Nate thought over what his parents had told him over dinner as he switched the laundry over to the dryer. Donovan, that was the name of their old boss, had somehow gotten in good with a powerful company the next city over. They were willing to fight to keep him as well, which was making the licensing bureau over there more than a little mad. The company’s permits to go on expeditions had already begun to be revoked, and yet they still refused to hand him over.
That wasn’t a good sign.
No company would normally go against the licensing bureau, let alone for some measly new employee. The licensing bureau was what allowed the companies to operate outside the city walls and then sell their good at the various processing facilities. Without their permits, it was possible to still leave the city, and you could even hunt if you wanted to risk getting in trouble.
What you would not be able to do is sell any of the beasts’ bodies to processing facilities afterward.
Yet, despite knowing all of that already, Donovan’s new company was risking everything for him. Which could only mean that they believed he held the key to some knowledge they needed. What that could be though, he had no idea.
Nate had never met the man and couldn’t say what he was like in any way. Was he smart, tenacious, and capable of picking up on small random details? He had no clue. All he could confidently say was that whatever information he was giving them had nothing to do with him. At least not directly. It might have something to do with the dungeon, but not him specifically.
Pushing those thoughts from his mind, he finished up with the laundry. His parents were waiting for him in the living room when he came out.
“Nate, can you sit down for a few minutes and join us?” His mom called out. “We want to talk with you about our plans for tomorrow, but also find out how everything went while we were gone.”
He grinned and tapped his chest. “I upgraded my core already. It happened pretty quickly with the items from the box that you gave me. It’s a ‘Bronze Core’ now, still low quality obviously, but it’s a step in the right direction.” He had started out as a ‘Copper Core,’ of low quality. “Other than that, I got my first three energy skills and have just been working on my meditation arts. It was pretty boring here.”
They spent a few minutes going over the three skills he had selected or been given before moving on.
“Alright, now tomorrow, we plan on picking you up after school,” His father began. “For some shopping.”
“We need to get your new kukris and some bolts for the crossbow, along with any other updated equipment we can afford,” Nina said.
“That sounds good to me. I take it we’re leaving super early on Saturday again?”
His parents nodded.
“We have a slightly different location from before in mind, as we want to stay away from other cultivators.”
They spent a few more minutes planning everything out for the weekend expedition before calling it a night. His parents were tired and needed their rest, and Nate wanted to get some more work done on the dungeons.
“Did you listen to any of that?” He asked Aura, deliberately sending a message to her.
It took a minute for her to respond, during which time he changed and prepared for bed.
“Nothing caught my attention enough for me to listen this time around. What happened?” She returned after he had plopped himself onto his bed. The message appeared in a box of text on his wrist.
He quickly explained to her everything that had gone on with his parents’ expedition and what they had decided.
“That does not bode well for either of the dungeons. These are meant to stop the invading forces, not the local cultivators. It might work out fine for the first dungeon since you already have a second floor in place there. However, changing the traps to fit the cultivators more than the blighted elves would be a foolish move.”
He felt himself nodding, even though she couldn’t see him. “On that, we can agree. Unless the traps are just completely overpowered, then they don’t work nearly as well against the cultivators. That said, we might actually have less of a problem with them in the second dungeon. The blighted elves are more intelligent than the beasts from the first dungeon… no offense. They talk and work together, something that the beasts never did.”
“It’s fine. I already explained that my race ruled for a reason, and it’s the one you just mentioned. They do gain intelligence later on, but not until the third stage of cultivation at the earliest. Or, as you know them, the eighth, ninth, and tenth realms.”
It was something that she had mentioned to him before, but he had forgotten.
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“Either way, we need to get rid of those cultivators in the first dungeon if you are going to attempt what we talked about before.”
“Which dungeon are you going to concentrate on tonight?”
He thought for a moment. “The second dungeon still. I’m going to make a couple more adjustments to the traps in the first dungeon first though. I want to create a spot where going past it would cost them too much. After I do that, I’ll start fixing the traps in the second dungeon, and then hop inside. Send me any notes you made on the performance of the traps or the blighted elves, please.”
With that conversation completed, he began working on the traps for the first dungeon. He was just going to upgrade the traps in two of the rooms with improved crossbow systems. There was a room with two exits just ahead of the cultivators, leading to a fork in the road. That was why he had to improve two of the rooms.
The power behind the new crossbows was already showing its fangs. A full room of traps built around it would be a bloodbath. The cultivators would be forced to truly work for every step they took forward in either of those rooms.
It just wasn’t something that he thought they would be able to do by that point. Many of them were already injured in some way, with about a fourth being carried. By the time they reached either of those rooms, those numbers would both have gone up some more. Injured people weren’t as careful as they should be, and there would be no way to ferry the injured through.
It would be the end of the line for them.
Besides, they still needed to make it back through the traps to get out.
Deciding that he had done enough against this particular group, Nate turned his attention to the second dungeon. The first thing he did was switch all of the lasers to red diodes, instead of the far more powerful, but also more energy-hungry blue diodes that he had started with. He had swapped a few of them out the night before, but had mostly shut down a lot of the traps instead.
With that completed, he also set the lasers to pulse. Instead of drawing energy constantly for their beams, now they only had to do it when they pulsed. It was still a lot and didn’t make a huge difference, but every little bit helped when you were dealing with such expensive items. It was an easy optimization, nothing more.
As he went through the traps, he made his way through his notes and Aura’s. There were a few easy placement issues that he could solve right then. The main problem seemed to stem from the fact he had been forced to disable most of the traps before. The energy expenditure had been too high to maintain them all.
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The variety of traps wasn’t quite enough, either.
Blighted elves were smart and tended to work together more often than not. They had even figured out a method to send messages sometime during the night. Now there was a large board in the portal room filled with information about the traps.
Aura had wanted to get Nate’s opinion on the matter before she did anything to the board.
He would let it stay in place for now, in the future, he might change his mind. However, being able to see what they thought of each of the traps was valuable information in and of itself. Not that he would be able to read their language, but he was confident that the Dungeon Core would be able to. It just needed to reach level two, and maybe do a specialized research project on the subject was all. One of those, or possibly even both, in the worst-case scenario.
He had never started the Dungeon Core to researching anything the night before. Part of that was because he had gotten distracted, but a much larger part was simply because of the energy expenditure the traps were accruing. It was a bit of an oxymoron. He needed to research them to bring the costs down, and yet he was leery of spending more energy than he needed to in the beginning.
Nate had always been a big proponent of saving money, and apparently, that carried over to how he worked with the dungeon.
Glancing at the resource counter for energy, he saw the two resource counters that he had noted before. It was the same for every resource. They each now had a local counter and a global pool counter. All current dungeons contributed a percentage of their resources into the global pool so he could use it for… something.
He hadn’t looked into the changes enough to know what he could and couldn’t use the global pool for yet. All he did know was that all the resources for a Dungeon Cores level-up needed to come from the local resource counter. He couldn’t just quickly upgrade them all in a rush like that.
After looking into it for a few minutes, he had a slightly better understanding of what was going on. The global resources could be used for items that had the potential to affect all the dungeons. That meant that all research projects could be funded through the global pool. There was something more, but it remained just out of his reach, as though he hadn’t unlocked it yet.
He would get there in time, but not yet. In the meantime, he set the Dungeon Core to researching the blighted elves' language, both spoken and written. With that completed, he set about installing a few traps for variety before he entered into the dungeon in his avatar form.
It was time for some practice, and if he was lucky, some more rainbow orbs and even possibly some equipment for his parents. He could hope, at least. The introduction of unknown cultivators who were eager to fight had unnerved him.
He had been hoping to have more time before he needed to start scrounging up equipment for his parents like this. Nate doubted he would last long against the blighted elves, then again, he didn’t really need to last a long time against them. Just long enough to get an item for each parent.
Either way, he hadn’t even tried fighting the elves at all. There was no saying how it would go… normally. Thankfully, this was exactly why he had saved his remaining few beast cores. He knew he would need them for long-range attacks against the more powerful blight elves in the second dungeon. They had a higher chance of dropping equipment or enchanted items than the beasts did.
At least, that was the hope.
The reports he had read said they carried those items, and he could obviously see them carrying equipment. Whether or not that meant the system that controlled his drops would give him those items though, was another story.
It seemed to work, at least somewhat, on what it felt he needed at the time.
He was giving himself the best chance of getting what he wanted and needed by doing things this way. Everything else was left to chance.
Settling into bed, Nate went back to the beginning menu and selected ‘Avatar’ followed by ‘Don Avatar’. His eyes closed, and he was taken inside the dungeon.