My Dungeon Life: Rise of the Slave Harem - My Dungeon Life – Chapter 1316-1318

Chapter 1316

Although this wasn’t necessarily proven, I believed that jobs worked much like the way heroes worked. A soul was a lore, the life story of a person. When a person became powerful enough, making enough connections with the world, with blessings, and with history, their soul became a sort of wondering curse, an incomplete lore looking for a new host that could help it change its fate.

When a person’s knowledge, history, and beliefs aligned with the lore of a hero, then the mark of the hero fell upon them. They would steadily gain access to the lore, experience, and knowledge of everyone who possessed the mark before. Thus, these legacy heroes would periodically be born across the continent, living often extraordinary lives, which had the side-effect of ending tragically.

If that was the case, then I reasoned that jobs were also a clump of lore that ultimately bound itself to human beings that met the basic requirements. Thus, the job granted the user the ability to acquire lore, experience, and knowledge which slowly unlocked as they leveled. That was the nature of the job system, and why it was often so redundant and seemingly random. In the end, it was just lore fragments from past blacksmiths. Of course, where there was only one legacy hero a generation, jobs seemed to be able to replicate endlessly.

This lore could be grafted onto an object, like with Hero and Knight tokens, and granted to people who fulfill some arbitrary agreement. I’d need to find out one day how these were created, and if others could be made similarly. For most people though, they gained their jobs gradually, starting at the lowest tier. I liked to see jobs as having four tiers. When your history and experience reflect a job enough, it minds you and you begin to earn experience in the lowest tier. Through the process of unlocking the tier, you gain access to various skills.

Eventually, once you’ve developed enough, another job, a more complicated and refined version of the previous job, attaches to your soul reflecting the next tier. This could happen four times before reaching the mastery of said job, refining to the very peak of a certain knowledge base. This wouldn’t necessarily make you the top of your field. There could still be a magician with mastery in multiple disciplines, or even potentially all of them. Would that open up the fifth tier? I had no clue. If there was such a tier, it’d be beyond mastery. What level would that be? Godhood?

In the case of knowing about Dungeons, you had the Dungeon Diver, a job designed toward increasing survivability in a dungeon. Once you learn enough about the art of Dungeon Diving, or more specifically once you’ve been bound with a blessing, you meet the criteria for True Dungeon Diver. This job centers around understanding and becoming one with a dungeon. Once you become one with a Dungeon, you unlock Dungeon Master. This tier is based on controlling a dungeon. Finally, the final tier would be Dungeon Builder, the ability to create a dungeon.

I didn’t learn them in this order. I learned True Dungeon Diver before I unlocked Dungeon Diver, and Dungeon Builder before I unlocked Dungeon Master. I was able to get Dungeon Builder early in the same way I was able to skip a lot of steps, by depending on the Dungeon Store. I ended up in a weird state where I built a dungeon, but my control over it wasn’t perfect because I lacked the Dungeon Master job. This led to Chalm nearly being destroyed upon my disappearance, but that was rectified thanks to Maid’s Lament, and I finally gained all four, although perhaps not up to the levels and experience they should be.

The point being, it should be clear how difficult it was to become a Dungeon Builder, and how rare they must be. Since I was one, it was time to start taking advantage of it.

Chapter 1317

“Master, what are we doing here?’

“We need a proper place to create our dungeon and effective seed. For that, I’m going to need a rich supply of mana, a clear and defensible position, and an appropriate guardian.”

“A guardian?”

“We’re going to have to take on one of those bosses.”

“Weren’t you saying they are too much to handle?”

“I did, and on top of that, it isn’t enough to just defeat it, we need to tame a monster and get it to give over its property and serve us.”

“Yikes.”

I nodded. “So, we need to find an enemy that I can defeat.  Thankfully, there is an area where I’m confident.”

“I understand, so we need to find a woman boss.”

“… what?”

“Hmm? Master can definitely seduce a female boss!”

“I was talking about the undead. I’m a White Mage. I’m effective against undead.”

“… ooooh… so master needs an undead woman?”

“It doesn’t need to be a woman!” I cried out helplessly.

Sometimes, I seriously wondered what the girls were truly thinking when they thought about me. My White Mage spells made me exceptionally powerful against the undead. Where many of the bosses down here felt like they’d be difficult to handle, maybe even life-threatening, all I needed to do was find an area of undead, and the undead boss would likely be something I could take out.

As for how I would find this monster type, I had a Dark Priest skill known as Detect Undead which I unlocked at level 16. Also, while wandering in the Deep, I had been testing out some other skills I had been ignoring up until now, and I found I could supplement Detect Undead with Dungeon Diver’s level 10 skill, Tracking. In the same way that Map could synchronize with Sense Life and Detect Treasure, Detect Undead could merge with Tracking.

I was level 13 in Dungeon Diver, so it was lucky such a skill appeared, but then I noticed that Tracking had also appeared at level 25 as a Monster Tamer. Who knew how many other jobs had it? I could imagine finding it in Adventurer, and Lydia’s Scout. I began to realize the possibilities behind them. If I could merge Tracking with Detect skills, then I’d be able to find people extremely easily. I’d bet that was why Raissa was better than me at finding a treasure! She probably had Tracking and Detect Treasure.

Either way, I should have been able to Track Terra and Garnet too. I realized that I had a skill called Harem Sense which was an even stronger connection than my broken Slave Bond. Even if Garnet didn’t qualify, Terra definitely did. It probably would have helped a bit knowing it existed while on Earth and chasing after Miki, but I had thousands of skills at this point so occasionally missing the potential purpose of some random skill happened from time to time. Since I had been able to more or less track them using the remnants of the Slave Bond, it wouldn’t have changed anything anyway. That said, there was no reason it should have combined with Tracking too. Yet, when I tried, nothing happened.

It was clear that Terra and Garnet were specifically being impeded, where these undead mobs were not. Tracking didn’t work from that far away. You had to already be close, so my girls might have been just too far away. For example, it might have helped me find Shao, but Miki would have been too far away. However, Harem Sense worked at a much farther distance and possessed that intangibility similar to the Slave Bond, and even that connection was obscured. I could even vaguely sense the presence of my girls above, but for Terra and Garnet, I felt nothing. This was truly worrying.

“Master, I was thinking, how many bosses have you tamed that were women?” While I was considering this, Alysia had been having her own thoughts.

“I’m not looking for a female boss!”

Chapter 1318

Of the other two criteria I had laid out from Alysia, only one of them was of particular importance. Once I had created a dungeon, I could rearrange the walls and create a more defensive formation. There might be a brief time of vulnerability, but if an area I was taking already belonged to the boss I was taming, there was no reason I would expect a sudden and swift attack from another boss. Until I started to breach another boss’s territory, it would just be business as usual for the Deep.

That said, the most important thing was mana, and the way I wanted to obtain that mana was by the discovery of a mana spring. That river I had nearly fallen in when I had first arrived here would be a primordial version of what I had in mind. Since then, I had traveled much lower into the Deep, and I was hoping I’d be able to find a richer mana spring running through a boss territory. That would be the ideal place to set up my dungeon. The spring would bring fresh mana into my dungeon, allowing it to grow quickly.

Normally, once a dungeon was created, it’d take ten years to stabilize the first ten floors. Although not every dungeon fit the motif of having floors, the concept was still basically ingrained into every physical dungeon. The dungeon grew about one floor a year. A twenty-year dungeon was twenty floors. A thirty-year dungeon was thirty floors. There were naturally innumerable exceptions, but I liked to see them as the exceptions that proved the rule. Examples such as Matty who had been remaining lowkey by stifling his growth or Gram who had extended a single level into a massive passageway existed everywhere.

For my dungeon, I had cheated by using a fairy spring. If I ignored all of the times that my dungeon was destroyed or damaged, it could be considered only a few months. Yet, despite being such a young dungeon, it probably was the size of a 30-floor dungeon. I didn’t know how many floors it had exactly at the moment. As the dungeon master, I should probably do a better job. I had mostly just left things to Astria and Elaya to play with. As two former dungeon masters, they seemed to know best.

I did know it was growing very quickly though thanks to the god spring and Elaya’s tinkering which had increased its efficiency. A dungeon was typically a double-edged sword. The dungeon could give someone enormous power, but the miasma inside it would eventually corrupt and damage the person, causing them to lose their minds. This is why every dungeon wasn’t necessarily designed a cleverly as mine. Astria and Elaya were both crazed when they were dungeon masters, and it wasn’t until they were freed that they began to think more logically. At least, that’s how I saw it.

I was curious about the so-called Dungeon Council. Was there some technique dungeon masters used to keep their sanity, or were they all insane? Then again, I’m sure some would suggest I was insane, so maybe I shouldn’t think about it so much in terms of crazy and lucid. As long as my decisions were smart, I’d continue successfully.

What did this all mean?

In the Deep, I had less than a month to build a dungeon large enough to map out the Deep and reveal where the dwarves had perished, and more importantly, to find Terra and Garnet. If they were somehow dead, and their souls were broken up and scattered in the wind, then I would take over the entire Deep, and suck every last remaining piece of lore belonging to them. The Deep would become a sacrifice designed to resurrect those that it dared to take from me!

Ah… maybe being a dungeon master was getting to me a little. I would reflect on it after recovering Terra and Garnet.