A Lonely Dungeon

Never underestimate the intelligence and cunning of an old dungeon. Too many beginner adventurers cut their teeth on young dungeons, only to get too used to their predictable patterns and small monster pools then fall prey to a concealed trap or unusual monster on the very first floor of an older dungeon. As a general rule, a dungeon that has reached twenty floors will be a match for the wit of a human, although whether there is a direct causal link between a dungeons depth and its intelligence is not known.

- An excerpt from the entry on dungeons, from Adventuring for Dummies

The dungeon pondered a name for itself. It glanced at Blobby who was now blobbing around happily on the sixth floor and admitted that it did not, in fact, have a great naming sense. But admitting there is a problem is the first step to recovery! And besides, it had way higher mana density now and wasn't quite so infantile. So, it should definitely be capable of coming up with a decent name. No, not Mr Dungeon, that would be silly. What was special about this dungeon? Its slimes? Slimy was also a poor choice of name. Maybe the errant tag; the dungeon decided to wear that as a badge of honour. Erryn then? Yes, that was a good name. "System, my name is Erryn."

Dungeon name registered successfully.

The freshly christened Erryn surveyed its expanding territory for anything of interest. No other signs of habitation as of yet, but there was the remains of a wagon on what was presumably a dirt track before Erryn had eaten it. Skeletons of horses lay in front of the wagon, with the remains of the driver still sitting at the front. A few more skeletons wrapped in rusted armour surrounded it. The wagon held some rotted wooden crates but whatever they used to contain had become nothing but dust. This was probably a merchant transporting goods, with a few hired guards. There was nothing to be scavenged from the wagon itself. One of the guards had a dagger that still seemed in good condition and the driver had a couple of pieces of jewellery, but nothing in sufficient quantity to trigger an unlock. He was also carrying a bag of coins, which did contain a sufficient quantity of gold.

New loot unlocked: Gold coin

Erryn abused a mass summoning to generate a gold nugget.

New loot unlocked: Gold nugget

Incongruity detected: Gold materials not available for purchase until dungeon has fifteen floors. Higher level mythril materials already unlocked. Ignoring.

Did gold coins not count as gold materials? Or did coins get special exceptions? Either way, that explains why the system was happy with silver coins back when Erryn only had one floor. Not that it pushed the level up much; the system was happy with a silver nugget with three floors. Erryn summoned a few more coins and nuggets, and watched the mana flows. In retrospect, it should have started the manual summoning experiments with nuggets rather than slimes; they were considerably simpler. Coins on the other hand were surprisingly complex, more so than could be explained by a coin having a well defined shape whereas the nuggets were just lumps. Some of the mana got caught up into the coin as it materialized, and could be still be seen as a detailed imprinted pattern after the summoning was complete. It would be impossible to produce coins from a mould and have this pattern of ingrained mana, but were there other ways to produce it? Erryn hadn't found any other types of coin in the area. It made for a good anti-counterfeiting measure, but having all coins come from dungeons didn't really seem practical. This world was full of mysteries... Erryn couldn't help but feel excited. Just how small was the corner of the world it had explored so far? What new discoveries and puzzles still lay ahead?

While continuing the surface expansion, Erryn returned its attention to nugget experiments. Trying to flood a gold nugget with mana in the same way as the silver did not produce anything, yet the gold did soak up the mana in the same way as silver so it would be worth trying again at higher mana concentrations. Summoning experiments went better: With experience from manual summoning of slimes, it was easy enough to grasp how to produce a lump of a solid material. Mostly.

New material unlocked: Copper

New material unlocked: Silver

New material unlocked: Gold

The amount of mana required for gold was enough that it was only practical on the lower floors, and mythril couldn't be summoned via the system in the first place; whatever the mana cost was, it was higher than 20. Without that there was nothing for Erryn to copy.

Having a material unlocked allowed for free-form summoning. Not really something Erryn had much use for; it had used stone pedestals from time to time, but that was just to keep stuff off the floor and the material really didn't matter. Erryn had no desire for golden walls or copper floors. Maybe at some point if it felt the need for some decoration it could trace some patterns in gold.

There was another category of dungeon features that Erryn had not touched in a long time; traps. With nothing to catch, placing traps had become pointless, and even the original traps on the first floor were now gone after the... incident. Was it worth experimenting there? Erryn had no interest in the traps themselves, but it did want to know if they contained any useful materials to poach. The pit just made a half meter hole in the floor, using no materials beyond what the floor was made from. The tripwire was a piece of thin cord strung between a pair of wooden stakes. The spikes appeared to be iron. Erryn watched the mana flows and rather than recreating them completely, extracted out only the parts of interest. Iron was easy. Wood had a more complex structure, and was harder, but it was not impossible.

New material unlocked: Iron

New material unlocked: Pine

Apparently the system differentiated between types of wood. The cord was more interesting; it was no harder to work out than the pine wood, but on producing it Erryn didn't get any further unlocks. It seemed that cord was not a purchasable building material.

With wood and iron available, it occurred to Erryn that it could now conduct some fairly extensive repairs to the ruined village. There was no reason to but... why not? Rotten wood bulged and flowed and the black, brown and green rot shrunk away into the lighter browns of fresh wood. It wasn't long until houses were standing strong once more, albeit rather roofless. The roofs were probably straw, given the lack of remains. That was not something Erryn could reproduce. So... thin copper sheeting then. A fairly ridiculous building material normally, but being a dungeon had its advantages. On the inside, Erryn could reproduce tables and chairs but not soft furnishings: Those solid wood beds would be very uncomfortable if anyone was around to actually try one. It was all good practise for material creation anyway.

What if Erryn wanted to make something from gold? It could only be reproduced in the high mana environment of the labyrinth. Erryn could surround the village with slimes until the mana density increased enough, but there had to be a more practical solution. Monsters could carry smaller items out from the dungeon, but that wouldn't work for larger items or if a small amount of gold was required as a part of a larger object. The system could take the mana from the core and instantly send it anywhere in order to produce something. The rules about summoning on the wrong floors didn't have anything to do with actually getting the mana there, as Erryn had proven when forcing an illegal summon through. That seemed to be a useful trick to learn next.

Careful inspection showed that the system was not moving mana through the air. Instead it flowed out of the core into the dungeon stone, and travelled to where it was needed through the stone and other materials that had been assimilated into the dungeon. Erryn tried pushing the ambient mana from the sixth floor into the compressed dungeon stone and firing it towards the village, but failed to produce anything from it at the other end. The mana had been diffuse to start with and was ejected slowly enough that the first part had dissipated before it had finished coming through. Then the mana needed to be compressed before sending. Erryn started coalescing some ambient mana into a gold nugget, but before anything physical was spun out, pushed it through the dungeon stone and out into the village. The mana immediately tried to burst apart in the lower ambient pressure, but a few attempts was all it took for Erryn to learn how to keep it contained. Experiment successful.

The act of moving an almost formed nugget gave Erryn another idea. It grasped at the mana around the nugget, but this time it pulled. The nugget broke apart in a burst of mana.

New skill unlocked: [Reclamation]. You may now destroy an object to provide a temporary increase in ambient mana.

That was a nice added bonus. It wasn't really useful for anything right now, but Erryn hadn't been trying to unlock anything there in the first place; it just wanted to see if it was possible. And even more, reclamation wasn't even the end goal of what it was trying to do. Erryn repeated the trick but this time instead of letting the mana dissipate, it pushed it to another location and forced it to reform.

New skill unlocked: [Relocation]. You may now move dungeon features to different locations within the dungeon.

Erryn's mana control wasn't sufficient to pull that stunt with anything more complex than a nugget, but the system acquired equivalent was amazing. Erryn found it could happily shove around any items, and back in the village even entire houses for very low mana cost. The only thing it couldn't move was monsters. It almost seemed like cheating. If normal dungeons could simply buy skills like that with no effort on their own part, what reason would they have to experiment on their own? Errant dungeons were obviously a thing the system catered for, but they probably came about in a very different way to Erryn. In Erryn's case it was to work around a lack of dungeon points, but for a regular dungeon the temptation would be to abuse their abilities to earn more dungeon points. Something like putting horribly overpowered monsters on the top floor to slaughter unsuspecting adventurers, killing far more invaders than would normally be possible. In that case locking out the dungeon from the dungeon point store would be likely to get them to very quickly repent. Erryn wondered if the tag would be removed after a period of good behaviour or something. Nevertheless, it was becoming more and more apparent that the system did nothing that Erryn could not theoretically do manually, given sufficient time and practise.

Then why did it unlock these skills for free after Erryn had performed a poor version of its own just once? When so much of the system seemed geared to prevent experimentation, that reward seemed to go against the grain. Or did it... Moving a nugget was easy, but moving a house looked mind numbingly difficult. How much practise would it take for Erryn to replicate that manually? Given that the system had conveniently given an option that required no effort on Erryn's part at all, what reason was left to expend all that effort practising? For the first time Erryn began to view the system not as a helper but as a leash, existing to limit what dungeons could do, keeping them under strict control. Given that Erryn had now assimilated out to a radius of almost fifteen kilometres and was still growing, it could see why someone might want to place a restriction on dungeons. Although how it would have gotten going without the system summoning the first monsters it had no idea.

Speaking of the surface, from a vantage point of the top of a hill Erryn could see another, larger settlement. More discoveries awaited!