[Please select a free monster model.]

[Minotaur (D) | Sphinx (B) | Paper Golem (E) | Alraune (C)]

His monster selections were beginning to get interesting, it seemed.

The system did its best to recommend monsters that would synergize with how each dungeon operated, but the way it did so felt… semi-intelligent. Automated.

The ranks of the recommended monsters would always be capped at the dungeon’s own rank, and this time, there was a variety. Perhaps because the system thought it had better narrowed down the types of monsters that would benefit him, rank became secondary. Evolution was (almost) always an option, anyway.

Anyway, because the system’s recommendations were based on how he was doing things in this life, there were more and more options he didn’t recognize.

The only one he knew of firsthand this time was the Minotaur. They were bipedal bull monsters with great physical strength and an even better sense of direction, ideal for guarding labyrinthine environments. The system probably selected it because of the maze that was one of the most prominent features on his latest floor.

He could guess, to some extent, what a Paper Golem might be from its name. But “Sphinx”? “Alraune”? Those were brand new words to him.

At times like this, it was best to consult others.

Archimedes brought up the copy he had saved of Ulbert’s memories and searched them for the names of the new monsters he had been presented with. Fortunately, the Dungeon Researcher had knowledge of the two most confounding of them.

A Sphinx was a large four-legged beast with a lion’s body and a beastfolk’s face. They were strong and highly intelligent, with a love of riddles and other mind games. Essentially, they liked to toy with their food before violently ending them. Rather sadistic temperaments they had, but those who showed sufficient wisdom were spared.

It was unclear how much of that assessment was due to the monster itself and how much was by order of its host dungeon. Anyway, it had probably been suggested because Archimedes had started using riddles as a gatekeeping tactic. It was the highest ranking monster among this time’s suggestions.

An Alraune, on the other hand, was a dainty plant woman—like a flower cleverly folded into humanoid form—with both physical and magical means of entrancing people. They were skilled at stalling tactics, misdirection, and seduction. They weren’t rooted plants like Nymphs and Treants, but wandering ones like Mandrakes.

This had probably been suggested because the most common type of monsters in his dungeon were plant monsters.

Archimedes had two types of beast monsters—both from wolfbat evolutionary lines—and only two matured individuals among them. There was a scattering of F-Rank Wolfbats, but he didn’t do much with them. He had one type of construct and exactly as many specimens; one type and instance of ooze monster; and one type of arachnid with four individuals.

Lilith, he still hesitated to categorize as a monster.

As for plants, he had two types with five individuals between them, including the newest Mandrake still growing in the ground. And two of his three previous floors hosted a Biome that synergized with plant monsters. They must have looked like the dungeon’s favorite monster type to the system.

It was a misunderstanding, though. Unless something really special appeared, Archimedes figured he had enough plant monsters.

As for Paper Golems, Ulbert had no clue, so Archimedes consulted Vow about it. Her response, of course, was that she couldn’t give personal advice or information about things he wasn’t already aware of, but using the stencil she had gifted him revealed her actual (quite biased) advice.

It seemed sensible that something as fragile-sounding as a Paper Golem would have some non-physical redeeming quality. And magic and paper made a decent combination. It was likely that a Paper Golem’s body was similar to a living grimoire: enchanted books that some outsider mages used instead of staves. (Of course, they found a way to implant small, conquered dungeon cores into the bindings, to use as casting aids.) Even if that wasn’t exactly how they worked, it was probably something close.

Archimedes struggled to make a choice. The Paper Golem was something of a wildcard, but magic was rarely ever not useful. It had the potential to help him with his goal of creating a mobile body, either through magical finesse or research aptitude. If one of the evolutions of a Paper Golem was a Book Golem, for instance, it could turn out to be a very smart monster.

On the other hand, he had seen images of what a Sphinx looked like through Ulbert’s memories, and it was a very imposing specimen. One didn’t acquire a title like “the Dungeon of Behemoths” without having a love of huge, beastly monsters. The Sphinx even balanced puzzles with violence! It solved one of the main issues that had stopped Archimedes from filling his halls with behemoths again! He, erm, rather found it useful to be able to delegate some of the more burdensome tasks that came with running a puzzle dungeon, and there weren’t many monsters that were both striking and clever. Not at low ranks, anyway.

Now that he knew there was such a thing as a Sphinx, he wanted one!

But… according to Ulbert’s memories, all three ancient dungeons had at least one Sphinx. What were the odds of that? They were clearly sharing the blueprints with each other. He didn’t need to go out of his way to get a Sphinx model from the system if he could trade for it later, and if he passed up the Paper Golem now, he might never see it again.

If only I had known about this before sending Umbra out! I can’t know for sure if they’re willing to trade without asking!

The worry that he was wrong and all three ancient dungeons had discovered the Sphinx independently worried him. What if his choice now was a binary one, and the option not chosen would be lost to him forever?

He had more personal attachment to the idea of the Sphinx, but the potential lurking in the Paper Golem couldn’t be ignored.

After several minutes of agonizing internal debate, Archimedes numbly asked Vow, “I can’t decide between the Sphinx and the Paper Golem. Any opinion?”

She answered immediately, as if she had just been waiting to see if he asked.

Oh, Archimedes realized. Except for on an open floor like the second, a Sphinx wouldn’t be able to fit in my dungeon.

That made sense. It was a B-Rank Monster, and the average size of a dungeon floor would be much larger by the time a dungeon was expected to reach that rank. If that was how it was, it definitely wouldn’t be too late to try and get the blueprints from another dungeon once his average floor size had increased. There was also a chance the system would recommend it again if he kept incorporating riddles into his dungeon.

Just in case, Archimedes tried the stencil on Vow’s newest message, and he found a phrase written in very cramped shorthand. If he was interpreting it correctly, it said something like,

He hadn’t considered that the golem’s body itself might be research material for him. His own mobile body would almost certainly be a form of construct as well. Hell, his current body was considered a construct, just one that couldn’t walk around. Having more examples of mobile constructs couldn’t hurt, right?

I need a better term than mobile to describe whatever body I make for myself, the dungeon lamented. Aside from dungeons and some plant monsters, what isn't mobile?

“I see your point,” he nodded, setting his mind back on track. He selected the Paper Golem monster blueprint with a small, lingering feeling of loss. “But someday, I absolutely want to get my hands on a Sphinx too.”

He tested out the new blueprint model right away.

It was a fairly inexpensive and simple recipe. Archimedes had more hope for the evolutions of a Paper Golem than for Paper Golems themselves, but if they turned out to be useful even at E-Rank, he could make quite the number of them. Especially because low-rank constructs didn’t have much force of personality to burden him with.

One ignited spell formula later, a monster coalesced from magic and light.

Its body was stark white and made of thin paper strips, wound around and around into the rough shape of a person. It had long, thin, cylindrical arms, jointless but flexible. They were affixed to the slim, blocky, triangular torso by cut shoulder joints that revealed its hollow interior. The arms thinned until they ended in five thin slips of paper that worked like fingers.

Atop a thin cylindrical neck was another winding of paper strips, forming a blank, oval face. A crinkled, wide brimmed, conical hat was affixed to the top.

Below where the torso tapered, there were no legs, but a conical, multilayered, pleated skirt that began at about midriff level and reached all the way to the floor. The inner layers bent and folded like accordions to pull the golem around.

It was actually more flexible than it looked, but stiff enough that the golem would still be able to stand straight up without any effort.

Archimedes made contact with the creature’s mind, finding a different sort of physical dialect than the one Minute understood. Its mind was rigid in process but flexible and creative in understanding; a bit like origami. The dungeon quickly parsed it and decided on a name the construct could understand.

“Your name is Vellum,” he informed it, projecting the concept of a paper-like material made from animal skins.

The golem pondered the name. “Am I not paper?” it queried. True paper was made of plant fibers, not animal skin, but Archimedes realized that the golem was confused about what it was versus what it was named.

“You are made of paper,” he told it, conjuring a book and a scroll for comparison. “As are these. But you are Vellum.”

“My title?” It asked for confirmation.

“Correct.”

Archimedes was surprised then when the golem reached one paper finger up to its blank face and scrawled its new name in black ink with beautiful calligraphy. The ink looked like it was conjured by magic, but it actually seeped out of the construct's pores. It usually hid within the thin white paper, like blood. There, it would be replenished by the creature’s magical biology.

What caught him off guard more than that was discovering that the creature had an innate understanding of written language. Literacy rates everywhere were high because of the system’s influence, but few creatures were born knowing such things. Archimedes’ monsters could borrow his understanding to “read”, but Vellum wasn’t doing that. Vellum understood for itself what writing was, and he would still understand even outside the dungeon.

He wondered how much of that property was because Vellum was a Paper Golem and how much, if any, was because of his Enhanced Creature Wisdom boon.

Archimedes was pulled out of his contemplation when he sensed the creature inquiring about its purpose.

“Tell me what you can do, and I will tell you what to do,” he said.

“I can write,” Vellum stated. Archimedes waited for more, but the golem seemed to deem nothing else worth mentioning.

Still, he remembered Vow’s advice and conjured the image of a flat spell formation, which would do nothing but conjure a small breeze. “Can you write this?” he asked.

Vellum casually nodded and ink seeped out of his chest into the exact shape of the spell formula.

“Activate it,” the dungeon ordered.

Vellum complied. It was able to activate the spell formula with no difficulty. It stayed inked upon his chest, too, implying he could cast it repeatedly.

“Can you erase it?”

The ink seeped back into the golem’s paper skin. Archimedes felt satisfied that it wasn’t permanent… and intrigued by the potential.

But the golem’s body was mostly hollow, so he presented a three dimensional spell formula next to test how Vellum would handle it.

“Now try this one.” He offered the spell formula for Memory of the Earth.

He had said the Paper Golem was mostly hollow, right? There were the folds and layers in his skirt, the five, winding, overlapping strips that made up his arms… and his oval head which was actually filled with countless paper layers like an onion. Vellum recreated the complex spell formation perfectly inside its head.

Archimedes watched closely with his mystical senses as the construct activated that spell formula, trying to gauge how much mana the creature could use before exhausting itself. He discovered that ink was actually consumed, and the golem was re-inking the formations as they faded. Presumably, it could continue casting until it ran out of ink, and given the volume of paper in its body… even at E-Rank, it had quite a lot of staying power.

It ought to, though, considering how fragile it is.

The creature was literally made of paper: a glass cannon at its finest.

“Good,” Archimedes nodded. “For now, your job is to memorize all the spell formations I show you and find a way to document the three dimensional ones so they can be stored in the library.”

Vellum left up the spiral staircase to complete his orders, and Archimedes’ main focus shifted to expanding his fourth floor. He actually had more than enough mana right that moment to build the entire thing, minus any furnishings. As for how he would build it…

His head had been quite occupied recently, so there hasn’t been much time to spend thinking about what his next floor should be like, but there was one thing Archimedes was sure of:

I can’t just keep scattering my experiments in remote or hidden pockets of the first and second floors. I need a proper, centralized workspace.

So the fourth floor had to contain a workshop. Preferably one hidden off the main path so that those only looking to pass to the next floor wouldn’t find it.

As for the rest of the floor, Archimedes was thinking it would be good to test the explorers on their understanding of mechanics and physics. He was searching for people with the potential to help him create a body, after all. They had to demonstrate such understanding to even begin to qualify.

Fortunately, with the theme decided, it was enough for Zemnes to get to work. The Man-Eating Bat already had a detailed working blueprint in his head before the fourth floor had even been constructed.

Delegating the architectural planning to Zemnes was convenient and time-saving, and the bat had discovered a real passion for architecture. Archimedes also had a love for floor design, but his creation’s creations were good enough that he didn’t mind that he wasn’t the one to draft them.

“I like it,” Archimedes nodded mentally and praised the red-furred creature. “Work with Lilith, Minute, and Helios on what puzzles to add and where. I’ll carve out the basic floor plan in the meantime.”

The design this time was one after Minute’s own clockwork heart. It was going to look like the inside of an enormous clock tower. The floor needed to be built as high and deep as possible, to allow for multi-leveled wood and brass scaffolding. Rods, pipes, gears, and tumblers would be scattered around both as decoration, functional clocks and metal drawbridges, and to disguise the locations of the actual puzzles.

It was a very vertical design, so Archimedes carved out a large column of air with the stairway opening out to the top corner. This meant only about a fourth of the horizontal space was occupied. The “clock tower” ended up being smaller than the third floor’s library, but still about as big as the entire second floor.

The remaining three quarters of the space was separated by a thick stone wall, but it too was hollowed out into a large workshop area. Archimedes artificially split the area into three vertical levels, relocating his Etherium and Mananite tanks to the bottom one. He planned to continue making more until that entire level was full of them. As for the top two levels, they would see use someday later. It was good enough just to have the space set aside for now.

The dungeon continued to happily carve, build, plan, and decorate along with the monsters that were helping him do so, all while overseeing Anther’s condition, exploring Vellum’s capabilities, thinking about Vow, and maintaining all of a dungeon’s ordinary functions. As the number of distinct tasks he had to focus on at once increased, he grew very glad to have built his fourth floor, so that the angular faces of his newest core layer could assist him in keeping those lines of thought distinct from each other.

In general, multitasking was nothing but rapidly switching between tasks so that they appeared to be simultaneous, but now he could multitask in a truer sense of the world.

Well, his individual core layers already functioned that way, but gaining four faces all at once more than doubled the effect in an instant.

Having the potential to carry out more and more separate trains of thought raised the odds of forming multiple personalities, however, so Archimedes didn’t regret not rushing to his fourth floor, and taking time to bond with his outsider friends and monsters.

From now on, he would be guarding himself carefully against mental influences, processing and refining the person he was now, instead of adding new layers to his ego.

Funny, because a normal dungeon at this stage would be making use of their larger body and multiple core faces to catalyze the process of forming an Ego. Archimedes already had one and was trying to stop the process. He had to find a way to make his biology work with him on this instead of against him, and he would not be progressing to the fifth floor until he was confident his ego could take the burden.

Because he would gain four new faces again on the fifth floor.