Mike was still reclining in his chair watching his television set. Off to the side was an unmade bed and strewn around him were a bunch of junk food wrappers. His idea to transform the knowledge crystals into streaming apps had worked perfectly. With a small exertion of will he got the Dungeon app to display its information in the form of a documentary series much like one of those educational shows that describe how stuff is made. That way he would be able to learn all he needed to about the current Dungeons of Calimandao just by sitting back and bingeing one episode at a time. And the best part was, if he ever got lost or confused, he could simply exert his will to have the show to explain what just happened again or or go into more detail about a topic.
He was so engrossed by this power that it took him a few days to realize that he wasn't getting tired. In fact, he discovered that he would no longer become tired or hungry or feel any other of his natural bodily urges unless he specifically willed it. If he wanted to he could continue watch these shows indefinitely with no need to take breaks to eat or sleep or use the bathroom. While such traits might have made him the ideal fast-food worker back on Earth, and on paper it seemed like there were no downsides, it also sounded like indulging too much could lead to insanity. After he realized what was going on he willed the expanse of white space in his Workshop to get dimmer and brighter to mimic a day-night cycle and tried to get himself into the habit of maintaining some semblance of a sleep cycle. He also made it a point to eat throughout the day. Snacks were no longer biologically necessary but eating still made him feel more normal.
As he was setting up the day-night cycle of his Workshop he found out quite by accident that days on Calimandao were actually 26 hours long. Switching over the the Calimandao app for confirmation he found that seconds were the same length as on Earth and there were still 60 seconds to a minute and 60 minutes to and hour, but each day on Calimandao was two hours longer than on Earth. And although a year was still 12 months long, every month on Calimandao was exactly 4 weeks (or 28 days) long which meant that a year was only 336 days.
After trying unsuccessfully to do the math in his head for while, he summoned a small calculator to determine that this meant a Calimandao year was 8736 hours long while an Earth year (including leap years) was 8766 hours long, so a year on Calimandao was 30 hours longer than a year on Earth. This was close enough that it probably wasn't worth putting much though into, but Mike still found it interesting to note. Mike set his Workshop's day-night cycle to be in sync with the 26 hour days of Calimandao and since he had to manually will himself to become tired anyway he didn't notice much of a difference.
One small thing that Mike did mentally work out, just as an idle thought in case it ever came up, was the fact that if someone from Calimandao turned 18 years old they would need still to wait an additional 21 days before they were considered at least 18 years old by Earth standards. He didn't know why this thought came to his head, but for some reason it seemed like and important piece of trivia to make note of and he stowed that fact away in his mind for future reference.
He realized that time didn't really matter to him any more. He had been 32 when he died but now that he was a Dungeon Master his body would no longer age. He could also will his body to appear older or younger if he really felt like it. Each month from now on he would be brought back to his Workshop where time would pass for him but not the rest of Calimandao. He could potentially experience centuries or millennia of time passing if he procrastinated on building his Dungeon. Other Dungeon Masters had been brought to Calimandao regularly for three hundred years, but he had no way of knowing how much time they had actually experienced since they could also spend as much time as they liked when visiting their Workshops. Perhaps some of them experienced the equivalent of multiple lifetimes going over every minutia of their Dungeon before connecting them to Calimandao for the first time, or perhaps some of them knocked everything out in a couple days.
As he sat in front of his television watching episode after episode featuring the details of the other Dungeons, he had to admit that a while most of them were very impressive, a few of them did seem to have a very sloppy initial design. Some included majestic backgrounds and fantastic vistas which were obviously iconic scenes for that Dungeon Master's original world, whereas some Dungeons were designed entirely with very simple grey stone walls. The Mobs of most Dungeons were usually pretty unique to them, but while some Dungeons had a vast menagerie of different creatures some simply repeated a few effective ones over and over. Mike still had no idea what he wanted to do with his Dungeon but he knew that at a very minimum he didn't want it to be boring. He was representing Earth after all.
One pattern that Mike did begin to notice was how incredibly combative all these Dungeons were. In order to progress further a Challenger needed to continuously keep fighting against more and more dangerous Mobs. There were a few Dungeons that depended on puzzles or mazes but even those were still filled with vicious Mobs with puzzles serving mostly just to slow people down or provide a venue for combat. Mike paused the television and consulted his instruction book. Cali had said that Dungeons should feature trials and challenges based on the Dungeon Master's original world, and he knew he could earn Dungeon Points whenever a Challenger was killed or expelled from his Dungeon, but that didn't necessarily mean that everyone needed to force their Challengers to fight their way through everything. Mike could easily think of a bunch of other non-combat trials that they could have made, and wondered vaguely why every other Dungeon he had seen thus far had seemed to have such a combative interpretation of the instructions.
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Mike continued to watch information on the different Dungeons for some time before getting a notice that he had reached the end of the playlist. This puzzled him. He knew the Age of Dungeons had been going on for three hundred years and Cali made a new Dungeon every three months, which meant that logically there should be 1200 other Dungeons and his should be Dungeon #1201. However, he didn't think he had watched information on nearly that many. Some fiddling with the settings confirmed that he had only seen info on 437 other Dungeons, and after some digging he found out why. He had originally set the show to display a series of the current Dungeons, which had automatically filtered out all the Dungeons that had been been destroyed. It seemed that over the past 300 years, 763 Dungeons had been destroyed.
This revelation worried Mike. He knew that it was possible for a Challenger who made it to the Core Room to destroy a Dungeon rather than accepting the reward, but Mike had assumed that this would have been a rare occurrence. After all, Dungeons seemed like valuable resources and destroying them ought to have been a desperate act or last resort. Why had the people of Calimandao destroyed almost 2/3rds of the Dungeons? Mike switched over to the Calimandao app to try to find out why.
The Calimandao app contained information about the world at large. It didn't go into into the specific details of each and every person's life, but it did have information regarding laws and policies and Mike was able to will into existence a show which explained how various political entities treated Dungeons within their borders. The world was made up of twelve Kingdoms, (some of which were further divided into provinces), and each Kingdom has a different national policy in place. One thing they all have in common was a firm agreement that any Dungeon which was discovered to have anything to do with mind control was to be immediately destroyed. Apparently that agreement was one of the few things that all twelve Kingdoms unanimously agreed upon and it came in the wake of a particularly dangerous Dungeon Master which had managed to use Mobs to brainwash nearly every Challenger who entered the Dungeon and turn them into cult members. There was also another agreement that every Kingdom's forces would agree to aid one another in the destruction of a Dungeon should any of them develop anything which could reasonably be considered a threat to the world or the population at large.
Well, those both seemed like reasonable policies. Mike had not really considered Mobs with mind control abilities but he made a mental note to make sure nothing in his Dungeon came close. In addition to the obvious world threatening reasons, there were a number of more mundane reasons a Dungeon might be destroyed depending on where it was located and the policies of the surrounding area. A Dungeon which had unspent points during their upgrade at the beginning of each month would automatically invest those points into their Core Room to use as rewards for those who conquer it. However, if nobody manages to get the the Core Room by the end of the month, the Dungeon would receive double their investment back. Therefore, if a Dungeon was left completely on its own without anybody conquering it each month it could begin to gain points exponentially. Most Kingdoms had a policy in place to preemptively destroy Dungeons which were hard to reach or seen as extremely low value in order to avoid a situation where one was left unattended for a years and is able to accumulate enough points to become nearly unconquerable threaten the world.
Switching back to the Dungeon app, Mike adjusted the filter to display shows based on Dungeons that had been destroyed. He wanted to see what they had done wrong so he could avoid doing the same with his Dungeon. There was a lot more variety among these Dungeons than among the ones he had already seen. The ones that were destroyed because they posed a threat to the world were obvious. There were only a handful of them but they included themes based on driving Challengers insane, manipulating them with mind control, infecting them with plagues or highly infectious diseases, and a few other threats at a similar level. Mike would definitely not be imitating any of them. There were also a number of incredibly small dungeons obviously designed specifically to save as many points as possible and try to take advantage of investing points into the Core Room. They included only the bare minimum required to qualify as a dungeon and their connection points were put in places which were very hard to find or reach, like inner rim of a volcano or hidden deep within a natural cave system. Such Dungeons typically lasted a couple of months but when they were found they were immediately destroyed.
These types of Dungeons only accounted for a small percentage of the Dungeons that were destroyed. There were also a few somewhat lackluster ones with no particularly valuable Loot and with connection points in awkward places which Mike assumed simply hadn't been worth the hassle of ensuring someone came around to conquer each month. Mike also noticed that a large number of the destroyed Dungeons attempted to have a completely non-lethal theme. A number were designed simply as schools or academies with Mobs designated as teachers programmed to provide information and instruction to Challengers. Some were set up as large open spaces filled with renewable resources just waiting for Challengers to come collect them. A couple Dungeon Masters built up entire cities with homes and buildings, apparently in hopes of attracting a population of challengers to live there. There were a few more in that same vein, however, without exception any Dungeon Master which had made a point of not including any kind of combat had been destroyed. It didn't seem like Cali or any of the Kingdoms had a specific policy of targeting such Dungeons, and while a few of them might have been targeted by individuals for various reasons Mike found it hard to believe that every single one being destroyed was just a coincidence.