Their sub-dimension grew 25 metres on each side of the dimension, from side to side and top to bottom. The dimension came out to be 83 metres wide and 85 metres high, and the new size of their dimension was not the only thing to change.
After their dimension finished growing, they received a series of notifications.
You have now gained the ability to set a night and day cycle throughout the whole sub-dimension.
You have now gained the ability to create a natural tide setting on each floor.
You have also gained the ability to create water mechanisms. Water mechanisms can be used to create unique flows of water or water traps.
Along with these new notifications of new abilities, the child also noticed a difference in the amount and largeness of the grey-brown stones and the silver-black stone veins.
Before they did anything else or checked on anything else, they started to play around with their new abilities and the instincts that they gained.
First, they started off with the day and night cycle. Then, they made the night longer than the day, making the night 60 hours long and the day 48 hours long. But the trick they did with it was that every 40 days, the cycle would switch itself so that the day cycle would be 60 hours long and the night cycle would be 48 hours long. They wanted the cycles to be like this to give unpredictability and keep the invaders and adventurers on their toes.
As soon as they put in the cycle, they noticed an immediate change in the brightness of their floors. In all of the floors, rooms, and hallways, the brightness looked as though there were only a few centimetres of ice between the floors and the sun. It was a lot different than before, where there was enough light to see but not bright enough to be able to see every single thing on the floors clearly. It made the child excited to see what the brightness would be during the night cycle.
Next, they used the tide setting to recreate the tides they already had in place with their water mana strings, freeing up those same water mana strings.
Once that was out of the way, the child looked through their dungeon to see if there were any other unexpected changes.
Going over every inch of their sub-dimension, there weren’t any other major changes, their floors shifted a bit, but that was really it.
But as they went over everything, they noticed that Dwyn, the undine monster they had, woke up from their hibernation and started exploring the child’s floors.
The adventurers wandering through their halls mostly did not notice their expansion and the after-effects of it.
With everything in place and settled, the child decided that they were going to expand their territory again, but this time they would do it actively.
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And they will do it in the one direction they have ignored, downwards.
Currently, their territory only reaches downwards into the sand. But it wasn’t far enough to see where the sand ended. So instead of expanding sideways like they have been doing, they focused their expansion downwards.
They pushed and pushed and pushed their mana strings downwards into the sand. Soon, about five metres down, they hit a grey stone. They continued downwards, going ten more metres down. Five more metres down, and just as they reached the limit of their territorial expansion, the child found something interesting.
At the very edge of their expansion, 25 metres down, they found a smooth chamber that was empty at the top, but at the bottom of this chamber, there was this black, bubbly, smooth stone. They looked around, though they were constrained as their territory only entered the chamber just a centimetre and only at the very edge. The chamber stretched farther than they could see.
The child knew that this tunnel with the black stone would be interesting and potentially fruitful. Still, they were at the limit of increasing their territory and had other things they wanted to focus on.
POV Alexis Miftern
Over the week that Alexis had been in the newly-named dungeon town Nome, he started posting low-paying quests at the adventurer guild for the live collection of the animals and plants found within the dungeon. They have even been buying the monster cores in large batches for cheap due to the number of monsters with cores found in the still unnamed dungeon.
He had been sending the living plants and animals to ports within the area to be sold to other merchants and within stalls in marketplaces. He also sent the more unique ones to auction houses further into the continent and such. He sold to or was connected to only a few places so far, but business was going well.
And so far, it’s been a pretty good profit margin, but as the Nome is growing and the dungeon floors are being explored more and more, there is more and more competition.
POV Blue Suns Adventuring group
For the group, it was different being in the dungeon. It had changed so much and is continuously adapting, but to Divan, it was not only the dungeon that was changing but the increase of other lower-ranked adventurer groups and the creation of the temporary dungeon town, Nome.
But they haven’t received any major injuries so far, and they have been one of the groups that have been continuously pushing forward.
That was until the dungeon implemented floor bosses.
The dungeon core never had floor bosses before, so it became a lot easier to go to unexplored floors. But once the floor bosses were implemented, the temporary guild master Leonos Vasir closed the dungeon so examinations could be made.
After the dungeon was opened again, Divan, Caliso, Neronia, and Anes were able to move through the dungeon quickly until they reached the floor bosses.
So far, they have only encountered the first and second-floor bosses. Even though they knew the floors, floor bosses made everything much more difficult.
The first battle was with an ice krill swarm with ice attacks that were much colder and a lot more dangerous. The ice moved faster, spread faster, and created a lot more severe damage. But that was not the worst part.
No, the worst part was that the 30 krill seemed to have one mind, all with the much colder ice attacks that were a pain in the ass to defeat. But, while it was a pain in the ass, once the group figured out the krill monsters’ fighting style, it became a lot easier to defeat.
The second-floor boss was a single monster, but it was of the most vicious monster type that the dungeon has, the ravenous snail. It was from a monster type that Enes, the dungeon-loving geek, had never heard of. Even before a boss was made from them, they were dangerous, especially in groups.
The second boss was much faster and favoured speed attacks, forcing them into places within the fourth room that was hard to fight back against. But they could defeat the boss monster and move to the third floor.
Even though the boss monsters were hard to defeat originally, they gained larger and more valuable monster cores from the corpses. When they brought the two corpses back to the guild, they even received a little payment for it.
But it was in the back of all of the members of the group’s minds that this dungeon was progressively getting harder and more complex and that it was learning from their experiences.
As of right now, they could handle it and fight back, but if the dungeon core continues with what it was doing, it may become very dangerous the farther they go.