~ Chapter 1: Rejuvenating the shriveled old prune ~

[Yandrea’s point of view]

It was quite the surprise to find out that something other than the usual Reiss and Forglores entered my Dungeon Territory. Even more so when I found out that this being appeared out of thin air somewhere at the 204th floor of my dungeon. If I didn’t reach it at the last second, it would have ended up stomped by a Bulldozer Minotaur. That thing was an elite monster donning an enchanted armor and powerful shield, both created by me. It could easily smash through any group of adventurers, Reiss or Forglores. Usually, they avoided the beast or tried to lure it in some sort of trap, otherwise, they had no chance of defeating it head on.

When I laid my eyes upon this creature for the first time, he looked like he was about to die. The poor thing was barely breathing and had a fuzzy face. Hair was growing all around his mouth, and it was very long. Oh, and it was bleeding quite badly too.

In a way, he was extremely lucky I was nearby to stop the Minotaur. I was honestly expecting to see some lost Reiss, but when I noticed he was something else, the little bit of curiosity I had left inside of me sparked like a wild fire, and I couldn’t just let the poor thing die like that. Then again, Reiss adventurers barely went past floor 65, where my traps began to appear, while the Forglores never crossed 200. Even luck had its limits, and the monsters in my dungeon were no joke. All of them could shred a Beginner to pieces.

The most surprising thing about this creature that appeared here was the way it looked like. He wore a funny-looking pointy hat, a long robe, and leather shoes with metal soles. In terms of looks, the closest being he came to was a Negvar Elf, but their kind never ventured around these parts. It wasn’t their territory, and the Reiss were a bit at odds with them. Although, this one wasn’t as tall as the elves were, or had their pointy ears and beautiful facial features. He had a face covered in hair, wrinkles all over the place, and looked a bit too easy to break in half.

Even so, the look in his eyes was a strange one. As a Dungeon, I had seen many types of eyes: angry ones, frustrated ones, those lacking the spark of life, exhausted ones, and even those of a lover, but I had never seen his type before.

This man’s eyes still held the spark of life, but although they were tired and weary from his long life, they still seemed to crave for more. I don’t know what it was about them, what sort of strange magic they cast to pull me closer to him, but they sparked my curiosity and desire to have him.

This man was the first one I wished to obtain. I wanted to make this ‘human’ mine. I had to make him mine!

That was the reason why, for the first time ever, I made a contract with someone. I asked him to marry me, and he accepted…

[Old Pervert Tuberculus Firerage Ulkar the Mad is now your spouse]

This was a rather odd and long name, but one part of it was surely a title of some sort. I decided to select it and see what details it offered me. As I began to read, I squinted my eyes in suspicion and wondered if I made a mistake about him. Unfortunately, for any sentient creature, unless they allowed me to read their energies, I wasn’t able to do so. It only came off as gibberish or static. This didn’t apply, however, to those bound through a contract of sorts to me, such as marriage.

Even so, I wasn’t able to find the definition of these things called ‘panties’ in my memory. It was a new word for me.

With a sigh, I looked down at him. Tuberculus was unconscious, so I absorbed him. In that moment, his body vanished and was sent straight to my Crystal Body, inside the dimension known as Inner Mind.

Now, for his other titles… I thought and looked back at the message which told me he became my spouse.

I didn’t close it yet, so I selected the next one.

[Firerage]: This is a Title as well as a Name carried only by Tuberculus. He obtained it after mastering the spell [Infernal Glacier]. May or may not have something to do with setting his house on fire and raging during his training sessions. It adds 10% power to any Fire type spell.

[Ulkar the Mad]: Title gained for taking the side of a Demon and a Dungeon. The wearer of this Title gains a 5% increase in all of his or her base stats as long as he is in the presence of a Demon or a Dungeon.

Reading the details of that last title made me wonder if my sudden attraction to this individual wasn’t also a side effect of it. From the looks of things though, it seemed as if his actual name was only Tuberculus, but if that was so, then this man was actually an orphan or someone who got kicked out of his family. His titles and sudden appearance on one of my floors certainly offered him an interesting allure.

After closing the window, I decided to scan my Dungeon Territory for any other uninvited guests. Besides a few Reiss adventurers, there was no one of particular interest, so I flew back to my Crystal Body to check up on my new toy.

The form I was using right now was something similar to a ghost without a body or a form. I was invisible too. Well, I could cast spells and up to a point interact with the world inside my Dungeon Territory, but that was about all I could do. When it came to touch, smell, or taste, I couldn’t do any of those things. Other people couldn’t even see me or feel my presence unless I said something.

The best part of this form was that it allowed me to freely fly through my dungeon, going through the walls and floors without any problem. The only catch was that I had to will myself to go through it, otherwise I would bump into it and stay outside. It took me a while to get the hang of it, but once I did, it became no problem for me to fly from the 700th floor to the 1st and back in a straight line. Before I learned this, it took me ages to go from one end to the other, but I had no problems in using this ability to torment any enemy who got too close to my real body.

Even with the power to fly through walls, it still was a long journey back to my Crystal Body, which was located on the 736th floor. When I built this place, I made the upper floors rather big, but after the 100th floor, they became gigantic mazes filled with large temples and nests for all sort of monsters I had summoned. Some of the floors had no monsters but were littered with traps of all kinds, ranging from simple spike or arrow traps to large cube rooms that launched attacks of all kinds from all directions on the unsuspecting adventurers. One of these floors was the main reason why some of the adventurers never managed to delve past the 300th floor.

After floor 327, the dungeon turned into whatever I felt like building at that time, that’s why I had in some places small deserts, while in others entire underground forests or cities. There were many buildings and temples I built, trying out my abilities and pushing my imagination to the limits. To make the place more lively, I allowed summoned creatures to breed and form colonies or actual towns. There was even a real network between them, going from one place to another, trading resources they mined form the outer walls of my dungeon, stuff like that. In general, they all paid tribute in materials or new stuff they invented.

Well, I wasn’t without my protection at these levels. If up until now, the adventurers met only single monsters or packs of them, after the 400th floor, they were met with armies led by generals on immense battlefields, however, they didn’t have the opportunity to wage any wars with me around. At most, I allowed them a few spars for local resources or the privilege of sending groups outside of my dungeon.

Either way, going by foot from level 736 to the surface was akin as traversing this entire continent. It was a pure nightmare for the ordinary mortal. One of my personal ornak guards actually tried it because he lost a dare to a dragon. He returned after 6 years, 2 months, and 3 days with a few flowers from the surface. For his effort, and the fact that he missed his mating cycle six times, I allowed him to choose any woman of his clan he desired, and a few extra goodies in terms of enchanted armors and weapons. He was mighty proud of it, too bad he died of old age two decades later.

Speaking of which, the 736th floor was by far the most massive thing I have ever built. It was at least 100km by 100km and 1km in height, it had a small forest, a lake with a tiny island in the middle, countless mazes and even a city of mixed species. The whole thing was built in incredible detail up to the point where the walls of the mazes had sculptures on them.

Ever since I learned how to built automatons capable of repairing the traps and protecting the residents here, I had more time on my hands. Of course, everyone was absolutely thrilled when they saw it and immediately settled in. The city built by me became their chosen capital. Of course, I didn’t forget about the dragons, they needed special nests unlike the other species, so I built a bunch for them.

This happened about 56 years ago and ever since then, this place had grown a lot. Without any natural predators to dwindle their species, they all grew in numbers quite fast, which made my entire dungeon even more dangerous.

As for my Crystal Body, it was located at the very top of the small island in the middle of the lake I built at this floor. I raised a pyramid there using enchanted gold bricks and placed as guards six dragons, eight lion emperors, and twenty eight ornaks ravagers. They were all handpicked by me and each with levels near 1000 and stats over 2000 points. From a mortal’s point of view, they were real monsters, but a [Super Nova] spell would have been enough to wipe out at least half of them. My Magic Armor was so powerful that not even a direct hit from all of them could shatter it. In other words, I had nothing to fear from anyone. In this place, I was all-powerful.

Truth be told, I was so bored in the past decades that once I ordered all of my guards to stay away and let a group of high leveled Adventurers come all the way to my core. I think they were ranked Supreme or something like that. When they reached my core, I was really excited to finally battle them, but after an [Inferno Blizzard] and [Ground Spike Tsunami], they were all dead. I didn’t even use 25% of my entire Magic Energy pool. They were utterly disappointing! Then again, they were inferior Supremes, so probably that meant they were much weaker than regular ones?

Oh well, now I managed to get my greedy claws on another toy: the human!

After I entered my Crystal Body, I flew through the clear blue skies of my Inner Mind and stopped when I finally reached him. My eyes were sparkling with excitement. He was asleep, and this place kept him from dying.

With a giggle, I proceeded to undress him and search through his stuff.

In this place, I didn’t really have a body, so I actually looked like a floating blob of pure white energy, or this was what I was told by a Reiss I once made a slave contract with. The sneaky little bastard tried to kill me the following year because I killed his brother when he ventured too deep into my dungeon. Well, he wasn’t able to do anything to me and died a painful, agonizing death. The slave collar was a very powerful spell that literally destroyed his body from the inside out and then melted him into a pile of goo. It was a very slow process because there was always the chance for the slave to reconsider, but the Reiss never did. He died cursing me.

Anyway, Tuberculus had some rather interesting things with him. There was this strange crystal, a small dagger strapped to his left leg, a funny-looking hat, and a robe. What he wore under it was a full body cloth with buttons at his back. If unbuttoned there, he could poke out his old, wrinkly bottom.

I saw many naked males when they were mating with females, but Tuberculus’ thingy was… tiny. For some reason, I let out a giggle when I saw it.

To be honest, I wasn’t really interested in testing out how it would be to mate with him, I didn’t even have a suitable body for that. What I wanted to do was to see how it would be to have something like a husband. The sentient species I harbored in my dungeon seemed to fancy the idea of a married couple, so I sort of got curious about it. Then again, I never thought those species were worth a try for this sort of thing.

Thinking about it, maybe making Tuberculus my husband was nothing more than a temporary whim and when he stepped out of the line, he would be met with the fury of a Godlike Dungeon.

In the meantime, I had to heal him…

Show me his status. I ordered, and a window appeared before me, showing me a bunch of details about him.

[Name]: Tuberculus Firerage <Spouse of Yandrea>

[Species]: Human

[Race]: Magus

[Level]: 203

[Strength]: 28 (436)

[Agility]: 2 (386)

[Intelligence]: 88 (806)

[Magic Energy]: 20 (4630)

[Magic Energy Regeneration]: 0.01 (5) points per second

Weak! He’s so weak! I shouted in my mind the moment I saw those pathetic stats.

Someone like him could barely reach floor 40 or 50, let alone 700.

I sighed and proceeded to heal his injuries. First of all, I checked what was wrong with him, if he had any disease, illness, or stuff like that. I wanted to remove any problem I could detect besides the fuzzy face and wrinkly bottom.

As soon as I confirmed where and what was damaged, I closed the status screen and gathered Magic Energy around his body. Like a child playing with clay, I began to repair his broken body and remove any ailments he had. The poison was the easiest part, then came his old age diseases, a magic affliction that stopped him from generating Magic Energy fast enough and all sort of other tweaks to his immune system.

Healing him was pretty much the same as creating an item, all I had to do was focus on what I wanted to create, let the magic flow and my subconscious do the rest. It was that simple. As for the result, the naked old man didn’t have a single scratch left on his body.

After I was done, I kept staring at him for a while, trying to think what was missing. Something felt terribly off, and I couldn’t tell what it was.

Argh! I can’t figure it out! I screamed after more than an hour had passed with nothing changing.

I was absolutely certain there was something there I was looking at, but I wasn’t ‘opening my eyes’ to see.

Thinking back about the other species, I suddenly remembered that the Reiss and Forglores adventurers were a bit different among each other. The same went for the ornak. Basically, some individuals became wrinkly as they aged, ruining their smooth appearance from when they were in the prime of their lives.

Up until then, I was never bothered with this strange aspect of organics, but then I realized that this might have been exactly what ticked me off about Tuberculus. In short, I didn’t like his wrinkly body.

Curious about this and wanting to know if it wasn’t some sort of disease I wasn’t aware about, I flew out of my Crystal Body and went to visit the only wrinkly humanoid among my guards. His name was Blorghar, and he was an ornak ravager, the strongest among his kind.

To find him was easy, he was sitting by a fire not far from my pyramid and talking with his son. I flew up next to them and listened in on their conversation for a moment. It sort of caught my attention.

“Son! When you take your woman, your arms need be firm and strong!” he said making a fist.

“Yes, father! Firm and strong! Me can do!” he nodded with a serious look in his eyes.

Is it mating season for the ornaks? I wondered.

“Foolish son, Rokiki! Stop using ‘me’! Use ‘I’! We not be savages! We know how to talk and write!” he corrected the boy, although, I found their broken language to be interesting and funny at times.

Just like Rokiki, Blorghar was an ornak of dark-red skin color. Their mates, however, were light-green. This extreme difference in skin color variation between males and females was a peculiar trait of their species. The other was their protuberant tusks on their upper jaws, which were used to make them look menacing and turn their meals into a slobbering mess. Speech was also particularly difficult because of this. They resumed to small words and simple sentences.

If I were to compare Blorghar with Tuberculus, the latter would win only in the overall number of wrinkles on his body. Brute strength was the ornak’s forte, making them perfect for the vanguard position in a battle. Their big frames and strong muscles turned them into real walls of flesh and bone who could take a great deal of punishment. On the other hand, Tuberculus looked like a shriveled green onion when compared to him. At the very least, he held a bit of magic, but it was far from what could be considered as useful against someone like Blorghar. Their levels were too far apart too.

“But father, I must ask.” Rokiki looked in his father’s eyes like a warrior about to challenge an enemy army, “Big bewbs or small bewbs?”

I nearly chocked when I heard him.

Seriously?! Ugh… men. I thought instinctively.

“Hm… Good question!” the old ornak nodded and leaned back, crossing his arms at his chest and closing his eyes.

Hey! Don’t think so seriously about it! I complained in my mind.

He then opened his eyes and with a serious tone of voice, he declared “Old and young say big is a man’s dream, but son, we also say that small means justice!”

Seriously? Big is a dream and small is justice? How does that even work?! I thought while raising an eyebrow at them, although… I didn’t really have any eyebrows or eyes in this form.

Somehow, I had the feeling these two stupid ornaks were mixing up their biological priorities with their own tastes. Then again, I was also feeling the urge to smack them both in the head with a lightning bolt… a very powerful lightning bolt.

Needless to say, I was in the ‘Big’ camp because of a very simple and easy to understand reason. The extra fat meant better cold resistance during the cold season. There was also the fact that the females with big chests were able to nurture and feed more than one baby, increasing their chances of survival in case their mothers suffered an injury or couldn’t breastfeed them at all.

Well, this was only available for mammals or mammal resembling species. At the very core of my preferences stood another thought: bigger bodies meant more Magic Energy for me, however, just being fat wasn’t going to cut it. Women, especially those of the Negvar Elves, for some reason, stored a lot more Magic Energy in their breasts than in any other part of their bodies, which explained why their queen was so well… endowed.

Why am I even debating breast sizes? I asked myself at one point.

After clearing my head, I approached Blorghar with a much more serious and important reason in mind.

With a fake cough, I interrupted their conversation.

“Huh? Who be there?” the two ornaks jumped up on their feet, weapons ready and looking around for the source of the noise, which was invisible and standing right in front of them.

“It is I, your Dungeon Lord!” I introduced myself with a self-important tone of voice.

“Lady Yandrea! Please forgive us! We not know!” the two dropped on their knees immediately.

“Relax. I have not come to punish you. I came here only to ask you a question, Blorghar!” I explained to calm them down.

“We listen! Oh, Great One!” replied the ornaks.

“Answer me this…” they gulped “Why do you have…” they gulped and looked at me with serious eyes”…a wrinkly bottom?” I spoke with a commanding tone of voice.

Upon hearing my words, they both looked at each other a bit confused. It was highly likely none of them expected me to ask such a weird thing.

“I confused? Maybe I not hear right, but Lady Yandrea asked why ornaks have wrinkly butts?” asked Blorghar, clearing out one ear of all that gathered up wax.

He could seriously make a candle with all of that.

“Pretty much, yes.” I shrugged.

“Erm…” he looked at his son and then back at me. “Wrinkles appear when ornaks grow old. It is a sign of aging. When they are a lot on one’s body, a young one knows that this one is not as strong and fast as he used to be. Age diminishes our strength and speed, but increases our wisdom and experience in life!” he replied proudly.

Indeed, Blorghar had the highest level among all the ornaks in my dungeon, but by far he wasn’t the oldest. My question, however, did receive an answer to my liking. From what I understood, wrinkles appeared as a sign to show others that their bodies have long since past the prime of their lives. This meant that Tuberculus looked like a dried prune because he was very old for a human. He wasn’t born with a furry face and wrinkly body, he gained them over time.

“Thank you, Blorghar, you may now return to your previous conversation.” I told him and then left.

When I returned to my Inner Mind, I already knew what had to be done. Surrounding Tuberculus’ naked body, I began to carefully control my Magic Energy and infuse it into his tissues. The spell I used wasn’t exactly a spell, but an advanced form of cellular healing. His genetic information was read by my magic and then I began to reverse the aging process of his body. Most of this was done instinctively because I had no idea how exactly to read his chromosomes. At most, I just felt when it was the right time to pull my Magic Energy in order to gain the required effect.

What I was looking for wasn’t only too make him young again, but also to make him immortal. I didn’t wish to see his wrinkly old bottom again. I also removed all that excess fur from his body, and tinkered with some other parts or his anatomy.

The downside of using this sort of technique was the fact that I consumed a lot of Magic Energy, and my regeneration wasn’t able to keep up with the pace. To be clear, the reason for this high consumption was also partially due to me failing one, two… maybe fourteen times until I figured out what exactly I had to change and where. Nonetheless, this turned out to be a very fun experiment. It was the most fun I had in the past century!

When I was finally done with this, the man standing before me was as handsome as an elf, with no fur on his body except for his scalp, strong muscles, no scars or weird spots on his skin, black hair without any gray strands intermixed, and a rejuvenated bone structure, including his chompers. To be honest, I debated if I wanted to add a pair of feline ears or not. He looked sort of cute with those.

Good! Now he looks like a normal creature! Yawn! I’m so tired… I can barely keep my eyes open… Maybe… maybe I’ll sleep for a bit? Take a short nap? Yeah… that sounds nice. I thought as I slowly drifted off to sleep.

There was nothing wrong with waiting until the following day, and I was certain Tuberculus was going to appreciate the many changes I made to his old, shriveled body.