"Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous impatience. Once implemented they can be easily overturned or subverted through apathy or lack of follow-up, so a continuous effort is required." -- Hyman Rickover

  Ornthalas departed early the next day, under the strong advice (bordering on insistence) of the crew of the ship that had brought him. I had the hawk-eagle close enough to hear the crew muttering about smoke on the mountain top and the startled movements of alpine birds. They had the impression that the dragon was stirring and wanted no part of any encounter that might ensue. They were barely willing to wait for dawn, in fact, and the ship was fully loaded, aside from bedrolls, before they turned in for the night – huddled against the gangplank in case a sudden departure was called for. At the first light of a false dawn, they were hustling Orn on board and casting off. I could only assume they would take a cold breakfast once they were on their way.

  Their nervousness was contagious, and I set the hawk-eagle to watching the mountain peak, but whatever had triggered the sailors did not seem to recur as the day wore on. I released the hawk-eagle to its usual activities at nightfall, but in the meantime had kept myself busy planning my next moves.

  The first two days were spent simply enacting some of Orn’s more logical recommendations – reducing the lethality of some of my traps and working to make the layout of the rooms seem more natural and plausible to visiting adventurers. The slime chute no longer would result in death, unless I opted to lower the inch and a half thick sheet of glass blocking the exit. The glass quality was unnaturally high, so in the heat of the moment anyone taking that fall would likely not spot it until it stopped them. All the impact, without the finality of it all, with any luck.

  Similarly, while I’d already added sapphires, I also provided a thin strand of gold to the stalactites holding up the deadfall in Room 2. One would hope adventurers would be suspicious, but I expected a certain percentage of greedy individuals to fall for it anyways. I did shrink the size of the deadfall a bit, so that it wasn’t necessarily fatal and left in some additional minor obstructions to slow its fall – all removable in an emergency.

  The final small change I’d enacted was to place a false door built from golden-oak at the end of the dead-end hallway leading past my core room. That would hopefully help people miss the partially hidden entry to my core room and, not coincidentally, led to yet another trap – in this case sharpened edges on the rear of a door knob coated with a paste of bleedgrass extract mixed with beef tallow. Not likely to cause major damage, but likely to cause a bleed effect on unwary hands and impair their ability to use their fingers unless they had fairly thick gloves.

  Blueprint Acquired: Golden-Oak False Door

  Blueprint Acquired: Bleedknob Trap

  The third room had two traps added to it along the hallway. The first was a simple pit trap, about 2.5 m deep and covered with a thin sheet of mica under some scattered soil, but with the bottom filled with an unpleasant bed of mixed blackberry briars and bleedgrass. It would cushion their fall, but not in a comfortable way. The plants wouldn’t thrive there, but I could pass them enough mana to keep them from drying up entirely.

  Blueprint Acquired: Discouraging pit trap

  The second trap was a bit nastier; I rigged a simple pressure trap that rewarded the uncautious with a spiked ball of wrought iron on a length of rope poised to swing in at gut level on an average sized humanoid. The ceiling was high enough by the waterfall to give it some speed and the noise of falling water would likely reduce the time invaders had to spot it coming. The trigger was left intentionally a bit raised above the floor level to give invaders a chance to spot it, but the stone surface was otherwise unremarkable.

  Blueprint Acquired: Gutcrusher pressure trap

  Blueprint Acquired: Pressure switch

  The bears didn’t really come this way, preferring to drink directly from the stream outside, so I’d arranged for the switch to trigger for anything over 10 kg of pressure. The badger shouldn’t spring it, but the ball would go over its head anyways. In any event, if I was paying attention, I could disarm the trigger easily enough.

  A small gold nugget inset into a hole behind the waterfall, with daggers set into the walls of the hole slanting inward gave visitors incentive to react greedily and be punished for it. Not fatal, but you could get some nasty cuts if you just tried to grab the nugget.

  Blueprint Acquired: Greed-punishing dagger trap

  Touches along those lines served to make the dungeon level both more insidious and less potentially lethal. Using some of my new blueprints also served to diversify the dungeon a bit in more positive ways, as well. I didn’t add any skeletons or kobolds, but I did throw a couple of manashrooms into the darker corners and some healmint not far from my entrance.

  The fifth room was the other that needed some content. Not having any particular inspiration, I left it unfinished but added three lesser cave goblins in leather breechcloths armed only with clubs formed from bronzed ash and barely shaped lumps of granite, bound with crude leather strips. They weren’t really sapient and were capable of only following the most basic imprinted commands to defend themselves and the core. I could take direct command of at least one of them, if I chose, but mostly figured I wouldn’t bother. They could mostly feed themselves by catching small fish and frogs in the adjoining room. Their room itself rapidly became littered with random bone shards, organic waste of all sorts, and amongst that were some scattered copper nuggets for the truly diligent searcher. I figured I'd generally leave a certain percentage of rubbish present for atmosphere but would keep it to a level where it wouldn't impinge on the joining rooms too badly.

  On the third day, I shifted my focus to planning out my second floor. I wanted it to be directly below the first level, about 10 meters deeper, with taller rooms and a more coherent theme. I still didn’t have enough diversity of blueprints to create a library theme, much less a full university. That said, I could now make books, and I could start working on my quest to transcribe lore. I would need to experiment a bit and see whether I could transcribe lore from my old world, or only the local lore I was developing. I sort of assumed my knowledge from the old world and the gifted eidetic memory made that kind of the point, but that remained to be seen.

  In the meantime, I had to think about how I could create an interesting theme that would still enable me to move in that direction. At first consideration, perhaps using elven skeletons set up to mimic a laboratory/scholarly residence would work. My gift of languages seemed likely to enable me to write in an elven script and the eidetic memory gifted me should help in allowing some discussion of basic physical phenomena. I’d have to set it up to enable checking of some constants, but I’d have to assume most of the simple Newtonian mechanics would be pretty close and the experiments to verify them would be simple to replicate. Most constants other than gravity would almost certainly need to be the same or, as I understood it, the entire system would fall apart. Magic, of course, added a whole other set of variables, but that would not be where I would start. That said, until I had a better sense of this world’s knowledge base, I wasn’t sure how far back to go in establishing the basics.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  In any event, I would need to experiment with my new materials to see what limits would be placed on my ability to produce items without any blueprint beyond my own, otherworldly knowledge. I was going to need to set aside some time, soon, to, as the kids say, “fuck around and find out”. My dungeon instincts were telling me that sort of production would be possible, but more costly in terms of mana than working from a blueprint. Most likely, I should start with the simplest things and produce, for instance, a calibrated set of standard mass units or a simple, straight edge ruler.

  Most of that planning could wait a while, though. In the short term, it was time to start digging. If you could call it that, as while I was absorbing huge amounts of stone, it was largely being converted directly into energy and atmospheric gases. The ability to directly banish the matrix as I removed it was a huge boon for an old archaeologist! No more backfill day. Ever. And relatively little concern that I’d miss cultural artifacts in the process either. The density of mana also increased as I opened space deeper in the matrix, with the highest density in those regions closest to the center of the sky island. I wasn’t sure if that was a side effect of the concentration of mass, or if there was some more concrete magical reason for it (a byproduct of whatever held the island aloft, for instance), but it was a noticeable effect, if slight.

  I wasn’t really picking up any new blueprints as I opened up my first new room – a bigger one at roughly 10 m X 10 m and 3 m tall. I left this one as a bare square space with polished granite walls for the moment. I hadn’t even determined whether I wanted this first room to be an interior one, or whether I wanted a big enough space to construct a physical building to house the rooms. A moment’s pondering left me convinced that I could save anything that ambitious for later when I had more time and mana to work with. The staircase down from the first floor ended in the northern wall of the room, and I decided to work in a spiraling pattern inwards towards the center. I wondered whether the system would count this room, when I was clearly not yet finished with it, but I got the clear sense that it would – any sufficiently large space open to the rest of the dungeon would be counted. I figured that I would take advantage of that to secure the quest rewards for my expansion quest and see what that gave me to work with.

  To that end, over the next day or so, I expanded with two symmetrical rooms on the eastern and western sides of the second floor landing room. I made them near clones of the original second floor room, pausing for a few hours to puzzle out ways to create a standard door from my limited selection of materials. I started with a fairly large slab of Northern Golden-oak, essentially the stripped-down trunk of a mature tree. Some tight focus on the water contained in the wood enabled me to extract most of it – mimicking the effects of aging the wood in a matter of minutes. Matter conversion enabled me to pare the trunk into flat planks about 2.5 m tall, 75 cm wide, and 12 cm thick. From there, I bound the planks together with wrought iron straps. The locking mechanism and hinges were trickier, as wrought iron wasn’t a great choice for finer details, but for the meantime I went with a simple latch raised by a wooden lever. It wasn’t going to keep anyone out, but it did at least limit visibility from one room to the next and gave the impression of a physical structure. I erected it with simple hinges in wrought iron; they wouldn’t last, being fairly brittle, but they worked for the time being.

  Blueprint Acquired: Rough Golden-Oak Door

  Blueprint Acquired: Shoddy Wrought Iron Hinge

  Blueprint Acquired: Rough Golden-Oak Lever Latch

  Shoddy felt a bit unnecessarily harsh, but I could see the justice in it. I wasn’t entirely sure how the adjectival descriptions worked in a systemic fashion; I was pretty sure shoddy was worse than rough, but was there a complete hierarchy of descriptors in use? I supposed I’d find out eventually as my repertoire expanded.

  Quest Completed: Create Additional Rooms; Reward – Choose one from each of the three groups:

  Group 1 : Parchment, Alpaca Wool, Marble, or Beeswax.

  Group 2: Beefy Bolete, Common Morel, Lesser Pestshroom, or Golden Amanita

  Group 3: Amethyst (rough), Topaz (rough), Altar of the Dungeon God, Blank Gilded Book

  The choices offered suggested to me that whatever directed my system prompts it has been paying attention both to my prior choices and to my intentions (at least those I’d discussed with Orn and Aven). Perhaps I was imagining things, but sources of ink, parchment, and fancy books suggested awareness of my bookish interests. Even the marble and the pestshroom (apparently a mild pesticide in its spores deterred common pests) had potential uses thematically for a library/university setting. Wax might allow candles, which would be atmospheric, but the mana lights seem like a safer choice for a library. The choices mostly weren’t difficult for me, though I did go back and forth for a moment between the beefy bolete and the pestshroom. In the end, I decided the pestshroom might have more general functionality, since I wasn’t really expecting to feed anyone for a while. And while marble halls might be traditional for an academic setting, there was certainly no need for it at this point.

  Blueprint Acquired: Parchment

  Blueprint Acquired: Lesser Pestshroom

  Blueprint Acquired: Blank Gilded Book

  New Quest: Create Additional Rooms – 10 rooms on Lvl 2; Reward: T2 Aquatic Creature Blueprint, T2 Plant Blueprint, and Magic Tool Blueprint

  The new quest offered some exciting rewards, but I felt like pursuing some of my other quests might be worthwhile, while I considered how best to proceed otherwise. Having finished some rooms on the second floor also completed my second quest from Aven. As with the first one, the rewards were immediate, but no new quest to continue was issued. I assumed that would happen when next the dungeon fairy visits.

  Quest Complete: Complete 3 quests and begin Second Floor; Reward – Choose one of the following: Cave Lurker, Lesser Banshee Bat, Giant Trapdoor Spider; Choose one of the following – Lesser Healing Potion, Lesser Mana Potion, Lesser Potion of Memory Enhancement

  These choices weren’t new for the T2 creature, but still took some consideration. I decided that the bat was probably my best option, thematically speaking. The potions were a bigger tossup – I wanted them all! The healing and mana potions were, so to speak, staples of a dungeon economy and I could see plenty of reasons why visiting scholars might favor memory enhancement. Putting my faith in the notion that anybody visiting a dungeon would likely come with healing and mana potions, I took a gamble and went for the memory one.

  Blueprint Acquired: Lesser Banshee Bat

  Blueprint Acquired: Lesser Potion of Memory Enhancement

  I had just about decided to go back to cataloging the local bird species as a little reward for myself, figuring that Aven would likely be back before I could get as far as the ruin I’d found. That was going to be my next real goal. It was only a matter of hours, though, before I’d gotten my next visitor – and it wasn’t Aven.