The first step in making a floor would be the mobs. Sure, I had some oversized cats, but there is a difference between a mere beast and the refined perfection that is a mob. Or at least that's what Ryia said, I got the feeling she wasn't as enthused with the cat theme as I was. And so here I was, staring at an empty room with little idea of what to do next.

“Any ideas?” I asked.

“This is the first room of the first floor. Make it something simple.”

Ok…

I looked over the Ocelot blueprint. I could just manifest a hundred unmodified cats, but there were several problems with that. Firstly, normal cats didn’t attack heavily armed and highly trained Adventurers. Secondly, even if they did attack an Adventurer, they were… cats, and all Adventurers were cultivators of at least D rank.

All that to say any Adventurers I met would either be slightly stronger than average or capable of destroying the surrounding five miles of real estate. While Ryia claimed the Adventurer Society wouldn’t send high rankers to a new dungeon, the World Core had included Murphy’s Law in my sentience package for a reason.

So yeah, cats weren’t going to cut it.

But crazy berserker cats…?

I added strengthening and force enhancement runes to the blueprint, which took care of the lethality problem. But how do you make a normally terrified cat attack everything that moves? It’s not like I could change their brain structure to always be angry and hyper aggressive. That would be unethical. I think.

“Ryia, what’s your stance on genetic modification?”

“I just spent the past few days watching you manifest bugs so they could die a slow death because you botched something up.”

“So… is that a yes?” She snorted.

“Knock yourself out, just make sure to clean up your mess.”

And with that hearty endorsement from my only ethical standard, I set to work.

I manifested a normal, unaltered Ocelot and started messing with it. The next few hours were the most gruesome I had ever experienced. And the most hilarious. Turns out that if you tweak a particular part of a kitten's brain, it stumbles around like it’s drunk while screeching like someone dunked it in water. Seriously, you should try randomly fiddling around with someone's brain sometime, just for laughs.

I had two cats randomly stumbling around, occasionally falling stone dead only to revive a second later as I undid the damage, when I finally found the answer. Turns out that if you ever so carefully cut the front part of a cat’s brain in just the right way, they become unstable. I knew when I succeeded as the damaged cat lunged at its companion, creating a whirling ball of claws and fur.

I unmanifested the two, adding the brain damage to the Ocelot’s blueprint. Combined with the enhancements I’d added to the blueprint earlier, I now had a berserker cat that would try to kill anything that moved. Including other cats. Fortunately for me, I could recycle the mana of dead mobs without loss.

The first room was an open space about twenty paces long, a single exit set into the far wall. There were about fifty cats in the space at any given moment, all caught up in a screaming melee, blood, guts, and bodies constantly being unmanifested. To add an element of fairness to the room, I healed a cat after it had killed one of its companions. Who knows, maybe someday a survivor of the bloody combat will catch my eye, being promoted deeper into the dungeon… nah, what were the odds of that?

The second room was set up a lot like the first. Same wide-open space, same archway set into the far wall. The only difference was the mobs. I had enhanced half a dozen kittens with bone enchantments, but their fur also spelled out runes, boosting the kittens further. They lacked the brain damage of their berserker counterparts, making them act like normal kittens. The trap was the Mascot Kitten mixed in with the others. If an ENAD thought they could just slaughter their way through the room and move on, well, spikes to those places mentioned earlier.

What was the difference between the enhanced kittens, whose fate was to die, and my Mascot Kitten, protected by the dungeon itself? The mascot kitten was obviously cuter. If you asked me, anything that could make a sound loud enough to make a few Adventurers have an accident was the elite of its species.

In the third room, I placed a single bronze chest. Once the lid was opened it would trigger the rune spike trap I’d set up earlier. Only after the trap was triggered would the door to the first room, disguised as a wall, open. There was, however, going to be genuine loot held in the chest. There were multiple reasons for not leaving some snarky message on the bottom of the chest and laughing in maniac glee as the Adventurers screamed to the heavens. Firstly, as… interesting as that might be, I didn’t want to be known as a dungeon who set up those kinds of traps. In my dungeon, if you saw a chest, it held loot. Opening the chest might kill you, but still. Secondly, if a person had made it this far they had earned some sort of reward. Probably.

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As a person opened a chest, assuming they survived whatever traps I set up, I’d manifest their loot directly. The value of each item would vary based on the chest’s color, going from bronze to platinum. Yes, I actually had platinum. While the stuff was stupid rare, my knowledge of everything in my domain extended to finding microscopic particles of the stuff. While I could just place static loot like gold nuggets or some such, I wanted to individually acknowledge the effort an ENAD had made in making it to one of my chests.

Or mock them on an individualized level, there always was that.

For the final room I went all out. Taking inspiration from a certain adorably loud kitten, I added force enhancement runes along the cat’s teeth, but cranked up to eleven. Seriously, I was a little worried about the cat’s structural integrity. This could have serious long-term effects on the cat’s body, leading to complications that would crop up in the cat’s later years. If that cat managed to live that long I’d… actually I don’t know what I’d do.

“Ryia, what do ENAD’s do when they get old?”

“The young people stick the old people into big houses with other old people and wait until they die so they can get their inheritance.”

“Hardy har har. For real, what do they do?”

“I’m not kidding.”

ENADs are messed up.

I added several sharpening runes to the PantherCat’s claws and teeth, but even so that cat was missing… something. This was the end boss of my first floor, but while it might individually be stronger than any other mob, the room’s difficulty didn’t match up to the rest of the floor. I tossed about for some engraving that would help but came up blank. Ryia knew the force projection rune along with the strengthening, sharpening, and growth enchantments.

Growth…

What was that Ryia had muttered earlier as she watched the cat melee?

“So much for nine lives.”

We’ll just see about that.

Several hours later I was looking over my pride and joy, the deadliest single mob I’d made so far. I was about to tell my mental, invisible, and most likely non-existent audience what I’d done, but I was interrupted as several ENADs entered my senses.

Adventurers had come.

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Barus, a six-foot-tall black man whose body rippled with muscle, examined the archway with interest. It was a big stone affair, simple but imposing spikes protruded from the edges, so sharp Barus couldn’t see their tip even with his mana enhanced vision. The air inside of the archway was heavily distorted, obscuring everything on the other side. All Barus could make out were many small forms, vaguely illuminated by a greenish light.

The old elder that had welcomed them last night had a meal of pork roasted over a fire ready by the time they awoke. After they had eaten and prepared, he led them to a small hill and pointed out the archway, standing alone in the middle of the jungle. Barus’s sharp eyesight had easily picked out the entrance to what was almost certainly a dungeon once the man had pointed it out, and they had spent the rest of the morning trekking across the damnable forest in the direction they had spotted the entrance. While lower ranked Adventurers might have been lost in the dense jungle, the first thing Barus had done on reaching C rank was Converting his mind. While Converting from the torso outwards like the rest of his team might have been practical for combat, Barus specialized in trap detection and disarmament. Having a C ranker's senses and clarity of mind was worth the temporary weakness. Barus removed a small orb from the satchel at his side and tossed it through the archway, then turned to the rest of his team.

Two other people were with him in the assessment team. A tall, pale woman who didn’t have a speck of dirt on her despite their jungle surroundings was Amaris, their mage. She was dressed in practical brown robes and held no visible weapon, but Barus knew from experience that the woman was far more dangerous than a squad of non-cultivators. A short, stocky man with straight brown hair and piercing green eyes was Altair, their frontline fighter. While most tanks preferred a heavy shield, Altair was good enough with the twin swords strapped across his back to block anything. Even something that couldn’t be stopped by a non-cultivator like a torrent of flames could be stopped cold by the man’s mana abilities. Barus rounded out the group, serving as the team’s scout, non-magical-trap detector, assassin, and a dozen other roles.

“Ok, are we playing this one by the book or are you going to go off script again.” Barus teased. Last time they were assigned to do an assessment on a dungeon, Altair had torn through the fledgling dungeon without stopping to actually do the assessment part of an assessment team. He had claimed that any dungeon that couldn’t slow him down should just be rated as E and left at that. Their branch supervisor had other ideas.

“You're never going to let me live that one down, are you?” Altair grumbled.

“Nope,” Bular agreed in a cheery voice.

“Boys, boys, we have a job to do.” Amaris interjected before Altair could fire back a retort.

“Give it a second, you know the alchemists throw a fit if we go in too early.” Barus defended.

“What do you think that orb does anyway?” Altair asked.

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“THIS IS AN OFFICIAL DUNGEON ASSESSMENT PARTY. PREPARE FOR INSPECTION.

THIS IS AN OFFICIAL DUNGEON ASSESSMENT PARTY. PREPARE FOR INSPECTION.

THIS IS AN OFFICIAL DUNGEON ASSESSMENT PARTY. PREPARE FOR INSPECTION.”

The blaringly loud sound screamed through my consciousness, drowning out all thought. When the sound finally, FIANLLY ended, I understood what having your eardrums blown out must feel like. And I didn’t even have a body, let alone ears. When I could focus again, I found the source of the sound, the small orb an Adventurer had tossed. Strangely enough, it hadn’t emitted physical sound, but the same ManaSpeech Ryia and I used to communicate with each other. When I tried to infuse the object, I found another oddity. The orb contained a strange alignment of mana that actively refused to be infused, no matter how much of my power I brought to bear. I only had a few seconds to wonder at the curiosity before an ENAD, the first ENAD to enter my dungeon, crossed the threshold.