After infusing my mana into the dungeon core, I almost feel like my consciousness expands a little. I’ve gained an awareness in the back of my mind of the state of the dungeon. Focusing on that feeling, a map of each floor of the entire dungeon fills my mind. With it, I’m able to detect the presence of every monster, trap, spawner, and even dungeon delvers currently exploring the floors. I can sense my mana subtly mixing with the latent mana in the dungeon air. All of this confirms that I've succeeded in overcoming the largest hurdle in my way to acquiring more strength. Though it wasn’t a victory without loss. I wish Pim were able to be here with Vulcan and me, but all that’s left of him is his spear. It is currently set to the side of the dungeon room he fell, serving as a cenotaph.
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Vulcan is still recovering from our last battle, so I’ll continue to explore the new functions I’ve gained as the dungeon master. I say the words “dungeon info” in my head, trying to get more information about the dungeon, the same way status screens work. From the corner of my vision, a new screen pops up, and I’m able to see the dungeon layout at the same time. The dungeon info screen displays some useful information, but it's a bit overwhelming. There are a bunch of stats listed about the dungeon, some of them even having nested info. For now, I’ll focus on the parts that catch my eye first, then work through them line by line. First, at the very top of the screen, is a value listed for “Entropy”. It’s currently at 496, but it’s gradually rising by one point every few minutes or so. Nothing else is listed about it to serve as a description, so I use ‘Identify’ on it. My skill reveals that Entropy is the numerical representation of the accumulation of mana within the dungeon, which is used to modify the dungeon itself or acquire monsters or items. This suggests that there’s a store function for dungeons, which should allow me to change the dungeon however I like.
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Thinking that, a new screen pops up, and of course, it's a dungeon store. It looks like a modern shopping website you’d see on Earth. Everything was listed in categories from monsters to traps to floor environments. Naturally, everything had a price associated with it, and my current Entropy was listed at the top corner. The front page featured some grandiose items and monsters, but they were all going for hundreds of thousands of points. There was even a Red Dragon listed for a million Entropy. If I save up enough, I might even be able to buy it before the sun explodes. Moving on to the monsters page, I’m able to sort from low to high. I was then presented with the cheapest monsters available, the usual simple monsters like goblins, kobolds, or zombies. The lowest tier of monsters was each 50 entropy at the cheapest for base level monsters, the price multiplying by five for each increase in evolutionary stage. Each spawner for a monster was ten times the cost, but I could apparently modify the individual spawners to change the price depending on stuff like respawn frequency or spawning limits. Compared to my current savings, it all looks weirdly expensive, so I look at dungeon traps instead. The only thing to greet me was similarly priced traps starting from 100 entropy and going up quickly with lethality. I check the items page, but they’re not any cheaper, nor are the modifications to the dungeon itself like unique environments or extra rooms and floors.
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What the hell, why am I so broke? Why didn’t De’gon save any Entropy if he believed a human invasion was coming? Wait, maybe he already spent it on something. I look back at the dungeon layout, poring over each floor for something that looks expensive. I eventually figured out where he had spent all of his savings. He had mentioned in the past that he wanted to expand the dungeon when he found another dungeon manager. At the bottom of the dungeon is a sixth floor, where the throne room and dungeon core are located, but it’s only half-filled with monster spawners, albeit of lower quality than the fifth floor. There is a final boss room, connected to the throne room by a hidden door, but there’s no boss monster. In preparation for the upcoming invasion, De’gon had expanded the dungeon, expecting me to join him, but that ended poorly for him. He couldn’t buy a new monster to fight that would have been strong enough to beat Vulcan, as it would have had level one skills and no fighting experience. It would have only been able to rely on its base stats to fight, which wouldn’t have been enough. That makes me question why he didn’t summon any monsters already present in the dungeon, but I think I know why. Hovering my vision over a monster presence brings up a smaller menu allowing me to see info on the monster and move it around the dungeon instantaneously, although that requires Entropy. I try to use the summon function, and it marks the rooms I can potentially move them to. The only exceptions are the rooms with hostile presences in them and the rooms surrounding them. The closest point of summoning would take about five minutes to get to the desired point. I guess it’s a mechanism to prevent abuse of the function. It would be pretty unfair to make it to the bottom of a ten-floor dungeon, just for the dungeon master to summon hundreds of monsters into a room if they had the entropy to spare. Dungeons are deadly, but they still maintain an element of fairness so that they don’t completely outstrip humanity’s ability to handle them. There’s probably a point where a dungeon can become unbeatable for humanity, but that would take a lot more Entropy than I’m capable of producing right now.
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De’gon also mentioned once that dungeons are self-sustaining, that they don’t need humans to survive, and I can see why that is. Entropy is derived from the mana of monsters; humans only provide a negligible impact for now, so I need stronger monsters to emit more mana to create more Entropy, fulfilling a cycle that just needs enough time to jumpstart to exponential levels. The rest of the info on the dungeon info screen has a list of stats about the numbers of monsters, their types, the mana being emitted, the mana being consumed by the dungeon, foreign bodies, and more detailed information nested in each line. Each of these probably affects the rate at which entropy is accumulated, but I can’t see the specifics of each relation, even with ‘Identify’.
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I want to get a better idea of what I’m working with, so I also skimmed through the info of each monster on the lower floors to see how far De’gon was able to build up his fighting capabilities. My analysis of them all only provided mixed results. The monsters of the dungeon can roughly be grouped into three categories of monster types: demons, undead, and beast types. The higher floors were filled with all three, but they didn’t go past their first stage of evolution, only increasing in number as a form of difficulty. The lower floors, however, had the second stage of evolution for demons and beast types of monsters, probably due to De’gon’s affinity for them. None of these monsters were high-level, usually being spawned and killed by dungeon delvers in their first couple of fights. Generon and Leron must have been the strongest monsters in the dungeon, Generon being slightly stronger than Leron, as he was a naturally spawned variant of a Hobgoblin. From what I could see in the store, each monster has the potential to reach its fourth or fifth stage of evolution. The only issue is that they’re basically being treated as fodder right now, never surviving long enough to make it to evolution.
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To sum it all up, I’m facing a potential war against humanity, and I’m starting with basically nothing but my experience in my past life to guide me as a dungeon master. Hmm? A new screen just popped up. In big, bold letters, the screen looks like the cover of a book with the title: “Dungeon Master’s Guide to Running a Dungeon: An All-Inclusive Explanation by the Creator of Dungeons, Chaos”. So Chaos was nice enough to create a guidebook for monsters to learn how to run a dungeon. The whole system does seem based on concepts from Earth, so this is probably necessary to create functioning dungeons led by monsters. There is a purchase box at the bottom right corner with fifty entropy listed as the price for it. I’m kind of broke right now, but this could be pretty handy, and it would be good for me to avoid falling under any assumptions based on my previous life. Hesitating for a second, I agree to purchase it and watch as fifty Entropy is taken from my meager balance. I turn to the first page, well, I try anyway, but a red overlay covers the screen, stating “ACCESS DENIED”. Under it is apparently a message. “It wouldn’t be fair for you to have this and otherworldly knowledge, so no help for you. Instead, have another present that’ll help you in your upcoming confrontation. Keep up the good work. ;P - Chaos”
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Goddammit, Chaos.
