Jake thought about what had just occurred. He had taken a second man’s life and he was ok with it. It was odd. He actually did not care. He had felt the man’s life slipping away this time. It was different than when the rats had died. More. Whatever he’d felt from the rats, he’d received at least double the whatever it was from that single human.

It wasn’t just experience, although he’d received experience when the snake killed the man. It was something else. He’d cleaned the man’s mana and while he was doing that something else had flown through him. He looked and he hadn’t received any new skills or abilities. He wasn’t really desiring to repeat it. He didn't develop this hunger for blood, for man-flesh, he just was aware that something had happened. He’d done something but had no idea what it was.

He didn’t even need to rationalize killing the man. It was just ok. He knew that he was changing then, but even that realization didn’t spark any kind of negative feelings, no depression, no self-loathing, no worries about what he was turning into, he was just ok. He thought about that some more and then decided to talk to Baxter and Hildi about it.

Decision made, he looked at his status again. He liked his new stats. He wished that he’d been paying more attention to them. He guessed that every animal that Baxter killed inside him contributed experience to him. He also assumed that when he dug or moved his core or created loot he got some experience, but he had no idea what it was or how it got calculated. ‘Things die, I grow stronger,’ he thought. And once again, that thought didn’t upset him.

After thinking about how to distribute his stats, he decided that he’d dump most of the points into Intelligence and Wisdom and then add the rest to Charisma, Luck, and Perception. When he did, his mana had risen to 4890 and so had his Qi. He wasn’t sure what he could do with Qi other than giving it away, so once again he added something to his ‘Things to Ask Hildi and Baxter’ list. 'Maybe Baxter would know,' he thought. 'He’s got to have some abilities. I mean he’s a Fu Dog,’ he thought. ‘He’s got to have some kind of martial arts abilities?’ Then, of course, he started picturing Baxter as Hong Kong Phooey and started drawing the cartoons on the walls of his first floor. He wondered if he could somehow get a snickering cat to go along with Baxter. ‘That would be awesome!’ he thought. ‘They’d be focusing on the dog and the cat could take them out.’ That thought did upset him a little. Killing bandits was one thing, a global dispensation to kill everybody was something else. Once again, he put it on his talk to Baxter and Hildi list.

Points assigned he decided to get busy working on Max’s. His family and their neighbors would be arriving in four days and right now, all he had to offer them was a big empty room.

He thought he could get a new skill to create walls if he tried to perform a bunch of the Create Materials uses at the same time, but he wanted glass! He needed to get those gaping windows in his north wall filled in with glass. Unfortunately, glass came at Rank Two, Level 4 of his Create Materials skill and he was on Level 5, Rank 1.

He thought again about what he needed to create. He knew that he needed a room for his parents and knowing his mom she’d be picking up any little orphans. Which, from his talks with Baxter, he understood meant she’d need space in her room for three kids under age two, two girls and a boy. Their parents were either dead or missing. Probably dead. Then there was another family that had a three-year-old. And, of course, his brother Rex and his wife Bernie had their one-year-old son. And finally, there were some slightly older kids that were now orphaned too: seven boys and three girls.

Then there were three married couples, his two sisters, his brother Jon Jon, Hildi and Billy, and then ten other adults of which at least two of them, were ‘not mobile’ or something. He didn’t understand what Baxter was trying to tell him, but it was pretty clear that they were a special case.

So, right now, he needed:

Room for his parents and three toddlers Room for Hildi (& Brother?) Room for Rex and his family Room for his sisters Room for a married couple (2) Room for the married couple with a kid Single Adults Room (8) Room for ‘not mobile’ people Room for boys Room for girls A pool (hot and cold) Maybe a gym Restrooms (Men) Restrooms (Women) Group Kitchen Dining Room Greenhouse

He guessed he needed to supply beds, sheets, pillows, a place to store stuff, chairs, tables, toilets, showers, chairs, and even fireplaces? ‘Shit,’ he thought. ‘I’m building a Motel 6!’

He checked his list and finally decided it was enough to get started on. He started on the married folk’s double rooms first. He wasn’t sure how it would work out, but he felt pretty comfortable about winging it.

One of the things that he’d noticed was that his spacial awareness or Proprioception had gone off the charts. Along with the ability to split his mind and focus on two things at once, had come this incredible ability to picture things mentally. For instance, he was able to mentally plot out the changes that he was planning on making in Max’s. It was almost as if he were drawing blueprints and constructing the changes, but nothing that organized. It was more organic as if the plans grew in his mind. No math, but an innate understanding of the process. He guessed it was like the way a beaver might construct its damn or a bee its hive. It also shared something with his Loot Creation skill. He pictured what he wanted, spent the mana, and the universe provided. Maybe not exactly what he was picturing, but the essential requirements.

He used the skill another 47 times and got another level-up notification. Level Six. The next time he used the skill, the mana cost dropped to two. Each of these rooms was going to take about 186 skill uses. He’d decided to make them up against the east wall, separated from the dungeon staircase enclosure by a small meter and a half corridor. He might cover the end of the small corridor and put a snake in there. 'Got to keep the family safe,' he thought. He put it on the ‘Talk to Hildi and Baxter’ list. He kept on creating and reached level 7. Pretty soon he’d knocked all three of the rooms out.

The next rooms that he decided to make were the single adult rooms. Knowing his mom, he decided to make extras. She was the type of woman that on the way to the supermarket would wind up adopting two puppies. He figured she’d find some more people somewhere. His childhood home was full of friends couch surfing trying to get away from bad situations at home. He needed eight, he decided to make 14. The template for the single rooms had one less chest in it than the married template, but otherwise the married and the single rooms were pretty much the same.

He loved his new mana points. He’d built three rooms and still hadn’t used up his mana. When he checked the amount of mana he had remaining, he thought that it looked like he had more mana than he should have at this point. He called up his Mana Siphon ability and discovered that it had changed too.

Good Job. Expect the unexpected.

Ability Grows

Mana Siphon

(+25 mana per half hour) * # of floors up to dungeon’s mana limits.

‘Sweet!’ he thought. ‘More mana.’ And then he realized that it was an ability, not a skill. He didn’t know that abilities could grow. He made a mental note to check his abilities to see if any of them had leveled up or whatever it was that abilities did.

Each of the single adult rooms was going to cost him about 431 mana points, so they’d be more expensive then the doubles, but he expected it because they didn’t share a wall with Max’s so... more to build. He could have saved some mana by not doubling up the walls between the rooms but figured it was more soundproofing. He was starting to believe that he was not going to get everything built before they showed up. But what party ever started on time with the host ready?

He reached Level Eight, Nine, and was waiting on ten. It was taking a while.

He also noticed that he reached level 23. He threw the two assignable points he got into Intelligence and Wisdom. He wished that the Bobs had allowed him to see the experience he was gaining from all his various activities, but that seemed to be a black box. Do something, get an unknown amount of experience for it and when the experience reached an unknown amount, you leveled. ‘Way to be transparent Bobs!’ But he liked the fact that his mana was now up to 5070 points a day. Plus the 3600 mana points he could siphon, meant he was generating 8670 mana points a day! ‘Take that Mages!’

His cost of making rooms fell too. By the time he’d finished creating the fourteenth single room, he was down to 242 mana per room. Of course, that was the walls. All told, he’d spent 4644 mana to get the single rooms created. Less than a day’s mana! He was on a roll. He might even get finished before his mom and family arrived.

He decided that he’d make the 'married with families' rooms next. He’d place them all against the west wall, leaving a corridor about seven-meters wide between the last row of the single rooms and the place where the family rooms were going to go.

That corridor led straight to the front door of Max’s. Actually it led to the front hole in the wall of Max’s. For whatever reason, when the Bobs had changed Max’s, roof into metal, walls into stone, resized it to be smaller, they’d not added glass to the windows or doors into the doorways. He hoped that they hadn’t done the same thing to his parent’s house, but figured that they most likely hadn’t. Baxter would have commented on it or Hildi would have made enough of a fuss that Baxter would have picked up that this was unusual?

Anyway, he started on the first room. The one closest to the door. It was another double, a spare. He knocked that one out and then came to the first of the special rooms, a family room. He was going to add a small bed for their three-year-old kid so he needed to expand the walls. Three 10 meter walls with a hole for a door in the southeast corner of the room.

The next room that he tackled was his sister’s room. He didn’t really put a lot of thought into it in a typical older brother kind of way. He just used the same floor plan that he used for a double room and planned on putting in two single beds, instead of a double bed. Good enough.

Then Hildi and Billy’s room. Once again, he used the double room template and planned on putting in two single beds. He wasn’t sure, but he thought that Billy might be living in the boy’s room which hadn’t been built yet. Living with his sister or living with a bunch of boys his own age? He was pretty sure he knew which one Billy was going to choose. Whether Hildi would let him, was another thing though.

After he finished the rooms, he thought about what still remained on his to-do list:

Room for ‘not mobile’ people Room for boys Room for girls A pool (hot and cold) Maybe a gym Restrooms (Men) Restrooms (Women) Group Kitchen Dining Room Greenhouse

Plus all the things like doors, chairs, beds, baskets, chests, toilets, showers, all the stuff that would make a bunch of people happy. Oh, and lights and he’d have to figure out a way to turn off the lights. Down in the dungeon, they stayed on all the time, nobody needed to turn them off. ‘Should he do that?’ he wondered. He thought his future monsters would like a regular day/night cycle. The snakes hadn’t complained or seemed upset, but they’d been pretty much inside Max’s which had a day/night cycle. It was lit right now by the sun and darkened when night fell.

‘More stuff to worry about,’ he thought. He started back building out the interior. It was the second day, but it was really early in the morning now. Dark and about 2 am. He’d used up all the mana in his mana pool only to have it refresh at midnight. He decided to start building the ‘not mobile’ people’s room. He wondered about them. He didn’t quite know what to think. He wished Baxter and he could communicate better.

The way he had the floor laid out mentally was to have the kid’s bunk rooms in pretty much the dead center of Max’s. Then to the west of them would be a pretty big place to grow things To the south of the kid's area would be the ‘not mobiles’ room and another growing area. To the east would be the pools and restrooms.

To the east of the ‘not mobiles’ area would be the dining area. He figured that he’d have a big open area with a bunch of tables and benches. Each table could seat 10 people and he was planning on having 12 tables. Mainly to give people a chance to spread out. Maybe he'd have some fireplaces in the middle of the tables. One good thing about being a dungeon is that he didn’t need to build in chimneys. His cleaning ability would take out the smoke from the fires. ‘Heck,’ he thought, ‘I could remove carbon dioxide and add oxygen too.’

Then in the far southeastern corner, he was planning on putting in a kitchen. A big roomy area where a bunch of cooks could work. And to the west of the dungeon enclosure, he planned to put in another restroom and the pools, big family pools with hot and cold water, and then two enclosed smaller His and Hers pools.

He got on it. The ‘not mobiles’ area took 229 mana and during the course of making it, he went up another level. It was almost free. In fact, when he was doing the little half meter walls to make the doors work, it was free.

He decided to make the kid’s rooms next. He planned to only create a single one of each, but then he thought of his mom’s inability to walk away from a stray and decided that he’d better make two of each. Each room could hold eight beds. If nothing else, the spare rooms could be used as a dorm for single adults. Each one cost 206 mana.

Then came the restrooms. Who knew that restrooms were so complicated. He had to build four walls to enclose the place and then he had to build a cubical to hold each toilet and a cubicle to hold the showers. He didn’t have enough space to put a restroom into each room. And he wasn’t sure about plumbing either. ‘Did he need it?’ he thought. ‘Couldn’t he just clean it away?’ That’s the option he decided to go for. ‘No septic system to back up, it just vanishes’. He figured he was coming closer to being able to split his mind again. Once he did, he’d use it to handle all this kind of stuff: water, waste, cleaning, all the little day-to-day problems that a living being has to endure. And a living dungeon has to help deal with. Another reason to enjoy his new crystal life! ‘Sounds like a lemon aid,’ he thought.

He was getting closer to being able to make glass. He wasn’t sure why he was so fixated on glass, but he was. It might have something to do about control, all those windows right now were open spaces that anyone could use to attack him or his monsters. He had never liked surprises, but now that he’d changed to a little, pink, immobile, gemstone, he liked them even less.

Once again, he called up his list and checked to see what he still had left to do:

A pool (hot and cold) Maybe a gym Group Kitchen Dining Room Greenhouse

The pool should be easy. The water may be a problem though. He only now noticed that the skill notification he received when he got the Create Materials skill didn’t say what water would cost or, for that matter, what any fluids would cost. He was sure he could create them, he had no idea how much it would cost though. Another problem was controlling the temperature of the water. He didn’t have any skills or abilities right now that enabled him to control the temperature.

The gym should be easy enough. He’d wait for someone to ask for it though. He didn’t think that he’d have any problems making dumbbells. He would probably have a problem making a squat machine or an exercise bike or an elliptical machine. ‘Hell,’ he thought. ‘Let them fight monsters! Isn’t that what I’m here for?’ He pictured Wade inside a hamster ball chased by a giant rat and was both happy and amused for about 10 minutes.

Again, the kitchen seemed a little tough. When he’d cleaned up Max’s, he’d not received any stoves or ovens or grills. He thought it was strange given that Max’s used to have two restaurants and a hot dog carousel in the convenience store part. And the soft drink machines had disappeared as well.

Before he got back into it, he noticed that a new day had rolled around and his mana had reset. He loved his 5070 mana points. Plus he still received 3600 mana points from siphoning too. ‘Life is good,’ he thought.

In the center of Max’s, between the three restrooms, the space for the pools still waited. He dug out the pools, ignoring the problem of no water for right now. The largest pool was about 14 cubic meters by 17. It looked a little like a cross between a gumdrop and a bullet train in shape. Kind of rounded, but slanting toward the center from the front. He made it about four meters deep on the east end of the pool rising to one meter at the west end. 69 uses of his Dig skill and he was the proud owner of a big hole in the ground. It turned out that he had needed to take out about 279 cubic meters of sandstone. And to add that much water back eventually. But no worries. If he can’t figure out the water thing, he decided that he’d fill it with dirt and tell his mom he was making a big planter. Maybe that it was a special location to grow rare herbs.

The big hot pool was quite a bit smaller. It looked a little like a slightly melted candy corn. It was seven meters long by about four meters in width. Five uses of his Dig skill later and he was once again looking at a big hole in the ground. The pool slanted from north to south, ½ of a meter in the north, two meters in the south. This time it looked like he needed to remove about 18 cubic meters of sandstone.

The four pools in the men’s and women’s bathhouses were ovals about four meters by four meters. He started the shallow ends of the pools on the side closest to the entrance of the little pool shack that he was going to make to surround them. He made the pools about ⅔ of a meter deep sloping to 1.75 meters on the deep end. It took him sixteen Dig uses to remove the sandstone and he had his pools. Hopefully his pools. Otherwise, his planters.

The dining room and the kitchen were just spaces. He still had to come up with the fireplaces or grills or whatever he was going to use for the kitchen, but until he started creating the various pieces of furniture or whatnot that were going to fill them he decided not to worry about them.

That left the greenhouse. It’s kind of hard to make a greenhouse with no glass so he decided that he’d make open raised beds within the southeastern corner of the building. He thought about digging the plots into the foundation but decided that raised beds were easier to work with. His mom had been a big fan of gardening using raised beds. So he decided to go with that and created two large plots of earthen fill with a raised surrounding wall 15 cm tall made of sandstone. Both of the beds were big rectangles. The first, next to the back wall of Max’s, was 16x30 meters. He went ahead and closed that rear exits while he was at it, filling the large loading dock and smaller personnel door holes in with sandstone.

While he was creating it, he put in little strips of stone about 15 centimeters in width every two meters lengthwise and every 4 meters widthwise to allow the gardeners someplace to walk when tending the plants. Soil compacts when you walk on it and makes it hard for the plants to grow. This way they could keep off the growing area. The second smaller raised bed was a rectangle 28x18 meters. It sat on the path from the front doors.

The whole process including filling in the back doors cost him about 7800 mana points. It looked like the dirt was cheap since it was a Bronze Level One material, but the sandstone was a Bronze Level Four material. It cost more to create and he’d had to create a lot of it to make the beds. His mom and the others would be happy though.

He was finally done with walls. He had one small section to go, at least he thought so. “At least before the women show up,’ he thought. ‘Then there’d be a bunch of changes he had to do.’

The last task was to build the small cabanas around the Women’s and Men’s pools. He wasn’t going to run their walls to the roof of Max’s like he’d done with the rest of the buildings. He had decided to leave them roofless and doorless. Just build three walls surrounding the pools and leave the fourth wall off, so the parents or adults could see and watch over the kids in the pool. He made the walls about two meters high and about 15 cm thick.

And with that, he was done. He still had to do the fixtures such as showers, doors, toilets, and stuff as well as all the beds and other bits of furniture. That was going to take a lot of mana. He’d start with the beds and then work on other big items like chairs, benches, and tables. He thought that if he couldn’t complete his vision, it would be better to have the big stuff done for a bunch of rooms rather than a few complete rooms.

He still hadn’t broken through to Rank Two in Create Materials. He seemed to be stuck at Rank One, Level 9. He’d spent over 16,000 mana points but hadn’t made it yet. He figured that each time he used a skill, it gave him points. Add enough points and he leveled. Judging by the number of times he had used the skill and comparing it to earlier times, it looked like as you advanced in Levels and Rank, it took more of those skill points to do so.

He wondered if there was anyone on the third rank yet. Maybe something with a single skill that used it all the time, like a termite. ‘Holy Crap!’ he thought. ‘A Rank 9, Level 9 termite would be able to take down a house in no time. It would be like vacuuming dog hair. Whoosh! House gone!’ He hoped insects didn’t get skills.

He checked his combat log which was pretty basic. Fought This, Defeated That. He also noticed that whenever Baxter fought, it appeared in his combat log. Even if his kill didn’t happen in the dungeon. He was guessing that that meant that he received experience for each fight in his combat log, but the Bobs didn’t allow him to track his experience.

It wasn’t totally a game-like world. You fought, got rewarded, but had no idea how much you’d be rewarded. No MMORPG player would stand for that. It’s hard to munchkin a system when it’s transparent to you.

And, judging by his combat log not showing any battles from Baxter, he confirmed that performing skills or using abilities or maybe even casting spells gave beings experience. He’d leveled between the time of Baxter’s last fight and now. So his new motto was ‘Keep Digging.’ He wondered if that was part of his imperatives slipping through. But decided that he didn’t care. It’s relatively harmless. It’s not like his motto was ‘Keep Killing’!

He finally noticed something. A kind of full feeling was creeping over him. He looked at his status menu and noticed that his mana points were growing again. The little brackets had appeared next to it and it was well on its way to 5500. Only this time Jake knew the cause and the solution to this problem. He looked up at the dungeon enclosure and sure enough, the room was practically shimmering with light blue clouds of circulating mana. The walls were beginning to phase in and out of existence. He needed to release some of the mana or else it was going to do it for him. He quickly dug three 15 centimeter holes out of the top of the walls that separated the dungeon from Max’s. Although, when he thought about it, there wasn’t really a separation between the two entities anymore. However, he had blocked off access from his core to the surface and the dungeon had backed up. Mana clog. Mana constipation.

He watched both his status and the mana level in the little enclosure and was able to see the mana levels falling in both places. When he created the holes, the mana had practically burst from the holes and flooded into Max’s and then slowly began reaching a new equilibrium. If he had to guess, he’d say that even with the mana flowing out the front door, the mana level in Max’s was quite a bit higher than it was outside.

‘It was odd that a wall would stop mana,’ he thought. ‘After all, he could see the mana in the walls using his Mana Sense ability. It must be perceptual. Because the wall exists and was created to keep things out or in, the mana is blocked?’ He thought about that for a while and then finally gave up. ‘It was as good a reason as any,’ he thought. About the only thing he could do was wait and see if he discovered some other piece of the puzzle.

And finally, he received the following notification:

Way to go. Finally out of the Bronze! Experience gained.

Skill Level Gained

Material Creation

Rank: Copper

Level 1

Choose:

Add one skill level to cost calculations to reduce cost Minus 5 mana to use skill

He chose the minus five mana like he’d done in the past without thinking about it a lot. He had been sitting on one mana point per use of the skill since he’d reached Level Nine. He figured that the lower cost would only come in handy when he started creating larger volumes or higher-level materials.

'Lord!', he thought. 'Finally!' But looking around the newly partitioned interior of Max's he thought it was a good effort. He'd done the equivalent of a 6 to a 10-month construction job in two days. 'Not bad! Not bad at all!' he told himself. And he finally knew what the hell ranks were.