With the sixth floor finished it's time to move on to the seventh floor. I do briefly wonder what's happening with the political situation outside. Not that I really care, it's more just idle curiosity than anything. As for the seventh floor the first thing I do is create an entryway. I don't really need to; there's no instincts or whatever compelling me to do it. It just feels like something I should do. After all they did just defeat a boss and letting them rest will allow them to get further and thus net me more mana.

  For the size I go for a nice round number. 100m x100m x 100m seems like a nice size for an entryway. In fact, this will be the largest entryway yet. Of course, this does require making a new room template by merging the 80m room template with several 20m room templates. Fortunately making new room templates is almost second nature at this point, so it takes hardly any effort at all.

  As for what's actually in the room I make sure to leave a huge gap when I'm filling the floor in with dirt. After that comes the water. I make a roughly 40m by 40m pond with gently sloping edges off to one side. Water's not as big a deal as it used to be for the town just outside the main entrance, but the town is still growing. I even go ahead and buy the freshwater aquatic farm template which comes with several fish species. Then I add some underwater plants and small crustaceans. After that I add a few different varieties of fish. The pond isn't huge, so I don't go too crazy. I do however do something I haven't yet done and allow them to breed on their own. This will be a new experience for me and Clyde both, according to his memories, so I have no idea what to expect.

  The next thing I do is add a few orange and apple trees. I then go back to the pond and place a few aquatic herbs that I recently bought the blueprint for. After that I add some berry bushes of various types. I'm still not sure why the fish don't count as a resource, but hopefully future generations of fish will. The last thing I do is cover the area in a blanket of grass. With that this room is officially ready for business.

  Now that the seventh-floor entryway is finished, I have a bit of time to kill before gathering the mana for the first actual room. At 320m x 320m x 320m it's going to require a whopping 2,621,440 world energy per room. Once they're actually placed, they can't be merged. They can be moved for about half the cost of placing them but sadly I can't add onto them later. Unfortunately, this means I can't start with a corner of the room and work my way out. I remember this from the fifth floor because no matter how close together the rooms got there was no option to merge them. Only an error message that they were to close together to place a hallway between them.

  The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  The square cube law is really starting to bite me in the ass. Not only are rooms getting eight times bigger with each new floor, but they are also getting eight times more expensive. The good news is that the mana generated by each floor is also going up. Still, this combined with entry fees being much steeper and delvers usually getting to keep little if any loot would explain why there are apparently dungeons much older than me with only 12 to 15 floors.

  Then again that is just what I've been able to piece together listening to the soldiers and delvers speak while resting. Some dungeons are apparently centuries old. Yet so far, the only dungeons to reach floor 20 are thousands of years old and all surrounded by major capital cities. In fact, kingdoms without really old dungeons in their capital are the exception. Even if not all of those dungeons have reached floor 20.

  While I'm waiting for my mana to build up, I get to watch Clyde's party make several more attempts at the fifth floor. It's a little hard to watch because some of the best loot is in areas they haven't yet visited. Not to mention some of the traps on the sixth are based on the assumption that they have experienced the traps in the castle and surrounding town. Plus, I still want to see their reactions to everything. After some thought I finally decide that I will simply tell them about the existence of the other rooms if they make it to the sixth floor without finding them. Normally I wouldn't as delvers dying nets me a ton of mana, but I like these guys. So, I want them to be properly prepared for the dangers that lie ahead.

  After a lot of waiting, I finally place my first true seventh floor room. To celebrate I place a hill so large that it could almost be mistaken for a mountain. At 80 meters tall it's larger than the castle on the fifth floor and has a base larger than the town surrounding that castle. I wanted to put in an actual mountain, but my rooms aren't quite that big yet. I should only be a few floors away though. The bad news is that even with me getting better at placing larger chunks at a time it still takes a considerable amount of time to place all the dirt and stone.

  For the mobs I decided this rooms would be perfect for a hippogriff nest. I don't actually know what the hippogriff home is called but nest just feels right. Just one mob type doesn't feel like enough though, so I also add some goblins and nightmares which are basically carnivorous horses. Somehow, they manage to look terrifying even though the only real difference, as far as appearance, is their sharp teeth and slightly elongated mouth. Oddly enough despite the name they are not all females. To finish off this room I place a chest in the middle of the hippogriff nest at the summit of the hill. Inside this chest I place three gold, two health potions, a mana potion, and a bag of infinite space. It's not really infinite but has enough internal space for a single person's use that it might as well be.

  It does take me a while to save up enough world energy for the bag of infinite space so thankfully I only need to purchase the blueprint once.