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  [Dungeon]

  Work on the 11th floor was going well. The plan, a desert. Hot, dry, empty, and deadly. A stark change from the ice floors.

  The first task, as always, was to cut out a cavern. Then to create a masterpiece. I just had to think of what it should be. Unfortunately for my plan I required the biggest cavern yet, bigger than my frozen ocean that housed orcas, bigger by far.

  It took me days? Weeks? Months? I wasn’t sure but I knew it was longer than I had spent on any other floor by a good long while.

  Once the room was cut out, I took a short break before texturing the edges. Similar to the ice floor, telekinetically slamming boulders into the walls broke both the boulders and the walls, which was good as that started my sand generation off.

  Filling the room with a thick layer of sand maybe one metre thick, took a while, but it did use up a lot of the stone I had been packing away into my material storage and that was good. About 25 million cubic metres of sand if I guessed right, and that was because of the sheer scale of this floor; about four or five kilometres = in both directions at one metre thick that was a lot of sand. The chamber extended nearly 200 metres in height too.

  The sand was rich in iron and spread out like a sheet of gold covering the floor as far as the eye could see, for my chamber was truly gigantic.

  Purely using the yellow gold sand didn’t look natural and so, in contrast, I added in other variations in colour, including the first trap of the desert: areas of black sand that were magically heated. Almost to melting. These traps would seriously burn adventurers who stepped on them. You could feel the heat the sand radiated though and so it would be pretty foolish to try crossing it.

  The walls were now too much of a contrast and so I built new walls around the edges in sandstone that seemed to fit more thematically with this floor after all.

  Now I needed to provide blinding light and heat. Scouring the store I found what I needed.

  The artificial sun was a replacement for the light magic that had been used on all the floors so far, as well as providing enough heat to hopefully turn this place into a scorching, hot, desert. The additional mana atmosphere generators hopefully wouldn’t be needed though. The only thing I needed to do first though, was to pitch the ceiling up so that the sun would be higher overhead and able to reach all corners of the room. This took me a day. Now in the centre of the desert the sun would sit 700 metres above the desert floor.

  I purchased the artificial sun.

  Putting it in place, I examined it, a burning ball of fire magic that drew from my dungeon mana constantly. The draw was very small however, so I didn’t mind it.

  On the previous levels, I had used light magic to mimic the effect the sun has on the overworld. I did this by streaming light from one direction only.

  Because this time the light was coming from a central source, my artificial sun, it meant that the shadows cast by objects would differ vastly depending on small shifts in location. Take a hundred steps to your right and the shadow would be pointing in a different direction. Perhaps it would be confusing, perhaps not. I didn’t really care.

  Testing the sun out, I managed to make the floor blindingly bright and also completely dark, I ramped it up again to a manageable level whilst setting up a day–night cycle approximately five hours each in duration. Then I moved on to testing how hot I could get the room. I first scaled up the heat generation to maximum, where it warned me that if I wanted any more heat and I would need a mana atmosphere generator, but luckily that didn’t seem necessary as the temperature of the room stabilised at about 60°C.

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  I had to think carefully about how hot to make it, though.

  Since the room was so big, adventurers would probably need areas to rest – areas that were not so hot as to be unusable. But if the rest of the floor couldn’t be rested at because of the heat then that would make these cooler spots perfect for monsters and traps.

  Deserts had oases, and so adding in these cooled oases would allow me to provide areas that adventurers would have to fight at and areas that were ripe to be explored.

  Once this feature was implemented, I slowly lowered the temperature output of the sun until, at the oases, it was about 30°C – significantly better than the rest of the floor at 45°C but not too pleasant.

  At the oases, the adventurers would have to contend with the Baked Sand Lizards that I had got from the ice and fire monsters pack, as well as a single noxious komodo dragonling and the occasional flaming salamander.

  I only had four baked sand lizards and 2 noxious dragonlings from that pack and I was using all four of the lizards and 1 dragonling at each oasis. So, I would need to buy a lot more monsters.

  I had 15 oases I wanted to kit out with this so I would need 56 baked sand lizards in addition to the four I already had. 13 noxious dragonlings in addition to the two I already had and six flaming salamanders to add extra danger to some of the oases (but not all). Buying multiple always made it cheaper and I had noticed that if you bought more than ten you got a five percent discount in the store. I wondered what buying 56 of a mob would get me.

  Selecting all my purchases I spent 8,883 points, meaning a 25 percent discount above 50, I assumed.

  It hurt spending so much, but the floor looked incredible afterwards. I had 16,162 points left and I was hoping that would be enough to get through the remaining floors. I had not planned anything so extensive for them and so it would require significantly fewer mobs too, or so I hoped.

  With the oases complete, the floor mechanism I was hoping for was complete. The idea was that adventurers would need to walk round slowly getting weaker until they would begin to die and hallucinate, unless they could make it to an oasis where they could recover, albeit after fighting the creatures I had placed. Then, they could explore and move to the next one and so on until they found the exit to the floor.

  I spent 32 points on other desert life. Small fish for the oases, insects and bushes and stuff that would make the place feel more alive, but I was missing something.

  Looking over my menus and stats I saw it. I had originally thought that the Manticore would be my boss but with a danger level of 2.9 it was less than the walrus on my ice floors and just wasn’t right. But having the manticore become a roaming boss in the desert just felt right.

  If they encountered the manticore, they would have to run to the oasis and prepare for a serious battle. Without a concerted effort from everyone it would spell certain death especially out in the desert.

  A little finagling managed it so that the roar of the manticore would frighten all the other mobs away, so at least they would only have to deal with one threat at a time. Just a little manticore action. Not too difficult right? Ha.

  On the uneven sand, facing a lesser manticore would be tough. One wrong move would result in death, and I doubted the adventurers would be getting past it for a while. Mages might fare better, but the ambush creatures that would spring out at the oasis would hopefully get them.

  Off the beaten paths between oases were extremely good prizes. Like full plate armour, potions of good quality, mana crystals, magic contraptions and more. Since this was by far the hardest level to explore, the loot was correspondingly of a much higher quality.

  Throughout the room, I threw in sand traps. If disturbed the sand would fall in on itself dragging with it the unfortunate person to their death.

  Finally, I realised that the adventurers had to know the route to get through the desert so at each oasis I would carve in a riddle that had compass directions as their answers. It would point them on a path to oases that led to the exit. I would be changing it around periodically.

  The secret for this floor was a fairly obvious one. Well, there were two obvious options. In an oasis or down a sand trap. It was fairly obvious the sand trap would be the one I used. The adventurers would be spending lots of time at the oases and so if I had the secret there, it would be rather too easy to find.

  Using a bit of mana manipulation, I created a small magic shell that kept the sand out and when an adventurer fell on it, they would be let through into a climate-controlled room with the chests in it.

  With that done, the floor was basically complete. And I had only spent nearly nine thousand points and nearly all my mana. At least, checking my status, I saw that it had pushed my difficulty up once more.

  The fire floors were going well and once I completed the four elemental sections I had planned things would start to get much harder and much larger.

  I would start introducing more puzzles and sophisticated traps and designs. At the moment, it was essentially just survive the environment and the occasional monsters. Soon it would be a fight to get through any level. First though, I had to finish off the fire and wind levels.

  In my heart chamber, I inscribed the walls with my current plan:

  Section 1 was nature or earth.

  Section 2 was ice or water

  Section 3 was fire

  Section 4 would be wind.

  Section 5 would be different.

  That was my planned-out dungeon for now, and I had ideas for hundreds of levels, so I’d just continue to get bigger and bigger.