18 Sketching

As they went to the Avian Cavern, Five leaned against the wall of Harriet's house and sat down. It was a relatively quiet environment since Harriet went to talk to her sisters. He would occasionally hear their hearty laughter in the distance.

A nice breeze was blowing in the village. It was quite refreshing especially since the weather was nice outside the dungeon. But things would be very different during winter. Five did not know how things worked there, but there were clearly no electric heaters.

"Maybe I should ask Harriet about this. It might be important later if monsters become affected by the weather!" said Five to himself.

Taking out a fresh piece of paper, he once again tried to draw satisfactory maps. Time went by as he tried several combinations. For example, he found that trying to communicate only one Chinese character per floor was the best option if he wanted to hide his message effectively. However, he could only modify 10 floors and by doing so, he would be unable to convey the desired message.

He thought for a little while and decided that the best balance would be to write two characters per floor. What he wanted to convey was a specific location on the floors; he wanted the players to be able to invade the internal part of the dungeon. He naturally aimed at the special spots like the entry he and Harriet used to enter the floors and the secret treasure rooms.

As for how he wanted to convey this message, he would simply give them the floor, the corridor, and the location in the corridor. Each one of this information would take two Chinese characters and so, with the way he planned, he would be able to give away 3 locations in the dungeon.

His choice was the balance between the amount of information he would be able to convey and the discretion of the message! The last thing he wanted was to be discovered by Kroff or the other monsters! But fortunately, they did not seem to have any knowledge of Mandarin.

Five's final goal was to cause as much damage as possible to Kroff and the best way to do it was to allow the adventurers to plunder his wealth or to kill a lot of monsters and the higher the level of the monsters, the better. But Five was well aware that the players were low leveled right now. He could not aim too big but still causing a loss of a few thousands of DP should teach Kroff a lesson.

Another detail that Five thought about was that the secret rooms were easier to find than the secret passages that the monsters used. Therefore, he chose to share the location of two secret rooms and one secret passage through the message. Floors 1 to 3 would contain the information about a secret room, Floors 4-6 would show the location about the second secret room and as for Floors 7-9, they showed the location of the secret passage.

This way, the players would have more chance of trusting the message. If they found the first two secret rooms, they would naturally be more willing to believe that the 3rd location was also true and would spend more time searching for it. As for the tenth floor, he simply decided to write "Good Luck".

He could keep the tenth floor the same, but to avoid suspicion, it was better to change them all.

With that in mind, Five resumed making sketches. It was still weird to have long tunnels in a part of the floor and a cluster of rooms in another. He made as many modifications as possible while keeping the message as the base of the map.

Unbeknown to him, one hour already elapsed as he was making sketches; countless crumbled papers were littered around him. Harriet was happily humming as she flew back towards her house. She already spent quite some time with her sisters, but she could not leave Five without any supervision, especially after the incident with Roy.

She returned only to find Five still deeply absorbed in making sketches. She internally sighed, "I bet that guy did not even look over the first 10 floors. Why was he so excited to gain their control if he would just ignore them?" She silently flew by and grabbed one of the pieces of paper.

"Still this crazy map!" said Harriet to herself. The map was still very strange. Although she could see some improvements in making it more normal, it still did not look like a dungeon floor to her.

Sensing her presence, Five raised his head to look at Harriet, "Hello, how are your sisters?"

"They are fine, thank you! But you should be more wary of yourself. Why don't you focus on the dungeon?" asked Harriet.

"It is fine! Don't worry! You are looking at the old sketches. Here! Tell me what you think about these ones!" said Five as he passed her some pieces of paper.

Harriet quickly grabbed the sketches and had a quick glance. "This, they are definitely much better than the first one you showed me but it still weird in some places. Some floors are fine like these ones, but why would there be so many branches in this corridor?" asked Harriet.

"I'll take that into consideration for my next sketch," answered Five as he grabbed back the papers from Harriet. There was still a lot of work to do but he was confident he would soon reach his goal.

Since Harriet just came back, Five decided to take a small break and talked to Harriet about various things. He was already tired both mentally and physically and taking a break might give him some inspiration.

He also took the opportunity to look at the floors he was in charge of. It looked like most players that arrived were currently hunting on the 6th and 7th floor. About 200 players were in the dungeon. He turned his attention to the amount of DP he had available and saw that it was 7200DP.

Not counting the 1000DP he used to make slimes for himself, he already lost 1800DP and the day was not even over. However, he was not alarmed at this number since he knew that the number of players would increase very quickly and so would his DP income.

...

Three hours later, Five lazily yawned as he placed down his pencil. He was finally satisfied with his sketches and even Harriet gave her seal of approval. He had to sacrifice the legibility of the message to make the floor look less abnormal. He believed that at least one smart person would be able to find the message if they took the time to look at the map attentively. It was true that it looked like a very mediocre writing but that was the best he could do to avoid raising suspicions.

During all this time, Harriet was simply reading the books about the outside world next to Five. To her, it was just like a normal day. "Are you finally finished with your aesthetics improvement?" sarcastically asked Harriet.

"I am fairly satisfied, I doubt it can be any better!" replied Five. He smiled at her tone but maintained an innocent expression.

"Then when do you plan to make these changes? You don't have much DP available for that. I know that it is just rearranging so it costs less DP than adding features but still..."

"Oh! Don't worry about that. I'll probably make changes tomorrow when the adventurers will leave the dungeon," answered Five. While he now had the plans for the rearrangement, that was just a small part of his plan, he still had other things to prepare.

...

Meanwhile, Kroff was on his throne closely observing Five. "This is weird. What are these sketches he made? " asked Kroff.

In front of him, a screen was displaying Five and Harriet carelessly discussing at the Harpies' village.

"These are the maps of how he wants to rearrange the floors master, shall we call him to have a look?" asked Mehlroth.

"A map?" said Kroff as he pondered for a while. A few seconds later, he ordered: "Mmmm Yes, please tell Harriet to bring Five here. He visibly did not do anything changes to the dungeon despite the heavy losses... I guess it's time to give him a wake-up call!" said Kroff while rubbing his hands.

He was closely following the situation of the dungeon and already knew that Five only had 6500DP still available, that meant that one-third of his original capital was already gone. Everything was going according to his plan!