Lucifer's pov

It is becoming even more apparent that I cannot sit idly by and expect the humans to play by the rules, I need better defenses. My current defenses don’t work very well against certain types of enemies like mages, I’ve only scraped by the skin of my teeth in every encounter. Sometimes because I don’t know how the enemy fights or more importantly because I cant determine the intent of those entering my dungeon. Without some method to filter those who are my prey and the others who are trying to prey on me, I am just waiting for the inevitable strong opponent to come that I cant deal with. During the last encounter, I still had an ace or two to use but that is still too close for my preferences.

After finishing Selenia's room I’ve decided to start working on a way to filter out the bad from the good because soon when this place is full of adventurers as I plan to have it, I won’t be so lucky to overhear some idiot speak his plans out loud. During the process of studying the holding bag, I obtained from the adventurers I was able to discover that a large portion of my first Earthmail was dedicated to a similar magic. This magic works by creating a separate space and making a doorway into this new room. The size of the room is directly proportional to the amount of mana I pump into the spell and its cost is astronomical, it's cheaper to just have the ants dig further. However, if I just have my dungeon dug further in a straight line then someone could just break through the surface if they were bothered enough to do it. Also, the new dimension allows me to have completely different environments only a few feet apart, like walking directly from an oven into a freezer after a few steps. I would imagine that would do some serious damage to the human body with the rapidly changing temperatures.

I plan to have only the first floor open for the moment and have the ant nest disconnected from the first floor. Instead, I will have the second floor connected to a random door on the first floor, with the dimension between the two floors being full of my most deadly creatures and traps. The floors the adventurers will be using won't be connected to a pathway to my core at all and will continue on a different path. The idea behind this is to filter those who are after my core and those who come to make a living because if you are just here for loot you won't enter the well-known death door of doom and will continue to go deeper into the path with the best loot. However, if you are after the core you will know that the path of dead bodies is the way to me, simply by using the doorway leading to me I can filter those who I need to kill and those who I will kill a little slower with their own greed.

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Starting by connecting the ant's nest to the room and the room to a ten by five meter stone door in the center of the first floor, so people don’t mistake it for the entrance to the second floor and hopefully the weight of the door will make most adventurer parties not bother to try the door. I then sealed the connection to the ant's nest because if I did it first I would be cut off from the surface, something highly unpleasant to the current me. It looks strange to have a huge stone door just standing by itself in the middle of a small clearing but hopefully it’s likeness to the gates to hell with the images I’ve carved into it deter most adventurers.

Now with my new defense complete, I can work on creating a real second floor. The ants have been digging out another cavern just as big as the first for some time now and a few extra caverns after that too, these new caverns will soon become the lower floors when they are finished. For now, I plan to make the second and third floors a jungle just like the first with the flora becoming denser as you go deeper.

Creating the first floor was a valuable experience for making the second floor, with all the necessary plants already in the dungeon I simply had to copy them into the next cavern. After finishing placing the plants and making sure to add more plants than the previous floor making it denser, then pumping mana into them to make them grow enormous I was half done. With that finished all that is left is for me to decide what creatures I want on this floor.

Thinking it over I’ve decided to move the cats to the soon to be completed third floor and have simple boars in the first floor then add bears and lions to the food chain for the second floor. The third floor will have ambush predators which will probably be my main source of life energy from overconfident adventurers or miners. After the first floor, there will also start to have traps occasionally, just simple ant hills that if you step into it will cover you in the smaller variety of ants to paralyze you, making you vulnerable to the other creatures of the dungeon. Another trap is just spider webs with over-sized spiders in them, the silk from their webs I would imagine is worth a lot of money and I’m sure some idiot will end up spider food at some point trying to get some.

As for the rewards I have increased the purity of the copper and iron veins of ore the further you go into the dungeon and placed plants that are worth not too much but not too little after discussing it with Selenia which plants are suitable so there should be no problems with people wanting to enter my dungeon.

I also want to grow the surface just as much as my dungeon too. I plan to have the greed of the nobles work in my favor eventually. If there is a city built on top of the dungeon the people living in said city would really hate having their money printing mine destroyed so they will help protect me too without me having to deal with them.