Jack's POV

  Ping!

  Level one goblin slain!

  Exp awarded: 2xp

  P.S As you are the Lord of this Dungeon the xp awarded is reduced by half.

  Ping!

  You have leveled up!!!

  Stat points plus five!

  Ping!

  You have reached Level 5, and a system restriction on you has been lifted.

  "You can now access the Dungeon Map"

  The location of all the creatures inside your dungeon are now at your fingertips!

  Ping!

  System Notice!

  "Slow and steady wins the race"

  You have taken the longest time to reach level five in the history of this dungeon. Any more, and I would have dropped you in the pit of goblins myself.

  Reward 1: Plus one hundred credits

  Reward 2: All weather boots

  "Whoa, an item drop…" said Jensen, reading the same prompt as me. The boots offered plus five to speed, and I would have loved to wear them. But…

  "How do I get those boots?" I asked him while he stood next to me.

  "They will be inside your inventory," he said, and the moment those words left his mouth.

  He and I exchanged a look.

  My inventory was locked.

  Ping!

  System Quest: "Training Montage"

  There are times when the elderly have to do what's right for their new generation. Even if it means dropping them in places where they shouldn't be dropped. Like on their head.

  Quest: Reach the fourth floor in next forty eight hours, and clear the goblin's nest!

  Reward 1: Unlock your inventory!

  Reward 2: Level appropriate attire for the lord of the dungeon!

  Quest Failure: You fail this quest automatically if you don't clear two levels in the next twenty four hours!

  Jensen and I shared a look again.

  "Has the dungeon ever sent that many notifications in one go before?" I asked him.

  "Nope," said Jensen. "But I think the System has taken a keen interest in your growth." He paused. "It is still tied to the dungeon rules. So it's doing what it can to nudge you on…"

  I eyed my interface again. The tab was on the bottom right corner of my interface which read map was now unlocked. The middle of my interface had a timer counting down the forty eight hours, and my quest was right underneath it.

  Frankly, I wasn't really interested in doing the quest. I just wanted to work or what Jensen says 'grind', and level up. But I needed my inventory unlocked, and I think the System wasn't okay with a dungeon lord being on floor one, and killing level one goblins. So this was its way of manipulating us into moving down faster.

  "Open the map," said Jensen.

  He had access to my interface, but couldn't operate it. So I tapped on the map icon, and the map spread across the entire screen, covering everything behind it.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Jensen clicked his tongue the moment he saw the map.

  "What happened?" I asked.

  "It's pretty old," he said.

  "The map?" I asked.

  "No," he grumbled. "The interface," he said.

  But I had no frame of reference for the interface. This was my first one after all. Jensen asked me to do a couple of things, and I did them. Like zooming in, panning around, and trying to go to the lower levels. There were toggles in the top right corner to do all that. So it wasn't that difficult to figure things out.

  From what I could see, the dungeon, as Jensen had said, was like a triangle embedded inside the earth. It wasn't exactly a triangle but something close to it. Because the edges of the floors were not perfectly straight lines. They just happen to grow outward and stop at about the same length in each direction for a particular floor level.

  On top right corner of the dungeon map, the population of the dungeon was shown. It was a little over twenty thousand. And as I moved from floor to floor. I could see the population scattered across the topography per floor as well.

  I couldn't see the terrain in great detail as everything was like a wire diagram. But the one thing common throughout the floor levels was the safe zone. It was always in the middle of every floor.

  So after having spent less than five minutes with that map. I could say with confidence that the map the adventurers had made was nowhere close to the total dungeon size. It only showed the path from safe zones to the staircase from floor to floor. But there was just so much more out there, and so many more types of goblins with their nests.

  The population of the dungeon creatures was also mentioned right underneath the adventurers population on the top right corner of the map. But unlike adventures population. The population of dungeon creatures kept fluctuating in terms of hundreds every few seconds.

  "What is this?" I pointed on the map and asked Jensen. It was a countdown I could tell. But it was in years. It was on the top left corner of the map.

  "That's the dungeon cycle," said Jensen. "The dungeon has to rebuild itself from time to time." He paused. "Benzo had lied about a lot of things in his records. But he was right about the dungeon cycle being three years."

  "It shows we have about twenty eight more months before the reset," I said, reading it out loud. "What if we just sit tight?" I looked at Jensen. "Get stronger and take the shortcut again to the main boss—"

  "I will fail my quest," he said, while having his eye on the dungeon reset timer. "I don't have that kind of time—"

  "How much time do you have?" I asked.

  "Less than three months," he said.

  I took in a deep breath at that and decided to do this the hard way.

  "Try and make the map small," said Jensen. "We need to have our eyes on it at all times going forward."

  I nodded, and managed to pull the map down, and after a little back and forth. I decided to place it facing up at an angle while being near my belly button. That way, it wouldn't block my view, and I could access whatever I needed from it.

  "It looks like the layout changes every four floors," said Jensen.

  "It does?" I asked, enlarging the map to its full size once more and toggling down the floor levels. I went from floor one to floor five to see the difference. I had to zoom out a bit, but the moment I did. The layout became much clearer, even though they were still just lines.

  The first floor on which we were hiding currently. It had two tunnel systems. The second floor had three tunnels. The rest of the area was a solid chunk of mass and nothing else. The third floor had nine tunnels all intertwined, and the fourth floor had well over sixteen tunnels. Unlike the first two floor levels of the dungeon, the next two had multiple exit points to the lower levels.

  "If only we could see this in three dimensions," I complained out loud.

  Ping!

  Would you like to invest five stat points to upgrade the map?

  Yes/No

  Jensen and I eyed each other, and then I looked at the ceiling.

  "Can we do it in three stat points?" I asked out.

  Jensen busted out laughing at that.

  "Are you seriously trying to bargain with the System?" he asked.

  "It's part of the trade," I said, feeling my face heat up. "My dad taught me that," I doubled down while Jensen kept laughing.

  I ignored him and looked back at the prompt.

  So I can use my stat points. But not the way Jensen had said, I thought.

  Would you like to invest five stat points to upgrade the map?

  Yes/No

  I clicked on yes, and the screen closed.

  "Map," I called out, and it popped up again. But this time, the points on the floor were marked in blue and red dots. And the toggles on the top right corner were replaced with a cube.

  I reached out to it, and when I turned it around. The whole two dimensional map turned into a holographic three dimensional representation. We could see goblins and adventurers as balls of red and blue lights.

  "Should I invest more?"

  "No," said Jensen. "We will save it for the inventory," he said.

  What followed was me carrying out pan and zoom again in three dimensions based on Jensen's input. Like how he had pointed out. Once the first four floors were crossed. The tunnel system ended. The next four floors had water, forest, and mountains for the most part. And the last four had plain expanse, which Jensen called dunes. But the final level was the most mind-numbing of them all. It was a maze. It was the floor with the minotaur.

  "Whoever designed this," said Jensen, after he was done studying the whole topography. "They made the floors five to eight a paradise, and floor nine to twelve a living hell."

  I couldn't help but agree with him. The distribution of population went something along the lines of the second floor having the highest population of almost six thousand adventurers. The third and fourth floors were empty, with at best ten adventurers roaming in them. Fifth, sixth, seventh, and eight floor each had a population of three thousand adventurers. The remaining population of a couple of thousand was scattered from floors nine to twelve.

  "Do you still want us to get strong and move down like lightning?" I asked, now that we had some new information.

  "Yes," he said. "The bosses aren't a challenge for me." He eyed the holographic map that was popping out of my interface. "It's the adventurers," he said. "If they gang up on us…" He paused. "I will have no option but to break my restrictions."

  He took a long pause.

  "Enough studying," he said, stretching his arms as if he was done thinking for the day. "Let's kill some goblins and move down two levels as soon as we can."

  *****