DungeonFall – [A Dungeon Creation / Cultivation Story]

Nate nodded in approval at the sheer amount of energy the monster had given him due to how slow it had been. A detriment that reared its head a moment later as a new monster appeared before he could make more changes.

The previous beast had taken so long that whatever timer they ran off of had run down on him already.

At least this one was fairly normal looking, for the most part. It was a rat. A large one for sure, but still just a rat. The tail looked strong but not as flexible as the whips the leopard had. It simply appeared to be an oversized rat.

He watched it for a few more seconds before focusing on his traps. He could feel his body protesting that he had been forcing it to stay awake again to watch the show. That meant he needed to get to sleep soon. However, before he did that, he needed to make sure the path to the Dungeon Core was secure.

Or at least as secure as he could make it.

Which mainly meant lining it with the arrow and spike wall traps. Those were all he could afford either way. His resources were tapped out for the moment. Until a lot more monsters died, he wasn’t going to be making any more large-scale changes to the dungeon.

Which was fine. He already had a fair number of notes that he needed to sleep to properly go through still. The dungeon he had designed was less than optimal in a lot of ways. Some rooms were too large, or too narrow, which kept the monsters from choosing them. There were a lot of things he needed to go through and change.

However, all of that could wait until after his nap, when hopefully he would be feeling better. Nate closed all the screens on his wrist computer and saved his notes in a password-protected file on his laptop.

The pain lancing throughout his entire body wasn’t enough to keep him awake a second longer after his head hit the pillow. He was out of it and didn’t wake again until his parents got home around dinnertime.

“Are you just barely waking up?” His mother asked with concern. Her warm hand felt at his head. “You have a slight fever, but that’s nothing new since the attack.”

Nate stretched out, feeling better after the long nap. Most of the aches and pains that had been bothering him since the night before had vanished, with only a few lingering ones left over. Not counting his knee, of course, that wasn’t going to go away by simply sleeping.

“I’ll be fine, mom. Any word on the medication?”

She shook her head, her eyes drooping as she delivered the bad news. “No change there, I’m afraid. Even the judge can’t order them to make it for you. I’m sorry, sweetie.”

His hand covered hers as he gave her a placating smile. “Are there other options? What about other cities? Can we import it?”

“That’s not the way it works. Each alchemy guild is in charge of its own city, period. We can’t submit orders to another city’s guild. They won’t let us, and it’s not allowed.”

He sighed and let his head thump lightly against the headboard of his bed. “I’ll guess I’m stuck like this until everything blows over then.” He swallowed around the suddenly thick lump in his throat. “Anyway, tell me how your and dad’s day went.”

“Interesting. There was a major change around the portal earlier. Our satellite images are still grainy, but it seems like a structure of some kind suddenly appeared around it. Since then, we haven’t seen any new monsters appear on the images.”

“Oh?” Nate stilled, trying to act normal. “Have any other structures ever appeared? I haven’t heard about them in school before.”

“No, this is the first one. It has a lot of people worried that the zones are about to undergo some change.” She sighed and pushed her hand through his hair before pulling it back with a cringe. “You need to take a shower. Your hair is all greasy. Anyway, they’re thinking of sending a unit in to inspect whatever it is.”

His hand shot out and grabbed her wrist. “Promise me that you and dad won’t be a part of that team. No matter what, please?”

“Are you alright?” She felt his head again with clear concern. “I promise, we wouldn’t get chosen anyway. However, if we did. We’d make sure to refuse.”

“Thank you.” He couldn’t allow his mom and dad to go into the dungeon he was creating. He had just gotten them back. To lose them to his own creation would have been a cruel joke beyond all others. “I’ll go take a shower and then come down for dinner.”

The brace he had on his knee allowed him to walk somewhat normally, but it was painful and he had to keep it on while washing.

The quick shower helped revitalize his mind enough to realize something was wrong with his body. Everything felt slightly different from before, longer, more detailed. Not like the injured semi-marshmallow he had become. A quick visit to the mirror confirmed his suspicions.

The changes he had made to his avatar were slowly being made to his real body as well. It was a good thing he hadn’t chosen one of those more exotic races. He hated to think about what would have happened then.

Each of the changes was almost purely superficial as well. For instance, he had the beginnings of a six-pack, but he wasn’t any stronger.

He was glad he hadn’t gone overboard on any of the modifications, but it did make him curious. What was the purpose of the avatar? If it was to fight in the dungeon, then what would happen to him if it got hurt or even died?

It was something he would need to be very careful about in the future.

For now, though, he needed to worry about getting through a dinner with his parents without saying anything wrong.

Dinner was a mixed affair, with his parents worried about his health still, and the appearance of the so-called structure. They wanted to keep him home for one more day at least, if for no other reason than because they believed he had slept all day.

It was a decision Nate was more than willing to get behind. Studying was a pain, but he enjoyed the socializing that came with school normally. Right now, however, he had something more important that he needed to explore.

There was a lot that needed to be done with the dungeon, especially if cultivators were going to be visiting it soon. After getting a renewed promise from his parents that they wouldn’t be part of any group to investigate, he went back upstairs.

Those groups couldn’t be trusted. In any case, there were too many politics.

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People like his parents would only end up being treated as disposable garbage by the rest, or worse. He had no desire to see them put through that. Thankfully, as a result of what had been done to him, their eyes had been firmly opened to how things worked. They wouldn’t be stupid and willingly forced into one of those groups, either.

Stripping down to his boxers, Nate laid down on his bed and rubbed his knees. He’d forgotten how much growing pains could hurt; it was no wonder he had been so uncomfortable earlier.

Pulling up the notes he had made on his laptop, Nate touched his wrist computer. A new option appeared in the main menu right underneath the now greyed-out ‘Dungeon Creation’ button. The new ‘Dungeon Interface’ was obviously what he was looking for.

Selecting it opened a sub-menu with only a single option on it at the moment. His sole created dungeon. Only after selecting that, did it pull up all the same screens that he had seen from that morning. There were currently two monsters working their way through the dungeon. One of them had gotten close to the exit, while the other had just left the room with the portal.

Nate glanced at the resource counters and sighed. He, or rather the dungeon, hadn’t gotten nearly as much as he had been hoping for. Energy was fairly plentiful. Everything else, on the other hand, not so much. They had increased, but not by as much as he had been hoping.

Then, as he was watching, the monster closest to the exit made a break for it and slipped through. It left behind a large part of its tail, but the beast itself had escaped. No wonder the rest of the resources hadn’t increased as much as he needed them to.

Who knew how many of those things had managed to slip through while he was asleep? He was lucky they hadn’t attacked the core.

It would seem that some of these beasts were smarter than he had been giving them credit for. Nate cracked his neck and made a decision. It was fine. He wouldn’t concentrate on those monsters. He would focus on the weaker ones for now.

He would build up slowly. This was a marathon, not a sprint. This dungeon needed to be able to take care of itself while he wasn’t around. Something that the core seemed perfectly designed to do. He just needed to make sure that it had the opportunity to do so.

With that in mind, he began another round of changes in the dungeon.

The goal this time was to make the exit harder to get through. He might need to make it similar to how he had done the core, except he still wanted to keep monsters away from that. He would see about far he could take this place later. For now, he just wanted to keep the things inside for as long as possible until they gave up and died.

There would be no moving walls in his labyrinth-like dungeon. Not yet, at least. He was too focused on traps. Unfortunately, he had no other choice with which to attack the invading monsters.

The dungeon couldn’t create anything living, or even a facsimile of it. There would be no horde of monsters under his own command, or skeleton warriors for that matter either. It wouldn’t even let him create an apple. Anything with life seemed like a non-starter.

Traps were the only way to go, at least for the moment. He had plenty of notes to work off of from before, and he made use of them now. Beasts were different from humans. They weren’t driven by greed, or at least not the same greed. He couldn’t hide treasure throughout the dungeon and expect them to explore the place.

They seemed solely focused on escaping the dungeon. He could use that. He just needed to set the place up in a way where it wasn’t one long death corridor. Nothing would be willing to walk through that, not even these monsters. Besides, he had a feeling the dungeon wouldn’t let him anyway.

He was hesitant to say it had rules, so much as it seemed to have certain guidelines he needed to follow most of the time. There had already been a couple of times when he had gotten away with minor infractions.

Like there weren’t supposed to be any traps in the portal room, yet the doorknob counted as a trap. It was a silly, almost inconsequential thing, but it meant something. He wasn’t sure what exactly, but once he did, hopefully, things would begin to move faster.

Nate added another couple of wall traps around the exit and a pressure plate for the spike floor. They were the final changes he was going to make for the moment.

There was one other thing he wanted to try out that night, and he was getting tired.

He exited the ‘Dungeon Interface’ and moved over to his ‘Avatar’ instead. It was time to see if this thing was good for anything. He selected the option and was greeted with his naked form and a new menu with two options. ‘Equip’, and ‘Don Avatar’.

It wasn’t hard to understand what donning his avatar meant. However, he certainly didn’t want to do that while nude and without a weapon.

With that in mind, his first selection was an obvious choice.