DungeonFall – [A Dungeon Creation / Cultivation Story]

“You didn’t have to come out after me, you know,” Nate told the girls as he grabbed his bag from his locker.

“Meh, he was annoying, and we both have people at home who can answer our questions,” Lindsay replied while Angie nodded along.

“Still, I appreciate it.”

“Still, I’m surprised he got the answer so completely wrong.” Angie looked back at the classroom in annoyance. “I was under the impression that the teachers here were better than that.”

Nate shrugged. “I had no real expectations of them in the first place. That wasn’t the original question I was going to ask either, but I didn’t like his attitude.” He noticed the time and shook his head. “I don’t suppose I can get a ride home from you?”

“Sure,” Angie pulled out her phone and typed away on it. “The car will be waiting for us by the time we get outside.”

“Well, let’s hurry and leave before Jace, Chad, or anyone else comes to find us and be annoying.” Lindsay pushed them both toward the school entrance.

“You three hold on! Where do you think you’re going?”

Lindsay cursed softly and glared and them both. “I told you this would happen.”

“We’re leaving. What does it look like we’re doing?” Angie said, turning to face the speaker.

It was a teacher that they only recognized because they had passed him in the hall before.

“Leaving early. However, shouldn’t you be in classes right now?” The man demanded.

“We could say the same to you, besides is it really any of your business if we decide to leave early?” Nate asked, unsure if the teacher was being overzealous or if something else was going on.

“Who’s your homeroom teacher?” The man demanded.

“You seem to be really interested in us for some reason,” Lindsay pointed out, her eyes narrowing. “Is there a specific reason you feel the need to be going above and beyond what your job entails at this moment?”

The teacher ground his teeth, failing to respond.

“You’re right, it’s kind of creepy. He just appeared and suddenly stopped us. How do we know that he is even a teacher here? I’ve never seen him before.” Angie cried out, getting into the act, and stepping behind Nate. Her phone appeared in her hand again as she sent out another rapid-fire message.

“I do not appreciate the three of you trying to make a fool of me like this!” The man ground out while taking a step towards them.

They stepped back, the lighthearted atmosphere vanishing in a second.

Nate could distinctly feel the weakness of his own body, as a pressure began to bear down on them.

Lindsay stood in front of him, a worried expression flashing across her face as she saw how pale he had become. The teacher had only released a portion of his cultivation realm on them, and this was the result. It was something the man should have known better than to do.

“I don’t appreciate you threatening the young lady or her friends!” Angie’s driver had arrived and immediately come inside to help when he received a distress message from her.

A punch seemed to materialize right behind the teacher’s head and sent him flying into the wall.

“Know your place!” The driver huffed before quickly straightening his suit and bowing to Angie. “My lady, I apologize if I arrived late.”

“No,” She walked towards the teacher’s twitching body. The fool’s head was stuck inside the concrete wall. “You arrived right on time, thank you.”

Lindsay nodded. “Yes, thank you.”

Nate slowly sank to the floor, his legs giving out as the pressure on them disappeared. While he had been fighting in the dungeon using his avatar, this had been something else. He hadn’t been prepared for this conflict.

“Are you going to be alright?” Angie asked, seeing how pale he still was.

“Yeah, just give me a moment. This isn’t the first time I’ve been exposed to cultivation pressure like that.” He struggled to his feet.

Lindsay scowled at the teacher and gave his limp form a hard kick. “Come on, I’ll help you walk. We need to get out of here before people come to see what happened.”

Classroom doors up and down the hall were opening as people poked their heads out. The cameras in the hall would reveal the truth of the matter to people who really mattered, regardless.

“I don’t suppose you know how long it’s going to take to get that medication?” Nate asked as Lindsay helped him along.

Angie shook her head. “They should have already finished making it. So… I would guess it has either been shipped already or is being prepped for it. If that’s the case, then it’ll be a few more days, assuming the transport doesn’t run into any trouble.”

“Does that happen often?” By that point in the conversation, they were outside and nearing the waiting car.

“Often enough that it makes regularly shipping items between cities a pain and a rather costly endeavor. Each trip that gets made needs to have a lot of items to make up the initial cost and pay for the cultivators guarding the caravan.” Angie slid into the car first, followed by Lindsay.

“Was your family able to find enough items for the caravan?”

Lindsay snorted. “Trust me, there is never a shortage of things needing to be shipped between two cities. Each place has their specialties or random items that can be sold, but the big one is always food. We have a lot of orchards that supply a large portion of our food.” Nate had noticed that fruit had become a large staple of his diet since coming into this world. “The city where your medicine is coming from specializes in wheat and corn fields, among other things.”

“What’s going to happen with that teacher you think?” He asked after they had finished talking about the medicine.

“I’m not sure, an argument could be made that he was simply doing his job.” Angie pointed out while Lindsay frowned and crossed her arms. “At the same time, I do think that he went a little too far in his efforts.”

“There was something off about him for sure,” Her friend muttered. “I wouldn’t want him anywhere near kids, that’s for sure.”

Nate snorted, but couldn’t help and agree. There had been something off about the entire encounter.

A few minutes later, they pulled up outside his home and he waved goodbye to the girls.

“Mom, dad?” He called out.

The house was empty, and he quickly sent off a message to them both, letting them know he was already home. He didn’t want them worrying if they went to pick him up and he didn’t appear.

Grabbing some water and a quick snack from the fridge, he headed upstairs and opened the screens for the dungeon.

Right away he could see that some of the damage had begun fixing itself as it would normally. However, at the same time, the sheer amount and severity of the damage the cultivators had caused was creating other problems. It was struggling to rebuild everything he had done originally.

At this point, it was almost better to just keep the rooms as they were, and redesign all the traps that had been destroyed from the ground up. It was a pain, especially when it came to the ones he had already upgraded. At the same time, he had already been getting more than a few hints he needed to go about things in a different way.

His previous method had been rather haphazard, and one of learning. Now he knew, for the most part, what kind of monsters and beasts he was facing. That meant he didn’t need to approach its reconstruction in the same manner. He could use this opportunity to fix the flaws and deficiencies in its previous design. Or at least as much as he was able to at this time.

That meant the question he was now faced with was what traps did he keep, and which ones did he swap out? Going even further than that, what would he even exchange them for?

Was it time to throw away certain low-technical, non-fantasy aspects of the dungeon?

Up to this point, he hadn’t really tried to push what he could do with the traps to any extreme. The only thing he knew for sure the dungeon couldn’t do was create any form of life or living matter, though even that wasn’t a hard and fast rule. He was able to create poisons and other things that used micro-organisms.

Regardless, the point was, the dungeon operated by rules, and up to that point, he hadn’t taken advantage of them. It helped that he had no idea what those rules might be, but he was sure they were there.

Now going back to the traps it meant he needed to do some more experiments.

He was the one who had gotten it stuck in his head that he needed to design the dungeon using these kinds of traps. But was that really the case?

Nate was always complaining that the wrist computer hadn’t come with a manual or guide. Well, maybe it had, after a fashion. It was possible it had been guiding his thoughts in subtle ways this entire time.

Or, it was entirely possible that he was overthinking everything and had simply not wanted lasers in this dungeon to save on cost. Either way, it was time to find out.

Propping himself up on his bed with some pillows, he made sure all six screens were up and set to work on fixing the dungeon. For so long, he had been ignoring the pre-made traps that he had almost forgotten the option was even there.

This time, his first order of business was to see what kind of traps it listed. He had never really taken the time to thoroughly explore what it contained before, and wondered if that had been a mistake.

It wasn’t.

The list possessed a few basic traps that were, unfortunately, an ill-fit for this dungeon. However, after that, it had an easy-make option for all the traps he had made through the menu itself. Doing it this way even allowed him to make certain modifications to both the trap itself and the room it was going in.

It seemed he needed to use the menu to design each trap the first time around, and then he could use their listing afterward. It was nice to know, and something that would save him a lot of time going forward.

Closing out of that section of the menu, Nate opened the search menu he used to create the new traps. Before he did anything else, he needed to know if he had been unconsciously guided this entire time. Could he just install laser traps everywhere, or was there some kind of rule in the dungeon that prevented him from doing that?

Did the core need to be a higher level, or was it related to the enemies? All were annoying possibilities that he had no answers to at the moment. But he could learn whether or not it was possible to include them.

Nate cracked his neck and began mumbling to himself. “Alright, if I’m going to place a laser inside this dungeon somewhere, I want it to be in one of three places. Right outside the core, the portal room, or the entrance slash exit. Which one should I go with though?”

He blinked and chuckled. There was no reason to choose. He had a lot of resources right now. The dungeon had reabsorbed all the damaged and broken pieces after a bit, so the amount he had actually lost was incredibly small. Only his energy was on a steady decline.

The amount of energy the dungeon had was the limiting factor in everything, but frankly, there was still a veritable ton of the stuff. He would have almost been able to upgrade the core if they hadn’t wrecked the place.

Regardless, the point remained that he didn’t have to choose. If he could make them, he could just place them in all three places. If he could make them.