Congratulations, For defeating Ice Wolf, Level 15, 87 XP has been awarded.

For defeating your first Ice Wolf, 174 XP has been awarded.

For defeating your first Dungeon Boss, 50 XP has been awarded.

Congratulations, You have reached Level 15. Two skill points have been awarded.

For defeating your first Dungeon, 50 XP has been awarded.

I watch the combat log scroll by, leaning against my sword, still stuck into the corpse of the ice wolf guarding the end of the dungeon, trying to catch my breath. It had been one of the longest fights I had experienced in the last eight years of delving into the dungeon north of Forestend. This was the culmination of all the hard work I had done. Most people would think it crazy, taking eight years to beat a simple level five dungeon, and usually, those hypothetical people would be right. After all, it usually took new Adventures about a year, maybe two, to complete such a low-level dungeon, depending on how often they delved and whether or not they delved in a group. Dungeon levels were synonymous with how many floors they had, and generally, the lower the number, the weaker the monsters.

That time estimate for a typical adventurer didn’t consider my unique relationship with this particular dungeon. One of the perks of my admittedly broken class was the ability to interact with the unseen forces that made up the System. One of those forces is the intelligence that controls the multitude of dungeons around the world. Over the last eight years, the Doungon Intelligence that controlled this dragon and I have worked together to turn this dragon into the perfect training ground. The one thing that became obvious when working with Doungon Intelligence, or DI, as I had come to call them, was that they didn’t have the capacity for creativity.

They could build dungeons, but it was more akin to a child building a structure out of wooden blocks. That child doesn't know how to create a new block. All it knows is how to put the existing ones together. The same concept applies to the DIs; they have pre-defined building blocks of a dungeon but don’t know how to create new ones. Fortunately, this DI had me to help out with the creativity, and he’d used those new Dougeon blocks to create some nasty surprises. Of course, most of the changes are hidden away in secret passages in ways that normal delvers couldn’t find without actively searching for them.

The DI had plans to incorporate most of the challenges we’d come up with over the years into the main dungeon, and I was a little sad I wasn’t going to be able to see the delver’s reaction to some of them. If those reactions were anything like the first time I had deployed a new feature to the system, it would be hilarious. Just thinking about it had me chuckling even now.

Gem and I had decided to forgo an announcement and just deploy the change to how the Looting Subsystem worked, which mainly enabled the ability to mass loot the corpses of monsters in a base 1-meter radius around the person. Because I had finished the update well before Gem had predicted—I had a knack for understanding how the system worked, apparently—Gem had decided to bring lessons about how the Ability Stats Subsystem worked. The five base Ability Stats were Health, Strength, Dexterity, Perception, and Charisma. There were a few others, but none had any true implementation in the System.

The unique thing about Ability Stats was that, unlike almost everything else in the System, they couldn’t be artificially upgraded; you had to work on them. For instance, if you wanted to raise your strength Stat, you’d have to do strength training, while Health could be affected by what you eat and your lifestyle. The subsystem in charge of the Ability Stats was magnificently complex, and even after eight years, I wasn't sure if I understood it completely.

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Of course, all that to say, having learned how the Ability Subsystem worked, I had decided to tie the max radius a person could loot to their Perception Stat; for each point in Perception point, 1 meter would be added to the base radius, up to a max of ten meters. All there was left to do was release it into the wild and wait for someone to figure it out.

To that end, on the day Gem and I decided to release the update, I found a nice spot in the Adventurer’s Guildhall around mid-day, figuring that was when most adventures would make it back from the forest, and waited. I did not have to wait long until a small four-person group returned from a monster extermination request, talking about how “that new looting option let them clean up after the kills so much faster.” When other adventures heard them talking about it, it didn’t take long for a commotion to happen to the point it had both Dad and the Assitant Guildmaster, a woman I still haven't met, come out of their offices to see what all the fuss was about. Of course, the one downside to the whole thing was at dinner that night; I had to act like I did know about it as Dad told us about it.

Shaking myself from memory and pull my sword from the wolf’s corpse. I say out loud since no one was around to hear me, “Okay, let's see what this new Sixth Floor has in store, Dungy.”

Dungy responded as a section of the back wall fell away to reveal a set of stairs. he added, and if I didn’t know any better, I would have sworn there was a smugness to his voice. The Reward Chest was a unique item to the boss room of any dungeon; on top of the loot gained from the boss, the dungeon would also create a chest with random loot, usually better versions of other loot found throughout the dungeon, but there were times when rare items would spawn. Of course, looking at the actual system that controlled the Reward Chest had demystified the entire process, and while the DI did have some control over what was spawned, it was mostly just up to random chance.

Pushing the lid of the chest open, I stood there in silence. I’m sure my jaw would have been on the floor if it could have. The shock wasn’t so much the amount of loot—there were only two things in the chest. No, it was what those two items were: a small pile of gold coins and a disk-like object. I don’t know how long I stood staring into the chest before Gem asked what was wrong.

“Is that what I think it is?” I ask no one, in particular, pointing to the disk.

Dungy said, and this time, I was sure I heard the laughter in his mental voice, which shouldn’t have been possible. By their very nature, Dungeon Intelligences didn’t have the capacity to display emotions. But that was a problem for later, and more importantly, was the thing in the chest. As its name would imply, a Beast Taming Token allows the user to tame one beast: monster or animal. The only problem was that, like the Summoning Tokens, Beast Taming Tokens were rare, to the point that they usually sold for hundreds of platinum on the open market. I didn’t even want to think about what they sold for in private and on the black market or, for that matter, what someone would be willing to do to get their hands on one.

I looked furtively around the cave that was the boss room to ensure no one had entered. Rationally, I knew the cave entrance was blocked, and Dungy wouldn’t open it until I had gone down to the sixth floor. But that didn’t change the instinctive fight or flight reflex that suddenly came over me. I snatched up the token and made it disappear into storage, along with the five gold coins. Taking a deep breath to try and calm my racing heart, I take a few moments to marshal my thoughts.

“Dungy, as much as I appreciate the gift and don’t deny it, I know the dungeon's loot system almost as well as you and Gem; please don’t do anything like that again. You nearly gave me a heart attack, and quite frankly, I wouldn't be accepting it if I didn't have access to storage space that is impossible for anyone to see the contents of.”

Dungy said contritely

“And I appreciate that,” I responded. Now, then, let's see this sixth floor. It's not every day I can say I got to explore an unopen dungeon floor.”