Nate collapsed onto his bed hours later, thoroughly exhausted. Spending time with the girls had been fun, but far more stressful than he was expecting as well. What with the McFaddens showing up, and then Angie questioning him about anime?

It had made for a day he wasn’t likely to forget for a while.

His parents had been gone when he got back home with only a simple note left by the door letting him know they would be late. The house had felt overly lonely and cold as he had made dinner and eaten it by himself.

For someone who had lived alone for years after his parent’s death, he had adjusted quickly to having them around again. Not having them around again felt wrong, and the simple pasta he had made tasted somewhat bland.

Upstairs on his bed, Nate rubbed his chest before pulling up a single dungeon screen and curling up into a ball.

He took his time going through the corridors and rooms of the dungeon looking for damage caused by the cultivators. Honestly, he had expected the situation to be much worse than it was, but it was almost as if the second half of the dungeon hadn’t even been touched.

It was only when he reached the portal room that he realized that was because it hadn’t been. The party of cultivators was stuck outside the portal room, facing three different monsters at the same time. Once more, he was reminded that the rules of the dungeon seemed to change when cultivators entered its walls.

There shouldn’t have been that many monsters summoned at the same time, or of that strength. And yet, there they were, fighting the cultivators to a standstill.

He watched them go at it for a few minutes before moving on and inspecting the rest of the dungeon. He needed to see the condition they had left the previous rooms in. However, just like when he had looked earlier in the day, everything was still intact. They had opened the various chests on the route, but that was it.

Whether they simply no longer felt like destroying the dungeon because their efforts from the time before hadn’t revealed anything more. Or they were unable to for another, reason he wasn’t sure, regardless he was happy with the result.

He peeked at the resource counter and smiled. Finally, a bit of good news. There was enough there for him to upgrade the core and have some leftover for incidentals. Unfortunately, he couldn’t do that while the cultivators were still inside the dungeon.

He needed to modify the walls inside the core room to get to the core. Any construction-based actions he took while in his avatar form would shut down the entire place until it was completed. It was risky enough when there was one beast roaming around. Doing it while there was a group of cultivators inside was a whole other level of stupidity.

Besides, he didn’t know how long it would take to upgrade the core, or even what exactly that meant either. If he had to guess though, he’d bet the entire dungeon would be inoperable for however long it took.

All that meant was that he couldn’t go making any changes just yet. It was frustrating, but he needed to be patient.

Closing the screens, he forced himself to unroll from the fetal position and began cultivating. Energy flowed freely along his rebuilt meridians, slowly strengthening them as they were used. He made sure that the odd meridians that had kept him going before were included in his efforts. Using more meridians during his daily cultivation ritual would increase his absorption speed some.

More than that, he didn’t want to lose the potential those unknown meridians represented to him.

Nate kept the process going for a few hours until it was well into the middle of the night. Finally, his mental exhaustion kept him from continuing and he had to stop.

Tiredly, he changed into his sleepwear and laid down on his bed. He barely had the presence of mind to check the dungeon screens instead of going right inside as his avatar. It was a good thing he checked too, as the cultivator group was nearing the core room.

If he had simply gone inside, there would have been no place for him to hide when they reached the last room.

According to the computer on his wrist, his stats were gradually improving. His internal energy had made decent gains with his recent efforts, and the other three attributes had increased some along with it.

The closer he came to forming his core, the stronger, faster, and healthier he would become. It all went hand in hand with becoming a cultivator.

Nate looked at the dungeon one last time before closing his eyes with a growl. Not being able to go inside, especially when he had everything ready to upgrade the core, felt like he was wasting time.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

He didn’t like it.

With a growl, Nate punched his pillow and then slammed his face into it with a sigh. He had a feeling it was going to be a long night.

***

Sometime in the middle of the night, Nate was pulled out of a light doze when the door to his room closed with a soft click. His parents had returned at last.

He rolled over and wearily opened the screens to the dungeon, finding it empty at last. With a determined jab of his finger, he donned his avatar and entered the dungeon.

Nate didn’t waste any time playing around and immediately changed the wall, hiding the core from view. With that one action, the entire dungeon went still as everything shut down for the short amount of time it took to create a doorway for him.

Once it was finished, he stepped through and patched the hole, shutting the place down again for another few minutes. Only once the wall was back in place and he felt reasonably safe did Nate dare to approach the dungeon core.

Putting his hand on the core, he waited for the upgrade option to appear… and then waited some more.

After waiting for a minute, he slowly pulled his hand back and tried to remember what he had done differently the last time. With a groan, he lay down on the cold stone floor of the dungeon and stared up at the ceiling in annoyance.

Somehow, he had forgotten that he didn’t need to do this in his avatar form. He could have just done the upgrade from the menu while laying in bed. He had gotten so used to doing complicated dungeon tasks in the avatar that it hadn’t even occurred to him until just then.

With a noiseless grumble, he exited the dungeon and opened his eyes to the dark of his bedroom. Flipping on the lamp near his bed, Nate navigated the menus on his wrist computer. He went down through the ‘Dungeon Interface’ and tapped on the glowing dungeon core.

This time, the prompt he had been expecting appeared.

‘Dungeon 1 – Core = Level 1, energy needed to upgrade to level 2 is 50,000 units.’

He took in how much energy the dungeon had stored, making sure it was more than enough, and then tapped it again. A different message appeared this time.

‘Energy requirement for upgrade – Met. Would you like to proceed with Level 2 Core upgrade at this time? Yes/No’

Decisively he pushed ‘Yes’ and waited for something to happen.

As if it was acting like a counter, the stored energy gradually began to tick down. He watched it for a couple of minutes before he was able to grasp a rough average. At its current speed of energy consumption, it would take around five hours to finish. Now whether that was when the upgrade would be done or merely phase one of it, he didn’t know.

What he did know was that the dungeon at least seemed to still be operating normally, while all of this was going on.

Closing the screens, he rolled over and forced himself to go back to sleep for what little remained of the night.

***

Nate’s eyes felt gritty and dry when his alarm went off a couple of hours later, waking him for another day of school.

In the shower, he pulled up the main screen for the dungeon for a brief moment. It was long enough to see that there was a beast inside one of the rooms and that the energy was still counting down.

That done, he closed the screen and went back to washing his hair and face, letting the hot water soothe his aching eyes.

“Are you both going to be out late again?” He asked a little later as he sat down at the breakfast table.

As had quickly become the new norm, his parents had sheets of paperwork spread across the table in front of them.

Nina shook her head. “No, I’ll be here when you get back from school this time. Your father, however, will be going around trying to recruit more people to work for our team. So, he may or may not be back in time for dinner.”

Niall nodded. His bulging cheeks were full of hash browns and eggs.

“Just…” He forked some hash browns into his own mouth before finishing the thought. “Be careful and choose some good people that won’t betray you.” He finished with a shrug. “I guess that’s kind of obvious, right?”

His father chuckled and flicked a stray piece of toasted potato at him. “It is, but that doesn’t mean it’s what everyone looks for. Some companies don’t care about whether or not their people are truly loyal to them. They simply want strength and that’s it. What your mother and I are looking for though, is loyalty. We want people that can watch our backs. Strength means nothing if they simply run away at the first sign of difficulty.”

“Have you been part of a team like that before?”

They both nodded. “More times than we can count. When it’s nothing more than a paycheck, there is nothing tying the cultivator to the overall group. Why would they risk their lives when they know they can always make more money later on down the line? The people we are looking for are those who are seeking a place to belong, a sense of family… Those who want something more.” Niall explained.

“It’s a little scummy, I won’t deny that,” Nina admitted. “But it will also help keep those people safer in the long run as well. That’s just the realities of this business. Even the companies that are decent aren’t truly good.” She finished with a wry smile.

Both of his parents had their eyes forcefully opened to how things work, and while they could try to be better. They still needed to work within certain limits.

Nate shrugged; he wasn’t going to judge them. It may be a little cold-blooded, but his parents’ safety was more important than people he didn’t know. He had already lost them once and would rather not have to go through that again.

“Anyway, let’s talk about something less depressing. How’s the cultivating going now that you’ve been healed?” His father nudged his empty plate to the side and gave him his full attention.

“Good, great actually. I got a new and improved method from the school library here and this entire ordeal has had unexpected benefits for the few meridians that did survive.” He said, explaining to them about the originally thin, almost unused meridians that had saved him.

There was a knock at the door just as he finished telling them everything. Time had gotten away from them, and the girls had arrived to pick him up for school.

“I’ll see you both later.” He waved and hurried out the door to find a sulking Lindsay and pensive Angie waiting for him. “What’s going on?” He asked, slipping into the car with them.

“Her parents heard about what Jace has been trying to do and threatened to put her in a different exploration team after she forms her core.”

“I thought most of the McFadden crap had been handled yesterday?” He groaned, wondering how these people ever got anything done.