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==Caden==

Like almost every skill I had received, the description on this one was vague and simple. Just like most of them, the actual functionality was complex, useful, and extremely powerful. That was good. I had been hoping that it would be worth its, originally, 4000 AP price tag. I was lucky enough that Learning had discounted that heavily.

Even if I had never bought a skill, the ability to learn skills faster would still have proven invaluable. By now, however, Learning had paid for itself many times over. I had to assume that it was something that everyone ended up getting.

Now I was busily disconnecting contiguous areas that no longer needed to be contiguous. That would save me some space, for sure, but I wasn’t sure how much just yet.

Areas where my aura converted to dungeon continued to expand, however, and those were not always in the most convenient location. Those areas should be usable for at least something now. And I was going to need to make some major changes.

That, though, depended on a major decision.

How did I want to deal with adventurers?

Sure, I wanted to avoid death when I could, and being able to teleport adventurers out of a lethal situation should help with that, but I had made the assumption that I would only be dealing with a small amount of people.

I had let myself assume that this was like the stories I had read. At most, in those there might be hundreds of adventurers delving a dungeon at a time. Even then, the line between the dungeon and home was very clear. The people coming challenged that.

I had built two relatively large buildings, enough to hold dozens of adventurers, but that was not going to be even close to enough.

Maybe people could just build some towns outside my borders, then they could make the trek inside for the day. Hell, it wouldn’t even be hard for me to build some form of mass transit. I could make a rotating gear to power some trolleys. The tunnel was more than wide enough to have a path for each direction. Add in some puzzle commands and I could make the trolleys stop and start according to a schedule or with simple rules. And maybe I would do that anyway; I could even add a bathroom to the trolley.

There would still be enough room for people with animals to go up and down the sides.

Not that I even needed to bother with that. I could add in teleportation there, too.

However, it looked like some people were already planning to live inside. Thousands of them. And I knew that the Adar were not exactly human. Hell, based off what I knew about them, it looked like they were born inside dungeons. They had some form of special connection, and maybe that meant that they were more comfortable with this.

I was a dungeon, however... I was also human.

And… when I was first combined with Exsan, I was told by the system that I was the first of my kind. That meant what I decided to do would influence anyone who came after me. What if I became more than a dungeon? What if I could become a city, a home?

I didn’t know what was going on with the world outside, but I would eventually. However, there was a black hole overhead, and the people who came in were wearing hand sown clothing. Maybe, between magic and the system, things were better than just a medieval society, but I had my doubts. If nothing else, maybe I could offer a good place to live.

I didn’t really know more than that, but I didn’t need to, yet.

Of course, I didn’t really have enough room prepared to make a city, or even something of the right size for the encampment that looked imminent. I wasn’t particularly thrilled about the Starlight Grotto being used like that, but I could deal with it for a little while. Originally I had envisioned something more like a park, with me adding a collection of buildings as new adventurers showed up, gradually building up a beautifully manicured garden filled with secluded homes.

I wasn’t sure what I would ultimately do with it now, but I had other things to focus on.

Shards got busy making sure the basics were taken care of. The fountains got new rules to teleport in additional water as necessary, since they were likely to be used as dedicated water sources now. I would need to figure out a way to deal with the trash and bathrooms, but I would need to see how they structured things first.

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The dungeon should be able to offer them plenty of basic options for food, but I was really only offering fruit at the moment. That wasn’t exactly enough to live off.

However, I now had an enormous variety of plants to offer, and I had the non-monstrous versions of the meat animals that they had used for jerky. I probably had a lot more animals than that, but it was hard to tell for sure what they were used to eating, and what was or wasn’t poisonous. There was no label declaring that something was poison. It wouldn’t do me much good, even if there was. Humans already ate plenty of things that were poisonous to other animals, and the same was true in reverse.

So, I went with some basics.

It only took a few minutes to add some abandoned grain fields outside the entry level town area. The sections of grain might be patchy, but it shouldn’t be hard to harvest if someone knew what they were doing, plus they would magically replenish if left alone for a few minutes.

A few monsters would try to ambush anyone who got close to the plants, so I didn’t feel like I was giving it away too lightly. It was still a beginner area, so I didn’t add too much difficulty. I added in meat jerky, in small rough cloth bags, as a potential drop for monsters as well.

If I became a true metropolis, I might need to provide some place to actually farm, but that was only speculation. Honestly, I had no idea what I might need to add in. There were a couple of iron ore deposits that the dungeon explorers hadn’t even run into yet. I added a couple of copper too, on a whim, as well as some other metals in places deeper than the Meadow.

Teleportation would make everything flow much more smoothly, but it also required other changes to make proper use of the dungeon. First were various structural changes, since I would need to handle far more people. I combined that with teleportation, timers, and puzzle rules to ensure that there was at least a little bit of time between each party, and that each section was individually sectioned off.

With some hesitation, I started to disable the various direct connections that would allow entry into my dungeon, worried that the system would object. With teleportation rules already in place, however, it made no objections. Any attempt to disconnect the direct route to my core simply wouldn’t work if there wasn’t a teleportation rule in place, which didn’t surprise me.

I planned to really explore what I could do with teleportation later, but for now I was hyper-focused on taking care of the more immediate concerns. Fortunately, the limited changes I was using the teleportation system to solve integrated seamlessly into the puzzle rules I was already heavily familiar with.

Making sure that there were enough monsters was a slightly trickier task.

They generated using the same ambient mana system that was busily remaking all the dungeon walls. Since the ambient mana levels were rather low right now, if a party was waiting to enter the monsters were set to generate quickly using some of the mana from the mana crystals I had in storage. Otherwise, they would just generate a little slower, like usual.

Stone appeared out of the air as I repaired the ruined and unused towers of the keep, adding additional towers to form a larger ring bailey around the central portion of the keep. Additional subdivisions rose up from the ground, the stone forming wedge shapes where additional mini-bosses would confront people as they climbed down each tower.

Additional entrances to the sewers formed in various places around the town. Stone dissolved away, giving way to rushing water and labyrinthine tunnels. I carefully interwove the tunnels, not letting them meet each other. Each was ultimately almost the same, but the exact directions and turns of the tunnels were all different. The entrances to the sewers would teleport people into an available sewer either at random, or when a sewer was no longer being used.

There was only so much I could do about the pathways through the actual grasslands, but I could make things a little grander to hide some additional pathways.

The meadow grass shuddered as soil and rocks were created beneath the surface. The ground cracked under the stress; roots were soon exposed to the air, some sections of grass overturning beneath the growing mounds as the earth rose like an ocean swell. Birds, insects, and monsters fled from the shaking and cracking noise, only to find more of the same happening across large sections of the Meadows, as the view was obscured between various pathways. Strategic bushes and copses of trees hid what the hills couldn’t, as new pathways carved themselves between, and sometimes even into, the hills.

I altered the aqueduct, too. I shifted it to a more central position, so that it could obscure each half of the Meadow from the other. I lifted the aqueduct upwards, increasing the height to make it more prominent, extending up dozens of feet. It should occasionally be visible even from the paths furthest from it. Since I was using the aqueduct more to obscure now, I also repaired it into better condition, making the streams originate from a designed overflow that waterfalled down directly from the aqueduct instead.

I briefly considered changing the name, but it was still a meadow, even if the hilly sections were a little larger than before. I left it a meadow, but changed the ruined part of the name.

The Wandering Woods were practically designed to be messed with using teleportation already, since I had done exactly that using the portals before. Now I could do some fun randomization, but I would need to ensure that there were fewer parties moving through the woods than there were total paths, so a wrong path could activate properly.

Some of the other sections were a larger issue. I didn’t have room right next to the Dark Descent to replicate it, but its nature as long narrow sections made it fairly trivial to replicate into the newly transformed dungeon areas that would be accessed with teleportation, only meeting the core shaft when teleportation brought them back. It would feel seamless. Replicating the next section, the Abyssal Crossing would be a much greater challenge, since it was a large area, just like the Meadow, which made sense considering its connection to the Meadow.

Well… for the moment I could just leave it. Hopefully I would acquire enough territory to copy it plenty of times before that was an issue. The adventurers hadn’t even got to the Wandering Woods yet. Though, honestly, once someone had done the initial trials someone could blitz through the dungeon sections pretty rapidly if they were experienced. The Wandering Woods should slow someone down, but even that was only a matter of weeks at the most.

Oh well, if some new delver went ahead and reached the end of my current dungeon, it wouldn’t be that great a disaster. Hopefully my defenses would be more than enough to deter them from getting to my core. Especially since I fully intended to incorporate all the various uses of teleportation into my defenses.

I continued working on the details of my dungeon, smoothing over the new changes, even as the group of Adar finally reached the Starlight Grotto.

It was only a few minutes later when one of them dropped something I was desperately wanting into the bowl as a sacrifice.

A book, blazing with power to my mana sight, fell into the bowl, triggering a prompt which I immediately opened.

Would you like to absorb:

Skill Book: Merchant Tongue (Northern Hemisphere: West)

Potential Skill Level: 10

Yes? No?

I didn’t hesitate for a moment after I read the title. I was finally going to learn how to talk to people properly!

I accepted and a deluge of knowledge flowed into me.