With that little bit of excitement over, I can turn my attention back to what I was doing in the first place.

The continuation of building my dungeon.

In just a couple of hours, I finally finish the first of the two tunnels after which I start on the second one.

At some point, I vaguely notice the two yetis returning.

After briefly stopping my digging to ask if Mary-Ann made it safely of the mountain, which they assured me she did, I finish the excavation of the second tunnel.

Keeping the same dimension as my entrance corridor and making both of these tunnels twenty metres long as well nets me another 7400 mana. Because I already spent what I got from what I got from digging half of the first tunnel on my Yeti's, I only have around 6000 mana in my mana reserves. But that is fine.

I still need to create a room. And who says I will even stop there. There is going to be a lot of digging in the future.

The very first room I created was 3 by 3 metres.

The next one I'm about to create will definitely be bigger.

I start by creating a cylindrical room with a diameter of then metres and a height of 7 metres. The roof of the cylinder is slightly domed to ease the pressure of the mountain and thus to prevent cave-ins. Having dug out this room myself gained me another staggering 20300 mana. Sadly enough for me, to claim both of the tunnels and this room, I need to invest 13850 mana. This still leaves me with over 12000 mana to work with though.

Using the mana from my excavation, I create two stairs made of blue ice and make it so that they start from the middle of the room and near the walls. Hugging the walls of this room, they go up for three metres and come together in a platform made of thick ice. So make sure the platform and the stairs will be able to support heavy equipped adventurers, I place a couple of support pillars underneath them. All symmetrical of course.

In the middle of the platform and on the far side of the wall, I create the start of another tunnel. Since I want to finish this room first, I only dig out the first metre of the tunnel.

Investing some more mana, I line the stairs with handrails and the platform with railings made from blue ice to prevent people from just falling off.

So far, I've been overlooking a pretty important part in designing my dungeon. Important to me, that is.

I haven't paid any attention to aesthetics yet. So far, my tunnel and first room were made with practicality in mind.

This will have to change though.

Going back to my entry corridor, I try to envision what I want to do with it. Standing near the entrance, I try to look outside but sadly enough my vision just cuts off. Luckily enough for me, I have two cored monsters that are capable of leaving my dungeon and thus are capable of looking out of my dungeon.

I mentally command one of them to come towards the entrance and make it stand there just at the very edge of my dungeon.

Mentally linking with it enables me to use its senses, temporarily swapping my own mana based senses for actual eyes, ears, nose, skin and tongue. The shift in perspective is profound and staggering but not necessarily unpleasant.

For starters, it seems like a Yeti is colourblind. Which would make sense I guess? When you live in a biome that is mostly white from the snow and dark from bad weather, you have you use for colours. Every colour just becomes a shade of grey to differentiate things from each other. It would seem that with a loss of colour comes an increase in contrast though.

I'm only guessing here but it would seem that the yeti that died earlier would have easily been able to spot my two camouflaged snow leopards if it hadn't been so busy snacking on the thugs since they rely on the colour of their fur to blend in with the surroundings.

The Yeti's sense of smell is just astounding. From where it stands, it is easily capable of smelling the musky odour of the leopards and of the other Yeti. Luckily for me and the yetis, the blood and the stench of it were absorbed along with the bodies, otherwise, it would have overwhelmed us and might have even driven the yetis into a bloodlust fueled frenzy.

Even this high up, I can faintly make out the smell of the pine trees that are hundreds of metres below me.

In the distance, the cry of some kind of bird of prey can be heard as it is most likely looking for its next meal.

Not being able to find it using the Yeti's eyes just confirms for me that a Yeti also has superb hearing.

For the first time since coming to this world, I'm now capable of truly looking at it.

The sole sun currently sits high in the sky which would mean its currently somewhere in the afternoon I guess.

Halfway down the mountain slope below my dungeon, the rocky, snow-covered slope makes way for the occasional pine tree. Pretty soon after, lone pine trees become many until it becomes a full-blown pine forest. Way beyond the dense and vast forest, the forest makes way for gentle hilled plains.

There are no signs of civilization as far as I (the Yeti) can see. It would seem like these mountains are truly desolated and that people steer clear of them. Unless of course there are people that live further in the mountains and that I can't see because the entrance of my dungeon is faced towards the kingdom of Ralomar.

The gentle snowfall outside of my dungeon brings me out of my reverie. Making the Yeti stick its tongue out, it catches some of the drifting snowflakes on its tongue where they spontaneously melt. I feel like a kid again, playing outside in the first snowfall of the winter. 

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

The proverbial inspirational lightbulb starts shining in my head as I get an idea for how to decorate my dungeon or at least parts of it. Leaving the Yeti's mind, I turn my attention back towards my dungeon.

Due to my new nature as a dungeon, I recently discovered that I'm now capable of perfectly memorising and recalling things. Making use of this trait, I start engraving the view I saw outside into one of the walls near the entrance. Slowly but surely, the slope of my mountain starts taking shape. After the slope is formed, I litter the slope with trees until they eventually become a vast forest. To finish it all off, I line the top of the engraving with the flowing hills of the plains.

Taking a metaphorical step back, I take in my creation. Its crude in some places and could have most likely been done better by actual masons or artists but, even though my background was in science in my previous life, I'm quite happy with it. I mirror my creation onto the wall on the other side of the corridor to finish this particular part of my decoration plan.

 The rest of my entrance corridor gets lined with engravings of snowflakes. Making use of the snow I previously absorbed, I make it so that every single snowflake is different except for its twin on the other wall to keep things symmetrical. Each snowflake spans from the floor to the ceiling and is as wide as it is tall.

The other two corridors that I have created so far get the same decoration treatment.

My two chambers, however, get a slightly different decor scheme.

I line the small room with a myriad of engravings of smaller snowflakes, some of them even the same to make things easier. After the engravings are done, I fill some of these engravings with a layer of ice so that the flickering torchlight makes it look like the snowflakes sparkle. From afar, the flickering snowflakes look like stars on a clear winter sky in the middle of the night.

Sadly enough, I encounter a problem. The torches that I placed in this room have increased the ambient temperature of this room ever so slightly. While not much, it is still enough to bring the temperature of the room above 0°C and thus above the melting point of regular ice. If I do nothing about this, I will lose the flickering effect of this room which would be annoying for I really like the aesthetic.

Instead of trying to lower the ambient temperature of the room, I decide to increase the freezing point of the ice instead.

While this may be harder to do, in the long run, it will be more useful to me. After all, I still have another room. One which stairs and platform are made of pure ice.

Increasing the freezing point of ice is no simple matter if you try doing it with regular means though. It requires components that I currently have no access to. Luckily for me, this is where magic comes in.

After fiddling around a bit, I manage to infuse ice in such a way that it essentially becomes enchanted. Because of this infusion, the ice becomes harder, stronger and has an increased melting punt. In fact, I managed to make it so that it requires four times the amount of heat that is needed to change the state of the ice.

If a fire mage happens to wander in my dungeon, he would have four times harder for him to melt my ice than he normally would. This translates to needing four times more mana to get the same result as with regular ice.

Deciding that my first room is sufficiently decorated, for now, I focus on the second room. I start with applying the same infusion as my first room to the ice to make sure my stairs and platform don't just collapse. Then I place torches on the walls near the entries and exits for the corridors and corridors to be. This way, adventurers will have at least some form of lighting even though it isn't the best.

The decor scheme of this room will be engravings of pine trees with snow on them, making it look like the entire room is surrounded by a stone forest in the middle of winter. Engravings like these take me a ridiculously long time but in the end, I'm quite happy with them and with how the room looks.

After aesthetics and decoration comes safety. I again line the corridors with a thin sheet of crystal clear ice.

Even though it is just a nuisance at most, I'm still quite fond of it. It works well with the theme I'm currently going for.

I dig out another pitfall in each of the corridors but this time I decide to ignore my prefab traps and decide to create them myself. To make sure that my creatures can safely traverse my dungeon at will, I leave some solid edges they can move over. Since they are bound to me, they should have no problem in detecting where its safe and where it is trapped.

I hide the hole of the pitfalls by growing a very thin layer of ice over them. I mix some very fine diorite dust in the ice so that it looks like a normal part of the floor. Only people that are very lucky and walk over the solid edge, that have some way to detect the trap or that just have great intuition will be able to traverse these traps without falling in.

That's the plan at least.

The bottom of the traps gets lined with copies of the daggers that I absorbed from the thugs.

Even though a dagger isn't very long, it can still kill someone if one lands badly or if he or she isn't wearing a sufficient amount of armour to stop the dagger from penetrating. After all, a dagger through your arm is painful and might kill you through blood loss. A dagger to your heart or your eye and you can be sure you are done for if you have no healer with you.

Would you like to add this modified version of the pitfall trap:

Pitfall with daggers and a camouflaged ice cover,

to your list of available traps?

This way, you can save the design and make them en mass wherever and whenever you want as long as you have the required mana for it.

Yes, please. This will make things that much easier.

Deciding to forego building the same trap in the second corridor myself as I did with this one, I just will my new trap into existence. Mana leaves me, slightly more then I used to create the first trap and coalesces where I want the trap to be. When the mana clears up again, there's nothing to be seen. Or so it would seem for when I inspect the place with my mana senses, the hole underneath the ice becomes glaringly obvious.

The increased mana cost doesn't come as a surprise to me since I dug the hole for the first one myself, which gave me mana.

In the future, if I want to make more of these, I might just create them all from scratch to save on the mana but just now, as an experiment, this was fine.