Salem was feeling quite chipper, as much as he could be without human biology, at least. The future seemed much brighter now that people were visiting him daily! Granted, they didn't know they were visiting Salem Cooper, but they were visiting all the same, and that was all that really mattered to him. For as much as he loved his own creations, nothing could relate to having actual humans around. He didn't even care why they came or what they wanted from or for him, just that they came and stayed. Even the Laponte Clan were welcome. They were still odd and somewhat disturbing, even as a living cave system, but the occultists were growing on him. The men came after midnight on most nights to sacrifice chickens to him, cutting off their heads and throwing the still-twitching bodies into the entrance fissure for his wolves to eat, and the women liked to adorn the statue of Samiah with flowers while quietly praying to her. He was beginning to understand why Gods demanded sacrifices and adoration – both were incredible sources of power. Each chicken willingly given granted him an order magnitude more energy than the deaths of other similarly sized animals, and the worship raised his passive power gain measurably.

But more than all that, he was just glad for the company. He'd been in a rough way emotionally after his first night as a dungeon. Watching that man crawl away after losing two dogs in an attempt to rescue him had sent Salem into bit of a spiral. He didn't want to terrorize Dudlin – his family and most of his friends lived here – nor did he want Samiah's statue to sit at the entrance to some wretched and accursed hole in the ground. At least his would-be-rescuer managed to kill one of his tunnel wolves and gained some Experience out of the mess; that made him feel marginally better about killing his dogs. Salem wasn't sure what it actually meant to gain Experience or what it was exactly, but hopefully, it could make a difference in the man’s life.

That hope and desire had been what he’d latched onto in the aftermath. Salem was powered by capital-C Change, and while chaos and havoc accomplished that goal, he didn’t have to represent negative change. He could at least try to make a positive difference in the world.

Salem wanted to be the kind of dungeon that people could build a civilization around. It was an ambitious goal. People had fled from places like Dudlin because of the danger, for the danger, or what it promised, to suddenly become the draw to bring them back was a tall order.

As super-tech made it easier to support and build megacities, Americans had, over the course of decades, slowly abandoned the countryside for major population centers. The consequences formed a negative feedback loop. Fewer people meant fewer supers and fewer resources to manage the various threats that inevitably congregated on the outskirts of society. More threats meant more people fled to better-protected cities, and on and on until you had a nearly perpetual state of emergency across wide expanses of the rural United States.

Ottoman agricultural tech and good old American superplastics had killed this once-prosperous town. Every farm left abandoned created more once-tamed wilderness on which problems could fester. Penn State had shut down its research stations and observatory in Dudlin due to the risk, and the lumber industry across the world had been in a slow collapse for decades. If nothing changed, there would be yet another ghost town dotting the mountains of Appalachia.

He could fix all of that. Dudlin, Pennsylvania needed a reason to exist into the twenty-first century, and he would be that reason. Salem would create new resources and drive a gold rush, one both literal and figurative. There would be gold, yes, and other precious minerals – they were cheaper to add than much of what he'd already done – but they would pale in comparison to what his imagination could make. For the first time in his life, he had a real vision for what his future as an artist looked like. He would turn himself into an entire ecosystem, ripe for plundering and eternally explorable, filled with never-before-seen wonders, strange alloys and organisms, and monsters packed full of more than simple Experience.

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Salem had left the cave entrance he'd made during the tutorial untouched. Its aesthetics were broad enough to work with whatever he came up with in the future, and more importantly, he could sense that myths were beginning to pop up around the eyes and the statue of Samiah. He couldn't intuit them, the rumors appearing like fuzzy, vibrating clouds that hung around the objects to his perspective, but many visitors had been kind enough to speculate aloud. It was 'bad luck' to touch Samiah and her gold, and the carvings were a warning that ancient entities watched over the cave. He found both myths charming, and they generated a little energy each time they proliferated, so Salem had decided to keep the entry.

Beyond that, though, things were completely different. Past the fissure at the back of the entrance was a Room of Respite. There were only two ways in or out of the room, both of which would be easy to seal with a bit of ingenuity, and in that relative safety, Salem had placed a pool of crystal clear, potable water, and ringed it with smooth, stone sleeping nooks. Above, for natural lighting, were curtains of glowing, poisonous silk strands hanging from the backs of glowworms. These insects were of his own creation and harmless to mammals, but deeper within himself, he had placed their much larger, much deadlier cousins with webs capable of ensnaring humans and clogging machinery. The ones here served as ambiance and as contrast for those so that a man, upon his return from the deep, could look up and shiver at their memory.

Past the Room of Respite was a worked hallway that opened into a natural, one-hundred-foot-deep pit with thin rough-hewn stairs carved in a spiral around its sides. At the bottom of this treacherous climb was his masterpiece, a massive cavern that sloped unevenly into the flooded depths a football field away. Beyond those lay only his Heart Room for now, the cavern and its ecosystem having exhausted his energy and focus.

At the core of the great cavern was the interplay between two weak Lures. In one of the hot springs that crowded the entrance, he had placed a very mild Source of extradimensional energy, a connection to an ephemeral dimension rich with Life Magic, and set the springs to bubble forth irregularly. Every few hours or so, the water would churn and spill out over the edge, trickling down the stepped natural terraces until it soaked the section of the cavern that was like a swampy forest. The soil for the plants came from the sporadic gashes and holes in the ceiling far above, and was fertilized by his second Lure, the enriched guano of his Source Bats, which nested among the thousands of stalactites. The small magical creatures were his gift to the mountains around him; they fed on almost exclusively invasive species of fungi, insects, and plants, and converted them within their digestive systems into a potent Source of Earth Magic. With time, as they grew in enough number to spread beyond his caverns, they would return the ragged woods of Appalachia to mighty, dense forests.

It was atypical dungeon design, he knew, to focus on a single massive chamber, but Salem thought he'd knocked it out of the park. By soaking the room with the ultimate magical fertilizer and Life-touched water, the energy cost for all sorts of in-theme monsters and living Lures had fallen precipitously. As long as something could plausibly exist within what was already there, it was easier to create, and with every organism he added, his understanding of their regulatory feedback loops expanded, giving him more ideas. The source bats had a symbiotic relationship with the giant glowworms; they spared their eggs and larvae, and the adult glowworms protected their roosts from tunnel wolves while they slept. The glowworms also ringed the holes in the ceiling, helping keep external Pennsylvania insects out and the bizarre and incredible breeds he was making in. And below, within the wetlands of the cavern, plants rich with Earth and Life Magic fed solar bees, which processed the pollen into glowing, golden honey. Their hives, in turn, nurtured said plants with their light, giving rise to more magical vegetation – and so on.

Yes, the cavern was coming together nicely, and once he had people coming in and out and taking his bounties into their world, there would be energy in spare to take it to the next level. All of the hot springs would be tied into Sources of Magic, the plants that processed the water and guano would be improved, and every niche that could exist in this ecosystem would be filled with awesome and bizarre creatures. Fortunes would be made within this grand chamber, lives changed for the better.

Unfortunately, his tunnel wolves had thus far kept people from pushing deeper, either out of fear or, in Ginny's singular case, because she'd been too excited by her kill to keep going. Charles Laponte had commanded one of his youngest to wriggle through the fissure, and the boy had made it to the cavern, but the Clan was notoriously reclusive. Salem doubted they'd told a soul what they'd seen. It was reasonable, he supposed, the animal sacrifices they performed for him regularly were extremely illegal, but still, he was dying to see some real action. He just had to take it on faith for now that his efforts weren’t in vain, and that somewhere out there, real adventurers were on their way.