Eternal Dungeon POV

I watched as the party Ava’s Own traveled through my new floor. Exploring the various paths and mapping everything out. The layout was designed in such a way that you could only move between layers using the Drop Shaft. Each of the Drop Shafts ledges were connected through the tunnels and caverns, meaning that to get from an entrance ledge to an exit one you would need to explore to find the best path. I further highlighted the exploration feature by making sure there were always at least two paths to explore with varying rewards in place for exploring certain out of the way areas.

I had high hopes that this would be the floor to finally score me a kill from this party. They were the first ones to explore and they were incredibly cautious and smart, their rogue was especially good at sensing danger. While I didn’t hold any animosity towards them, I also didn’t want anyone thinking my dungeon was a cakewalk. That being said, a sign of a bad DM is trying to kill your players, so I wouldn’t force it. I would just hope that they did something stupid, which might actually happen on this floor considering the difficulty difference between levels 5 and 6 spikes.

I had designed this floor more like a traditional dungeon, at least in my sense of it. There was a set level that all monsters would spawn at or above. Level 25 for The Lost Mines and Level 30 for the Wyrmscale Caverns. The Dungeon was also level capped at 10 levels above the minimum with the final boss being at level 35. The difference in minimum level created a sharp jump in difficulty when going from layer 5 to layer 6, a jump that I hoped would catch some people off guard and lead to deaths. Although you could deduce this jump in difficulty if you 100% completed the Lost Mines area. I liked to reward thoroughness and information gathering as well as the people who actually read all the lore I spent time making.

On the subject of rewards I needed to start making some more fine tuned loot tables. Sure most of my monsters and plants had inherent value as reagents and materials but I wanted something better. I did have lots of copied equipment and items from people sacrificing equipment or losing it on death, but that wasn’t enough for me. I had finally absorbed enough stuff that I was confident in creating something from scratch this time. I think I’m going to do a deeper dive into my most popular item first, the Legacy Tomes.

The Legacy Tomes were an item that a lot of adventuring teams seemed to save up to buy. I’m reasonably sure they're just reselling them on the outside. Which implies that a Legacy Tome is worth more than the 20,000 silver that you could get from the EC exchange. I wanted to try and see if there was anything I could do with the Legacy Tomes as they were easily the most complex item I had ever seen, not including anything system made that is.

First, I wanted to pick it apart piece by piece. I had already absorbed it which means that I know everything about it, but I would need to actually sort through that information if I wanted to make something new. I needed to examine each individual piece of the item's construction to see what did what and see how it could be applied elsewhere.

I quickly learned that there were several advanced magic constructions that looked similar to dungeon magic. Perhaps whoever made this was basing it off of a dungeon item? Most of it was used to directly interact with the local system of a user and make a copy of their class, along with a process that would then save that copy and alter the item into a Legacy Tome of whatever the class was as opposed to a blank one. I wish I had a filled Legacy Tome to get a comparison, but I doubted anyone would just give me one of those.

I knew for a fact that dungeon creatures couldn’t get a proper class due to drawing power from the dungeon. In order to have a class a creature had to be a sentient and have developed their power on their own. Dungeon creations, no matter how autonomous, couldn’t get a system class. Now I could try and cut some Spiritkin loose on the condition they give me some filled Legacy Tomes, but I didn’t like the idea of that.

Not only were my Spiritkin incredibly devout, meaning that cutting one lose could cause serious mental trauma, but they were also unaccustomed to life outside the dungeon. I had no reference to even prepare them for what non-dungeon life would be like. I refused to condemn a Spiritkin, one of my creations, to a complete unknown. There’s also all the issues that could come from a dungeon being able to create sentient creatures and then release them into the world. It was better to just not do it.

With no way to compare my blank tome to a filled one I moved on to figuring out if its magic structure could be applied to other things. I used a little system help in the sense that I ordered my system to just play hot and cold with me. It would give me a feeling the closer to the correct answer I got. I could’ve figured it out completely on my own, but I didn’t want to be experimenting for hours on end this time.

It still took me over an hour to figure something out, but it's not comparatively that long based on the previous times. I learned that I could create an item with a set amount of raw potential and then use the class scanning features to generate class items. In theory. I had to test it on an actual adventurer to see if it would work properly.

I used one with only lesser potential and gave it to Aika to try out. It turned into a pink scrunchie that was a race specific item for a Spiritkin Chosen. It had minor buffs on it that would help her in day to day things but nothing too major, it was only a Lesser item after all.

After my success I gave Aika a whole set of gear that had Legendary Potential so that she would be appropriately outfitted as my chosen. I wanted to give her Mythical gear but the mana difference between Mythical and Legendary was an entire order of magnitude. I made saving up more mana a priority on my to-do list, I really wanted to see what a Mythical Item was capable of.

With the class equipment figured out I decided to try and work on it more. I wanted to test if there was a way to direct the way it generated more. At the moment I was just creating balls of mana with magical instructions programmed into them. I decided to try a similar thing but as an enchantment on a premade weapon. I made a variety of weapons and had different Spiritkin and beasts try to use them.

I learned that the Spiritkin could reliably generate a Spiritkin specific race weapon, however my beasts had no success. What did have more success was giving the weapons to goblins and kobolds. I learned that the stronger ones could easily generate race weapons. It looked like their rank had to be equal or greater to the items to generate a race weapon. I did more tests using the initial balls of encoded mana and found that my beasts would generate items that were more appropriate for them. Large pieces of armor shaped for their bodies, specialized gauntlets that allowed space for their claws, and even custom accessories for fur, horns, and scales.

I decided to give Bellator as many Legendary picks as Aika, but he refused them. He wanted any item given to him to be more personal. I agreed to get back to him which I could tell pleased him greatly through our bond. I set aside a portion of my attention to devising an item type that would fit him well.

I’ve now learned something, the class items only generate if the item is appropriate for the class (or in this case race). I could still give out completely random items using the balls of encoded mana, which I shall name Random Items. However I could also enchant preset equipment with the class item feature and it would allow me to better control the result.

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I quickly whipped up several class items using generalized equipment. A set of plate armor and a shield made up the Tank class set. A set of leather armor for the Skirmisher class set, this would be for rogues, archers, etc. A set of padded cloth armor made for the Caster class set. I added plated leather and light mail armor set as well just to cover all my bases. I created an array of weapons to choose from and made a bundle system giving everyone a choice of weapon+armor set. I made some daggers and shortswords as paired weapons, meaning that they counted as one weapon for purposes of the bundle.

With all that done I added the class items to my current shops but they could only be purchased by receiving a token as a progression reward. I also gave all my Spiritkin who were craftsmen the ability to make custom class gear. It was rather easy since all I needed to do was give them my perfected recipe for the class enchantment. Now my new class items were ready and for sale. Hopefully this wouldn’t cause any big waves with the adventurers. Right?

Guildmaster Tor POV

The whole guild was about to riot. I already had to personally stop six separate groups from rushing into the dungeon. These idiots saw a fancy prize and were about to kill each other to try and get it. A party had come out of the dungeon and reported that the dungeon was producing class equipment.

Did they do this quietly in the confines of my warded office? No, that would’ve been too smart for those idiots. Instead they came out yelling about it at the top of their lungs and caused every adventurer in the outpost to try and rush the dungeon entrance. If it weren’t for my immediate arrival some of them would have succeeded in getting past the guards. Now I was stuck watching the dungeon entrance while every adventurer in line eyed it greedily.

Very few dungeons dropped class equipment and it was highly prized by all adventurers. Class equipment would perfectly suit your class, often giving specialized bonuses to it. Class equipment could also give powerful set bonuses along with enhancing certain class skills. Having a full set of class equipment could give a power increase of up to 60% if the gear was good enough. This would let you fight up several dozen levels in some cases, vastly improving your leveling rate.

The Guild Founder was the only person I knew with a full set of class gear. Few dungeons dropped it and they usually only dropped it once for each individual as a first completion reward. This meant it required insane luck to not get a duplicate of a piece you already had. There were also few dungeons that would drop the equipment at a high enough level to be useful. The three star metal dungeon was one of the few that consistently dropped a weapon that was both a class item and legendary rank, but that required an immense amount of work to unlock.

I sighed heavily as I prepared to stay up for a few days straight while everything calmed down. I already knew that by the time I returned to my office I would have a hundred more letters waiting for me. I wish this dungeon would stop doing crazy things all the time, this post was supposed to be relaxing.

Eternal Dungeon POV

Yeah I’m sure it’ll be fine. The class gear was so easy to make based off of the Legacy Tome that I can’t have been the first one to make it. I had high hopes for this new loot, I really wanted to encourage the adventurers to actually take on more risk. Right now they all stuck to the easy wins that other people had already learned all the secrets of. Only a handful of teams were actually exploring ahead of the others, like pioneers for the Guild.

Although based on the high competence level of these exploratory parties I had to assume it was the Guilds doing. It would make sense for them to send ahead the best groups to learn the dungeon before sending in the rest; especially for dungeons that would actually kill you, but I had a respawn system. The whole point of bringing them back to life for a penalty was to encourage a higher level of risk. I wanted everyone to get a chance to explore the unknown.

Well if I wanted everyone to get a chance to explore the best thing to do is make bigger floors. Still I had already planned out my floor layout, the only place I could make things bigger would be floor 6. I split off some of my attention to rework my floor six through ten plans to make them all larger than initially planned for. I refocused my main attention onto my quest system.

I wanted to make some more questlines to help fill out the second floor and to encourage more exploration/adventure. I would make some quests that led to various parts of the floor and required tasks to be completed. I also needed to make a few quests for my new third floor, the only one it currently had was the unlock questline.

I had to design most of the quests myself using the system to interact with the adventurers. I had integrated the quest system into my progression tracker so that I could lock certain things behind questlines. The way it worked was simple, an adventurer would receive a prompt from the system for the quest whenever they entered an area that they could receive the quest from. Most quests were given out from the questboard in Wyla with some special quests requiring people to talk to certain Spiritkin first to receive them.

All the quests were kept inside the system itself. I used the system to keep track of progression on the quests as well as automatically process the rewards. I had to lean heavily on my nature as a dungeon to help everything work properly. The system already had an inbuilt feature to keep track of who got what amount of credit for doing anything, which I used to make sure someone couldn’t get carried through a quest by others. (I used the same thing to stop people from being carried through the dungeon in general).

I split my attention into a dozen lines of thought and started making new questlines for exploration and ones for the third floor. I reached out to my Spiritkin and assigned a few of them as quest givers, giving them the relevant memories and rewards. I felt a tug of my attention as something failed.

What? What failed? I had done this dozens of times, I had never had a problem with my quest mechanics before. I checked further and found that the point of failure was actually in the Spiritkin. I delved deeper to find that all my spirit contracts had been broken. Well not broken, more like nullified.

I started questioning the system to figure out what was wrong. I quickly learned that the reason for the change was due to the Spiritkin being a proper race now. Since they were my dungeon race they inherently belonged to me so I didn’t need contracts binding them to me. Apparently this was something all the spirits agreed to as well. This meant I would have to rework a lot of my Spiritkin reward programs.

On the plus side, my Spiritkin were no longer a constant mana drain since they were my creatures instead of contracted ones. I now had to rework the way I was rewarding them . . . wait did they actually care? Everything had been going smoothly with the rewards being broken so far. The Spiritkin were just doing their jobs without the promise of reward. Well that wouldn’t do, I should reward them somehow. Luckily I have the perfect person for the job.

“Aika, my Chosen. Go out amongst the people and ask what they desire as compensation for their contributions to my work.” I sent the command through our shared link.

“My Lord, the Spiritkin have no need of compensation. You have brought us to life with purpose, there is no greater joy than fulfilling that purpose.” Her response came

Well it seems I have created a group of devoted followers. Still I would be a bad boss if I didn’t reward them somehow. Though it would also be bad if I didn’t respect their wishes. What to do. What to do. Hmmm. I strained my current mind so much that other streams of thought started snapping back to my main one to help.

After several minutes of high speed thought I still have no ideas. I don’t know of a way to reward them that they would actually accept. I even went through all of their minds to try and find anything and Aika was right. They’re all perfectly content to fulfill the jobs I gave to them. I kind of already set up a perfect system.

They have the ability to try out different roles and find one they enjoy and then can simply do that role until they get bored with it. There's nothing locking them in place and I don’t really restrict their freedom so long as they stay in the dungeon. I decided to simply give up on this for now, if I think of something I can implement it then.

I returned my thoughts to their divergent paths allowing me to quickly finish the quests I was creating. With everything set up I felt that my dungeon was in a good enough spot for me to start working on the next floor. I had plans for the fourth floor already. Since the adventurers were so excited about teaming up, it was time for a Raid Floor.