“I, am a genius!” Kazue sent to her husband and wife. She’d just figured out a solution to needing their zones better fleshed out with enough inhabitants to fill all roles. Over the past few weeks, it had been getting harder to spend enough mana that they didn’t feel bloated, as word had spread quite thoroughly now and they were getting groups of people from all over to challenge the combat path: tengu hunting parties, elven scouts, dwarven warriors, Kuiccihan soldiers, mercenaries, and more. Most groups that were not explicitly training newer people were managing to at least reach the library, and many were clearing it, as she and Mordecai were keeping everything at normal difficulty instead of trying to tune up to match stronger groups.
Fewer were clearing the mushroom forest, and so far no one who had tried to brute force their way through had made it, as that drew the ire of both war bands who were eager to practice their newest training now that the Trionean soldiers had completed their contract. And only a handful in the past couple of weeks had managed to clear the river. But all of this had still required carefully shuffling their bunkin and rabkin about as needed.
The non-combat path was somewhat less popular, but herbalists, druids, and alchemists were able to find rare ingredients there and often brought something new with them as well. Additionally, some groups were specifically bringing their kids with them in order to send them to meet Kazue’s challenges while the parents started knocking the rust off their own skills on the combat path. There were even a few knowledge seekers who were willing to work their way to the library in order to start doing research, and Kazue and Mordecai had agreed to a standard trade of one new-to-them work of writing in exchange for twice that amount of written material copied from the dungeon’s library.
All in all, they were becoming a rather busy dungeon now. This was why this solution was going to be useful, it also fulfilled Kazue’s need to make her path properly challenging. She mentally giggled to herself as she started assigning new roles. Genius was overstating it, but it had been fun to say.
“What are you doing love?” Came Mordecai’s query as his core focused on what she was doing. “Wait, are you sure you want to do that? And here I thought you were supposed to be the nice one.” His comment just made Kazue giggle more.
Moriko’s attention had been thoroughly grabbed by this conversation, “What is our wife up to now?” she asked Mordecai.
“Our wife has decided to take advantage of Little Li’s gift of faeries. She’s assigning them roles of quest givers, stagehands, shopkeeps, and so on. This is going to flesh out our numbers properly and ensure we have enough to cover everything simultaneously and make the zones properly difficult.” Mordecai was sounding very amused. “After all, would you rather try to negotiate prices with a reasonable bunkin, or would you rather try and explain what you want to a fairy, and try to keep them on track long enough to complete a conversation?”
“Oh, that is mean. And it seems that this Kazue agrees that it is a brilliant idea. I thought we married a nice, sweet little fox?”
Kazue pretended to ignore their banter and did her best to project an aloof, haughty air. This was not easy to do while trying to control her desire to laugh gleefully as she finished assigning faeries new roles, freeing up enough bunkin and rabkin that both the combat side and the challenges side were completely staffed in all zones.
“And done!” She said with satisfaction as she felt the subtle shift that meant she could begin work on their next zone. “Mordecai, any last-minute thoughts or changes?” She’d been itching to do this for a bit and did not want to wait any longer. Her husband had no objections, so Kazue began with changing how the river ended. She kept the lake but created a new river from the center of it. The rock formations dividing the lake stayed, and the new river grew out from the center of the lake, so delvers were going to be forced to land their boats to continue on. The river flowed into a new tunnel, with about twenty meters of land on each side to give people plenty of room to walk down. Then the tunnel eventually widened out into the start of their next zone.
As she created more of this next zone, Kazue grew the space internally even as she claimed more territory. The river slowly widened as it lengthened, growing shallower and eventually breaking off into several smaller rivers separated by soft earth, then spreading out even more until there was a large, wide expanse of terrain where the difference between ‘land’ and ‘water’ had become blurry. At the far end of the zone, the level of the land dropped enough to form a shallow lake. For now, she kept with a single exit. A quick examination told her that there was roughly five times as much internal space as had been claimed externally, a ratio that Mordecai said should continue to increase.
Back at the river, right before it started dividing into several smaller rivers and deltas, she created a bridge across it, making sure it was wide and broad enough to support several buildings and lots of people. This was going to be much like the previous town, a hub for mutual trade and for potentially switching paths, as well as the place to hire guides and helpers.
But it wasn’t time to build out the town more than that yet, it was time to give the place some life. This was going to be their marshy delta terrain, so the appropriate selection of plants and trees needed to grow. Their catalog had grown quite nicely, and it was fun to start using the plants that hadn’t been suitable elsewhere.
This was their only real wetlands area, so Kazue wanted to bring everything she could in. She decided to simply tier everything by how salty it liked its water, starting with fresh water near the river, and slowly making everything more brackish until they reached the now-salty ‘lake’ at the far end. Ecologically it was still a mess, plants that did not normally grow in the same area were now growing side by side, and they even had some plants that technically belonged in a tropical rainforest, but they could monitor and adjust things as they went.
Add in a thick layer of perpetual fog and mist, remove some of the glowing crystals that normally decorated the dungeon’s ceilings, and make some of the other crystals glow in various dim colors, and you have a very difficult terrain to navigate, and it was easy to lose your way too. Hmm. Maybe she could even… she was out of mana.
Stolen novel; please report.
What?
“I told you that levels start to get more expensive,” Mordecai commented.
“But, we had so much mana, I thought for sure we’d be able to finish the whole zone.” She wasn’t completely out, that was almost impossible as there was always more coming in, but she’d managed to deplete their stores of it, and Kazue hadn’t even finished designing the level itself, let alone start creating special challenges and features. Well, it looked like she’d have to wait. In the meantime they at least had a final challenge for the victors of the river zone to make their way through. Oh, insects, she had enough left to work in some normal biting insects and some basic small insects. The rest was going to have to wait.
“Well, I have something to show you that should distract you for a while.” That drew Kazue’s curiosity and she let her attention shift to where he wanted her to focus.
While Kazue had been building out their eighth zone, Mordecai had been paying attention to the patterns of the potential manaforms that had been building up. With an even-numbered zone, they should be able to claim another pair… there. Perfect, the one he’d been hoping for was settling into place next to her core. As for his own selection, he decided on the one that seemed most immediately useful to their situation.
When Kazue was out of enough mana to do significant work on the wetlands zone, he brought her attention to him. “Remember when I showed you how to see the individual nodes for our bosses? I need you to shift into that way of looking at things. Now, we are going to start filtering things out one by one.” He talked her through the process of isolating the energy patterns he wanted to show her. It was not at all unusual that she hadn’t noticed yet, there were so many different webs and patterns that their cores connected to that figuring out how to filter down to only this specific layer was something that took most dungeons a few years at the least. Instincts and natural development in response to actions did well enough until then.
Once she had the right layer as her focus, Mordecai began pointing out the specific patterns in question. “As a dungeon grows, it gains various abilities that are not gained by all dungeons. They are not really so much unique as just customized selections based on your nature. I mentioned theming when we first started working on the dungeon together. This node over here is where the pattern connects to your side, reducing the capacity burden for cute creatures as inhabitants, while I have a similar one for dragon-like creatures. This is the node that formed when you started making so many of our inhabitants fully sentient. And now I can show you why I have waited so long to teach you how to see these.”
He pointed out the newest node, the pattern still finalizing its attachment to her side of the core. “This one is special. I’ve only ever seen one dungeon with it before, so I knew it was possible, and it is a perfect fit for you. I don’t think I could be quite the right sort of person for it. Do you want me to tell you what it does, or do you want to figure it out?”
“Mmm, let me try.” She replied, and he pulled back to just watch her for a bit. He was a little amused that she ‘thought out loud’ for something like this the same way she often did physically. It was cute. “So, if this node ties to each of our inhabitants, and this is what lets us build shortcuts, then it looks like the new one ties to… our guests? But what is it doing? Hmm. It’s a boon of some sort or it would have to overcome instinctive resistance. That bit there looks like it’s trading off higher power for… frequency? So it can only be used so often, but it is always there? That doesn’t make sense, wait, yes it does, if it’s a contingency.”
She’d taken to lessons about spell craft quite readily, and her analysis of the node showed how well she’d correlated that to the dungeon’s special type of magic. There was a pulse of pleasure and surprise from her as she figured it out. “I have it! It keeps people from dying! Well, somewhere between that and instant resurrection. But there’s a restriction, looks like it creates feedback that makes it unable to trigger on a person very often. Looks like once a year?”
Mordecai was quite pleased with her analysis. “Correct. It also will teleport the person to a safe area, though we have some flexibility on exactly where that is.” it also put the person and their gear into the dungeon’s control for a moment, letting them extract material penalties if they chose, depending on the circumstance, “And if you want to focus on this ability, additional nodes can enhance it to be available more often, but at the cost of new abilities. I think it can eventually be reduced down to once a day. But that is for the future. For now, however, I think we should not advertise it. I don’t want to encourage too much recklessness. But it is a nice safeguard.”
Kazue fell silent a moment, and he waited until she finished thinking and asked, “How do you know about this ability already, and why did you need to keep these a secret?”
“I had a friend once who had this ability. He was a very nice person, whom I would have loved to be able to introduce you to. Unfortunately, something happened to him. I don’t know the full story, but from what I gathered from one of his inhabitants who managed to flee when the body of the dungeon started to collapse after the death of the core, I think he was tricked into trusting the wrong person.” The memory was painful, but not the worst of what he had to bear. “There are some people who have trouble seeing anyone not like them as real people. I don’t know if it was hate, fear, or greed that motivated them, for dungeon cores can be as valuable as dragon scales and the like to the right person. And I didn’t have the same level of resources as I would centuries later and it wasn’t an attack on me, so I couldn’t use the same tricks to gather the forces I needed to find out.” He sighed mentally, then moved on to her other question.
“As for why I held back, I was worried that knowing this power was available would have you thinking about it too much. I wanted to keep your sincerity ‘naive’, for lack of a better word. I wanted to make sure it came to you instead of you chasing it. I think for this particular ability, chasing it would have been counterproductive. If I had shown you how to see the nodes, and how to see the potential ones forming, there would have been no way to hide this specific ability forming. And I very much wanted you to be able to have this, I think it would have hurt you very badly if someone had been accidentally killed in a fight or challenge.”
Kazue gave it thought for a little while before she responded. “Yeah, that was a good reason. I’m glad I didn’t push for what you were hiding. Thank you Love, you’re really thoughtful about things like this. And I am sorry about your friend.”
Moriko’s voice joined them now. “I’m sorry about your friend as well. And I think that this was a wonderful gift for Kazue. Her avatar is ecstatic at the news.”
The warmth of their feelings was a sweet soft joy to him, and Mordecai allowed himself the time to just enjoy it for a little while before turning his attention back to the rest of the dungeon.