A few minutes later Eskoth and Sear walked in and came over to us ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ Sear asked Val with a worried look on her face ‘That looked like it did some serious damage.’

‘I am fine now that it has been treated’ Val replied with a smile on her face, calming Sear down ‘I probably won’t be able to do any strenuous activity for a couple of days so no adventuring while it heals. I am still able to practise my magic so I don’t really mind.’ As she replied I looked over at her and saw that she was mostly telling the truth but she still winced every time she slightly moved her arm so it clearly still hurt.

‘That is good to hear.’ Eskoth said, clearly relieved that Val would be ok, ‘You both fought valiantly today, I would be honoured to fight together if you two want to travel together.’

‘Thanks for the offer but I am tethered to the dungeon and so cannot travel far.’ At this Val nodded her head ‘By the way, do you know why those monsters attacked us? When we spent a month exploring the area surrounding the dungeon we didn’t see any monster like that. I was under the impression that monsters mostly kept to one area.’

‘Oh, that is a shame, but I can answer your question.’ Eskoth said, sad to hear that we wouldn’t be able to travel with him but happy to help, ‘We heard about a group of adventurers going to deal with a goblin colony, that must have been you. There are two types of monsters, the first are stationary like goblins. These will find a good place to take root before settling there.

‘In the process they do something with the mana in that area to make it so that only other monsters of a similar type will be created, in that case it was goblins. They will then use that extra power to slowly expand their domain. This means that they are incredibly hard to find until they get out of hand as they don’t go searching for people to kill and anyone unlucky enough to find them usually don’t live long enough to warn anyone else.

‘The second type of monsters are migratory; they will travel around in search of prey to kill. This makes them easier to find as they will find you but they are still hard to deal with as you have to be constantly prepared to fight. In this case the thorn wolves probably came from the north as there have been a bunch of sightings up there.’ With that Eskoth finished answering my question.

‘Thanks, that explains why I have never seen them before.’ I said, glad to have the help, ‘Now let’s change the subject to something more cheery.’

With that we started to chat about our adventures as the hours went on, during that time more adventurers filtered into the guildhouse before getting a drink to celebrate living through the battle and remembering the dead. Eventually a proper party started and even though I usually don’t like alcohol I wanted to do something to stop myself from picturing the dead bodies every time I closed my eyes. 

The next day I woke up with a headache from my hangover due to drinking too much so I cast a quick healing spell to get rid of it before getting to work. Val couldn’t go adventuring for the next couple of days and I still have a bunch of DP sitting around being useless so I wanted to build my sixth floor. With that in mind I left the dungeon and walked to the remains of yesterday's battle. 

Most of the damage had already been cleaned up to the point that it was almost impossible to tell that a battle had taken place here yesterday. All the evidence that remained was a few branches that were cut too cleanly to be natural and a pile of loot that had dropped from fifteen thorn wolves. Although the pile was slowly shrinking as it was free for anyone to claim. 

Since it wasn’t an official quest none of the adventurers had gotten any rewards from the guild so the guild hadn’t taken the drops. Some of the adventurers had decided to take whatever loot the monsters they killed had dropped and split it amongst themselves although most of them didn’t think it was worth it so they left it for others to take. Which is why the pile contained half the loot it should have. 

This meant that any of the leftover loot was free to take and I didn’t have to worry about making anyone angry so I grabbed a third of the remaining loot as I instinctively knew that was what I needed to create a new pattern. The wolves had, as usual, all dropped monster cores, although these were a similar size to the hobgoblins I had fought at the colony, indicating they were around the same strength. 

They also dropped an array of magical plants such as: black flowers that sucked in all the light around them; yellow flowers that emitted a comforting glow; light green leaves that released a strange goo; deep red roots that were hot to the touch and black bark that was unnaturally strong. That wasn’t even listing half of the plants. Each one contains a myriad of effects that someone with the right knowledge would be able to put into their creations. 

Unfortunately I couldn’t say exactly what these effects would be as I hadn’t been given the necessary information when I was reborn. I could probably research what they did but that would take a lot of time so I decided to leave it for later. I would eventually have a bunch of spare time when the floors started to take weeks or months to generate enough points to create. 

Taking this into account I took five monster cores, a bouquet of flowers where each one was a different plant, some leaves, roots and finally a handful of extremely hard bark while making sure that I didn’t take the last of anything. After gathering everything I needed I made my way to the guild to make a request that will take a while to bear fruit before going back to the dungeon while looking around to make doubly sure that I wasn’t making anyone angry.

As soon as I entered the dungeon I absorbed the loot and sure enough a new screen appeared showing me the new pattern I had acquired. I then found a nice place to sit down on the fifth floor safe zone before giving the pattern a proper read.

Going from top to bottom the Thorn Wolf was classified as a D tier monster and required to be at least level 10 to be spawned in which made sense considering how strong they had been. Although I had a feeling that the wolves we had fought hadn’t been merely level 10. They were quite costly at 225 DP each at the base level but I had started to have more monster DP than I knew what to do with so that wasn’t an issue.

The stats were spread quite evenly except for Int and Will which were quite low, this made sense as they were just beasts and so wouldn’t have much intelligence or willpower. It looked like their main focus was on overwhelming their prey with high strength while using a few magical tricks to help put their prey on the back foot. Shown by their mediocre Wis letting them blend into their surroundings for a long time before running out of stamina.

All of the abilities were new to me so I went over them one by one to see what they did, starting with [Earth walk]. [This creature can move the earth around them as they wish by expending a small amount of mana.] This probably wouldn’t be too useful offensively as even Val and Eskoth hadn’t been knocked over by the skill but it would be good for sneaking around without being noticed.

[Minor Shape Change][This creature can change their appearance slightly to help them blend in with their surroundings.] This would be another great skill for them to use to sneak around a forest or jungle biome as it would make them practically impossible to notice, perfect for an ambush predator. The delvers might be able to use sensory magic to counter this but not every party would have someone capable of that and they would need to be constantly vigilant of an attack.

[Nature’s Renewal][This creature will regenerate a small amount of damage as long as they are touching the ground and not under any damage over time effects. As long as this creature can regenerate it won’t die even when at 0 HP for less than 10 seconds.] This explains why they were using Earth Walk to make sure they never lifted a single paw off the ground. This skill is perfect for turning a protracted battle of attrition to their favour if their initial strike failed to kill their prey.

I expected the delvers to quickly find out about the trick behind this skill and easily counter it but that was fine by me as it rewarded gathering information, something vital in making sure they didn’t die. Not to mention that there would always be idiots that would refuse to do any research and have to learn the hard way. I had even witnessed a few parties like that when I had been bored and decided to watch some delvers.

[Overwhelm][This creature is able to work in conjunction with at least two other creatures with the Overwhelm skill to make a target easier to hit as long as they have the target surrounded.] Reading this ability made me realise that I should be careful how many Thorn wolves I should put into an encounter. If I put in too little then they wouldn’t be able to use one of their main abilities and would be incredibly easy to beat.

On the other hand if I put too many wolves into an encounter then they would be able to separate most parties and easily kill the backline before the frontline got to them. The last two abilities I didn’t witness during the battle and reading them now I realised how lucky we had been. If the fight had gone any differently, say, if we had pulled more wolves or Val hadn’t set both of them on fire, then one of us could have easily died yesterday.

Going through the Thorn Wolf's stat sheet gave me a pretty good idea of what to do for my sixth floor so I told the system ‘Initiate creating sixth floor’ causing a screen to pop up in front of me.

Reading this I realised two things. Firstly, each floor doubles in size compared to the base of the previous floors, this was already kind of made apparent because no matter how much I expanded a floor it wouldn’t make the next floor bigger. What I was unsure of, however, was whether that would include raid floors but this confirmed that it ignored if the previous floor had been a raid or not as the sixth floor cost the same as the fifth floor and so will be the same size.

The second thing I figured out was the more floors I made the more biomes will be in the selection that my options will choose from as I had never seen the sea or frozen desert biomes as options until this point. It was something to keep in mind in the future but it didn’t really matter at the moment as I couldn’t do anything with this information.

Over the next two hours it took the system to slowly create my new floor I messed around with my magic and planned out the floor so that, by the end of the two hours, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do. The system had done most of the work this time as all I wanted was a huge jungle, there was just two additions I wanted to add

The first addition was to make the edge of the floor incredibly dense with foliage to the point that no one could get to it unless they were really trying. The second addition was to add a few nodes of ores since I unlocked resource nodes. This would attract a bunch of people that didn’t want to be full adventurers but still wanted to get rich quickly which would have the byproduct of speeding up the growth of the village. 

I wasn’t strong enough to be able to make any magical metals like mithril or orichalcum yet but I could still get deposits of weaker metals like iron, copper or tin. I wasn’t really sure which one would be best so I placed down one deposit of each in random areas of the floor. It was quite expensive at 4000DP each node so that was all I did before looking around the floor; I didn’t add any chests as I felt like the loot of this floor would be the ore. 

The jungle was an amazingly diverse place with tons of different trees and flowers that I had never even dreamed of. Some grew sweet fruit to entice animals to eat it and spread their seed while others coated themselves in an incredibly sour, and probably poisonous, goo that stopped most creatures from eating the plant. The trees were taller than I thought they could physically go and were incredibly resistant to damage. 

The whole scene was absolutely beautiful, the only issue I had was that it was too quiet so I added some random small animals like colourful songbirds, ants and small critters causing the jungle to come alive with sound. I had taken in the view enough so I began adding in the monsters, the first of which was ten packs of Thorn Wolves. Each containing six wolves, five of which would be lvl 13 and the sixth would be lvl 15, using up 19.5k DP. 

I had a feeling that this would be plenty as I didn’t want to make the jungle infested with them and if I placed more wolves in each pack then I doubt a single party of level 30 adventurers would be able to beat them without getting very lucky. I then placed fifteen packs of force slimes and oozes around the floor randomly, using another 18.4 thousand DP. Each pack contained six lvl 13 force slimes and a single lvl 15 ooze. 

These didn’t blend in with the jungle particularly well since the slimes were dark purple and the ooze was a dark black but that was fine as I didn’t want all the encounters to be hidden. Although if I found the slimes to be too easy I could always get them to climb the trees so that they would be able to drop on the squishy backline. I had ten thousand points remaining and this was a perfect place for the goblins to be able to use their [Sneak] ability. 

With that in mind I used up the rest of the points spawning them in. In the end I made four squads of heavily armoured goblinoids. Each squad contained four goblin warriors and four goblin archers, all at lvl 13, and a lvl 15 hobgoblin to act as the commander. Since the previous floor had been a raid floor and I wasn’t sure a floor boss would suit my plan for this floor I didn’t add one. 

Although I did add a bit of challenge by making it so that every time a new party reached this floor both the entrance portal and exit portal would be in random locations that were never closer than five hundred metres to each other. I then opened the floor to everyone causing, once again, my DP generation to increase by 50 points and another instance to be created. The screen didn’t have anything new in it compared to the other times I had seen it so I quickly dismissed it and moved on. 

Due to the amount of mana that went into creating my monsters the whole thing took three days which I spent mostly hanging out with Val and getting better with my magic. Val’s wound had healed after a single day, similar to the wound I sustained in the mana crystal cave so I didn’t worry over her too much. Although Val was still not fully recovered so she spent most of her time reading with me as company.