Chapter 10

Pan was a little disappointed that the first team to attempt his dungeon had uncovered his secrets so easily, but was placated when he remember how close they had come to death. Anyone below the C rank would stand no chance of even getting to the cavern, but with how basic his dungeon currently was he was sure nobody above C rank would come. He wasn’t even certain many C ranked parties would be able to defeat his steel decapede, since the group sent to test his dungeon was near the top of the C ranks.

It took another week after the expedition had left before anything changed. A group of people came and set up in the camp the expeditionary team had left behind. They seemed to be patrolling the area and guarding his cave. A few at a time would go in, but the majority were D ranked, and never ventured too deep. Very few died, and they were being cautious, probably since they had a more important job to do, and taking too many risks would be frowned upon by the guild. Only one team got to the stone centipede, and they turned back when they saw it. During the week he was unattended he watched his populations grow, and used his gathered mana to purchase some long overdue level ups.

Level 9

Unlock skill: Environmental Modification

Need 10,000 mana for level 10

+25 Dungeon Points

Level 10

Unlock skill: Floor Creation

Need 25,000 mana for level 11

+25 Dungeon Points

Environmental Modification

The ability to modify key parts of the dungeon’s environments. For a small mana upkeep cost, things like temperature, humidity, air pressure, and other variables can be modified and maintained.

Floor Creation

The ability to add a new floor to the dungeon. New floors can be a completely different environment from the other floors. Cost increases greatly for each subsequent floor.

After he did a bit of digging into the nature of floors, it seemed like Pan had previously had the wrong idea about separating floors. A floor was an arbitrary distinction made by the dungeon, so a dungeon could make a floor in any way they wanted. He could have two separate floors at the same height, but they would be magically distinct from each other. The furthest floor from the entrance would have the highest mana density, however, and it seemed like all natural dungeon simply made each floor lower than the previous, despite there being no requirement to do so. Pan had noticed that as he extended deeper into the earth, the mana density increased, which explained why he had more trouble extending down, as well as why natural dungeon expanded in that fashion. However, a floor really was only a device that manipulated the natural flow of mana in a dungeon.

He was excited to start on his second floor, but he knew he had a lot to do before he would be ready to make the change. He also had the adventurers setting up outside, and he wanted to watch that scenario play out first. Besides, he had a massive cavern separate from the dungeon to begin his preparations for future floors. He would need new monsters to pose a greater threat, and hopefully draw stronger adventurers, just not yet.

He also had another skill to play with, and he had increased the heat and humidity of the cavern marginally. The cavern was already very mana dense, and he hoped that the extra heat and humidity would be more distracting to adventurers, as well as make an interesting environment for his monsters to adapt to. It was also just a personal preference, since he was really enjoying the pseudo-jungle he had created, even without using any actual tropical plants.

To prepare for his future plans, Pan decided to put leveling up any more on the bottom of his priority list. He put almost all of his mana into expanding even further, in an effort to prepare for an eventual new floor, as well as increasing the size of his current setup.

The guards had only been in place for a few days when the first caravan came. There was a large number of laborers, as well as a few more parties of guards. The day they arrived there was a flurry of activity as they added nearly fifty more tents to the camp on top of the plateau. There was a larger tent for the cooks, as well as a few for important administrative people. Pan was surprised when his flies identified a city planner, a stone mason, a few carpenters, and a blacksmith. It seemed like the guild was sparing no expense in their effort to set up a proper and efficient settlement.

The next day, a few foundations were laid near, but not next to the entrance. The entrance seemed to be the center of a future plaza, so as not to impede people from entering or exiting the dungeon. There was the obvious beginning of a guild house in a straight line away from the opening, and behind Pan’s modest stone building on the edge of the cliff was what he knew would become The town hall. His spies had looked at the plans for the future city. He was surprised to see that they were hoping to create an actual city out in the forest, but it made sense when he thought of how valuable a dungeon could be.

There were plans for a fort to be constructed on the slope leading up to the top of the plateau, so as to defend the dungeon and important parts of the city, as well as collect a tax from people wanting to attempt the dungeon. The guild could not levy a tax, so Pan assumed some lord had invested, and would be collecting the tax to recoup his money. Only the land's owner could tax people, and they needed to have the authority to do so granted by the crown. No king would ever give an adventurer guild the right to tax nonmembers, so Pan knew a noble house had to be behind the founding as well.

He was impressed by the amount of money being thrown at the project. Building the guild house would cost up to one hundred gold, maybe more considering the size and remoteness, and the fort would be more than twice that. Not to mention the cost of hiring the specialists, such as the city planner. The rushed founding of a settlement like this probably cost ten to fifteen platinum, an absurd sum, but with a dungeon, the investment would be paying off easily. If his dungeon provided enough profits, he would become the center of the first city in the wild forests, and he could already see nice roads being created by earth mages.

It took a few weeks for the first real building to be finished, which was, of course, the guild house. It was amazing how fast skilled construction mages could create a building. The mages had set up a grid of paved roads on the top of the plateau, And areas were marked out to be sold to prospective business owners in one area, and as land for houses for those who could afford the valuable real estate on top of the plateau. Sadly, Pan had been forced to close his other entrance, due to all of the logging and industry being built up around him. Most trees within one hundred foot of the plateau had been cleared out, as well as all of the ground cover. The land was being marked out to be turned into more streets and city blocks. Plans were drawn up to build walls into the cliffs of the plateau, to prevent people from climbing them.

Many of the guards had been allowed to attempt the dungeon while the construction went on, but only one team of four or five at a time. Only two teams had died, totaling eight people. They were all D ranked, but their mana was a welcome addition to the dungeon. They all died when they challenged the stone centipede, and were unprepared for its tremendous defense. Pan couldn’t wait for the eventual influx of adventurers, but to prepare he needed a larger dungeon, otherwise not too many groups at a time could challenge the floor at once. He also needed a way for people who have already cleared a floor to bypass it, otherwise, they’d just kill all of the monsters easily without any real challenge.

The first problem was much easier to solve than the second, and he had made his feeder cavern over a mile in diameter over the month since the first guards had shown up. He had finally started summoning more than just invertebrates to populate his dungeon. There were many small birds, mice, squirrels, and a few families of foxes, but they all had to be wary of the much larger insects. He had plans for them eventually, but for the foreseeable future, he would just let them establish themselves. Besides the mana-rich dungeon cavern could support many more animals than a similarly sized patch of forest, and he was constantly expanding his cavern.

Pan did make some modifications to the birds, since they were adapted to temperate forests. He made them more colorful and larger, to fit better in the jungle he had turned his cavern into. Almost as an afterthought, he imbued some minor alchemical properties into their feathers, and allowed them to spread into the dungeon where people could harvest them. The foxes and rodents needed fewer changes, but he made them more able to tolerate the heat, and boosted their speed and reaction times, in an effort to extend their lives.

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They did well enough in the cavern, and he didn’t have to resummon them due to temporary extinctions. They added much-needed diversity to his pool of creatures, and the rodents were a good food source for larger monsters. The foxes were also the most intelligent inhabitants in the dungeon, after the ant queen, and he had big plans for them in the future.

He was very pleased with the progress he had made, and the environment was now teeming with new colorful species, and filled with a cacophony of exotic sounds. The creatures he had available would make excellent monsters for his first few floors, but he would have to start purchasing or creating new species for floors past the first few.

He had also been preparing an expansion to his dungeon, and had created another forty rooms to spread around the network. The first floor would contain seventy rooms, connected by thin snaking caves, in a large roughly circular area, about a mile in diameter. His total claimed area was a rounded rectangular area two miles long, and one mile wide, centered under his entrance. One-half was dungeon, while the other half was his cavern. When his connected his new rooms, more than doubling the size of the dungeon, he began planning for his eventual second floor, which would cost fifteen thousand mana to set up. It would take him nearly four days to collect that much.

Just when he started saving up, the guild opened the dungeon to all adventurer parties. They were limited to three parties in at a time, separated by two hours, but once the first party returned and reported the expansion, they let seven parties enter at a time, one party per ten rooms, so as not to stress the dungeons resources. However, monster deaths from these parties were inconsequential to Pan, since he had massive amounts of creatures nearly overflowing the cavern.

A surprising amount of people died, but he overheard the guild members talking about it like it was to be expected. It seemed that nine out of ten D ranked adventurers or parties never lived to advance to C rank. It was not a problem since guilds recruited basically all of the people who would be jobless otherwise. A nonadventuring job was hard to come by, since apprenticeship fees were expensive, and farms barely needed any people to function. In fact, a single farmer with a high level and the correct skills could feed a village, so there were plenty of people with no other option than joining a guild, and since food was plentiful, there was never any shortage of new people to replace the deaths.

Even as a human, Pan had been aware of this, but he had no idea how many people died. He would probably have apprenticed to a master mage, and been hired by some noble house as a specialist. Mages were in high demand among the nobility, especially those with talents in creative magics, such as enchanting or alchemy. A few mages always became adventurers, but their death rate was much lower, since they were rare and could pick the best teams to join, as well as the rest of the team would protect them since they were incredibly effective in combat. A good mage drastically increased a party’s chance to survive, so they were a precious resource for guilds.

When Pan’s spies gathered this information, he realized that none of the four parties that had died in his dungeon had a mage. It was a shame, because Pan wanted to be able to imbue his monsters with more types of magic. Even low-level mages would have their elemental specialization, and Pan hoped that would be enough to get the related imbuement. If he got enough, he could start experimenting with how to create rarer mixed element combinations, such as magma, nature, or metal.

A sufficiently skilled mage could learn spells from an advanced element, if he had an affinity for one of the requisite elements. Rarely, a human would have the ability to specialize in two elements, and advanced elements formed by the two he had would be much easier to use. Monsters, however, were fixed in their specializations. A dark attuned creature could only use spells from the darkness element, so he would have to create advanced elements from the beginning to access the spells. Creatures from an advanced element were always quite powerful, and he hoped he could create rare multi-element monsters.

But he was getting ahead of himself again, and he returned to his immediate plans. He needed to plan out his second floor, and as much as he liked his invertebrate hordes, he wanted something different for the newest floor. His most powerful monsters specialized in defense, and it was a good choice for his first floor, but he wanted to play with other specializations as well. It would also have the added effect of catching adventurers who had prepared for mainly defensive monsters having to face down something unexpected. He decided his second floor would be more open, but no less lush. The caves would be wider, and the rooms would be bigger. And it’s inhabitants would focus on speed, he just needed the perfect base monsters.

His foxes would work, but he wanted some diversity for his second floor. The first floor was mainly the ants, and while they worked well, he wanted to add more monsters to that floor later on soon. As he looked through the dungeon store, a few ideas stuck in his head, and he was glad he could get away with making the second floor more dangerous than the first. The first thing he needed was a base for his food chain, and he knew just what he wanted. He purchased a basic deer from the dungeon store, and it was a cheap three points since it was a nondeadly herbivore.

He modified the deer to suit his purposes, since he didn’t want them to die too easily. He made them much faster, and improving their reaction times, as well as burst speed, was his main focus. Pan made them much stronger, and sleeker, with incredible jumping ability. If something threatened them they could jump out of the way so fast and hard they would be nothing but a streak to all but the most keen eyed hunters. They couldn’t keep their speed up for a long time, however, and after a few powerful bounding leaps, they would have to switch to their slower, but still quick running speed. He did make the males larger and more aggressive, with sharp metallic antlers. They would be able to defend their herds if the need arose, but Pan intended for them to be the staple food source for the real monsters on the floor, he just hoped he hadn't overdone it.

The next acquisition was a two point purchase of a rabbit. It would be a smaller, but abundant prey animal, and he intended to release them to the first-floor cavern as well. He had realized he would need to separate his first-floor animals from the second-floor ones at some point along the way. The rabbits were made larger and sleeker, to be better able to navigate the lush forest he intended to continue on the second floor. Unlike the deer he had created, he introduced them to the original cavern. They were a success, and didn't go extinct while providing a source of red meat to the monsters growing in the cavern.

Pan was excited to get to the long-awaited creation of the actual threats on the floor. First up would be the foxes. They started small, and he wanted them to remain small, but they should still be able to provide an adequate challenge to adventurers attempting the floor. He modified them further from the already changed foxes in the cavern. He made them lightning fast, able to chase down the rabbits that would be their main food source. He made them around thirty pounds, large enough that an adventurer party would have trouble with them, especially since they moved so fast. They would be the challenge for the first part of the floor, but he wanted the second half to be strong enough to attract C ranked adventurers.

For that, he bought his final monster. A twenty-five point jungle cat called a “jaguar.” Pan had never heard of them, but they seemed ferocious, and would make a great monster for the second half of the floor. He made them larger, at an average of two hundred pounds, and again made the animal sleeker and faster. Their advantage was their agility, and he made them into even better ambush predators that should have no trouble surprising even the deer that would be their main prey. Like the deer, their speed was focused on short bursts, and they would leap out of hiding to make their kill incredibly quickly. But they were also strong enough that adventurers should have trouble if their initial attack failed. A good C ranked party should be able to handle them, although not easily, but if caught unaware, a few party should be easily killed and drug off. Finally, he made them black.

It had cost Pan nearly five thousand mana to create the monsters for his second floor. And he had to dip into the mana he was saving for the second floor. When he finally saved up enough mana, he purchased the next floor. The mana was sucked out of him, and nothing visibly changed. But Pan could see that he now had a point he could expand off of leading from the first-floor boss room.  He savored the moment, since it would be awhile before he got the chance to do this again, he could see that another floor would cost him fifty thousand mana. Over time, he had extended his reach another hundred feet down, and was ready to begin sculpting the second floor. He extended a staircase down sixty feet, and began creating the next floor.

Instead of cutting off the massive cavern, this time he decided to incorporate it into the dungeon. He would leave his core in the cavern above, since it was easier to defend, and Behemoth was more dangerous than the cats, and while he would be the boss for the floor, he would be guarding Pan until anyone came close to the boss room. When he left the queen would guard his core, in case anyone tried to pull something sneaky.

He made the floor in the same general layout as the first one, but he found that when he purchased the floor, he claimed a lot more land, despite the higher cost to expand deeper. He had an elliptical area about three by two miles to play with now. The first part was wide sixty foot tall caves, in a network that covered the first mile of the ellipse. There were many enormous rooms in the network, around fifty of them. The foxes would be the main threat for the first part of the dungeon, with none of his black jaguars guarding the caves. But the second part of the floor was all cavern, and that was where the massive cats would make their homes.

It was two miles long by two miles wide at its widest, narrowing down at the back. The previous area had gradually sloped down enough that the cavern could be one hundred feet tall. Right now the entire floor was bare stone, but he worked to quickly add dirt to the floor. He allowed non-evolved bugs from the first floor to enter the second floor, and he populated it with plants as fast as he could. It took two days, but the intermittent deaths of adventurers had helped speed the process along. He let any nonmonster from the first floor freely venture into the second, and the bottom of the food chain quickly established itself.

However, before he could populate it with the monsters, he still felt that something was missing. He had spread trees around the floor to prepare for the moment, and now he poured mana into them, creating towering monoliths that would watch over the floor. He couldn’t wait to see the floor’s ecosystem settle like the first floor. It was going to be a truly spectacular sight. The floor was massive, but he felt no desire to create another floor on the same scale as this one for awhile. It was amazing, but he wanted to continue to change up the style of his floors, to keep adventurers on edge.

He finally added the monsters he had designed for the floor, first the foxes and deer, than two days later he added the cats. Pan hadn't named any of the species yet, and he had decided to let the adventurers name them. The introduction went very well, and Pan was glad to see the population of each species properly balance out. There was plenty of food, and the mana in the caves caused rapid reproduction and growth, before slowing for adulthood. All of the monsters could potentially live for years, but that was unlikely due to the deadly competitive nature of living in a dungeon.

He was finally ready to open the floor to adventurers, so he created a room behind the first-floor boss room that would have a staircase leading to the second floor, as well as a way to return to the entrance. Now he just had to wait for the first challengers.

Dungeon Menu

Level: 10

Type: Sentient Dungeon

Name: N/A

Titles: N/A

Mana: 192/25,000  (+500)

Rooms: 122

Floors: 2

Animals: 100,000+

Plants: 100,000+

Monsters: 5182

Skills: [Dungeon Menu], [Dungeon Manipulation], [Dungeon Absorption], [Dungeon Creation: Level 8], [Dungeon Expansion], [Dungeon Summon], [Targeted Evolution], [Monster Imbuement], [Dungeon Map], [Name Bestowal], [Drop Assignment], [Floor Creation], [Environmental Manipulation]

Dungeon Points: 720

Achievements: Evolver, Legend Slayer, Boundless