Chapter 9

==========

[Dungeon]

A couple of days had passed since the man had left. Though it meant that I could get back to work, there was something missing now. It felt…

It felt…

Lonely? Yes. Lonely.

That was it. Was I lonely?

Perhaps.

Though I wasn’t sad about getting back to work, I felt more alone than I ever had before, and it was peculiar to me. At no point in the span of my life had I felt anything like this, nor had I ever experienced anything even resembling companionship or company. I had never been in proximity with a person and I had never even seen one before, before this man stepped inside me.

Never had I thought of what it might be like to spend the rest of time alone. I hadn’t even conceived that a feeling such as this might exist. Yet here I was, alone. The echoing silence of my dungeon rang like a gong in my head. I was alone! Alone!

I felt incomplete. For the first time in my life I had felt the joy of company. And even if the man hadn’t known I was there, watching him explore the depths. I had known him, and that was enough. I had felt the beating of life within my caverns and the experience was electric. I had felt alive.

What I had originally thought was an annoying, incessant drumming that stopped my work was life, conscious life. The feelings had shot through me. Now, in its absence, I felt the hollow, solitude flooding back in.

Why had they left me?

Would they be back?

Or…

Or, would they leave me forever?

NO!!!

They wouldn’t do that!

I was useful!

How could they leave me?

They couldn’t!

They would be back, I was sure.

I… I had to be ready, if the challenge was never ending then they couldn’t leave!

Why would they want to leave then?

They wouldn’t!

Snapping out of it I checked on my mana.

Fully charged!

I thought it seemed pretty reasonable for a few days of meditation gathering.

If I was exact and efficient with my building, I felt that I could get the next two floors done and dusted. Finishing off the ice levels was my plan for the next few days. Hopefully I would be able to move on to the next set before the man came back.

The floors I was planning on creating were in fact quite easy to do, in regard to mana consumption at least. Actually getting them to work though? That would be difficult.

Everything about my dungeon was supposed to be a self-sustaining. I didn’t want a huge maintenance job on my hands, limiting what I could do. That was the original plan. Now though, I was keen to take a greater interest in my dungeon.

I suspected that whilst I would gain a lot of mana from the adventurers being killed. I would also be spending a lot of that mana, in two ways especially.

First: I would have to repopulate my dungeon with all the killed mobs that weren’t part of the ecosystem. There was only so much reproducing my creatures could do and be battle ready. I was expecting to have to repopulate whenever a dangerous team came in and cleared out the floor. Whilst this didn’t pose a problem right now, it might in the future. Furthermore, I suspected that replacing a big mob boss would be quite expensive.

Secondly: I would be spending my mana on replenishing chests and resources that the adventurers took as well as switching things up a bit. After all, if the floors were always the same, then what on earth was the point in most of them. It would become boring and tedious and I was not going to get that label.

Dungeons had to grow and there must be a way of re-organising it. Surely it wasn’t that I had to destroy and recreate everything if my levels were wrong.

The system seemed to have everything imaginable in the store and I thought it unlikely that it would have overlooked this.

Focusing on what I wanted, I began to push the mana, filling up the mental shape of my dungeon when. Ding!

~~New skill acquired: Re-organise~~

It was called re-organise and it basically allowed me to magically re-organise my dungeon. It was seemingly able to cut out what I wanted and insert it where something else was. All I had to do was to make sure that the gaps left over were filled up by the sections that were replaced.

If I took a floor out, I would hold it in magical limbo and then swap it around and fill in the gaps. In this manner, I managed to start swapping floors and do all sorts of chaos. Playing around with it entertained me for quite some time. I ended up resorting to the original though. I was happy with it so far.

It did however give me ideas. For the ice run, this would come in handy as I could change up the routes and tracks.

From day to day, places would change, potentially catching out unwary adventurers. After all, once some experienced ones learned of the early levels, they would have no trouble advancing through quickly. Eliminating everything.

Thinking of all these ideas set me off into what I was in fact supposed to be doing, which was building floor nine.

When looking over the ice run, I had noticed - whilst I was totally not pushing helpless animals down the tracks - that when highly polished, the ice had a slightly reflective surface.

What I was hoping for, was a surface that was reflective enough that it would confuse the adventurers and mobs. Obviously, it wouldn’t be mirror like, there was just no way to achieve that wit ice. But hopefully it would confuse them enough that the creatures could finish them off.

First, I had to do some testing.

I summoned a block of ice. It stood in front of me, a towering pillar of frozen water. Slowly melting; droplets rolling down its side as I set to work.

The block had an uneven texture to its surface courtesy of the falling water droplets that had refrozen. They would have to be removed. Shaving the ice down with a blade of mana took a few attempts. Getting a flat uniform surface was rather difficult. Despite being basically a god within my own domain, it didn’t prevent classic parallax error. Something that all craftsmen had to deal with. Just winging it produced shoddy results and I had to retry to get it right.

Next, I had to polish it. It was a long and arduous process, though, if I could achieve the desired effect it would be a great level.

Result one was a failure. The ice just had too much colour to it. Any reflected image was far too hazy and blurred to be effective.

Using my magic, I delved into the ice to find out what caused its colour. It took a moment, but I detected traces of gas. The water had dissolved gases within it and when frozen they become trapped within the ice, leading to a white colouration.

Now, how to go about fixing this?

If I boiled the water, it would force the gases to be released and the water could then be frozen to leave a colourless transparent block.

Hopefully, this would work.

This in fact worked. I smiled to myself at it. Once again, I cut, smoothed and polished the surface to try and get the effect I was looking for.

Now that I had eliminated the gas problem I tested it. It wasn’t quite right. I could still see through the effect at certain angles. I needed more reflection. Common household mirrors used a reflective metal backplate to reflect the light. if I copied this design with compacted white ice, perhaps it would reflect better?

It did.

Once I was happy enough with the effect, it was time to start building.

From the exit of the eighth level, a set of stairs descended as usual before opening out into a set of caves. This time however, there was no large open cavern, but rather a termite mound style cave network.

Corridors of roughly carved out stone coated in ice, spiderwebbed out in various directions, opening up into rooms and then closing back down to corridors again.

This system of tunnels spanned a good 500m by 500m of ground. Though not very maze like, it still had enough dead ends and tricky bits to be annoying.

In each of the rooms, I placed slabs of this reflective ice. Images of the mobs and the adventurers would appear and change the perceived space of the room. It was supposed to be confusing and with a decent reflection I hoped it would work.

To test my concept, I released both predators and prey into the caves to see what would happen. They slid around on the icy floors a little, quite literally like a frightened horse on a frozen lake. Their newfound legs, unstable and uncontrolled as they floundered around.

Test one failed as I had forgotten to block off the access to the previous room and the animals had run upwards to try get somewhere warmer. Though it was still icy, the water level was warmer, and the nature levels natural warmth bled down through the layers. As it went deeper, the ice became colder and colder. I suspected that the adventurers would begin to seize up as the cold started biting in to the bones and a cold weariness set in.

Test two was more successful and the animals stayed in the level. Admittedly it was just that I had corrected my oversight. But, improvement, no matter where it came from was still improvements. Unfortunately, that was the only way in which it was more successful. I had placed the animals so far apart that they never got near each other. I got bored fast.

Test three could also be classed as a failure. I had chosen wolves as the predators and sheep as the prey. Both animals gathered in a pack or herd respectively and so when they saw themselves in the mirrors, they just accepted it as there were more of them. The wolves were more cautious since they couldn’t smell these phantom wolves, but they weren’t intelligent to realise why.

Tests four, five and six failed similarly, the predators just didn’t get it. I had tried out mammoths, lions, and something called a synth cat. None worked out very well for me, though the synth cat was interesting. I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to increase their intelligence, but I expected it would be the case.

The next ten tests failed just the same and I concluded that I would have to boost intelligence for the mirrors to work.

As a last-ditch effort, I tried a gorilla, it worked… Ish.

The gorilla reacted to the mirror as I wanted, however it immediately decided to smash it. Confronting the fake gorilla in a battle to the death.

Shortly after prevailing, the gorilla died. The cold had got to it. Gorillas were creatures of the forests, and warm ones at that. Not the frozen tundra.

No matter how much I adapted them, I doubted they would ever work in the level. But I had a starting point and that was what was important. It would work, the creatures just needed adapting.

The testing had shown me a few improvements to make and I was happy.

First, the ice needed to be sharp and cause injuries if broken. I expected that the ice mirrors would be destroyed quite often in battle.

Secondly, they just needed a bit of repositioning.

The problem with icy environments is that they are extremely harsh and inhospitable to almost all developed forms of life, excluding the yetis. There just wasn’t much that lived in the frozen regions.

The synth cat was my answer to this conundrum. When mana infuses the metal ores, the creatures that feast upon mana end up consuming the mana rich materials. As a result, they begin to take on the characteristics of said material. Hence the synth cat, synthetic from the metal affinity that it has and cat since, well it’s a cat.

The synth cat had a resistance to cold since it was no longer an organic being. Having consumed enough of the mana rich metal, the cat had transformed. A metallic gleam to its fur and metal spines and teeth that could crunch through all but the most stalwart of armours were the signs. Its tail could whip around like an Ankylosaur and spear through an adventurer.

The level had several smaller species of this cat, whilst towards the end they grew stronger.

The only task left was to put in the secret room. A simple small tunnel behind an outcropping at one of the dead ends led into a small room with some treasure, done. It was one of the easiest ones but there wasn’t much to be done in such a simple format. A simple mirror ice wall made the concealment better and I hoped it would be enough to challenge the adventurers. With any luck it wouldn’t be too easy.

Finishing off floor ten - the boss level for the ice realm -took me another day. Its cave was simple, with few stalactites and decorative feature to get in the way. It took very little time at all. The boss drained most of my mana though. It was a large behemoth that I couldn’t wait for the adventurers to have to face.

I had originally planned my dungeon to have rest levels at floor five, fifteen, thirty, fifty, seventy-five, one-hundred and so on. But I was now reconsidering whether or not to do so. Every five levels was also a good option for the safe haven and I would then be able to have very tricky floors if they only had to make it through five at a time.

I decided to go for it and create another safe haven. I could always change later.

The main reason that I wanted to do such a thing was because I wanted to throw adventurers from frigid icy conditions into blisteringly hot deserts.

The body would have to work hard with such rapid temperature changes and it just made life much much harder for them. Evil, I know, but delightfully evil.

Sat on a frozen lake, in the middle of a frosted cavern was a delicate, imposing castle of ice. A gate of frosted spears sat between two sharp towers, rising up into the sky like skyscrapers.

Within its walls was the central courtyard. From the covered corridors around the edge, the centre had a social area and a fire pit, I wasn’t that hateful.

Snow was used for a lot of the bedding. Cold metal chests that would freeze closed and toilets were the few amenities in the rooms. Couldn’t give them too much.

It would do.

Menu

Name

???

Race

Dungeon

Titles

Renown

Just Discovered

Skills ^

14

Rating

4D

Level

45

Health

3,451/3,451

Mana

2,461/22,960 (22,960 mana for Lvl up

Knowledge

22,034

Dungeon Points

107

Status

OK

Attunement

E4, N3, I3

Rooms

523

Floors

10+(2)

Bosses

2+(1)

Monsters

2035

Creatures

46,132

Creature types ^

1428

Unique Items

1

Item Types ^

282