READ NOVEL ONLINE Chapter 2 – First day of my second life (Part 1/2)
When I woke up I knew I was no longer human as I didn’t have a body like I used to, instead I was a sort of floating consciousness in what I could innately tell was the void in which I would be building my dungeon. I could also tell that if it weren’t for the mental changes Shonu mentioned I would be having a major panic attack right now at not having a body, instead I was just disturbed as I focused on my task to try and take my mind off of what I had been turned into.
‘Right’ I thought to myself ‘time to get to work’ the first thing I decided to do was to have a look at my stats. This turned out to be very simple as all I had to do was think ‘menu’ and a screen with my stats on it appeared in front of me just as I expected it to.
I couldn’t really tell since I haven’t seen anyone’s stats yet, but I felt like this was decent for starting out. The first thing I did was set my name as Liz, causing the screen to immediately change my name producing a giddy feeling to rise up in me as my name was finally officially what I had wanted to change it to for years. Next I cleaned up the screen by getting rid of the bit explaining what DP was as well as moving the text so that the gaps were smaller leaving me looking at a much tidier and smaller screen.
With all the quick and easy things done it was time for me to move on to what I had been most excited about as soon as I was told about it, avatar creation. The first thing I had to do was decide what race my avatar would be, the world of Nero had many races to choose from, some I was incredibly familiar with like elves and dwarves but also others that I had rarely heard of before like dryad.
In the end I choose to be a catkin, it was very similar to other versions of the race as they had the typical cat ears and tail but it also went a bit further than that as catkin had fur covering their feet and hands that went up to the elbow and knee as well as retractable claws that would be very effective weapons or useful for climbing. Finally Catkin have the same kinds of eyes as normal cats do so they can see much better in the dark.
Once that was finished I had to start on the actual body, I was always happy with my height as I didn’t think about it too much but I always wondered what it would be like to be on the shorter side so I ended up making my avatar an even five feet tall. Next I had to choose the fat to muscle ratio of the avatar. I always liked cute, slightly chubby women so I decided to go with that, making the avatar have a cute, soft appearance that was perfect for cuddling as I always wanted.
The next thing I had to decide on was my bra size, I went back and forth on this for a while but I ended up going for D cups as they looked natural while still being on the larger side. Then it was onto the next layer of details, the first of which was my hair, I ended up making it a nice straight lavender purple that went down to the small of my back and would be pretty simple to style depending on my mood. I made my fur the same colour as my hair so that it wouldn’t stand out much.
The last few things was the tone of my skin, which I quickly decided to be a pasty white as it was the same as I used to have as I spent all my time indoors, my face and any extra moles or freckles. I spent the longest on my face as every time I stepped back to look at it I always saw something that was slightly wrong with it but after a few hours I ended up with something that I was happy with. The face was cute with a small nose, chubby cheeks that were perfect for pinching, had the perfect number of freckles on it, deep crimson red irises in the eyes and perfect teeth.
I spent another hour placing freckles and moles all over my body, I got rid of a few if I thought it was too much but most of them stayed and I was finally finished with the avatar as I stepped back to appreciate my creation. I saw a cute catgirl of my dreams, she was cute, cuddly and just generally perfect, everything I had always longed to be. It took me a minute to calm down after it sunk in that this is what I would look like.
I looked at the system clock to see how long this had taken only to find out that almost a full day had passed as I was customising my avatar. I wasn’t too surprised by this as I was always a perfectionist when it came to something that I truly cared about and I don’t think there was something I could care about more in that moment than the body I would be inhabiting for the rest of my life.
With that done I moved on to creating the first floor of my dungeon so that I could materialise my avatar and inhabit it. As part of the mental changes I was given an innate knowledge of what I needed to do, the first step being to think ‘start dungeon creation’ at the system causing a blue screen to pop up in front of me before typing its progress like an old text adventure game.
The number of dungeon types was so huge that it would take forever to read them through. To get around this the system already gave me knowledge of all of the types of dungeons I could choose along with a brief summary of what they did and how they grew. I had already been thinking about which dungeon type I would choose in the back of my head as I was creating my avatar.
I ended up choosing the planets type as it would start off simple with each floor being its own biome but would eventually get into some amazing things later on such as asteroids or metallic worlds. It stood out to me as I felt like the variety would keep me interested while also keeping any adventurers on their toes. After selecting this the text on the screen started to progress again.
Again there were a lot of punishments to choose from, including some that I thought were a bit too harsh, so, just like with the dungeon type, all the necessary information was already implanted in my mind. These punishments would be applied when a party was completely wiped out and I didn’t want to give them a unique punishment. The length of the punishment depends on how deep they had gotten as well as how strong they were, which I couldn’t influence at all. However, if I decided to give a unique punishment then I could decide its length as long as it wasn’t too much longer than the punishment they would have gotten had I not given them my own. So it was worth properly thinking about what I wanted for the general punishments as I couldn’t ever go back and change this.
After thinking about it for a minute I decided to just go with the standard manalock and xplock which would syphon off any mana or experience the adventurers earnt, sending it all to me. I felt like this was a decent punishment that would incentivise people to be careful while making it so that their lives weren’t destroyed if they failed, it also had the added bonus of accelerating my growth. Once I had decided the punishments and confirmed them the screen started typing again.
Since there were thousands of monster patterns in the system, if the dungeon was left alone to choose three out of all of them then it would take an eon just to get past this part. Instead it picks a few thousand that would work best in the dungeon, this is slightly weighted to certain monsters if the dungeon has a blessing already like I do. Then it uses a raffle to randomly select 10 patterns and lets the dungeon select the three it likes the look of the most to use as its starting monsters.
Looking at the choices I had I was dismayed as none of them looked particularly cool, most of them being either very common monsters or quite obvious. Monsters were designated a tier from grade E to grade S that indicated how strong that monster was and the system only started dungeons with mostly grade E options with a few grade D options if the dungeon was lucky. So it would have been very unlikely for me to get a monster that wasn’t weak as if the dungeon only got strong monsters it wouldn’t be able to populate itself very well and if it did then weaker delvers wouldn’t be able to get very far.
The only two monsters I didn’t know from my previous life were the cockatrice and the stirge, so I looked into them using the system. It couldn’t just give me the knowledge of all the monsters since it would be so much information that even in my new state I wouldn’t be able to retain it all. Luckily I could look up any information that was missing.
It turns out that stirge is just a hyped-up mosquito so I was pretty disappointed in it, however the cockatrice looked interesting, it was a chimaera of a bat, a lizard and a chicken and could turn flesh to stone by bite when it was a low level and eventually by just looking at its food when it reached a high enough level, exponentially raising its danger level.
After finding this out I definitely wanted to use the cockatrice so that was my first choice, I then spent about 10 minutes thinking about my early plans for the dungeon before a solid idea formed in my mind. This would require kobolds, as it was good at working in groups and was quite flexible, and Slimes, as they would be relatively easy for delvers to beat while still having the potential to get much stronger at lower levels plus I thought slimes looked cute.
I confirmed my three choices and the screen disappeared as more information on how to use the patterns was beamed directly into my mind. I was expecting just a standard pattern for each one and I did get one Cockatrice pattern however I got three kobold patterns, [kobold warrior], [kobold archer] and [kobold druid], as well as a ton of slime patterns.
These slime patterns were the standard [Slime] pattern, the elemental slimes that had a different pattern for each magical element and two miscellaneous slime patterns for the [Life Slime] and the [Null Slime]. I’d go more into depth about what they could do later but for now I wanted to get on with making my dungeon. Getting all the monster patterns made me curious how my stats had changed from choosing my dungeon type so I had another look at them.
The stat changes were quite small but it seemed as though the planet's dungeon type leaned more towards magic and outsmarting the opponent rather than brute force as two of the three stat increases were in the mind category, which I was quite happy as this suited me quite well. With my curiosity sated for now I went to the next stage of my quest, designing my floor, thinking ‘Initiate creating first floor’ at the system, immediately making another box appear in front of me as I felt mana drain from my body.
As part of the planets dungeon type I would get to make each floor a unique biome, I only had three choices right now but that was because this was my first floor as I levelled up and expanded I would unlock more biomes and be given more options to choose from. Each biome would have a different DP and Mana cost that correlated to how much effort the system would have to put in to create that biome for me.
For example the forest biome cost more than the desert biome as it had trees and grass that the system would have to materialise whereas the desert biome only had sand in it. I was always an outdoorsy person growing up and some of my favourite memories were in a forest, so I chose that one, even if it was the most expensive choice.
As I decided the biome I wanted the menu once again disappeared to be replaced by a new screen that told me how far along the system was in turning my floor into a forest. I ended up not having enough mana for the system to finish creating the forest but the system just slowed down the process and took my mana as it regenerated.
Luckily I had a decent rate of regeneration so it only took an extra four minutes for the system to be done. In that time I watched in awe as the void quickly sprang to life around me as ten thousand square metres of forest formed, even with a skybox that looked as if I was actually outside.
As soon as I read ‘Done!’ the blue screen disappeared, leaving the rest to me as the system wouldn’t do everything as that would defeat my purpose. The first thing I had to do was separate the floor from the void and then create walls for the rooms, I did this by making massive oak trees that were aa full metre thick and ten metres high that were grown so close together that they touched and even fused slightly, every four trees I made cost one DP, which sounds cheap however it took a whopping hundred DP just to do the edge of my floor leaving me with just 1025 DP left.
I spent another 150 DP outlining the five rooms I needed for the quest while incorporating the flowers, smaller trees, and plants that the system had already created. First the core and entrance rooms didn’t need to be too big, so they just ended up being small rooms with each wall just being five metres long.
The next room I made was what would end up being the biggest room on the floor, my boss room, this ended up taking a quarter of my floorspace, or 2500 square metres, which would hopefully be big enough that everyone can fight to their full extent, the other 3 rooms I made exactly the same size, about 30 metres by 30 metres, however since this was a forest and not an office building I placed the trees that outlined the room randomly so that they would feel like they were natural groves in a forest.
With my rooms done I used 25 more DP that I had set aside for my rooms making winding paths that went from each grove to the next one. I liked the end result so now I went on to placing the monsters. I hadn’t actually looked at my patterns yet, so I decided now was as best a time as any to start, I ended up starting with the cockatrice pattern as there was only one so it was the simplest.
As I was curious about the skills I decided to take a look at them starting with [Petrifying Bite] [A strong bite that slowly turns the victim to stone, if this succeeds the victim will revert back to whatever it was previously made out of after 24 hours]. Next was [Charge] [the user charges at high speeds in a single direction while unable to turn]. Seeing this gave me a bit of an idea however before I could form a proper plan for my dungeon I would need to look through all my monster patterns and next up was the kobold patterns.
After looking through the three patterns, I had a look at their skills, the first being teamwork as all the patterns had it [Teamwork] [This skill helps this creature work better in groups even with little, if any, communication], ‘Huh, neat’ I thought next looking at the warriors skills, [Stalwart][The user becomes heavily resistant to the next attack against it for a short time] this would make them very good at making sure that no one got past them to attack any squishy targets in the back.
With the warrior done I went on to the archer [trap making][helps the user make better traps more successfully] this would be good for tight corridors where the delvers would be forced to go through the traps. Finally, onto the druid [Minor Fire Magic][Allows the use of low level fire spells] at first that didn’t seem good but there were a lot of fire spells other than the usual firebolt. These included a spell that would cauterise wounds, healing them slightly, and a spell that would give an ally extra energy making them faster and stronger.
It seems like the kobolds were just as I thought they would be, a menace in groups but very weak on their own. I would definitely save them for a later floor where I could get them enough room to be in big groups. Now onto the long list of slimes.
Ok pretty standard, [physical resistance] [Take 50% less damage from any non-magical form of attack] ‘seems pretty good against early parties that probably won’t have magic or enchanted weapons’ I thought. Looking through the elemental slimes they all had physical resistance like the standard slime did but they also had 50% resistance to whatever element of magic they were attached to and the ability to use minor spells from the element they were attuned to.
Finally the two miscellaneous slimes, the [Life Slime] didn’t have any resistances but it was able to heal itself and its allies which would be very useful. Then the [Null Slime] This also had no resistances but it couldn’t be affected by magic, including anything that would normally be able to detect it, so it would be great in traps. As a way to balance things these two had a minimum level of five and cost 6 times more than a standard level one slime. The elemental slimes started at level 2 and cost slightly more than twice what a standard slime cost. After looking through all the slimes my plan started to solidify all that was left now was to create my monsters.