My second life as a dungeon

A couple hours later I heard someone knocking on the front door. I immediately put a bookmark in my book before setting it down and answering the door. As I was expecting, it was Shonu in her usual incredibly revealing toga that had been knocking on my door. As soon as I saw her I started to blush and she hadn’t even said anything yet.

‘Hey Shonu, knocking on my door is a bit polite for you, isn’t it?’ I greeted, slightly confused, and honestly a little disappointed, that she was being kind of polite after how she constantly teased me. ‘Usually you find some way to tease me while my guard is down.’

‘Aww, I am sorry darling, did I disappoint you? The conversation we need to have is a bit more serious than usual so I decided to save my fun for another time.’ Shonu teased with a mischievous smile on her face, clearly seeing through my facade. ‘Next time I will be sure to tease you till my heart’s content. But for now let’s get down to business, it is time to give you your next quest but this one requires a longer explanation than usual so let’s get comfy.’

As the beautiful goddess said that I realised that we were still standing in the doorway into my house so I let her in before we both went to the living room. I sat down first, choosing the smaller of the two black leather sofas, naively expecting Shonu to sit on the other sofa opposite me. I was wrong though as she immediately sat next to me, clearly not finished teasing me, causing my blush to expand to my ears.

‘Um, Shonu? Wha-What are you doing?’ I said, starting to stammer as I got incredibly nervous and felt like steam was rising from my head as I overheated. ‘Aren’t you going to sit on the other couch?’

‘Well you looked so disappointed that I didn’t tease you earlier and you did such a good job on the quests so for that I think you deserve a reward like the good girl you are.’ Shonu said while slowly shuffling closer to me, getting into my personal space and making me feel like I would be melting right now if I could. Seeing her reaction on me Shonu laughed as she got up from the sofa and went to the bigger one.

‘Sorry, that went a bit further than I expected it to and we do need to have a serious conversation so I’ll stop now.’ Shonu said, still giggling to herself as she sat down, she was still being seductive but I am pretty sure with how beautiful she was that no matter she sat it would still be sexy. I was still too flustered to speak so the teasing Goddess continued while I got myself together.

‘So, getting to business, the past quests I have given you have all been to guide you on what you need to do as a dungeon master but you no longer need guidance. Instead your quests going forward will be proper challenges that will push you to grow just like how mortals experience quests.’ Shonu explained ‘Although since you aren’t able to exactly go far the quests will instead have to come to you.

‘But that means that you would always have to face whatever quest I give you so instead the quest will instead make whatever trial you are going to face harder in some way. Your next quest will involve a rumour going around about something killing dungeons to hinder the mortal’s training for the return of the demon king. Since you are a dungeon and its path is heading your way it will eventually cross paths with you.

‘Your task will be to prepare for this danger before it arrives, ultimately defeating. Unfortunately I can’t help with any quests so you will have to do it without my help. Obviously I can’t just let you die so if it starts to look like you are losing I will step in and protect you.’ By this point I was mostly back to my normal self but hearing about a potential threat to my life shocked me out of my flustered state completely.

‘Wait, what?’ I said incredibly confused ‘I thought it would be ten years before the demon king returns and even then I wouldn’t have to deal with them. My job is to train those that will fight him and his army, not actually do it myself. Also what would me defeating this ‘threat’ even do? Anyone that ‘dies’ in my dungeon just respawns with a few debuffs and can try again after a week.’

By this point I was ranting and Shonu had to hold up her hand in a placating manner to get me to stop before answering my worries ‘First off, yes it will be ten years before the demon king has enough energy to resummon himself to the mortal plane and you won’t have to defeat them personally. But he already has enough power to affect Nero and has forces that do his bidding that you might have to deal with.’

‘As for defeating the threat, when you give people special punishments you can give them permanent penalties, including death. You will get less XP the more severe you are and killing them will give you nothing, plus if you start killing too many delvers then you might end up on the guilds shit-list. You will know how the threat is when they arrive so you don’t have to worry about killing the wrong person.’

After hearing her explanation I calmed down enough to clearly think about the quest and realise that it was, at least theoretically, possible. ‘Oh, thanks.’ I said, grateful for her never-ending patience. ‘But do you think I will actually be able to complete the quest?’

‘I have full faith in you sweetie’ Shonu said with a charming smile on her face ‘And, again, if it looks to be going south then I will step in and protect you. All that is left is to actually accept the quest.’ At that a screen popped up in front of me that I quickly started to read. 

While I was reading the screen Shonu added a little bit more context ‘Oh by the way, I could be wrong and they may fall before getting to you. In which case you would have had no chance of passing the Quest but because you didn’t fail the quest you will still get the reward.’ She finished her explanation as I finished reading the screen but I spent a few minutes thinking about it.

At the pace I was going, five levels would take me about a month to gain and it would increase the strength of my soul, letting me travel further. But more than that getting an additional five attribute points was something I instinctively knew I would only be able to get from quests or magic items and so was incredibly tempting.

The only thing that made me hesitate was not being able to gain any experience from delvers for a full month would set me back a good four or five levels. Especially if I took into account how much more experience I would be gaining from the additional floors and instances. The extra five stat points was too good to pass up though so in the end I decided that it was worth the risk and accepted the quest.

This probably caused Shonu to get a notification as she immediately stood up before saying. ‘Well, with that sorted out I have more business to get to so unfortunately I won’t be able to stay and tease you some more. I know that you will be able to do this so don’t be so nervous. The last hint I will give is that you can expect them to turn up around when winter starts in four months at the earliest.’

I also stood up and we both walked to the front door, I opened it for her and she walked through. Before she could disappear I said, ‘Thanks for being here for me, I hope it won’t be too long until we see each other again.’

Shonu turned back with a sad smile on her face. ‘I am sure the time will fly by with all you have to do and with your little friend to have lots of fun with.’ At that my blush returned in full force at finding out that even Shonu had noticed my growing crush on Val. She just laughed before disappearing, leaving me stuttering like a mess.

As soon as Shonu left I decided to start building my seventh floor since the earlier I built it the sooner it would start giving me more DP and I had nothing better to do.

Looking through the three choices I decided on the lake since I had just got the Corrupted Sharks and wanted to use them. Plus it would be a good environmental challenge for the delvers like the volcano on floor two is. Once I had made my choice the screen disappeared and the system started creating the base of my seventh floor, finishing after three hours.

As soon as I got the notification that it was done I went down to see how it had turned out and was greeted by a huge lake that was surrounded by two hundred metres of grassy plains. It was a bit bland though so I went straight into adding some aesthetic decorations to it. I started from the outside of the floor and worked my way in, first using 10k of my non-monster DP reserve turning the plains into a dense jungle full of different flora and fauna.

Since I didn’t want it to be completely devoid of monsters I used 13.6k DP creating four squads of hobgoblins. Each contained five of the huge goblinoids, all level 20. I then moved on to the lake itself, by my rough calculation it had a surface area of around 1.1 km2 so I decided to create multiple environments inside the lake. To do this I split the lake into three sections.

First was the centre half of the lake which covered about 0.55 km2 of the seabed and would be saved for last. The outer half was then split into six similarly sized areas that bled into each other. Two would be turned into incredibly dense seaweed forests that would limit the delver's field of view, another two had the seabed lowered in some areas while other areas it was raised to create tons of cliffs that I littered with tiny caves for small fish to live in.

The final two areas would be unchanged. Once I was done terraforming I looked around the six areas and was happy with how it turned out so I moved on to the centre area. This would contain the ruin of a long abandoned research facility in a similar style as the city on the fifth floor. The lab itself had three sections to it, creating a T floorplan, and was made out of the same futuristic metal that the buildings on the fifth floor were made out of.

The edge of each wing contained an entrance so delvers could change where they entered from if they wanted to. The upper left wing was the sleeping quarters where the personnel slept, ate and relaxed. This wing contained two floors and each one was essentially just one long corridor with apartments branching out from it every fifty metres or so.

The upper right part was the storage where everything was kept. It had two huge halls, the first is where they kept the research materials and the second was all the food and stuff for recreation. Next, the lower part of the T was where the research was actually done, it spanned three floors, each one containing ten huge labs that each would work on separate projects.

Finally, where the wings connected was a huge lab about the size of three standard labs which would be the boss room. It also connected to a smaller room in the back where the portal would be once the floor was finished. Once it was done how I imagined it would have looked when it was being used I turned it into a proper ruin.

Most of the lights were destroyed, it was almost completely flooded, a bunch of the doors were broken in. Everything that wasn’t metal in the apartments was torn to shreds or completely destroyed and the storage halls didn’t have anything left in them that could be salvaged. As I added my final touch I was satisfied with my creation but before moving on to the monsters I added a few chests.

I put a chest in each of the storage rooms, three of the apartments and three of the standard laboratories to reward people for exploring enough that they would stay longer. Once I was done I checked on my DP and I had spent 22k DP on aesthetics before I even started with the monsters, luckily I still had plenty to spare still.

I was happy with how it turned out so I stopped for a while both to take a break and hang out with Val before returning the next night to start on the monsters. Thanks to the experience of building six floors before this, I could now tell how much DP I could spend on monsters before reaching my cap for that floor. This meant that I could tell that after I deducted the points I spent on the hobgoblins I had 82.4k left to spend on everything else.

I usually left the boss until last but I felt like changing it up so this time I started with the boss, instantly spending seven hundred points to spawn a huge purple shark that was more like a small megalodon than a big shark. It looked like it would have to squeeze to get through the door of the boss room, it had tons of huge teeth all about the size of my arms, its purple skin was riddled with scars and its eyes were a deep purple.

The fight couldn’t be just a single shark though, no matter how scary it looked, so I used another 2.1k points to spawn in four level 20 corrupted sharks. These were still pretty intimidating but they were the same size as a regular great white shark so they weren’t as scary as the boss was. Looking over the five sharks I thought it was too simple so I created an air pocket at the top of the room as well as four platforms floating on the surface.

I then placed a single kobold druid on each of them and tried to level them up but the system wouldn’t let me raise them above level 15. Annoyed, I looked through the encyclopaedia that had been forced into my brain for the reason why. It only took me a few minutes before I found out that each monster had a max level they could reach before they couldn’t go any further without evolving.

I was annoyed by this but I begrudgingly decided to focus on creating the floor and would figure out how to evolve them before starting the next one. With that I was left with four level 15 kobolds floating around the room, they had only cost me 652 DP but I was finally happy with the boss fight so I moved on.

I split the sharks into twenty pods each containing five level 20 corrupted sharks before scattering them all over the complex. Half of them patrolled the various hallways while the other half would be hiding in various rooms. Two pods would be in each of the huge warehouses, while the labs and apartments that contained chests would get a single pod of corrupted sharks each.

Creating so many sharks had taken 52.5 thousand points but the complex was big enough that I didn’t think it was too much. That finished off the complex so I moved on to the lake proper. I used the rest of my DP to spawn in seventeen weaker pods of corrupted sharks. These pods contained four sharks at level 16 each as I wanted the bulk of the difficulty to be in the complex.

They were evenly spread out and wouldn’t interfere if they stumbled across a party that was fighting another pod unless the adventurers were overwhelmingly strong. These sharks were slightly smaller than the ones inside the complex but still quite intimidating and shouldn’t be too easy to kill. Spawning all the sharks had taken a whole week due to my mana regeneration being so slow. What made it worse was that I couldn’t practise any magic as I was constantly mana depleted.

Luckily I had my training with Ilv to keep me distracted but after training non-stop for two weeks I desperately wanted to go back to my magic. With this in mind I decided to spend the next day not doing any work on the floor and just playing with my spells. I didn’t make any new spells but it was still a good change of pace.

The next day I went back to designing my dungeon by adding the final touches. I added more caves into the underwater cliffs and some minor deviation on the floor bed so that it wasn’t just a single neat bed of sand. Finally I added a myriad of fish from my old world such as mussels, oysters and rainbow trout that would feed my sharks and kobold druids.

Once I had added the last fish I checked over the floor until I was happy with everything and opened the floor to the outside world. The confirmation screen had nothing new on it so I just ignored it before going to bed, exhausted after working for nine days while only resting for one day in the middle.

The only other time I had actually relaxed was when the monsters were being created and I had nothing more to do. I spent most of that time hanging around Val or training with Ilvaite. As I lay down on my bed I briefly worried about how long the later floors would take as I would have to spend more and more mana to fill the floors.