LITMIR.BIZ

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      Unfortunately, it had worked a little too well.

      It seemed as if every fly in the Northern Territory was in David's little room. Blow flies and march flies. Worse, European wasps had shown their fucking heads and had started laying eggs in the Fori's mouth. And as much as he loathed every single one of them, the dungeon was forced to concede that he needed them.

      Through some playing around, David was able to create an energy bar which allowed him to see how things worked on a deeper level. He set up with zero to ten points. Each one of the putrid creatures added a single spark of energy pool. Individually it was nothing, but when you combined all of the thousands of flies together the energy bar was slowly going up.

      Without much to do, he watched the bar slowly climb. When the bar restarted with no sign of where the energy went, he did a little more fiddling around and after many hours of thinking, decided to expand the bar to a hundred. But it was only until he increased the bar to a thousand that he understood what was happening.

      David was actually making DP.

      Every time the bar turned to a thousand, the dungeon obtained one single point that he could use later.

      There was just one problem; the thing was as slow as his dead grandfather. He was currently making one DP every four days, and every creature that he summoned ate at that energy regeneration. Create too many insect puppets and David would go into the red.

      It couldn't just be a one off payment. Oh, noooo. That would have been too easy. There had to be an accumulative cost. You couldn't just have a horde of zombies and skeletons and expect them to work for free. You had to give them dental and time and a half.

      This meant that David needed to bring in more insects and animals if he hoped to really play with the system.

      “Why does everything have to be so fucking complicated?” David had once screamed at the monitor.

      One curious thing was that the energy regen, which was what David referred to as his maintenance costs, were not stable. There were the occasional boosts and it wasn't until he began playing around with the flies that he understood what was happening. Every time that something died, the dungeon got a single burst of energy from that creature's death. It wasn't much, a blip. But it forced him to go back through the logs and analyse the data.

      The dungeon couldn't access the information before his upgrade but he did see something. When the Fori died, he received nearly seven and a half dungeon points. Which was vastly more energy than he would have gotten if the animal had lived.

      He came to one conclusion.

      “I have to kill to get anywhere,” he said aloud. The dungeon avatar's eyes moved to his precious coffee pot. The words DEATH FOR COFFEE taunting him.

      He got up out of his chair and paced the room, speaking to himself as he did so, “No. No. I'm not killing anyone. There isn't even anyone out here to kill. I'll just stick to getting more flies. I mean, there's no real rush. For all I know my stupid core could end up getting hit by a bus two seconds from now.”

      David took a look around his security room, the only sanctuary he had. It hadn't been a week and he was bored out of his bloody mind. Needing something to occupy his time with, the dungeon returned to his seat and began to examine the wiki.

      Dungeon

      The species, Locas Ventris, is a curious species of creature that takes on the appearance of a room or landscape. Locas Ventris naturally exist across the multiverse, in a variety of realms where the lines between worlds intercept. It is also possible that Locas Ventris can be man-made using synthesised dungeon cores.

      They are creatures of the abstract. A source of wealth, a curse, a home, and a prison. Many people see these places as a threat to their survival, while others see them as cradle of civilisation.

      In some barren worlds the Locas Ventris was the focal point of life itself. Dwarves, elves, fairies, demons, and humans. Some can trace their lineage to one simple cave or patch of forest. Through time, dungeons grow to the point where accession is possible and become the world's gods...

      It all kind of blurred together after that. From what David was picking up, some outside forces used dungeons to seed other worlds. He supposed that made some sense. Dungeons didn't need food in the general sense, nor did they need oxygen.

      David thought about it into terms of something like NASA dropping a biosphere on Mars and giving it a reasonably intelligent AI. They would use another creature as a base, and instead of waiting for something to happen in billions of years or so, they could have sentient creatures pop up in a few centuries.

      What was surprising was that the wiki's knowledge was very limited. Being a dungeon himself, the avatar thought that if anyone knew more about a dungeon it would be another dungeon, but that theory was starting to look like utter shit.

      Exhausted from pure boredom, David closed his eyes and decided that he had earned a nap. Before he could shift into unconsciousness however, a prompt brought him back to the waking world.

      You have slept for 25 hours and 7 minutes. Your raiding team has successfully attacked a European wasp nest and have brought back the following spoils.

      1 wasp nest.

      1 wasp queen.

      2397 wasp larvae.

      1252 insect corpses.

      You have lost 48 bull ants and 9 wasps.

      David shrugged. There were always more where they came from. What disturbed him more was the sleep-mode function. He had not felt tired since becoming a dungeon, but simply resting his eyes had resulted in an entire day being wasted.

      He would look at the settings later.

      A trumpet blew through the speakers and David looked at his monitor to see that he had received another window.

      Congratulations.

      You have earned the achievement Insect Initiate.

      You have shown that you have a way with insects.

      5% more control over insects.

      Well, that was nice and all, but what David needed most was some real monsters and miners.

      He stared at the monitor for a moment longer; expecting another prompt or email to surface, but nothing came. He turned his focus to the ants that were carrying the nest around on their backs like it was a soccer trophy.

      It was all too slow. If you didn't count the Japanese light novels, David knew that he had a surprisingly good start, but he needed more than ants and flies. He needed some real powerhouses, real monsters; miners, and things that could drag in trees.

      Out of the corner of his eye, the dungeon avatar noticed that the monster icon was flashing. He clicked on it, sure that it was just an update on the wasp counter or some new spider that managed to crawl inside.

      A tutorial-like window popped up.

      While other dungeons have access to magic and various anomalies, your basic knowledge of your world's science has allowed you access to other methods to create monsters. You now have enough resources to modify your creatures in various ways. You have unlocked, Splice, Evolve, and Mutate.

      “Okay.” David trailed off.

      He didn't know what set this off but he would take it. With nothing else to do today, David followed the tutorial's instructions. He clicked on the splice button.

      Genetic splicing is still a new science that involves taking the DNA and RNA of creatures and overwriting them with other traits. Select a minion which will act as the base ingredient, then select a second creature with the characteristics that you want. Build a genetics lab to understand and refine the process.

      Genetics lab? Well that would be cool to have if David was able to make his first fucking room.

      Following the tutorial, he selected a bull ant and he got a list of the animals that he could splice them with, including Morgan and

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