DungeonFall – [A Dungeon Creation / Cultivation Story]

There was still another day’s worth of time before the new dungeon came into being. Now that he was in his avatar though, he was able to manipulate certain things in far more detail than he could before. It didn’t matter which dungeon he was actually in at the time. Which was nice, as it made it easy to get around the one rather sizable downside of fixing the same floor of the dungeon that the avatar was on.

All the traps would go inactive at that time while the upgrades he had ordered were being built. This way, he never had to worry about that negative at all.

Nate relaxed inside the core room of the dungeon and began working on the traps for the new dungeon.

He was still working on the idea that the traps would be futuristic. Earlier, while sitting on the couch, he hadn’t seen any options for what he had in mind. Now that he was in his avatar form, he was getting the feeling that it was merely a matter of time. The dungeon just needed him to finish one of the traps on his own first, so it could understand what he wanted. It had bits and pieces of what he wanted, but not as one complete whole.

Not yet, at least.

Thankfully, the trap crafting menu was a fairly hefty beast. There was a search bar at the top that he had used extensively in the beginning of the trap creation process for the first dungeon. After a certain point, he had gradually stopped using it though, as he had found the different items and traps he wanted to use.

This time around, he wanted to use advanced traps, and that bar was the key to finding the components to everything. There was no chance he would be able to create a proper laser from the ground up. There were just too many items involved in their creation.

He had seen one in operation when he was younger on a college campus. Granted, their overall construction had gotten much simpler since those days. Of course, their parts had also gotten infinitely more complicated as well. Not that any of that mattered. He had died before seeing anything in action outside of videos on the internet, and something told him that wasn’t enough to make one from scratch.

Luckily, he didn’t need to make it from such meager beginnings. He could, instead, after a few initial steps, skip to where it would be a usable trap. The search bar at the top, showing its usefulness once more.

He did discover one oddity when he did things this way — well, two, actually. The first was that the lasers each appeared as a blackboxed setup that he couldn’t change. The dungeon would let him use them as traps, however, there was nothing inside the boxes at the moment. For the first time, he needed to research a tech tree with the Dungeon Core before he could do anything more with them.

It was a matter of how efficiently the dungeon was using resources. It could blackbox the tech, and make it work, but doing that was extremely inefficient. Each shot of the laser in the current fashion would cost far more than it normally should. From there, once the insides of the trap had been properly filled out, the Dungeon Core could continue to research the tech tree and make it powerful and efficient.

The second oddity was related to the first, in a way. The blackboxes could not be properly integrated into the dungeon. That meant the traps this time around would be fully visible, and able to be destroyed as well.

It was a rather interesting find to be sure, and suddenly he was a little glad that traps couldn’t be taken out of the dungeon. That sort of tech would absolutely overturn everything this world knew. However, that didn’t mean he wasn’t annoyed that he couldn’t use it for his own purposes either. Unfortunately, that was life, give and take.

The dungeon system had set the boundaries, and he was willing to work inside them on this one. All of the truly cool tech he could think of making at the moment took up the precious free time he didn’t have or would have been too eye-catching in any case.

As soon as Nate placed the first of the laser traps, it was added to the list of pre-built traps. He really needed the Dungeon Core to be finished before he could start doing anything even remotely fancy with them. All he could do at the moment was to place them. With the older style traps, he could make upgrades to them himself, at least to a certain level. With these tech-based traps, that wasn’t even a possibility anymore.

It wasn’t a downside that he had considered before that moment, but it certainly was one. The new dungeon would -hopefully- be much more powerful and versatile than the first one. However, in return, he would be depending on the Dungeon Core far more.

Again, give and take.

He placed a few more of the laser traps before stopping to think about what other trap he could use. Nate had no way of knowing if they would be effective yet, let alone how energy and resource-hungry they would be. Just because the resource counter between the dungeons was combined, didn’t mean he suddenly started to run a deficit, simply because each shot of the laser cost a thousand times more than it could ever hope to bring in. He wasn’t running a government, but a dungeon.

Nate started jotting more ideas down, using the same method he had discovered before. Some of them would be far too complicated to be workable, while others had some potential. It all depended on how much the dungeon system was able to assist him in their creation. It had obviously done a lot for the laser, pulling a fair bit of the information from his mind if he had to guess.

It gave him hope that his future ideas might work, though the research the Dungeon Core would need to do for each would also increase quite a bit. In the old games he used to play, they were called ‘Tech Trees’, and generally, there would be one overarching research branch for everything. However, if he did things this way, it would be more likely that every individual trap would need to be researched.

The tech tree wouldn’t come into play until the next tree, when it was able to consolidate all the information this one had learned. At least, that is what his gut was telling him. He would ask Aura what she knew when she came back to life in a while.

For now, he worked on constructing more weapons and possible traps.

Some were total blackbox affairs that he knew would be prohibitively expensive to use. For those, he only tried to place one or two in places where they wouldn’t be going off constantly.

The others he at least had a basic, if extremely rudimentary understanding of how they functioned. Like the railguns, those would still need a lot of research done to back them up, but the existing knowledge he already had would prevent them from being complete energy sinks.

Regardless, he had chosen a technology-based dungeon, and that was exactly what he was going to do. If it took a little bit to make it fully useable, then that was fine, just as long as it didn’t send him into the red. If that was even possible.

Nate had seen how many dimensional zones there actually were just in his area of the continent. The number was much higher than what he had seen on the map at school.

Whatever the end goal of the dungeon system, this wasn’t going to be a short project. Whether it was closing the portals, if that was possible, or something else, the sheer number involved meant he was going to be at this for a long time.

Sure, after a certain point, he had to imagine that he would sort of start hitting a rolling stride in resources. Where he would have so many that he would be able to create the next dungeon and simply dominate it from the get-go. Considering how many resources he already had, that might now even be too far off unless the traps he was building truly were thirsty POSs.

All of those were concerns for a future Nate. Right now, all he needed to do was worry about constructing traps and weapons, and making sure his first dungeon wasn’t going to be overrun by greedy cultivators.

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It was a balance.

For the moment, he kept the variety of traps and weapons high, but the number of each was somewhat low. Until they could be properly researched, it was simply too dangerous to have too many of each otherwise.

He took care to place them in the rooms where he thought there would be the most traffic, or they would be unavoidable.

Finally, with a few minutes to spare before Aura came back to life, he finished his preparations on the new dungeon. It still had a day before the Core was finished and the dungeon came into being, but he was largely finished. The only changes he would make to it now would be minor ones or items that came to him in the moment.

For now, it was as ready as he thought he could make it without ever having seen the blighted elves in action.

With that taken care of, he closed out of the interface and instead opened a few camera screens of the dungeon he was in. The number of beasts on the second floor had decreased with the modifications he had made before. The tunnel was still packed though, with the occasional beast getting pushed into the room and then into the abyss below. Without the floor there to catch them, they simply died one after another.

The tiny bridge, on the other hand was still as popular as ever, and still as hard to cross as before.

As soon as Aura revived, it would be back to the same farming spot he had created the other night for him. He wasn’t going to force her to participate if she didn’t want to. He knew firsthand how… invigorating and downright terrifying death could be.

Nate tended to avoid it, when possible, for that exact reason. It hurt, and it sucked. Yet Aura had been doing the opposite. She was dying every night. He wasn’t sure it was healthy for her, heck; he didn’t know if she was trying to punish herself for surviving when the rest of her family hadn’t or if it was something else.

All he knew was that he needed to talk to her about it before it became a problem, or a larger one, if it already was.

There was still some time left before she was due to appear, and Nate immediately set about cultivating.

If he was being honest with himself, then he did not spend nearly enough time cultivating at the moment. However, he had reasons for that. Namely, the rainbow orbs he received from training inside the dungeon were far more effective, time-wise. There was also just how busy he was as well.

There was so much that he needed to do each day. School, training, working on the meditation arts, working on the dungeon, -which easily took up the most time, especially lately hanging out with his parents. All of that left him with little time to actually cultivate like he was supposed to.

He figured most kids did their cultivating at night before going to bed. But he was still actively doing other things at that time. Maybe he just needed to better manage his time, or perhaps he simply needed to not worry about it.

He had been managing fine up to that point, after all. He wouldn’t say everything was perfect, but for now, things were still under control.

Nate would revisit the topic after the second dungeon was completed, and he had finished working on the meditation art. At this point in time, he still had too much going on to even feel somewhat safe messing with his current process.