“Who’s insane now?” I said aloud, to the empty dungeon room.
After consuming six buds, I had one left, and I decided to take a little risk with the seventh. I wouldn’t do anything as drastic as splitting part of my core again, but I did split something else…
I carved the last bud into four pieces, and then I attached them back onto the essence vines, which had now spread to cover a full quarter of the wall behind me.
It probably wouldn’t work. Back up on the surface of the world, farmers had to be careful how often they planted things in the same soil, because getting too greedy could use up all the soil’s nutrients and ruin it.
It was the same with buds. These four new little budlings were all descended from the first one I’d found, and their starting vitality was weak. The poor guys didn’t have much of a chance, but I decided to cross my metaphorical fingers.
I felt great now. Full of vigor, full of essence. Ready to go! Carving out a full dungeon room didn’t seem like such a massive task anymore. It was time to get to work.
I thought back to how, when I first arrived here, it had been hard to dig even a small chunk from a wall.
Now, with my digging skill improved and with all my new essence, I made great progress. Leveling my digging skill meant that I worked faster and more efficiently, and each use of it cost less essence and dug out more mud.
For the next week, I dug out a room. I didn’t stop there, though. I got a little carried away, which happens to me a lot.
I first made a room that connected directly to the tunnel. This was right next to my core room, so dungeon law dictated that I would have to leave loot there. In other words, this would be my dungeon’s loot chamber.
This was a rule I had found strange when I first began studying at the academy. Why should a core cater to the needs of the very heroes who he was destined to try and kill? Do lions make sure bison are feeling comfortable and well-fed before they pounce on them?
“Those are the rules,” Overseer Bolton told us all in class. “When you’re living your second life, you have to follow rules. Get used to it.”
Right now, all I had was an empty space. You could hardly call it a loot chamber; I mean, it didn’t have loot, and there was no boss monster to guard it…yet.
After finishing that, I created a tunnel going north from the loot room. It ran for twenty feet, which would be enough room to put a few traps and stuff. I made this tunnel split at the end, going off in two directions for another twenty feet. At the end of both tunnels, I made two new rooms.
Digging increased – 11.2%
Dungeon Structures Created:
Tunnel x3
Loot room x1
Unassigned Rooms x2
So, after starting in my core room with just a pedestal, an inch of moss, and a whole heap of nothing, I now had the basis of a dungeon.
The thing was, I couldn’t call it a dungeon yet. Not officially. To be recognized as a fully operational dungeon, it needed four things.
The first was loot in the loot room. The boss monster guarding it was optional, but what right-minded core would let heroes just stroll in?
The second requirement was at least one monster and one trap. Again, most cores would have more than one of each, unless they were really crummy at their jobs, or if they’d just given up on their second life or something.
The third, and easiest, requirement was to have at least one means of entry. If heroes couldn’t get into your dungeon, how could you kill them?
Finally, a dungeon needed a minimum blueprint of one core room, one loot room, and two puzzle, trap, or battle rooms.
I still had a whole heap of work to do, but I was making progress.
Requirement 4 satisfied!
You have created the bare minimum rooms needed in the dungeon blueprint.
After all that, I was absolutely sick of digging. Seriously, carving this all out by myself had put me off digging for the rest of my second life. As soon as I conjured a monster with hands, that sucker was going to dig for me.
This brought me onto the next stage in my dungeon construction: filling it with living – or undead - things.
I had only barely begun to think about what to do, when I heard a voice.
“Good evening, Core Graduate Beno.”
CHAPTER 5
It was the voice of an overseer. I could sense them standing behind me, but I couldn’t put a name to the voice because I had been too busy thinking about my dungeon to concentrate. I didn’t want to turn and look yet.
The academy often sent its overseers to evaluate cores in their first dungeons. There was no guessing when they’d come and do it, because overseers loved to spring that kind of thing on you. That’s what passes for a sense of humor for those geezers.
It was always a worrying thing, or so I’d been told. After their evaluations of your progress, the overseers would give you either a reward or a punishment, according to how they felt.
It wasn’t all about the quality of your dungeon, though. Nope. Overseers were human, after all, and they had biases. If an overseer didn’t like you, they might let that affect how they evaluated you.
I needed to get a good evaluation. I couldn’t afford a punishment now, and I could really use a boost.
So right now, I was praying that Overseer Bolton was behind me.
If it was Overseer Clifftop, I was screwed.
Slowly, I turned on
