Grace led Theo, Wen, Phoebe and Fischer into the forest. The rest remained behind to get some more work done, Willam deciding to sow his fields before nightfall. Phoebe and Fischer were both prompted to follow, as they were the most likely to stumble upon the dungeon deeper in the forest directly adjacent to Sigil Lake. As the town’s only dedicated forager and hunter, knowing where to stay away from was just as important.

  On the short trek there, Theo got some more insight into dungeons, courtesy of Grace, much to Wen’s chagrin. They were naturally occurring phenomena where the world’s laws bent ever so slightly due to either a sudden or a long, continuous increase in mana in a specific area. There were multiple dungeon categories most dungeons were classified as, but the general rule for all of them was the same; One person could only enter once every two days, counting from when they left it last.

  There were more rules depending on the type of dungeon it was, but Grace decided to keep to this specific dungeon type for now. As an adventurer, she had more knowledge about these sorts of things than most others with a different trade did, as the nuances of dungeons weren’t all that exciting for most common folk.

  “This dungeon would be classified as a ‘Cultivating Production-Monster Hybrid Dungeon’. What it means in general terms is that the dungeon will grow in strength and size, up to a maximum based on several factors we don’t need to speak of right now. That’s the ‘Cultivating’ part. A ‘Production-Monster Hybrid’ is a specific challenge and reward category; the dungeon consists of resource-producing flora or fauna, which can also be classified as monsters. Upon slaying those monsters, you gain their specific resources.”

  Grace was certain in her tone and easily moved through the uneven woods with light movements even as she spoke, revealing this was far from her first foray into such a place, and that she knew what she was talking about. Wen seemed to notice a turn of phrase that Theo didn’t, and asked about it:

  “Would be classified?”

  “This dungeon isn’t charted. I just found it a few days ago. It isn’t all that uncommon out here in…” she started to explain, but stopped herself to more carefully choose her words.

  “The middle of nowhere?” Theo laughed.

  “Yes. Sorry,” she excused herself a bit shyly.

  “No one knows this better than the ones who founded a town here, so you’re off the hook,” he said to ease the guilt she was showing him with worried eyes. They glistened happily in response to his comfort.

  “So where’s this—”

  “Right here,” Grace grinned like a vixen to her prey as she interrupted Wen’s offensively pointed question. She pointed down to a wooden hatch seemingly grown from the ground near some bushes and haphazard roots. It looked entirely out of place, but was just hard enough to spot to be quite easy to ignore.

  “How sure are we that this isn’t her serial murderer cellar where she brings all of her victims before brutally murdering them?” Wen asked. Grace’s tight smile was undisturbed, almost eerily so. “So let’s just mark the area and keep away, right?”

  Then Theo thought about what kind of dungeon this was, placing his finger gently on his chin as he looked down at the dark brown hatch. “What kind of resources?” he asked.

  Grace beamed and skipped to his side to pull him closer to the hatch. “You’re considering how much this dungeon would help your town, aren’t you?” Her wide eyes were exceptionally hard to avoid losing himself in.

  “Uh… Maybe.”

  “You know, I don’t really have a place to go back to,” she continued, wagging her imaginary tail as her smile grew only a bit smaller. “You might stand to gain from having an adventurer on your leash, at least with a big, dangerous dungeon so close to your town,” she winked, making herself overly cute, just for Theo’s sake.

  “This is starting to sound more and more serial murdery,” Wen commented from behind. “Just sayin’.”

  “How dangerous is it down there?” Theo asked, trying to ignore both of them to the best of his ability. Considering his neck was catching fire from Wen’s firm gaze and his face was being scorched by Grace’s flirty antics, he wasn’t doing a good job.

  “Not too dangerous right now, but I had just cleared it last night when you started that light show. I can’t head inside before two nights have passed, but I wouldn’t mind showing you. I feel I might owe you after the whole kidnapping thing.” She looked innocently down at the hatch before raising her eyes up to his once more, their shine ever so slightly increased.

  “Hey, you healed me. If anything, I’m the one who should be owing you,” Theo said, diving head first into her trap. He realised too late. Grace jumped on him affectionately.

  “So you’ll come with? Great! I promise I’ll protect you from anything bad,” she beamed. Theo couldn’t help but notice the odd tone of that last word. To assure him she’d done that on purpose, she leaned closer and whispered with a breathy voice, barely audible to even him. “So let’s go alone, shall we?”

  With a furious reddening of his face, Theo turned, chuckled an embarrassed laugh and headed back towards town. “Welp, nothing more to do here, then!”

  He noticed Wen’s frown burning in Grace’s direction as he passed her with an innocent smile designed to hide his worry that she was going to explode. While he had found Wen was being a bit ‘adversarial’ towards Grace, he hoped it was simply her protecting him in her own, almost violent way. Maybe she was protective due to some romantic feelings towards him? He certainly wouldn’t mind that. Grace was being oddly aggressive in the same way, but she was a bit harder to pinpoint since he didn’t know her at all.

  The group disbanded, Phoebe going her own way, Fischer his, and Theo, Wen and Grace all headed back to the town, following the constant sound of hammering, chopping and sawing.

  Several more planks had been turned into a wall on the barracks during the short time they’d been gone and Willam had only barely started sowing the bagfuls of seeds on the first field. Hoping to gain some experience to his planting skill, Theo dashed ahead with a wave to the women following behind him. His main goal was to increase his skills, but the bonus of quickly running far away from the glares shared between those two was invaluable.

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  Then, Theo stopped, about halfway to the impromptu farm. He had suppressed several messages regarding the events that transpired that night. He was wondering whether he should read them now, but sowing the fields would soon be over with as well! Having Level One skills was great, and he wanted more of them. But… Level Two skills added a multiplier to all his other skills’ stats gains. He shouldn’t stop using the skills after simply gaining the first level of it, right? What would be even better than a dozen Level One skills was a dozen Level Two skills!

  He continued toward the farm with dedication lacing his every step.

  Night fell once more, and again the villagers gathered by the campfire. New this time was the location; it was placed a close distance to the more or less completed barracks. It was a long building filled with doorless rooms and seemed to stand on nothing but itself as its support. For a quick two-day build it was excellent and sturdy enough unless a storm was upon them, but it was just what they needed for now. It offered only theoretical privacy, but there were six rooms in all, all placed in a single line, meaning each shared one wall with another room. There were no beds, no furniture of any kind, but it was shelter.

  Plans were already designed for more complex, yet still basic housing, but it would take longer to complete. There was discussion about what to construct first; Willam needed a basic farmhouse now that his fields had been sown, which would double as a house with a bedroom or two. Wen was adamant about getting her inn built first, considering there was to be plenty of rooms there that everyone could make use of, plus a kitchen and room for eating on proper furniture. With the barracks complete, Julie and her lumberworkers wanted to increase their production with a proper lumberyard, which was a fenced-in or walled-off area that worked about as a farmhouse did; ‘unmagically’ increasing production of the attached worksite. It was only unmagical for everyone else. For Theo, the idea of a building simply increasing something just from being there was pretty magical. True magic be damned.

  The builders didn’t have much to say in regards to building order, though they both mentioned that having a town-central building would increase everyone’s productivity, would allow for more applicants to be hired or even request to join the town directly and would put the town on the map. Theo was quietly wondering to himself whether that ‘map’ was some kind of self-changing device that everyone had access to, but he decided to let it go. He’d probably find out eventually. Maybe all maps were auto-adapting?

  Grace seemed content with staying for a while and only mentioned briefly that an adventurer’s guild or a dungeon management building would be fitting as both a town-central building and a way to get more traffic around, but she didn’t push it. She also mentioned the dungeon’s level was easy enough for her to complete alone and without a party, which was more useful to her personally.

  Dungeons seemed to work a bit like entertainment parks, though with a slightly higher mortality rate. The more traffic they received, the faster they would grow in strength. This would usually increase traffic again, causing a loop that lasted until the dungeon reached its Apex, the very maximum of its strength. The Apex was a value that could never change within a single dungeon, but that differed from dungeon to dungeon. A bit unsurprisingly, Ercheat was built right on top of such a dungeon, and it was among the dungeons with the highest Apex. Having adventurers die within their domain was the dungeon’s quickest way of gaining strength, though even without that, they siphoned off the spent energy, be it physical, mental or vital, of its visitors.

  Technically, there was also a way for dungeons to reduce in strength, though this was prohibited by law unless the dungeon proved far too dangerous. This was done by sending surgical strike teams in, killing some monsters and bringing their bodies back out with them. This would rinse and repeat, causing the dungeon to keep creating more monsters without ever getting to reabsorb the energy spent on creating them while also missing out on plenty of adventurer energy.

  With the sun descended, offering only the slightest hint of orange-yellow light that licked the flat horizon, the villagers soon settled on Wen’s idea. The tavern she wanted was by far the biggest construction project of all the alternatives, but also gave them most of everything they needed right now; it could act as a town-central building provided there was a wing or section of the building dedicated to that, an eatery and kitchen as well as rooms to sleep in which provided more comfort than they had now. If planned properly, it would not only serve as every prerequisite for most highly skilled town applicants, but provide more available titles, increase town bonuses across the board and might even increase the town’s level, all in one go.

  No one had any particular experience running a town, so town levels were a bit of a black mark on their collective knowledge, but they all, except Theo, knew that was a thing.

  With that settled, Wen went on to regale the rest of the villagers with her grand vision of the tavern and its future magnificence. It would be four stories tall and have grand velvet carpets on their walls to invite colour and contrast to its furniture and its guests. It would be bustling and flowing with the greatest drink ever made and the money would be stacking up in towers in her coffers, which would in turn flow into the town’s coffers. The patrons would have constant smiles on their faces as the heads of dungeon monsters and roaming wildlife both hung from the ceiling or high on the scarlet walls and eyed the guests with a dead want and unquenching jealousy.

  ‘Is that what taxidermy mounts are for? Making people feel superior?’ Theo internally asked himself.

  She went on for quite the tirade, and as was maybe the intent of a tirade as a whole, it tired everyone out after another long and exciting day. The builder couple was the first to head into a room of the barracks, right on the far left. Julie, seemingly for lack of a good drink rather than tiredness in and of itself, went next, taking the next room. Her two male woodworkers took the next. Phoebe later dropped into Julie’s room while Hunter the fisherman and Fischer the huntsman agreed to each other’s presence during the night and took the next.

  With four of the six rooms gone, only two remained, an easy mathematical equation to solve. The complexity of the equation was an illusion, however. It wasn’t the simple subtraction of one number from another. No, there was more depth to it. A room could only fit two people in general comfort. There were four people remaining. The very second the huntsman and the fisherman left the campfire to fend for itself, six eyes fell heavy on Theo. There was Willam eyeing the man sheepishly, awkwardly wishing not to bunk with any of the two women. Four eyes glared over the low fire, reflecting a red-orange malice. Wen was certainly not sleeping in the same room as Grace. Grace seemed less like a scorned fury and more a vicious vixen, though Theo was getting more and more certain she was only so direct in her flirtatious approach to scorn Wen, who was starting to wear her feelings more on her sleeve.

  “Willam, I think it might be best if we shared a room, right?” Theo attempted, knowing fully well how these might be his last words. It might certainly be his last night.

  Willam nodded with a happy relief, though he didn’t dare look at the two women that then remained forced together. “Agreed.”

  The four of them sat for a while longer, talking and making merry, getting to know Grace more while also talking more about each others’ pasts. Willam headed to bed first, but Grace had already fallen asleep whilst sitting up. Wen was courteous enough to help Theo get her into bed, if the flat floor inside the barracks could be counted as such. Wen hugged Theo good night moments later, her warm embrace lingering just long enough for her to get some much needed words out: “I’m glad you’re okay after last night.”

  Theo smiled, yet said nothing before the embrace ended. “Me too. I enjoyed spending time with you.”

  She looked into his eyes, and he into hers. Then she headed into the room where Grace’s light snoring could be heard. Theo took care that the fire was fully out and contained before he, too, headed into the barracks, joining Willam on the far right. Then, after lying down on the hard, bare planks, he let the stream of System messages from the previous night flow free.