I opened up the dungeon interface. It was one of the clunkiest things I had seen since coming to this world that I still didn’t know the real name of. I looked at all the tabs running across the top and now understood them much better. I had gotten all the readme files downloaded into my brain, so I knew it better than many of the skills I had.

While a skill would guide me to do something without knowing why, the readme files made my brain think it knew everything. I grabbed the 10th tab from the bottom and accessed the option. It didn’t take me long before I was into growth and reproduction.

Then I smiled and selected the seed option. It wasn’t something I would want to do if there were people in the dungeon, as it would take time for the system to eject them. The collapsing floors would close the doors going down and then start to work in from the edges, moving people up. If they didn’t move fast enough, it was a quick and rough eject to the top.

I chuckled a little. “I bet that it would be the stuff of nightmares though. Seeing the dungeon slowly disappearing in front of you.”

Then I triggered the level eleven dungeon seeding. Slowly the heart spun faster and faster then a small ball of light started to orbit the heart. After that, another one showed up, and then another one. Twelve small orbs orbited the heart.

Slowly it all spun down, and I reached out. Each seed looked like a shooter marble that gave off a slight glow. I plucked them one at a time out of the air and dropped them into a bag I had tied to my waist.

I looked around the dungeon master room once more. There was still some of the meat I was curing in here, but overall I would be ready to leave tomorrow. I would want to pack away everything, but I was ready to be gone. If the trip was going to take longer than I wanted, I wanted to get going sooner than later.

I headed up to the thicket. I popped open the door and went up the steps to the treehouse. I was letting my mind get a little ahead of myself. I was hoping that I would get a chance to drop the seed in without Kasidy seeing.

I was about to knock on the trapdoor when my brain landed on a stupid idea. Could I core the dungeon seeds? If I could, what would it look like, and what would happen? Dungeons already had a ton of power and smarts, and everything just seemed to get better when I put a core in something.

I shook my head. I didn’t need to go down that route; I was already about to do something that hadn’t been done as far as the dungeon knew. There was no reason to add another variable to it. I thought for just a moment longer before I got the feeling that it would be a very bad idea.

I knocked, “Kasidy! Blink! I got your gear here. I am coming in.”

I pushed open the door and stepped into an empty tree house. The girls were nowhere to be found. The mess was still around, and the table was still partially set. I knew I hadn’t been gone for too long.

I tossed Kasidy’s bag onto the wooden hammock on the wall and then peered out the windows. It only took me a few moments to check all directions. Not seeing them, I brought up my map to find Blink. I went out to the birds-eye view and saw that Blink was near the river.

I fished one of the seeds out of the little bag. “Might as well do this now.”

I activated the seed and tossed it into the central hole in the tree house. I watched it go down much like a coin in one of those funnels I used to see at shopping malls. It just spun its happy self down, going around the wall of the hole until it got to the bottom. Then it activated.

I didn’t know what I was expecting to happen but what happened was far from it. The whole tree house flashed marble green. Then there was a rumbling, and I felt the room sway a bit. A moment later. I got a pop-up.

Dungeon Master

You are within 20 feet of an unclaimed

Dungeon heart

Claim?

Yes No

Well, that wasn’t what I expected, but it was much better than I had hoped. I selected claim and then got the menus to pop up. While I would have preferred it to not to be the whole thicket, it seemed that was already done. When the seed bonded with the area, it took everything from the enclosed area on the ground all the way into the new heart room. So I selected the ground and the tree house to act as the opening room in the dungeon. A place where you could come and go and be safe.

The dungeon heart jumped all the way up to level 7 with the influx of power from the thicket. Then out from one window, a boardwalk grew. It was like I was watching a tree town be born. The boardwalk was a hallway, and then another tree became a room. Around the next tree, a platform formed, going out around twenty feet.

I also felt the thicket that I was in shaking. I watched as the ground moved further away as we rose into the sky. The trees became as massive as redwoods, but my ability to see beyond the edge of the dungeon was cut off. I had been able to see the river from the thicket, but now it just turned into a forest that went on and on.

A dungeon's beginning growth was always expanding where it could easily go. It wouldn’t go everywhere if it ran out of power, but it would expand as much as possible. This one was going to be level seven, so I was looking forward to what that meant.

As the dungeon master, I could feel the heart moving away from me. It was following a root down. Then it seemed to settle down about 60 feet underground. I pulled up my interface and saw that the dungeon had expanded out. The boardwalk ran down the line of cube trees and ended with the last of the thickets that I had put in.

From the end thicket, the dungeon went down the roots until it found a natural cave which it started to expand into because everything was already connected to each other. The dungeon bloomed. Because of the magic it was consuming or perhaps bonding with, the thing was growing more powerful.

I felt the way the dungeon was being made or perhaps just saw it. Watching from inside the interface was kind of strange to me. I had never seen a level form or claimed an area before. I had always just it after it happened. This dungeon’s exit was now far from here.

The cave that it latched onto was long and went almost due west. Not in the direction that I needed to go right now. That said, since I was the dungeon master, I could enter through the exit. That would let me cross in and out of the orc-held areas nearby if I ever wanted or needed to.

As the dungeon finished its first round of growth, I got a pop-up.

Title Change.

Dungeon Master => Dungeon Master II

Claim more dungeons to unlock more power.

I pulled up my title screens as the pop up gave me nothing.

Titles

Dungeoneer (Team)

+1 Vitality every Primary Class level +1 Wisdom every 5th level of Secondary Class

Dungeon Master II

Owner access to owned dungeon. Communication and transportation now active Unaging in all dungeons. Neutral standing in all other dungeons that are not owned. Dungeon sense Passive: feel a draw towards dungeons within 15 miles Active: See through dungeon misdirections 5 mana per hour Level locater: Know the quickest and most direct path to the end of the level

Well, that told me some more. Communication and transportation were two words that I had seen before. However, they had both been grayed out, so I hadn’t been able to learn about them. I was hoping that would change now. As for Level locater, I was hoping that Dave might give me more insight into that.

What I needed to do was spin a yarn now for Kasidy. It needed to be complex enough that she didn’t see through it but empty enough not to tell her anything. Just because I was taking her with me didn’t mean that I was letting her in on any more secrets.

* * *