As soon as the invader leaves the dungeon, Avery demolishes the box again. With mana filling her once again, she turns her attention to whatever nonsense she had just been talking about. Somehow, she was going to have to write both a note and directions.

Paper, paper. Ah, paper was fairly cheap. Five sheets for two mana. The hard part was going to be figuring out how to write with it without any kind of marking material, and no ability to manipulate it once the thing was made. Oh hold on a moment, a spellbook with a hundred pages was only fifteen mana. That was a much better rate of return. Then again, Avery didn’t really need a massive quantity of paper, and that would basically be wasting thirteen mana to get...

If she had the invader tear all the pages out of the spellbook, then demolished the pages in groups of five, she’d make a profit of twenty-five mana, and whatever remnants she’d get from the cover. In terms of hourly returns it probably didn’t compare well to the passive gains from rooms and secrets, but maybe if she could automate the procedure in some way, like making the books have a map in them to prompt the menu to make them a respawning object whenever an invader wasn’t in the dungeon, she could set a monster to continuously pull the pages from the respawning book, and then demolish the results every once in a while to gain a resource boost.

Never mind that, the books apparently qualified as ‘parchment’, which was twice as efficient mana-wise. Ah well, easy come easy go. Five sheets for one mana was still a good thing. Saved her a point. And twenty mana per hundred sheets of parchment was still a profit of five mana. Maybe that’s what could be in the various dead ends of the maze. Each one holding a kobold skeleton tasked with ripping pages out of a book, putting the result off to the side, and repeating on the freshly spawned book continuously. What the method lacked in magnitude, she could make up for with quantity and consistency.

She could also make them into cell-like things, with the skeletons behind some bars too wide apart to actually stop them from passing through.

Now that she thought of it, the guy said that the bugs were dead. She didn't get a notification about that, but maybe at least she would be able to get their spawn from specifically demolishing their bodies.

Demolish not available on living or undead creatures.

Huh. They certainly were motionless for being a cross of 'alive’ and 'insects’. Avery would have guessed they were dead at first glance as well. Maybe once she had enough mana to spare, probably in the next day or so, she could just use her detect living spell on anything she had questions about.

Apparently the bugs were features? Before doing anything else, Avery spends a point of mana to engrave where the bugs landed, just in case they were positioned in some sort of magically significant arrangement. Then, annoyed at her lack of forethought, she spends another point to engrave the design on a surface that wouldn't be damaged when she drops a stalactite on it.

Rather than do something with the potential to go catastrophically wrong due to a further lack of foresight, Avery starts working on writing a note on parchment, using nothing but the build tool and the customization she could wring from it. Attempting to change the color of the parchment to black in certain spots were unfruitful, but as she was now gaining mana during failed experiments and useless time wasting, Avery was less than concerned that her first idea didn't work out. The next one was sure to work though.

All she had to do was not create the parchment in the spots that would correspond to the placement of letters, in those letters shapes. It takes a few sheets, which accumulate on the ground until there's enough to be worth demolishing, but eventually Avery manages to make a note entirely out of the negative space, with instructions on how to navigate to her home at the bottom. Perfect, now she can use her precious alone time thinking about horrible puzzles.

Clearly, the first one would be in the central room, which happened to also be the first room. It would be where she put the first ‘requires a special key’ door, it being a token of some sort that would fit into a slot. What that would be, she hadn’t decided yet. Probably a skull of obsidian, once she had access to the gem.

That would be pretty valuable though. What would stop them from taking it and selling it, or just using it as a necromantic assistant device? Deciding to table it for the moment, Avery goes through the menu again, looking for the type of door she was hoping to make. Eventually, she finds that the one labeled ‘Boss Door’, one of the many new additions since disassembling the box, has the option to set another object as the ‘Boss Key’ associated with it. Putting the iron slab in line with the simple pit trap, Avery prepares to spend the fifty mana, only to get another message.

To create a Boss Door, a Boss Key must be placed somewhere on the floor.

Fine, she’d wait until she had the obsidian. Puzzles then. A relatively simple one for the first room, she figured. Once she got the spellbook disassembly station figured out, she’d even be able to have one set up in the corner, flinging out the clue to the puzzle at anyone who came near. That would definitely be enough to get the menu to classify the book as a respawning object. It’d be the clue to solving the thing that needed to be solved in order to progress.

Just to check, Avery tried to put one of the labeled ‘Puzzle Door’s on the side exit of the room.

To create a Puzzle Door, a Puzzle must be placed within the room.

Fine. Podum, five mana. Adjusting the dimensions, brings it up to six mana. Then, carve out holes for the pieces to slot into, which brings it back down to five mana. Of course, that savings was nothing compared to the cost of the puzzle pieces that were going to go into it. Avery builds the five parts that will serve as the solution, scattering them around the room, which costs another five mana. Now, she just had to figure out how to set them to be a proper solution when they were put in correctly.

Somehow, instead of it being a huge issue like she assumed it would be, based on absolutely everything else up to this point, she just had to go into the build menu, which added the things she had custom created into its list, set them to be built in the correct spots, and think that it was correct like that. The mental projection of the items turned a shade of green, and the ones already made and scattered about the room began to project the same kind of aura. Perfect.

Finally, she could install the puzzle doors. Twenty mana each, tied to the puzzle in the center of the room. One on each side, preventing access to a good six rooms. Nice. With everything functional, it was time to add needless complexity and annoyance. Stripping the embellishments from the puzzle pieces, Avery generates four of each shape and scatters them around the room. When she had time, she’d demolish each of them and put obviously wrong answers on each face, so unless the invader found the exact correct piece the puzzle would be unsolvable.

The whole mess cost sixty-five mana, but it was going to be worth it when she managed to get all the rooms decked out in puzzles. Footsteps, and the creature was inside of her again.

“It gets pretty dark out when the sun goes down here huh? Probably should have thought of that earlier. Didn’t bring anything to help with vision while I was here. Oh hey, the note.”

Lifting the parchment from the ground with the innate mage hand, the invader looks at the holes in the sheet.

“Yeah I can’t read this.”

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

Spotting Ham through the gaps in the portcullis, the flying clay thing screeches at him, flitting through a hole in the gate to bite at his exposed flesh. Unfortunately for it, one of its trailing legs clips one of the wooden planks on the way through, knocking it off its path. Capitalizing on the abject failure of a magical device, Ham smacks it with deathly energy.

Completely unaffected, the clay thing flips itself over and bites at the fingers that dared to touch it. Immediately, Ham feels the approach of sleep. For a moment, he struggles against the poison injected by the bite, but succumbs quickly.