NOVEL NEXT Chapter 3 – First days of my second life (Part 2/2)
I wanted to start with what would end up being the most expensive room in terms of DP, the boss room, first I spent 100 DP on a cockatrice before I designated it as the floor boss which automatically gave it 2 more levels, bumping it past the usual cap of level five as floor bosses were special exceptions. This cost an additional 50 DP and 10 mana which told me that the number in the brackets was how much levelling a monster would cost.
I was still out of mana from doing everything else on this floor so it took ten minutes to summon the cockatrice and another ten minutes to turn it into the floor boss. At the end of the fifteen minutes I was face to face with the cockatrice as it squawked happily and walked over to me. At first it was weird to look at as it was simultaneously like nothing I had ever seen before but also had features from creatures that inhabited my old world.
It had the face of a chicken, its body was quite bulbous and spherical while being covered with tiny, soft feathers that almost looked like fur. On each side of its body sprouted leathery wings reminiscent of a bat but expanded to have a wingspan of approximately five feet. Beneath the body were two thick scaly legs almost as if someone had chopped off a lizards legs and then attached them to the cockatrice. Once I was finished examining it I moved on to how its stats had changed compared to the pattern that I used to make it.
Looking at the stats I figured out a few things, firstly, each level added 1 point to a stat at random as long as it was a stat that the creature used in its fighting. Secondly, the HP and MP seemed to be the used stat times the level, for example the Con (17) times the level (7) is 119, using this information I could make an educated guess that all stats worked like this. This meant that leveling even once would be very worth it as it would increase the monster's stats incredibly fast, especially at early levels.
Next I placed 2 life slimes and a null slime into the boss room as minions using a total of 180 DP and 12 mana. I only had 520 DP left over for the other rooms so I moved onto the rest of the floor, I didn’t have much control over the loot room as I only had access to wooden chests that cost 35 DP and 9 mana so I just put that down in the middle small room leaving me with 485 DP to split evenly between two encounters.
Since I was new to this whole experience, even if I had read stories with similar scenarios in them, I decided to experiment a little bit to see what would be the best way of placing my monsters going forward. The first encounter room would house eleven standard slimes each level two, costing a total of 220 DP and 44 MP, and would test if having more weaker monsters would overwhelm the delvers.
The second encounter room would see if having a few stronger monsters was good so I placed 3 water slimes and 3 wind slimes each levelled to 4 which cost me a total of 264 DP and 48 MP. I looked over all my rooms to see if there was anything for me to change, it was a small floor but I had used up all of my DP and I wouldn’t get anymore until I finished my quest and opened my dungeon. Luckily I wasn’t locked into the floor being this layout and would be able to expand it once I was able to.
That said I was still quite happy with everything as it was for now. After I had finished I looked at the time and realised that, including the time I spent making my avatar, two days had already passed since Shonu had sent me to this world without me realising it. I knew that I could get absorbed into any project that I was interested in but I had never let a full day go by without realising it. I was kind of worried that this was due to me becoming a sentient dungeon but I quickly put those thoughts aside and focused on other things.
As that realisation struck me a huge wave of exhaustion rolled over me even though I was a core without a body that got tired. I could only guess that the mental strain of concentrating as hard as I had made me extremely tired, so I decided to sleep and turn in my quest once I woke up. The last thought I had before I fell asleep was that these past two days had been the most fun that I can remember having, and I was pretty sure that wasn’t due to the mental changes.
I woke up fully rested and looked at the clock at the top right of my view to see that I had slept for a full 16 hours. Since my mind wasn’t drained from working two days straight anymore I looked over my floor to see if anything stuck out as a mistake, this took a good half hour but I couldn’t find much to tweak except for some pretty minor things.
Happy with my floor as it was, I went into my menu and confirmed that I was done with my first quest. As I waited for Shonu to arrive I eagerly materialised my avatar and experienced my dungeon as a delver would for the first time. The first thing I did was look at my body from its perspective and I knew that I liked it immediately as a rush of euphoria suddenly hit me causing me to have a massive smile while I started to giggle and jump around in excitement for a solid 5 minutes.
Eventually I managed to calm myself down enough to function, I materialised a long, light green dress in the same style as what Shonu wore when we first met since I didn’t want to meet a goddess completely naked. I started to eagerly skip through my dungeon starting from the core room where I had materialised. It was a pretty small and unimpressive room but it was going to just be where the gateway to the next floor would be so it didn’t have to have too much flair.
As I bounded into the boss room the cockatrice, who I really had to name, turned to look at me with no sense of hostility as she knew I was the dungeon master. Seeing its soft head I decided to walk over to the Cockatrice and carefully started patting her head. At first she wasn’t sure what to think of it and looked a bit confused but soon decided that it was quite nice and started to lean into my hand.
While I was patting her head I looked around the room, it was pretty big but it had plenty of trees and flowers dotted around the place so it wasn’t too monotone. I got absorbed by petting the cockatrice for about ten minutes before I remembered that I had stuff I wanted to do before Shonu arrived. At some point I had sat down and the cockatrice had decided to rest her head in my lap while the three minion slimes had bounced their way to my side.
I had to move a very grumpy cockatrice’s head off of my lap so that I could stand up, causing her to squawk at me in protest. I quickly assuaged her fears by saying ‘Don’t worry I’ll be back later to continue our petting session, umm…’ I had to pause for a minute to think of a name before shouting ‘Meg!’
I knew it was a bad name for such a fantastical creature but I was never good at naming stuff so it was the best I could come up with on short notice. With my promise of head pats I left Meg and her bouncy friends behind as I carried on down my path towards the entrance portal. The walk really reminded me of a forest that I would cycle to with my parents back when I was a child, which is what I was going for.
The elite slime room was next, the slimes were about the size of a medium dog, coming up to just below my knees, and were bouncing all over the place. The water slimes were a dark blue, reminiscent of the deep sea while the wind slimes were almost completely clear and see through making it so that if you weren’t looking for them they could be quite hard to see, both had cores around the size of my heart floating around in them.
Moving on I looked at the loot room which wasn’t particularly interesting, it was just a small room with a wooden chest in the middle of. I decided to add a little bit of gravitas to the room by adding some flowers around it and moving the branches around so that a beam of light hit the chest and some of the surrounding flowers. Once I was done I was much happier with the room.
The final main room lived up to my idea of a slime horde as they were absolutely everywhere making it so that I could hardly take five steps without stumbling on a slime, sometimes they would clump up in certain areas but they just tended to wander around aimlessly so this was just down to chance. These slimes were about half the size of the elemental slimes, had a slight green tinge to them, a core about the size of my fists floating in them and weren’t as energetic as their siblings but still bouncing around.
The entrance room was exactly the same as the core room except without a core or even a portal as it would only appear after I had opened up the floor for delvers. I felt like it was quite dull as this would be the first thing anyone sees as they enter my floor, and dungeon, so I decided to try to liven it up a bit. I did this by making the entrance to the path into an archway the same size as the portal that had vines growing on it that sprouted flowers in a multitude of colours which I felt did its job very well.
It had taken me about an hour to explore the whole floor and Shonu was still nowhere to be seen so I decided to wait for her by wandering about and having fun doing stuff that I couldn’t in my previous life without fear of my parents finding out and punishing me. The first thing I did was walk around picking a few flowers and then, once I felt like I had enough, I sat down in the slime hoard room and got to work making a flower crown while all the slimes made their way to me so that they could huddle around me.
I expected the slimes to feel gooey and sticky but instead they felt very solid but still bouncy, sort of like a small slightly deflated beachball, after about 10 minutes I had finished my flower crown and put it on. I created another temporary mirror to see how I looked and another wave of euphoria hit me as I saw a pretty woman wearing a flower crown that suited her very well stare back at me and I realised that I was that pretty woman in the mirror.
Next I wanted to test out my new body to see what it could do so I extended my claws and started to climb one of the smaller trees that the system had made, which turned out to be surprisingly easy. Once I got to a good branch I laid down on it and closed my eyes to get a bit more rest intending to just wait until Shonu arrived but instead I accidentally fell asleep again.
A weird breeze on my ear woke me up and before I could look around a playful voice behind me said, ‘I see you are enjoying your new body.’ I hadn’t realised I had fallen asleep so getting awoken so suddenly startled me, making me completely forget where I was so that my flailing caused me to fall out of the tree and straight on to one of my slimes. I ended up going through its soft ‘skin’, getting goo all over me, luckily the slime just reformed a minute later but I don’t think it was any happier about something falling into it as I was falling.
I looked up grumpily as I stood up and started to swipe the goo off of me as the laughing goddess slowly glided her way down to me ‘sorry I couldn’t resist, you looked so cute that I wanted to see what your reaction would be and it really didn’t disappoint.’ the goddess chuckled, I could feel my cheeks warming from being called cute, ‘Anyway, I see you have finished your quest.’
‘Yeah, I had just finished exploring my floor when I lay down on a branch to rest and accidentally fell asleep.’ I said, a bit curtly as I was still slightly upset about being woken up so suddenly, although most of my initial anger had dissipated by now as it wasn’t a big deal.
‘Right, onto your next lesson then.’ Shonu said, completely ignoring my mood ‘You will have a rewards tab in your menu where you can unlock your new random monster, but you can do that later while you wait for the party to arrive. I had a look over your floor before waking you and I think it is pretty good so far, if a bit small. The only issue is that the floor’s ecosystem is just one step from being finished. Something that wasn’t included in the information you got was that your monsters will need sustenance other than your mana to live.
‘While your slimes are complete omnivores and can eat grass your cockatrice is a carnivore so she needs creatures to eat, plus adding some small animals will also help in feeding your slimes a bit.’ Shonu said, going into full teacher mode ‘Once you open your portal and attach to the local leyline you should definitely add some rodents for your monsters to eat.’
‘Oh ok, I didn’t realise I needed to feed my monsters.’ I said, a bit embarrassed that I hadn’t thought about that ‘I’ll change that as soon as I can. What’s next?’‘The final step before you are finished with your initiation is to join the outside world. Just think the thoughts
open surface portal, and the system will do the rest. Also now that you have finished your first quest I think it’s time to give you your second quest.’ Shonu said as a blue screen popped up in front of me.
As I was clearly confused Shonu clarified ‘As I told you before, if the challenge is too easy then the System won’t give much, if any, reward for completing it. This quest is to push you to make your dungeon harder so that it poses a proper threat, and the punishment is to let me take control a bit to help balance things, honestly as long as you don’t make the dungeon too easy you will inevitably have at least one party fall within a month.’
Having my confusion alleviated I accepted my second quest. Shonu clapped her hands again to get my attention ‘I need to go and get your party for you, but before I go I have a bit of advice for you. While the floor right now is big enough for the quest you should definitely make it bigger. You can expect the party to arrive anywhere between 3 days and a week, I’ll be waiting expectantly to see how you do.’ As Shonu finished saying this she vanished in an instant while winking at me.
It took me 5 minutes to digest everything I had been told and to calm down before heading to Meg. On my way there I thought ‘Open portal to local area’ at the system and a second later wind rolled through my floor as the inside and outside air pressures reached an equilibrium. Once that finished I started using my remaining DP as well as the slow trickle I was generating to make a few trees into either rat or squirrel nests.
I spawned in a total of 10 nests each, all with two of the corresponding inhabitants, and told them to reproduce and look for food while making sure that they kept at least 4 of each in the nests so that they never accidentally went extinct. I planned to add some more to the population every so often to make sure that they were kept healthy, even if I wasn’t sure if inbreeding would be a problem for anything that I create I didn’t want to find out.
I finished the last nest as I walked into the boss room, sat down with my back resting on a tree and waited for Meg to come over while opening my reward tab. Meg was already charging at me and soon had her head resting on my lap even as she gave me a grumpy look that said ‘What took you so long, you promised more head pats.’
‘Someone quickly got addicted to getting pet, not that I can blame you.’ I said while giggling a little, ‘Sorry, I accidentally fell asleep’ As I finished apologising I opened my loot bag excited to find out what I would get. It didn’t look as if my apology helped so I just started to give her head pats as another screen popped up showing the system rolling for the pattern.
I had never heard of Magmin before so, as the information for the pattern was beamed into my mind, I looked through the system to see what they were. The first thing I found out was that they were an uncommon rated monster, which is probably what the (D) indicated. I also found out that they were a weak fire elemental that had to be bound to this realm by something, in this case that would be me. I was curious about their pattern, so I quickly pulled it up.
Before I decided how I wanted to use them I looked through their abilities starting with [Fire Touch] [the creature’s body is so hot that just their touch can set most things alight and prolonged touch can even melt certain metal]. That sounds OP as hell, unless their fire resistance was high enough the delvers would struggle just approaching these elementals.
Next was [Shed Skin] [The user sheds it’s hardened skin making it more susceptible to attacks in return for increased mobility]. This sounded interesting as it could be used to change how the Magmin fought depending on the situation. If they were up against a slow, but heavy hitting bruiser they could lose the armour and suddenly be able to dodge all of the attacks. Meanwhile if they were up against an agile delver that focused on many weak hits they could keep the armour so that they could absorb more blows.
I thought about their attributes and how I wanted to use them and decided to use them as the main monster in my next floor if I could get the volcano biome as they seemed like a big threat to any unprepared party while still having some tricks that could pose some threat to a prepared party, but that would be for later. For now I would worry about the party that was being sent to me, before I fully relaxed though I wanted to look through my stats again to see if anything had changed.
It turned out the only thing to change was that the DP generation section had stopped displaying its message and now instead displayed [DP Generation: 120 DP/day]. It wasn’t a lot, but it would do for now and I had a feeling I would be getting most of my DP from divers anyway. With everything on my immediate ‘to do’ list done I went back to relaxing and just having as much fun as one gal can have while waiting for the party to arrive, which turned out to be mostly just scratching meg’s head and playing with the slimes.