From the air, things looked very different. It was much easier to use the map this way, since I could ignore most obstacles.
I reached the site of the battle, but I wasn’t interested in the site itself. Rather, I wanted information on the people my Irregulars had met. Surveying the area from above, I found what I was looking for: A small clearing in the canopy revealed the remains of a campsite. Without the skills of a forensics expert or a hunter, I couldn’t be completely sure, but it looked like it’d been used recently to me. If they’d camped out here, that meant the nearest human settlement couldn’t be that close. If a town was nearby, they would have just gone back there instead of camping overnight in a scary forest.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any obvious tracks, so I had no idea which way these people had gone after they polished off my Irregulars. Fortunately, I had another option: the “follow the river” strategy. If there were humans around, then it stood to reason that some form of settlement would be relatively close. Flying high above the forest, I searched in every direction but couldn’t find anything that resembled a human settlement. I followed the river, scanning the horizon for any signs of civilization. According to my map, I was heading west. After flying for several minutes, though, I still hadn’t found anything, so I turned back.
If I couldn’t figure out where they came from, I’d just have to lure them to me. Even if I couldn’t capture them, I’d still be able to follow them home if I could lure them out.
If these really were humans, I could think of at least one really easy way to lure them in: the sudden appearance of a huge tower. In other words, it was time to upgrade the dungeon.
Unfortunately, it usually took quite a bit of time to gather the materials for the first dungeon upgrade, but I had a work-around. In the game, there were items to make various time sensitive things happen more quickly. Naturally, these were quite potent when used correctly. However, when I was playing, I was usually focused on Lilac, and how cute she was. I would spend hours dressing her up in little outfits and trying different combinations of accessories. As a result, most of my time skipping items were still in my inventory.
As soon as I returned to the dungeon master’s chamber, I tried one out.
The results were amazing. I could see my team of Irregulars on-screen, moving at dozens of times their usual speed. A few seconds later, the materials I’d been waiting on were delivered. There was a rest period before the Irregulars could go out again, but I shortened that with a speed-up item as well. When I used the speed-up items, they seemed to compress the time around whatever I sped up. The Irregulars still got their whole break, but from my point of view, it happened in seconds rather than hours.
These items were awesome. They wouldn’t last forever if I kept using them at this pace, but they were originally meant to be used. Normally I just preferred to let things that took a long time happen while I was asleep.
I used a few dozen lower-tier time accelerators, then started the upgrades. First, I increased the Irregulars to level three. Next, I added four more floors to the dungeon. Normally, even after you spent the points for the upgrade, the dungeon would take a while to grow, but a few more time-saving items remedied that little problem. With each floor I added, the dungeon expanded, becoming wider and longer as well as taller. Now that there was a five-story-tall tower in the middle of the forest, hopefully I’d draw in some curious humans.
Just drawing them in wouldn’t be any fun, so I summoned a hundred Sprigumdrops and activated a Sprigardener. Sprigumdrops were small, sticky creatures who ranked among the weakest in the game. In Questonicia, players needed to defeat a slime in the wild before they could summon one, but I seemed to already have access to all of my summons from the game. I stationed forty squishy Sprigumdrops on the first floor, twenty on the second, fifteen on the third, fifteen on the fourth, and ten on the fifth. I left the ones on the first floor at level one, but the ones on the second floor were leveled up to level two, the ones on the third were level three, and so on. This was actually really easy to accomplish with the Sprigardener in place.
The Sprigardener was a tower dungeon’s first step to being self-sufficient. It was called a gardener, but it was really more of a farmer. It grew useful materials and automatically deposited them into the material inventory. Thanks to the time accelerators, I’d earned a ton of dungeon points, but I’d spent nearly all of them on upgrades. The Sprigardener would help me passively recover the points I’d spent.
Since the Sprigardener grew things, its domain was the roof of the tower. On a hunch, I paid it a visit. I hadn’t added a staircase that led to the roof, so I flew up there instead. The creature in question was a huge sentient treelike creature, but instead of having a gnarled wooden face like similar creatures from other games, it had a cute, feminine face with huge eyes. I approached the Sprigardener from the air. It noticed me, and it smiled as I landed in front of it.
“Oh, Your Majesty! Welcome! What can I do for you today?” Like my other minions, it was speaking Sprigian.
“To thank you for your hard work, I’ve decided to give you a name. From this day forward, you will be Maple!”
At my declaration, Maple’s body began glowing, and just like the Irregulars, she transformed. This change was much more striking, though. Instead of a tree, there was a large flower blossom, with a sort of stem extending from it that connected to Maple’s main body. Her actual body had amazing proportions, just like my other female minions. Instead of just being a tree trunk with a face, the new and improved Maple had arms and legs, not to mention curves in all the right places. She had dark brown skin, bright green hair, and pointed ears. The tether that connected her to the flower was connected to her main body just above her butt, so it looked like a tail.
Now that she had a proper body, Maple knelt in front of me. With the upgrade she’d gotten from being named, Maple was able to produce materials (and dungeon points) more quickly, and they were higher quality as well. This would increase the efficiency of my first dungeon in this new world at least five-fold.
“I will do my utmost to prove worthy of the name I’ve been given, as I continue to serve you,” she pledged.
“I’m counting on it,” I replied.