One of the benefits of imprinting a monster onto myself is that their creation costs a vastly reduced amount. Enough so that it only takes a couple of hours for me to populate the whole tunnel leading to my core with them.

Which signals the completion of dungeon version 1.0. Except that that’s not really the case. It more like the alpha version of the dungeon, or perhaps even pre-alpha.

It certainly isn’t something I’m proud of. Just the bare necessities to allow for something grander to come later on.

And it will come.

Let’s see, what can be improved? And what need to be improved? Technically everything, but some things are more pressing and if I were to list every single detail I’d never finish.

The most obvious thing is layout, but once again, I push that back a bit. I can manage with just this for now.

No, a much more important thing is the environment itself. Right now, I only have bare walls with no decorations. Only the occasional frog to disrupt the monotony.

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Sure, the walls are made of asbestos, but that’s not going to be much help in and of itself. No, to take full advantage of that I need to create a dungeon where every movement forces you to scrape against the stone, chipping microscopic strands off of it. Those will then find their way into the lungs of the intrepid adventurers foolish enough to venture into the depth of my dungeon.

It may not do much, but a slow killer is still a killer. And in the meantime, it’ll at least weaken them, giving my monsters an easier time of defending themselves and the dungeon.

And then, even if they manage to survive and escape, they’ll still die in a decade or two.

So, I get to it. Shaping the tunnel to have more bends and curves, ground and ceiling riddles with stalagmites and stalactites and even the occasional stalagnate. I also make sure that the surface layer of asbestos is much less compact. Hopefully that’ll cause more of it to come off.

With that all done, I’m not left with enough time to do any more major changes before the first of my challengers will begin to arrive. It’ll be more effective to reinforce what I already have.

I throw myself into one last whirlwind of reinforcement. This time, I use my nascent creation and destruction powers to increase the concentration of asbestos in the walls. While they aren’t very good or efficient now, they won’t improve if I won’t use them.

And the very last thing that I also do in tandem with that is something I should have dedicated a small amount of my power to this whole time. Letting my dungeon energy permeate the walls of the dungeon, strengthening them and, hopefully, also causing their secondary purpose to improve.