Nate was still thinking about the sling Anna had shown them hours later when he was cooking his dinner. Which in this case meant throwing a frozen, slightly weirdly seasoned pizza into the oven.

He had his laptop out in the living room and was working through the mediation art while waiting for George to show up. At least, that was what he was supposed to be doing. Instead, he had been working on the second dungeon, getting it ever closer to completion.

Originally, he had been tempted to put the Dungeon Core underneath the portal room somehow. That urge had lasted about as long as it took for him to remember where his avatar always spawned. He didn’t want to appear in the middle of a group of angry blighted elves if he could help it.

Instead, he chose a room a little farther away, and then disguised, and blocked the entryway. The preceding room thankfully also led to another room besides the one he had taken over. With another exit for the blighted elves to head toward, it should keep them from looking too closely at the wall. At least, that was his hope.

Regardless, he still built up the same type of walled interior that he had done in the first dungeon, enclosing and hiding the Dungeon Core from view even more. With all the practice he had gotten using the interface, he was able to make the holes even smaller than before. Which he thought was rather impressive, considering the interface seemed to just be meant for the broad strokes. It got things done fast and efficiently, but not in the same exacting detail that he could manage in his avatar form.

With that decided on, he went to work tweaking the various rooms, changing one aspect of them after another. This dungeon was designed for thinking beings, not mindless instinctual beasts like the first one had been. He couldn’t design it in the same way.

He wasn’t even able to take away a basic advantage in the same manner that he had with the beasts. Taking away all of nature from the dungeon had been easy, but also seemed to have a piece of misguided information. When they had run into the beasts in the forest during the expedition, he couldn’t remember that many of them using nature to their benefit. Then again, he had been rather distracted.

Either way, he didn’t have enough information on the blighted elves to do something similar. Besides, as an intelligent race, he had little doubt that their abilities, strengths, and weaknesses would be just as varied as a human’s. The only weakness he could think of that they might have was to various forms of light. However, he had already taken care of that, and it wasn’t even a significant weakness in any case.

For now, it was simply an item that he put on the back burner of his mind. Once he actually saw the blighted elves in action and started learning more about them, then he would be able to make some better decisions in that regard.

In the meantime, he was going to start designing the traps for the dungeon. He had already decided that this dungeon would be more high-tech than the first one. There would be no bow and arrows in this one if he could help it. Instead, he planned on going almost to a sci-fi level with the tech.

At least, that was the plan. It depended on what he could design and make work. He had a sneaking suspicion that creating a working laser, even with the dungeon system helping him, would be more complicated than creating a bow. Then again, he could be wrong about that. Only time would tell.

At the moment, the oven timer was going off, so he closed the screens and opened his laptop instead. He would get some more studying done while he ate.

Nate had to admit, modifying the meditation arts was far more complicated than he had initially expected. Which was stupid. He should have been expecting them to be complicated. If they weren’t, everyone would be trying to do what he was doing. Yet, even making small modifications to them could have cascading effects down the line.

The meditation arts had been designed to be modified in specific ways so that they would fit each cultivator. What he was attempting to do went far beyond that and touched on their core sections in small, but interesting ways.

He wasn’t too proud to say that he was most definitely out of his depth on this one. Not that knowing that was going to stop him in any way. He had already known how difficult the project to integrate multiple affinities into one art would be and had always known it would be a long-term one. What he was attempting to do was not something that could be completed overnight.

Even modifying the art the school had given him so he could use it was taking some time. Honestly, he wasn’t sure if it was truly worth the effort since he would be getting the void meditation art anyway. Yes, working on the shadow art was valuable practice, and if nothing else, it would be nice to have it done for later, but still…

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Knowing that even if he managed to complete it before he got the void art that he would only get a day or two of use out of it was a little annoying. But that was life, it wasn’t fair, and he didn’t expect it to be.

Cutting up the pizza, he slid the pieces onto a wire rack and carried it back into the living room, along with a tall glass of water. Just as he was about to sit down, there was a knock at the door.

Rolling his eyes at how typical it was to be interrupted just as he was about to eat, he cracked it open to find George Trellow standing on the front step. He had come to check on him, just as his parents had said he would.

Swinging the door open the rest of the way, he invited the man inside. “I was just about to eat some dinner. Would you like to join me? It’s just a pizza, but there is plenty.”

He glanced at his watch and grimaced. “I shouldn’t stay long. I hadn’t realized how late it was. I have a prior engagement tonight,” George’s voice trickled off into a whisper as he followed Nate into the house.

“It sounds like it is a meeting you aren’t entirely sure how to feel about.”

There was a halfhearted laugh in response as they settled into the couches of the living room. “That is putting it lightly. You know I used to be married and that my son died. His circumstances were somewhat similar to yours.” Nate nodded. They had talked about the guild master’s past once or twice. “Well, my ex-wife is in the city and wanted to see me.”

“Ohhh, and how has that been going?”

George shrugged, and ran a tired hand over his face, paying special attention to massaging his closed eyes. “It’s not like we separated on bad terms, not really anyway. The death of our son was just too much for us to handle at the time. A part of me resented her for giving up on our marriage, but I was no better. I guess you could say that time has brought a certain clarity to our past mistakes.”

“Has she remarried, or is there still hope of something being there?” Nate could never avoid hoping for a happy ending when it came to people’s romantic lives. It was something that he had never been able to achieve himself and had little experience in, even before he got sick. He had never aspired to be a Don Juan or Lothario.

He wasn’t an idiot who believed love solved everything. That said, having the right person by your side certainly made going through life’s problems a lot more bearable.

“She was married for a while, but the husband died on an expedition, from what I understand. She has been alone ever since. As for if there is still something there…” George seemed more than a little apprehensive as he kept opening and closing his mouth without saying anything.

“I don’t know. For that matter, I don’t even know if I want there to be. We have a lot of history between us. She was my first love. My childhood sweetheart. We grew up together. I will always care for her, but moving past the death of our son, and discovering who we are now… that is something else entirely.”

“Well, it sounds to me like you should get going then and find out. I’m fine for now. Come back tomorrow and let me know how everything went.” Nate pulled the older man to his feet and pushed him toward the door.

“Hmm, you managed to upgrade your core?”

“Tomorrow. We can talk about it tomorrow.”

George nodded, getting the hint as he moved along so he wouldn’t be late meeting with his ex-wife.

A few seconds later, Nate was alone again with his slowly cooling pizza. He slipped a slice onto his plate and brought the laptop onto his lap.

Most of the screen was taken up with the shadow art he had gotten from the school. There was a small section on the side though, that was being used by two separate notes. One was for his ideas on the mediation art, while the other was for anything related to the dungeon. Just because he had stopped working on it for the moment didn’t mean his mind was no longer thinking about it in the background.

Over the next couple of hours, he made decent progress in understanding the basic composition of the art. The fact that he had read through a few of the others already helped significantly in that regard. However, that meager understanding didn’t really help him when it came to modifying it to fit himself. Or, in regard to his larger goal of modifying it, so he could use two or even three meditation arts at once.

Those were long-term goals though. For now, he simply needed to understand it well enough that he could ask the teacher Mr. Jones the right questions. Which he thought was finally the case. Studying so many different variations of the shadow mediation art had definitely slowed him down in that regard. But it was already beginning to show some dividends, at least in his opinion.

The teacher might think otherwise.

Nate shut everything down around nine o’clock. He carefully went around to each window and door and made sure they locked before going upstairs to his bedroom. He left the hallway light on, just so the house wouldn’t be completely dark with him in it.

A few minutes later he was inside the dungeon in his avatar form, staring at his information in confusion. He had missed it earlier when he was working on the second dungeon, but two, well, three pieces of information had changed.

His core had changed from Copper Grade (Low Quality) to Bronze Grade (Low Quality), and the charge had subsequently dropped to zero. Those were two things.

The most eye-catching one, at least in his opinion, was that his energy had also dropped. That morning it had been at fifty-nine, and now it was thirty-one. It still felt like the same amount as before, but the number was reading as much lower. It had been halved, almost as though it had been compressed by his new core.

Nate began to laugh as the proverbial light bulb went off inside his head. No wonder cultivators wanted higher-grade cores; they came with more qi energy. The density of the qi inside them, even at the lower realms, was much higher than what he would have gotten otherwise. He would have needed to go up two realms to get what he had achieved by upgrading his core once.

Increasing his realm came with an all-around power increase. While increasing, the grade of his core only upgraded his qi. In other words, that morning he had gotten a little mini power increase without even realizing it.

He wondered how many more times he could upgrade his core before he would be forced to increase his realm.