3〗 (+2)

Water Shot 〖Lv 2〗 (+1)

Water Blade 〖Lv 2〗

It was interesting to note that these ones he created from scratch, without letting them live in his dungeon for a while, all had one level three skill and one level one skill. Most of the ones of F- that he let develop had all level two skills at F- rank. It seemed creatures that developed in his dungeon didn’t receive a pure infusion of their attribute, the same as monsters on the outside.

From his studies what he had discovered was that the attribute presented by the system wasn’t completely correct. While that attribute made up over ninety percent of the individuals’ mana composition, there tended to be traces of others, trending towards any attributes the individual previously had. The same amount of experience was absorbed in the end, but having higher leveled skills related to an individuals’ attribute was generally deemed to be better. Other skills would suffer, but those skills were generally unused by the individual.

When he had asked Andre and Mackenzie to present his findings at their university, everything about them twitched. Their eyebrows, their pointed ears, and especially their fingers were shaking to their roots.

The initial rush to find the perfect place to train resulted in a lot of deaths. Fire attributes jumping into volcanoes. Water attributes diving into whirlpools. Earth attributes burying themselves alive. Wind attributes jumping off of large mountains. Metal attributes stabbing themselves. The rush died down as people stopped jumping to conclusions and being complete idiots in the face of becoming stronger.

The overall benefits of training in extremely harsh environments just for the increased attribute gain was negligible. The benefit of training while swimming or surrounded by fire was almost as good as jumping into a whirlpool or volcano. However, nature was not homogenous, and there were almost no areas where a single attribute made its domain. The end result was more efforts were spent on refining the experience they received rather than changing the type of experience they received. This resulted in his immense confusion as that was something he had to do from birth.

When he had trained his tamed monsters in other dungeons they had the same attribute problems as outside the dungeon. He had hoped that would change when the creatures were created by him, but sadly it seemed it wasn’t to be.

It was difficult to refine mana into the correct attribute, and he was glad to have started the goblins early. Of course, if they were like other monsters, then when they reached a high enough rank, actively refining wouldn’t matter. It varied between monsters species, but the higher the rank, the better they passively refined mana into their defined attribute. Everyone was disappointed this change in passive mana refinement didn’t apply to sapients.

Mana refinement may use the same process for both internal and external refinement, but external was a lot harder. In fact, no matter how much he said it was the same thing, no one agreed with him, even Estella. They all said that refining their mana to become a mana artist was not the same as refining received experience into the correct attribute. It was around this time he learned how garbage of a teacher he was.

Ian stopped reminiscing and contemplating before getting back to his floor. With three ferns made, he moved to make the first room. First, however, he needed to enchant the room.

The more abstract the attribute of mana, the more could be done with it, but the harder it was to do it. Nature encompassed literally the entire universe, but worked best when working with things related to geology and wild creatures. The questions was: what did he want to do with this room? Nature could apply the same effect of proliferation that would be in the mushroom room, but that would be redundant. ….How about something targeted towards the shadow ferns he just made?

All the rooms would have lights as he planned on making the enchanted walls, ceiling, and floor all glow in different colors for each room. To improve the shadow situation in the first room he needed bigger shadows, which meant he needed bigger ferns. To make bigger ferns, he needed to either make them himself or use nature to make them grow bigger. The problem was that his monsters and creatures didn’t grow naturally in his dungeon. Would a growth enchanted nature room grow things that weren’t growing? He supposed the only way to find out was to try it and make revisions to his normal formation. Thus, he began enchanting.

The shapes and lines of the formation grew from small to large as they proceeded through the formation. Shapes bloomed into bigger and better versions of themselves while maintaining their integrity and self. Not only did the growth of the formation progress along the walls, ceiling, and floor of the room, it progressed along every stalagmite, stalactite, and column. More than that, the progress occured into the depths of the formation. Each line was layered upon one another from small to large and back.

It one took Ian a day to complete the formation. Not having to spend time to infuse each line with vast amount of mana worked wonders. It glowed a light green and pulsed occasionally. The pulse had no purpose beyond the fact that he thought it looked cool.

He placed the three fern types in the room along with the green cave ferns. Now he only had to wait. While he was waiting, he placed a couple traps. A single water trap next to both the entrance and exit of the room. The two slightly upgraded illusion pitfalls were placed in front of a treasure he placed the corner and another pitfall in the corner opposite of the treasure chest. He set the treasure chest to be randomized F- equivalent loot.

Ian turned his attention back to the ferns. If he had just stared at them visually, then he doubted he would notice a difference. However, they were his creatures, so he could spot physical differences quite readily….it wasn’t just because he had kept analysis magic constantly monitoring it, okay. It seemed every fern in the room had grown slightly. A couple of minutes for a couple of centimeters was pretty good. Sometimes no matter how much time was spent specifying the details of a formation it still came out wrong, so he was pleased with the resulting growth increase. Now the only worry was if the room was cleared out every day, would the growth rate keep up. That was something he’d have to find out after people started to clear the floor.