Chapter 39: Tomb Floor (Part 1)

Zion got to work immediately. The moment he committed to the Shadow Panther, the shape of Floor 3 began changing in his mind.

He no longer saw it as an empty layer waiting to be filled with a few discounted traps. It needed an atmosphere now, a proper setting.

Something that made the panther feel as though it belonged there.

As he considered what kind of place suited a roaming predator and a floor full of traps, his thoughts drifted toward the old adventure films he had watched in his previous life.

The ones with lost tombs, crumbling passageways, hidden blades, and treasure chambers that looked glorious right up until the ceiling tried to kill someone.

There had always been something satisfying about those places. They didn’t feel like ordinary rooms with a few hazards thrown in. The environment itself was dangerous.

Every hall promised some secret, every shadow looked suspicious, and every step felt like it could be the wrong one. That was exactly what he wanted.

Zion opened the terrain store and nearly regretted it at once. There were far too many options. Ancient sandstone ruins appeared first, followed by several limestone crypt designs with heavy pillars and weathered relief carvings.

After that came a long list of temple interiors, buried catacombs, ceremonial halls, stepped pyramid chambers, jungle-covered ruins, and at least three styles of collapsed tombs that all looked slightly different despite clearly existing for the same purpose.

He went through them more slowly than he intended.

One floor looked vaguely inspired by an ancient desert kingdom, with pale walls carved in long neat rows and angular pillars capped with gold accents.

Another had rougher stone and broad stairways that reminded him more of something hidden deep in a jungle, though the decorative masks on the walls looked unsettling enough that he paused longer than expected.

Still, neither felt quite right.

The Shadow Panther needed darkness. Not total darkness. That would make the floor frustrating rather than clever. But enough that a party would feel uneasy from the moment they entered.

Enough that someone carrying no light source would have to rely on the sparse torches along the walls and the dim glow of old braziers.

Enough that every turn in the corridor could conceal movement.

Eventually, Zion found one labeled:

[Inner Pyramid Passage Complex]

He opened the preview.

"That’s it."

The walls were built from large dark sandstone blocks, each one marked with faded carvings that ran in repeating bands down the corridors.

Narrow passages connected broader chambers, the ceilings sat high in some places and uncomfortably low in others, and several sections of the floor came with steep descending ramps already built into the base design.

Best of all, the entire preview was dim.

It wasn’t pitch black, but the space clearly depended on torchlight, and the shadows between the pillars gathered thickly enough that Zion could easily imagine something moving through them.

He rotated the model several times. The more he looked at it, the more certain he became.

"This is the one for sure."

The purchase went through, and a large portion of his remaining essence disappeared.

He winced. Not very hard, though. Terrain was expensive, but at least this purchase made sense. Unlike certain decorative bracelets bought in a panic, this one directly contributed to the structural safety of the dungeon. And to his life once the protection period was over.

Once the purchase finished, Floor 3 changed at once.

The plain unfinished layer disappeared beneath dark stone corridors and sloped passageways, with carved walls rising where the empty edges had been just moments before.

Zion moved his awareness through it slowly. He liked it immediately.

The entrance opened into a broad antechamber with a descending path stretching forward and downward from there.

The walls on either side carried old relief carvings of beasts, warriors, and symbols Zion didn’t understand, while thick square pillars supported the higher portions of the ceiling farther below.

At several intersections, the floor widened into chambers that would be large enough to hide something unpleasant. Which, in Zion’s opinion, was exactly what a proper dungeon floor ought to do.

For a few moments, Zion simply moved through the new floor without changing anything.

The scale felt different now that he was inside it instead of looking at a preview. Some corridors seemed narrower than he expected, while the larger chambers opened high above him into darkness that the default lighting barely touched. Even the sound felt different. His awareness did not hear things the same way a person would, but the space still seemed to swallow everything into complete silence.

He could already picture adventurers entering cautiously, lowering their voices without realizing it.

That made him like the terrain even more.

He opened the decoration settings next and started placing torches. At first, his instinct was to line the walls neatly so every corridor remained visible. After setting the first few, he stopped.

"No. That’s too bright."

If the panther was supposed to stalk parties from the dark, then the floor needed darkness worth stalking through.

Zion went back and reduced them. One torch near an archway. Another farther down the corridor. A brazier in one of the wider chambers, placed off to the side so its light left part of the room in shadow.

In the narrower sections, he left stretches of wall completely bare, trusting the little bit of ambient light from the other flames to prevent the place from becoming impossible to navigate.

When he finished, the result pleased him even more.

The floor was visible, but just barely.

Adventurers would be able to move without walking blind, yet the corners and spaces between pillars still looked uncertain.

The farther Zion pushed his awareness into the darker sections, the more he felt the floor changing from a trap course into something with personality.

It felt old, buried, and eerie enough that people would feel a little on edge the entire time they were down here.

"Much better," he said, satisfied.