Day 2 late in Phase 1 Construction

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My heart is pumping heavily while I run toward the dungeon entrance. I shout “Parsi, fly ahead and place two more tigers into the heart room!!!”

‘A dozen wolves or more is definitely too much for me and a single tiger. And I think I’ll change my skin to full tiger as soon as I get there – I don’t need to speak at the moment but the additional 3 stat points from that transformation might help.’

I jump over a fallen tree and can now see the clearing. I’m only a hundred meter from the Heart, but unfortunately I’m approaching almost from the south – I have to run around the building to get to the entrance.

‘If I time it exactly right, the wolves will pass me while I jump around the edge. That should give me the seconds needed to get inside.’

Twenty-five minutes of pain and fighting later I sit down on the floor, panting. To my left a tiger dissolves into nothing while I watch the System Screen.

Party combat results: Victory

14 Forest Wolves have been slain by the party of Claudia and three Rank E Dungeon Monsters

Claudia has temporarily lost 12 Body points and 12 Agility points

White Tiger A has temporarily lost 14 Body points

White Tiger B has been killed

White Tiger C has temporarily lost 10 Body points

Claudia has received State: Minor Bleeding (-1 Body per minute, 4 minutes remaining)

White Tiger A has received State: Bleeding (-2 Body per minute, 6 minutes remaining, DANGER)

Nighttime skill use bonus +20% effectivity to Claudia

Nighttime skill use bonus +20% effectivity to White Tiger A – ERROR

*** Error Resolving Process ***

Dungeon Monsters should not be able to fight during Construction Phase/Nighttime

Problem: Dungeon Monster outside Dungeon Barrier at Nighttime

Problem caused by Prototype Priority Override %&#&§$”! by ?????

Problem solution requested from Higher Authority

Temporary solution: apply bonus to template chance

*** Process End ***

Monster Template Chance

Calculating chance of gaining Forest Wolf Template

14 Wolves -> 36%

+20% Effectivity bonus (+7.2%) -> 43.2%

Rolling

Success

Template “Forest Wolf Rank G” available as Dungeon Monster

14 fresh Wolf corpses available for absorption

Do you want to absorb them? (Y/N)

Absorption Summary

14 fresh Wolf corpses

Fur Absorption – 24 points gained

Meat Absorption – 24 points gained

Ivory Absorption – 12 points gained

Claws Absorption – 12 points gained

Skill levels improved

Fur 0 (66%)

Meat 0 (66%)

Ivory 0 (36%)

Claws 0 (36%)

“Ugh – more scratches and bites than I can count to care for, one tiger killed and a second about to die unless we can somehow heal our monsters – and all for almost nothing on points? And why didn’t I get the next Animal Killer title either?”

“That’s life as a dungeon for you, Claudia, grinding from day to day” Parsi calls from the heart where she is checking a few things. “If you fight in a group the kills are split between the members, so you probably counted only for four or five of the wolves. Which means you’re still one or two animals killed away from the next title. I told you those titles are only secondary in gaining experience.

But you should have gotten a decent amount of usage percent for your fighting skill, and you did get us the wolf template.”

“I may be forced to admit that we got something – but nowhere near what I would consider a good reward for my work and pain. But what do you think about that error resolving process?”

Parsi looks up at this “What error process? I didn’t check the window because there should be nothing special in it…”

She flies over and reads the messages.

“OK, that is a bit strange. But it seems as if it was caused by the same change to the dungeon that allowed us to leave in the first place.”

“Yes, those strange symbols in the override seem to be the same I got when the Dungeon was first created, but why the question marks? Especially since I have seen the same in our contract and elsewhere.”

“The question marks are placeholders until the name of whoever it is about is known. In the case of our dungeon it is because we haven’t named the dungeon yet, but in this case it is because you never got the name of the god that reincarnated you and modified the system for our dungeon.”

“OK, Parsi – but let’s go back to that ‘daily life of grinding’ – what exactly do you mean by that? Because I think I missed some of the context on that due to not being from this world.”

I watch as Parsi thinks about this for a minute before flying to the table and sitting down on the thickest book there. Then she begins to explain:

“OK, you’re right. I keep forgetting that you had no System in the world you came from, and from the old stories even those who were reincarnated from System worlds often had a different system. And if we want to make our dungeon successful you need to know the details.

Especially since what most of the adventurers’ guilds have determined to be ‘Dungeon Laws’ is a pile of bull.

It all comes down to level advancement. For that, you need experience – and the only long-term and reliable source for experience points is skill advancement through skill use. Each time you complete a skill level you’ll get experience points for it, and there is no real limit to the number of levels you can have in any skill, or the number of skills you can learn.

However there is a practical limit: the higher a skill gets, the more difficult it is to level through use.

But that is where the dungeons come into play.

As soon as you get out of the common low levels, the most important fact about the dungeons is that they restock their contents faster than regular animals can grow up or traps can be build normally. And that allows the adventurers to keep using their skills at higher levels in deeper dungeons.

Most of the public works written on dungeons is for the beginners and those books still talk about the treasures to be won, but once you are at rank D or C most adventurers only consider the treasures a side effect, not the main draw of the dungeon.

Unfortunately they got a lot of things wrong on how the dungeon works, and that is why conquered dungeons often stall out early – the adventurers who gained control give the wrong commands as how to handle things. Some of the reincarnated souls have tried to talk to adventurers and to correct their mistakes, but unfortunately they got that wrong again and are now thinking that an intelligent core is a core where an adventurer that died in the dungeon has its soul trapped and needs to be destroyed to be freed.”

“So we really need to be careful as to who we talk to about the truth if there are that many misconceptions floating around. Although we might be able to use some of them for our own purpose, especially considering that some of the rules really have been changed for our case.”

I muse on what I learned for a while.

“But are there any rules we have to obey, other than what you already described on dungeon construction? There has to be some reason why the adventurers get something that simple wrong.”

“None, but as I already said the adventurers got a lot of things wrong. For example take the so-called safe rooms.

The adventurers believe that the System forces all dungeons to create safe rooms designated by a safe-glyph and where they can rest in the dungeons without any danger. Which is bull because the System only forces truth but never cares about the survival of anyone.

In reality their ‘safe-glyph’ is the permanent mana generating rune, and because any grid square can hold only one placement the rooms set aside for mana generation are not containing any real danger for anyone. And of course a dungeon with many traps and monsters needs more mana for them, so there are more mana generating rooms when the dungeons are more dangerous to the adventurers.

Then they believe that traps are for corridors and monsters for rooms, and any deviation from that points to a strange dungeon. But again there is no law enforcing that – it’s just that in a room a trap can easily be evaded, while monsters in a corridor have difficulties attacking at the same time in the limited space available.

Third point is that they think placements can only be done between phases. That is wrong, but most dungeons simply don’t have the mana to make multiple placements per phase unless they are littered with mana-generating room. The only real restriction on placement is that the square grid where you want to place something must not be occupied by anything else, no matter if that is another placement or an adventurer – or something like the table I’m sitting on.

Unfortunately quite a number of pixies believe that they are safer by following those superstitions, especially since some guilds tend to send out conquerors to dungeons who break too many of those supposed rules. I don’t agree with that opinion, and we are already off the road considering usual dungeon behavior anyway – so I don’t think it matters for us.”

“No, we should decide on a case by case basis on what we do. But what are the options of the Guild? How can it react to what we do anyway, because I don’t think they plan to send in the big guns for every new dungeon? Especially as you said there are around a hundred new dungeons each year. And how does that even work with so many dungeons?”

“Umh – OK, I knew that I forgot a few things – sorry.” Parsi says and then hesitates for a bit.

“The easy part first – there is no ‘one’ Guild for the adventurers. There are hundreds of guilds, sometimes even warring with each other.

Different guilds can have different rules to handle dungeons, and that can even include stealing access to dungeons from each other or intentionally destroying the dungeons of a different guild. There is a Guild Association that works to limit the worst cases and put up some rules because no one wins if all dungeons are destroyed, but it is limited in its local influence.

However one of the tasks of this Guild Association is to declare whether or not a small dungeon to be a failed dungeon and send people to destroy it. This decision is supposed to happen when the construction phase changes into a third adventuring phase, and is based on how difficult or rewarding the dungeon is supposed to be then. The less rewarding ones are destroyed, because there is a limit to the dungeon density in any area. But as usual sometimes politics enter that decision…

This destroys about forty dungeons or so each year and is half the reason for the high number of replacements.

The other half of the vanishing dungeons – to tell the truth, no one really knows. The elders of the pixie villages have two lists for larger dungeons. One is called the list of Ancient Dungeons, the other is called the list of Older Dungeons. Every year, one to three of the Older Dungeons are magically moved to the Ancient Dungeons list, but around fifty more Older Dungeons simply disappear.

I bet that the god who send you here knows why, and I hope that what he did is to increase our chances to become Ancient, but no one else had more than wild guesses about why a few dungeons become Ancient while most vanish instead.”

Hearing that I just grumble “This is getting more frustrating with every hour – how am I supposed to handle and survive all this?

As soon as the current phase ends and we collected the mana, I heal and charge up and then we go out to map the area. Hopefully you find something to tell you where we are and where the way to civilization goes.”