And she was doing so well! Fifteen mana regeneration in like five minutes, and then this douchebag shows up with his negative forty-two. APPARENTLY, that meant that not only was this guy keeping her from making improvements, but he was sponging off her limited supply of mana to supply his basic needs. A slime took up one mana regeneration, so this guy consumed the resources of over three dozen slimes, just walking around. It boggled Avery’s mind how such a small frame could be such an ecological disaster that it was on par with a small nest of slimes setting up without being purged. With that many all in one place, they’d be enough to kill an armed person with a decent bit of experience.

Considering the relative upkeep costs, it might actually be worth investing in a pile of slimes just to keep this particular guy out of here… Avery stopped that line of thought. It would cost two thousand mana to get forty slimes, and she’d still be in the position of having a bunch of worthless balls of goo inside her. Negative ninety-nine mana regeneration was bad enough, and she didn’t have the two thousand to spare anyway. There might be bonuses for certain amounts of monsters spawned though…

“Hello! I’m baaaack. And I brought back my stuff too. Would you say you would consider yourself intelligent life, by the way? Not now, since you’re dead and alllll wait a minute, what happened here? Pretty sure this was just a smooth tunnel carved out by extremely high levels of energy obliterating everything in a straight line when I left.”

Stopping to put down the box in the center of the chamber, the invader looks askance at the blanket hanging on the left wall. Turning away from the ‘tapestry’, they say “I’m not falling for your trap a second time. If I go near that thing it’s going to fall on me and I’ll be stuck under it. Clearly you aren’t aware of the type of being you’re messing with here,” before noticing the other wall. “Oh, neat. The exposed trap on the left is a clue to imply symmetry of the room, letting the wary know that they aren’t safe on either end. I, however, am equipped with exactly the toolset necessary to disarm this nefarious contraption.”

Raising a palm toward the grey tapestry on the wall, the invader pulls down from the center of the room, and the fabric easily detaches itself from the stone and crumples in a heap upon the ground, revealing the map below.

Your secret has been discovered for the first time! You gain a one-time bonus of fifty mana.

New information there. Judging from the lack of verbal components when he used it, that was a spell-like ability of the cantrip Mage Hand. It was technically possible for it to have actually been the spell, but that would both be an inefficient use of mana, since making a spell silent increases the consumption by a stage, and would require that he had spent significant time and effort learning how to make spells of all kinds wordless. That was honestly less useful than removing the physical gestures associated with the given magics, seeing as how there were more situations where somatic components would be impossible to use while the verbal would not be, such as when a wizards arms were pinned by a stronger creature, or they were bound by ropes out manacles, but not gagged. Removing the verbal part of a spell would mainly be useful for being sneaky, and, while an application of five pounds of force unobtrusively would be an asset in a wide variety of situations, it was comparatively less useful than many ordinary spells that use the same amount of mana, but don't require learning to silence casting. The Sleep spell, for instance.

Additionally, a wizard would need to be significantly more powerful than Avery to think so little of casting one of their spells with so little provocation. Whereas she was dumping soul energy into the environment, a wizard would just use the external mana they absorb, leaving the soul untouched, able to grow larger and hold more mana. Apparently a Dungeon Core just relied on the size of it's gem for that, and could use all the mana contained within it, or so Avery started theorizing, but even if that was true a negative mana regeneration and zero mana would mean being trapped forever as an inert stone, unable to affect anything going on around her. That was a bit of a horrifying thought, particularly along with the possibility that any given gem could be a tormented consciousness trapped in an eternal prison of their own corporeal form. Deciding not to think about that, Avery instead celebrates the windfall of a cantrips worth of mana.

“Yes!”

Surprised by the sudden noise, the invader jumps backward away from the engraved map, bumping into the opposite wall. Jostled from the impact, the tapestry falls forward onto their head, covering the creature in heavy fabric and bringing it down to the ground.

“No, not again! How could this happen to me?”

As the useless lump on the ground struggles to free itself from the blanket, Avery decides to spend her non productive time productively. Just because she couldn't use anything in the menus didn't mean she couldn't explore them at all. First off, she had the stone weapons. Though the outline comes up red when she selects the option, she us able to think of pretty much any given object that would be used for combat and have the mana cost update to reflect the item. A farming sickle would cost six mana, whereas a spear was only two for some reason. Next was one of the far too expensive things, the stone armor. Judging by it's outline, it was in fact a full suit of plate armor, which she could modify to be slightly larger or smaller in places, or otherwise adjust how it would sit on a person. Not having been a professional blacksmith, Avery could generally determine what size equipment would fit an adventurer that went into her parents shop, but magical equipment, even the weakly enchanted stuff like her family mass produced, would automatically adjust to the wearer, to a limited extent. You couldn't expect a chain shirt made for a human to expand enough for a giant to wear or anything like that, but usually something like that would modify itself enough to fit a dwarf or elf. Non-magical rocks would not.

Looking it over one last time before moving on, Avery notices that there looked to be cloth padding inside the suit. Since she didn't have access to that material back when the item unlocked, that implied the various options in the build menu would occasionally be upgraded without fanfare when new materials became available. The cost for the armor didn't increase either, which meant there was no downside to making the superior version of the item once it was available. When there wasn't someone blocking her, Avery could just demolish the inferior structure and build the new version in its place for no actual cost.

Clothes seemed pretty self explanatory, and it was. As tempting as it was to just spend all the time waiting for her invader to leave overlaying her body with dresses, Avery moved to the obscenely expensive robe section.

It was different. Instead of a freeform creation, she had a choice between nine premade designs, each of them with a very different price. The most expensive one looked to be covered in eyes, while the next most expensive was just an ordinary unmarked robe. However, the least expensive robe looked the most interesting to the necromancer, being covered in patches in the shape of bones.

“Hate these traps. Even when you solve the puzzle, you still have to manage to avoid them somehow.”

“It's not even really a trap! You just keep pulling my blanket off the wall and onto yourself. It's a decoration!”

“Then you need to secure it better, it shouldn't fall off at the slightest bump.”

“I was in the process! You barged in as soon as I got them up at all, and now I have to start over.”

“Oh. Yeah, I guess it would be a bit difficult to do things without a physical body. Good job on clearing up those rocks that killed you. And you… used them to build a wall separating the halves of the tunnel for some reason? It's like you're trying to match up with this blueprint you carved under the first trap.”

“It's not a trap! And for your information, I already did.”

“Huh, I was only gone for… ok yeah I'll admit I got distracted by a tree for a while. Still, judging by the side of this room and the dimensions indicated by this map, you would have had to excavate about four hundred cubic meters of stone for the rooms. That’s pretty impressive.”

“There’s also corridors.”

“How’d you manage that? Do you function as a poltergeist, moving things around as though you still have physical form, or more like a movie haunting where things just happen for no discernable reason?”

“I’m not a ghost, and have no idea what you’re talking about, but I guess it works more like the second one. I’m a necromancer, and I’m alive.”

“Ah, a specialist then. I don’t know much about the profession myself, but you’d be surprised what a healer with a good book on the subject can do with bones. Pretty sure you’re dead though. Any spontaneous generation of blood on the walls or anything like that yet?”

“Get out of here, or there’s gonna be blood on the walls non-spontaneously!”

“Kind of a more credible threat now that you’ve shown a bit of your capabilities. I’m almost certain I can still take anything you’d try and do, but as a gesture of goodwill I’ll step out for a bit until you calm down.”

“While you’re out, could you tell my parents I won’t be home tonight?”

“First off, if that’s your unfinished business that’s pretty lame. Second, I don’t know where they live.”

“Screw you, I’ve only been gone for like a day, and I’m not dead. We live in the outer city, three streets down and two houses to the right.”

“You lost me there, what city?”

“The one on top of the cliff. How did you spend so many hours out there and not notice it?”

“I get distracted easily. Any specifics?”

“Just go down to the valley, go up the path to the top, and it’s the thing with the giant tower with a ball on top in the middle.”

“Huh. Need to go check on that first then. Be right back.”

And with that, Avery once again turned away an adventurer before they could get to the room she held her core in. Menus unlocked, she demolishes the tapestries on either side of the chamber and recreates them in their proper place, which prompts another notification to come up.

Would you like to set these features to automatically reset when the dungeon is clear? Yes No

Selecting yes, Avery thinks for a moment about what she had found to give mana regeneration. There was five for rooms and one for corridors, five for a secret, and five for making a floor map. She didn’t want to have to find out if the regeneration for the map was revoked if she made changes to the layout, so she was probably going to have to make a new floor instead. Fortunately, she already had a perfectly serviceable hole in the ground to act as an entrance to a lower level.

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

Twenty-four seconds after falling into the pit trap, Ham stood up, restored to full health. An entire three meter square area in front of both the iron door and the door he had been walking to had fallen away beneath him, and the hole below had been seven meters deep. It probably wouldn’t have killed him, but if he had landed more wrongly it was entirely possible that the damage done would have been enough to knock him out instead of simply breaking his legs. If that were the case, healing wouldn’t have been nearly so quick, as he wouldn’t be able to channel the deathly energy into his skeleton without consciousness.

Looking at the walls of the pit, they seemed consistent with the typical dungeon wall. Uneven surface, some handholds and footholds visible in the slopes, and otherwise simply like a block of stone had been pulled from the ground roughly. Ham wasn’t much for physical exertion, but he had a pick, time, and unlimited power. He could stab actual handholds in a stable manner and climb up slowly.

Starting off on a side of the pit, so he could brace against the wall on the opposite corner, he begins. After three minutes of picking, and halfway up the wall, he gets stuck on an outcropping and falls back down. Since that was only about three meters, he didn’t take very much damage from the collision with the stone, and was back up the wall in less than half a minute. This time, it’s easier, and he makes it all the way out of the pit in a total of five minutes. Somehow, a hole in the ground had been his most fearsome opponent so far in the dungeon. For some reason, it seemed that the majority of the place was empty rooms and corridors that went nowhere, with the occasional decoration or trap. He hadn’t even found any treasure yet.

At the very least, he is able to decay his way into the next room, which was again an empty one with three exits. Deciding to discount the furthest door on his right, as it was different from the other two, being a portcullis rather than an actual door, he flips his coin and goes to the right.

Another empty room. This one only had one exit though, so he rips through the door, immediately finds a crossroad, and flips the coin before noticing that to his right, not only does the path end quite rapidly, it also has his first real gain of the dungeon. Hanging from chains and manacles from the wall are four skeletons.