Chapter Thirty-six: Vast Rewards
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Dunstan looked through his inventory, counting his newfound wealth. The achievements he had racked up with his first dungeon had rewarded him with four bronze chests and a single golden one. As he took stock of his new achievements and AP, a new notification came in.
[New Achievement: 100 000 Fame! | Reward: +1 Silver Chest]
Bronze at ten thousand and silver at a hundred. Did that mean he would get a gold chest at the one million mark? Dunstan hoped so.
‘News sure travels fast!’ he found himself remarking sardonically. ‘Cloudy Sky must be boiling right now!’
Even so… one hundred thousand points from fame. That meant one hundred thousand people had heard of the ‘Vast Heaven Legacy’. The numbers would slow down after a while, he suspected. The bulk of this must have come from the city at the foot of the mountain. It would take some time for the news to truly get out there. More likely, the next dungeon would not be as novel, so the news wouldn’t spread as quickly. However, one hundred thousand was more than enough to build something truly incredible.
‘No more shoestring budget’, he realised.
He could easily up the dungeon instances to ten. The Mirthtree Mausoleum was only a tier-one dungeon, so that was only an extra 5000 AP. However, with the increase in dungeon traffic, he would need a bigger AP stockpile to account for what the adventurers took out. 20,000 AP should be more than enough. Assuming he’d need as much for the next one, that made for 40,000 AP that needed to be left aside.
He frowned. ‘I don’t need sixty thousand just to build one dungeon!’
The Mirthtree Mausoleum, a ten-room dungeon, took less than 3000 AP to build. Categorised by the Dungeon Maker System as a small, first-tier dungeon, it was perfect. Given that he wasn’t planning on tackling second-tier dungeons anytime soon, Dunstan set himself an upper limit of 10000 AP for his second dungeon. Three times the budget should be more than enough for him to create a large-scale setting. If push came to shove, he could simply do what he did the first time and rely on stuff from the overworld instead of the dungeon store. He had to work smart here and figure out ways to get free stuff like the chest rewards from the system instead of spending all his hard-earned AP in the store.
‘Speaking of chests’, he thought, nudging the interface with his mind.
[You have received…]
Gloomshroom Template | Flora | Grade: Common
[You have received…]
Healing Pulse | Technique | Grade: Uncommon
[You have received…]
Blade Sting Mandible | Resource | Grade: Common
[You have received…]
Boundless Mural | Facility | Grade: Epic
[You have received…]
Fire Dragon Blood | Resource | Grade: Rare
Weeping Willow | Flora | Grade: Common
Winter Palace Brocade | Material | Grade: Rare
[You have received…]
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Soul Severing Blade | Item | Grade: Rare
Onyx | Resource | Grade: Common
Kobold Template | Fauna | Grade: Uncommon
Sheep’s Wool | Material | Grade: Common
Vicious Spear | Technique | Grade: Common
‘At least my luck has improved a bit.’ He sighed to himself, mentally restraining himself from throwing a fit.
Why he was being subjected to gacha shit by his own power, he did not know. All he could do was sit up and take stock. There were six chests, and they gave him twelve rewards and four shinies. The gold chest was the biggest disappointment, with only one rare reward. The ones he expected the least from, the bronze chests, actually gave him an epic piece.
First, he sorted by rarity. His six common rewards gave him a template that would allow him to grow hallucinogenic mushrooms, the mandible of what the info screen revealed was a giant magical scorpion, a completely ordinary willow tree template, a cart-sized block of onyx, an entire farm’s yield of wool and spear technique.
It left him confused. Just what did the system consider common? The set of rewards did not make much sense. Martial techniques and mundane trees did not belong in the same category unless…
This Vicious Spear technique was a good skill. It contained an uncomplicated fighting style that could be pushed further with mana/essence enhancement. It could even be used at the exultant tier. It wasn’t special by any means; only a poor exultant would rely on something this basic but it was adequate. He wasn’t too conversant with the prices for such things, but he doubted it would fetch anything less than 1000— 1500 gold coins on the open market. Wood, mundane wood especially, couldn’t be worth more than a gold coin per log. He scratched his head, wondering if willow trees had any other use besides lumber.
It didn’t matter if they did. It changed nothing. Mundane wood and actual cultivation techniques weren’t in the same category or rarity.
Dunstan took the time to reconsider. Those prices were merely the case in the Vast Heaven Dominion. At the end of the day, price was determined by supply and demand. Martial techniques might be uncommon, but that was only when you considered the general, non-cultivating populace. Prices might be different depending on location but the trends held true. Even in his past life, with the exception of a couple of countries where they were more plentiful than school meals, there were a lot more steps involved for civilians to get in contact with guns as opposed to people in the military where you are practically assigned one when you signed up.
The analogy wasn’t perfect, but the same was generally true for cultivation and combat techniques. Joe Everyman in a farming village might struggle to get the coin and connections to buy a suitable technique, but every student in a dojo or sect was getting taught something, likely on a ‘freemium’ plan. It probably wasn’t a good technique, and the Masters likely banked on making their ‘students’ work for it, but the actual techniques themselves were usually plentiful. They were, however, never as common as lambswool.
However, that itself was clearly dependent on which strata of society you fell in.
Dunstan recalled all the inferior manuals he went through to synthesise the Mirthtree Sword techniques for his dungeon. For the head of the Dominion’s premier sect, that came easy for him. How easy would it be for a system that could essentially conjure up whatever it wanted? If supply and demand were not issues, then price or rarity would follow very different parameters.
With a somewhat greater understanding of the scale he was dealing with, Dunstan continued to look through his rewards. True to form, the uncommon ones were good…very good. [Healing Pulse] was another thing that made him nearly return to his considerations on how his system categorised rarity. This was a technique that lets you heal others as well as yourself. Healthcare came at a premium even when outright magic was involved. Even for him, that would not be easy to come by.
The second was a new monster template for his dungeons. Kobolds. Dunstan loved the little dragon minions. Felix, his past self, used them a lot in his games. He loved monster types he could scale up however necessary, and dragon types fit that perfectly. Need a common mob? Use kobolds. Need an elite field mob? Just use wyverns. Need a cool end boss? What a perfect opportunity to use a giant red dragon. The more he reminisced about Felix’s old game design docs, the more Dunstan liked them. In fact, he could pretty much port that over wholesale, couldn’t he?
As if agreeing with his thoughts, his rare rewards included a vat of fire dragon’s blood. That was two dragon-related rewards in the same session. That had to be a sign! The other rare rewards were a bolt of silk fabric with snowflakes and winter imagery embroidered on it and a long sabre with an ominous aura. The cloth gave a bonus and resistance to ice-related magic if used to make clothing, whereas the sabre supposedly cut souls as easily as it did flesh, whatever that meant.
All of these were useful, and Dunstan could already see future uses for all of them. The epic reward, however, was some kind of facility or building. That one would have to wait unless it slotted into his new dragon-themed dungeon plans.
‘Hold on! I must not have read that right’, he muttered to himself.
He had but was unable to believe his eyes, so he read the item description again.
“This changes everything!”
Staring Dunstan in the face was a new building/facility that could be added to a dungeon or moved into the overworld for three times the fee, something Dunstan already knew he was bound to do. This Boundless Mural could grant special abilities to those who used it.
Quickly, he selected it, and like with all the other dungeon features, he was immediately drawn into an alternate space. It took longer than he thought it would. In fact, it was nearly morning that he received a new notification.
[You have comprehended the mysteries of the Boundless Mural!]
[You have acquired a new trait: Boundlessness]