After Ryia and I had a rough idea of what had gone wrong, she had me set up several runes. One was to regulate the air content of the room, while another was to let me know if the air content somehow got out of whack. A third was set up at the entrance. It was meant to bolster my air seal, but also to slowly release air under set conditions. Like, as a random example, fiery immolation roasting my dungeon alive. There was also a rune set up at the entrance to each of the dungeon’s rooms. In case of a similar event happening again they would trigger and seal the room off from the rest of the dungeon, hopefully containing whatever I'd screwed up. We would have set up more anti-dungeon-killing-explosion measures, but Ryia's off the cuff knowledge of runes wasn't that great.
I was infusing mana into a force projection rune, for the very scientific purpose of checking its maximum output, when Ryia interrupted.
“Granite, we need to talk.” Her tone, usually somewhere between perpetually amused and saucy, was completely serious.
“What's up?”
“You can't keep blowing up your dungeon. I know that seems like a given, but I'm serious. Someone’s probably already noticed that there’s a new dungeon here, and it’ll only take a few weeks before an assessment team investigates. If you don’t have a functioning dungeon by then, they could just write you off as another core doing research. Once the Adventuring Society makes an assessment, it can be awfully hard to change it.”
“It’s not like I’m trying to blow stuff up. It just… happens.” That sounded better in my head.
“This shouldn’t be that difficult. Most Dungeon Cores have an innate sense of their domain and can usually subconsciously tell when something is out of tune. Look, let’s try something simple.”
A few minutes later, the corridor between the first and second rooms had a false floor leading to a spike filled pit. It was a simple trap but might catch a particularly stupid ENAD. Maybe. Ok, so that was probably me being optimist, but it was a theoretical possibility. In the third room I set up a barely visible rune on the floor. There was a tube under the rune leading under the floor and behind one of the walls. Once triggered, the rune would send a concentrated and powerful blast of wind through the tube, forcing a preloaded spike down the remainder of the tube and out a disguised hole like a dart from a blowpipe, hopefully with enough force to do serious damage.
Another rune trap I set up was a simple force rune that could project various kinds of force in a set direction when triggered. I set up one at the top of the stairs from the third room to the final room, where I intended to have the boss set up. Once an ENAD stepped on it, they would be hurled down the stairs by a powerful blast of concussive force, hopefully disorienting them. Along the ceiling of each room, I placed a strip of bioluminescent moss, illuminating each of the rooms in a green-yellow light.
While I would love to explain how I carefully set up each room for maximum carnage, the truth was that I really didn't have the mana, knowledge, or mobs to make something terribly dangerous. Sure, I could set up a dozen spike spitting traps along the halls, but what would be the fun in that? Not to mention that a spike trap wouldn't do real damage against a high-level cultivator.
Cultivation was something Ryia explained while my domain was expanding. It involved cultivators taking in ambient mana and making it their own, infusing it into their bodies. Because mana responds to intent, the more mana a person has the faster and stronger they will be. Because many mana types usually don’t work too well together, cultivators usually specialize in one or two types of mana cultivation. Why can’t a person just hang out in a place with super high mana levels, becoming top tier Adventurers in a day? It had to do with the nature of F rank and mana.
F rank is something each and every person, animal, plant, and rock has, and represents how ambient mana has seeped into their bodies through their everyday actions. Unfortunately for them, the mana they have is basically ambient mana, mana that has not been claimed and doesn't usually respond to intent. The first steps of cultivation involve infusing that mana with their intent, much like the way I expanded my domain. Depending on the mana type, it could take anywhere from weeks to months to reach E rank, the point where most of a person’s mana had been infused.
E rank was something most people obtained naturally and offered several benefits. An E ranker was slightly stronger than an F, their minds a bit sharper, and they were significantly less likely to succumb to sickness or infection. To get from E to D, a person had to finish infusing their mana. This might sound similar to F rank, but if a person screwed this part up the jump from E to D was about a thousand percent more likely to fail.
Breaking through to D rank required a person to take all the mana they’d spent so long infusing, and toss it out into the world, letting it revert to ambient mana. They would then have a very short time to suck in a particular mana type and rapidly infuse it, while keeping the ambient mana at bay. Most failed, ambient mana flooding their bodies and sending them back to F rank, but those who did break through reached the absolute peak of mortality. Their strength, intellect, dexterity, resilience, all of it was at the very peak of what the mightiest of F or E rankers could physically manage. No amount of exercise or training could place an E or F ranker above the level of a D ranker.
When Ryia told me how E rankers broke through, I wondered which idiot discovered the method. They would have had to carefully infuse their mana, then purposefully get rid of it, then carefully suck in only a specific mana type. The person was either absolutely insane or an unbelievably smart genius.
To get from D to C, a cultivator had to increase their mana density. This could take a long time, as a cultivator could only cultivate their particular mana type. Simply taking in ambient mana, which was really just a hodgepodge of random bits of mana, would just hurt their cultivation, as most mana types didn’t get along too well. Once they’d increased their density to the maximum their bodies could hold, they were considered C rankers.
To get from C to B rank, a cultivator had to convert their bodies to mana. Not gain more mana, but actually turn their physical bodies into mana so dense it acted as a physical object. Naturally, this took a ridiculously long amount of time, as in hundreds of years, and was incredibly dangerous; screwing up your brain or heart meant you were dead, no do-overs. The power level of C rankers varied wildly depending on how much of their bodies they’d converted and their mana type, but regardless C rankers were forces to be reckoned with. The weakest of them was stronger than five men, while a peak C ranker could decimate companies.
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Once a person was completely made of mana, they were B rankers. B rankers were impossible to kill by normal means because their bodies were made of mana. Slice off their head? They’d grow a new one. Blow them up? Ok, that might actually work if you blew them into really small pieces in a harsh mana environment, but odds were you’d fail. Poison, fire, all of it just didn’t work. The only way to kill a B ranker to have a ridiculously expensive weapon that could project mana into the cultivator, disrupting their mana, or have another B ranker take them out.
On top of that, they were literally forces of nature. They were made of mana that responded to their intent, so flying or turning into a giant fireball or a lightning bolt or a giant was all possible. There were limits of course, the cultivator only had so much mana to work with, but even so their power was on another level. There wasn’t much information on how to reach A, S, SS, or SSS. Either Ryia hadn’t been paying attention at wisp school or whatever, or there was genuinely little information on them after that.
All that to say my puny traps were unlikely to do much against a high-level cultivator. Still, better than nothing.
Once this was finished setting up the runes, I was back to where I had started. Waiting for a random creature to wander into my dungeon. I had tried modifying the various insects that I had captured, but while I knew everything about something I had infused, that didn’t mean I was suddenly a genius when it came to biological manipulation. My mobs tended to twitch spasmodically before dying, their compound eyes somehow conveying betrayal and helplessness rage.
I stopped experimenting.
It took two days before a non-bug wandered into my dungeon. It was a small mouse, only a couple inches long, warily watching its surroundings while sniffing around for scraps. By some incredible bad fortune (for the mouse) a sharpened stalactite was jarred loose by the mouse's footsteps, skewing the tiny, defenseless creature. Ryia and I mourned the mouse's passing, futilely railing against the Fates that had brought an end to such a promising young life. An extensive period of mourning was initiated lasting for the incredibly long .0005 seconds it took for me to infuse the corpse, before we got on with our lives.
Anyway, while a mouse might not seem like much, to me it was the luckiest thing that had happened yet. Not because mice made particularly good dungeon mobs, nobody wanted to fight oversized rats, but because mice, as had just been demonstrated, were pushovers killed by the most random of occurrences.
Or the most dangerous of killers.
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The predator stalked through the jungle; its path illuminated by the moonlight that managed to filter through the dense, dripping canopy above. It was still early, and the nocturnal beast had yet to score its first kill. It paused, its nose twitching at the scent of prey, its black spotted body seeming to fade into the jungle as it froze.
The creature had never before scented such an abundance of food in one place. The closest it had come was when it had broken into a mice warren, gorging itself in the chaos that followed. The simple memory fed what its body was already telling it to do, to rip and kill and feast on the prey waiting to be devoured. As it approached its waiting meal, its appetite only grew. There were dozens of meat packets waiting to be devoured, simply sitting still and waiting for their fate like the defenseless vermin they were. As it flashed towards the prey, claws out and maw open, it felt an impact followed by a brief spike of pain.
Then everything went dark.
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I wasn’t sure whether to be delighted or insulted. I unmanifested the dozens of mice that had baited the trap before staring at the creature before me.
It was a cat.
Sure, Ryia called it an Ocelot, but it was literally a cat. Still, it was better than manifesting another screwed up mob. As I examined the creature's blueprint, I realized that I'd actually gotten lucky. The Ocelot had good reflexes, an excellent sense of balance, and were naturally inclined to kill stuff. On top of that, I could scale them up to panther size without any short-term problems, and making minor changes like sharper teeth or greater bite strength wasn't too difficult. While it was no goblin, the cats had the potential to make a good foundational mob, at least for my first floor.
After manifesting a cat about as tall as a human, promptly named a Panther cat, I got to work truly designing the first floor.
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Akira Jung watched the party of Adventurers march into his small village. They were caked in mud and covered in bites from the man-eating jungle insects, but despite their ragged condition, they were obviously experienced. Despite the exhaustion from their thirty-league journey, their eyes picked out every detail of the small collection of huts Akira called home.
“Greetings, I am Akira Jung. Welcome to Brink.”
“Thank you, elder. I am sorry if I seem blunt, but it has been a long journey and some rest would do us all good. Perhaps in the morning we can talk about this dungeon of yours?”
“Of course, of course. Right this way.”
After the adventurers had washed in the nearby river and he had shown them to their sleeping quarters, Akira sat by the fire, letting the sounds of the jungle sooth him. As the sky darkened, Akira reflected on his past, the time before he had moved to this remote place seeking peace from a life of conflict. A time when any member of the Adventurer society would have called him brother, and there was no challenge he could not conquer. He thought of the folly youth and cultivation could engender, how confident and brash he'd been. He had soon learned that not all problems could be solved through conflict, and not all dilemmas had a right answer. But he remembered nonetheless, the sight of the Adventurers bringing up memories long buried. He sat there until the fire was reduced to smoldering embers, until the brilliant stars once more faded into obscurity, calling forth the dawn.
Far in the distance, in the direction of the dungeon, a roar rose above the waking sounds of the jungle, bringing an instant of quiet, before the jungle sounds resumed.
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If I could have jumped up and down in joy, I would have. I looked at the small fluff ball that was my newest adaptation of the Ocelot and laughed as the small kitten let out a roar that could drown out a lion.
It turned that engraving a force magnification rune onto the kitten’s teeth, magnifying the kitten's sound, turned a slightly louder than usual “mew” into a physical wall of noise. I decided right then and there that this would be the official mascot of the first floor. To signify this, I rearranged the kitten's fur pattern to spell out “Mascot, don’t kill me”. To protect this precious symbol of my dungeon I did... nothing. If anyone was heartless enough to kill such a sweet, innocent kitten I'd see how they handled several spikes to places-which-shall-not-be-named.
"Granite?"
"Yes Ryia?"
"Can you stop messing with kittens and actually make your dungeon?"
I gasped in outrage.
"Me!? Messing with kittens?! Certainly not. I'm... uh... researching new mob types?" I'll never know how Ryia manages to glare, considering she's just a floating orb of light, but she does it remarkably well. Grumbling, I got to work.