“And this is the library,” I explained. I glanced over at the windows, now showing a view from Talnier’s main keep. I missed the old pictures already, but I wasn’t ready to come out to Issey as being from another world.

I’d spent all my dungeon mana on furnishings and a second floor. Since I was stuck waiting for it to regenerate, I thought I’d show the others what I’d done so far. Admittedly, it wasn’t much. A few phantasmal books sitting on equally illusory shelves.

Felicia was drawn to one of the more unusual (to her) looking books. A reproduction of my first economics textbook, its brightly coloured paper binding stood out against the more traditional leather-bound books that I’d created.

“This is… in your native language?” she asked hesitantly, glancing at Issey.

“Yeah, turns out I can reproduce books from memory, and translate them easily, but I can’t produce a translated version with a thought,” I said glumly. The skills — well, [Memorise] was a skill, my translator was a [Trait] — didn’t link up that way.

“I wonder, I could…” her gaze drifted off into empty air. “Yes, I could spend a Development point and be able to read this.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Learning an unknown language is that easy?”

“Oh, like you’re one to talk. It’s not unknown to the [Status], anyway.”

“Well,” I said doubtfully. “If you want to, I can keep you in reading material. They’d have to stay in the dungeon though.”

I had been thinking of recreating a lot of books from home, for both a comfortable feeling of home and to improve my [Memorise] skill.

“This one might interest you,” I told Issey, handing her a text. She and Kyle hadn’t joined Felicia and Janie in investigating the shelves. “This lug lets his girlfriend do all the reading, but if you study that for an hour, it should unlock the [Scribe] skill.”

It was a phantasmal replica of one I had already made. I’d tried making one for a different skill, but I had run into difficulties. For one, writing a new book was a physical process that I had to actually do. I couldn’t do it in my head and then make an image of it. It was like that for a lot of my skills. So far, the only skills that I’d been able to farm out to the Dungeon were skills that cost mana.

“Or if you don’t want to spend the skill point, Kandis should be able to make materials for you to get the skill with competence!” Felicia put in. “That would take a month, though.”

“That quickly? I thought it would take longer.” I said.

“It does depend on your [Intelligence],” Felicia told me, “But you don’t need full mastery, just enough to convince the [Status] to give you the skill.”

“I’ll think about it?” Issey said. “What do you get out of it?”

“Well, not much, but I’m happy to help,” I said. Actually… I should check something.

[Dungeon Status]

Dungeon Name

Tower of Learning

Level: 7

XP: 38,045,236

Next Level: 100,000,000

Floors: 2

Current Mana: 6

Mana Cap: 300

Mana Regeneration: 31.8

Upkeep: 0.146

Dungeon Traits

[Expand]

Invaders: 4/0

Interesting. When I’d gotten the second floor, my mana regeneration and cap had both gone up, to thirty and three hundred respectively. Now my regeneration was up by a measly 1.8. I did some quick math. That was the sum of the levels of all the people in the dungeon — aside from myself, divided by ten.

“Janie,” I said thoughtfully. “Can you go up the stairs to the next level?”

“Are you sure you want to do that, Mistress?” Rhis popped up with a concerned look on his face, even as Janie shrugged and left the room. No one else reacted to him — he had appeared in my white room perception.

It took a little bit of focus to make myself speak in the white room without making a sound in the real world. A little more to adjust the view so that I could watch Janie walk upstairs.

“What’s the problem, Rhis?” I asked.

He wrung his hands in anxiety. “It’s just that she’s getting awfully close to the core room… if she should try something we’d be helpless to stop her.”

“It will be fine, Janie’s not going to do something untoward,” I assured him. He gave me a reproachful look.

“If you would just let me summon one monster, I’d feel better.”

“No.” I wasn’t allowing him monsters… at this stage. I might have to change my mind on this later. For now, I watched Janie reach the second floor.

Dungeon Name

Tower of Learning

Level: 7

XP: 38,045,236

Next Level: 100,000,000

Floors: 2

Current Mana: 6

Mana Cap: 300

Mana Regeneration: 32.3

Upkeep: 0.146

Dungeon Traits

[Expand]

Invaders: 3/1

An extra 0.5 regeneration, or Janie’s level divided by ten. So there was an advantage to me when people delved deeper.

“There’s nothing up here!” Janie called. I could barely hear her from downstairs, but my white room perception could hear her clearly. For practice, and because I didn’t feel like yelling, I used my Dungeon mana to cast [Unseen Sound]

“Thanks! That was a successful test, you can come down now.” My voice came out of nowhere, making her start, but she shrugged and headed back down the stairs.

“What’s next?” she asked as she rejoined us.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Really, I’m just waiting for the mana to recharge, but that could take a while. Unless I…” I trailed off for a bit.

“Issey,” I said, making the girl jump. “You don’t get experience from dancing, do you?”

“Nope,” she said mournfully. “If I did I’d have more than the King.”

“How did you get to level three then? Fighting with other people?”

“A bit,” Issey admitted. “But mostly… there's rats that spawn and come up from the sewers. Big place like this, I get more than my fair share, and there’s no one else to take care of them.”

“I thought built-up areas didn’t get random spawns,” I said slowly.

“That’s because the mana is shaped,” Felicia explained. “Here… well, you’ve seen how chaotic it is.”

“So all that wild mana gets sucked into spawn points… how big are these rats?”

Issey shrugged and held her hands about half a metre apart. “Used to be they were about this long, not including the tail.”

“Threat three?” Kyle speculated, his interest in the conversation perking up now that we were talking about monsters.

“I guess,” Issey said. “Lately they’ve been about twice that size.”

“Lately?” I asked, alarmed.

“Three weeks or so,” she told me. “More of them, as well. Reckon I’ll make Level four before too long.”

“There were a lot of ‘Rat in basement’ quests at the guild,” Janie pointed out thoughtfully. “None of them looked worth our while, but there was a lot.”

“A plague of rats isn’t our business,” I said, without any kind of conviction. “And this dungeon should soak up a lot of the local mana, reducing the problem near this building.”

“If you say so,” Issey said doubtfully.

“I was thinking that this place should be about improvement. Learning and training [Skills]. But now I’m wondering if I should have a levelling component.”

“Monsters, you mean?” Kyle said. Rhis didn’t say anything, but he looked at me hopefully.

“Yeah,” I sighed. “There isn’t a better way of getting experience, is there? And there’s the security aspect as well.”

Rhis was practically dancing. He kept his feet on the ground, but he moved his weight from one foot to the other excitedly. “Yes, mistress! An excellent decision!”

“Wait, can I…” I thought about it for a moment and the answer came to me. Casting [Phantasmal Emissary] through the Dungeon, I instinctively knew the changes I needed to make to let Rhis control it.

“Ah hello!” Rhis said, finally visible again to the others. “I hope you’re enjoying the honour of being in Mistress’s dungeon!”

“Not much to it right now, is there?” Janie asked slyly. Rhis glared at her.

“None of that.” I cut him off before he could speak. “If we’re discussing monsters, I thought you should be part of the discussion. That means keeping it polite.”

“Um,” Issey interjected. “Who — what — is that?”

“This is Rhis,” I told her. “Rhis — this is Issey. Rhis is… I guess you would call him a dungeon spirit?”

“He looks strange… not like a fox-kin. Is he a monster?”

Rhis grinned at her. He seemed pleased by the comparison, but with the teeth he had, you needed to know him to tell.

“Don’t let the fangs worry you,” I said wryly. “He can’t hurt anyone as an illusion.”

“Indeed no, and your command prevents me from even trying,” Rhis said. “But we were discussing monsters?”

“What do you guys think?” I asked the group.

“It is traditional…” Felicia offered. “I don’t think there’s a dungeon that doesn’t have monsters.”

“And you do need to defend your core,” Kyle said. “I don’t think you want monsters on the first floor though? They would make it hard to study.”

“Then may I suggest a Trap Spider?” Rhis said. “The second level is mostly empty space at the moment, and it can make good use of that.”

“How so?”

“It can fill it with traps made from its silk, of course,” he explained. “We can have it leave a path for you… and your friends.”

“That sounds… quite effective,” I said. “Just one monster for the level?”

“At this point, that’s all we can afford, and the Trap spider does well against multiple opponents. When our mana improves, we can upgrade it to get a youngling brood for a small additional cost. Oh! And its poison is non-lethal, which should appeal to you, Mistress.”

“Non-lethal? What effect does it have?”

“Agonising paralysation, that can last for up to an hour!” he announced proudly. “If you’re monitoring things, that gives you plenty of time to order the spider to spare the victim.”

“I guess that is better than death,” I allowed reluctantly. “Do you have anything that just puts them unconscious? Painlessly?”

“There are such poisons,” he admitted sulkily, “but they are not as effective. Adventurers can resist the effects with a high enough [Stamina].”

“Isn’t that true for the… agonising paralysation as well?”

“Yes, but the difference is that once you have resisted the sleeping poison, the effect is over. You can resist the paralysation poison to move, but the poison stays in effect, meaning you have to resist it once more to move again.”

I looked at the others. Kyle shrugged. “Better than killing them, at any rate? And I don’t think you can be squeamish if you’re going to run a dungeon, otherwise, the adventurers will run right over you.”

“Ideally,” I said, “We’d keep the adventurers out of this Dungeon entirely.” I had some ideas for who we were going to allow in here, but I couldn’t let it be Level five or six killing machines.

“We can work out a level for the… lower levels to grind at, once we’ve recovered some mana,” Rhis said. “But for now… with your permission?”

He looked at me eagerly. Fox eyes weren’t exactly puppy-dog eyes, but…

“Fine,” I said.

“You won’t regret this, Mistress,” Rhis said. He paused for a moment. “Done. We can leave her to scout out her area and start trapping it.”

I looked at my Dungeon Status again.

Dungeon Name

Tower of Learning

Level: 7

XP: 38,045,236

Next Level: 100,000,000

Floors: 2

Current Mana: 0

Mana Cap: 300

Mana Regeneration: 32.3

Upkeep: 0.746

Dungeon Traits

[Expand]

Invaders: 4

Monsters: 1

[Expand]

My residual mana had gone, and my upkeep had ticked up. One monster cost considerably more than five hundred individual illusion spells. I could probably make use of that, make up my numbers with harmless Phantasmal versions of my monsters.

Level

Monster

Threat

Notes

1

None

-

2

[Trap Spider]

6

[Poison] [Constructer]

Six mana for a Threat six creature. Simple enough. I turned to the others.

“It’s going to take a while to regenerate the Dungeon’s mana,” I said. “So let’s talk about what I’m going to do with this place.”