Amazing Progress_Experimental Dungeon Novel

First though, there were a few more pressing matters. If the bonus mana regeneration was a short-term thing, and she would stop getting it when the last box was done with, Avery would probably be better off extending into a third floor before doing that. Corridors wouldn't give the best regeneration to mana spent ratio, but Avery had the idea and urge to make the third floor a maze. Unfortunately, she only had enough spare mana for thirty-one instances of corridor, which was nowhere near enough to do what she wanted. Well, at least starting at the furthest endpoint from the entrance of the second floor, she could get started and get some of that bonus regeneration.

Almost as if she had planned it in some way, Avery had a room that already terminated away from the cliff face. Ideally, she would have stairs going down, but there was both no time for that nor an option to do so, and carving them manually would take far too much mana. Instead, Avery angles a corridor down from the southernmost endpoint, and starts from that. Ramps were perfectly fine, and it was only like a twenty-five degree decline. Most people would be perfectly able to get back out, and leaving was the only important bit.

For starting your third floor, you gain a one-time bonus of 15 mana regeneration!

For this maze, Avery was going to try a switch-based layout. She toyed with the idea of making an elaborate maze, and then having a shortcut hidden behind the stairs, but the whole point was to keep people away from the shiny thing, not let observant people through the area easily. Besides, all she had for hiding things were tapestries, and they had so far not done the job very well. On the other hand, she did get a mana bonus when someone found a secret for the first time, so maybe hiding things terribly was a good idea somehow. Not a path forward though. At best, she’d put in that secret passageway, but only when the person made it all the way through the maze, and flipped the switch to open up the doorway leading out.

Now, she only had enough mana for thirty more corridors, so she was going to try and get as much of a basic layout made as she could. Two forward corridors, then one to the left and one to the right. The one to the left, she would be hiding behind one of the switches, and the right would go on another corridor, then turn right. That corridor would have a switch that flipped the wall on the first corridor going right over to block the path back, at which point they’d go up to that section, turn right, go up two corridors, around a corner twice, and there’d be a switch that opened up the path forward. They’d still have to go back and switch the first one back again though, and they’d have no indication that that was what the switch had done.

She could think of more tricks when she had mana though. Quickly burning through all her available energy, Avery builds enough corridors to get about to the middle of the second floor, right under the pit. That would be where she started branching off into puzzle segments again.

Dungeon Statistics

Age 7 Weight 7573

Structure Points 253/253 Mana Points 1/8350 Structure Regeneration 0 Mana Regeneration 261

Power 8 Intelligence 15 Finesse 12 Wisdom 8 Hardness 15 Charisma 6

Menu Options

Build Spawn Demolish Map

Oh, looked like that mana regen got her another corridor. Huh. It was nice not having a constant drain. With all these floors, rooms, and corridors, Avery was getting a point of mana every fifteen seconds, which was extremely nice. Once she was done fabricating a whole maze, she'd be so flush with mana she wouldn't even have to worry about spell limitations anymore. Unlimited power was hers to command, and without having to have relied on the Tower at all. What could they offer Avery that she didn’t have now? Space? She had an entire underground lair within walking distance of the capitol. Freedom from oversight? Aside from being hidden from the world, Avery was essentially dead already. Resources? Anything she could get an example of, she could create out of raw energy, limitlessly. Speaking of which, there was the wooden box. More important to her now than the mana she could harvest from demolishing it was the fact she would get wood, and all the things she could make out of it. Levers, buttons, staves, wooden spikes for the bottom of the pit, doors, the possibilities were tantalizing. Demolishing the object, Avery is suddenly bombarded with messages.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Demolish not available on living or undead creatures.

Avery quickly looks closer at the space where there was once a box, and found that there was a number of small insects. That was odd.

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

The scythe blade traps were guaranteed to hit him if he set them off, that was true. That didn't matter to Ham, since even at their deadliest he would still be able to fully repair himself in a matter of minutes. This particular one was ineffective enough he simply breaks the blade on his body, and continues on. Flipping his coin, Ham takes a left, passing over a tile floor of some maze of another. He ignores it, and follows the path, which leads right back to the entrance. Rather than keeping on with a looping path, he backtracks and goes the other direction, which leads to another two intersections, where he takes a left, a right, finds a dead end, and finds another dead end down the other branch.

That was just what dungeon exploration was though, lots of walking, dead ends, empty rooms, and other boredom, punctuated occasionally by violence. Coming up against a stone door, unbudging, with groaning coming from behind it, Ham works on slowly grinding it down. While a common adventurer would use something physical, like the pick Ham was holding, to carve through a stone, Ham had unlimited power with which to do the same. It takes a good three minutes to decay the hunk of stone to powder, but it is uneventful and the noise proves to have been unsourced. Ham dismisses it as a part of the dungeon, and moves on. This time, there are four exits to choose from. Assigning each doorway a side of the coin, Ham flips twice to determine which move on to the finals, then assigns and flips once more. The winner is the rightmost door, which is simply another wooden door, unlocked but requiring physical force to move.

With the door out of the way, Ham finds himself in another room with four exits, face to face with a statue of some guy. He ignores it, and the masks hanging on the wall to his left, as he continues exploring. This time, an iron portcullis at the end of the wall with the horned masks wins the toss. It is similarly to the stone door in terms of how much raw energy it could withstand, but eventually all things decay. Walking through the rusted grate, he follows the path as it turns to the left, and he is able to see one of the rooms he had already passed through a lack of door. However, there is another door in this hallway, so he rots down the wooden planks, at which point a pile of skulls cave through the opening.

Not being attached to anything that would allow them motor function, Ham disregards the skulls as useless and moves into the room. There are two additional doors here, one of which would lead back to where he had first flipped three coins, and the other simple wood. He rots it down, and moves through, discovering the portcullis he had taken out of the coin-flip running. With that pathway having been explored, he travels down the leftward hallway, turning as it bends, and slows when he hears something that doesn’t seem to be on a loop behind the door.

Amazing Progress

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