As Nate soon found out, creating a dungeon for the ettins would have been interesting if he hadn’t gone this route. The first few giants he had seen were between fifteen and eighteen feet tall, well over double and almost triple a normal person’s height. Then came a few that were nearly twenty-five feet tall.

  That was a difference of ten feet in height from the shortest and tallest that he had seen.

  It didn’t change what he was going to do. If anything, it made him more interested in how they would react.

  Up to that point, the ceiling in the other dungeons had always been around fifteen in height, which gave enough room for the traps to be effective. In this dungeon, he was decreasing it to eight feet, which should be high enough for Lindsay to still use her halberd. Next, he made the width of the corridors less wide at four and a half feet. It was enough for a human to walk comfortably single file, but the ettins would have to go sideways, and with the lower roof, it would be even more difficult.

  For the next while, that was all he did, work on the layout of the dungeon, and think about what the theme should be.

  The layout was relatively easy, as they usually were. Unless he was trying to create a labyrinth, then he could just throw rooms and corridors wherever he really pleased.

  The bigger issue was the theme… What should he use against the ettins? Something low-tech, high-tech, fantastical, or somewhat magical as he had with the bulgae? There were so many options and likely more that he hadn’t even thought of yet. The issue was, despite seeing the monsters, this time around he couldn’t figure anything out about them.

  With a growl of annoyance, he finished building out the dungeon layout with its extra thick walls and switched to the gremlin dungeon.

  He had a little more information on these beasts than the ettins, though they presented their own problems. However, he could still build out the rest of the dungeon, the same as he had for the giants.

  Unfortunately, due to the diminutive size of the gremlins, he couldn’t pull any cheap tricks this time, not while still making it traversable for the rest of them anyway.

  All he could do was make the dungeon as normal and then move on to the next location. While he studied the little buggers and considered what the dungeon’s theme should be as well.

  There were several other dungeons that he needed to work on with monsters that he did know the weaknesses of. Once he knew that, then creating a theme around it was relatively easy. The hard part came in attempting to make the traps effective against cultivators, as well as some of the weaknesses could be odd.

  Case in point was the Sirens from the dungeon in China. They were weak to sound. Now there were two ways someone could go and take that information. He could blast heavy metal at them at ear-bleeding levels, or he could take a page from the second dungeon and use sound waves and the vibrations they emitted to hurt them.

  Of course, an argument could be made that any living being with ears was susceptible to loud noises and that the same went for the sound frequencies he had been using. However, that wasn’t strictly speaking true. On Earth, it might be, but these were monsters with foreign biologies. The way they processed sound might not always be the same, or they might be made of denser material naturally. The frequencies would still affect them, but would take much longer unless he could make them much more powerful.

  In the case of this dungeon, there was no reason to choose between the two, when he could just do both. Normally, he liked to do a variety of traps inside each dungeon, but they would always be built around the existing theme.

  Which in this case had just become ‘.

  He set the theme and moved on to the first of the dungeons in Japan. It was dungeon number forty-nine and had the Nagas. Their weakness was equally well-known as they were cold-blooded creatures and enjoyed the heat. All he needed to do was make the dungeon cold. So, the theme of the dungeon would be ‘.

  Dungeon number forty-eight, the second one in Japan, which held the Efreet, were beings of fire and smoke. Unsurprisingly, their weakness was water and a tiny bit cold as well. Which is what its theme became.

  The Djinn in India presented a somewhat unique challenge, as they had existed in Earth’s mythology for many years and the information on them was convoluted. They were somewhat similar to gremlins and nagas in that way, only much more so. Djinn had been part of India’s and Arabic culture since pre-Islamic days.

  His direct knowledge of them was relatively limited and came from a series of games he had played when he was younger. The characters had used djinn to fight. He had found the term interesting at the time and done some light research on what djinn were.

  Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

  It had been many years since he played those games. Now the only thing he remembered about the research he had done was how varied their weaknesses could be. Some djinn were weak to elemental attacks, while others to physical or magical attacks. The one relative constant was a weakness to iron.

  They weren’t part of the fae, or at least, not officially, but they shared the most well-known weakness. In the case of the djinn though, while it weakened and hurt them, it didn’t deal the catastrophic damage it did to the fae.

  Any traps he created would have iron in them as a result. However, that didn’t help him come up with a specific theme for the dungeon. This particular dungeon was probably going to need to have a more generalized theme. Something that just used regular traps in a similar way that the first dungeon did. He had used that method for many of the initial dungeons, especially whenever he didn’t have information on the monsters inside.

  At least the last two dungeons were relatively easy to work with.

  The wendigos in Alaska were weak to fire and accordingly became its theme. The golem's weakness was similarly well known, though that presented a curiosity of its own.

  Golems were artificial creations, and these were extremely similar to the ones that appeared in Jewish lore. In that story, the golem had an inscription written on its head, usually the Hebrew word for truth . To kill or deactivate the golem, you had to change the word to death ‘.

  A second method was removing a parchment from its mouth, which contained the golem’s given name.

  In the case of the golems he was seeing, they were obviously manufactured and had the inscriptions. These weren’t in Hebrew, though, and through the cameras, he had also caught glimpses of a parchment in its mouth.

  He could accept that certain monsters were similar to the ones from their mythology. However, a being that was created was going too far.

  It made him wonder if all their worlds were far more intertwined than they had initially believed. Was it possible that every beast, monster, and scary being that humans had ever put into a story belonged to their own separate world? That the veil between all their worlds was thin enough that humans could sometimes catch glimpses of them?

  It was an odd theory… but it made a certain amount of sense at the same time.

  Regardless of what the answer ended up being, there was an additional problem with this particular dungeon. All he was seeing wandering through the dungeon at the moment were the golems, whoever was creating them.

  It wasn’t necessarily a major problem, but it was something to consider when creating the traps. Either way, they didn’t appear to be a major part of the dungeon… at least for the moment. The golems were constructed of different materials. Some were made from clay, wood, metal, and others of rock, like the natural elemental golems they had encountered before.

  It was best to keep the theme for this dungeon as basic as possible. In this case, he was thinking about using heavy bashing attacks. There would be no reason to change the wording or remove the parchment if its entire head had been smashed flat.

  Nate set the dungeon’s theme and then pulled back so he could start taking notes and check on the dungeons that were almost conquered.

  There were three of them, and each was getting ever closer to completion. The twelfth dungeon with the goblins was the closest to being fully conquered and only had a few hours left. Whereas dungeons five and twenty, both had three days left.

  All three would be getting communities when they were finished getting conquered. Goblins were ugly little blighters who fought without concern for their own lives. From what he had been able to tell, though, unlike in how they were portrayed in some stories, they weren’t the evil bastards who were driven purely by their instincts to propagate.

  A little later, he shut everything down and rubbed his eyes. He really needed to remember to blink more. In the back of the Overlander, Aura and Mika were lying on the girl’s bed. Aura was in the middle of teaching the weasel how to telepathically communicate with others.

  “You ready to switch out?” He asked Lindsay, who was still driving.

  The young woman liked to drive, but there was a difference between driving fast and the endless miles that happened on a road trip. Someone could only look at the cracked, pothole ridden-road, and constant towering trees to the side for so long before their mind started to wander.

  “Yeah, I think so,” She mumbled through a yawn.

  Lindsay didn’t even bother pulling off to the side of the road as she slowed the large vehicle to a stop and hopped out of the driver's seat. Covering her mouth to hide another yawn, she took the laptop and notes from Nate as they swapped seats.

  She didn’t stay in the passenger seat for long before slipping back to join Angie at the table. The other girl was quietly going through the different dungeons, with her own notebook in front of her.

  “What are you looking at?” Lindsay asked, sitting down across from her.

  “Hmm?” Angie returned somewhat blearily. “The resources that each dungeon gives, I’m attempting to analyze them and determine if there is any correlation between the frequency of orbs that we’ve received at each.”

  “And? What have you determined so far?”

  Angie cracked her neck and leaned back on the dinette bench. “As far as I can tell, they have no influence on each other. It was just an idea anyway. The only thing that has an effect on the orbs is if the beings possess certain items that we need. Such as armor or weapons. The dungeons can generate them without taking them from their bodies; however, it seems to cause strain to them in that case. This is what happened when Nate used it to create items for his parents. Some of those items could be taken from the blighted elves, but not everything, and it caused problems.”

  Lindsay raised a brow. “You got all of that from a few hours of your weird merchant analysis magic.” She waved her fingers in the air as she spoke.

  Angie chuckled. “Yes, and no. The whole strain bit is just my own supposition. It makes sense to me, but I have no proof or anything.” She closed her notebook. “Anyway, since that more or less went nowhere, what do you have there? Nate’s notebook?”

  “And his laptop,” Lindsay added with a sly grin.

  “Oooh, hand that baby over. Let’s see what sort of things he looks at on the internet. Maybe we can even find a journal or diary on here.” Angie whispered to her friend with a giggle.

  https://www.amazon.com/author/joshuakern

  https://joshuakernbooks.com/