Dungeon Prowler : One Man Army 111 Second Floor

On the sixth day Yunan found a group of goblins gathering sap from a weird large flower, Yunan did not disturb them, and waited to see what they will do with it, he was surprised to see that the goblins applied the sap to their weapons and darts before collecting a few jars of the sap, and leaving, it seemed that is how they got their poisonous darts and weapons, although Yunan did clean up the group of goblins, he still took some of the sap with him to study.

According to Black Fate, the large flower was called putrid maw, it had a very potent poison glands that would create a mixture that can randomly inflict a status effect on those who comes into contact with it, the flower would digest rotten corpses in its vicinity, and use that to grow and develop the poison, it exists in every floor and the potency of the poison depends on the level of monsters it digests.

During this week Yunan found an understanding of the dungeon he could not find in a book. The dungeon was self sufficient, there was always something edible in every floor, there are healing items as well as poisonous plants and venomous monsters. There was a cleaning crew, and there was repopulation rooms, there were reward rooms, challenge rooms and even trap rooms, however the success of each challenge and trap rewards one with enough gains to repay the effort.

The dungeon did not discriminate between monster or adventurer, there was something for everyone, and as the humans could grow so did monsters, it just was more noticeable in adventurers, the delicate balance of Tartarus is in itself a marvel of engineering and management, something that took a lot of time to plan and execute.

After the seventh day when Yunan completed the map of the first floor, denoting the rooms and the putrid maw flower location, he chose to omit the nest of the Queen bee and merely noted a cl.u.s.ter of bees in the room, he returned to base and sold the level 3 boars and the map to the guild and headed towards the entrance to the second floor after a good and a hot bath.

The second floor was almost the same as the first with a bit more kobolds than goblins, and the occasional level 3 monsters. Yunan did the same thing he did with the first floor, map the entire floor before pushing forward. Yunan did not have much trouble staying awake for a whole week with his Dragonification armor on, however he found that if he never left a challenge room or a trap room it would not reset, at least in the 6 hours Yunan slept soundly in there. With sleep and food taken care of, Yunan only needed to return to the base on the first floor once during his two week stay in the second floor, he did that mainly to sell the corpses that Drogon did not feel like eating and were clogging up the storage s.p.a.ce.

During the first week Yunan came upon a challenge room that would reset half an hour after it is cleared, it sp.a.w.ned bosses up to level 5 which Yunan found very helpful to training, however things escalated after that since Yunan did not leave the room and rested inside waiting for the next boss by taking naps, he noticed that the bosses were getting stronger and then when he beat an especially challenging level 5 ant that was bigger than Dustan, the next boss to appear were 2 weak bulls, then the cycle started again, stronger pairs into threes and the threes turned into fours. It was then Yunan hit a snag and could not kill the 4 weak boss bulls before the next wave of bosses sp.a.w.ned, so Yunan used his trump card, spitting fire a.s.sisted with the armor and roasted the bosses a few seconds later.

Yunan made his way to the chest in the room before the next boss wave appeared, and found a golden book, the book was heavy enough to be made of solid gold. The t.i.tle of the book was "mastering the heavenly smithing". Yunan opened the book and started reading it, the book was written by Hephaestus himself, it was a simplified version of the art he practiced, after Yunan read the last page the book disappeared and the status sounded in Yunan's mind "be advised, the skill dwarven forging level 5 has been integrated into the skill heavenly smithing, the skill heavenly smithing is now level 5."

Yunan did not know if he should laugh or cry, he imagined the state his bones would be like after Balin was done with him when he sees the new skill. However, Yunan felt his forging level was more than 3 times higher than before, if he was correct, heavenly smithing incorporated all kinds of forging techniques from all the races, to create it. That was not all, Yunan found the existence of endless challenge rooms, as long as one does not open the chest, they continue to pose a challenge for the ones inside the room until they open the chest getting a reward equivalent to how many waves were survived.

However if the challengers are greedy they can end up like Yunan, in a fight they can not win or time to rest, thus dying out of greed. Therefore Yunan choose to be safe and leave the room to one of the ordinary safer ones, and rest quietly for 6 hours before continuing his journey, mapping the floor and collect resources, deciding to never challenge the same room twice, pressure meant growth and knowing what to expect took too much away from the challenge. He also decided the last day on the second floor would be a magnificent battle to prove he have actually conquered the floor successfully.