The rest of the ride to Nate’s house was filled with talk about affinities and what the girls might have. It was a pleasant and remarkably upbeat conversation; despite the extra work and effort, it would mean for them.

While it was true that many cultivators did simply ignore any secondary affinities, they might have because of the time involved. There were also those who understood that it also held the key to more power. If they were willing to put in the time to work on them, then the variety of attacks they had access to would double.

After all, affinity-based attacks did not take up a slot on your core. You had to learn them normally, but in return, you could use as many of them as you wanted.

For most cultivators, one affinity was enough, and it required less time and effort. It was simple math when you thought about it. When times got tough, though, it was usually the ones who had more than one affinity and had worked on them that brought everyone through the crisis.

Nate waved goodbye and walked up the short path to the front door of the duplex they lived in. The car was still gone, so either his dad was still out, or he had returned, and then left again.

Opening the door to a still, silent house, it was easy to determine that his mom was now gone as well. He had sort of expected that would be the case. With all the paperwork she had been doing that morning, along with them heading out on an expedition the next day. There was plenty of stuff that they needed to buy.

Hopefully, they wouldn’t forget that he still needed a new pair of kukris for that weekend. If they did, then he would be stuck using the kriegsmesser. Which wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, but it also wasn’t the weapon that he had been practicing with lately.

He would need to remind them that night before they went to sleep.

Grabbing a drink from the fridge, he headed upstairs and opened his notebook on his desk. The layout of the new dungeon was spread out before him as he deftly flicked through the menu of his wrist computer. It was time to start building the new dungeon while no one was around to interrupt him.

The first room to go in was the same room he had built the first time around. The one that surrounded the portal.

From there, he slowly began building outward. Adding one room after another along with the appropriate corridors. There would be no traps in them just yet. Those could wait until later. For now, he was just concentrating on dropping in the thousand and one rooms he had envisioned earlier. It was an annoying pattern to create when you weren’t paying close attention to everything.

It all started out fine, but soon enough, he started having to make adjustments to the layout and overall design. He had forgotten when he was creating the initial drawing that the dungeon creation system used a grid layout. So, when he made one room bigger than the others, it would snap everything to the next line in the grid if he tried to keep it all in line.

He could have just created every single room to the same uniform pattern, and maybe someday he would. For now, he was still enjoying the process. He hadn’t gotten to the point where he was going to throw in the towel simply because it was annoying. He had plenty of time and would take it slow.

He may not be the best at coming up with traps, but that didn’t mean he was going to phone in the variety of rooms they came in. Not that it truly mattered either way. The rooms were one of the many things the Dungeon Core had fixed when it had taken over operations for him in the first dungeon.

He assumed it would be the same here. Once it reached Level 2, it would begin fixing all the various mistakes that he had made along the way.

Nate kept creating rooms until he reached the eventual end. His initial neat drawing had turned into a chaotic mess of corridors and rooms that looked nothing like what he had envisioned. It was actually rather impressive just how much it had changed, and all because he hadn’t wanted to make the rooms uniform.

With an annoyed sigh, Nate ripped out the map he had drawn from his notebook, crumpled it up, and threw it in the wastebasket.

The next thing on the list was to add some lighting to each of the rooms. He didn’t want it to be too bright though. The blighted elves were somewhat similar to dark elves in the stories he was familiar with. They enjoyed dark places and could see well in them. Unlike traditional dark elves, they also seemed to be fine on the surface and in the light. They were a sort of in-between race that existed between them.

Hence why they were considered blighted. They were neither light nor dark elves, but they were also both.

In any case, the moderate amount of lighting he was spreading throughout the dungeon would be enough to throw off their vision. Like all beings, their eyes had trouble adapting when there was too little or too much light. For humans, it was just after sunset as the stars were coming out. With the blighted elves, he could only trust what he had read, and then modify the lighting afterward.

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He had less overall information gathered on the dimensional zone this time around. However, a lot of what he knew about elves from his previous life did seem to still be applicable. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it got him one step closer to creating something decent. The idea wasn’t to get everything perfect on the first try. Instead, all he was trying to do was make traps and items that would work with better-than-average efficiency.

The first dungeon had gone through an almost total rework in many respects after he had seen how the beasts responded to everything. This dungeon would be no different.

Nate finished placing the last of the lights and began tweaking them. He wanted them to flicker and brighten and dim at random intervals. It was one of the best ways to keep a human on edge and prevent their eyes from properly adjusting. Whether or not it would work on blighted elves who were also cultivators, he had no idea.

There was no harm in trying every idea he could think of and then removing those that didn’t work.

He closed the screen and leaned back in his chair. His thoughts had already started to drift toward the traps he could place. There was no real sense of rush to install any of them. Everything that he had just done didn’t actually exist yet. It was nothing more than a design in some software on his wrist’s computer.

None of it would come into existence until the Dungeon Core was finished being created. Until that time, he didn’t even need to worry about anything going through the long, empty rooms he had made.

Retrieving his laptop, Nate opened a browser and began researching meditation arts. Just like their teacher, Brick Jones, had said, there really were a lot of them to be found.

It was also immediately obvious that most of them had been played around with in some form. Nate had only spent a few minutes studying his shadow affinity mediation art, and he knew enough to tell that. Despite that, he kept looking and saved all the ones that seemed like they might have been messed with the least. It was hard to actually say, as each art, assuming it was complete, was typically at least three hundred pages long.

Even skimming, each one took him a couple of minutes to rush through. Thankfully, it was generally easy to tell how bad they would be from the first few sections of the art.

Pushing through, he gradually began to build up a collection of arts for both his known affinities. All of them would need to be gone through with a fine-tooth comb later. He already knew that none of them could be used as is, and that was fine. That wasn’t what he was looking for.

He was searching for common items, things that appeared in both affinities and in all the different arts, no matter the maker. Those were the pieces of truth that he needed to note for later. It was only after he had created a list of those commonalities from a whole host of different arts that he would even be able to think of taking the first of combining them.

For now, he needed information, and then he needed to work his way through it, finding the useful bits. Then the process would be repeated several more times in all likelihood.

He wasn’t even entirely sure what he was looking for either, which would slow him down some in the beginning. Until a pattern began to emerge from them based on the one good one he did have.

Which meant the first thing he needed to do was study the meditation art he had copied onto his phone. Once he had memorized it, or at least could recognize parts of it in another art, then he could move on to studying the other ones.

Shutting down his laptop with a grin, he flopped onto his bed and pulled out his phone.

He wasn’t intending to memorize anything on this read-through. All he wanted to do was make his way through all the novel's worth of pages he had taken pictures of.

His goal was to read the entire meditation art at least once that night, if possible. In all likelihood, it wouldn’t happen, but even if he failed, he should be able to make a decent dent in the process.

Nate had made it through a few pages when he heard the front door open. Tossing the phone onto his bed, he hurried downstairs. He found his parents in the kitchen, carefully setting down giant armloads of food.

“Uh, do you two need help bringing in any more of that?” He asked with a raised brow.

Niall shook his head. “No, everything else stays out in the car for now. It will go with us in the morning on our expedition. All of this is to make sure you don’t starve while we are gone.” He joked, patting the frozen pizza and other frozen dinners.

“The sign of a healthy diet is that it came out of the freezer,” Nate quipped, helping to put everything away. “So, you are leaving in the morning?”

“Yup, they already got the trailer fixed up and everything,” Nina replied before pushing a separate box across the counter to him. “We stopped by the McFadden’s on our way back. Those are the first set of ingredients to upgrade your core. I would suggest taking them in the morning before school while in the shower. And not all at once. They can create quite the mess from what I understand.”

He blinked at the box in surprise. “They actually came through on that, huh? I know they said they would, but I didn’t actually expect them to. I wonder how effective they’ll be?”

“I guess we’ll find out when we return in a couple of days.” His dad said, ruffling his hair. “Speaking of which. The house had better still be standing when we return. If you must have a party, keep it to one-thousand people or less, and if the cops aren’t called at least twice, you know it doesn’t count as a proper party.”

Nate snorted at the unexpected joke from his father. “Right, next you’ll be telling me to have an orgy out on the streets.”

“We would never tell you to do that,” His mother protested. “Pavement is horrible for chafing. If you must have one, do it here.”

She managed to keep a straight face for a couple of heartbeats before breaking out into laughter. “You should see your face right now!”

“Mine? I just thought my parents had been replaced by pod people or something. Talking about parties and orgies.” He waved his hands in the air and rolled his eyes while chuckling. “Okay, I admit, it was pretty good. You had me going there for a moment.”

“Stay safe while we are gone. We already asked George to stop by tomorrow night and see how you are doing.”