The Illicitous Dungeon

Two months had passed since Therina and the dungeon eliminated the goblins in the ruined elven village and a lot of things had changed.

The dungeon itself was much bigger than what it was previously. After many arguments with Therina on the issue, it had also given itself a name: Styx

Whilst the cave entrance remained basic and without adornment, the inside was much brighter. Styx had completed a basic oil lantern design which relied on a combination of animal fat and seed oil, most of which required Therina to help in the beginning until the intellectually challenged shroom gnomes could managed to extract the oil from the seeds and dismantle corpses correctly.

Therina still helped when Styx commanded, mostly for training her skills, and had gotten highly proficient in the tasks.

The oil was then infused with mana which made them burn longer and also gave the flame a soft blue tinge. One lantern full of oil would burn for an entire week,

The initial corridor has widened to be twice as wide and high, along with the cave entrance, but it still remained unadorned to avoid making anyone recognize it as a dungeon from a distance. Styx always wanted to lure in more beasts and eventually adventurers, but Therina had explained the dangers lurking in the forest and he decided to be a bit more low key whilst in the early stages of growing.

Beyond the corridor, the dungeon then opened up into a huge chamber with giant stone and ardonite pillars in the four corners with Aztec and other ancient type carvings in them. The walls were carved to look like stone blocks and had several other decorations on them.

Styx had spent almost an entire week testing different designs, ending up returning to basics and doing a high and low picture rail out of basic steel, while using stone and ardonite to create carvings of demons and hell like scenes, and under the bequest of Therina, more carvings of flowers, trees and nature.

The strong contrast between the two actually created a balance which left Styx extremely pleased, which he then continued without any requests from the elf. Some of the things he was most impressed with, was the use of manasteel to create suns in the carvings, and small starlight like pins of glowing light on parts of the ceiling.

Wolfbone steel was also used to replace random stone blocks on the wall.

The ground was a great stone bridge approximately 5 meters wide, underneath of which he had managed to locate an underground stream and direct up with a series of custom built wooden water wheels. The water filled underneath the bridge and would slowly flow under the circulatory system he designed.

This design extended past this large room, as the bridge broke off into three directions. The dungeon had become a mass of tunnels and rooms like an ants nest. There were random rooms disconnected from the bridge system, leading to other empty rooms for future designing, and some new districts it was still working on.

The three rooms when immediately entering the dungeon, including Therina's room, were gone. The young elf maiden now had a new room further inside the dungeon which was a collection of several rooms.

Therina's new room was four times the size and had timber slotted floorboards, which was one of Styx's great accomplishments with a rotary mana engine, a manasteel sawblade, and several guide rails and supports to form a giant band saw.

He could take the wood as a pure resource and store it, but doing so ended up removing all of its grain and natural beauty from the wood, so he had to manually have his minions carry trees in and process them.

The floorboards were then treated with an oil resin that was of elvish creation, leaving behind a beautiful timber floor.

The structure of the bed was still made out of stone, but it now had a mattress padding over the top of it and a cotton pillow stuffed with feathers. Therina had been so elated with having a proper bed again that Styx had some trouble getting her out of it.

The room also had several items of furniture inside of it, all of which were Styx's designs. There were three book shelves and three shelving units made out of wood, which stored only some things as the elf didn't have a lot of belongings.

There was also a large dresser and chest of drawers for her to store clothes inside of and several hooks to hang things on the wall. The room also had her favourite design of flowers along the wall banner.

A small hallway led to a pantry storage area as well as a large kitchen, although it was currently only a bench, cabinetry drawers, and a wooden table and not even running water.

There were also giant rooms filled with stone storage crates. Styx had even managed to manually duplicate the space expansion fractal, and used an enlarge version in a hidden layer behind the walls. He could only increase the space in the room by 30 percent however before space became too chaotic to store anything inside of them.

The idea gave him inspiration to create a space expansion trap. These were one off, and the room had to be destroyed afterwards, but he looped his mana in a circuit behind the walls of a room along with a trigger.

When set off, the mana would rapidly unfold into a large space expansion fractal, turning the space inside the room highly chaotic and inevitably turning anyone or anything into a real life gore filter.

In another area was the current training room, which Therina was currently inside of.

This room was extremely large and had lots of wick lanterns, including ones on the ground which much be avoiding to avoid burning or pouring flammable oil over oneself.

There were several different training fields in this giant room, including thing wooden posts to stand on, rocky terrain, slopes, and a basic urban landscape. Each one had wooden pillars with pegs for hand-to-hand combat, stone steles with narrows slits for sword practice, archery and magic targets, and others training dummies for spears, bunt weapons.

Therina was dancing around on the wooden posts, each one only wide enough for one foot at a time. She held a thin manasteel sword with a wooden hilt and leather grip. It was no longer massively out of balance and now balanced properly at the crossguard.

She thrust the sword into the narrow slits on a stone stele as she jumped between posts, striking like lightning before retreating to another post. She also attacked other stone steles which had slices half an inch thick cut out of them at various angles and depths meant for training sword slashes.

"Good, now stab points 2, 5 and 7 on the first target, slash points 1 and 5 on the second target, and throw three knives at the first three targets."

Therina danced around the posts and followed the command, grazing the second thrust and first slash, but otherwise completing the challenge perfectly.

This training continued in different ways for another hour before the elf was covered in perspiration and sat down at a small rock pool in a side room. She stripped off her clothes and say along the edge with her feet resting in the water.

Styx was enamored by her beauty and stared so much he paid less attention to other parts of the dungeon. Her bare breasts heaved up and down as she breathed deep breaths, her body having a slick sheen to it from heavy training.

"You are staring again, aren't you?" Therina asked in her oriole like voice to nowhere in particular.

Styx immediately answered in her mind, "is it not natural I would admire my thing?"

The elf merely giggled at this with a faint smile on her face, not trying to hide her naked body and even sticking her chest out a little more.

"Today is one of those days, yes?" She asked nonchalantly as she finally slipped her body into the cold water, soaking in the clear water before grabbing a rose scented grey soap and scrubbing her body.

"Correct. I will be having you do external work after you level up again, so I need to raise a basic monster force to defend the dungeon while you are gone."

"Which monsters do you wish to breed today?"

"Another treant spirit."

"Eh, those are… quite the burden," Therina mumbled with a sigh as she remembered the last treant spirit she gave birth to.

Treant spirits were currently the strongest monster Styx could safely use her womb to create. They weren't trees, like one would imagine a treant, they were skinny bipedal monsters with bark like greenish-brown skin. They were incredibly agile, could climb on any wall they could get a grip on, and naturally skilled with bows.

They also had a base level of <Lv. 10> after reaching adulthood, which was about two hours after giving birth.

Styx's monsters currently consisted of:

[

• 16x Miners

• 12x Shroom Gnomes

• 6x Stonerats

• 8x Forest Goblins

• 3x Forest Assassin

• 4x Treant Spirit

]

Therina had been constantly practicing her skills and hunting in the forest for experience as well as luring monsters back to kill in the dungeon. She had grown much stronger than the weak elf who was helpless as her village was raided. She was now <Lv. 7>, only 15 exp from reaching <Lv. 8>.

"Come lie down, I want to examine your mana network again, and also as you level up," Styx said excitably while she was washing her hair with a natural degreasing shampoo made from plant matter, ash and scents of the forest.

"Yeah, yeah. Do you really think you are going to be able to understand the level up procedure and the way potential is stored and used?"

"Of course! You continue to underestimate my intelligence time and again."

"You basically cut me open trying to look for my physical mana network!"

"I also healed you again. Not to mention found out some very valuable information."

"What about me? That was incredibly painful, you know."

"Some brief pain, all for the benefit of knowledge. One cannot conquer their body without knowing it first."

Therina shook her head in defeat, washed her sweaty training clothes in a separate bucket of water and hung them up on a rope washing line in the next room over before heading to the nursery, where she aided the dungeon in breeding monsters.

She had a towel wrapped around her as she walked through the dungeon, the only sounds being the tap of her feet on the giant stone bridge walkway and distant echoes of miners digging and shroom gnomes hammering at ores being refined.

She reached the nursery and left her towel to the side as she mounted the breeder inside.

Many tentacles curled up and wrapped around her as Styx said, "Let's have a look at your mana network after that training."

Therina watched his mana tendrils which extended out from the walls and ceiling toward her like the roots of a tree, eventually reaching her and entering her body at countless spots, even her eyes.

"No matter how many times I see it, I feel nervous." She said as she closed her eyes, which made no difference as to whether the mana tendrils could enter or not.

"But at least you can see, which is already a vast improvement."

"Something which you figured out by complete luck. What if something had gone wrong? I could have died!"

"It was not that much of complete luck. You already have a piece of me inside of you, which allows us to communicate. Some small adjustments to connect to where your eyes are in your mana network before fusing that part of me with you and voila! You can use that part of me as a springboard to view mana directly. It's genius, is it not?"

"Even if you understand it, it was still luck," Therina moaned in comfort as she felt like her entire body was in Styx's warm embrace, a feeling she enjoyed far more than she cared to admit.

The mana tendrils filled up her mana network as he inspected everything that was going on inside of her. The channels of her mana network were fractured due to having too much mana inside of them. At least, this is what it appeared like.

This was highly impressive considering that he had artificially nursed and managed these mana passages to be extremely large and sturdy.

Styx stipulated that this energy which shifted and refracted into different things wasn't just mana, but the essence of a person. It was their mana, their lifeforce, ki, and also which bred the potential they built up.

The mana network itself was metaphysical yet tied to the body in a way he couldn't understand. What he did know, was that this mana network directly affected the body, and the body in turn affect it.

When she trained and practiced her skills, Therina's mana network would nurture and develop potential within itself, which should be released upon levelling up as he suspected. If practicing the skill only built up potential within the body though, it tugged at another question he has had for some time now.

"Therina. Tell me, do you believe your status affects you and gives you skills, or your status is a reflection on what you are capable of?"

"You know I don't know those kinds of details. But classes give skills, don't they?"

"Yes, they give skills upon acquiring them. But these are skills I believe are ingrained into the classes, which teach your body via your mana network how to perform them, like a biological blueprint. The skills given by classes also contain blueprints for sub-skills, whilst you were taught sub-skills for archery. Do you notice that you never earned any sub-skills for the other skills you learned?"

"It is common knowledge that one can only be proficient in the skill provided by their class."

"That is why I tell you to work harder. You can learn these sub-skills from being trained by others with them, so why can't you learn them on your own, or even make your own. Any new technique you develop will be updated on your stats. What I'm more confused about is why you can't feel what's going on inside of you."

"Why? What is currently happening in there?"

"It's all cracked and leaking out."

"Eh, what!? But I can't feel anything, isn't this really bad??"

Therina began to panic. She had learned to feel her mana network, even if she couldn't see it herself, and control it to heal her wounds at the expense of mana, which caused her to learn the skill Mana-Health Conversion, which was the initial reason for Styx to believe that a person status were a reflection on their capability, rather than their status giving them that capability.

"It's fine, this appears to be a natural course of events for your potential being full. This means that doing more training before leveling up will not bring you any greater benefits than current. Once the pressure in your mana network is lowered to below its threshold, it will naturally recover the damage."

"Don't tell me you've made me hit Max Level at <Lv. 7>… Please tell me I can still level up," Therina spoke with a stormy expression and tightly gripped onto the tentacles hugging her.

"Of course you can. Experience is just a type of potential, of which you are at your threshold. Technically, you are already at full experience. No, you are beyond it. Before I confirm any theories though, let's have you level up."

Three forest goblins and a forest treant dragged in a nearly dead direwolf into the room along with Therina's sword.

They seemed to have difficulty locating her as she constantly had Concealment active, so Styx had to manually control them to place the direwolf next to the breeder and pass her sword to her.

Therina didn't waste any time and simply stabbed the sword through the side of its neck, severing the main arteries and leaving it to die within seconds.

[

Direwolf <Lv. 5> killed!

+ 83 exp

]

[

Experience threshold met. Level Up!

Lv. 7 -> Lv. 8

Accumulated skill experience bonus:

Archery <Lv. 12> -> <Lv. 13>

Trap Setting <Lv. 6> -> <Lv. 8>

Concealment <Lv. 15> -> <Lv. 17>

Swordsmanship <Lv. 9> -> <Lv. 12>

Dagger Arts <Lv. 7> -> <Lv. 9>

Hidden Weapons <Lv. 5> -> <Lv. 6>

Iron Will <Lv. 6> -> <Lv. 8>

Pain Resistance <Lv. 3> -> <Lv. 4>

Dismantling <Lv. 6> -> <Lv. 7>

Mana Sight <Lv. 2> -> <Lv. 3>

Mana-Health Conversion <Lv. 3> -> <Lv. 4>

All Stats(Non-Luck): +1

Class bonus: Dex +2, Int +1

Mana: 648 -> 758

]

[

Species: Tree Elf

Name: Therina Sel'Ether

Class: Thatcher

Age: 40

Mana: 758/758

Exp: 68/2,797

Level: 8

Str: 13

Dex: 30

End: 14

Vit: 19

Int: 21

Mnd: 14

Lck: 6

Skills:

Nature Touched (Racial) <Lv. MAX>

• +20% Dex, End, Vit when in forested regions.

• Forest wildlife is less hostile to you.

Weaving <Lv. 12>

• 3-Fold Plat – 1 mana/min

• 5-Fold Plat – 2 mana/min

• 9-Fold Thatch – 3 mana/min

• Wood Weaving – 10 mana/min

• Thread: Auto-Spin – 2 mana/min

Flower Arrangement <Lv. 12>

• Nature Alignment – 15 mana

• Mana Alignment – 30 mana

• Defense Alignment – 40 mana

Archery <Lv. 13>

• Twin Shot – 5 mana

• Rapid Fire – 5 mana/shot

Swordsmanship <Lv. 12>

Dagger Arts <Lv. 9>

Blunt Weapons Arts <Lv. 3>

Hidden Weapons <Lv. 6>

Trap Setting <Lv. 8>

Concealment <Lv. 17>

Iron Will <Lv. 8>

Pain Resistance <Lv. 4>

Dismantling <Lv. 7>

Taming <Lv. 2>

Detection <Lv. 4>

Mana Sight <Lv. 3>

Mana-Health Conversion <Lv. 4>

Titles:

Child of Mana, Mother of Monsters

]

[

Mother of Monsters

Effects:

• Reduced burden when birthing monsters

• Increased options for breeding

• Increased chances of taming monsters

]