“Elias, System’s glitched again!” Thomas called out, but by the time the fairy showed up, he was laughing hysterically.

“What’s so funny?” Elias frowned.

“Oh, you wouldn’t understand, it’s … it’s an Earth thing,” Thomas told him.

It was ridiculous, but the current situation reminded him of a memory from his previous life.

Of sitting down at a desk with a computer while a friend fiddled with the router, trying to set up the internet, shouting “It’s still not working” for the millionth time.

And now, he was basically doing the exact same thing, but with regard to a supernatural force that granted superpowers.

New world, old problems.

The powers weren’t gone, thankfully, but having everything quantified made things quite a bit easier. Knowing how much a given substance cost, what kind of small structures could be found inside of his countless matter patterns that he could use and abuse.

For example, if he absorbed a chunk of coal, it was theoretically possible that some tiny part of it held carbon formed into an absolutely perfect lattice known as diamond, which he could then replicate into a fist-sized hunk of extremely expensive materials.

Of course, the museum had an entire room full of interesting minerals on the second floor, at whose end was a vault full of actual precious stones, diamonds included, but there were likely a lot of other interesting things that Thomas could find.

His current pride and joy, though, that he’d managed to gain enough information on even though looking into it had crashed the System half a dozen times already.

The potion he’d stolen from that asshat cultivator was a B-Rank epic healing potion.

According to Elias, gear and items were ranked from common to legendary within their respective Rank, with common referring to objects that were as mundane as they could possibly be within that rank, uncommon objects having been worked on in some way, and everything beyond that holding some manner of advanced magic.

For example, watering down a single drop of the healing potion with almost an entire liter dropped the quality down to common. Though considering how most of the people he dealt with were still F-Rank, it was still immensely useful.

There was also the even rarer “mythical” classification, which referred to powerful magical items that scaled with the user’s power in some way.

The main point was that he’d gotten his hands on a healing item so powerful that it might as well be a panacea to anyone he met. It was so expensive to make that he could barely afford to make it, mana wise, he even needed to fill the vial it came in in stages because his mana pool was too small, so using it as a regular loot drop was right out, but he could use it as a lure.

Make a vial or two, post about their existence at the door, and watch people do all sorts of stupid things to get them. He’d have to implement some kind of “minimum power for entry” to make sure desperate people didn’t get themselves killed en masse, but simply as a way to get soldiers of fortune and the like in the doors.

Honestly, Thomas wasn’t even entirely sure he’d feel about it when the first human died in the Dungeon. Fully human, that meant, after all, he’d killed at least one human-turned-monster before, probably two, maybe even more than that. And he’d made his peace with that.

In the end, he decided the best place to put the vial was the geology section. Putting the loot that drew in people right in front of his core was just asking for someone who’d just lost a teammate to smash him. The main path to his core was also a delveable Dungeon, but you could quit it at any time. The new section was all about getting to the end, getting the prize, or being forced to retreat with basically nothing.

But the geology section had a beautiful setup.

A tall, three-story hall with two layers of balconies running around the outside of the room, and an escalator that led to the second story from the dead center, straight through a spherical sculpture. He could decorate that, turn the non-functional escalator into real stairs, and make people work their way back down through the exhibit. Go clockwise along the balcony, fight your way through whatever he put up there, reach the ground floor … and then walk back the same way they’d gotten in.

Yeah, that part’d be annoying for the delvers, but Thomas was fine with that.

And he’d also make the top floor a water level, just to make diving through very difficult. Also, hopefully, in the delvers’ memories, the “stupid water level” would stick out more than the danger. The human brain could be funny like that, lending weight to certain things not based on their actual importance, but rather the emotions involved.

So hopefully, they’d blame the water for any failures, rather than the monsters, causing feelings of frustration rather than fear. Frustration could turn into stubbornness far more easily than fear, and he wanted to keep people coming back.

That part of the Dungeon was meant to be a trap for the greedy, not something to farm XP.

And locking the only vial of healing potion he’d produced so far behind strong defenses didn’t prevent him from gifting or trading any vials he made at a later date.

He also had a bunch of cheap, diluted crap that involved manifesting a single drop of potion above a bucket of water which would, according to the System, do at least some work. The effect would be minimal but it should still be valuable.

Heck, just sealing wounds that would heal on their own in a matter of days in an instant would be something that people with income to spare would be willing to pay for. Healing abilities existed, as evidenced by the orc who’d gone dungeon-delving with that cop, but they seemed to be rare. At least he hadn’t seen any in the monsters, though that might be more down to the source of his sample group than anything else.

After all, monster powers seemed to be shared across species, so there wasn’t an option for a herd to have a designated healer.

Anyway, point was, magical healing would be one hell of a draw, now he just needed to defend it … once he implemented something that had just occurred to him.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Something so heinous that some might argue killing people for power was the lesser evil by comparison. Lootboxes … sort of.

What was a lootbox, at the end of the day?

Someone did something to get a random piece of loot from a set list, with odds that were now required to be publicly available in many parts of the EU.

Now, Thomas might not have decided to create actual lootboxes, but he’d had a different idea.

Simply put, he’d post the loot tables for his monsters at the front gate. Most people would only see the common bits of loot, like scales and pelts, which might be useful in crafting and potentially valuable for other reasons, but nothing particularly earth-shaking.

However, he’d made quite a few nice bits of other stuff that was more expensive to manifest, mana-wise, so he didn’t drop them often. Familiar tokens, mostly, but also a large volume of magically-charged body parts or even diluted healing potions for the bosses.

The issue was that the cost didn’t hit Thomas when he set the loot table, but when the item was randomly summoned from the available list, so giving out the cool stuff overly much could result in a frustratingly high resource drain.

But also, while Thomas might not have been a psychology expert or the like, he knew people. Dangle a reward in front of them, one that could be claimed just by grinding, people would go for it. Some, at least.

By making it known what could be gained, he’d get at least some returning customers … if people actually came along.

The last week had been boring beyond belief. He was literally 99% of the way to D-Rank, having only gained 2% in the last seven days. Inspector Abrams had shown up briefly to tell him the cultivator had been arrested, and fought the entrance hall dinosaur, but then left again. Apparently, she’d gotten caught up in the bureaucracy of the formation of a new agency to deal with the supernatural mess which had engulfed the world.

And as for monsters, they were all in hiding. Which was weird.

Initially, he’d put it down to him having wiped out large chunks of the local population when they’d invaded en masse, but Elias said that that couldn’t possibly be the case.

Not to mention that any monsters Thomas sent to explore beyond the bounds of his Dungeon almost immediately felt uncomfortable, as though they were being pressured by some powerful presence.

Was there a big, bad, nasty creature out there after all? Why hadn’t it shown up?

Anyway, Thomas wasn’t bored because he had so many patterns to play with, but he was antsy as fuck. All it’d take was one minor invasion, and he’d grow to D-Rank and maybe even unlock something cool.

He might have been busy writing down the loot tables right now, but that didn’t stop him from seething with frustration at the current state of affairs.

But eventually, he was finished writing everything down and Elias flew away with them to post them to the front door, while Thomas decided to get himself some cute animal therapy.

One of the three pet velociraptors he had surrounding his core jumped onto the table he usually wrote on and let itself be petted by his avatar.

His most commonly used velocirator pattern was E-Rank, holding two powers. The first was Dungeon Avatar, which let him speak through them, while the second was shared by the jaguars he used for visitor crowd control.

During the brief instances where the System hadn’t been a glitchy mess, he’d seen this power was called “Inoffensive Existence”, and he wasn’t particularly unhappy with that definition.

Basically, it turned its bearers into living plush toys, adorable and almost unable to cause serious damage.

In other words, these velociraptors were cute as heck, barely larger than a chicken, with huge eyes, covered in colorful feathers that were soft like velvet, with any that didn’t stick up or otherwise drew the eye being basically goosedown.

They were perfect for communicating with delvers when a diplomatic approach was needed, and the associated familiar tokens were going to be extremely coveted when their existence got out.

After all, who didn’t want an adorable dinosaur as a pet?

But that was enough of the cute animal snuggles, Thomas had a Dungeon to build … once he’d listened to why Elias was acting as though someone had tried to flush him down the toilet.

“There’s a fucking dragon incoming!” the fairy mentally screamed, shooting through the museum’s corridors like a bottle rocket.

Ah, that’d explain it.

Normally, Thomas might have been annoyed at the interruption, but he’d been waiting for a new invader for so damn long.

He threw his mind upwards, into the body of one of his wyverns, which he immediately abused by using it like a CCTV camera. Magical creature, king of the skies, reduced to nothing more than a means to see invaders from afar.

And Elias had been right. It was a bloody dragon.

Granted, its shoulders only stood as high as a pony’s, and if you ignored the tail, it was only a meter at most longer than one, but it was still a dragon, wings and all.

The creature mostly was forest green, with the thin membranes of its wings a bright, pale, color while its scales were the darker color of pine needles. However, the beast’s twin, backward-facing horns, large weapons that jutted from its skull, were dark brown, almost black, as were its claws and the line of spikes that ran alongside its back.

But the most striking thing about it was its eyes. They burned with a venomous green light, promising pain and death, with pupils that were, for lack of a better word, darker than black, seemingly sucking in the light around it.

Venomous green, that was a funny term, wasn’t it? Everybody could picture the color, knew what it was, and yet, there was no real basis for it, no famous green liquid with toxic properties or anything of the like. Hell, there wasn’t even a proper green poisonous dart frog, since they preferred colors that made them stand out. The green ones were an incredibly pale, unnatural, shade of the color, and it only covered a small part of their body, the rest of it was patterned black. So why … focus, Thomas, you can muse on that nonsense later.

So, incoming dragon. The bugger could fly, and its wings were small enough that it should be able to get off the ground indoors.

What to make to counter it?

More giant sloths who could reach it with their long arms, another camarasaurus with its whip-tail, more jaguars in high places, sabertooth tigers to inject razor-sharp teeth … how about all of it?

Thomas’ supply of truly high-end creatures aside from his champions was somewhat small, but a swarm of slightly-less-than-high-end might do the trick.

Normally, he didn’t have the time to come up with a proper list of cool critters to summon, and then actually summon them, which was why he usually went straight for a whole bunch of powerful creatures that vaguely fit the bill.

But somehow, this time, he was able to keep calling creatures into existence until he slammed headlong into his command limit, and the dragon was still nowhere near the entrance.

Was it actually coming in, or just posturing?

The dragon kept padding forward, projecting a level of cocksure confidence only found in hilariously overpowered anime characters, or smug villains one loved to see get punched in the face. It seemed to think that there was nothing that could hurt it, nothing at all.

Admittedly, as it closed, Thomas’ senses told him that it was D-Rank, but only barely. Sure, it had an extra power, but the real gain from hitting a new Rank was that power, physical enhancements came as one progressed within a Rank. Hell, this thing would probably be easier to kill than that fucking cultivator, since it was highly unlikely that it’d have a massive number of magical healing cheat codes on its person.

And then, a mere meter before the door, before it would have entered his domain, the dragon stopped, spreading its wings wide, and with a single flap, pulled itself up onto its hindlegs.

Holy fuck, that was impressive. Or rather, Thomas felt it had been impressive, until it blew emerald green flame into his domain, a mere graze setting fire to one of the big wooden doors.

Somehow, after that, merely standing on its hind legs didn’t seem particularly impressive.

“Greetings, Dungeon. Do I have your attention? You may not have reached the Rank required for true thought, but if you do not understand the concept of power, you are not long for this world.”

The dragon’s voice was smooth, aristocratic, and somehow, without an accent and simultaneously holding every accent even remotely related to leadership or royalty. That thing could talk?

“I represent her imperial majesty, Empress Alaxia Mystscale, true ruler of the Jungle of the Verdant Hells, returned from her slumber. And you will submit to her rule, or face destruction. What is your choice?”

Well, that didn’t sound good.

And what the actual hell did that mean?