Later on back in the dungeon, Doyle is tweaking a few things on the second floor when a pop up interrupts him.

{Disconnecting Energy Well influence from external Territory...

Town Anchor applying area restrictions to Energy Well influence...

New Options available for Town/Dungeon interactions}

‘Huh’, Doyle pauses, ‘Well that’s a new one. I guess that’s a good thing for me as I don’t have to hold back my territory anymore. [System, show me the new options.]’

{Allow more space to be designated for Energy Well influence than available: [On] [Off]

Limit allowed area: [Area Restriction] [Clear Restriction]

Energy Well works in Safe Rooms: [On] [Off] [Town’s Discretion]}

‘Well, that’s short and sweet. I’m sure there will be other options for me to deal with later but for now I wonder what the area restriction does. Set [Area Restriction]’

Doyle’s view is pulled out of his dungeon and into the area right outside the entrance. Except instead of a normal view, anything outside of his actual territory lacks detail. No matter how hard Doyle tries to focus on something it is like looking through a badly adjusted telescope. The trade off is that Doyle can now see the general lay of the land for quite a distance around the dungeon, well into the forest and across the river.

After a good look around, Doyle focuses back on the purpose of this view, setting up restrictions on the Energy Well. There is already something set up, likely the restrictions the town had decided on. In fact, Doyle is certain that is what he is seeing because it mostly matches the pre-existing area except the path to the portal and the space in-front of Ace’s desk are set to not have the Energy Well’s influence. Basically everything the town would want. Though Doyle has to wonder if they will change up the whole dungeon containment thing now that they can limit the affected area.

Doyle turns back to his own controls as what they do isn’t too important to him at the moment. Instead, he tries to change the restrictions on the area. This throws the area into a stark contrast. The currently covered area is a deep white that, despite the sameness is unable to cover up the details while the rest is all shades of black yet not grey. Within this realm of colorless purity marred by the limits of reality, Doyle picks out the two areas the town had set up quite easily, both changes being areas of muddied grey and missed potential.

Those areas are where the Energy Well is permitted by him, but not by the town. With the barest of effort, Doyle converts an area of blackness outside of the town into a permitted area. That space loses all color like a sculpture made of the clearest of glass or crystal. Doyle resets it and extends the allowed area around his dungeon all the way out to the current outer wall while keeping the current height. Though Doyle does let the area continue to extend under the ground. He can, of course, do more later but for some reason he doesn’t see them wanting much more than that.

Happy with the results, he exits out of the area restriction mode and is pulled back into the dungeon and closes out the option panel. The other things in there are nice but are fine as is. Though the option to let his Energy Well work in safe rooms is tempting, it could lead to people camping out in them. Doyle had just found out that he can alter a dungeon floor as long as one of the instances is free of people with the new layout taking effect for everyone going forward. But that wouldn’t help if enough people stuck around. It wasn’t that long ago he was worrying about the wolves camping his last floor and now the system is offering a way to do it to himself.

With a shake of his core, Doyle turns back to tweaking things in his dungeon. But despite trying to stay focused, something at the back of his mind is distracting him. After half a day, what he was missing finally bubbles to the top. He can now travel further down the Energy Well Path. He doesn’t have the points at the moment as except for a few patterns gaining a level nothing else has leveled. While the second stage of Energy Well doesn’t cost much, he doesn’t have the six points for it at the moment. All he can do is wait, likely until the next floor as many of his skills are based around sculpting his dungeon.

Though speaking of patterns leveling up, an interesting one happened. Even after he had gotten a number of plant collections, his clover pattern had stood alone. Recently, though, it has gained a large number of levels. Not the strangest thing, other patterns had done that. No, what was interesting was the clover pattern moved into the herb patterns at level ten.

Doyle had known that clover was used as a herb for various minor health problems, generally as a herbal tea. The interesting part was how after it gained enough levels, the system decided it now counted as a herb. On one hand, it could just be the system finally getting around to re-categorizing it. More likely from Doyle’s point of view is that after having leveled up enough the herbal properties had grown to the point that the system recognizes it as such.

While not immediately important, it does mean that not all major changes to a pattern will result in a new pattern. A sneakier wolf won’t necessarily turn into a stealth wolf with a separate pattern, but rather just be another form of wolf like how Doyle can create a variety of swords with the sword pattern.

Though Doyle remembers Ally’s talk about Jimmy trying to combine his skills and a different option springs to mind. Skills and patterns are just the system categorizing what a person knows and providing extra knowledge when needed. The sword pattern might be similar to how people get the carpentry skill instead of a wooden table making skill. While the system does fill in the gaps, the skill is actually made up of infinitely dividing specialty skills and techniques. Even combat skills should be similar to an extent.

Of course, Doyle already suspected the system had to be cheating with skills in some way. Not that this was proof, but keeping this new guess in mind could provide some interesting insight. Right off the top of his head the pattern collections would be the system attempting to combine them but not being able to. After all, even with clover he doesn’t have ten herbs and all of them are from his planet. To reduce the pattern collection to just a single pattern would at the very least require him to have a majority of system known herbs and examples of all the type of effects that a herb could have.

Just the idea of a single pattern for swords already is a massive simplification and while the system is okay with that, expecting a similar thing for herbs would be silly. Though as Doyle considers it, he realizes that sub-categories of herbs might be possible. Like with how swords are under weapons, it might be possible to gain a pattern for all common blood thinning herbs or all the common herbs that settle a stomach ache. Only the common ones.

Doyle isn’t crazy enough to think he could gain the ability to create legendary herbs that just happen to cure a stomach ache and within his patterns there is already proof of this sort of thing. After all, he has the pattern for grass but he can’t make bamboo with it. Now, maybe with more levels in the grass pattern, bamboo might become available. But that alone would point to the same thing. So even if he does get a pattern for herbs that cure stomach aches it would take quite a few levels in it before getting anything more than mundane herbs. In fact, if he absorbed a special herb after getting a combo skill like that it would probably stand alone until the combo had enough levels to absorb it.

Satisfied with his current understanding of things Doyle settles back into tweaking minor things on the various floors. While the new adventurers aren’t much of a challenge, they are providing more than enough lessons on where his floors need improving. And like that, a few more days pass. Outside, there is a bit of chaos when the people from upriver realized the settlement had become a system recognized town but without a true architect they didn’t comprehend the true meaning behind the change.

Still, more and more people began to delve into Doyle’s dungeon and the twice a day boat trip became four times a day. Then once another couple ships were found they started making trips whenever enough people had gathered who wanted to go. Besides that, not everyone who went wanted to return and so a tent village popped up right along the section of the outer wall that faced the river.

It isn’t even just people from the city upriver. At first they had managed to keep it from the settlement but they were in direct communication with at least three other locations and those places knew of further towns. Though the place upriver was the most populous, with both the most initial residents and, of course, many people moving there as they tried to keep to the old norms.

All of this while interesting didn’t matter too much to Doyle. He was going to have people visiting from far away no matter what. This just sped it up and allowed him to observe how other people handled his dungeon. But of course, with this, more people ended up dying in his dungeon and that finally pushed him to level up.

{Level Gained!

Level goes from 2 to 3, Strength goes from 21 to 26, Agility goes from 25 to 36, Constitution goes from 30 to 37, Intelligence goes from 27 to 34, Wisdom goes from 33 to 49, Presence goes from 20 to 25, Destiny goes from 35 to 45, Karma goes from 45 to 60, Luck goes from 24 to 35}

It takes Doyle a moment to go over all the changes. Most of them at this point are increasing by large amounts with his Wisdom the front runner at 16 a level. However, they aren’t all good. His Strength and Presence are only increasing by 5 a level and more worrying is Constitution only just two more matching along with Intelligence.

The others can be propped up as needed, but his Constitution directly increases how much energy his core can hold and things aren’t exactly getting cheaper. It is doing alright because of a lot of static boosts but that will hold it back in the long run. Besides that, Doyle is also low key worried about his Presence as it is his lowest score and the current description given by the system isn’t exactly informative.

{Presence: A mind’s specialty is projecting. Your race has turned what for most is an external stat into an internal one. This represents a core’s ability to affect their own monsters on a mental level. This stat will increase your ability to fine tune the behavior patterns of non-sapient monsters.}

Though looking over it again makes him worry all the more. While it isn’t exactly shocking that the stat which started the lowest besides his Karma was still the lowest, the way a dungeon core uses it hints at some things to him. Specifically, he just gained his first sapient monster and this stat supposedly was how well he could affect his monsters mentally. While he doubts his monsters can rebel against him, that doesn’t mean that a monster with a mind of its own won’t decide to go and do its own thing.

So far, none of the adventurers had gotten to the fifth floor, not even the founders, despite how far they had gotten into the fourth floor had made it yet. But any day now he expected someone to manage it as the wolves aren’t exactly figuring out a new strategy to fight and even the random ambushes had partly been figured out. At this point Doyle doesn’t have how closely his kobold Boss is going to follow the plan and that worries him.