Destruction and Creation go hand and hand, two sides of the same coin. To know how to make something also imparts the knowledge of how to destroy it. Thus when it comes to the pursuit of learning creation magic, one of the first things I do is make my students break down various objects. Once they learn to disassemble and clock into all of its component pieces it becomes shockingly easy for them to reassemble that clock through movement magic, and eventually they can simply fabricate a clock from nothing more than mana.

One must imagine that the constructive and destructive knowledge of a dungeon is terrifyingly immense, as they are an entity capable of breaking down and building any object they have ever touched.

* An excerpt from ‘A Guide to Basic Fabrication Magic’ by Guildmaster Lina Lei

----------------------------------------

Eternal Dungeon POV

‘Hmmm, things feel kind of weird without those three around. Also I totally forgot to ask Wyla my system questions before she started her Ascension. I’m probably going to forget to ask again so I should definitely write this down somewhere.’

My thoughts wander around as I spend some time getting familiarized with the dungeon and writing down questions for Wyla on a notes feature in my system. It doesn’t take long since I can write at the speed of my accelerated thoughts and I can perceive my entire dungeon with my aura. Not too much has changed, mostly the adventurers getting into new trouble.

Well I say adventurers, but the Guildies have actually been progressing well and minimizing deaths thanks to all their experience with my dungeon. It’s actually the non-guild people that are falling for the easiest of my traps and dying by the dozens. Which sucks for them but is really good for me, in fact it's part of why I wanted my dungeon opened to the public in the first place. A near limitless supply of people who don’t know my dungeon well and are likely to die a few times on each floor because of it.

Even with those deaths people are still getting rich, my EC is worth a lot and I don’t just mean my personal conversion rates for it. The Adventurer’s Guild has been offering a lot of gold in exchange for EC because they know how much value it actually has since it's the only valid currency inside my dungeon. It’s actually getting to the point where I think I’m going to stop offering a gold exchange for it myself and just let other people handle it. I only even offered gold for it in the first place to help entice people into entering my dungeon.

With that errant thought resolved I deactivate my gold conversion, it shouldn’t matter much since most people have been using the Adventurers Guild anyways. Now I refocus on actually trying to accomplish something, I’ve been ignoring my quests long enough and it’s about time I start completing some of them.

Most of my quests require me to have more information about my surroundings outside of the dungeon. So my first step towards completing them should be to expand my aura more. I’d pretty much been ignoring my aura ever since I set it up to automatically expand over time, however now I should get a proper check on its progress and focus some of my prodigious mana production into expanding it faster.

I delve into myself focusing on the little mote of my mind that performs the endless task of steadily growing my aura. I hadn’t realized when I first started, but this little part of myself that automatically grows my aura was the first ever time I split a thought process off. I had just assumed that by doing it continuously I had made it subconscious, which isn’t exactly a wrong statement, but what I had really done was use my dungeon core nature to split off a thought process that endlessly performs a repetitive task. A very necessary ability for any core that doesn’t wish to go insane.

My aura expansion technique is fairly basic now that I’m looking at it again. When I had first started all I knew to do was shove mana into the outer shell of my core and then slowly push outwards to expand my aura. This method works perfectly fine, but now that I’m looking at it with more experience with mana manipulation I can tell that it could be better.

I know from my work with runes that mana can be encouraged to perform more effectively when following certain patterns. Different patterns can also impart different effects on the mana as well, which is the entire foundation of runework and enchanting. Thanks to my many experiments along with the donations of many adventurers I have a sizable bank of usable runes. I just need to create a pattern that will help expand my aura more efficiently or quickly, either would work for me.

With my task decided I can finally start dedicating my mind to completing it. I split my attention in two and dedicate each to testing different patterns with separate final goals. One half will experiment with trying to make my aura expansion more efficient, because if it takes less mana per inch of expansion then I can get more aura expansion out of the same amount of mana. The other half will experiment with testing patterns for making the aura expand faster, because if I can make it expand faster than I can just spend a few days throwing mana at my aura until it's large enough for me to start doing quests.

Of the two I think making the aura use up my mana faster and expand faster is my preferred one currently. At the current moment my aura expansion is limited by how fast it can use the mana I give to it. If I can accelerate how quickly I turn mana into aura then I could just dump my mana generation into my aura until it reaches whatever size I want. That being said, having an increased efficiency in converting mana into aura would also be useful. It would just mean that I would take a slow and inexpensive approach as opposed to a fast and costly one. There’s no reason to not pursue both since my mind is very capable of multitasking, so I decided to experiment with both approaches to see which will work better.

It quickly becomes apparent after a few hours of testing that making it go faster is a lot easier than making it more efficient, however the mana costs are scaling horribly. It makes me start to understand why the rate of my aura expansion had been so stable before. If I want to use mana to grow my aura faster the amount I have to put in scales exponentially causing the time saved to quickly become worth less than the mana lost. The rune sequences I’m using to perform these accelerated transfers are also rapidly increasing in complexity which is causing me to run out of space to write them on the surface of my core.

I manage to get four rune sequences made before I’m forced to erase everything and continue my research in an even smaller script, but the four patterns I have tell an interesting story. By doubling the cost of mana per foot of aura expansion I can make that expansion happen roughly 50% faster. By tripling it I can make it happen about 83% faster. For quadruple the cost I get a total bonus speed of 105%. The pattern holds for my fourth sequence as well which has a staggering quintuple mana cost in exchange for a 125% increase in conversion speed. My rune sequences are effectively lowering the mana efficiency of my aura conversion in exchange for performing them faster.

The correlation between mana efficiency and aura expansion speed may mean that increasing the efficiency will cause the rate of aura growth to slow down, however I won’t know for certain until I manage a rune sequence that actually makes it noticeably more efficient. So far my tests in that direction have managed an ‘amazingly high’ 0.05% increase in efficiency which could possibly just be a fluke of my method of measuring how much mana I’m inputting into the sequence. My core is constantly off putting small amounts of my mana which escapes the inner layers, it's fully possible that some of that mana is going into the rune sequence and making it appear like a slight increase in mana efficiency. Unfortunately I have to make the sequences directly on my core or else that can’t interact as an intermediary between my mana and aura so I have no real way of testing this.

For now I decide to pull most of my ‘processing power’ out of the aura conversion project but I do allow myself to continue some research on it. If I can simplify the runework or perhaps simply discover a better method of mana to aura conversion I might be able to still make progress, but I doubt I can make more progress at my current level. Hopefully Wyla will hold some insights for me once she returns from her ascension. For now I think I’ll turn my attention back to my dungeon, more specifically my dungeon creatures who I haven’t checked in with in a while.

* * *

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

I spend a few hours going over all my floors and getting a general sense of how my dungeon creatures are feeling. A shockingly high number of my dungeon's creatures have gained some level of sapience, which is slightly unnerving considering that they're being used as fodder. While I feel no moral burden on my conscience due to this, likely another effect imparted by either the system or my lack of a biological body, I still don’t want my creations to be unhappy.

Thanks to my little check in I now know that all of them seem to take pride in the fact that they are one of my creations, but more importantly they are driven by their own ambitions to improve. Thanks to my system which allows my mobs that have reached their level cap to move to lower floors and continue growing, many of my dungeon creatures find purpose in the act of increasing their strength and progressing downwards.

This is further compounded when you consider that I allow some of my dungeon creatures the luxury of being revived on death as opposed to being replaced. A mechanic that I had at first started to ensure that every floor would always have some competent guardians has transformed into something else entirely. Now on each floor every one of my mobs has to choose between locking themselves onto that floor for an extended period and gaining the perk of returning to life when killed, or they can risk not binding themselves to the floor and be able to advance the moment they reach the level cap.

I remembered implementing many of these dungeon rules when I had first started, but it seems a mixture of Wyla’s interference along with some natural progression led to this new system being in place. I personally see no reason to change it as of yet because it works wonderfully and it seems to keep everyone happy. As I looked over it I even realized just how much Wyla had been doing for the more basic creatures that I had forgotten about. I had spent so much time focusing on my Spiritkin and Chosen, along with making plans for the future, that I forgot about the creatures that make up most of my dungeon.

I make a mental note to thank Wyla as well as a quick splitting of attention to dedicate a small amount of myself to watching over my dungeon creatures. I need to try and keep an eye on things until Wyla is back, it’s barely been a day and I’m already realizing how much of the basic dungeon processes she took over for me. My ability to split my mind and perform different tasks is slowly being tested as I check over different things and dedicate parts of myself to overseeing them.

Loot and shop items need to be fabricated and spawned according to the various variables that govern them. My own rune work that helps run much of the dungeons' more magical aspects needs to be constantly checked and maintained. Dungeon Creatures need to be either revived or replaced depending on their status. Quests are actually mostly self sufficient once implemented, but they still need occasional input due to the amount of freedom that adventurers have in completing them. There's plenty of small, easily missed functions that need to be looked over and either maintained or altered. Lots of things for a dungeon to do.

I already need a break. No breaks to be had though, the dungeon needs to run. It’s not strenuous as much as it is monotonous and repetitive. I fail to understand how it is that Wyla enjoys doing this stuff. I split off a part of my mind to work on solving one of my problems just so that I can have something else to focus on and alleviate the tedium.

Several of my bosses have expressed interest in getting a chance to move to lower levels of the dungeon where the level cap is higher and they can begin advancing again. It’s a sentiment I understand since I too hate being stuck at the same level for too long, but one that presents a problem. Namely, who will take their places?

With standard, or even ‘elite’, dungeon creatures I don’t really have to micro manage them since if they move to a different floor I can either promote a mob from a lower (numerically) floor to replace them or simply spawn a new creature. Bosses are a different story. Every Boss of an explored floor is well known and the quests have been set up in such a way as to help give hints as to what each boss is. This means that I can’t just promote a new mob unless it's one of an identical type like what I do for the first floor boss. I could always spawn a new boss monster, but it won’t be as experienced as the original and anyone who fought the previous one would be able to tell. I would also run into the issue of the new bosses wanting to continue progressing as well.

So I can’t replace the bosses to allow them to move on. Simply not allowing any of my boss monsters to progress is also always an option, but it feels like a cheap solution and is something I really only want to do as a last resort.

So where does that leave me?

Clearly I need to think outside of the box and figure out another method that satisfies all parties involved, including my own sense of pride.

‘Perhaps I should ask my bosses if they have any thoughts on the matter? I’m having trouble thinking of a new solution outside of the ones I’ve already considered. Maybe I need a fresh perspective on the matter.’

I move my attention through my floors and seek out the bosses of each. I connect my mind to theirs and pull them into my own accelerated thinking so that I can hold a conversation with them without impairing their normal duties. I then explain the situation to them before asking if they have any thoughts on how I should handle their advancement.

“We think that advancement and replacement is a bad idea!”

“Yes, Yes! We have too much to learn, we refuse to advance after being defeated!

The voices of the Wyrm of Duality speak up. The two have become more and more like a single entity as the days go on. Ever since their defeat at the hands of Ava’s Own they have dedicated themselves to training harder and improving their combat ability. It’s to the point where all the groups that came after don’t believe that there's any way Ava’s Own could’ve beaten them. So far my third floor boss has been defeated six times, each time by an Adventurers Guild party and each time they improve some aspect of their fighting style.

“We of the fourth disagree. While the other floors may be structured differently, the fourth floor would certainly benefit from an advancement system for us bosses. It would allow us to promote one of our underlings to the position of boss once we ourselves advance and I personally think it would suit the floors dynamic well, Lord Eternal.” Grobnozz says, the other two faction bosses nodding in agreement.

Recently Grobnozz has had a string of victories, leading to him gaining an advantage over his two rivals. However things have stalemated now that both Bognoz and Red Belly started working together whenever they had to fight Grobnozz. All three factions still fight each other, but they work together just enough to ensure that Grobnozz can’t further exploit his lead.

“I will consider such a thing for specifically the PvP Raid floors, but for now I want to focus on establishing a general policy for boss advancement.” I say with a nod of acknowledgment to the fourth floor bosses.

“Lord Eternal, is there a way that we could perhaps be the bosses of multiple floors? Many of us spend a lot of idle time waiting for groups to reach us, perhaps there is room for taking on multiple duties?” The lone prowler present asks.

I called in the prowler that Bellator considers his second in command as she was the one who would replace Bellator as the second floor boss that guarded the path to the sixth floor. The Prowler boss of the first floor was excluded from the conversation since the first floor boss already has an established advancement method.

“That’s a rather good point. Even the first floor boss spends only a few hours of each day actually engaged in combat, most of your time is spent waiting around in your boss arenas. Although this once again doesn’t really apply to the fourth floor as each of them have more active roles in the factional combat. . .” I drift off as my mind spins with thoughts, none of my bosses question it and simply sit in silence while I think.

‘It’s already clear to me that the fourth floor, and any floors like it that I make in the future, will need a separate policy from my more standard floors. So I can at least confirm that aspect of the problem and send the three fourth floor bosses back to their duties.’

I take a moment to explain as much aloud to them and give them a chance to speak their own minds about it, however it seems that they all agree with me and are eager to return to their war. A wave of my hand sends the fourth floor bosses back to their own minds and I return to my thoughts.

‘I need a way that allows my bosses to advance to better floors so that they can continue their progression, either as another boss or as just an elite monster. However I still want the bosses to be able to keep their original role. This poses the level problem, a boss that advances will obviously end up too strong for whatever floor they started out as the boss of, so I would need a way to remove those levels whenever they act as a boss.’

I generate a chair within my mindscape and then proceed to lean back into it. I feel like I have more problems now instead of less. Maybe it was a mistake to even think of allowing my bosses to advance in the first place. No. Don’t think like that. Most of my boss monsters ended up in their roles because they grew into them. Really it's just the Wyrm of Duality that I spawned as the boss, all my other bosses earned their place and I need to make sure they can continue to grow. Still, this would be a lot easier if I could just duplicate them so that they can do both.

“Now that’s an idea. . “ I mumble to myself outloud drawing curious and slightly worried glances from the remaining bosses in my mindspace.