Rather than spend half a day traveling out there, I pulled out a map and asked him where the boss was located. This was an intricate map that I drew myself based on my mapping of the dungeon. My Cartographer job had increased again as I made sure to distribute this map to all of my army leaders who actually could understand maps. The most interesting skill I had unlocked was Geometry. It allowed me to more easily calculate things like trajectories. I realized that I’d probably be pretty good at aiming a catapult or a trebuchet now.

I had nearly 90% of the map completed. Technically, it was all finished when it came to copying from other maps, but I had personally viewed 90% of the dungeon by using my bandits as proxies and portaling around. The 10% I was missing was the area around the demon castle.

Portaling was exactly what I was planning to do once this bandit pointed out where this boss was on the map. It turned out they were located around a large lake. I had tried to grasp how levels worked in this dungeon, and it seemed that there were concentric rings, with the ones on the outside perimeter showing weaker enemies, with them growing in strength as we moved toward the epicenter. That epicenter would be the demon lord’s castle.

The rings weren’t perfectly round, and resembled more like the trunk of a tree, with divots and depressions. There were only twenty rings in all. I had a theory that this dungeon once had a lot more rings, but since it was cut off from the mana of the other world, the dungeon had been sacrificing rings to keep itself going, like a shrinking bubble of space. I had no proof of this, and perhaps Xin was the only one who could confirm if this was reality.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

For all I knew, dungeons evolved, and once a mega-dungeon grew deep enough, it changed into a ringworld like this instead, losing most of its levels as it converted into rings. Once again, I spent too much time thinking about the nature of dungeons. Since I was a Dungeon Master, it only made sense though. The game had always been called My Dungeon Life, so I felt that unlocking the true nature of dungeons was likely the name of the game.

At that moment, I needed to focus on the dungeon boss. The bandits were located around the 13th ring of the dungeon. Banding together, and with a giant or two as help, they were about to make incursions as far as the 5th level. I called the 5th level the dead zone, as I had not managed to get anyone, even spies closer to the demon castle than that.

As for the monster they located, it was on the 10th ring. It looked like this world did hold by rules similar to the previous dungeons. That meant that there must be some kind of free-roaming miniboss on the 5th ring that made getting closer impossible. The reason we hadn’t encountered the 10th ring boss yet was that they were actually on the opposite side of the world from us. If I tried to ride there, it’d take at least a week.

However, at this point, those loyal to me were all over the map. I hadn’t just united all of the bandits and subdued them, but various pockets of monsters as well. My dots were spread across the map like a growing flood, slowly conquering the dungeon piece by piece. Once I had a dungeon boss at my command, that power would grow exponentially, or so I hoped.

I selected a bandit who was near the area this man indicated, created a Portal, and then headed toward my first dungeon boss.