NOVEL WEB Chapter 7 – Expanding the forest
I watched the party leave with a sense of accomplishment, but also of longing as I desperately wished I could join them. As they disappeared into the treeline I sensed a presence appear behind me ‘Hey Shonu’ I said, greeting her without turning around.
‘Hi Liz, I am glad that they lived up to my expectations, I am definitely going to keep an eye on them as they grow.’ Shonu said with a hint of pride in her voice, before adopting a tone that reminded me of one of my old teachers ‘So, what did you take away from this whole experience?’
‘Firstly I still have a lot to learn’ I said, feeling like a schoolkid under Shonu’s gaze ‘Like how to balance my floors, they shouldn’t have been able to breeze through my slimes but then barely defeat Meg.’
‘Mm, I agree with that, although I think that you should just raise the difficulty of your encounter rooms since your boss is at a particularly good difficulty at the moment’ Shonu said, ‘You should also know that, even though they might not believe it, they are a strong group for their level.’
‘Yeah, I can see why you chose them for this quest. Secondly my floor is far too short, I feel like it should take at least an hour to get to my boss, let alone beat the whole floor.’ I said, ‘I know you said that I should expand my floor but I didn’t realise quite how badly an expansion was needed. I also didn’t want to be in the middle of renovations when they arrived, but I am going to do that now since they have left.’
‘I know, you don’t have to justify any of your actions to me like you used to do with your parents.’ Shonu said in an effort to calm me down. She also gave me a look that made me think that she had more she wanted to say but instead she just said, ‘I’m nothing like them.’
‘Right, sorry. That’s a bad habit I really need to get out of.’ I said, ‘Lastly I would have to say that I need to think about tactics more, the only reason the barbarian, and therefore the druid, was taken down was because they weren’t expecting the slimes. If I can use my monsters more efficiently through tactics like that then I will be able to increase the difficulty of my dungeon while not using more DP.’
‘Its fine, you don’t need to worry about it.’ The Goddess said, ‘I wouldn’t rely too heavily on just hiding your monsters as most parties will have at least one person that is capable of passively sensing enemies without the use of sight. However, giving your monsters some form of tactics will help them considerably. Now, I know my visit was short and I do love talking to you but I am terribly busy so I have to go.’
‘Before you leave I just have to say thank you, I didn’t say this before because I wasn’t sure if you were tricking me or not but I can tell now that you were telling the truth.’ I said. I wasn’t sure how to show my gratitude so I just awkwardly bowed my head to her, causing Shonu to let out a cute giggle. ‘Not even in my wildest dreams would I think that I would be able to experience an actual fantasy world. Anyway, um, bye, I am looking forward to seeing you again.’
‘No problem, when I was looking at people to bring over you were the one that was the most compatible with me.’ Shonu said, ‘See you later.’ And with that the beautiful Goddess disappeared into a cloud of smoke as she waved at me, leaving me alone to my thoughts. As I walked back to the boss room I thought about everything that had happened over the past two hours.
I had been walking around my forest when I sensed them entering the portal so I climbed up one of the trees, using my new claws to help me. I could have just dispelled my avatar and gone back to the dungeon view but I really liked being in this body and wanted to spend as much time in it as possible. It didn’t take them long to get to my first encounter room and start attacking my slimes.
The battle was over so fast that I could hardly make any judgement on how strong they were or how they fought. Watching them kill my slimes made me upset as I viewed all my monsters as my children and didn’t like seeing them get hurt. But I knew that they would respawn and this was their purpose, so I just worked through it. I was startled when they noticed me but they didn’t assume I was a dungeon monster and attack me so I kept on observing them from a distance.
They didn’t seem too impressed with the loot chest which made sense as it didn’t contain much but I was still annoyed as I made a whole room for it and put some effort into it. I didn’t get any more information about them from the elemental slime room either but the fight with Meg was a marvel to watch, they were all moving so fast that it was hard to keep up and their fluid teamwork was amazing. I shuddered to think of how powerful an experienced adventurer would be.
I was really happy my little slimes managed to surprise them and proud of Meg for taking down two of them, I would have to pamper them all later as a reward. I had been thinking about the party for about 10 minutes before I ended up in the boss room. Meg had respawned by then so she quickly walked over to me to get her fill of head pats.
I sat down with my back resting on a tree as I started to change the floor into what would hopefully end up as its final form. Before I could get anything done I had to see how much DP I had gained from the dive to see how much I was working with so I opened up my character screen.
I had forgotten that I would be generating DP naturally once I had opened my portal but it wasn’t much so I couldn’t solely rely on it for my projects. If I factor that in with how long I was waiting it would seem just a single short dive gave me around 150 DP which meant that that single adventurer’s party had given me more than a days’ worth of DP. I didn’t know whether that was for just beating the whole dungeon or just the first floor but I could figure that out later.
Ok, time to get on with this. The first thing I wanted to do was expand my floor since it would make the later changes easier. I looked through the information I got when I was transformed into a dungeon to see how to do this. It turned out that I could theoretically expand my floors forever, however it would get exponentially more expensive and it wasn’t recommended as it wouldn’t increase the monster DP cap.
For example if I wanted to double the area of my floor it would cost me the same as it cost the system to create the floor from scratch. However, if I wanted to increase the area by another 10,000 metres then it would cost double the DP and mana. I ended up adding another 50 metres to two sides of the floor, increasing the area by 12,500 metres, which cost a total of 300 DP and 33 mana.
The next thing I did was move the trees that had previously been on the border of the floor to the new border while adding more trees to fill out any gaps. I was going to move around the rooms while changing them next so before that I told all my current slimes to come to the boss room as I would be keeping that the same.
Once the last slime had gotten to the boss room I created four more rooms, the first was a circular room that had about a 12-metre radius, the second room was hexagonal and about the same size with each side being about 15 metres across. The third room was a small, natural looking room with each wall being roughly 5 metres long.
The last room was a large octagonal room that had 15 metre long sides, I then halved the size of the two pre-existing slime rooms, making them cover about 225 metres squared. Before moving all the rooms to where I wanted them, adding all of the trees cost me an additional 100 DP, bringing me down to 230.
The room order ended up going: small natural room; medium circular room; 2 small rooms; big octagonal room; medium hexagonal room and finally the last small room. I lengthened the pathways between each of the rooms while making them twist and turn, trying to make it feel more natural. Before moving on to the next step I remembered my conversation with the party so as I was moving the trees I thinned the canopy so that more light could filter through.
With all the rooms connected again I told the slimes to go to their designated room while I created more of them. I liked how strong the slimes had been so I created the standard slimes all at level 2 and the elemental slimes at level 4. I was also only using two elements, water and wind, as I felt like introducing more elements would make it unfair for beginners. The first room after the portal room houses five standard slimes and two elemental slimes, one of each element.
The second room has seven standard slimes and three elemental slimes, two air and one water. In the next room I put the first loot chest, although box would probably describe it better. I put six standard slimes and three elemental slimes in the next room, making it the opposite to the previous encounter as it had two water and one air slime.
In the big room I put in twelve standard slimes and six elemental slimes, three of each type. I intended this room to be a mini boss before the delvers fought the floor boss. The second to last room I put in eight standard slimes and one of each elemental slime, then in the last room before Meg I put a second loot chest.
Once I had spent a total of around 1750 on the monsters on my floor I got a feeling that I wouldn’t be able to spend more than 2000 DP on monsters on this floor. This didn’t include the chests, as that didn’t increase the floor's difficulty, nor the boss’s two free levels, as this was given by the system.
After I had placed the last slime I had 206 points left to spend before I hit the floor cap. Not wanting to waste points I had a look through the floor, it would get too crowded if I added anymore slimes so instead I levelled up some of the slimes. Fifteen standard slimes got a level, three in each room, and five elemental slimes got a level, one in each room. Leaving me with just one DP left.
I had quickly ran out of DP doing this so I had to wait for it to be restored by my natural regeneration which took almost eight days. Instead of wasting this time doing nothing I set up a training area with targets and training dummies in the boss room as well as a bow and a dozen arrows. I then used my downtime to train my archery and karate skills, I hadn’t used either in a very long time so I was incredibly rusty.
But since my new body didn’t tire nearly as fast as my old one I was able to train much longer than I could previously. This meant that I quickly got rid of my rust and by the time all the slimes had been created I was much better than I had been previously. I even ended up getting a level for my trouble.
I wasn’t finished quite yet though as I spent a couple hours thinking of strategies I could give my slimes. Unfortunately I wasn’t particularly good so the only two things I could think of was to make the standard slimes act as a frontline while the elemental slimes shot off spells. And for the slimes to work in groups to take down one person at a time instead of randomly attacking anyone.
With everything done I had a look over my floor happy with it, it may not be perfect but it was good enough for me and at the end of the day that is all that matters. I hadn’t been training for the past week for no reason, I was preparing to have a look around outside the dungeon. From what I understood most people didn’t go around destroying dungeons for no reason so I didn’t have to stay here to protect it all the time.
Plus no one had visited me over the past week so I doubted too many would turn up if I left for another week. Especially since I was out of DP and wouldn’t be able to do anything until I had regenerated at least another 2000 points, which would already take me fifteen days. If I had to guess the total I would need for it I would place it around 4000 DP.
Firstly the monster cap would be 3000 points and secondly the floor would take almost 800 points to create and expand. Lastly I rounded up since I would also have to create each of the rooms and place the loot chests which would take DP as well. All that to say I had nothing to do for a month which would drive me insane as I always got bored extremely easily.
It was quite late though so I slept with Meg in my lap as I had done for the past eight nights. In the morning I materialised everything else I needed, a dagger for skinning anything I ended up hunting. A proper backpack with enough rations for two weeks, I didn’t need to eat while in the dungeon as the ambient mana kept me alive but I wouldn’t be able to do that outside the dungeon.
A waterskin, leather armour that replaced my dress, making sure that I added a piece of iron over my breasts. I had already accidentally hit myself there as I wasn’t used to worrying about it and didn’t want to repeat that experience. The equivalent of five bronze coins, split evenly between bronze and tin coins and a dozen more arrows as I didn’t want to run out.
I may have done quite a bit of training over the past eight days but I knew I shouldn’t expect that to get me out of every situation, especially since I was alone. But luckily the body I was using was just my avatar so if it died then I would just go back to the dungeon. The only way someone could truly kill me was to destroy my dungeon core. This knowledge didn’t stop me from feeling incredibly nervous, but also excited, as I stepped out of the dungeon.