DungeonFall – [A Dungeon Creation / Cultivation Story]

Nate was not having a good time. Working out while his body was still suffering from the effects of a damaged core and broken meridians was not a good idea.

He wasn’t sure how he did it in his avatar, but in his normal body, it was a strain. Everything hurt, and he felt like he was going to die.

Of course, that could have been because he was out of shape, but he didn’t think so. No one was that out of shape.

Merely thirty minutes after going downstairs, he crawled back up to take a shower and look in on the dungeon. He thought it might be time for the expedition to have arrived anyway, or at least that’s what he told himself.

That was an event he certainly didn’t want to miss.

Freshly showered and still feeling a little weak, he stretched out on his bed and pulled up the screens to the dungeon.

There was a particularly ugly butt-monkey thing falling victim to one of his traps when he opened it up. No sign of them just yet though. However, the monkey had been in the corridor leading to the core. It was slightly worrying, but not something he hadn’t been expecting already.

It was why he had gone through so much trouble to protect the core, and redo some of the traps there.

He could not let it be destroyed.

Nate began messing around with the menu while he waited, hoping to stumble across something. He already knew he wasn’t the most creative person in the world. The lack of variety in traps attested to that.

He was limited in what he knew and what he could imagine.

However, that wasn’t going to stop him from improving everything. So, what if his traps were boring and unoriginal? This was his training dungeon; he wasn’t going to let that stop him from learning.

Interestingly enough, he learned that he could click on traps that he had modified with his avatar. Those traps gave him various upgrade paths they could take. He could pay for them to be more durable or do more damage. In the case of the acid, the smell could be hidden or go away entirely. There were so many paths.

And he was only now finding them because he had been goofing around.

With that thought in mind, he tapped on the core, hoping to see an upgrade path for it as well.

‘Dungeon 1 – Core = Level 1, energy needed to upgrade to level 2 is 50,000 units.’

Nate glanced at how much energy he had at the moment and sighed. He’d been thinking fifteen thousand energy was a lot, but now he knew it was nothing special. Who knew how much the upgrade after this one would cost?

He held back from allocating any towards the core and thought instead about upgrading some of the traps. Those were what this dungeon was built around, after all. It made sense to focus on them before anything else.

He couldn’t risk upgrading the trap closest to the entrance until he knew how long it would take. If it was an instantaneous process, then great, otherwise, he would be knocking it out of commission right before the expedition showed up.

It made more sense to try it out on one of the other traps first. Though, once again, Nate couldn’t help but wonder how many other secrets this whole dungeon system was hiding from him.

It was simply a matter of deciding which trap to choose. Did he want to better protect the core, or go for one of the more utilized traps? No matter how much the dungeon dispersed scent and other smells, he had noticed that most tended to follow the same basic paths.

It was to the point where half of the dungeon hadn’t even been used. The original labyrinthine idea had been nice but was decidedly a failure in this regard. Why had he even wasted resources making it all if it wasn’t going to be used? It was yet another lesson Nate was learning from this entire process.

He made a note to start deconstructing portions of the dungeon and moved on to selecting the trap he wanted to upgrade.

Really, there was only one trap that he could risk doing anything with at the moment. It was the one a few rooms away from the exit. The one he had just modified the night before with all the arrow walls.

Highlighting the room, he tapped on the traps and looked at the upgrade options laid out before him. Looking at it closer, it seemed as though he could actually select multiple upgrades as long as he had the resources available.

‘Silent Arrow – 100 Wood, 300 Energy’

‘Hardened Arrow – 100 Wood, 20 Iron, 2 Carbon, 10 Trace Elements, 5 Energy’

‘Explosive Arrow – 100 Wood, 100 Energy, 30 Aluminum, 5 Nitrogen, 2 Sulfur’

‘Wind Arrow – 100 Wood, 500 Energy’

The list continued on for a few more entries before finally coming to a stop. Some of them seemed useful, while others were completely bonkers. There were seeking arrows that stayed on target, and others that teleported around the room randomly.

They sounded cool, but completely pointless. There was no guarantee they would ever hit anything! Of course, there was also the possibility they could appear inside the monster and kill it instantly.

Either way, everything on that end of the list was far too expensive to even think about anytime within the next few months.

Nate scrolled back to the top of the list and selected three of the options he knew he could afford. ‘Silent Arrow’ which did exactly as the name implied and made them silent. ‘Hardened Arrow’ which increased the damage each arrow did along with a small amount of better penetration due to the steel heads. Lastly, he selected ‘Wind Arrow’ which increased the speed of the arrows.

Combined, the three should make the room a deadly inferno of doom. Or a complete waste if they didn’t work as well as he hoped together. It was a crap shoot either way.

With a heavy stomach, he accepted the changes and watched as the traps began the upgrade process and then completed it a few seconds later. Thinking about it now, he should have done them one at a time.

He had learned something valuable, and it hadn’t ended up mattering, but it had still been a stupid risk.

Nate had just learned that while traps were disabled and upgrades time when he was inside the dungeon in his avatar form. That was not the case if he made those same modifications in his normal form.

The mistake he had nearly made was infuriating to think about, and not something that he had the time to dwell on at the moment.

Forcing himself to figure everything out on his own was resulting in him doing nothing more than making one mistake after another. He was learning, but he was also wasting time and resources each time he did so.

If there was a silver lining to everything, it was that he had chosen a good location to build the first dungeon. The weak monsters meant he wasn’t constantly struggling for every single scrap. They also didn’t seem that interested in destroying the dungeon core, which had given him time to secure it.

He was struggling, yes, but it could have been so much worse. The true test would come when the cultivators entered the dungeon. Only after he saw how they reacted to everything, and how effective the traps were on them, would he have a better baseline for the dungeon.

There were too many unknowns at this time, and while he somewhat liked having the dungeon entirely to himself. He wanted information more. Besides, he truly didn’t think the expedition would survive the experience.

His traps weren’t weak… right?

Suddenly, Nate began to question everything, wondering at how strong or weak the beasts might actually be. He had seen the one shadow monster that was quite obviously stronger and faster than the rest. The rest had seemed mostly comparable to each other.

That didn’t tell him anything about what their strength levels were.

With a groan, he closed the screens and reached for his laptop. He might as well continue his reading from earlier.

Nate read for another half-hour, making sure to take more notes about the process. It wasn’t hard to form a core; it was actually rather easy to do once you had enough energy. The difficult part came from doing it properly and ensuring you made a good, high-quality core. It also became more difficult to do as you gained energy.

A person’s meridians were only meant to hold so much energy without a core. If you went over that limit, it became difficult to control. It was possible, that’s how the best cores were made. It was just many times harder than normal.

Nate glanced at the readout of the computer on his wrist. The energy was meant to be stored in his meridians and eventually transferred to his core when it was formed. Yet he somehow had energy, with broken meridians and a deformed half-core.

He hadn’t tried cultivating since he’d taken over this body months earlier, but maybe it was something he should try. There was time, and he had nothing particularly more interesting to do at the moment.

Thankfully, it was something he had stumbled on how to do in his readings early on. There were many ways to go about the process. Some were more effective than others, while some could cause damage to your system if done incorrectly. By and large, however, there was no one single method that was better than the others.

Cultivating was a matter of meditation and taking in foreign energy into yourself. Or at least that’s how the books always described it.

If you could meditate, then you could cultivate. Maybe not well, but you could do it. The hard part came from learning to know yourself and understanding what worked best for you. Each cultivator eventually built an inner model of themselves that represented who they were and what they understood to be true.

A cultivator who believed the truth of crossing space lay in eating a bagel would still be able to use dimensional abilities. That was his truth, however, it may not be a real truth and would therefore have a lower power and efficiency.

That was why no one looked to cultivators for wisdom and truth. They chose what they wanted to be true and made it so. If they believed in it enough, then that is what it became.

Of course, that isn’t something that he would need to worry about for some time. That was beyond everyone’s ability in this city. Even George Trellow hadn’t managed to reach that level yet. If he had, then healing Nate wouldn’t have been a problem.

Regardless, this was as good a time as any to start meditating on himself and begin cultivating again. It was a skill he needed to practice at some point. Especially if he needed to know himself and learn what worked best all over again.

In his current state, there was no way he knew either of those two things.

Nate closed his laptop and moved his notebook to the side, before sitting up on his bed and closing his eyes. He wasn’t going to start with a Lotus position. He wasn’t a monk, after all. But he did want to be comfortable.

Leaning against the wall next to his bed, he closed his eyes and began following the basic meditation tips from the books. Taking slow, deep breaths, concentrating on his heart rate until everything else fell away. Then, once he felt the first sparks of energy entering his body, he could begin the rest of the process.

That was where the fun began, where each person learned what worked for them. How they cultivated best, how their meridians liked to be used. Everything changed from person to person. Subtly affecting their skills and everything else.

Only the basics could be taught. For the best results, you had to forge your own path.

Not that there weren’t people out there who didn’t take the easy route. However, they generally belonged to groups and sects that were trying to grow their power rapidly. They rarely lasted long, but that never stopped them from trying.