The screaming was sudden, like the hunter was attacked by surprise. Everyone froze what they were doing for only a moment, but that moment was long enough for the screams to get devoured in the sound of blood and tearing flesh. There were sounds of animal footsteps on stone echoing through the cave. By the time that they got over their shock and hesitation, it was too late.

A wave of animals rushed into the bottom of the hole and attacked the hunter with the broken legs and the hunter Stor was helping to lower down. The rope they held was grabbed by the animals and yanked down. Stor managed to release his grip just in time to avoid falling down the hole, the other person he was with wasn’t so lucky.

The rope carried him close to the edge as he landed on his chest, the hard stone punching the wind out of his lungs. He watched while his lungs tried to breathe again, seeing his friends fall down into the massive wave or pool of things. It was dark and he struggled to see them, until the final breath was drawn from his comrades, and the things all turned up to look at him in unison.

They were animals but there was something horribly wrong behind their eyes. They stared at him. In still silence. Time stood still and Stor was trapped in a nightmarish eternity as the possessed animals, no, monsters gazed at him and looked through him. They were watching his blood flow beneath his skin, they were watching his flesh and bones, they were staring into his soul. They were staring…

The next moment of consciousness, he was outside of the cave. The gazes of those demons were etched into his eyes and burned into his being. He screamed and clawed at himself as he felt, deep down, that his soul had been scarred and corrupted. He scratched his skin hard enough to cut and draw blood while he writhed on the damned forest floor, crying for the god of his village to come and save him. His mind reached a breaking point and collapsed into a dark, nightmarish sleep.

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“Yes! Fucking Yes!” Alex shouted as he raised his arms above his head and danced. Those adventurers were easy to kill, far easier than in the game. He celebrated because the best source of soul points in the game came from human souls or anything intelligent and sentient.

With that, that means that he could earn an enormous sum from this encounter. No, more than an enormous sum - he didn’t need to spend any points during the whole thing. He had some regrets not building a way for some of his animals to attack the person that got away, but the speed of that man was far faster than any rat or small animal he had.

He felt a little bad about what happened, from what he saw the man looked to have some severe trauma. He felt like a bastard for harvesting people's souls too. However, it wasn’t like he had much of a choice. He had no idea how he got in this strange world or how he got powers from Dungeon Heart.

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“Dungeon fairy, what would happen to me if the dungeon core was destroyed?” he asked, hoping to assuage the horrible guilt he was starting to have.

“Well, it depends on the level of your dungeon core. At this level, you would experience horrible pain as the core is torn apart, then you will die and disappear. Perhaps the origin of the dungeon will have mercy on you, but probably not.”

“What or who is the origin of the dungeon?”

The dungeon fairy was stunned for a few moments, before turning its head towards Alex and asking, “Origin of the dungeon?”

“Yeah, like you just said.”

“Origin of the dungeon…origin of the dungeon…origin of the dungeon? I…I don’t know. Or…or maybe I don’t remember… Origin of the dungeon…origin of the dungeon…”

Great, his dungeon fairy was broken. Why was it that everything from Dungeon Heart was broken? He didn’t get the reward of soul points like he should, the waves attacking his dungeon were irregular, and now his dungeon fairy breaks down over simple questions. Did he insult one of the game’s developers, and that developer was part god? So that god cursed him to be in a janked and buggy version of the game he loved?

That was the best theory he had so far. This certainly wasn’t a coma or very long-lived dream. He turned back to his bank account and watched as the number of soul points he had reached triple digits. He felt a certain degree of relief and excitement, but the glitching of his dungeon fairy and the lingering remnants of his guilt had soured his mood.

He finally had enough to truly start building this dungeon. What he needed most was a foundation for which everything to be built around. He couldn’t create a second floor until he reached level 3, and if he did choose to spend his points and upgrade his dungeon core, there wouldn’t be enough left to do anything.

Strategies and ideas filled his head from his days playing Dungeon Heart. While he knew the best possible strategies for the game, there was a strong possibility that those strategies wouldn’t work outside of the game. He needed to choose a strategy that would work with the increased possibilities and potential ways to go wrong inherent in a more physical reality.

The most important role of a dungeon was to protect the dungeon core, followed closely by harvesting enough soul points to fuel the dungeon and its growth. In order to do this, he needed to both lure people and animals to this place and kill them. The hard part is that if everything that entered his cave died, then no one would want to enter his dungeon.

Protect the dungeon, and lure people to their deaths within the dungeon. He didn’t have the power to create strong incentives like magic metal or enchanted artifacts, the closest that he could get to an incentive were the creatures under his control. The [Create Dungeon Organism] ability could modify creatures as well.

Beyond the ecosystem, his dungeon was lacking in structure and traps. That was the biggest flaw he could see and the one that he needed to fix the most. He also needed a path for his animals to reach past the cliff he constructed, which he could save and use later when creating the next floor.

There was no rest for the wicked, and Alex felt himself force a smile in self-deprecation at that line of thought.