16 Observing the players

Five and Harriet swiftly went back to the tunnel after the players left. The harpy queen was clearly annoyed. She easily spotted the lustful looks on these humans especially the one called Wang Lin.

"You should be more patient, Harriet. You got annoyed just because they came to talk to you?" said Five along the way.

"Hmmp! I don't like the way they looked at me! These idiots! How dare they show their vile desires in front of me! I can behead them with a single hit," answered Harriet.

"Oh man, I better be careful around her," said Five to himself. He found Harriet a little bit impulsive but again, she considered humans as weak creatures that could easily be killed. If he was not a dungeon master, he might have received the same treatment.

The two returned to the communal room as it was time for lunch. He had already collected a large amount of DP. Five now had 2200DP.

Harriet happily brought Five to the Harpy's Communal Room. She enjoyed these moments with him since they would then talk freely and Five would tell her about his own world. Having lived a rather sheltered life until she came here, Harriet could only learn about the outside world through books and stories of others.

She enjoyed hearing stories, especially the ones that described places like the sea or the desert. Although she did not like humans, she sometimes wished that she could go to Five's world and experience everything there.

However, this time was different. Five was intently looking at the pseudo-dungeon core that Kroff gave him. He was planning to look at the group of ten that arrived earlier to see their behavior. The pseudo-core had many functions aside from making modifications and one of them was the camera function which allowed Five to look at any area on the first 10 floors.

When he activated this function, a tiny hologram popped up showing the group of players. They were on the fourth floor, exploring to find the stairs. They were easily killed all the Giant Ants coming to stop them. It was to be expected since the players were level 10 while the Giant Ants were only level 8.

Five carefully observed the players. It was clear that the leader was the one named Wang Chong. The rest of the team was made up of 2 rangers, 1 priest, 2 mages, 2 rogues and 2 paladins.

While Five was watching the players, the melee classes engaged a direct battle with 3 Giant Ants. Another Giant Ant was making its way towards the group, but the mages and rangers showered it with projectiles.

At that moment, Harriet came back with two trays of food, "What are you looking at?" asked Harriet.

"Just the adventurers that arrived today. Since they are supposed to revive after their deaths, I thought it would be interesting to look at their fighting style," answered Five as he absentmindedly grabbed the sandwich on his plate.

At the same time, he noticed that more players stepped on the first floor. When he looked at the pseudo-dungeon core, he found that the 10 players already generated 1000 DP after just 30 minutes. It was a very small amount considering that they already killed 900 DP worth of monsters and they were not showing any signs of stopping, continuing to move to the 5th floor.

...

On the 5th floor,

"These stupid ants! There's so many of them but they are not even worth our time killing them..."

"That's only because of our level. Let's hurry up and check the higher floors. We are only here to scout the place and check if the monsters are just like the programmers said... If they are right, we should stop on the 7th floor where there are mine bats."

"F***ing hell... They should have made it so that we are not forced to go on all these floors to reach the higher ones... Such a waste of time."

While it looked like a waste of time for the players, it was just a feature that helped the dungeon masters get a few more DP for each player especially later into the game where the players would climb more than 50 floors. A considerable amount of time would then be needed, and a significant amount of DP would be generated.

"There is the Ant Queen somewhere on this floor... So be careful to avoid it. I don't want to waste time on this weak boss!" said a player.

"Why didn't the elders come with us?"

"These old men are just lazy! They want us to do all the work while they can stay at the training center and practice their techniques..."

Harriet silently stared at the hologram. She understood that Five would always be serious when it came to dungeons, but she was not pleased since she would no longer have the opportunity to talk about miscellaneous things with him.

From her point of view, these adventurers were really weak and did not understand what Five wanted to observe in them. Time went by in silence and finally, she could no longer hold it in, "So? Now that you are finally in charge of the dungeon's first few floors, what are you planning to change?"

"Huh?" Five raised his head and looked at Harriet. He smiled and said, "I am seriously thinking about completely changing the arrangement of the floors. It would not bother Kroff, right?"

"The arrangement? What is wrong with the actual one? Is it not good for it to be orderly like that?" asked Harriet, to her, the arrangement of the rooms and tunnels would not affect the generation of DP. It was quite a useless move that would only waste DP.

"I just think that the dungeon could benefit from better aesthetics..."

"Aesthetic?" said Harriet to herself. She had a bad feeling when she heard Five's answer. It was clearly a rubbish excuse and for the first time she felt like Five was planning something sinister, but she could not figure out what.

For a moment, she did not know what to answer and so, the two turned their attention back to the hologram. By now, the group of ten has already reached the 6th floor and was smoothly making its way towards the 7th.

On the lower floors, several small groups of players appeared and started to climb their way up. According to the pseudo-dungeon core, 60 players in total have reached entered the dungeon.

Five momentarily shifted the camera to have a look at the other groups before returning on the first 10 players. "They are all Asians, if I am not wrong, they should be Chinese. They look like Wolf and their names all sound Chinese," thought Five. Wolf was one of his partners when he was undergoing training. He vaguely recalled that Wolf told him that most Chinese had distinguishable features but there was no way for him to confirm.

"Anyway, China has one of the largest populations of Asia. It should be safe if I write in Chinese. Besides, many people also started to learn Mandarin," said Five to himself.

Luckily, when he was at university, Five followed a language course since he could use it to replace the grade of another module and coincidentally, the language he chose was Chinese.

Still sitting in front of Harriet, he quickly took out a piece of paper and started to write in Chinese," Fifth Floor Second Corridor..."

As for Harriet, she curiously looked at Five's actions not understanding what he was doing. She could not read Chinese and for her, it looked like he was writing some sort of runes.

After thinking for a brief moment, Five started to modify the writings, adding lines and gaps here and there. He then quickly shaded part of the drawing. Now, the original sentences were barely recognizable. He clearly knew that he could improve what he had drawn but for a first sketch, it was not too bad.

Having finished his tasked, he raised his head and asked, "What do you think? I am thinking of mapping the floor like that. The shaded parts represent the walls or solid areas while the white parts are the rooms and tunnels?"

"The new map? Is it even a map? Why are there long tunnels in this area and why did you cluster so many rooms there? " commented Harriet. To her, it simply looked like a mess but her intuition kept telling her that something was wrong with this map.

"Mmm" Five clearly knew that there was a lot of room for improvement. He needed to find a way to rearrange the floors, "Maybe break the sentences and place the bits on different floors? Or use different words?" thought Five.

"This is aesthetics, Harriet. Just aesthetics"