Chapter 6: Trading and Teenagers
Dungeon POV:
So, I survived the encounter with the demon child. The only thing that was crushed here was my pride. Abnormally strong children aside, I’ve decided to increase the difficulty of my dungeon and no it has nothing to do with a child besting my latest monster. It’s time to get in touch with the other dungeons in the area.
The AI network is very weird but that’s probably just because I’m not an AI. It’s like a web of connections and you just have to find the right paths to get where you want too. As I spread my awareness I quickly found five sources of light on the network but they were decisively not dungeons so I ignored them.
In the end I found two dungeons within my range of influence. There was a goblin dungeon pretty close to me and an undead dungeon at the farthest reaches of my range. For now, I ignored the undead dungeon since I had no plans of adding undead to my dungeon and both felt like around three floor dungeons. Somehow my brain was able to categorize the brightness, the size, and the color of the light into meaningful data. Must be some kind of dungeon or AI thing anyways the closer goblin dungeon was the obvious choice and no, I wasn’t miffed at all that these two dungeons had grown faster than me. I just got off to a rough start. The last few days had been rough and I wasn’t even talking about my dying.
The goblin dungeon had the personality of a perky teenage girl which I found odd. For one we’re dungeons and we don’t sleep so how can someone be so perky 24/7. Secondly who the hell programed these AI’s since I highly doubt they’re people whose data was corrupted like mine. Which reminds me I finally got a reply from the devs. Apparently, they now know my data was corrupted but they can’t do anything about the corruption. Like me they were also unsure what would happen if I died. They said they could probably save my consciousness from deletion upon death, but probably isn’t good enough for me. I am not dying anytime soon!
In the end after a series of negotiations we agreed upon a trade and on my side a level 8 rose creeper and one of my predator class bunnies disappeared. There was no way I would let another dungeon gain access to my future dragons. I would be ‘The Dragon Dungeon’ not one of the many dragon dungeons.
However, trading a carnivorous rabbit and a rose monster for a troll was a pretty good deal if I say so myself. The troll was a ten feet tall green over muscled monstrosity, I loved it. Finally, a monster that wasn’t fluffy or pink.
Troll
Classes: (Troll lv. 9, Un)
***
Health 370/370
Stamina 195/195
Armor 35
Natural Armor 35
***
Mana 35/35
Spirit 29/29
· Strength 37
· Agility 4
· Dexterity 2
Troll Regeneration
· Constitution 37
· Endurance 35
· Perception 4
***
Traits:
Troll Brain (Max intelligence 4)
· Intelligence 2
· Wisdom 3
· Charisma 2
It was stupid and actually had an intelligence limiter but to me it seemed like the first real monster I’d gotten. If this was a just world I would have gotten this troll instead of a bunch of birds and flowers. Still now I just had to evolve it. With the use of an evolution point to boost its natural talent I can hopefully evolve it into a rare class. My first rare class how great that would be.
As I watched the troll’s features smoothed out becoming more humanoid, obviously it will become a troll king or something. It turned out to be or something. While the warts faded and its greenish brown complexion lightened I finally saw what it had evolved into.
Sexy Troll lv. 10 (Rare)
Sexy trolls are said to be the rarest of all trolls. They evolve in an environment that cares about appearance above all else and strive to imitate that. They are just as strong as the average troll but have an added boost to charisma.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
+4 Strength, +4 Constitution, +3 Endurance, +1 Charisma
Why? Not even a troll can maintain its ugly, warty, brutish appearance in my dungeon. Right now, it still looks like a big green apish man but what happens when it gets higher leveled. It’s just going to get better and better looking. My dungeons reputation is getting thrown out the window. Why couldn’t it get smarter, or stronger, it had to get better looking.
Still it was a real monster and now I could start upgrading my dungeon. After the second room, well third if you count the core, was built on the floor I created my troll’s monster lair, troll’s cave.
Troll’s Cave (Lair):
1 evolution point
A troll’s lair it will continuously spawn more of any creature with the troll racial class or one of its rank ups.
Size: 3 burrows (with the blessing of love trolls have 2 young each time)
Spawn Rate: 50 times normal (normal time: 180 days for gestation, 6 years to grow up) (Dungeon natural rate: 20 times)
6 level 5 trolls will be born every 2 days, 8 hours, and 53 minutes
Upgrades:
· Size: double nest size (6 nests), 1 evolution point
· Spawn Rate: double spawn rate (100 times), 1 evolution point
· Level: improve all spawns to level 6, 1 evolution point
I slightly regretted it but I decided to spend a point on doubling the spawn rate of the trolls. That meant it would just over a day to get 6 trolls, not very fast but at least I will get some new ones almost every day.
After that it was time to upgrade some of my other lairs. In the end I decided on rabbits since they were the only monsters so far who’d unlocked a second class and I wanted to see if I could spawn monsters with that class. In the end after 3 points of upgrades the floor 2 rabbit screen looked like this.
Rabbit’s Den (Lair):
A rabbit monsters lair it will continuously spawn more of any creature with the rabbit racial class or one of its rank ups.
Size: 4 burrows (with the blessing of love rabbits have 10 kits each time)
Spawn Rate: 10 times normal (normal time: 30 days for gestation, 60 days to grow up) (Dungeon natural rate: 20 times)
40 level 6 (5+1) rabbit monsters will be born every 10 hours and 48 minutes
Upgrades:
· Size: double nest size (8 nests), 1 evolution point
· Spawn Rate: double spawn rate (20 times), 2 evolution point
· Level: improve all spawns by 2 levels, 2 evolution point
· All rabbits spawn with a second class (90% Predator, Un; 10% Servant of Love, Un) at level 1
Now all my rabbits would have a second class and I doubled the spawn rate. I would be overrun with rabbits if I was lucky. Which is to say if I’m unlucky people will kill them all before I can power them up. Now it was time to grow and grow.
The next day Fletcher came and brought me a few things. He stood outside and started to toss them in. The things which caught my attention was the weapons a rusty old short sword, a battered and broken shield, and a sparkling brand new steal knife. He’d grumbled about that one but tossed it inside in the end. Besides the weapons he also threw in some other things. First was a moth eaten boot, then a florescent orange pair of skinny jeans, I know right can you believe even this world has skinny jeans. Next, he started throwing in what appeared to be the remains of last night’s dinner a half eaten carrot, an old ham bone, a piece of cheese, and an empty bottle of beer. Then he patted himself down and smirked. I vaguely heard him say ‘that should do it and Captain doesn’t need to know I didn’t take this too seriously’, I bet he shorted me.
While I was inspecting my new poor quality loot he came back with a group of teenagers I guess, you would call them. They were all around 15 or 16 and most had a total of around 8 or 9 levels, a few had a couple more but none of them had a class over level 10. The oldest was a level 7 farmer and a level 4 warrior. I could handle this most of my monsters on the second floor are 5 or 6 but I have a couple sevens and the boss is a 10. There are only 6 of them and Fletcher. Yah with Fletcher here they won’t have any trouble.
The kids all charged through the first floor and besides the boss they easily killed everything else. The boss almost got the shortest, a fat little goat herder but Fletcher quickly jerked him out of danger. It just took a while longer for them to kill the boss since they were lower level than my first crazy group of adventurers.
They were quite a bit slower on the second floor since most of them weren’t much stronger than the monsters in terms of level. The rabbits could dart around them and through their ranks biting and clawing while the trolls just charged at them head first. They might be higher level but none of them could compete with a troll in terms of brute strength, farmers and ranchers aren’t a very strong class and even woodcutters have trouble facing off against a troll. Still it was the dove wyverns and swan wyverns that really got to them.
Fletcher had to shoot down a couple that came close to gouging out an eye or two. Over the course of an hour or two they slowly cleared each room. It would have been faster but they took a short break after each room. Still I now knew that while weaker my monsters would have been easily able to overwhelm the six of them without Fletcher. They peaked into the boss room but when Fletcher saw it was a troll he turned them around and they left the dungeon.
After they left I finally decided to turn my attention to the loot issue. While I was fine giving just monster parts for the average monster it was time to create some boss loot. Maybe I’d even arm the trolls if any of it turned out successful.
First off though I copied the style of the orange skinny jeans and scaled up the size while changing the color to a deep red. Looking at the description I was fairly happy with what I got, they were called Troll leather skinny jeans. While they would look very unusual on the trolls I was already tired of watching a bunch of naked trolls walk around. After that I decided to plant the carrot and see if it grew, little did I know what consequences that action would bring, before turning back to my original task making loot.
After a while I was pretty satisfied with the results. The first thing I had created was a pair of shields. One was a tower shield made from a solid slab of apple wood with a rose carved into it. The second was more of a buckler, it was made of iron and had the image of a swan wyvern in flight engraved upon it. Next, I’d made a well it wasn’t chainmail but that’s what it was most similar to, I called it feather mail it was made from a dove wyverns metallic feathers.
Moving on to weapons I had created a ginormous club, for my trolls, a replica of the steel dagger, and a steel short sword. Finally, after I decided I was missing something I tried my hand at a mages staff. It was made from a gnarly branch of apple wood and the deadliest rose stems. This deadly greenish staff was then topped with a replica of one of the pink gems from the altar. Okay, let’s just face the facts I made a woody stick a pink gem on it but it’s still the best mages tool I’ve ever created.
Now that the loot was done I could go back to building. When the kids came in I had six rooms on the second floor, again not counting the core room, done and still needed four more before I could finish. Soon though I would be strong enough to rival not just teenagers but real adventurers.