DungeonFall – [A Dungeon Creation / Cultivation Story]

“Well, at least she made sure to include some decent provisions in the agreement,” George muttered when Nate finished his tale.

Nathan shrugged. “She didn’t seem to think it would matter. Right before I was asked to leave, they had started talking about how the boy in question was ignoring the requirements. He still considered Angela his, he just didn’t care about doing his own part to maintain the agreement.”

“That gives the Chrighton’s a good excuse to push the entire matter into the past. They might have to deal with the boy, but until then, the McFaddens shouldn’t make any individual moves.” He sighed and shook his head. “I truly thought Trissa was smarter than this.”

Nate opened his mouth and then closed it a second later. He didn’t know the woman well enough to truly comment. All he could say was that he didn’t approve of what she had done on any level. She had sold her daughter after a fashion. It didn’t matter that she had worked all sorts of items and provisions into the agreement.

She had still done it without asking Angie first.

“You don’t approve,” George stated, already knowing the boy didn’t.

“No, I don’t. I don’t like what she did. It feels wrong, like she was selling her daughter, without first asking for her input. I know how that would make me feel as a guy, and I can only imagine it’s worse for Angelica. I thought we had moved past selling our family members for profitable deals years ago.”

“Some places in the world never moved past that practice, but you’re right, it’s not exactly common in our society.”

With that, George opened the door and walked out, leaving him in peace. He was going to go down and give Niall and Nina a few more ideas for their new business while Nate recovered from the session.

Nate closed the door behind the healer and shuffled over to his bed. He couldn’t say for certain, but he thought his body was reacting to the healing sessions worse each time. Everything hurt and was sore. It reminded him of how his body had been in his last life.

Thankfully, he knew everything would feel better in the morning.

Changing into his pajamas, he slipped into bed and entered his avatar without delay. There was too much he needed to do to the dungeon and too little time in which to do it. It was a good thing that the dungeon was still overflowing with resources from earlier.

He was going to need them, assuming, of course, he could come up with decent ways to make the traps deadlier.

There was also the added problem that he was now needing to design them for humans and monsters. One or the other was relatively easy, but not both. At this point, he somewhat knew what to expect when it came to dealing with the beasts that came through the portal.

Human cultivators, on the other hand, were something else entirely. His experience with them was almost non-existent. He had no idea what the baseline was for their powers, or how fast and strong they were.

That was just when talking about normal cultivators, like the ones who had failed to survive the first room of the dungeon earlier. What was coming were elites. It was entirely possible that he was overreacting and worried for nothing.

Unfortunately, the growing chill he could feel between his shoulder blades wouldn’t let him believe that theory for long.

Whoever was coming was more dangerous than he could imagine, and the dungeon needed to be ready. Or he would lose everything.

Settling into his avatar, Nate entered the dungeon and pulled up the cameras. The first thing he needed to do was assess how dangerous the area was first. It would do him no good if all he did was die right after entering because he wasn’t careful.

The viewing screens showed two separate monsters strolling through the inside of the dungeon. One was even nearby and in the corridor, just outside the dungeon core. That meant for the moment at least he was trapped.

Until that monster either died or left for a different area of the dungeon, he wasn’t going anywhere either.

There hadn’t been a chance to perfect all of the traps he had made in the beginning, and some of them just plain didn’t work. He had learned a lot since he first created the dungeon, and many of the ideas he had used had proven less than effective.

There was something to be said about keeping things simple. Simple things were easy to build on and fix, the same could not be said for complicated items.

He felt as though he was constantly searching for new ways to create traps. It was stressful. This was only the first dungeon as well. What would he be like when he had two or three or even dozens if that ever happened?

It was a goal that, depending on his current mood, he wasn’t even sure he wanted.

Not that he was going to let those future worries stop him from accomplishing something with his current dungeon. Of course, deciding what to do at the current moment was a little more difficult than normal. If he made any changes, then the trap in question would deactivate and the beast could simply walk right past it if it realized.

He had already made a fair number of changes to the traps in those corridors from before. Really, all he needed to do is the upgrade that would perfect them to their current best form.

However, he couldn’t help but hesitate for a different reason. Standing this close to the core reminded him of the cost to upgrade it. It was something that he hadn’t even considered before, but it did come with a couple of benefits. Such as being able to upgrade all the previously perfected traps again.

They would go from a perfected level one trap to a perfected level two. He had no idea what that entailed, but it certainly sounded impressive. He would need to have enough resources left over to buy each upgrade though. They didn’t just come along with the upgraded core for free.

Still, it was tempting. Did he want the guaranteed ability he knew he would get from making the existing traps better? Or did he want to roll the dice and use up almost all the dungeon’s resources on upgrading the core?

Well, he said ability, but really it was just the increased effectiveness of the traps.

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Actually, now that he thought about it, he couldn’t even remember how much he needed for the core upgrade. He remembered it being a lot and only requiring energy, but that was it. Deconstructing parts of the dungeon had given him a lot of other resources, not just energy. Thinking about it with a clear head, he still might not have enough energy anyway.

Nate glanced at the counter for the dungeon’s energy resource and shook his head. There was a lot there at over thirty-five thousand. Frankly, it was far more than he was expecting. However, seeing that number was enough to jog his memory, and he needed even more.

The cost to upgrade the core to level two was fifty thousand units of energy.

It was a sum that was frankly ridiculous and only viable if you purchased it right away instead of expanding the dungeon as he had. Another of those hidden items he was sure would have been mentioned in the manual. If such an item had existed.

Or maybe he was wrong and upgrading the core didn’t do anything special for the dungeon.

Shaking his head, Nate focused on the screens, showing the two beasts still inside the dungeon with him. Both were smarter than average and appeared to know that there were traps in the rooms. They were content to avoid those rooms, going around where they could, and simply laying down in wait when they couldn’t.

Deciding to just go for it, Nate walked out into the corridor and began the process of perfecting the traps. He had upgraded them but never done this final step. Of course, he still couldn’t do it for the last room either. Not with the monster in there waiting.

The other couple of rooms and corridors, however, were open territory for him to do with as he wished. Not to mention, if he got lucky, then maybe the beast at the end would try to attack him. He still needed a shirt and armor, among other things.

He worked his way toward the last room, gathering up his courage every step of the way. Only to find the beast had gotten bored and left a few minutes before he arrived. It was now headed toward where the other monster was lying in wait.

He wouldn’t be getting another piece of equipment or energy from it, but he could now finish perfecting the final traps in the corridor.

While Nate did want a shirt, his chest kept getting cold. He could live without one for a while longer. There were more important things that needed to be focused on.

The elite human cultivators were coming, and he was going to make sure the dungeon was ready. Or at least as ready as he could with the information he had on hand.

Nate sighed into the empty room. The enormity of the task he had been given suddenly threatened to overwhelm him. There was just so much he didn’t know, and it was up to him to make sure the core stayed safe.

The rest of the dungeon could fall and be destroyed, but not that. Which meant he needed to make some changes to the dungeon. An addition or two that would keep the humans from looking too closely at certain areas.

Namely, he needed to add one or two treasure chests, and hope that the system would actually fill them with something. Although considering how he had to fight the dungeon monsters just to get his own equipment, he wasn’t going to hold his breath.

It would be entirely too cruel if he could have simply bought some equipment this entire time. However, that could wait until he had finished everything else. That was not something that required him to be in avatar form to accomplish.

Nate finished the last room in the corridor leading towards the core and began concentrating on what to do next. For now, he wanted to finish the room he hadn’t been able to complete the night before. He had worked on them then but hadn’t been able to start the final upgrade process.

For a simple and strategically unimportant room like this, he was just letting the system perfect the traps already in place. He wasn’t making any special changes as he had for a few of the rooms. He tended to save those for the rooms and corridors that were a little more important.

The rooms leading to the core had gotten a few extra options to them when he had perfected the traps.

He continued to work through the night, upgrading each room as he came to it. He held back from perfecting any more of them, for the simple reason of expediency. Besides, he had a different goal in mind at this point. He wanted the dungeon fully up and running before he woke up for school in the morning.

If he could perfect two more of the rooms by the exit of the dungeon, then that would be even better. Regardless, he wanted every room to finally be done. He might change the traps in them later, but they would at least be fully up and operational.

It was with those thoughts in mind that he spent the night dodging the monsters that kept appearing. He would continually backtrack and slip off into side rooms, when possible, all to avoid them. It was a somewhat cowardly process that worked well all the way up until he reached the last few rooms of the dungeon.

That was where the possible escape routes ended. He had erased them earlier.

It was there as he was working on perfecting the traps that he suddenly met his end. A shadow-tipped tail suddenly plunged through his chest, creating a stifling pressure around his lungs. The pain came several moments later.

It was the same kind of beast that had killed him the first time. Only this one didn’t bother playing around with his body, something that he was immensely grateful for. It had already gotten past one of the perfected traps, and there was the faint smell of copper and iron in the air from an open wound. Admittedly, though, that could have been from his own gaping and dripping chest.

It flung Nate into a nearby wall with bone-crushing force, and he passed onto the realm of sleep for the rest of the night.