Early the next morning, as the sun was just cresting the horizon, Bellona was putting the last of her gear onto a rchant wagon. With the change in plans for several routes that ca with the news of the new dungeon ca an opportunity to start the first part of her route with so company. For the first leg, she’d be accompanying a caravan, then going by horse alone for the second leg, before going on foot for the last leg. It made her logistics easier, as it ant she wouldn't have to worry about feed for the horse for most of the journey.
The champion of Amiru went over her ntal checklist one more ti as she adjusted the position of her stuff, making everything as neat as possible. All her heavy armor was in the chest, until she was setting out on the last leg there was little reason to wear more than a chain shirt. There was little chance of danger on the main roads, so her axe she’d keep at her side and her shield on the horse. Even when traveling solo, it would be easier on the beast to distribute the weight of her armor rather than have her entire armored mass centered on its back.
For the last leg, when the horse would be left behind, she’d wear her full kit. If you were going to be carrying the weight anyway, there was no better distribution than to wear it. That would also be the section where she’d be traveling up mountain paths, and she didn’t look forward to it. She’d worn her armor for days while moving and fighting across relatively flat land before, but days of going up a mountain in armor was going to be quite different. Fortunately, it was early sumr, so the mountains wouldn’t be too cold on her way up.
After Moriko had reached the monastery, Mordecai and Kazue had turned their attention back inward, for it was ti to build. As usual, Kazue went first. With her plans finalized, the walls of the cavern on the fifth floor shifted and ford tiers, enabling ever-higher placent of mushroom buildings, and larger structures that could spread their weight on supports of multiple heights.
This was a large village of artisans, crafters, farrs, athletes, entertainers, writers, philosophers, and similar professions. She expanded on her tokens idea, to pass through the gate required five tokens, but the laganthros were free to hand tokens to one, so, all, or none of a party’s mbers as they saw fit, and the tokens would attune themselves to those who they were presented to. She also borrowed from Mordecai’s double-door concept: the first door could be opened by anyone who had five tokens, the second door would open only if the first door was closed and everyone inside the corridor had five tokens, and the first door also can’t be opened unless the second door is closed.
In addition to the more straightforward challenges she’d been thinking of previously, she had developed so slightly more complicated quests. Many professions use heat, so a challenge could start with “My fire drake wandered off and I can’t find him!”, leading to tracking down the drake, then figuring out the sub-challenge (it might be sowhere hard to access, or be distracted by a love interest, or maybe it found a shiny too large for it to carry but won’t let it go and hisses at any one who gets close, etc), solving the issue, and then they might still need to persuade the drake to co ho.
There were many variations of ‘I need a thing’ that could be made into challenges, and the first obstacle was unstated: The inhabitants could pick the challenge, and could make it harder. If they didn’t like you, it would probably be long and involved, and wind up with you getting dirty, wet, and cold. So being at least reasonably polite made everything much easier. It wasn’t terribly likely that this would be an issue by the ti soone got this far, but Kazue had decided that she was going to include variability in all her future challenges that made things easier for people who were being nice.
Now, people needed proper settings for them to venture into, so she spun off side caves of differing layouts and environnts; so were jagged rifts that required navigating a lot of vertical terrain, so were wide with one or more streams or small ponds, others saw a return of crystal outcroppings, and a few were mildly caustic with acidic, alkaline, or salty environnts. Nothing too dangerous of course, unless one was exceptionally foolish.
With many of the available challenges being at least partly physical, she started arranging for appropriate rewards as well. Mordecai had made sure she now knew how to craft so of the common physical enchantnt items and how to alter their form and fine-tune their secondary abilities. A belt that could let soone carry more weight, boots that made you a little faster or made your steps quieter, a cape that could keep you warm or could help you blend into the background, and many other possibilities.
Not that she neglected the ntal side either: glasses that could help decipher an unknown language, a pen that always wrote smoothly and without saring and with unlimited ink of your choice, crafting tools that enhanced the product you made, and several other items of specialized use were all available rewards. She wanted the rewards here to be more focused on helping people better their skills, rather than rewarding them with direct knowledge as the library did.
Of course, sotis people would be coming through who knew more than anyone in the dungeon did on a topic. Their challenge would be to teach, and rewards would generally be in raw materials unless there was other information they wanted.
She did have to be careful just how generous she was though. From dawn to dawn, there was a limit to how much the dungeon could create that could be claid as loot, and they could only ‘stockpile’ for values that had already been won or that they already owed as part of a trade agreent. Their inhabitants were not so limited, but only if they worked with ‘real’ materials rather than ones created directly through dungeon mana, and it took a fair amount of ti and effort to craft even a minor enchanted item the proper way. So unless there was a good cause, the items the inhabitants crafted were their own to use or to trade as they saw fit.
When Kazue was done she looked over the town to make sure she was satisfied with her work. There were towering mushroom spires, thick-walled squat mushroom buildings, long buildings made from many mushrooms grown together, and every other combination that had been asked for that she could make work. A lot of them were ‘dummies’ at the mont with no roads to reach them or doors to enter them, but she’d change that as the population grew. She even had a few unoccupied buildings growing from the ceiling, which were left available to be claid by any inhabitants that could make their way to them. A little challenge and reward set up for her own people, figuring out how to make flying magic items or systems.
Creating the lighting had been one of her favorite parts. There had been a few concepts she’d considered, such as just making every mushroom and fungal surface glow slightly to create a very even and ‘sourceless’ lighting, but in the end, she went for sothing a bit more flavorful. The underside of the mushroom caps glowed to illuminate the area around their base while large glowing ‘spores’ floated overhead to cast a dimr radiance to the general area, and all the paths were marked with tiny little puffballs that would collapse in a sudden burst of glowing dust spores if disturbed, most likely coating whoever ssed with them and leaving a glowing residue that would sar the more you tried to rub it off.
All of the fungal-based light was in a soft blue/green color, but in addition to the ‘natural’ lighting, the inhabitants had access to fire and normal light spells, making the interior of the buildings look warm and inviting against the backdrop of perpetual twilight outside. Overall she rather enjoyed the contrast of slightly spooky exterior lighting and warm, inviting interior lighting.
They’d had plenty of ti to build up lots of energy since Kazue’s mother had co through, so technically Mordecai could have built up his side at the sa ti. But he felt it was best to wait until she finished in case there were any surprises. The upside-down houses on the ceiling had not been in their original ideas for example, though in this case, they didn’t cost a significant amount more. They did, however, give him an idea to add later.
For now he focused on his original plan. At the entrance to the fifth floor, visitors would find themselves entering a wide campsite. There was no equipnt, but the space was obviously cleared with a small, 2-foot tall ‘fence’ of piled stones and a fire pit in the center. There was also a plaque that read:
This area is neutral territory for the two warring factions beyond, but animals and monsters do not know such distinctions.
Proceed at your own ti and in your own way, there is no one path or one thod to success.
Combat challenges were fun and straightforward, but even the library was only a warm-up. Beyond the cleared campsite stretched a dimly lit mushroom and fungus forest that gave away nothing of what lay in wait for brave adventurers to face. Or at least would, when he was done.
Mordecai started with the terrain. The campsite was going to be slightly disadvantageous in that it was at the bottom of a shallow depression. All ways out were uphill, making it impossible to see most of the cavern from here even without the addition of a forest. From there he varied the terrain, creating twisting valleys, solo and clumped hills, the occasional small ravine, and very few areas of simple, flat land. If one tried hard enough, one could even find thin trails running along the walls of the cavern, but those were carefully placed and angled to be difficult to spot from below. Once done with the layout, he created a few springs to beco the heads of several streams that eventually combined into a river that flowed into the boss chamber at the end of the cavern.
Back toward the entrance, he also introduced a small, natural ‘alcove’ with three waterfalls coming down along the inner curve of the wall into a small pool, which in turn started its own stream. These three waterfalls were connected back to the warren’s water network, making them part of the ecology of the dungeon. It was also ti to add a layer of complexity: rather than just having exclusive pathways for different water uses, he started using nature’s filters of rock, soil, and sand to keep most of the impurities flowing into the sewers, and then let water seepage work its way into various underground ponds, which in turn beca the sources for further streams. He made sure the paths alternated going into airless pockets and into caverns that were half-air and had light sources embedded in the ceiling to let photosynthesis take place. All natural purification. This was the source of the water for these three waterfalls and introduced the preexisting bio into this floor.
Now he looked at his entire catalog of available mosses, lichens, and fungi to select the best ground cover options, then he carpeted the entire floor in a mixture of this ‘grass’. Not entirely unaltered, Mordecai did fortify them to make them more resistant to being walked on and generally tougher, but for the most part he left them alone in their design. He was also doing a wild-seeding mix, to let them all compete and find their preferred environnts. And there were plenty available, every single visitor had brought in various spores and tiny seeds that most humanoids never realized were clinging to them and shedding from their skin at all tis.
He’d also been very considerate of Kazue’s origins. While she knew how to zoom in on material structures, he’d carefully avoided showing her how that technique could be used to examine all the tiny critters that lived on people all the ti. Mordecai had found out a long ti ago that most people did not want to know about them. It did however provide a source for the next layer of this floor’s ecology, filling all the undergrowth with tiny creatures invisible to most people. Once Mordecai was satisfied that everything had reached a self-sustaining state, it was ti for the ‘trees’ of this forest.
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