He spent time thinking about what he wanted the second layer to be about. He needed to create plants for some of his animals, in particular the deer, to eat. As this layer was going to be deeper in the dungeon, he had much more freedom to do weird things without scaring off adventurers.

  He decided to make this a jungle cave setting, like an underground forest full of tangle vines, wild animals, and trees. Like the underground wilds from stories like Journey to the Center of the Earth and others like it.

  Now that he had decided what to do, it was time for him to actually create the second layer.

  Unlike within a layer, it was impossible for anything other than the dungeon fairy to paths between layers. An earth magic beast could keep trying to dig from one layer to another and never reach it.

  This was because layers were essentially individual realms. Technically they were still large spaces within the ground, but each could have their own climate, ecosystems, and character. One layer could be a barren winter and the layer next to it could be a magma hellscape without any conflict.

  However, there was an issue: mana. With each layer further away from the Overworld, the natural mana saturation decreased. He struggled with creating the foundation for an ecosystem for the first layer, and it will only get harder. With enough time, the mana saturation of the first layer would dwarf that of the surface—that was near impossible for the lower layers.

  As the second layer was still close to the surface, the mana it had was still sufficient for orthodox dungeon ecology. However, that didn’t mean it was going to be easy.

  The first layer will take advantage of the higher concentration of mana for the creation of mana crystals via the crystal blooms. On the second, the generators were going to have to be a much more permanent structure than a food and mining resource.

  As he wanted to create an underground jungle, having an ecosystem that ran on mana didn’t fit. He didn’t want the plants and trees to become mostly mana cores just to survive. Jacob reviewed the many, many playthroughs he had done before he recalled a solution he could use.

  He was going to create artificial suns. By having a few single organisms handle the transition of mana to energy, the organisms wouldn’t be required to use their mana to supplement their energy intake and free them up to be much more dangerous.

  These artificial suns, which will most likely be some sort of plant-based creature, would convert mana into sunlight to feed to the plants below them. This sunlight will help sell the wonderland of the layer and, hopefully, enrapture the imaginations of dungeon explorers.

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  He used the dungeon fairy to create a downward tunnel to the bottom of the layer. Once he had reached that point, he created the portal to the second layer. This took the dungeon fairy much longer than normal to create, once it was done there didn’t seem to be any noticeable change. Jacob had to summon his map to confirm that the layer had been created.

  He created a simple core chamber deep within the second layer and moved the dungeon core to the safer location. Once the core was moved, he created a few chambers for testing the new organisms for the second layer.

  The crucial organism that he needed to make was the artificial sun. The plant that he was going to base it on was a sunflower, though one that will grow on the stone wall sort of like an orchid and will grow to an enormous size. This organism needed to be long lived in order for it to work.

  Mana recovery scaled with level, and he had used the formation of inner mana crystal as a form of level determination in the crystal blooms. The more shards they have grown, the higher their level and more mana they are able to absorb from the environment or generate. When shards are taken, they lose levels and the benefits.

  Because of this, a crystal bloom trying to grow its first shard will take much longer than one trying to grow a third. To compensate for the second layer, it will have a longer development and provide much cheaper sunlight instead of mana. There would be consequences for the ecosystem though.

  Eating mana crystals was similar to the idea of steroids, it will greatly enhance the crystal ants and the predators that hunt them. Even without dedicated mana cores or mana recovery characteristics, they would be stronger just by the high amount of mana that courses through their veins.

  Food with high mana like that couldn’t be made here. Like the surface, the animals and organisms here would need to fight, eat, and develop to slowly level up and improve.

  He was thinking too far ahead. The sunflowers would need to grow on the ceiling, maybe to give the illusion that sunlight was leaking through the stone into the caverns and corridors. Instead of claustrophobic caves, he could have large, expansive areas full of foliage and predators and prey. The ceiling would be high above and maybe there will be a primitive climate.

  He now had slightly less than two hundred soul points, which wasn’t a lot. He was going to begin designing it, but then he received a notification.

  People were coming to his dungeon? Already? Jacob started to panic as he floated back and forth. He had only just barely passed the fifth wave and hadn’t had the time to clean up.

  His dungeon hadn’t been renovated for adventurers. Unlike the invaders, sentient species aren’t compelled by some maddening force to walk to their deaths. If something was strange or suspicious, they would leave. Once they left, who knew when they would come back.

  He wasn’t interested in killing them. What he wanted to do was to attract their interest. He wanted for their story of his dungeon to spread like wildfire. Depending on the size of the group, killing just one could make it so that his dungeon remained obscure.

  His mind raced as he quickly outlined something to fill the dungeon and make the explorers curious.