Of the other two criteria I had laid out from Alysia, only one of them was of particular importance. Once I had created a dungeon, I could rearrange the walls and create a more defensive formation. There might be a brief time of vulnerability, but if an area I was taking already belonged to the boss I was taming, there was no reason I would expect a sudden and swift attack from another boss. Until I started to breach another boss’s territory, it would just be business as usual for the Deep.

That said, the most important thing was mana, and the way I wanted to obtain that mana was by the discovery of a mana spring. That river I had nearly fallen in when I had first arrived here would be a primordial version of what I had in mind. Since then, I had traveled much lower into the Deep, and I was hoping I’d be able to find a richer mana spring running through a boss territory. That would be the ideal place to set up my dungeon. The spring would bring fresh mana into my dungeon, allowing it to grow quickly.

Normally, once a dungeon was created, it’d take ten years to stabilize the first ten floors. Although not every dungeon fit the motif of having floors, the concept was still basically ingrained into every physical dungeon. The dungeon grew about one floor a year. A twenty-year dungeon was twenty floors. A thirty-year dungeon was thirty floors. There were naturally innumerable exceptions, but I liked to see them as the exceptions that proved the rule. Examples such as Matty who had been remaining lowkey by stifling his growth or Gram who had extended a single level into a massive passageway existed everywhere.

For my dungeon, I had cheated by using a fairy spring. If I ignored all of the times that my dungeon was destroyed or damaged, it could be considered only a few months. Yet, despite being such a young dungeon, it probably was the size of a 30-floor dungeon. I didn’t know how many floors it had exactly at the moment. As the dungeon master, I should probably do a better job. I had mostly just left things to Astria and Elaya to play with. As two former dungeon masters, they seemed to know best.

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I did know it was growing very quickly though thanks to the god spring and Elaya’s tinkering which had increased its efficiency. A dungeon was typically a double-edged sword. The dungeon could give someone enormous power, but the miasma inside it would eventually corrupt and damage the person, causing them to lose their minds. This is why every dungeon wasn’t necessarily designed a cleverly as mine. Astria and Elaya were both crazed when they were dungeon masters, and it wasn’t until they were freed that they began to think more logically. At least, that’s how I saw it.

I was curious about the so-called Dungeon Council. Was there some technique dungeon masters used to keep their sanity, or were they all insane? Then again, I’m sure some would suggest I was insane, so maybe I shouldn’t think about it so much in terms of crazy and lucid. As long as my decisions were smart, I’d continue successfully.

What did this all mean?

In the Deep, I had less than a month to build a dungeon large enough to map out the Deep and reveal where the dwarves had perished, and more importantly, to find Terra and Garnet. If they were somehow dead, and their souls were broken up and scattered in the wind, then I would take over the entire Deep, and suck every last remaining piece of lore belonging to them. The Deep would become a sacrifice designed to resurrect those that it dared to take from me!

Ah… maybe being a dungeon master was getting to me a little. I would reflect on it after recovering Terra and Garnet.