The next morning, Five actually woke up before Harriet could come into his room. After almost a whole week, his body already adapted to this schedule and his biological clock would wake him up just before Harriet arrived.
"You are already awake? What a surprise! Are you stressed about the changes you've made?" asked Harriet.
Upon hearing her, Five quickly opened the interface of the Pseudo-Dungeon Core. As he scheduled it, all the changes he wanted were implemented during the night. All the floors were completely different, and some players could already be seen exploring the first floor.
Harriet immediately tensed upon seeing the DP left. Only a thousand was left and considering how much it decreased by yesterday, it would probably reach 0 today if the changes were not successful.
"Don't worry, Five. I am sure that the changes are great!" said Harriet trying to cheer Five up.
But the latter did not mind it. He was not even concerned about the amount of DP since he did not plan to stay here another night. Before going to sleep last night, he made some final predictions on what could happen and bought a few more items with his own DP.
After a quick breakfast, Harriet brought Five to Kroff for his daily lesson.
"Today, since your modifications have been made, let's check out the result!" said Kroff as he projected the hologram of the floors.
“Players are just starting to come but look here on the third floor, you can see that…”
...
A few hours later, the lesson was over. It mainly consisted of Kroff criticising the modifications but still, he did not give any constructive advice in doing so. But Five just silently nodded whenever Kroff spoke. All he did was observe the players' reaction. Although he was 80% confident in his own plan, there were still some variables.
To begin with, just the fact that he chose to write in Chinese was a gamble, he had no way of confirming that the players actually understood the language. Furthermore, they might understand Mandarin, but what if his message was not clear enough? Besides, he also did not know if the players would be smart enough to look at the map when they would receive it!
In one of the previous lessons, he already learned from Kroff that whenever he would make some massive changes like he did, the guards would often send a group of explorers to plot a map of the floors. Five naturally predicted that the same thing would happen when he would change the floors and since it was in a game, he guessed that it would probably come in the form of a quest to the players.
He did not know the specific details, but he could already see some players running across the different floors as fast as possible. They were even avoiding the annoying monsters and were going in each corridor, even going all the way to some dead ends.
"Come on, let's go for lunch," said Harriet while lightly nudging Five.
The latter quickly nodded and both left Kroff's room to the Avian Cavern. This time, he specifically asked Harriet to eat at the Harpy's village instead of the Communal Room and the latter did not mind. She was instead thrilled since she would get to play more Checkers with her sisters.
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The game became extremely popular among the harpies but that was probably temporary. Once they would play it enough, they would get bored of it.
...
Five was calmly sitting next to Harriet who was playing against her sister, Aria. He was occasionally helping the latter and hinting at the correct move to make but most of his attention was currently focused on the hologram of the Pseudo-Dungeon Core.
He saw that the player's behavior had already changed. Compared to this morning, the players were clearly trying to completely explore the higher floors. But the task was more difficult; even if Five modified the spawn points of the monsters to allow the players to travel more easily, he could not control how the monsters would move.
It was clear that the group of players exploring was different from yesterday. He did not recognize any of the faces, but he could see that these players had a different atmosphere. More importantly, he could see that the guild badge was different.
Above their head and right next to their name, players would usually have their level displayed followed by a guild badge if they belonged to one. For now, the players did not yet have the option to hide their badges.
"It looks like they already have all the maps for the 7th floor and lower... But they do not seem to have noticed anything with the map... Are they waiting to get them all before actually reading them?" said Five to himself.
He was starting to feel nervous. It had only been half a day but still, he was flustered at how slow the players were actually moving.
“Is it going to fail?”
...
On the 8th floor, a player quickly approached his leader to report.
"Sir, we have obtained the map for the 8th floor. We can move to the 9th now!" said the player.
"Good, let's hurry up before the other guilds come. We have a good lead now, hurry up."
"Yes sir," answered the player as he quickly bowed and went back to join his party.
As he left, another player with the name: Shining Blade approached the leader of the guild. "I told you, right? The game is quite flexible, we can just send different parties at different locations on the floor and then combine the part of the map they generated to form the final map," said Shining Blade.
The leader, who was a tall and muscular man looked at Shining Blade with piercing eyes. "Don't get too cocky. It's true that this method saves some time but it's mainly our coordination that is able to produce such results," said the man with a dry voice.
"Sure sure, I'll just go and explore the tenth floor," Shining Blade bit his lips and left quickly. If he stayed any longer, he might swear at his leader. "That F*** old fart, I proposed such a good idea but it looks like he will take all the credit for that... F***".
He walked towards the stairs to go to the 9th floor. Behind him, a group of players silently followed. Along the way, he came across several players who would all smile and salute him but he himself remained expressionless. "How can I make that old fart acknowledge me?"
Shining Blade was actually the official guild leader of one of the 3 strongest guilds of Algate City: the Stone Defenders. However, even if he was the founder and the leader in name, he had limited authority. The real leader behind the scene was his father, the man he just talked to.
As he walked towards the other stairs to go to the tenth floor, he decided to take out the maps in his possession to have a look at the current progress. He now had the map of the first 8 floors in his possession.
These were automatically generated as the player would explore the dungeon but, in his case, he obtained the maps by combining several bits from other players. The maps were in the form of a scroll.
After one week of playing the game, the players quickly realized that there were a lot of tricks and loopholes they could exploit. These were voluntarily placed into the game to allow the crafty and ingenious players to triumph over the rest.
When Shining Blade saw the quest, the idea of having different players explore different parts of the dungeon and then combine them together, crossed his mind. And as it turned out, it was successful!
He simply opened one in front of him to have a look. Since the very beginning, he felt that something was wrong with these floors. Compared to yesterday, the change was so drastic and did not necessarily make sense.
Now instead of having two stairs to choose from, they only had one if they wanted to change floors. Also, he noticed that there were fewer monsters than last time.
He looked at the first map with indifference; he sneered at the weird arranged of the walls and tunnel. He quickly closed in a put it back in his inventory before looking at the second one.
Shining Blade was about to close the scroll when he suddenly noticed something and stopped his moving hands. He quickly stopped walking and placed the map flat on the ground to have a better look. A few seconds later, he quickly took out the rest of the map quickly and placed them next to each other.
The silent players who were following him looked at him with curious expressions. But the latter simply ignored them and looked at all the maps. His eyes shone as he snapped his fingers, "Is this..."
He quickly separated the first 3 maps from the others and carefully looked at them. "Is this a coincidence?" said Shining Blade to himself.
After a few seconds of reflexion under the curious looks of the players, he looked at them and said: "Gather some players, I would like to go and check the 4th floor..."