A couple days went peacefully but eventually the itch to build took over. First of all, I needed to make some tweaks and improvements to what I had, before I could go into an expansionary phase.

  I had already realized that the Abattoir’s zone was slightly problematic. Plus, I wanted to see if I could adjust the zone’s size and features. The issue was that the holding was triggered by the front doors, but the lobby was devoid of both holding and demesne. Probably, maybe, it would all work out, but I decided to fix it.

  It turned out to be really easy. I simply withdrew the holding much like I could do with my demesne, such that it ended at the portal. Easy-peasy. I made sure that the demesne itself was left untouched, particularly the molding with plants near the ceiling. Having a way to passively “spy” on people outside my demesne seemed really useful.

  I turned my attention to the Spider Pot–the Skeleton Fighter room.

  Here, too, I believed I had a simple and easy fix. I created a trap that covered the entire room and then linked the skeletons to the trap. Once this was done, it was easy to make a trap that acted as a limiter. In other words, when the trap (i.e., when a delver entered the trap designated space), the skeletons would only attack someone in the “trap.”

  It was dumb, but I thought it worked. The skeletons, as part of the trap, would attack someone in the room and reset if there was no one in the room. In this way, the skeletons couldn’t be kited into the hallway and dealt with one-by-one. I hoped.

  Ah, that was right–I had reabsorbed the two magical coins along with the dead goblin bodies. The iron box in the skeleton room was now empty. But, recreating them would be a big mana loss, so I left the box empty for now.

  The Skeleton Room was done. That left the Spider Pot Room. I sighed.

  I had thought and thought about this room. Nothing came to me to solve the issues the room had. First, the spiders were animals, not monsters, meaning they do not have an intrinsic intent to attack delvers; only if they are threatened then maybe they will lash out and strike. I think I just got really lucky the first time.

  Second, the pots were just a nuisance. The goblins’ smashing of the pots was not only logical, it was clearly an efficient means of dealing with both the spiders and finding the keys. I had wracked my brain thinking about how to get delvers to respect the pots. My few ideas tended to rely on Trap Creation–for example, setting some of the pots to explode violently when attacked to train delvers not destroy them, make them as indestructible as possible, and a few other thoughts.

  But with both problems, I finally decided that the room as a whole was not workable.

  What I needed in the room was a monster–a real monster. My options for monsters currently were: Skeleton Fighter, level 2, which basically was little more than a road bump, and Skeleton Warrior of Light, level 6. The former cost 20 mana; the latter cost 60–10 mana per level. I could probably make another fighter variant, but did I really want to do that?

  Undead spiders were possible; they had exoskeletons after all. But did I really want to go down the path of spiders? Like most humans, I always found the small ones to be benign and the big ones scary as fuck.

  The more I thought about things, the more I began to feel that I was unconsciously constraining myself. I was thinking too much of what was realistic by Earth's standards. But I was in a fantasy world with literal magic. The Skeleton Warrior of Light was evidence enough of this. Yes, it was a skeleton, but it also had magic skills and abilities that were set by my imagination.

  Yeah–it was time to get a little creative.

  To do this right, I needed a complete restart. So, while I still thought a storage-type room would be good (thematically), this room was not what I wanted. So I wiped the entire room bare and disconnected it from the complex (I kept the empty space because I didn't want to spend mana filling it in and figured I could find a use for it later). With the old storeroom now blocked off, I reconnected the Dart Trap Room to the top of the staircase that wrapped around the shaft with another hallway.

  I carved a new short hallway about halfway down between the bridge and the Skeleton Fighter room. This hallway ended in a door (keyed to one of the keys on the key ring). Behind, I sculpted an even larger storage room. To give it a little more pizzazz, I gave it an arched ceiling along the entire length of the room.

  I extended my demesne beyond the room to take up a large amount of space just behind the new storage room. I slowly and carefully absorbed the stone in this area to create an organic, natural cave. I set the floor of the cavern a little lower than the storage room’s floor and made it uneven and more natural. However, I made several low-sloping stairs and paths that went around the cavern, all leading the center of the far wall. For the walls and ceilings of the cavern, I cut numerous rock formations extruding along the walls and even a few stalactites roughly evenly spaced throughout.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  At the far end, where the paths converged, I dug a small, shallow hole, which I filled with water to create a pool. I lined the pool with stone brick work that was about foot-high. Farther up the wall, I carved some natural-looking channels and then built a very small hole that went to a hidden chamber that I also filled with water.

  A thin stream of water began spraying out of the hole. That was not what I wanted! I forgot about the water pressure.

  I remembered at this moment that water pressure was usually managed in Earth structures with special valves. Valves that I didn’t know how they worked.

  Well, I thought I had a workaround anyway. It was called Trap Creation. I designated the output spot as a trap with the condition of starting with the instance and allowing water to release at my desired rate, a similar rate of water falling as a typical fountain. Finally, I added an outlet drain for the pool and a hidden bottom reservoir so that the pool wouldn’t overflow. Overall, it should work to create a nice waterfall, but it wasn’t perfect; the water would eventually run out after a day or two.

  I connected the store room and the new cave–I decided to call the “Grotto” by creating a large hole, nearly the size of the back wall. I also replaced the remaining wall with some cave protrusions on each side.

  In the storage room itself, I carefully created four large free standing wooden racks of shelves. I even added details of iron nails holding the different parts together. Each rack had four shelves on it, and in total the highest shelf was about 8 feet off the ground. I made clay pots of various sizes packed tightly, some broken or partially broken, and added iron boxes here and there too. Finally, I put an instanced trap for the shelves, carefully weaving it through the frame of the shelves and then each individual clay pot (but not the iron boxes). Each instance two random shelves would be sabotaged. If a person destroyed an intact clay pot on one of these two shelves, the shelves would collapse and fall over.

  Back to the Grotto, it was time to fill it with plants–mushrooms in this case

  Picking an outcropping at random, I willed a very large mushroom to situate itself there, but held the picture of the mushroom’s shape in my mind instead of letting it manifest. While doing that, I started enlarging and expanding its web-like roots, stretching them out to reach the ceiling and across the floor.

  The effect was dramatic: there sat a huge gray and purple colored mushroom several feet high sitting within a dense network of purplish webbing.

  Gleefully, I replicated the mushrooms and webs all across the Grotto, leaving the paths just slightly less covered. I also added some smaller mushrooms and webs in the storeroom just outside the Grotto, resembling the slow colonization of the built space by the fungal inhabitants of the Grotto.

  I added two wandering spiders into the store room area for old time’s sake, but now their purpose was more of a distraction. if a person sees giant webbing all over, they will surely think, “Giant spiders? Why does it have to be giant spiders? I hate giant spiders!” And while I was fairly certain I could make undead spiders–exoskeletons are still skeletons–I was feeling increasingly unbound to the demands of reality or tropes.

  Then again, I hated giant spiders too.

  I had to wait a couple more days to top up my mana. When I passed 30 mana, I spent the mana to create a new level 3 undead unit. I picked another animal that did have a skeleton to act as the base. Then I focused on what the skill would be, trying to have more control on their direction and form. Once I was confident I had a strong enough picture, I released my hold and let the mana do its work.

  A skeleton of a snake appeared in a recess in the rock hidden by mushrooms and webs. It was about 10 feet in length and a hand wide. Like the other skeletons, it had soft glowing balls of light in its eye sockets.

  I was absolutely giddy.

  I checked the skills.

  This was almost exactly what I had wanted! The snake would move easily and quickly in the dense mushroom web forest and launch ranged attackers. Not just any ranged attacks, but acid attacks. Overall, the proof of concept was clear: magic for the win.

  By now, I was almost depleted of mana again, so I largely rested. I made some tweaks to the Grotto and added some keys (a couple in the storeroom and one at the bottom of the pool) back. Now, for each instance, one of the keys that were on the key ring in the Dart Trap room would open the door at the end of the bridge; one of the keys in the storeroom/grotto area would be randomly assigned to open the door to the Skeleton Fighter Room.

  I was feeling pretty good about things.

  A little more than a day before the Reserve would be filled and the dungeon opened, chaos came to my doors.