It’s been about a month since we wiped out the main force sent to investigate the dungeon for any abnormalities. Since then, there have been changes on both sides. The remaining dungeon delvers on the second and first floors waited for news from below, not knowing their fate. Still, they waited for two weeks, which gave me enough time to accrue the 5,000 Entropy with the aid of the Chaos Infuser to purchase mana crystal growths in the dungeon. Now, mana will accumulate at certain points throughout the dungeon to eventually form a node of mana-infused crystals. Humans can harvest and use them for magical equipment and magic-derived technologies, while they serve as a catalyst in dungeons to increase the rate of Entropy gain. I’ve now doubled the rate at which I earn Entropy, going from 288 every day to a total of 576. The neat part is that mana crystals have a scaling effect based on how much latent mana is in the air, so I could see exponential increases in the future with stronger mana-emitting monsters.
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The remaining dungeon delvers eventually decided to look for their comrades, but ran into some of these mana crystals naturally growing out of the dungeon. It was only a small outcropping, though; they would need to go deeper to the core to find bigger nodes. Upon finding them, the party went right back up and relayed the info to the other base, triggering their exodus out of the dungeon. I couldn’t see too far out of the dungeon unless I teleported to the entrance and expanded my vision from there. But I could still sense that a number of dungeon delvers and normal people stayed at their camp outside of the dungeon. When they were first told about the crystals, I could sense a rush of movement around the entrance, but it’s calmed down a bit since then. However, a few of them started to build more permanent structures around the entrance. If I could, I would charge them rent, but I don’t think they’d take too kindly to it. We’re in a valley of hills, so they have to drag timber from the nearby river, so there hasn’t been too much progress.
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Inside the dungeon, there weren’t any delvers inside, so I had free rein to modify the dungeon, within budget of course. I bought the mana crystals as soon as I could afford them, about eleven days after the end of the invasion, which doubled my Entropy income for the next nineteen days until now. Those nineteen days earned me about 11,000 total Entropy, but the cheapest spawner still cost 500 Entropy for base-level monsters. A new room costs 250 Entropy to add, so I refrained from doing so, considering the sixth floor had the standard twenty rooms of all the other floors but was only half completed by De’gon. I didn’t want to leave half of the sixth floor completely undefended since mana crystals still grew there, so I decided to take the current dungeon philosophy in a different direction. Instead of just increasing the difficulty with stronger and more numerous monsters, I’ll add variety to challenge different aspects of a dungeon delver’s skills. The dungeon currently hosted a decent variety of monsters, but they were almost all physically-focused, relying on brute strength with a few exceptions like the flying demons and web-laying Arachne. This is a fantasy world with dungeons and magic, but I’m the only monster that currently uses magic in the dungeon. So, at the total cost of 5,500 Entropy, I placed ten new spawners of Lesser Spirits. Together, they covered the major elemental magics in use: water, wind, fire, and earth. I also threw in a lightning-magic and ice-magic spawner to fill the last two slots. Each spawner normally costs 500 Entropy, but I put in a little extra to boost the spawn rate a bit to provide a bit more of a challenge to delvers.
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Half of the sixth floor still lacked traps, and the other half wasn’t well-equipped either, but I didn’t have much more Entropy to spend. Instead, I turned my attention to the current layout of the first five floors of the dungeon. In its current setup, a dungeon delver would travel linearly down the dungeon until the fourth floor, where there were a few intersections, but it wasn’t very complicated. The dungeon would then return to its linear format all the way down to the dungeon core. This meant that any monster that spawned would inevitably die as dungeon delvers would cross them. I don’t have enough to completely change the layout, and moving the current tunnels around wouldn’t achieve the desired result. Instead, I created a series of elaborate tunnels that could allow at most one golem to pass through. Starting from the second floor, I created these entrances hidden in the shadows of the walls to allow monsters to be able to run and escape from an encounter with a dungeon delver. Monsters should be able to easily find them since they’re features of the dungeon, and dungeon delvers shouldn’t go down narrow tunnels in fear of traps. Just in case, I also put a room connected to all of the tunnels a bit away from the floor so I could still teleport a monster in or out of the room. I didn’t know if monsters would actually use these tunnels to run if I just broadcasted a message to all of their minds, since I would have to do that with every single fresh spawn, but then I found a setting in the dungeon menu that would help. In the Dungeon Info menu, there was a “Monster Behavior” setting that I could apply to all monsters or individually based on qualifying attributes. There were a few options, like the currently set “Total Aggression", “Docile”, or “Passive”. Under it were a few behavioral modifiers, but the specific one I changed was “Ability to Retreat” from disabled to enabled. Being able to modify the mentality of monsters brings up a few concerning implications in my mind, but the most I can do for the monsters under me is to try to keep them alive. Maybe that guide I was banned from reading by Chaos contained the answers, but I can’t know either way.
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Those tunnel modifications cost another chunk of Entropy, so I had to build a little bit more each day as Entropy trickled in. But I still had enough for one more modification that I wanted to make. I created a room a bit of a way away from the dungeon, as far as I could go, and created an entrance to the surface. That encampment at the entrance didn’t look like it was going anywhere, so I built this alternative route to be able to get outside of the dungeon without alerting anybody on the surface. Plus, I could always build an extension to the dungeon if I wanted to, although it’s a little too far for mana crystals to grow.
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All of that is the basic summary of everything that happened in the past month. I don’t think we're in any danger anymore, so I’ve been slightly optimistic for the future. I’m currently overseeing Vulcan’s team’s training while keeping an eye on the surface around the entrance. They’ve been building up their skills in preparation for the return of dungeon delvers to the dungeon, although their levels can’t increase with an empty dungeon. The levels of their skills have increased with effort, and I think both Virtus and Mars are on the edge of earning a weapon mastery-related skill like Vulcan. It’s all smooth sailing down here, so I think I’ll pop up to the surface through that alternative route I made. Teleporting in an instant, I’m at the base of the stairs to the surface. I make my way up into the sunlight and behold the sight of verdant green and bright blue sky once again. My skills have gone up, too, so I can see even farther than the last time. I focus my mana into a cone and sweep around to survey a few miles in each direction. Just like last time, I see hills and forests, a river bending around an embankment of trees. There’s the small encampment at the dungeon entrance, people bustling around as they work on some new construction. Then, my vision goes down the river a little into a clearing. Within that clearing, I see dozens of people, dungeon delvers and ordinary people, building up a small town with fresh lumber from the cleared trees. They even have a perimeter set up with a basic fence surrounding the clearing. Across the river is what seems like the beginning of farms in the plains between hills and river. I knew mana crystals were valuable, and they’d probably not want to destroy a dungeon with them, but I didn’t think they’d go through all of the trouble of starting a new settlement to capitalize on it. Well, this could be a headache, but now I have a much larger source of experience points coming in the near future.
