Dungeon’s Path

Enlightened, Doyle turns to something else. The numerous teams flooding into his dungeon. His first and second floors are always filled at this point except during the deepest hours of the night. Beyond that, the third, fourth, and even the boss floor will generally have people kicking about for at least half the day. In an almost ironic turn, of all his early floors it is the third that tends to see the least amount of activity as the main reward there is the ore and the town clears that out early on.

A quick look outside, though, shows that this is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many visitors that a tent district has popped up in the outer ring. Even after you account for all the merchants looking to make a quick buck, this mass of people outnumbers everyone from wolf’s rest. In fact, people visiting from further away than the place up river are in the majority. The only thing keeping the area stable is the adventurers guild.

While Ace hadn’t yet managed to get a system recognized guard set up, the guild apparently makes allowances for ‘frontier’ towns and, if asked, will help provide security. For a fee, of course, and it is only normal security. If someone decided they wanted to take control of the place that would be fine, though the guild might do something if that new owner wanted to kick them out as well. After all, Wolf’s Rest is very much far from unique as similar situations tend to pop up all over the multiverse anytime a dungeon pops up in the middle of nowhere.

The middle of nowhere, something both Ace and Doyle separately are having a hard time admitting describes their whole planet. It hadn’t been at the forefront of their minds, but at this moment both of them are having a moment of synced despair. Ace, standing on top of the inner wall, looking out over the sprawl and Doyle looking down from above like he was playing one of those god games he had enjoyed.

Below them, there was such a small number of people. In the past, a city could easily have this many people dropped into it without it being noticed. Now, there likely weren’t many places that would qualify as a city anymore.

The moment passes and Doyle turns back to his dungeon. His own little world, though as recently proven, it wouldn’t stay little. Though the idea of having thousands of floors is more than a little daunting. A quick mental note is made to go and ask Ally about it, not that he believes he will remember to actually ask.

There are still too many things to do and yet it all involves slow and steady progress. For a while now, he had been carving on the seventh floor stone sphere and was mostly done on the framing. Still, he didn’t feel like doing that for the moment. Plus, he had been putting off some of the other stuff he needed to do a little too long at this point. Things all over the place unused and forgotten.

First on the list at the moment, though, was improving some of his patterns. Not the monster patterns. He has an idea on what that will require, but doesn’t have quite the right place for it yet. Well, maybe the sixth floor, but it can wait.

No, even more basic than that, the materials, wildlife, and plants will be his focus. And with good reason, he hasn’t taken an in-depth look at them recently, but last time he had checked there were multiple patterns still at level 1. Doyle isn’t certain if maybe that has changed or not, so asks the system to bring up a list of them for him.

{seaweed lv1, bread lv1, sugar lv1, wheat lv1, lemon lv1, strawberry lv1}

Doyle sighed, except the lemon he hadn’t exactly been throwing these ingredients around, but to still be level 1? They were dragging his pattern database level down. Especially seaweed as he was fairly sure it was still in the main list and not in any specific selection of sub patterns. A little odd as the seaweed had been from seaweed snacks, or at least Doyle assumed it had been, but it isn’t like he could ask the system for its reason.

Still, with these level 1 patterns, Doyle would finally be able to figure out how to go about improving them. Sure, he knew that if he was a human baker, he could improve the bread’s level by baking more and better bread. Problem is, he couldn’t exactly do that. Besides, what does a higher level lemon even mean? It isn’t like a farmer was going to have a lemon pattern.

That aside, he was going to need a place to play around. This meant one of his floors with extra space and low likelihood of being delved. Two things which are currently a bit at odds if it wasn’t for his ninth floor. The first few floors have a bunch of space above and below the floor proper but people are always there. The later floors don’t have many people coming by, but Doyle had also more efficiently used the space, to the point that what was free was dribs and drabs spread around.

After all, any big enough area was used for his monster farms and sure, he could have used one of the farms, but Doyle wanted more control over the space. Good thing while the ninth floor had a farm, the simple hallway design meant there was still a bunch of area to use. Though after setting up a decent area to test things in, he realizes he had missed one other option and also fallen for his instincts again.

The easiest solution would have been to just change up a floor. Just because dungeons don’t like doing that doesn’t mean they can’t. In fact, this reminded him of the story about the one elementally aligned dungeon that ended up not being able to stock its earlier floors. That is a stupid thing! It could have just used monsters of the correct level. There had to be some sitting around somewhere. That or using younger versions should have been possible.

Besides that obvious solution, there was also the fact Doyle was the master of space within his dungeon. All those dribs and drabs of space? He could have literally grabbed them all and stuck them together. No need to waste space when you can literally rearrange it as needed. Still, he had already made his new test area so all of that can be left for later.

Well, he does after going to Ally and telling her that if ever he complains about space on an earlier floor; she needs to remind him that just changing the floor is an option. Then he turns his attention to the test room. There isn’t much to it besides a giant blank stone space, a few lights overhead, and a bunch of stone planters. Oh, and one big tank of sea-like water cause seaweed.

From there, the first test was simple enough and involved the sugar, a whole lot of sugar. For the floors Doyle had been spawning all kinds of things over and over, but it was more like mindless work. As if he was on some factory line adding a piece of siding to a car over and over without thinking about it. So, for the sugar, he tried to do better.

At first he spawned handfuls of the stuff, but soon was making less and less, really focusing on the sugar. Doyle wasn’t sure what “better” sugar would be like, but the system seemed more than willing to help with early levels of stuff. Still, there wasn’t much progress made until he got down to making the sugar grain by grain.

It was then that he noticed the irregularities. Sure, he had “noticed” it before, but not really on a conscious level. Each piece of sugar was slightly different, like you would find when going through some actual factory made sugar. So he tried to control it. No more irregular pieces!

That didn’t come easily. In fact, it took Doyle five days before he was able to create near perfect duplicates. Then another three days for him to create a pile of sugar all at once that matched. In the end, he felt it was worth it. On one hand, sugar’s level had gone up to seven. A respectable result which was about inline with the crafters in town from the little he had observed.

On the other hand, it had pointed out another avenue to improve and in which he was shockingly bad. A thing in which he honestly should have been trying to improve from the start. That of control over his creation skill. Sure, the skill’s level was up there with all the others, but that didn’t magically make him good at everything he should be good at. At least these experiments would help with it.

Though at this point, sugar wasn’t going to get him anywhere. He wasn’t quite certain what was improving about the sugar he made besides the regularity of it and that was blocking him from moving forward. So instead he turned to the wheat. Doyle wasn’t an expert on wheat, but he did have some passing understanding of what a good piece of wheat looked like.

So Doyle tried to copy what had worked with the sugar, and what a shock, it didn’t work. Doyle wasn’t actually shocked by this of course. Sure, with sugar, you could just change the physical form easily enough. Wheat is a plant seed and so can’t be squashed up willy-nilly. No, it was going to require a different approach. Thus the stone planters.

Planters that Doyle takes a moment to find despite being the dungeon because at some point they had gotten buried under all the sugar he had been making. Sure, for a good while he had been making the stuff grain by grain, but at the end there he was making decent sized piles of the stuff at a rapid pace.

Sugar removed and the stone planters once again visible, Doyle plants some of his normal wheat, spawned like he would for delvers. That, of course, didn’t grow. Yes, it was perfectly preserved wheat. They just happened to be as dead as a doornail. This makes some sense as living matter tends to cost a tiny bit more. Sure, for something like a single wheat seed, it wasn’t even going to move the bar, but the default method of creation that was drilled into him by the system had dead as the default.

Changing that fact proved the idea that he needed to get better control of creation as such a simple change took days. It really shouldn’t have. The difference was almost non-existent. Except for the fact that part of how creation worked was dealing in the more mystical elements of the universe, with life and death being quite heavy concepts within that realm.

Still, in the end, he managed to create living wheat seeds which once planted started to grow with the usual speed of plants on uninhabited floors. Something Doyle is for the first time really taking notice of. Sure, he had always thought of it as quite an oddity, but now it was really being shoved in his face. After all, why would this change when delvers were on a floor?

Except he had an answer for that. The speed up was an active manipulation on his part. While maybe he wasn’t doing it consciously, the speed up was a function being done by him and so once an invader made it so he could mess with a floor, the speed up stopped. The answer was clear from this: the speed up was time manipulation. An act that came as natural to dungeons as breathing and something he would have to ask Ally about.