As the ogre chief faded into mana, the hobgoblin body Ian possessed crumbled into ash before it too returned to mana. With his focus back in his core room, he focused on the new windows that had appeared before him.

Dungeon War Won!

Reward: 1 Free Perk.

Dungeon Contract Completed.

Considering the prep work and amount of creatures he killed, they seemed to be somewhat lackluster fanfare. Although, he had high hopes for the free perk, and it did make sense that he already received his reward of around eight hundred dungeon contractees.

Ian brought up the reward menu and began browsing. He scrolled through his choices before realizing there was a search option like the Dungeon Shop and typed in what he wanted. When his selection popped up, the spine of his book curved into a grin. He hadn’t expected it to be there.

Ecosystem

In a designated floor, all creatures will act like they would in their natural environment. Sapient monsters will not be affected by this however, their instincts will be more prominent in these rooms. Before the floor can be entered by intruders, it must develop into a working ecosystem first.

His choice of perk multipliers rather than this was a stupid decision in hindsight, but thanks to the Dungeon War (he really wanted to hug that simple window now) he could rectify that mistake. In fact, he wasn’t seeing the negatives to having a large number of dungeon wars. Sure, sapients would get up in arms about a dungeon going to war all the time, but according to Tidon he was unkillable unless the gods designated him as such. As long as dungeons went to war with non-sapients and focused on warring with monsters, the gods wouldn’t have any good reason to designate them as killable.

With a Dungeon War he was able to get a perk that he was normally only able to get every one hundred levels. Additionally, the amount of brand new mana he released into the universe was high enough that he was no longer worried about providing adventurers with proper rewards. Well, not completely, but he was at least willing to test out more useful rewards than he was before.

The problem was in his two hundred and fifty years as a human, he had never come across any dungeons that he would consider to be participating in a Dungeon War. It was possible he was an abnormality with sending so many creatures out of his dungeon, but considering the purpose of dungeons that seemed unlikely. Him and his friends were also present, which might have mitigated dungeons even attempting to send creatures outside. However, if those ideas weren’t true, that meant there was probably a reason dungeons didn’t participate in Dungeon War after Dungeon War. The most likely reason being his previous thoughts that dungeons themselves can’t instigate a Dungeon War.

Ian shook himself out of his revery; he had things to do before he got sapients that would build a town or city around him. ...At least the non-monster sapients...it still felt weird for him to think about monsters as sapients.

First he checked on the groonvat. It seemed they had divided the houses into family units, and he noticed a couple of personal possessions scattered throughout the house. There were some groonvat inside the houses, but most of them were either in the center courtyards or outside their homes basking in the light from the daytime portion of the ceiling. Their tails were fanned out to gain as much surface area as possible, while their stumps or feet split into roots that burrowed into the ground to absorb its nutrients. Good thing he created a layer of dirt over the impenetrable dungeon stone. As he observed their absorption of the light and nutrients, there was another stream of mana entering their bodies. That stream was the same as his created dungeon creatures but smaller. It seemed while they still had to get nutrients to sustain them, they were topped off by the mana that permeated his dungeon.

After his observations, Ian focused on the chief of the groonvat, who was walking from house to house making sure his villagers were settling in fine, “Hey, Arend, how’s everything going?”

The groonvat jumped slightly before taking a second to respond, “Oh, Ian, everything’s going well. Mirielle woke up and is with Cynthia.They’re consoling each other about what happened. The rest of the village is adjusting to things. Not living in a forest for the first time is thoroughly confusing them. The nutrients and light levels aren’t as good as the forest, but we remain just as full as when we lived in the forest. I assume that has something to do with being in the dungeon?”

“Yeah, I’ll explain it to you after you tell your village about them coming from a dungeon.”

“*sigh* That means the implications are as bad or worse than that?”

“Yep.”

“Well, it will be a while then. You saw Cynthia’s reaction. I only reacted so well because the speculations from the previous chiefs’ memory packets. Having the idea in my mind made the impact of that revelation a lot duller for me.”

“Hmm, okay, I’ll need to learn more about how your telepathy works later. I expected your whole village to start freaking out soon after you and Cynthia had the revelation. For now, though, I’ll leave it to you, you know your people better than I do.”

“Thank you. Also, before you go, some personal effects would be useful if you could provide them.”

“I could, but how about you just go back to your village and gather as much as you can?”

“Oh, right. That’s related to why you agreed to help us, yes?.”

“Yes, so after you get the stuff from your village, send out hunting and collecting parties to start bringing creatures and items back to the dungeon. If you encounter danger or other sapients, make sure to rush back to the dungeon. If you still need things then, I’ll use some of my focus to provide it to you if it’s available.”

“That is much appreciated. I’ll go form the parties now.”

“Talk to you later, Arend.”

Ian moved his focus from Arend to the sapient monsters in his dungeon: Yervin, Mina, and the rest. They were all in their respective homes with most of them sleeping. Yervin was snoring up a storm. Thankfully he never had that problem while human...at least he was never told he had that problem. Mina and Izu were snuggled in each other’s arms. He didn’t even need to check on Narcy to see what she was doing.

He addressed the three that were awake just talking with each other, well two of them were talking while the third was just kinda there, “How’s it going Botan, Pugi, Arc?”

“Everyone’s sleeping,” Botan and Pugi answered, while Arc did a little jig of affirmation.

“I knew that,” muttered Ian as he ignored the little smirks that appeared on their faces, “I meant in regards to the Dungeon War and what are you going to do now.”

They both gave a little shrug of their shoulders while looking at each other, and Botan answered, “We’ll continue doing what we did before the war, and I assume the others will do the same.”

“Okay, I guess that’s good. After I’ve prepped the dungeon for actual adventurers, I’ll reward you guys with something. I don’t know what yet thought.”

“How long will that be?” asked Pugi.

“Hmm, based on the distance of the nearest sapient settlement?” Ian mused, “Maybe a week if they started traveling immediately after I opened my dungeon. But there are other factors: how well they can detect the mana density increase, how much they care about a dungeon at this distance, how much they fear the creatures that live around the mountain, etcetera. Technically, it could take hundreds of years if they have no interest in moving towards this mountain.”

“So, no rewards for hundreds of year then?” Pugi pouted.

Ian laughed, “What? Oh, no, no, the actual prepwork I have in mind won’t take that long. And if we don’t get actual adventurers coming to the dungeon, I’ll try to do something about it. As much as I like building the dungeon and evolving creatures, if no one comes in to admire what I’ve done, then I lose half of the enjoyment I get from making something.”

Pugi’s face brightened up with a wide grin and wide open eyes, “Great!” Botan nodded in agreement with a grin of his own. Arc began rubbing their two front legs together.

“Make sure to tell the others then, I’ll be putting most of my focus on improving the dungeon.”

With nods and waves goodbye from the three of them, his focus shifted back to his core room.

His first problem was mana. He had enough for most things if we waited for a while, but producing creatures above B rank would be immensely difficult. Either he needed some way to get more mana, or some other way to evolve his monsters. ...Oh. Right. The trees. Those were for monsters too. Forgetting about that felt like the time he hadn’t realized a magic tool had a function to dim or undim and lived in perpetual twilight for five years. Eventually Ian calmed down and realized he didn’t know how expensive the higher rank creatures would cost DP wise, but using the staff as comparison they shouldn’t be too expensive.

Still, having a perk to increase his available mana would be useful. Ian began searching through the Dungeon Store hoping the opposite of the Mana to DP conversion perk was available and the conversion wasn’t too pricey. If his choice of ecosystem perk came to bite him in the ass this soon, he would only be able to shake his pages in defeat.

It was there! And the conversion was more than reasonable, it was astounding! For one hundred thousand DP he could get one hundred thousand mana for every DP spent. The next tier up for an additional five hundred thousand DP he could get one million mana for every DP spent. Sadly, he couldn’t get the million DP upgrade to get ten million mana for every DP as he only had around eight hundred thousand DP left.

The prices left Ian to think. How were mythical creatures only one hundred thousand while this was up to a million DP? ...He never checked the requirements for those creatures did he? He just thought those would be cool and moved on. With a shrug he bought the first two upgrades.

Now that he had around eight hundred billion mana to work with, he could get started. Of course, he would only convert his DP when needed.

Ian looked at his new ecosystem perk with eyes of longing, but with a sigh he moved on. Needs before pleasure.

After purchasing the rock treasure, the ore vein perk, the self-replenishing ore vein perk, and purchasing up through the rock treasure tree for copper, iron, silver, steel, gold, titanium, magisteel, mithril, orichalcum, adamantite, and vast number of other treasures, Ian was left with around five hundred thousand DP. So much for having eight hundred billion mana to spend.

The general outline of the floor was composed of deep cave terrain with a couple intersecting corridors along with multiple dead ends. Unlike his previous floors, Ian made this floor vertically oriented. Overall the floor size was slightly larger than the G- and G rank floors, but each segment was about the size of the F- floor. There were ten segments, each constructed in a similar manner to his room and corridor structure that was present on previous floors. The difference being that each segment was connected by hole in the floor or ceiling, depending on the segment. Each of theses shafts was variable in how they allowed the intruders to proceed through each segment. Some shafts had a straight drop with no handhold, while others had handholds. Others were curving corridors that were either smooth enough to slide down or had rocky protrusions that had to be carefully climbed down. Overall, the floor looked like ten smaller floors stacked on top of one another with pipes between each floor layer.

Ian made sure to make layers of non-dungeon stone that could be mined through. There was still dungeon stone behind the non-dungeon stone, he couldn’t have adventurers plummeting into a void of nothingness.

The non-dungeon stone in the first segment was easy to break, but became harder to mine with each successive segment downwards. With the breakable stone in place, he began seeding the ore veins in each level. Going downward, Ian seeded copper, iron, silver, steel, gold, titanium, magisteel, mithril, orichalcum, and adamantite. There was less and less of each type of ore going downwards, so copper had the most and adamantite had the least. A much larger decrease in ore was present between gold and titanium as the last five ores were much rarer.

Even if he made the latter five ores much rarer compared to the first five, the fact that adventurers could get such rare materials so easily (this floor would be before the EX rank floor) was a problem. He wanted to get these floors out quicker, so he didn’t have time to play around with making strong monsters. As such, he began covering the floor in one large magic formation composed of many smaller magic formations.

The primary attributes he used were earth, metal, life, construct, and time. With a combination of sharp, solid lines; flowing, variable lines; a complex web of lines; and some clock shapes, Ian was able to finish the formation and test it out within seven days. Not having to worry about conserving mana made the process a lot quicker. The fact that the formation used the dirt, stone, and ore he already created also helped.

The formation detected life signs within a specific area of the floor, if any life signs were detected in that area for a set period of time, the formation would spawn a golem made from the surrounding material. If there wasn’t enough material to make a specific type of golem, then he was able to get the formation to obtain mana from the other universe to create the remainder.

Each segment would create dirt, stone, and ore golems. What type of ore golem it would be would be dependent upon the ore present in the segment. The time it took to spawn a golem was dependent upon each segment. It would take much longer to spawn a golem on the copper segment, but only a couple of minutes in the adamantite segment. The three different golem types would also take different times to spawn with dirt being the quickest, then stone, then the ore golems taking the longest.

He had considered letting the golems wander and persist, but decided that would make the floor too difficult. Thus, the golems wouldn’t leave their designated areas and would return to their respective material after a month. It was a long time, but he didn’t want stealthy adventurers coming in every day and taking some of the rarer ores. They’d accumulate too fast then. That also meant the door to the boss room couldn’t be in the tenth segment as only the strongest of adventurers would be able to make it through that segment. To give a proper challenge but still have it possible to get through the floor, he decided that the fifth segment would be the best option when he had the option to place the boss room.

The floor was in essence complete (at least Ian considered it complete), but his floor requirements didn’t feel the same. So, with a bit of a huff, he placed the minimum amount of creatures throughout the floor. Ten was the minimum, so he placed one on each segment. He also made sure they were the weak G- rank version of creatures that he had placed on previous floors. Thankfully the formation counted towards his formations requirement and his traps requirement. The ores counted for his treasure requirement, so he was good on that front. Thus, the only thing left to do was his magic requirement. That would of course be fulfilled by the floor lights.

Rather than have balls of light and long strings of light that seemed to make the whole floor glow, he wanted the lights for the Golem Mine to give the impression of a mine. So, on the ceiling of each segment, Ian created latticed cages equidistant from one another. Inside those cages he created a magical, flickering flame. The color of the magical flame was dependent upon the ore in each segment. Copper, silver, and gold were self-evident; iron, steel, and titanium were shades of grey; magisteel, mithril, orichalcum were shades of blue, and adamantite was black.

With the floor requirements met, Ian copied over the functions from the previous entrance room and boss room. For the entrance room, he simply created reliefs of golems on the columns rather than the few monsters and creatures he put on the floor. The boss room, however, was a major problem. It only took what were designated as monsters to be the boss, so he was left with weak G- rank options for his boss. As he scrunched his pages up, Ian began to look for a function to mitigate this problem.

After a couple of hours he found a couple of worthwhile functions, Trap Boss, Treasure Boss, Creature Boss, Magic Boss, and Magic Formation Boss. With these new functions everything he placed could become a boss. The function that selected the boss through monsters killed received priority as long as he had it turned on and didn’t work with his new functions. Of course, just because it could be made into a boss didn’t mean it worked well as one. Any bosses based on his magical lights from previous floors would be a walk in a park as the intruder just had to walk through a brightly lit room.

For the boss of the Golem Mine, he set it to the golem formation. However, upon testing it out, the boss room spawned a group of five adamantite golems, not the challenging but possible to get through boss that he intended. Thankfully, due to the variable nature of his formation, he was able to customize the boss makeup as he desired. Considering his versatility in magic and magic formations, his boss rooms just got a lot more versatility with the latest functions than he thought they would.

Ian changed the boss makeup from five adamantite golems to one copper golem, one iron golem, one silver golem, one steel golem, and one gold golem. Rather than fight the intruders all at once, the copper golem would spawn first, and the iron golem would spawn either after the copper golem was defeated or after fifteen minutes had passed. The successive golems would follow that pattern of either spawning fifteen minutes later or after the previous tier of golem had been defeated. Once all five of the golems had been defeated, then the intruders could pass through the floor.

He debated adding improvements to the formation to make the gold golems harder as it was a softer material compared to the rest. Of course, magically created golems were harder than their original material, but it was still softer compared to the other golems. After a while, Ian decided to leave them until he got actual adventurers. If they started to extract too much gold, he’d made the changes then.

With the floor complete, Ian gave a quick test of the formation. In one of the more open spaces on the copper ore segment, the stone surrounding a copper vein began to shake. Cracks formed in the copper and formed boulders of the ore. The large gathering of copper fell to the floor from the wall. Once released from its stone prison, the golem stood up, its head reaching the ceiling. It was humanoid in shape, but its profile was of numerous misshapen round boulders folded into a human shape rather something that had been sculpted with immaculate detail.

As it had no vocal chords, it made no roar, but the grinding of copper against copper could be considered a type of roar. Once it realized there were no intruders to fight, it began to roam the room, but never leaving it. Ian checked out all the other golems with each one performing in the same manner. Seeing the small chunks of the rarer ores fall from the wall and then sprout into enormous golems was quite amusing to watch.

Ian’s final touch for the floor was to turn off the instance function for this floor. While the floor itself wasn’t much larger than previous floors, he didn’t want enormous amounts of useful ore to pour into whatever kingdom or empire he was near. With a limited amount of space, they would have to ration themselves. Especially if he set the self-replenishing ore to replenish every day or every couple of days. For now he set it to replenish every day.

Dungeon Level [6] → [7]

1 Cubic Kilometer Floor Space Gained.

Mana Generation Increased by 10,000

DP Generation Increased by 1

Ian had been going off of memory for his DP numbers, so when he noticed that his DP pool was around two million more DP than it should be, he could only stare. As his nonexistent eyes stared at the window, his book did a little hop. Oh, right! Killing five hundred sapient ogres was bound to give him a lot of DP. But, two million? If that was a good estimate for normal adventurers, then dungeons were more DP based than mana based than he thought. Also, while he might be ahead of the curve, maybe it wasn’t as much as he thought. Although, the death rate of adventurers in new dungeons wasn’t high at all. Maybe a couple a year. Well, it was even more information to think on when he had the time.

He pushed those thoughts to the back of his mind. With only a couple more levels until he could begin research, he began on his next project: a farm. Wait! If he had two million additional DP, he could buy the next tier of the DP to mana conversion! The farm could wait a minute.