I looked around. Orb. Cave. Recent time of death. That could only mean one thing.

“Welp, guess I’m a dungeon now….Funnn...” 

At the very least, the starting position was okay, if not great. A pile of rocks piled high on one side, indicating a cave in, and some very rusty sets of equipment were jutting out from beneath, meaning someone got caught in it. I could probably use or repair some of that stuff later and the cave in would cover me for a while. There was nothing else immediately in the room though, just empty walls. 

“Alright, so are we doing this by [dungeon status] rules or…” 

Sure enough, a menu appeared at the thought with a small list. 

[Unnamed Dungeon: Level 1

Mana 100/100

10 per day

Unique monsters: 0/1

Floors 0/1

Basic monster available 

Basic creature available

Basic flora available]

With a little extra thought, the available lists opened up as well.

[Basic monsters: next unlock at level 5

Spiders 

Slimes

Scorpions 

Small biterfish

Clothling

Common snake

Goblin 

Kolbolds 

Large rat

Shadeling]

[Basic creatures: next unlock at level 5 

Small nibblerfish

Pill bugs

Small rat

Rabbits 

Common Butterfly

Small common snake]

[Basic floria: next unlock at level 5

Common red mushroom

Cave root

Common kelp

Common brown mushroom

Common grass

Common cave flower]

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

Well that answers some questions then. Creatures could turn into monsters eventually, if I was right about the snakes, fish and rats. And not all animals were considered creatures. How they did so is still unknown but it does help remove the two upgraded creatures from the list. 

Beyond that, the bugs, minus the butterfly, were off the list due to me not liking them. I’m also removing goblins, slimes and kobolds because they seem rather generic. If there are other dungeons, which I’m sure there are, I want to stand out from them at least. 

Anything that I could feasibly acquire myself, so all the cave and mushroom options were taken off the list, which also included the rat, snake, rabbit and butterfly. I would also include the nibblerfish, but looking at the remaining flora, I decided to hold off on excluding it. 

That left clothlings, shadelings, nibblerfish, snakes, grass and kelp. Not exactly the most exciting of lists but I'll work with what I got. I tried focusing to see if I could get any more information out of the system and six descriptions rose to the forefront.

[Clothling: A magic construct given form by loose rags and spare cloth. While flexible, they are ultimately only as durable as the cloth they come from. Requirement: spare cloth. Unspent mana.]

[Shadeling: a weak demon given form by shadows. It hides in shadows and ambushes prey to kill them quickly. But their weak claws make the follow up highly unlikely. Requirement: dark environment]

[Nibblefish: tiny fish that are prey to most other fish. They nibble at anything in their vicinity and due to this and their small size, they’ve been known to eat away many fisherman's bait. But they often work just as well as the bait they consumed.]

[Small common snake: a snake that has yet to reach maturity. It lacks both poison and fangs and eats by consuming anything put in front of it. It’s harmless to anything larger than itself.]

[Common kelp: a plant found in most rivers and lakes. While gross to many, it can have both water and healing properties in the hands of an expert. Even if much better alternatives exist.]

[Common grass: blades of grass that can be found mostly everywhere. Although grass can have a number of uses and properties, you won’t find that here.]

“Huh. That's interesting.” The system seemed to be downplaying the choices. Like, ‘this is what you get, but you could do better.’ Makes sense for the first purchasable option. 

Regardless of dismissive menus, the choice of monster was easy. If shadelings were demons, I’d rather not have them in my dungeon in case religious nuts come in to exterminate the entire thing. So clothlings it is.

I still wasn’t sure between fishes or snakes, so I left them aside for now. But between kelp and grass, which wasn’t much of a choice. I ended up choosing not grass, because it was grass. While it might have some uses down the line, chances are likely that I could get that easily later. Worst comes to worst, I could just buy it at level 5. 

With all that in mind, that left the fish and snake. The fish seemed like they could evolve easily enough and could at least be useful, assuming I got water. The snakes on the other hand, had a different problem. I had no idea how large they were. They could be 1 foot long or 3 inches. Add to that the fact that I don’t know the sizes of other creatures and that it’s harmless to things larger than itself, and I’m looking at a no win scenario either way. 

With a heavy heart, I eventually chose the nibblerfish.

[Acquired: clothling, common kelp, small nibblerfish] 

With that out of the way, I tried to summon my first monster. At first, I just tried to summon it in a random spot, but something stopped me. Something in the system told me that I needed the materials before I summoned them. Luckily, there was a scrap of cloth by the cave in, which I'm pretty sure is why I was even offered a clothling in the first place. 

In a shimmering light, the old cloth rippled once before rising slightly off the ground. A vaguely humanoid shape formed out of it, like someone wearing a very baggy robe with two little lights for eyes in the hood. 

It was also very tiny. As in, could fit inside my orb tiny. Or someone’s hand. 

It stood on shaky legs, (actually, outside of the hood, it was kind of just a lump of cloth, so ‘rags’ more specifically) and tried to walk over to my orb but fell over after a few steps along the way. 

After a thought, I tried to pull up it’s stat menu.

[Clothling: Level 1

Classes:

Attributes:

Magic:

Skills:

Drops: ]

“So, it has nothing then. Oh well, at least you’re cute lil’ buddy. Why don’t you focus on trying to salvage the stuff from the rocks, alright?” The clothing nodded with literally shimmering eyes and turned to run at the objective, only to fall while doing so. 

That didn’t seem to stop them, as they got right back up and tried again. That kid’s gonna go far if they keep that attitude up. 

Next, I tried making a piece of kelp in the corner of the room. It worked as a new kelp plant started growing but something in the system told me something was wrong, that the plant was going to die if I didn't do anything. Thinking quickly I tried to summon water, and I got a puddle, only about as deep as a dime was tall and as wide as a top hat. It seemed to work though, as the system stopped telling me the thing was dying.

I brought up the menu again to check my mana

[mana 0/100]

“Out of mana already! How’d that happen!” The system didn’t have a backlog, so I was stuck not knowing for now.  “Sigh, I guess we’re done for the day. Let’s hope tomorrow works out better.”