As Ian was about to bring up the flashing windows, something caught his attention. Things were crawling inside of him.

  Insects had entered his dungeon and were crawling around the entrance hall. That would have normally been the focus of his attention, they were his first intruders after all, but he could feel them. Of course, he expected to be able to detect the presence of intruders, but not to have it feel like creatures were crawling inside of him, even if that was what they were literally doing. There were only a few insects inside the entrance hall, but the itchy, disgusting feeling permeated throughout the dungeon. His feelings were transmitted to the dungeon creatures and made them antsy.

  Was this feeling going to persist forever? For every intruder that entered his dungeon? If so, he was more surprised that dungeons retained their sanity at all. The worst part was not the feeling of something crawling inside of him, he had gotten used to similar feelings, but the fact that he now had an enormous urge to get rid of them.

  Killing intruders was important, but only doing that would make him a target of extermination. They’d send clear team after clear team until they finally destroyed his core. Of course, they’d have to get some very dangerous individuals if they wanted to succeed.

  He quickly browsed through the Dungeon Store, but none of his searches brought up anything that would clear up the feeling. Damn, it looked like he would have to deal with it for now. He could only hope that it cleared up through some other way, like existing, or killing a certain amount of intruders, or leveling up a certain amount, or maybe it had something to do with the auction or competition.

  With an internal sigh, Ian moved most of his focus back on the few insects in his dungeon. They were slowly scuttling along, making their way to his transfer formation. He cocked his book spine as he wondered how they would get to the main dungeon. His transfer formations required input, and had not been designed to deal with unintelligent beings. Which was something, he now realized, he should have taken into account. Although, the ability to select which floor to start on wasn’t too uncommon, so that would have also proved a barrier to unintelligent beings. Soon after his contemplations, Ian got his answer.

  One of the insects, a beetle, stopped in its tracks before making a beeline for the transfer formation. As soon as it stepped on it, the formation lit up and the beetle was transferred to the G- floor. A few feet into the floor, a spider lunged at it, bit into it, and injected venom into it. Soon after, the beetle disappeared into a burst of mana, which rushed out of the dungeon. None of the mana entered Ian and simply dispersed once outside of his dungeon. The reward he received in return was a small amount of DP. And by small, he meant a half a point of DP, so not that bad considering he only got a single DP a day passively at level one.

  There were two possibilities that Ian could think of for his transfer formation to work for insects. One, the selection options were translated in such a way that even a beetle could understand, and they chose to activate the transfer formation. Two, for creatures that don’t have the ability to activate a dungeon’s movement options, the dungeon’s movement options are activated automatically. He was leaning towards the second option, as it seemed unlikely for a beetle to be able to cognitively recognize they needed to select something. However, the second option meant that while he created the transfer formations a certain way, the dungeon system could still tamper with them. Thoughts for the future.

  Ian soon grew a little bored with the ever entering insects, which had now grown in size, along with the occasional bird or small mammal joining them. It wasn’t a parade of animals, but he had made about fifty DP so far. However, more so than his boredom, an idea he had previously thought answered had creeped back into his mind.

  A key feature of dungeons was that while not every creature inside them occurred in the surrounding environment, a large number of them did. Ian had made an assumption that since his terrain choices were determined by the surrounding area, thus some of his creature choices, the similarities between creatures in the dungeon and outside the dungeon were due to that.

  His observation of the insects threw a kink into that hypothesis, since none of them were the same as the ones he chose. He hadn't chosen the forest terrain yet, but that was the point. A lot of the creatures in the dungeon were the same or similar to the creatures in the terrain most immediate to the entrance of the dungeon. Of course, most dungeons might not have the variety of terrain that he had to choose from. However, only being able to choose five creatures per terrain type was limiting.

  Also, the floors closer to the entrance often had less similarities to outside creatures, which led to the possibility that the creature similarities were due to a factor after dungeons already finished multiple floors and opened to the world.

  Ian began searching through the Dungeon Shop with searches such as outside creatures, copy creatures, copy, more creatures, and a few others. However, none of them brought up satisfying results. It wasn’t until he thought about his original assumptions of what dungeons did with those they killed. He had assumed they absorbed them to produce the materials, but after learning that dungeons released mana back into the world, he dismissed that idea. What if his initial idea wasn’t completely wrong?

  A quick search for absorption answered his question immediately.

  So rather than storing all the items intruders brought with them, it allowed him to create them on his own. For him, this was amazing. For other dungeons, that most likely relied on the dungeon trees, it was still good, but had its downsides. A purchase of one hundred thousand DP and any new creature that died was now something he could create. He’d have to spend more time developing different creatures rather than focus on making tons of elemental spiders.

  The makeup of creatures coming into his dungeon hadn’t changed, so he moved back to the flashing windows. He had made sure to zone out the gossiping goblins, so he would be surprised.

  ….That was useful, although it must be a generic greeting, since he didn’t need to know the name of the world he lived on for two hundred and fifty years.

  Ian stared at the titles for a while. It made sense, he had done a lot in the year of preparation, but it still seemed like a lot considering he only had four floors. Of his three dungeon titles, he couldn’t disagree with Overkill, but he didn’t exactly like having it. He had just wanted to be prepared in case some hater of dungeons was his first visitor, and the EX floor would continue to move down as he made more floors. Would he always have that title? Maybe he should make a sign warning intruders about that floor? ….Nah, the name of the floor and having to choose to transfer were good enough. If the adventurers were stupid enough to enter even after it said EX rank floor, then they sealed their fate. His contemplation over, he opened title descriptions and effects.

  Half? That seemed like a lot for what he did. Although, he did only do mana evolution….or at least primarily mana evolution. He couldn’t remember if he tried out the evolution trees at least once when he was checking them out.

  The second effect was more interesting. Could he make lower rank space goblins? Even if he did the same ratios as before, they might be E+ rank. What if he did purely space magic? He might even be able to make F+ rank equivalent space goblins. Of course, this effect should apply to his other creatures as well. This meant he could hopefully make rare and interesting variants even on very low rank floors. D wasn’t exactly high rank, but having his E, F, and G rank floors left with just elemental variations from biota and normal monsters didn’t sit right with him.

  Creating mana hearts in biota wasn’t the most costly of procedures, but it was a welcome reduction. Although, not all biota were as small as the ones he’d used so far, nor as unintelligent. Could he create monsterized humans, hasjam, elves, dwarves, or others? He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. As his goblins and most dragons showed, not all monsters were out to kill, but killing was still the sentiment of most monsters.

  Ian chuckled to himself. How many people that knew him would say, ‘Ethical considerations of experimentation? You?’. He always responded back, ‘I always get consent first.’. Why was he worrying about it now? He couldn’t experiment on them after they became sapient, only before. If they never had any experience being human, then what would they care if they were a monsterized human. ….Well, they might care once they started to meet humans.

  He shook his core. It was time to stop contemplating monsterized sapients and regretting not purchasing the Ecosystem perk. Onto the next title.

  He had effectively doubled his mana with these titles. The only uses of mana that hadn’t been influenced were actually using magic and creating creatures.

  Was this gift something all the gods came together to agree on? Or was a specific god selected to choose for each dungeon contributor? Either way, it was heavily dependent upon which gods were involved, if he was going to be excited for this ‘something’.

  Yay? The goblins evolution trajectory certainly wasn’t normal, but the most unusual was Narcy, and he had seen Sleepy Goblins before. The only other somewhat unusual evolution that he didn’t develop directly was the Clear Construction Spider. Based on his current complement of unusual evolutions, he wasn’t sure how useful this would be. He did suppose variety was more useful than generic monsters. As long as none of these unusual evolutions gave adventurers the secret to immortality, then there shouldn’t be too many problems.

  He gave a quick glance at the slimes and jellies still taking care of the infants before moving on.

  ….Y-Yay?

  He had wondered why he hadn’t gotten a title for creating the space goblin at the time, but at least he had that answer now.

  Although, the fact that titles were only granted after forming a more permanent connection with his universe had some implications. How was the Dungeon System different than the System he had when human? They both seemed to be overseen by the same God, but maybe the Greater God had a hand in the Dungeon System. Hmm, more and more questions, but that was one of the enjoyable aspects of life.

  Also, the effects seemed somewhat lackluster for a ‘grand feat approaching the Gods’.

  Name? ….That’s right. He had a soul name and a dungeon name, but the dungeon name was blank. Or at least it was. He brought up his status.

  He was correct, his dungeon name was now Dungeon of Evolution. He’d have make sure he was considered the Dungeon of Evolution and not a Dungeon of Evolution. Well, he could only assume there were other dungeons of evolution as the requirements didn’t seem that difficult. Actually, the fact that he had never come across dungeons with the same names was more unusual. Maybe once a name was taken, then it was removed from the pool of possible names? His three dungeon names were more broad than the average dungeon name, well besides the SS rank Dungeon of Knowledge, whose rank gave no indication of her difficulty or age. At least voice wise, he thought it was a her. He never met the avatar. Although, maybe he could change his voice when addressing intruders? Hmm.

  Ian’s mind slowed down as he glanced at the Helper. He used the outer book cover to scratch the top of his pages. Right.

  “Hey, Helper. Can dungeons have the same dungeon name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did I….no wait….how often does it happen?”

  “Every known dungeon name has occurred multiple times.”

  Really? There were that many dungeons on this….

  “Can a dungeon name be repeated on the same planet?” Ian asked.

  “No.”

  “Alright, thanks.”

  It seemed he didn’t have abnormal luck to not encounter duplicate named dungeons. Tidon has said there was a universal auction and competition, how did they deal with names then? He supposed that soul names came into play there. Actually, he wondered how many dungeons called each other by their dungeon names and not their soul names. Especially since they could probably be changed.

  Ian moved his focus back to his status.

  A few other things had changed about his status. Besides the addition of his titles, there was a lot less to his status. In fact, compared to his status as a human, it was more of a ‘Can’t remember your numbers? Here they are.’ than an indicator of his overall strength and progress. The loss of a rank indicator, the number of perks he had, and the number of creatures he had was more of a loss of fluff than anything important. It was interesting to look at his creature numbers increasing, but that was it. He supposed eventually the title category would proceed the same way as before, but for now he could see all of them as soon as he brought up his status.

  The last change would be the most noticable if he hadn’t remembered what his status looked like before. He could see how the numbers changed in the parenthesis, and everything italicized and bolded was new. It was a nice quality of life feature that would be even better when looking at the statuses of his creatures. Actually, why the depths didn’t his status have this feature when he was human? It was quite the improvement for the year he had been gone. Updates to the system happened occasionally, but such a big quality of life upgrade was uncommon. Dammit, he could have really used it while human.

  Ian decided to finish reading the detailed explanations for his titles before he explored the possibility of changing his dungeon name, not that he wanted to.

  At least there wasn’t a reward for clearing the EX rank floor. He wanted intruders to experience his EX rank floor, just not clear it. It would depend on how often he could change his name, whether this would be useful or not. If he could change his name anytime, then whenever he wanted to create EX traps, he could equip this name.

  The second effect clicked Ian’s mind into place. Gambling! Of course! It was the best way to make people think they have a chance of winning, but in reality they would lose everything. He hadn’t thought of it before because he absolutely hated it, but considering he already had to do some things that wouldn’t exactly be called morally right, it fit right in.

  He could only hope the second effect occurred early to get the adventurers attention, and then never happened again! The only problem was if the enchanted effect was too grand. None of his current enchantments would be too big of a problem, but he’d have to be careful of what he enchanted in the future.

  ….Wait. The description said ‘any’ treasure. Did that mean non-enchanted items could become permanently enchanted items? If so, was the enchantment random? Ian’s core twitched for a while at the implication. He hated gambling.

  This was going to be hard. He liked evolving new creatures, but magic interested him just as much. If it hadn’t, there was no way he would ever have become an EX rank mage.

  The increased skill proficiency gain was the most important, and gave him definitive evidence that certain dungeons did provide a tangible benefit to training in them. Numerous studies had been done, and it was considered fact, but it was still nice to have the System say ‘Yes, it does this’.

  The equivalent for the Dungeon of Evolution was the development increase for tamed monsters. However, tamed monsters were a much narrower field than all magic skills.

  What would produce more mana? Creatures being removed from his dungeon or the mana infused into adventurers from skill gain and increased mana regeneration? Based on his analysis of his creatures, living things were dense with mana. But, the perk he used also said they were dangerous in terms of condensing mana. He supposed the danger came from the fact that once outside his dungeon they would live and reproduce out in the world. Tamers were liable to attempt breeding on any rare monsters that were produced from his dungeon, which meant a lot of babies and a ton of mana being condensed into them. If he was going to focus on tamers coming to his dungeon, then he needed to make his tamable monsters infertile.

  Even with all this internal debate of which one to choose, he still hadn’t even checked if he could change it. Something he needed to know as he had never seen the name of a dungeon change.

  Did the description update after he received a dungeon name? It must have, as that was a lot more information than he ever remembered getting.

  At least he now knew that while changing his dungeon name was possible, it wasn’t encouraged.

  Now, magic or evolution? ….The choice was a lot simpler than he thought. While there were still secrets of magic he had yet to discover, he felt more complete as a mage than he did in his understanding of creatures and monsters. As he wanted to learn even more, evolution was the only choice. As such, he left his name as is.

  Now that he was done with his personal windows, he should check on-ooh a fox, that would be useful for later-the goblins and his other creatures, to see what changed with their windows. Mina, Izu, Pugi, and Botan were getting restless as he had told them to wait while he examined his own windows. Narcy was sleeping, and Yervin was examining his window in the learning room without bringing it up to Ian.

  “Okay, what has all….three of you so excited?” Ian corrected himself as he noticed Pugi sitting with her head down.

  “My lord, we got-!” Mina glanced at Pugi before bringing her raised hand down and lowering her voice to normal levels, “We got titles and changes to our status.”

  However, Mina’s actions didn’t go unnoticed. Pugi stood up, walked over to Mina, and punched her in the gut.

  “Don’t treat me like frail wood, Mina.” she frowned, “You can still get excited about something if I’m down about it.”

  Mina’s eyes widened before she shook her head slightly and stood up from her hunched over position. A couple of seconds of staring at each other occurred before Mina grabbed Pugi into a big hug. “I’m sorry, Pugi. You’re right. However, I’m never going to stop taking you into consideration.”

  Pugi’s frown turned into a smile as she gave a nod and hugged Mina back.

  Ian was glad to see them getting along. If they liked each other more, then maybe he could spend more time making his dungeon than interacting with them. ….He supposed he should stop thinking that way as they were likely to be together for all time. Or at least a very long time considering the age of the Dungeon of Knowledge was greater than most estimates of Jauter’s age. He had spent some time on the problem, but his interactions with geologists hadn’t gone well. They didn’t like dungeons as it was impossible to take samples from them, and the study of rock ages and compositions didn’t interest him that much.

  Ian opened up Mina’s status as the three goblins bragged about their titles to him, while Pugi declared she would get more titles than them in the long run.

  Mina was the only one with two titles. Izu, Botan, and Narcy had one each, while Yervin and Pugi didn’t have any. Of course, Yervin had his titles from when he was born, but no new ones.

  Botan had the ?Plant Lover? title, Izu had the ?Creature Lover? title, and Narcy had the ?Narcoleptic? title. Ian thought it was somewhat annoying to have his naming sensibilities so blatantly pointed out.

  The best change with his monster’s statuses was the ability to hide certain parts of the window. He hid the descriptions, drops, and gender, since those weren’t liable to change without his input. The others he left because they either had changes, or he simply liked looking at them.

  The overall aesthetic of the windows changed for the better. Being able to change the window aesthetics was important to a lot of people while he was human, and while it didn’t affect him much, he wondered if the titles were what the goblins were truly excited about.

  After he finished his short discussion with the goblins, Ian moved his focus back to his core room. Opening to the world was less of an event than he expected, but as much of an event as he thought. There wasn’t much change in the stream of creatures into his dungeon, so now he had to try out copying his floors. As much as it bugged him to do so, he needed to level up faster.