It only took a moment for Nate to have all the usual screens pulled up that he used to monitor the dungeons. What he found as soon as they were all up and running was a veritable swarm of cultivators inside the dungeon.

They were in the process of tearing through his dungeon. The first of the treasure chests had already been found, and it appeared to have only made them more eager.

Checking over the cultivators in the lead, he could see plenty of wounds from where they had simply barreled through traps. There were a couple who were being carried along as well due to more intense injuries. There was no way for him to check to see if anyone in the group had died already.

Dismissing them from his mind for the moment, Nate skipped a few rooms ahead and began examining the traps there. He didn’t want to change the theme of the dungeon and start using technology all of a sudden. It might just be him being stubborn, but it felt wrong to change the theme like that.

What he needed was something that remained on theme but was either stronger -which was getting hard to do with his knowledge- or he created unexpected traps. Against thinking individuals, the unexpected was generally the most deadly. They were prepared for the regular traps by this point, their minds and reflexes were slowly being trained by them.

All he needed to do was shake things up. Not a lot, and not very often, but enough to ensure that it was effective.

The Dungeon Core would need to take over the duty of upgrading the traps and making them stronger. It might be time to start looking into upgrading it to Level 3. That could wait until later though. For now, he had something else to worry about.

The modification he was thinking about doing was akin to a crossbow above the doorway with an explosive-tipped arrow. There would be two of them set to aim and fire at the head of a random person as they walked into the room. It could be the first person who walked in or the tenth. There would be no telling.

They would be completely hidden and firing from just a couple of feet above the person’s head. There would be no time to react unless that was their cultivation specialized in. Even then, they should still get damaged by the explosions from the dual crossbow bolts hitting the ground.

There was more he could and would do, but Nate wanted to see how they reacted to this little treat first.

While he waited for the cultivators to arrive at the room, he began to put traps around the next treasure chest. Nothing too crazy, but when the chest was opened, a giant saw blade would shoot out from the wall and catch any of the person’s companions that were right behind them. He had seen that particular trap in a few movies before and wanted to see if it had any chance of actually working.

By the time he was finished playing with that, the first of the cultivators was about to enter the room. If he watched carefully, he could see the pressure tighten around the trigger assembly with every person who entered.

It was on the fourth person that the trap activated.

In an instant, the cultivator’s head was vaporized in a cloud of red mist that was quickly overtaken by the actual explosion caused by the crossbow bolts. Without the need to worry about having a person draw the crossbow, he had been free to make it as powerful as he knew how. Which, in this case, thanks to his own crossbow, was apparently far more powerful than he would have thought. The explosives tips were more of an afterthought by the time they activated.

The explosions did throw a few of them back, several of which had been carrying others on their back. The resulting impacts against the hard walls and floor dealt even more damage to the group, which was nice. It just hadn’t been the main form of attack as he had originally imagined it would be.

Above the doorway, the trap reset, and he could tell by the pressure on the assembly that the wait would be longer this time.

At least it would have been, originally.

With how fast the attack had been, no one seemed to know where it came from and instead began rushing around, looking after each other. Every time one of them stepped out of the room and then back in, the crossbows came a little closer to firing a second time.

The power of the trap had been exceptional, but the confusion it caused, at least this first time, was beyond his expectations.

It did give him an idea of what he could do for the other traps in the dungeon. He had never really tried to improve the throwing mechanism that flung the spears. He had also mainly left the bows in the arrow traps alone, concentrating instead on the arrows. The wrist computer itself had modified the bows at least once, but he hadn’t done anything with them that he could remember.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

It was time to change that glaring oversight. This was clearly an area where his real-world experience could make a huge amount of difference in how they operated.

It was something to think about for later. Right now, he wanted to see how they reacted to the trap activating a second time.

Another person passed through the doorway, and their head vanished from their shoulders. The explosion followed a beat later, atomizing most of the body and flinging the sole other person that had been too close into the wall.

The resulting panic was much less pronounced this time around due to the limited casualties. It had proven itself effective as a trap, and that was enough for Nate. Turning his attention away from the invading cultivators, he instead began working on upgrading the bows behind the arrow traps and the throwing mechanism for the spears.

When he looked over the original spear traps, he became especially ashamed of those. They were using a bent leaf spring to fling the spear out of the hole. It had been modeled after the old trap he remembered seeing on TV that used a thin bent tree to provide the springing force.

Really, it was no wonder that they weren’t doing better. The same mechanism was used for the spears or spikes that shot out of the floor and impaled everyone but didn’t actually fly out from the opening. Those had been working a little better, but the power and speed with which they deployed had been lacking as well.

Now he had an idea of how to fix them all at once.

In one fell swoop, he removed the old mechanism and replaced it with a ballista-style spear launcher. It took some fiddling to get it to fit properly underneath the floor, but he was able to, after only a few minutes of trying.

Deciding that those were enough for the moment, Nate shut everything down and headed for the stairs to start on dinner.

Peeking into the living room, he spotted his parents still passed out in the same positions as where he had last seen them. At some point, they had moved closer together, and his dad’s arm was now wrapped around his mother. Other than that, one small but nice-to-see change. They hadn’t moved at all during the time he had been upstairs.

Opening the freezer, Nate pulled out two of the frozen pizzas he was supposed to have been eating while they were gone. He had chosen to cook himself one the first night, but the second night, he had made a proper meal for George and himself.

After popping those both in the oven and setting some extra time on the timer to account for it warming up, he sat down at the table. He needed to figure out a decent method to use basic ties. Something that would get it to the point where it could evolve and become properly useful. Whether that was constantly using it on everything he saw, including at night inside the dungeon, or something else. He needed to come up with a plan for its use.

The first part of that involved him actually beginning to use it. After learning the three skills earlier, there hadn’t been a chance to try any of them out. He knew how to use them. That wasn’t an issue. There simply hadn’t been time during school.

With a thought, he activated the energy skill and felt something change at the back of his eyes.

Looking around the room, he didn’t see anything obvious. There were nothing obvious that jumped out to him. However, nothing in the room was using any qi either. This was more of a skill that he would need to practice with people around or while out on an expedition in the wilds where there was plenty of qi in the environment. That meant using it at night while inside the dungeon would be an effective training method as well.

As that thought came to mind, his eyes drifted to the strange ephemeral computer strapped to his wrist. No one else had ever noticed its presence, and it didn’t interfere with his clothes either. Only his hands seemed to be able to interact with it in any way.

When the skill behind his eyes touched on the wrist computer, it went crazy and began absorbing a large amount of his qi. It continued to gulp down his qi until he forced his eyes away and shut down the skill.

“Okay… I am not doing that again.” He panted, more than a little freaked out at what had just happened. He could feel that the skill had made a lot of progress, but the method had felt dangerous. “Keep that in mind, Nate. Don’t look at weird, possibly extra-dimensional things again.”

Specifically, that meant not looking at the dungeons from the outside.

It took him a few minutes to calm down, and by then it was time to set the table and wake his parents for dinner.

They were already beginning to stir when he made it into the front room. The smell from the pizzas having made its way into their dreams.

He gave them both the final shake they needed and a minute later; they were all seated around the table.

“Thanks for letting us sleep,” Nina said in between bites of the cheese pizza. “I don’t think either of us realized just how tired we actually were.”

Niall snorted and then coughed as a piece of food went down the wrong tube. “I know I didn’t.” He admitted hoarsely after he had finished coughing.

“It was fine. It gave me time to finish cleaning up everything in the garage and do some homework. I still need to switch the washer load over to the dryer. I forgot to do that.” He shook his head and grabbed another slice. “Are we still on for this weekend’s expedition, or did the appearance of all the new cultivators derail those plans?”

“No, they’re still on. If anything, that area should be safer than where we were at. I doubt the cultivators we met will come that far inside before turning towards the inner dimensional zone where the structure is.” His father answered, drinking some water, and gently rubbing his upper chest.

The table was silent for a minute as they tore into the food.

“Whatever happened to your old boss? The one who did that pump and dump thing on you last week. Did they ever catch him?”

His parents shared a look that he couldn’t quite discern.

“There have been reports of him, but not here. In the next city over. The Chrightons and Travers have been working with the bureau to have him brought back. However, it seems that their requests have been met with some resistance. He has attached himself to a rather strong company over there, and for whatever reason, they are willing to fight for a new member.”