My second life as a dungeon

As I woke up I felt full of energy, almost as if I hadn’t spent the past three days hiking and fighting tons of monsters. I didn’t know why my body always had so much energy but I planned on using it to the fullest. I wanted to immediately start building my third floor but I had promised Val that we were going to celebrate getting our classes as soon as we got back and I wanted to do that before anything else.

I jumped out of my bed and strode over to Val’s room before knocking on her door. I heard some movement coming from the room for a minute until Val called out to me ‘Come in.’ As I walked into the room I realised that I must have woken Val up as she looked quite sleepy and her hair, which was now starting to go below her ears, was incredibly messy.

‘So I have been thinking about what we could do as a celebration’ I said while blushing, I was a little embarrassed about my idea, unfortunately I couldn’t come up with anything better to do, ‘I wasn’t really sure what to do since there isn’t much around here, the only thing I could come up with was to have a picnic in one of the nearby fields. We don’t have to if you think it's dumb though.’

I kind of felt like I was back in secondary school asking a girl out on a date as I waited for Val to give me an answer. Luckily I didn’t have to wait long as a second later Val exclaimed excitedly ‘That sounds like a wonderful idea, don’t be silly!’ before looking around for something before turning to me with a blush of her own, ‘Um, could you make me a dress please? I don’t have anything nice that would be good for a picnic. It can just be anything that you think would look good on me.’

‘I am happy that you like my idea, it would be my pleasure to make you a dress.’ I said before concentrating for a second as I materialised a light green dress. It went up to the neck, was sleeveless, the skirt went three quarters down her legs and was loose so that it could blow in the wind. As I handed it to her I could tell she liked it from the happy expression on her face ‘I’ll let you put this on as I get everything else ready.’  

I only had to wait a few minutes for Val to put on the dress and it fit her incredibly well, the light green complimented her blonde hair and, even though she wasn’t very curvy, it extenuated the curves she had. All in all I was very pleased with my decision and, by the smile on her face, so did Val. After a short walk we reached the portal and was greeted by a fine sunny day.

We wanted to have some peace and quiet so we walked in the opposite direction of the guild and out of the clearing. It had been officially summer for over a month now but today it truly felt like it. The weather was pleasantly warm, the birds were chirping, there were a few clouds in the sky and the wind softly blew past us every now and again.

I had a basket with a cover on it in one arm and one of Val’s arms wrapped around the other as we walked to our destination. It didn’t take us long to find the perfect spot for our picnic, it was at the edge of the clearing so very few people would be here but we would still be able to people watch from far away. So I unwrapped the basket before putting the blanket on the floor, placing the basket on it and sitting down with Val deciding to sit next to me.

The basket had a variety of food in it. A couple of sandwiches with different fillings, a fruit salad with grapes, blackberries and strawberries among other berries as well as an apple and rhubarb crumble. It also had a bottle of blackcurrant juice and a pair of cups in it. ‘This is some typical picnic food from where I grew up.’ I said a little sheepishly as I opened the basket, ‘I hope you like it.’

‘It looks lovely,’ Val said as we started to dig in. We spent a few hours slowly eating everything that I had brought as we chatted about anything that was on our minds. When I felt comfortable I asked Val to turn away from me so that I could comb her hair until it was tidy. Once I finished Val returned the favour and combed my hair for a while, my hair may not have been messy but it was still very relaxing.

Eventually we ran out of stuff to eat and it was getting late so we returned to the dungeon and said goodbye to each other. I was very happy that Val had enjoyed the picnic and hoped that we could do more stuff like it in the future. I had a feeling that Val felt the same but I wasn’t sure as I have always struggled at reading people.

The picnic had left me with a full stomach and a happy feeling in my heart but I couldn’t daydream about it all day so I started the construction of my third floor straight away. A few minutes after I said goodbye to Val I thought initialise third floor creation

I didn’t have a concrete plan in mind for this floor so I took a minute to look over my options before deciding on one. Once I was happy that I knew what I wanted I sent my intent to the system and the screen disappeared. By the time I got to the core room the system had finished creating the third floor so I teleported into it.

There wouldn’t be a portal until I was ready to open it up to delvers and I wanted to see what it would be like for the delvers while building it so that I would hopefully need to make less changes. That said I had no doubt that I would still have to make some changes before I was truly happy with it.

The room I teleported into a simple room that was surrounded by stone without any exits, the system must be giving me full reign to make this floor how I liked. The first thing I had to do was expand it so I spent another 635 DP making the floor a 340m by 340m by 10m cuboid of solid rock. While this was going on I started to plan what my encounters would contain.

The monster DP cap this time was 6000 points of which I set aside 1050 for my boss so I had 4950 left to spend on my encounters. If I created nine encounters that were in three different difficulty groups then the three hard encounters would each get 750 DP for the hard encounters. The medium encounters would each get 525 DP and finally the easy encounters would receive 375 DP each.

Now I just had to decide what each fight would have in them, which would take a bit of calculation and balancing. As I went about doing this I realised that I had never had a decent look at the Oozes stat sheet so I decided to do that now. 

It seemed like the Ooze was very similar to the slimes that it had evolved from except that it was now able to ignore 25 percent of magic damage from any element or source. It could also use its acidic body to deal more damage than a normal slime could but until I got the [Acid Touch] skill at a later level it wouldn’t be able to dissolve any equipment, even non-magical stuff.

Overall it looked like it would fit into the role of tank very well for this floor, it would just need a few fellow monsters to do the damaging. About thirty minutes later I had figured out how to get the most out of my DP allowance.

The first set of encounters that I figured out were the easy ones, in the end they would have: two level 5 Oozes; four level 3 slimes and two level 3 Earth slimes. I felt like this would be decent on this floor as it was only eight monsters and they were quite slow. Each easy encounter cost me 366 points to spawn.

The next encounter I calculated were the medium ones, these would have two level 5 Oozes, six level 4 slimes and three level 4 earth slimes for 552 points. The number of enemies in this encounter hadn’t gone up much but I feel like the extra levels would give the monsters enough power to increase the difficulty enough without overflowing the rooms.

Finally the hard encounters, these would have three level 6 Oozes, five level 5 slimes and three level 5 earth slimes for 745 points. These were to properly test any delvers that tried this floor so I purposefully gave it a bit more strength than I thought was ‘fair’. I planned for the main difficulty of this fight to come from the extra Ooze and the fact that all of them had an extra level.

Unfortunately I had gone above my self-imposed limit by 39 but since I set it myself I wouldn’t face any repercussions like I would if I went over the limit that the system set. I would just have to take the extra DP that I used from the boss fight, bringing it down to 1011 DP from the 1050 I originally planned to use on it.

With the rest of the encounters figured out I just had the boss fight left to sort out so I went back to my calculations. I knew I wanted the main Boss to be a level 10 Ooze so that was already 190 DP accounted for, I would use up the other 821 points by placing nine level 6 standard slimes and five level 5 earth slimes.

I had six points spare but there was nothing I could do with them so I felt happy with my plan. The boss would have enough strong slimes to command that I felt like it would turn out to be a rather challenging fight, it would require any challengers to focus on what they killed which would need good teamwork.

By this point the system had finished expanding the floor a while ago so I got on with creating the rooms and paths. In total I would have sixteen rooms, all of which would be circular. Two of them would be small, circular rooms, with a ten metre radius and placed at opposite corners of the floor, one for the entrance to the floor and the other for the core/exit room.

Another two of them would be huge, circular rooms, eighty metres wide, both placed in the ‘upper’ third of the floor. One would end up being the boss room while the other would be my first safe zone. The twelve remaining rooms would then be split up into four categories: three small rooms, each with a chest placed in them; three medium rooms, housing the three easy encounters; three big rooms, with a medium encounter in each of them; and finally three huge rooms, these would get the final hard encounters.

The small room had a radius of fifteen metres and then each time the size of the room increased its radius would increase by five metres. I placed these rooms at random so that there was no pattern and would keep any divers on their toes, at least for their first dive.

Once I had finished my first go through the floor I went through it again, this time adding a bit of décor, this included stuff like stalactites, stalagmites, full stone columns and a variety of bioluminescent mushrooms. These went all over the floor but a few rooms got a bit more décor added to it, for example I covered the safe zone with moss and turned the ceiling into the centre of a crystal geode.

I ended up liking this so much that I added it to about a quarter of the other rooms, including the boss fight rooms. I was almost done decorating the floor but the safe zone still felt a little barren so I added three small buildings into it, all of them were thirty metres long by thirty metres wide and went from the floor of the room to the ceiling.

The first building was a general goods store where any diver could buy supplies if they had run out for any reason or if they hadn’t prepared for the next floors. The second building was a bookstore where most of the books it contained were only fantasy stories but it also had a few books able to increase the level of someone’s skill if they already had it at the minor rank except it was incredibly expensive.

The third, and final, building was an inn where any diver could stay for as long as they wanted to. Since I didn’t need money everything here could instead be bought using mana as I was able to convert it into DP. Most of the cost would go into replacing whatever was bought but I kept 25% of the payment as profit.

The only issue left was that none of these buildings had staff, luckily any monster created in safe zones wouldn’t count towards the total monster point cap but they couldn’t do anything that might cause harm to a diver, even by lying about the dangers ahead.

With this in mind I chose to place Kobolds down as I thought they were cute. The two shops got one kobold each and the inn got two as I felt like that would be busier than the shops. Usually monsters created by mana would attack anything on sight but I had full control of how they were created so I just created them without any lust for blood.

Now that I was finally done with decorating I went around and placed the monsters in the corresponding rooms. Something I noticed while doing this was that as the slimes increased in level they not only got more energetic but they also got bigger, to the point that the Ooze slime was three metres wide. I still couldn’t tell exactly what level they were without the system telling me but it was something to note for the future.

With everything done I was finally happy with my floor after spending so I opened it up and received a notice that I was expecting.

I was slightly annoyed that I had unlocked the next tier of chests after I had already finished creating the floor. I didn’t complain though as I could swap any chests I already placed down for iron chests so I made all the chests on this floor and the previous floor iron.

As I left the floor I checked how long I had taken only to be surprised as I had taken a full week to do everything when it felt like I had only been at it for a day at most, I had a feeling this had something to do with me being part dungeon but there was nothing I could do about it at the moment so I didn’t worry too much.