Stor felt his skin scream as he ventured into the forests. Normally there would be birdsongs and animal cries as the wind rattled and played with the leaves and grass blades. Now, the wind played alone—there were no sounds of creatures.

  These forests were ancient, and there were good reasons why mothers and elders told nightmarish tales of the place. It was old, so grandly old, and there were many old things that lay hidden in it. Stor was a hunter, and all the years he and his ancestors had ventured into here, there had never been a day of silence.

  There were old titans that lived here, or so the legends went. Only the power of those forest kings could cause such suffocating silence this far into the outskirts. He had no idea whether this all was a terrible omen or a coincidence praying on his paranoia. All that he did know was that no one in his village would get much sleep tonight.

  Jacob watched the bear slowly get tired. He had waited so long that he was half tempted to strike it a few more times with the dungeon fairy’s magic. While the fairy’s magic didn’t cause expensive injuries, resurrecting an animal cost a small fortune. The mania in the animal caused it to waste energy when it shouldn’t, and now the bear was beginning to falter.

  There were two types of brainwashing that he could use, enthrallment and assimilation. Enthrallment transformed animals into direct minions, giving him power to command and direct them. However, enthrallment caused the animal to lose a lot of its independence. It also caused the animal to produce very few soul points when it died.

  Assimilation simply caused the animal to lose any hostility to the dungeon. Jacob couldn’t use assimilated creatures in an army but they didn’t require his input to move and they gave many more soul points when they died. Unassimilated animals produced more soul points though.

  This bear was going to be enthralled and turned into one of his boss monsters. He waited more as the bear kept wasting its energy; the only reason animals could go days without eating was by conserving their energy. It kept getting more and more weak as it kept moving and thrashing against the solid stone.

  Finally, the bear collapsed. He watched its heavy breathing as it tried to put itself back on its feet. He wasn’t going to lie, he felt a little bad about it. He liked bears back on Earth and this was a very beautiful bear despite its somewhat alien appearance.

  He extended his hand to the bear and said, “[Enthrall].”

  Seven soul points was still more than he wanted to spend as there was a chance the enthrallment failed. He was running out of time though.

  “Yes,” he replied and the bear started to cry from the mental anguish of the spell. It thrashed despite its exhaustion and injuries as the enthrallment tried to overtake its mind. The bear lost its vigor as it fought the spell, and for a moment Jacob thought that the spell would succeed on its first go.

  “…Shit!” he snarled through his phantom teeth. If he had waited longer, the spell would have probably succeeded the first time.

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  “[Enthrall],” he said again. This time the cost was only 5 soul points, and he didn’t have to wait long for the spell to succeed the second time.

  Immediately he felt a connection between him and the bear where there wasn’t one before. What was shocking was that he realized that he already had a connection before this to the dungeon fairy and hadn’t noticed.

  He could command any creature he enthralled, but there were limits. The commands he could make were similar to the dungeon fairy, he could mark locations for it to go to and mark enemies to attack. There seemed to be a good chance that he could say commands instead of marking like with the dungeon fairy, though the bear wasn’t in a good situation to try that.

  He looked at his status screen—he had only 33 soul points left. That wasn’t much when it came to mutation…first things first, he needed to heal the bear. He used the dungeon fairy to transport a corpse from the dungeon into the bear’s cell.

  The bear could sniff the food, but because of its dependence on him it struggled to move of its own volition. Jacob had to baby it and mark the corpse as food for it to eat. The bear struggled to get back on its feet as it moved to its meal and started to eat. It would take time for it to recover naturally, but Jacob wasn’t bothered by it. The bear by itself was a decent enough guardian for the moment.

  He returned to the bodies where the Scarlet Teeth were growing. Veins of red were growing within the dead flesh, showing that the fungus was growing well. The edible stalks hadn’t started to grow yet, but from what he could tell they were getting close.

  Jacob left the prison ceiling and summoned his map. The dungeon before was ugly and crude, something he designed in a rush. Before the second wave came, he needed to update and improve many parts of his dungeon. He just wished that he knew when the next wave was coming.

  Wait, it felt like he was forgetting something. He stopped what he was doing and started digging through his memories to find what he was missing. It had something to do with the next wave, wait, whatever happened to his starting quest? The quest at the start of this adventure about claiming an entrance to the dungeon.

  Normally the quest icon would be flashing back in the game, but he didn’t have that here. He deduced the ability phrase for this and said, “[Quest].”

  He had 25 soul points waiting for him this whole time! While he wished to smash a rock against his head, he claimed the much-needed soul points. He was about to return to the dungeon when a new quest appeared.

  Jacob looked at the new quest in stunned silence before sighing. He really wished he could kick himself.