Chapter 3 (Part 2 of 2)
(Dungeon POV)
Pulling out my pile of mana stones I looked through them to see what I had. There were 3 High Grade Spirit Stones of earth and water attributes I used to use for cultivation, that would give me over 12,000 mana. However the majority of the mana came from the 153 low grade mortal spirit stones I had. They weren’t very useful for cultivation but it was easy to use them as a fuel source for my flames when I was refining. That way I had more mana to focus on combining the ingredients and manipulating the flames. I had almost 28,000 mana it was time to get started.
The top floor was basically cave like, I’d shifted some soil down from the top to the floor for the plants but layout was basically a series of interconnecting caves. I wanted something a little different for the second floor. In order to utilize my birds and plants to the best advantage it would be an one big room with tall ceilings and trees everywhere. Now I just have to figure out how to prevent adventurers from sneaking past all the monsters to reach the boss room.
After some thought I created 6 keys, one of the 6 would occasionally drop every time a certain monster was killed. Using the 6 keys gained from killing all the beasts they can unlock a reinforced steel door that’s over a foot thick. Adventurers of C rank and above could forcefully break the door after a couple of attacks but that didn’t really matter. This was another floor aimed at weak adventurers. As I put the last of the plant life in the room I considered what kind of monsters to spawn.
For completing the second floor in near record time you have gained the right to acquire the floor 5 bonuses early.
You may decide to become a temporal dungeon or a spatial dungeon.
* Temporal Dungeons have an altered flow of time within them. This allows them to evolve faster and quickly repopulate the dungeon without wasting mana. For every floor your dungeon is 1 times faster than reality (currently would be 2 X reality)
* Spatial Dungeons have many times more monsters in them because they have multiple instances. This means the dungeon can decide the max number of people in an instance at one time and boot out any extras. Very useful if large groups try to invade. For every 5 floors 5 more instances are added, starting with 5 instances (currently would be 5 instances)
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You may also choose your third race from the remaining two options:
* Insects
* Elementals
Okay this was unexpected but I had heard that older dungeons had weird ways of altering reality. First I would choose my third species since it could affect the first choice. Elementals were magical beings formed from the very elements. However, I don’t think I’ll choose them. For one unlike insects they are insanely hard to evolve. Their speed of reproduction is so slow it’s almost nonexistent and my plant beasts were just as good as golems in many ways. Plus the water bird had ended up similar to a water elemental or slime so they probably wouldn’t help me out too much. Decision made I picked insects now I just had to make the hard decision to focus on rapid evolution and advancement or creating basically multiple copies of myself, though there is only 1 core. In the end I knew my answer I would always choose quality over quantity if I didn’t then I could never be a true alchemist, I’d just be one of those half rate pill makers who churn pills out by the dozen never paying any mind to the inferior quality of their products.
I felt something in my core change and then everything just seemed to shift. My dungeon seemed to speed up while everything else outside my walls seemed to slow down. However after that first distortion it was gone. The only difference was the two parts of my mind that monitor the inside and outside of my dungeon sped up and slowed down respectively. Time was wonky to me but I guess I’d just have to get used to it. It’s not like I could do anything outside my dungeon so the outside didn’t really matter except for in the detection of threats.
‘Okay focusing back on what’s important what kind of monsters did I get?’ The new race option gave me a large centipede (30.5 cm, foot long), a type of poisonous spider, and a bunch of tiny ants that seemed worthless. It’s experimenting time again, I didn’t become an alchemist without a drive to experiment, for example one of the requirements to become a higher level alchemist is to create your own unique plant.
Channeling earth mana into the centipede I got it two reac 3 feet in length, it’s armor was much thicker with a crushing strength lurking inside it. The spider reached the size of a palm and turned a deep blue with crystal white legs. A type of frost spider its venom would cause organs to shut down and freeze in great enough quantities. The ants ended up the wierdest no bigger than a grain of rice they didn’t get any bigger but create a tiny surge of electricity and with a large enough swarm of them they can take down almost anything effectively shocking them to death.
Spreading my new beasties over the forest I spawned flocks of water birds, metal woodpeckers, and static hawks. They all spread out over the area hiding in trees, among the grass, or nesting in clumps of moss. Then tweaking my idea of the monsters dropping keys I spawned 6 mossy boars each one with a key embedded deep in it’s body right next to the core. Adventurers would have to wonder all over the forest searching for the mossy boars and fighting the other creatures along the way.
For the boss room I created an even larger earth enhanced centipede, a mossy boar, and a mandrake, the last just cause I saw how much it annoyed the adventurers. Now I had some things to consider about the third floor, it would be a large increase in difficulty. Both the first two floors could be cleared by a party of F rank adventurers but the next floor should be more along the lines of E rank difficulty.