Zion didn’t spend long celebrating the discovery that defeated adventurers survived.
He still had nearly a hundred active parties moving through Floor 1, and most of them were expecting something to appear after defeating the Horned Ram.
The empty Boss Drop Chest suddenly felt like a much more urgent problem.
Zion opened the reward menu and sorted the available items by price.
The list reorganized itself immediately, placing the cheapest options at the top.
[Rusted Dagger — 3 Essence]
[Worn Leather Bracer — 4 Essence]
[Bundle of Iron Arrowheads — 5 Essence]
[Minor Antidote — 5 Essence]
[Common Cloth Gloves — 6 Essence]
The list continued.
Zion stared at it for a moment before selecting the twenty cheapest items available.
He’d already learned what happened when he tried too hard to impress people.
This time, he intended to make the exact opposite mistake.
[Create Loot Table?]
[Selected Items: 20]
[Randomized reward selection enabled.]
[Confirm?]
“Yes.”
[Floor 1 Boss Loot Table established.]
The next party to defeat the Horned Ram received a bundle of iron arrowheads.
Their reaction was considerably less dramatic than Mara’s had been.
One of the adventurers picked up the bundle, looked at it, and shrugged before placing it into his bag.
Zion watched closely, accepting their reactions.
At least nobody looked offended.
Another party received a worn leather bracer.
The woman who opened the chest examined it for several seconds before handing it to one of her companions, who immediately replaced an even worse bracer on his arm.
That reaction was slightly better.
The third party received a minor healing draught, which produced the first actual smile he had seen since changing the loot.
He began to understand the difference.
Experienced adventurers barely cared about the cheap rewards because most of the items were beneath them, but the weaker groups still found uses for almost everything.
A new sword could replace an old one.
A potion saved them money at the apothecary.
Even a bundle of arrowheads mattered when someone had to buy ammunition after every trip.
Floor 1 didn’t need to give everyone something extraordinary, it just needed to give them something.
Later, once he understood the system better, he could add a few more valuable items at much lower probabilities.
The pendant had been an accident, but judging by the number of people currently filling his dungeon because of it, rare rewards clearly had value beyond the item itself.
If most people received ordinary equipment while one person occasionally found something exceptional, everyone else would know that exceptional reward was possible.
“That could work.” Zion made a note to revisit the idea when he had more essence to waste experimenting.
For now, the cheap loot table would keep people from leaving empty-handed without forcing him to sacrifice another floor every time someone opened a chest.
The rest of the day became increasingly difficult to follow.
Groups continued arriving in a steady stream, and the number of active Floor 1 instances climbed until Zion stopped trying to count them himself.
At one point, he checked the system and discovered ninety-seven separate versions of the pasture running at the same time.
“Ninety-seven?”
Every one of them contained the same grass, hills, creek, fences, barn, sheep, and Horned Ram.
But the battles taking place inside them couldn’t have been more different.
Gareth’s party returned sometime in the afternoon.
Zion recognized June first as their instance opened near the entrance, followed by Gareth, Mara, and Elias.
Mara was still talking about the pendant before they’d even stepped fully onto the pasture.
“I’m telling you, we should’ve kept it.”
Elias sighed.
“You said that six times on the walk here.”
“Because I’m still right.”
June laughed.
Zion watched them for a little while before another battle pulled his attention elsewhere.
By then, he’d gotten used to observing several instances at once.
It still reminded him of a wall covered in televisions, except every screen showed a different group trying to solve the same problem.
The differences were useful.
One party consisted almost entirely of melee fighters.
They tore through the sheep quickly whenever they could reach them, but anything that forced them to spread out or cross open terrain slowed them considerably.
Another group had three magic users and a single heavily armored tank.
Their damage was enormous, but once the tank became separated from the others, the whole formation became noticeably more fragile.
A different party had no magic caster at all, while another had no proper healer.
One group relied almost entirely on ranged attacks and became visibly uncomfortable whenever the sheep managed to close the distance.
Zion gradually stopped caring as much about whether individual parties won.
He started paying attention to why they struggled.
By evening, patterns had started forming.
Strong melee groups disliked distance.
Magic-heavy groups became vulnerable when pressured continuously.
Parties with weak healing could survive short fights but deteriorated quickly when encounters dragged on.
Groups built around one strong tank performed extremely well until something reached the people standing behind them.
Even the strongest teams seemed to have some kind of weakness.
That changed the way he looked at Floor 2.
Until now, he’d mostly been thinking about what monsters he could afford and which ones looked dangerous.
Goblins had immediately caught his attention because they carried weapons, coordinated with one another, and looked far more threatening than sheep.
With the amount of essence he had now, he could finally afford them.
Several of them.
Probably even more than several.
Zion checked his balance.
[Current Essence: 5,184]
Five thousand.
For the first time since waking up inside the dungeon, Zion felt genuinely rich.
He could buy the Goblin Warriors he’d wanted.
He could add archers, spearmen, barricades, maybe even the shaman.
He could build the fortified camp he’d imagined when he first saw the contract list and still have essence left over.
His attention moved toward the floor expansion menu.
[Floor 3 Expansion — 1,000 Essence]
“That’s affordable now.”
Floor 4 remained locked behind Floor 3, but its previewed expansion cost was already visible.
[Floor 4 Expansion — 2,000 Essence]
He could buy Floor 3 immediately and still have enough essence left to build most of Floor 2.
The idea was tempting.
Every additional floor placed more distance between the entrance and his throne room, and after watching the stronger adventurers that morning, distance had become extremely appealing.
Still, he didn’t purchase anything yet.
Five thousand essence felt like a fortune only because he’d spent most of the previous week worrying about purchases that cost thirty or fifty.
The store still contained hundreds of categories he hadn’t unlocked, and everything he’d learned so far suggested stronger floors would only become more expensive.
Spending everything simply because he finally had it seemed like an excellent way to become poor again.
He returned his attention to Floor 2.
The goblin army still looked good.
It just no longer looked like the answer.
Zion thought about the parties he’d watched all day.
If he filled Floor 2 with the strongest monsters he could afford, then every group would face basically the same problem.
Stronger parties would overpower them and weaker parties would lose.
Eventually, someone would arrive with enough raw strength to ignore the design entirely.
Floor 1 had already shown him what happened when power alone decided the outcome.
He needed something different.
Instead of asking what monster would defeat the most adventurers, Zion started asking what kind of adventurer each monster could defeat.
A heavily armored fighter might have little trouble against claws or blades but struggle against something that ignored armor.
And a group dependent on magic could be pressured by anything that made casting more difficult or expensive.
Ranged parties could be forced into tight spaces, while melee parties could be made to cross dangerous distances before reaching their targets.
If every challenge attacked a different weakness, then a party that passed one section easily might struggle badly against the next.
It was also much more interesting than just filling the floor with whatever looked strongest.
And it meant he didn’t need every monster to be individually powerful.
He needed the right monster in the right place.
The stronger parties would eventually make it through those layers anyway.
He had seen enough that day to know some adventurers simply had too much experience and equipment to be stopped by basic tricks.
That was fine.
The early sections of the dungeon could eliminate groups with obvious weaknesses first.
Anyone who survived all of that would eventually reach the monsters Zion actually needed to be strong.
He liked that idea considerably more than simply buying an army and hoping it worked.
His attention returned to the Floor 2 store.
The goblins were still waiting in the list, but this time Zion scrolled past them and looked more carefully at the creatures he’d dismissed before.
The cheap, strange monsters.
Those with unusual resistances or movement abilities.
For the first time, the cheapest option didn’t automatically look like the weakest one.
Before opening any of them, Zion remembered something else from the day.
The pendant.
Nearly a hundred groups had entered because one party found something unexpectedly valuable.
Most of those adventurers had received ordinary rewards afterward, and while the experienced groups often looked disappointed, very few seemed angry enough to swear off the dungeon entirely.
The weaker teams were usually happy to receive anything useful.
That meant the rare reward didn’t need to happen often.
It only needed to happen often enough that people believed it could.
Zion opened the treasure menu again and selected another option he’d ignored before.
[Hidden Cache — 25 Essence]
A small preview appeared beside it.
Unlike the Boss Drop Chest, the cache could be placed anywhere on an active floor and didn’t require the boss to be defeated before appearing.
Its location could be concealed through terrain, structures, or environmental features.
Zion looked toward the empty Floor 2.
A hidden chest with slightly better rewards would give adventurers another reason to explore instead of simply rushing toward the exit.
Most groups might never find it.
And the ones who did would feel like they’d discovered something special.
More importantly, once someone found a good item inside, everyone else would start looking.
He purchased the cache.
[Hidden Cache acquired.]
[Current Essence: 5,159]
He still had more than five thousand essence left over.
“I could get used to this.”
Then he returned to the monster list and started scrolling with considerably more care than before.