It had taken them a few days of travel, but they finally reached the Grand Canyon and the location George had given them. At which point, Angie and Lindsay began to glare at Nate.

  “Nate, if there was a dungeon here already, why did we have to come out here?” Lindsay demanded in annoyance.

  “It only appeared a few days ago,” He answered honestly. “There was also one that appeared overseas. More of them are beginning to appear.”

  Angie stared at him with narrowed eyes, clear suspicion showing in her eyes. Nate had a feeling that she was getting close to putting everything together by that point. There had been too many little hints and clues that they had up close and personal for.

  The dimensional zone at the Grand Canyon was odd. There were a few visible monsters in the area as all the ones there had been changed by the heavy spatial qi. It turned out that the weird floating jellyfish monsters inside the dungeon weren’t the only things that could use spatial qi.

  It didn’t seem as though any of them were able to teleport. There were a few that were able to actively displace items around them though, which was close. The items would reappear at seemingly random locations within a twenty-five-foot radius of the being. The stronger monsters and animals appeared to have some degree of control over where things would appear, but that was it.

  Then there were the attacks, which were scary in different ways.

  They watched from the rim of the canyon, looking down, studying all of the possible dangers. One of which was a stretched-out sleek looking coyote. Its tail was far longer than normal, and prehensile in the way it moved. Two edges were covered in a thin layer of black spatial. Anything that touched one edge was cut cleanly and came out the other side.

  There were also bullet-like spitballs that dug through everything in their path, depending on the strength of the animal that fired it. Along with a variation of the above attacks, that wicked away heat in mere moments.

  “Well, I can study these guys up here,” Nate offered. “Unless you really feel like going down there and dealing with all of that?”

  Both girls, along with Aura, shook their heads, before promptly heading back to the RV, leaving him alone.

  Nate pulled out his notebook and activated his binding ties energy skill, the evolved version of basic ties. The skill let him know how everything tied together, and at least in theory, he would be able to understand and eventually create a meditation method based on how the energy moved inside their bodies. Strictly speaking, he should also be able to recreate their energy skills. However, that required far more precision work than just creating a meditation method, something that he had plenty of examples of already.

  They planned on staying there for as long as needed, hunting and lazing about. There was plenty for them to do nearby in the area while Nate stayed on the rim watching everything.

  Lindsay and Angie continued to go over their planned route, adding in details that they received from the professional hunting teams. Some roads had completely vanished years before that they had been unaware of. Other locations had been taken over by bandits or beasts that had set up their nests or dens nearby.

  The professional teams were helpful, but they only had information on roads going out roughly three hundred miles in every direction. Still, it was enough to get them started and help them know just how out of-date their road maps were.

  There were a few locations they wanted to see, and places they wanted to visit on their way to New York. After taking care of Jace, they would start to loop back around and begin heading back home. The plan had changed somewhat since the beginning, but all of them wanted to get rid of the boy and put that matter behind them.

  The dungeon in Busan, South Korea, had started to generate some decent energy and resources for him. He had gone with an ice theme for the dungeon in a bid to combat the heat from their fiery bodies. Unlike with the Kobold dungeon, it worked much better this time around, for one simple reason.

  Fire.

  The kobolds were semi-intelligent and not bothered by the cold. As such, they only combined to spit fire when threatened.

  The bulgae, as he had come to learn they were called, were always on fire. The fire would melt the ice, which would cause the water to drip onto them and then turn to steam. It was a vicious cycle. The dungeon was always creating new cold glacial ice, while the fire dogs were continually melting it and turning it into steam.

  After only a few days, the inside of the dungeon had turned into a three-zone sauna house. At the top was the cold zone, at the bottom was a layer of water Nate had ordered the dungeon to not absorb, and in the middle was a thick layer of steam which held back most of the airflow.

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  In the end, most other traps weren’t needed and actually did more harm than good as they disrupted the layers. Given enough time inside the dungeon, the bulgae would asphyxiate from a lack of oxygen, and then fall unconscious into the water, never to wake again.

  It had all happened by accident, but the simplicity of it was frankly brilliant, in his opinion.

  The night after they had left the lake, Nate had decided to take the jump and place a Dungeon Core at that location. After three days of waiting, he had gotten a notification, letting him know that he had conquered and closed a new portal. As soon as the Core had come into being, it had automatically closed the weak fracture in space.

  In other words, he had spent two-hundred and sixty thousand energy on an experiment that yielded him nothing. All that closing the portal got him, was one more dungeon towards his creation limit, raising him to thirteen dungeons. In other words, all the energy had been wasted, because he had to spend a dungeon to get a dungeon while getting nothing else in return.

  Needless to say, he would be ignoring the rest of those cracks for the time being. That was endgame, completionist-type content. The sort of stuff you did once you had finished everything else.

  He was nowhere near that point as there were so many dimensional zones that needed to be taken care of first.

  They ended up staying at the Grand Canyon for a solid week. During that time, all Nate did was sit on the rim and study the beasts with his energy skill. He did the same inside the dungeon as well, though he had been forced to make a few changes to the place. Namely, adding some clear glass through which he could see. He could watch the floating jellyfish through the cameras, but the binding ties energy skill didn’t work without a direct line of sight. Unfortunately, a camera just didn’t cut it.

  After that week, Nate wasn’t quite done creating the new meditation method. However, he had taken enough notes that, combined with his prior experience and the other methods he could look at, there was no issue leaving. Not to mention that he would always be able to continue studying the jellyfish.

  While he had been doing his thing, the girls, by which he was naturally including Aura, had been hunting. During the last eight months, they had all gotten lots of practice doing that with his parents. Anna had also trained them mercilessly every chance she had gotten. Their skills and abilities with their weapons and energy skills had grown a fair bit under their combined tutelage.

  As they left the Grand Canyon behind them, their stores of meat, energy cores, and bodies to sell were not exactly flush since everything was being stored inside Nate’s storage space, but close to it.

  Beyond that, he was also working on a new dungeon that they would stop at on their way to New York. It was the thirty-ninth core he had created, putting him one below his limit. He had been creating them at a furious pace lately.

  This particular dungeon was situated in the semi-wilds of Virginia and was semi-odd. The dimensional zone originated inside an old abandoned mine shaft and parts of the dungeon reflected that.

  It hadn’t been immediately obvious to him, but by that point, he had figured out that there were certain conditions for the custom dungeons to appear. If the portal was completely underground in some way, as with the ants, then a custom dungeon would appear. On the other hand, if it was a mix between the two, or if the inhabitants of the portal actually had no real need for a special environment, then you ended up with a mixed-environment dungeon.

  Case in point, the denizens of this particular dungeon were mostly dwarves, but there were also a few kobolds and some rock golems.

  He had an idea that he wanted to do, and Aura thought it was an interesting one. She was being somewhat cautiously optimistic.

  Regardless, at the moment, he was designing the layout of the dungeon floor, and that is where he was running into issues. Rock golems were incredibly strong and could punch through most walls that the Dungeon Core could currently make.

  The dwarves, on the other hand, would take their picks to anything remotely minable. They stuck mostly to the more natural sections of the dungeon, but there were plenty who also entered the stone-worked sections. No matter what, they attempted to dig through the walls, and through the golems they encountered.

  These dwarves were less in the modern-styling and more in line with the old Snow White version of them. They didn’t exactly seem interested in fighting unless it interrupted their mining activities. They even nibbled on rocks and gems as they worked.

  The only ones not causing near-constant damage to the dungeon were the kobolds, which Nate was thankful for. However, the lizard beings, despite their supposed intelligence, seemed intent on attacking any dwarves and golems they came across. They weren’t fighting them to the death, so much as trying to show them who was boss. It was weird to watch, and thoroughly confusing, but it’s what they were doing.

  Dungeon politics. It wasn’t the first time he had encountered something like it, though normally they were less violent in nature. The matter was generally taken care of before they stepped through the portal, with the other group generally being subjugated in some fashion.

  Nate was guessing that in this case, the portal on the other side was in a contested zone of some sort.

  There was no way to know for sure at the moment, and he didn’t really care. The fights that were breaking out only helped the dungeon.

  In the end, they split up the dungeon in such a way that the kobolds had the most access to the exit. The dwarves were more interested in mining, with only a few leaving to look for other locations to mine. The golems were completely uninterested in leaving the dungeon in any manner. They were less numerous than the other races, at least in the beginning.

  Over time, that would change as the other two races came and went, while the golems continued to stay inside the dungeon. The elemental rock beings were happy there. The environment inside the dungeon, especially the natural rock sections, was perfect for them. As a result, Nate expanded the dungeon in those sections more than he normally would have.

  This helped both the dwarves and the golems, keeping them busy and inside the dungeon, generating energy and bits of other resources.

  He wasn’t usually so accommodating with his dungeons, as he tended to be focused more on traps and taking control of the portal. He was still going to add traps; the kobolds were not a peaceful race. However, the other two races seemed largely content to keep to themselves.

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