POV Archmage Orius

“Oohh, these bones of mine are getting too old to be doing this,” said Orius as he walked through the Outrey forest.

He was currently in this forest due to the mana surge that was detected by Nodia, the most famous school of magic in the Ekesh continent.

“And what do you know, being friends with and owing a favour to Nodia’s headmaster, Eris. And he sent me away on this adventure,” grumbled Orius as he stretched his arms and back. He knew that he would have loved doing this, rather than teaching those snot-nosed nobles who think that he should bow down and kiss their feet, if not for the uncomfortable bedroll. “I’m too old for this.”

Despite how young he looked, he was still an old man. He just recently had his 210th birthday.

Before Orius went on and on about Eris and his age, he stopped his train of thought and went back to what he was supposed to be doing.

Even though this was not his area of expertise, he was still sent to the outrey forest and everlasting mountains to figure out the origin and the effects of the mana wave. His true area of expertise was creatures, monsters, and plants of any period. Well, he practices nature magic and different subclasses of elementalism. Still, his main academic focus was living creatures and the magic involved with them. And because of this, he has been on many field jobs and dungeon expeditions. But he still and always will hate not being able to sleep on his nice comfortable bed at home.

Anyways, Orius had spent the past 27 days trying to figure out the source of the mana wave, but it was like the source disappeared. It was evident that there was a mana source, as the changes in the environment’s mana saturation would not have been as high as it was. He decided that either the mana source ran out or was taken by somebody else before he got there. So, he packed up his mana equipment, the scrapings and specimens he had collected from the environment with high mana saturation, and he put everything into his storage bag. The storage bag allowed Orius to place a finite number of objects of any size within the bag without having any of the weight of the items weigh him down. He grabbed his bag and set off onto the road leading to the new dungeon town, Porta.

He also had a job with the adventurers guild to evaluate samples found in the new dungeon in the town of Porta.

Orius walked down the path for another couple of hours before he reached the entrance to the town. As he walked up to the entrance, he could see men and women building a large wall that encircled the town. He walked up to the entrance and gave his guild identifier to the two guards. The guards looked at his identifier, looked at him, and ushered him towards the guildhall.

When Orius reached the guildhall, a woman was standing right inside the door to meet him.

“Archmage Orius? My name is Chiura Ogi. I’m the guild master of Porta and the territory around the town and the dungeon. If you would come with me?” said the guild master while gesturing to the stairs leading to the second floor.

As they were walking, the guild master started asking him questions. “I’m surprised that someone of your level came all this way just to evaluate some samples from the first floor of a new dungeon.”

“Well, I was already going to be in the area. And besides, I wanted to see what this new dungeon is all about,” replied Orius.

As they talked, guild master Ogi brought him into her office and opened up a mana safe. Orius found it interesting that a guild master that was not in charge of a large or essential territory would have a safe that would only open if the registered owner’s mana was inserted into the safe, along with the combination.

“I can see you wondering about my safe over there, archmage Orius,” called the amused guild master as she was entering the code into the safe. “I was a guild master from a busier area, and I brought it with,” she explained as she brought out vials and samples of natural material.

Orius’s attention was instantly grabbed by what she brought out. He grabbed his bag, pulled out some of his devices, and started studying them with his special magnifying glasses.

After a couple of minutes, he looked at the guild master and said, “These samples are fascinating. Overall they are somewhat common in this area, but that’s not the most interesting thing. It’s that these samples contain a lot more mana than in this area. You said this was from the dungeon, correct?”

“Yes, all of the samples were collected within the dungeon’s first floor,” confirmed guild master Ogi.

“Oh my,” replied Orius. “Then, I guess I’ll have to visit this dungeon.”

* * *

POV Teaghan

It has been a couple of days since she had used her new 2x time magic room effect on her experiment room. What occurred was very interesting. Teaghan had created an experiment room where she just placed small plants, including the montesia plant, and small animals, such as spiders and rats. She then set the abilities “merge” and “cross-breed” onto the room and the creatures and plants within it. Teaghan had never used both skills before at the same time, so hopefully, it will work, and the time effect would speed up the results.

During these past couple of days, Teaghan had observed many solo and groups of adventurers coming into her dungeon. With this large influx of visitors, another blue screen from her status interface was accessible, her dungeon’s mortality rate.

She pulled it up to see the current mortality percentage rate of any who visit her dungeon.

Average Mortality Percentage Rate

36.7%

From what Teaghan observed, this percentage rate was only because complete newbie adventurers were making stupid mistakes and getting themselves killed without any interference from herself. But, over the last couple of days, the death rate was getting lower and lower with the larger amounts of visitors having knowledge about the traps, monsters, and creatures within her first and second floor.

Yes, the second floor had been breached a couple of hours after the guild master spoke in front of her dungeon and the influx of adventurers happened.

From just watching the adventurers, Teaghan decided to not make any changes to the first couple of floors as she grew bigger, which would make the floors more difficult for visitors. She chose this because she figured that if all of her floors became more and more dangerous, not many people would venture within her realm. So, Teaghan decided that going forwards, her floors would get harder and harder every five or so levels while leaving the first floors relatively the same difficulty as before.

As she wondered about her future floors and how to make them better, she felt somebody powerful walked through the dungeon entrance.